THE THIN BLUE LINE (Errol Morris, 1988)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

For a while, one of the unfortunate legacies of The Thin Blue Line is that its use of reconstructed events, corresponding to witness testimony, was adopted by television news shows. Now that that practice has subsided, if not entirely vanished, Errol Morris’s beautiful documentary can be appreciated afresh.
     On one level driven by narrow agenda, the film sets out to show that a man then serving a life term for killing a Dallas police officer was most likely innocent. Indeed, the attention Morris’s film drew to this likely miscarriage of justice helped get the man released. This is no small thing for a film to accomplish, but, of course, this speaks not at all to the merits of the work. This does: an eerily engrossing mosaic of interviews, reportage and dramatic reconstructions, with fugue-like repetitions and a both burrowing and meditative temperament, and all of it enriched by steely, somber color and by Philip Glass’s hypnotic music, The Thin Blue Line achieves the aspect of a tone poem on human ambiguities. All this, moreover, combined with the Dallas locale, elusively insinuates the mystery surrounding President Kennedy’s death. The result haunts.
     And one thing more: Like Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), Morris’s film inconveniently rattles us, in this instance, with racist testimony helping to exonerate the imprisoned man.

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PLAIN TALK & COMMON SENSE (UNCOMMON SENSES) (Jon Jost, 1987)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Jon Jost’s holistic films interrelate a series of humane, social and political concerns. Plain Talk, a British documentary Jost wrote, directed, cinematographed and edited, addresses U.S. myths and realities. It reminds us that we reside on confiscated land.
     The film’s opening is lyrical, as a shot of sturdy wild grasses changes to one of a pulsating river superimposed over which a hand tries grasping the U.S., which Jost’s voiceover poignantly explains always eludes him. American tourists are shown at a topographical point where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet, accompanied by an inscription in stone: “Four states meet here in freedom under God.” Playfully, compulsively, families take photographs, unwittingly reducing the experience of place to things: snapshots—commercialized “memories.” People are thus deftly divided from their humanity by a commercial(izing) culture. They are also being divided from Nature, for, Jost’s voice reminds us, states’ boundaries, artificial, were drawn by politicians.
     The film itself becomes a kind of tourist in its attempt to take hold of America. A segment presents overlapping voiceovers reading from a plethora of American documents and utterances, accompanied by gorgeous abstract designs that compare the U.S. to a vast cosmic mystery. Jost then analyzes America, initially in terms of European perceptions of it and, later, in terms of demographic facts and figures. (Examples: 1% of the population owns 33% of the nation’s wealth; 31% of eligible voters elected Ronald Reagan president in 1984.) A chamber of commerce-type promotional film about Colorado Springs yields to a frightening consideration of the Strategic Air Command and its role in overseeing prospects for World War III.
     In this “essay from the margins,” Jost addresses U.S. nuclear obsessiveness, the military-industrial complex, marketplace tyranny, and the pernicious nature of the nation-state. It’s edifying stuff.

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THE LAST EMPEROR (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

“Don’t you ever like films that win best picture Oscars?”
     The Last Emperor, the first part of a trilogy that gets progressively more lost (The Sheltering Sky, 1990; Little Buddha, 1993), is one of the two or three best “best pictures,” and maybe the best. For the record, though, if Academy voters had grasped its politics, they never would have given Bernardo Bertolucci’s film its Oscar, nor given it eight additional prizes besides, including those for direction and cinematography (Vittorio Storaro).
     This is a mesmerizing, if dubious, biography of Pu Yi, China’s last emperor, whose humbling and rehabilitation by the Communists is heart-piercingly symbolized by the release of a cricket from long captivity. The Last Emperor is the richly detailed drama of the liberation of a soul from the decadent lifestyle and the arrogance that misled him to believe that the common lot of humanity was beneath him. Communism enables Pu to learn, by difficult degrees, to be human.
     It is (especially in the hour-longer version now available on DVD) one of the most passionate and splendiferous movies ever made. It is a work, also, of cool irony, for Pu’s enforced obscurity and humility mirror his confinement behind imperial walls during a terribly lonely though exalted, endlessly pampered childhood. Pu’s existence remains solitary. From start to finish, his is the life of one of history’s unluckiest pawns.
     The film is formally indebted to Roberto Rossellini’s The Rise of Louis XIV (1966), whose objective humanism Bertolucci moves toward a more sensual romanticism. However, the film’s most gripping scenes, perhaps, are those describing Pu’s imprisonment and re-education. These are spare and austere.
     As the grown Pu, John Lone is superb.

