SPEED (Jan De Bont, 1994)

Speed, the most thrilling police actioner ever, is an extended roller coaster ride. Moreover, two interlocking subtexts of Graham Yost’s savvy script help the film to engage some interesting aspects of reality and myth, lifting the result way, way above the gutter grade of such other summertime rushes as the Die Hards, The Fugitive and the Schwarzeneggers.

The plot involves the rescue of hostages. The good guys here are Los Angeles cops; the one bad guy is a former Atlanta cop, a former bomb squad member who, years earlier, lost a thumb in the line of duty. This led to his being laid off—for this man, Howard Payne, a humiliating outcome. Now trying to extort from one city the “pay” another city denied him, the fortune he feels entitled to, he is a human timebomb with an ironic sense of justice; he uses his “retirement” watch as the timer for a massive explosive device with which he terrorizes a busload of passengers. Their suffering, intended to quiet his own (note the homophone of his last name), he delights in monitoring by way of a hidden camera. But this is gravy; basically, he’s after the money.

This elaborate scheme of his also bodies forth a death-wish. While trusting his ample wits and expertise to show up the Los Angeles cops, who, not the hostages, are his real quarry, thereby proving he ought to have been allowed to keep his job in Atlanta, Payne pushes his exploits beyond all limits. Why? Without the stature his position as a police officer conferred on him, he already feels as good as dead. Howard Payne has been robbed of his usefulness and his daily recognition. Now he taunts other cops to catch and to kill him so that his misery might end; and, to leave his mark, he cares nothing how many others, hostages and police officers, he will take down with him. His single-mindedness, then, compensates for his actually being at such cross-purposes. Only the loot that Payne is after stabilizes him.

Clearly, his example sheds light on a wide range of criminal behavior; but, too, it helps make explicable the reckless, violent responses—the rage—of postal workers and others who have lost their jobs.

In what amounts to a preliminary episode, Payne proves unsuccessful in a previous extortion attempt involving passengers trapped in an explosive-rigged skyrise elevator; after two years’ planning, he himself is apparently blown up by his own devices as two L.A.P.D. SWAT-team members move in on him. Payne is proclaimed “dead” prematurely, though—a concise revelation of how he feels: alone among the living dead.

One of the heroic cops tracking him becomes a focal point for the criminal’s revenge; in him Payne may be seeing a distant, shining, now taunting image of himself. Payne may also see in the boy, Jack, the former misguided innocence, loyalty, trust and dedication of his that had set him up for the fall he took in Atlanta. (We certainly are meant to link the two adversaries; hence the joke about the gold watch that Jack will receive thirty years hence.) Once Payne’s “death” is ceremoniously credited to the young officer, Payne engages him—this “other,” if you will—in a tournament of competing wits. He baits Jack—if the speed of city bus #2525 falls below 50 mph, explosives rigged to the vehicle will detonate; and the chase is on.

Jack’s youth invites paternal feelings. For instance, his superior proudly refers to him as “my boy.” Early on, Payne derisively addresses Jack as “boy,” but later, in a revelatory slip, Payne sympathetically addresses him as “son.” Jack, moreover, is being mentored by his middle-aging partner, Harry, who warns him that courage, luck and instinct—all that Jack relies on—aren’t enough for their dangerous job; to survive over the long haul, one has to be able to think quickly ahead—a lesson that the boy will better and better learn. But, for the moment, Jack already works well; he seems “on top of things”—poised, competent, brave, kind, utterly optimistic. In one impossibly tight spot, though, he mutters alone, “Save me, Harry,” hoping his partner will locate and take out Payne, and inviting our protective, parental feelings, especially when Payne delivers the worst news of Jack’s young life: Harry is dead, having been lured by Payne into an explosive trap. Payne, who earlier had warned him, “Don’t grow a brain on me,” gleefully taunts Jack that he (Jack) now inevitably must lose in their contest because he (Jack) has “lost” his “brain”—that is, Harry, presumably the only one of the two partners capable of thought. Until that moment commandingly steadying for the frightened bus passengers, Jack now finds his legs wobbling underneath; he mutters, “We’re going to die.” The passenger who has replaced the incapacitated driver at the wheel—she and Jack will romantically pair—now must buoy Jack. The boy’s breakdown is awesome. Clearly we are meant to infer from it that Payne’s taunt coincides with what, despite his compensatory air of ‘having it together,’ had been Jack’s terrific self-doubt all along. The boy, therefore, is convinced that he can’t ‘make it on his own.’

