American Sniper

I mulled over American Sniper for weeks, and finally got so jammed up I couldn't finish writing about it. Every argument in my head elicited a counterargument from myself. (Hey, that sounds like a form of mental illness!) As the weeks went by, whatever I might have had to say became irrelevant. Now that the movie's out on on home video, though, maybe it's time once again to puzzle it out: if I think this film is a good one--and I do (with some caveats, which I'll get to)--why then did I walk around for a long time after seeing it thinking, "I have got to get the taste of this thing out of my mouth?'

The movie, a character study about a real-life U.S. Navy SEAL sharpshooter called Chris Kyle, who once shot a target from 2,100 yards away, and who found his direction when he signed on to go fight in Iraq after 9/11, became a flashpoint in an America still fighting decades-long, bitter cultural wars.  Over the weeks after seeing the movie, one of the thing I mused on was how culture divides us as much as it unites us: gun culture, music culture. Kyle is a working-class guy, so he enjoys country music and Metallica.

At first I was going to say the movie is a study of how someone like this is produced, but then I decided there's something condescending about that approach.  Everything about the way the Iraq War went down disgusts me, but it is essential to admire and honor the sacrifice and courage of those who volunteered to go, most of whom, as it's been pointed out, came from lower econmic classes (and whose selflessness was, in my view, treated very carelessly, even cynically: soldiers tossed aside like so much damaged goods).

So I should say up front that I take exception to the idea, which both the movie's detractors and its supporters seemed to hold, that American Sniper as a narrative is "heroic and clear-cut." Respectful, yes. But Eastwood's telling one hell of a sad story, in my view: even a tragic one. 

Discussion of the movie got caught up in the ongoing controversy--the rending of the social fabric--caused by the wars of the Bush administration, and sometimes rather got away from speaking in terms of the picture as the work of a team of professional filmmakers, such as writer Jason Hall and cinematographer Tom Stern, who's been Eastwood's DP since "Blood Work" in 2002, or as a very good performance from Bradley Cooper, who fully inhabits this character.  I mean, he is this guy.

Heck, sometime you could forget we were talking about a work of art, or even just a piece of entertainment.

Lost in the fray, outside of "movie people" circles, was evaluation of the picture's formal choices, such as Eastwood's telling choice not to use music to punch up the battle scenes. Eastwood is an accomplished, economical visual storyteller in full, serene command of his art, and I believe we owe it to Eastwood to view him as an artist first (and, I believe, an important one). and a conservative Republican second.

Still, when you talk about movies it is permissible--sometimes even desirable--to talk about the wide world beyond the frame. And yet how "extra-textual" are you meant to get?  You can see how I got jammed. 

 

I remember being on edge as we settled into our seats and the film began. I braced myself for the prospect of a theater of people cheering the assassination of Muslim people. But it soon emerged that the tone of the picture was sober, not cathartic. As the call to prayer pierced the black screen, I thought of Karolyn's and my visit to Morocco a few years ago--my first visit to a Muslim country. I thought of a line from Dylan: "Don't fear if you hear a foreign sound to your ear."

Immediately we are in Kyle's shoes, on a rooftop in Iraq, faced with the choice of whether to shoot an Iraqi woman and child. This is riveting: we hold our breath. We can see that they are carrying a bomb towards approaching U.S. soldiers; Kyle thinks they are.  And so we are forced to see what it's like to make a life-or-death situation in a split second.  After he pulls the trigger, we are left wrung out, not cheering.  Yet there's a sense in which the deck is stacked. There's no ambiguity: well, he had to do it, to stop a murder. 

 

I will say I take exception to the idea, advanced by its critics, that the picture never shows the folly and futility of the Iraq War. For me the key scene of the movie was the funeral for Kyle's friend and fallen soldier, where the deceased's mother reads aloud a letter from her son that shatters the George W. Bush-fantasy version of the war, replacing it with hard truths. His letter, as read in his mom's shaking yet purposeful voice, expresses his suspicion that the war has become a crusade, a terrible waste of blood and treasure. Back in the car, when Kyle's wife Taya (nicely played by Sienna Miller) recalls that moment, he dismisses his late friend's comments.  Kyle won't--can't--see the truths in it.

