MONSTER (Patty Jenkins, 2003)

I knew if I lived long enough I would eventually see a film so unremittingly stupid that it becomes almost an event. Monster, unwritten and undirected by Patty Jenkins, who should muster the mercy never to make another movie so long as she lives, deals with a Michigan-born highway prostitute who, stranded in Florida, becomes a serial killer, first, in self-defense and increasingly, later, in vengeful glee for all the male hands that have roughly touched her over the years. She ends up killing the sweetest john who ever cheated on his wife (Scott Wilson, in a touching performance). This gal is in the grip of a nasty compulsion.

She is also based on an actual person, whom the State of Florida put to death: Aileen Carol Wuomos, whose miserable history of abuse from childhood on, I have read, at least provided some context to the two documentaries about her that a filmmaker other than Jenkins, Nick Broomfield, has made. Jenkins isn’t big on context, and, as a result, what emerges is an uninflected, larger than life, and totally sympathetic portrait of someone none of us would ever have wanted to run into.

Indeed, given the elements of mise-en-scène at her disposal—ugly-ass U.S. highways, ugly-ass bars, ugly-ass motel rooms, ugly-ass concrete structures,—it is a reverse marvel that Jenkins can find no visual key to project a dehumanizing environment. Nor does she seem to possess the slightest interest in Wuomos’s potentially heartbreaking relationship with a young lesbian, called here Selby, who by shifts and turns emulates Wuomos and tries to snap her out of her delusional flights of evasive and optimistic fancy. The two fall in love, and this generates a bit of pathos, but Jenkins provides no sustained analysis of the contours of an unlikely, hence potentially fascinating, union. Jenkins hasn’t made a sensational film; that’s not the problem. Jenkins has made a rudderless film. We learn next to nothing about Wuomos.

Charlize Theron won an Oscar and numerous other prizes for playing Wuomos. As far as I know, Theron has never given a bad performance, and she doesn’t give one here. Her impersonation of Wuomos, for which she gained thirty pounds and is heavily made up, is astute, and every now and then Theron strikes an aching chord; but Jenkins has given her nothing to play, in effect. Theron’s deep empathy for Wuomos is ultimately to no avail, because, brainlessly coasting, Jenkins cannot come up with any sort of context that might suggest some thematic purpose to all that we are asked to endure in watching this foul-mouthed, dead-end film. Perhaps Jenkins believes that Wuomos’s most garish, self-serving speech, in which she justifies her killing spree on the basis of political or religious serial murder (by which she may mean war), clarifies something or other. But this is simply tossed into the script; it connects with nothing else. And we have confronted this potentially interesting idea in a film where it is more seriously and thoughtfully pursued: Charles Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947). Wuomos’s utterance, which doesn’t even seem to belong to the character, is unhelpful and irritating.

Chaplin’s black comedy is (intentionally) funnier. Jenkins’s film is ridiculous.

THIS ABOVE ALL (Anatole Litvak, 1942)

Sanitizing Eric Knight’s novel, whose title and content predictably misread Polonius as Shakespeare, Anatole Litvak’s This Above All balances wartime romance and wartime propaganda. It’s the most charming, entertaining Hollywood film about the British homefront during the Second World War.
     Prudence, although an aristocrat, enlists in the ranks of the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force); she meets and falls in love with deserter Clive Briggs, who totes a working-class chip on his shoulder. Why fight for a nation so riddled with class division, when even winning the war will not improve Clive’s lot? Prudence, a patriot, insists that England must win the war. After he and Pru have married, Clive sets the film’s politics to “acceptable” by reasoning that Pru’s war must be fought and won first, but after that his war must be fought and won. The victim of a German bombing raid, Clive looks ahead to a future of social equality and political equity from what is likely his deathbed in hospital.
     As wartime romance, this film is far, far better than Mervyn LeRoy’s World War I-set Random Harvest. It is also better in every way than William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver—for instance, in its much more rattling and terrifying portrait of the German bombing that ordinary people endured. Both the LeRoy and Wyler films came out the same year as the Litvak, with Wyler’s winning the best picture Oscar and LeRoy’s being nominated. This Above All was not nominated.
     Joan Fontaine’s performance as Prudence is piercing and heart-walloping—an emotional powerhouse. Tyrone Power, who plays Clive, is at his best here. However, Power draws an (explosive) inadvertent laugh when Clive refers to a “deep” feeling of his. Power (like his reincarnation/facsimile, Tom Cruise) had no “depth.”
     R.C. Sherriff wrote the script.