Why, though? The preliminary episode repeatedly bears witness to Jack’s extraordinary gifts of intuition and insight. His lack of self-confidence, then, must be something that Jack brings to the job; and, because the script (shrewdly) offers no particular explanation, we are left to assume that it is, simply, the result of his being so young. Jack’s lack of self-confidence derives not from any trauma but, categorically, from his youth. And, in fact, it is there to see, really, from the start. Jack’s breakdown—the film’s most electrifying moment—convinces because the brilliant actor playing the part, Keanu Reeves, has—quickly, deftly—laid its psychological groundwork. In the preliminary elevator episode, although both officers are alert to danger, Jack is animal-like in his restlessness; unlike Harry’s, his eyes lack focus. Indeed, Jack’s much greater risk-taking, far from revealing self-confidence, displays it in an attempt to stabilize this unsettledness of his; Jack makes such a show of going out on his own precisely to suppress his overreliance on a seasoned older partner. Throughout the episode, moreover, Jack chews gum quietly, rhythmically; and Reeves—what sensitive and creative acting this is!—uses this bit of business to show Jack steadily steadying himself into the air of confidence that Harry amiably, easily projects. Thus we are able to “see” Jack’s lack of self-confidence through the secretive effort Jack makes to appear confident. And later we grasp, therefore, that Payne comes to embody for him this lack; for just as Jack throws back at Payne a taunting image, Payne is the mirror that throws back at Jack Jack’s wobbly self-image. In concert, script and actor Reeves have effected a stunning chord of emotional insight.

Jack pursues Payne, then, in order to achieve self-mastery and confidence. (Were it not for Jeff Daniels’s inept acting as Harry, we would have right before us an image of Jack’s goal.) One of the script’s interlocking subtexts, this bears mythic resonance; to pass into manhood, the heroic youth must overtake the murderous beast. But the script here may have boxed itself into a corner. Obliging moviegoers out for a good time, we have accepted earlier improbabilities just to get and keep the show on the road. With the blow-up of the vacated bus, though, the “show” now is “off the road,” and we are painfully unaware of how overextended Jack must be. In reality, wouldn’t his commanding officer order him home to recuperate while fellow officers apprehended the criminal? Jack, however, continues—but only because the mythological subtext requires him to; and, unlike the earlier ones, this incredibility grates. Having caught our breath, we’re not so willing to suspend our disbelief.

Worse, the confrontation so vital for the hero’s coming-of-age turns out silly. Jack winds up on top of a speeding subway car inside which Payne—insanely angry once he discovers that the ransom he extorted and collected is counterfeit—holds hostage Annie, the relief driver recruited from the bus passengers after Sam, the driver, is shot. (Payne has rigged Annie with explosives.) Jack, in a precarious position, holds onto the subway car as best he can; an apt pupil, he takes note when he is nearly struck down by a tunnel ceiling light. When Payne joins him up there for their decisive last battle, Jack, having internalized superego Harry and having thus learned to think and anticipate, pushes Payne up so that the inevitable decapitation can occur with the next overhead light. (Wit: Recall that Payne had taunted Jack for not having a brain of his own.) Jack has accomplished more than he knows; for by destroying the beast he has expunged from his own future the possibility of his ending up like Payne. This, too, brings to fruition the second subtext, which involves the vulnerability marking Howard Payne’s decline from Atlanta hero to L.A. beast; now, unlike this adversary of his, Jack has the sense of self-worth that can defend him against life’s harsher vicissitudes. If some day he also loses his job, Jack won’t be thrown. Secure in himself, he will not require, as Payne did, something outside himself (such as the job) to fix his value. Through this outcome, of course, Payne, although dead, also is redeemed.

But ever milking its thriller aspect, Speed is not over yet; Annie and Jack have one more trial to endure—a blatant anticlimax that nevertheless reaches a satisfactory romantic conclusion. Still, the “couple” that most matters in the film are the cop and the ex-cop, the hero and the beast; for the latter brings to light from the depths of the former’s unconscious the obstacle that the boy must overcome: his self-doubt. In effect, then, it is Payne who engineers his young adversary’s momentous rite of passage.