As to its depiction of American gun culture, American Sniper is respectful. However, any viewer who does not come away with the gnawing feeling that there is something profoundly wrong with that culture is, in my view, missing something. Think of the disturbing scene near the end where the supposedly healed Kyle trains a gun on Taya, and it's supposed to be a big joke.

The undeniable weakness of the film, one it almost can't recover from, is its cartoon Iraqi bad guys.  Wouldn't it have been more interesting, for example, to show Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), the enemy sniper and Olympics marksman, to be Kyle's opposite number, an idea the film just toys with?  A fellow obsessive?  As it was, and with Kyle's talk of the enemy as "savages," I had to go look at our photo albums from Morocco just to get the taste out of my mouth of the demonization of Muslims.  

On the other hand (see where all this even-handedness gets you?), it should be pointed out that American Sniper works within a certain tradition. I've been reading Lewis Jacobs's absorbing The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (With an Essay-Experimental Cinema in America, 1921-1947), published in 1968.  Jacobs writes of the pre-WWI era: "Hand in hand with frontier morality went military patriotism. As in earlier years, films about the Army and Navy and American history enjoyed an unslackening popularity...The courage and loyalty of the soldier and sailor were convincingly dramatized in film after film. [For Flag and Country was one title.] Since the display of the Flag at the end of a picture was certain to evoke applause, wily producers often made films with nothing more to commend them than a shot of Old Glory."

So I guess after all these months I'm still mixed on American Sniper.  Divided, you could say.  Maybe what was lost in the controversy over the picture was that, as a cultural product, it was not red or blue, but some more interesting shade of purple. Perhaps the achievement of Eastwood’s film is that it helped someone like me understand this man, Chris Kyle.  In a divided America, that counts for something.

Rating: ***

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Tiny Furniture

The first thing we notice about Lena Dunham is that she does not look like a person who would normally star in a movie.  We are made aware of how rarely we see ordinary-looking people in movies, especially women.  But then, to depict a young woman as a human being--ordinary, earthy, flawed--is part of the point.  To show us a moment like her character putting on roll-on is, after all, a choice.  Her features are expressive, full of shy--not to say sly--deadpan humor and intelligence.  

“Tiny Furniture” is a comedy, and quite funny, I think.  It’s the story of a girl, Aura, who moves back in with her artist mother after graduation.  (The antiseptic white of the apartment is a punch line in itself.)  It’s a satire of the mores of twenty-something creative people in New York City, especially the feckless men.  Alex Karpovsky is funny as an aspiring artist whom Aura invites to crash at her mom's apartment while she's out of town.  She has a crush on him, but he'd rather read.  David Call plays an asshole sous chef.  Dunham satirizes her own tendency to defer to these assholes. 

I think viewers who think Aura's a sulky lump can be forgiven.  However, her state of mind will be relatable (or even recallable) to anyone who didn’t take the easy, unimaginative path and, say, go to law school. 

It’s a personal movie.  Dunham's mother, Laurie Simmons, plays her mother; her sister, Grace Dunham, plays her sister.  In real life as in the movie, Laurie Simmons is a successful artist, meaning she's made a living from her art.  For a creative person, that's the goal.  (She makes photographs, sometimes of tiny furniture.) 

Of course she actually had to create, which doesn't seem to have occurred to Aura and her mopey friends.  This is probably the main difference between Dunham and her character, although, as with Woody Allen, people are going to confuse the two: Dunham made this movie, while Aura more or less sulks.   

There are no great emotions in the picture, just moments of quiet honesty and sexual honesty, as well as the pleasure and surprise for a generation of seeing itself on screen.  In that way the film does for this generation what “Breathless” did for another.  That this generation won’t be as surprised to find themselves up on screen says more about the way the world’s changed than it does about the quality of this film, or about Dunham's supposed self-absorption. 