MIRACLE (Gavin O’Connor, 2004)

Written by Eric Guggenheim and directed by Gavin O’Connor, Miracle is a mess of a movie, a cliché-ridden Disney sports melodrama revolving around the unexpected victory of the U.S. hockey team at the 1980 Winter Olympics. It narrows this topic to Coach Herb Brooks’s relentless preparation of his hand-picked team of dedicated amateurs, but it never lights on a theme or a thesis relevant to this topic, so there’s no basis on which to shape the material, including this and eliminating that, in order to help develop the theme. As a result, everything is crammed in, resulting in a piece that is a stupefying 135 minutes long, and which seems like three or more different movies rolled into one. Miracle isn’t about much of anything. Everything in it is more or less irrelevant, because there is nothing for any of it to be relevant to.

This is a pity, especially as a couple of interesting themes, early on, suggest themselves. Brooks chooses for the team, rather than “the best players,” “the right players”—that is to say, those he feels are capable of transcending their individuality for the cooperative functioning of the team as a whole. His motivation is strategic rather than ideological; Brooks hopes to beat the world’s best team, the Soviet team, “at their own game.” Still, O’Connor might have unified his rambling material along a blue line of irony, since, while the winning Soviet approach to the game is an extension of the nation’s socialism, the losing U.S. approach is an extension of American rugged individualism. (Prior to 1980, the U.S. team hadn’t won the gold medal in twenty years.) O’Connor hints a parallel of national vulnerability, citing the U.S.’s recently ended war in Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s current invasion of Afghanistan, but all this turns out to be mere period window dressing. We never get the promised balancing act between Soviet-U.S. Cold War presumptive, arrogant similarities and foundational differences. Moreover, a brief shift to exchanges among the U.S. players equally fails to submit the material to another potential theme: the transformation of Brooks’s ambition and aims, unbeknownst to him, by the teammates’ own interests and prerogatives. Other possible themes similarly fall by the wayside.

In addition, the film is rhetorical and phony. On the homefront, Brooks and his wife, Patty, endlessly bicker as an index of the pressure on the poor sonuvabitch. (It falls to gifted Patricia Clarkson to give the worst performance imaginable as Patty Brooks.) Patty explains to Herb that she can’t be in two places at one time, asking him to please pick up either their son from sports practice or their daughter from ballet class the following day. Brooks, however, has an obligation stemming from his coaching the U.S. Olympic team. Oh? This is beyond his wife’s understanding? One would think her kvetching reasonable if Brooks were opting for some golf with friends; but he is coaching the U.S. Olympic hockey team, for gosh sake. He just might be out of commission for routine family chauffering, wouldn’t one think? Perhaps Patty simply wants confirmation that the family Herb is necessarily neglecting still matters to him (neither of the Brooks’s children ever enters a single frame of the film), but her invocation of the tyranny of false alternatives—since I can pick up only one child, you must pick up the other—leaves one a little dumbfounded. Shrewdly, Brooks barks at her, “You’ll work it out,” as we wonder why this nonsensical petulance of hers was even included in the film.

An even phonier exchange between the Brookses arrives later, at the Olympics. Patty notes a letter she received from someone in Texas—a Bush, perhaps?—exhorting her husband to trounce “the Commies.” Herb uses this opportunity to dismiss the whole idea of politicizing sports. Whoa! What a feast of cake for the eating and still having, for O’Connor thus manages to raise the issue just to dismiss it, just to have it in the film! This creepy, loathsome dishonesty is typical of the film’s manipulative tack.