Repetitious and often plain silly, Speed does contain, then, material richer than what one expects from an American summer fun-film. (By comparison, Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 Forrest Gump is mindless and threadbare.) Moreover, the action genre seldom gives rise to such good acting. As Payne, Dennis Hopper provides a compelling portrait of inconsolable frustration and torment; he illuminates a feeble soul who, dependent on the recognition of others, nevertheless appears to the world as hugely, irretrievably self-important—a widely applicable paradox. Payne’s ego, like that of many criminals, can’t be satisfied because it doesn’t exist. Immersed in Shakespeare for his upcoming stage appearance as Hamlet, Reeves gave his role in Speed far less, he has said, than his usual preparation. No matter. Reeves makes Jack a most worthy and engaging opponent; full of sterling quicksilver responses, and striking the right balance of vulnerability and strength, his is, simply, the best performance ever in an actioner. The great sincerity and tenderness Reeves brings to Jack’s feelings for Annie bring his endeavor to an irresistible fullness. Sandra Bullock may be no more than adequate as Annie (and often not even that), but Hawthorne James is splendid as gentle-hearted Sam, a character far removed from the raging bully, Red, that he played in Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats (1991).

And De Bont, the first-time director? (He has since made the execrable Twister.) He seems to have contributed little or nothing to the film. This is why, despite the script and the acting, Speed is less art than entertainment. Formerly a cinematographer (All the Right Moves, Die Hard), De Bont works up some visual flash (his quick camera zigs, zags and dips); but John Wright, his agile cutter, is at least as responsible for the film’s “look,” and of course for the film’s riveting pace. Doubtless, producer Mark Gordon—his Swing Kids (1993) preceded Speed; his haunting documentary, which re-teamed him with Reeves, Children Remember the Holocaust (1996), followed, as did Saving Private Ryan (1998)—is more responsible than De Bont for creating the conditions that brought a measure of integrity to the piece. No filmmaker is this De Bont. On balance, Speed is a sometime delight that De Bont seems to have technically engineered without once inhabiting it.

THE HOURS (Stephen Daldrey, 2002)

Stephen Daldrey’s immensely likeable Billy Elliot (2000) cannibalized itself beyond repair by its political silliness; there were other problems as well. The acting by Julie Walters and Jamie Bell, widely honored, of course elevated the musical-comedy-drama, and there was no dearth of passionate, heart-jumping scenes; but Daldrey’s first film left a good many of us with a sense of having been manipulated towards no other end than a walloping emotional payoff. Whatever my reservations, however, Billy Elliot did nothing to prepare me for Daldrey’s second film, The Hours—despite a thrilling, complex and indelible performance by Nicole Kidman, a perfectly dreadful film. Indeed, one of the worst films I have seen, this heartless exercise in audience manipulation—it’s as much a “trick-film” as either The Sixth Sense or Memento—is based on a prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, which David Hare, no less, has ickily adapted. Despite an elegant appearance (lots of arty compositions, with labored lighting, of highly decorative sets, accompanied by the music of Philip Glass, both old and new, and Richard Strauss), this is a crude, offensively reductive and basically moronic piece, and one in which the vast majority of the acting is bad beyond belief. Since the directing of actors is how he apparently defines his work (this is not the job description of a gifted or serious filmmaker), Daldrey has thus effectively eliminated himself from any future consideration as an artist. Consider him, instead, a buffoon.