Aura's friend from college (Merritt Wever) finally makes it to NYC.  She is open, nonjudgmental, bookish, smart, funny, utterly free of fashion.  Aura's new (old childhood) friend (Jemima Kirke) is loyal and means well; but she's also judgmental, superficial, full of ennui and English-accented high drama, and stylish.  She’s “in the club,” and Aura decides she wants to be in the club.  She's changed.  The scene where she turns away from her old friend is sad. 

Likewise, some begrudge Lena Dunham her status of being "in the club," but this film shows she’s not just lucky but talented, and that she is quite aware that the club is full of shit in many ways.  In other words, "Tiny Furniture" walks a fine line, but in the end it's more a send-up than an expression of the ennui of the entitled.  

Bring on “Girls”?     

The Muppets

Karolyn and I watched The Muppets (2011) at the cabin over Memorial Day weekend.  It's a delightful musical comedy.  I'm not ashamed to admit that my eyes welled up during this scene:

I chuckled when they cut to Animal and cheered when he got back behind his kit.  Keeping me on the edge of laughter, tears and cheers at once was a tone it sustained really well throughout, I thought.  The filmmakers wisely kept the story to pretty much, "Let's put on a show."  But not just any show: it's a comeback show, a show to save their old theater, which evil tycoon Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to destroy.  It's a plot stumbled upon by young Muppets fan Walter when his brother, Gary (Jason Segel, who co-wrote), and Gary's fiance, Mary (Amy Adams), take him to LA for a tour of Muppets landmarks, which have fallen into sad neglect and disrepair. 

Walter, you see, happens to be a Muppet himself, and thus never ages, even as Gary (a stone Muppets fan himself) grows up.  Neither brother seems quite sure to which world they belong.  There's a nice message about how growing up is about becoming who you were meant to be.

If I have a criticism, it'd be that some of the background muppets (Scooter, the Swedish chef, Lew Zealand, etc.) become just that: part of the scenery.  Perhaps it would have been better to have more for them to do, and less Gary and Mary, in whose story (will Gary remember their 10th anniversary?  Will he grow up enough to be a good companion to kind Mary?) we're not as invested.  (That said, Segel and Adams are so game about laying back in the cut for most scenes, and perform with such exuberant innocence when they're foregrounded, that this isn't much of an issue.  They've been given songs by Bret McKenzie, half of "Flight of the Conchords," which are funny, albeit not as memorable as those in "The Muppet Movie.")      

So let's put on a show again after all these years, years in which the gang went their separate directions, led separate lives.  Piggy has become a fashion designer in Paris; Fozzie is performing in a Muppets tribute act; Rowlf's been just hanging out.  Meanwhile, Kermit, retired, walks the lonely halls of his manse in L.A.  One hall is lined with portraits of the old gang: his family.  He sings a moving song about them, "Pictures In My Head."       

And the years between then and now are part of what the movie is all about, for people my age.  Watching this movie,  I saw myself sitting on the living-room floor at my cousins Jeff & Matt's house in Kalamazoo, watching "The Muppet Show" on a 1970s color TV set. 

And during a scene like the one above, when they go into "Rainbow Connection," the music is somehow not so much nostalgia as it is a direct portal, the way the scent of Carmex transports me back through time and space to our 1985 family reunion.  (Hey, I had cold sores.)  It's not just that you see yourself as that kid again: in a way, you are him again, at least for as long as the song is playing.  "The lovers, the dreamers, and me..."  Though I confess, the line that hits me the hardest now is, "Have you been half asleep..." 

There are some good gags about the gulf between the late 70s and today.  Richman scoffs to the Muppets that the world doesn't care anymore about them and their Dom DeLuise guest appearances.  His imposter "Moopets" are a bit gangsta: a "hard, cynical" bunch for "hard, cynical times."

I saw The Muppet Movie on the big screen when it came out, when I was around nine.  My dad was in awe at the shot where Kermit rides a bicycle.  I remember him exclaiming in wonder, "How did they get a puppet to ride a bicycle?"    

Me, I'll always wonder at how Jim Henson made a creature like Kermit--so expressive, and with such heart and humanity--out of a green sock, a couple of ping-pong balls, and a handful of magic.