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THE DEAD (John Huston, 1987)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Some literary works are untranslatable into cinema, and The Dead, from James Joyce’s 1914 collection Dubliners, is probably one of them. However, Irish-American John Huston long had nurtured the dream of turning the most beautiful short story in the English language into a film. He was in his eighties and working from an oxygen tent when he did this, from son Tony’s script, and the result is overwhelmingly moving. The Dead was Huston’s last completed film.
     With its bristling life, irresistible humor, sharp observation, and glow of melancholy, The Dead is Huston’s most deeply felt and beautifully composed film. One problem, though, did intercede. Joyce’s story unfolds through an omniscient narrator, some of whose gravest reflections are, now, unsuitably given over to Gabriel, the protagonist. Otherwise, though, the film is bliss. With guests dancing lightly around their persistent awareness of “the last end,” the film gives us afresh Joyce’s buoyant, captivating comedy of life written in his twenties to acknowledge “all the living and the dead.” Approaching his own end, his legendary sourness gone, Huston transforms this young man’s piece into a serene contemplation of a universal mystery whose depth of secrets only now he is on the verge of discovering. This hauntingly lit and gloriously acted film—Donal McCann, Anjelica Huston (Huston’s daughter) and Donal Donnelly are the Gabriel, Gretta and Freddy of our dreams—bears the sense of a gracious last testament freely given.
     Huston’s is one of the most substantial careers in American cinema, and some films of his that once seemed failures or overly commercial, such as Key Largo (1948) and The Misfits (1961), possess much greater interest today.

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TIES THAT BIND (Su Friedrich, 1985)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Su Friedrich’s black-and-white documentary Ties That Bind is two films in one: her much admiring biography of her mother, a longtime political activist, to whom she is bound in familial love; her own autobiography, centering instead on her difficulties, even now in adulthood, vis-à-vis so formidable a role model, to whom her own sense of identity is inextricably bound.
     Friedrich’s mother, Lore Bucher, was born in 1920 in Ulm, Germany, where she lived until 1950 before moving to the U.S. with her American husband, Paul Friedrich. Bucher had been vocally anti-Nazi, refusing in school, even, to raise her hand and say “Heil Hitler!” Neither she nor other family members would give up Jewish friends, causing her father’s horticultural business to suffer, and culminating in their family’s being “written up” in Der Sturmer, the Nazi paper. Throughout, Bucher’s voice is the one we hear; Friedrich’s questions to her mother appear as intertitles.
     Ties That Bind thus becomes Friedrich’s antidote to both rigged family melodramas (like Robert Redford’s 1980 Ordinary People), where a parent is conveniently and gratuitously cast as the villain, and trash television talk shows where whining grown-ups confront a parent to “resolve issues” between them. Her film is a coming-to-terms with a larger-than-life parent, but Friedrich accomplishes the task lovingly, admiringly, humanely.
     Nevertheless, whenever (like Little Red Riding Hood vis-à-vis Grandmother-Wolf) Friedrich isolates in closeup this or that part of her mother (such as a foot), as though the whole of her mother were too much to take in at once, we glean how daunting a marker to measure up to Friedrich finds this woman—how in her presence Friedrich still feels like a small child.
     At times in this tremendously moving film, Bucher’s blazing decency and no-holds-barred courage make us feel a little like her daughter does.

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