I had misgivings to begin with, for the press seemed to indicate—not that it at all cared—that the film’s portrait of Virginia Woolf, the British novelist who is its protagonist, was primarily designed to dupe people who knew nothing about her into believing nonsense about her. If one were to believe this ridiculous film, Woolf had bats in her belfry—a manic-depressive, she experienced a few psychotic episodes (not nearly as many as, I bet, this wretched film has induced in any one of its audiences), and she lived in continual, if not continuous, fear of the onslaught of madness—but her sister, Vanessa Bell (whom you might not even guess was a painter) was a model of sanity and bourgeois decorum. What a clever idea: make Bell, a bohemian who painted human figures without faces, ten times more staid than she actually was just to make Woolf look twice as nutty as she was. It’s fortunate for the film that Kidman’s exquisite, poignant, dignified performance redresses some of this nonsense, but nothing in the film suggests the truth about Woolf’s suicide. You would never guess from what you see here that the author of the seminal pacifist-feminist tract “Three Guineas” (1939) was in despair about the new European war, just as she had protested the First World War, and that she worried about the fate of her Jewish husband (whom you would never even guess, from this film, was Jewish), socialist and political writer Leonard Sidney Woolf, with whom she had devised a suicide pact should the Nazis invade England. (Leonard Woolf survived his wife by close to thirty years, devoting himself to her literary legacy.) It’s a really queer and skewed presentation of Woolf that has her so beset with personal problems that she hasn’t time to consider the world outside. To be sure, this film, for the most part, sets Woolf earlier, at the time in the mid-’20s (between wars) when she was writing Mrs. Dalloway, but because the film is framed with scenes of her drowning death in Sussex it behooves the film to give some sense of the environment out of which this suicide occurred. Indeed, the compression of time that The Hours ruthlessly effects implies that the poor woman wrote the novel and promptly killed herself. Rather, her greatest novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), as well as Orlando (1928) and others, still lay ahead.

My goodness: the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press is presented as comic relief!; but, by my calculation, this here joked-about private press had already published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land a couple of years earlier. (Maxim Gorky, Sigmund Freud, E.M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield: these are others whose work this press published.) This film insults the intelligence of anyone with the least bit of knowledge about the Woolfs—and certainly that should be anyone with a liberal arts college education: one would think, the movie’s target audience.

But that’s not all. Guess who isn’t mentioned at all in this strange, undesirable piece of cystic fibrosis? Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, and one of the most towering figures in British literary and publishing history. (Among his voluminous accomplishments, Sir Leslie wrote History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 1876, and, along with Sidney Lee, edited the first 26 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, for which he himself wrote 378 entries. Stephen also was a famous religious doubter; concluding that God’s existence is unknowable, he declared, “I do not the less believe in morality.”) One may argue, foolishly, that Stephen had, after all, died twenty years earlier; but the character of Mr. Ramsay in To a Lighthouse, who “never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all his children,” would be based on Stephen. Indeed, their father was the principal bone of contention between Stephen’s daughters, for Vanessa, who adored him, suffered a nervous breakdown upon his death while Virginia went off on a holiday excursion. Daldrey’s film implies that Vanessa’s children separate the sisters (the Woolfs are childless); but, from Vanessa’s point of view, she was unable ever to share with Virginia her profound sense of loss over the death of their father. Stephen, however differently, remained at the center of both their consciousnesses. One imagines that Woolf’s suicide, overdetermined as are most suicides, owed something to her ongoing quarrel with this difficult and daunting and now deceased parent.

Kidman makes up for a lot. She and Stephen Dillane, excellent as Leonard, portray a marriage with the complexity that is its due. Kidman’s acting is not only finely etched, it has a lyrical dimension. At one point, asked by her niece what happens when one dies, Woolf responds that one returns to where one came from; when Woolf commits suicide by entering a lake, Kidman’s body language suggests that Woolf is going home. Kidman’s Woolf is gracious and poised in the midst of outrageous anguish and disappointment. Kidman fully merited the Oscar, the British Film Academy Award, and the Golden Globe she won for it, along with the best actress prize at Berlin that she shared with her co-stars, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep.