The scenes on the ice during competition are strenuous and tedious, a rush of noise and action rendered all the more incomprehensible by the overlay of televised commentary. Whip those cameras! Splice those shots! The film’s solemn coda, to the effect that U.S. Olympic teams in this and other sports—they are called “dream teams”—now consist of professionals rather than amateurs, implies a loss of innocence, youth, possibility, and somehow this shimmers with a reminder of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The coda, delivered as character voiceover by the actor who plays Brooks, brings a meandering film to a salient point.

The entire film is poorly acted except for the lead performance by a fattened-up Kurt Russell, looking like death warmed over, as Herb Brooks. (Brooks, a consultant on the film, died in a road accident just prior to the film’s release.) For about a minute Russell’s acting, teary-eyed, is repellent, but the rest of it is concentrated, astute and charming. (The best test of this charm is a long passage in which Brooks punishingly keeps the team, past the point of exhaustion, on the ice at practice after a pre-Olympics match. We like watching Brooks do this!) The semblance of unity that the film manages to project derives solely from the intense nature of Russell’s contribution. An actor of resources somewhere between low and nil, Russell, this once, winningly comes through—like the team that Brooks coached.

FIREWORKS (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)

Hana-bi comes from Japan. Takeshi Kitano wrote, directed and edited this allegedly important piece of cinema; as Beat Takeshi, he is also its star. He plays a cop who retires after a young rookie is (he feels) killed in his place when he (the retired cop) takes off a few hours to visit his wife in hospital, where she is dying of cancer and nurturing a grief: the death of her and her husband’s young daughter. (The girl on the beach whom the couple watch flying a kite. Everyone I’ve read takes this as a literal person. Might she not be an imagined image of the couple’s lost child?) Anyhow, the former cop’s partner, deserted by wife and child, is now wheelchair-bound for life as a result of the same shoot-out that claimed the rookie’s life. Heavy guilt for Beat Takeshi, who transforms a taxi cab into a facsimile of a police car and poses as a cop so that he can rob a bank so he can tend to his wife’s care and pay off loans to neighborhood Yakuzas. He also kills and/or mutilates a lot of fellas who rub him the wrong way, most of them Yakuzas. He has a particular thing for eyes, stabbing one out with a chopstick and dropping a knife into another as a beaten guy lies on the floor. Meanwhile, Beat’s former partner has turned to painting animals and people with flowers for faces. All the paintings in the film—and there are many—were done by Takeshi Kitano!      Visually the film is entrancing, capturing a forlorn loveliness in Nature in a lonely, underpopulated seaside Japan, and the elliptical narrative precisely juggles present, memories and imaginings in order to burrow into the protagonist’s psyche. The elegance of Kitano’s artistic expressiveness, however, can hardly wipe the viewer’s eyes and mouth of so much spilt blood, and unless your taste in films runs to Scorsese and Tarantino, I do not recommend Fireworks. I spent a fifth of the film diverting my eyes from the screen when what I really wanted, and needed, was a fifth.

GREAT ECSTASY OF THE SCULPTOR STEINER (Werner Herzog, 1973)

Steiner is Walter Steiner. A measily two minutes is devoted to his wood carving, while the balance of the film, some three-quarters of an hour, is devoted to his “ecstasy,” ski-jumping—or, as Europeans apparently call it, ski-flying. Needless to say, we get lots of shots of Steiner in slow motion “being ecstatic,” with Werner Herzog on the scene of a championship match, microphone in hand. (Is Herzog’s “ecstasy” being a sports announcer?) Steiner, whose good looks fall somewhere between blandness and glamor, is a star all right, and his disclosure that his mobs of fans come to see him bleed is interesting; but this is a simplistic piece of work.
     Some viewers, however, greet the film with ecstasy.