Whom do these other actresses play in their own separate plot-lines that are interwoven with one another and Kidman’s Woolf? Don’t ask, and I won’t tell. Suffice it to say, one takes place in the early 1950s, and the other in the present; and while Woolf is working hard at composing Mrs. Dalloway, another is reading it for the first time and overidentifying with it, and still another seems somehow to be living bits and pieces of it. Moore, not at her best here, makes the 1950s thread of the plot unconvincing, although one doesn’t know how such rank soap opera could have been better handled; John C. Reilly, as her clueless spouse, and Toni Collette, as her addle-brained, cancer-ridden best friend, give even worse performances. Then there is the Streep strand. Oy! Somehow, the woman she plays is named Clarissa Vaughan, and her best male friend, who is sick, is in the habit of addressing her as “Mrs. Dalloway.” But wait! Not only is she possibly, improbably named Clarissa (it’s also possible that she simply calls herself this, after the novel), but her lover’s name is Sally—as in Sally Seton, Clarissa’s bohemian friend prior to Clarissa’s becoming Mrs. Dalloway. (Or does this Lester woman, whom Allison Janney abominably plays, merely call herself Sally to extend the role of the novel in her and her Clarissa’s lives?) But wait again! Richard, whose care has long been the focus of Clarissa’s life (they were once, briefly, lovers—taking their cue from Virginia Woolf’s bisexuality, each of the other two parts of the film are bisexually oriented), opts for an end to himself à la Septimus Warren Smith, coincidentally also a poet, in Mrs. Dalloway. Just tell me the point at which, for you, credibility goes snap!

At least Richard, Clarissa Vaughan’s friend, isn’t a shell-shocked war veteran; he is sick, instead, with AIDS. But he goes over the window sill just the same.

All this is ludicrous, of course; but the trickiest trick is yet to come. It turns out that Richard is the son of the character that Julianne Moore plays—a woman who, unhappy in her conventional life, abandoned spouse and kids, making Richard, it appears, angry at her for life. This also is miserable to contemplate. A boy would feel abandoned; a grown-up, though, should attempt to understand. He’s a writer, after all; hasn’t this crybaby read Ibsen’s A Doll’s House? Or Handkë’s Die Linkshändige Frau?

Needless to say, this unexpected crisscrossing of two of the film’s parts is very clever. It’s stupid, too, since it upsets the balance of all the ways the three parts interrelate while remaining separate and distinct. Daldrey has said that his aim in making the film was to celebrate the impact that reading can have on people’s lives; isn’t the trick revelation counterproductive to the unifying influence of this theme? It’s one coincidence too many. I’m happy that this soap opera restored Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to best-seller lists; but are people (re)reading To the Lighthouse as well?

The Streep part is not without some merit. A number of gay characters appear, male and female, and not one is a stereotype. Although Claire Danes as Clarissa’s twenty-year-old daughter is, as usual, inept, she strikes a note of grace towards the end. (No such luck with Ed Harris as Richard: one of the worst performances imaginable.) Then there is Streep, whose acting is brilliant, captivating and spirited. This is her finest performance in many a moon. It falls short of Kidman’s through no fault of Streep’s; whereas Kidman could deepen the soap opera stuff that the script dealt her by drawing on (through letters and novels) the real Virginia Woolf, Streep was stuck with the script—and the silly story it was based on. It’s astonishing what loathsome sub-literature Streep is able to transcend here to the extent that she does.

In this dull film, Kidman and Streep shine.

Please see, elsewhere on this site, my essay on a film that beautifully relates Virginia Woolf’s writing to the film’s themes, Under the Sand. See category film reviews.

THE CHESS PLAYERS (Satyajit Ray, 1977)

This is what Akira Kurosawa said about Satyajit Ray: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”
     Since it has been trimmed of a quarter-hour for its U.S. incarnation, perhaps Ray’s The Chess Players (Shatranj Ke Khilari) isn’t due any legitimate criticism from me. In effect, I am not seeing the full moon.
     The film is certainly fine, okay—and visually splendiferous. But if I hadn’t known that Ray wrote and directed it, I never would have guessed that The Chess Players is a Ray film. Its genial satire is very far from Ray’s usual rigor. The only other Ray films I have seen that are as relaxed as this one are ones Ray specifically made for family viewing.
     I am disappointed. Perhaps making a film in Hindi took Ray, a Bengali, out of his comfort zone.

MACARIO (Roberto Gavaldón, 1960)

Despite winning a brace of best film prizes (in San Sebastian, Denmark, Santa Margarita Legure), despite being the first Mexican film to be nominated for an Oscar in the foreign-language division, despite excellent acting (the lead actor won at San Francisco), despite a crackerjack story (by B. Traven), and despite being gorgeously photographed in black and white (by Gabriel Figueroa, no less), Macario is very disappointing. Arch allegorical stuff.