The Innocents

This 1961 adaptation of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" is not only a classic haunted house movie, one that still provides the delectable fun of feeling tingling up your spine.  It's also a master class in how to bring the printed word to the screen.  This is not simply a matter of sticking the plot up there.  It means translating the book completely into cinema.  Camera movement, shot distance, angle, cutting, performance, sound, palette, etc., etc.--all ringing changes on the book's theme, mood, psychology. 

The genius of "The Turn of the Screw", of course, was that you could read it in two different ways (at least).  Was that house really haunted by the children's severe, perhaps perverse former caretakers, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, hell-bent on taking the children's hands from beyond the veil and reuniting their little group in death?  Or were you reading the memoir of a sexually repressed young woman having a mental breakdrown?  (She describes Quint, who haunts her, as "handsome and obscene").  Or does the truth lie somewhere in between?  The book is not scary, exactly: it's more that its farrago of desire troubles you on a kind of primal, unconscious level.

The great achievement of the filmmakers was somehow to preserve the book's sense of ambiguity.  That's a far trickier proposition in film because it's a much less ambiguous, much more direct medium.  And while the persona of the narrator is stronger in the book than the film (as it nearly always is), Deborah Kerr is so right for the role of the governess that you believe she is the woman whose internal life we experienced, that here is the woman who composed the beautifully written sentences in which she sets down her story in the book (a nod here to the screenplay, co-penned by Truman Capote).    

Freddie Francis's deep-focus cinematography lets you peer deeply into the recesses of that unhappy mansion, down dark halls ending in softly glowing windows.  Even the natual light in this film looks pale and grey.  There's bottomless darkness in the spaces of director Jack Clayton's widescreen compositions for unseemly secrets.  That tension of light versus shadow: it drives the governess's disorientation.  Why is the ghost of Miss Jessel somehow so much more unsettling when it appears in broad daylight than it would be in the dark? 

And the sound: the creak of a door, the governess' frightened breathing in her ears.  The silences of the vast house deafen, as well.  Most unforgettably, there is that chiming music box, to which the little girl will later add those eerie sing-song lyrics, which sound to us, and to the chilled governess, like a siren call from beyond.      

   The performances by the children (Martin Stephens and Isla Cameron) are remarkable turns of poise as well, tapping into what's mysterious and unknowable in all children. They teeter on that angel/devil fulcrum, without ever letting the balance finally rest anywhere.  The governess views them askance.  She's as alarmed by the idea they might be corrupt as she is that they're in mortal danger.  Just who is terrifying whom, here? 

There are whispery intimations of sexual abuse, never at a conscious level, and the obscenity of the idea that the children might have a bond with their late abusers.  Why is it that the sound of children laughing should make the governess' blood run cold?  It is the sound of her deepest fear, or her most fevered fantasy: the corruption of innocents.

  

Running On Empty

I threw this one on as part of my ongoing program to catch up with Sidney Lumet pictures I’d missed.  It rather blindsided me with how well-observed it is.  It's that rarity: an honest film.

I imagine the characters of the parents here--former 60s radicals who’ve been raising their family “underground” ever since their bombing of a napalm factory accidentally blinded and paralyzed a janitor--are modeled on Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres of the Weather Underground.  In Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch the filmmakers have found the very embodiment of these roles.  Lahti actually reminded me a bit of Dorhn, physically. 

Every few years when they feel the heat getting too close, the family has to beat it to a new town and assume new identities.  They've made plans for every eventuality, including where to meet if the kids, a teenager and a 10-year-old, need to flee when the parents aren't home.  When we meet them in the late 80s, that's exactly what's going down.   

The film not only resonates with some of my long-term fascinations (the left, the antiwar movement, the cultural upheavals of the 60s), it has a protagonist, the teenager played by River Phoenix, who shares my particular generational take on them.  I was born the same year the bombing is meant to have taken place: 1971.  That means that, like the Phoenix character, my understanding of it all can never be direct.  I experienced "Running On Empty" as a film about how my generation was shaped, in ways of which we might not even be aware, by the weight of what went down before we were even born, in a era more volatile than we can perhaps imagine.  

I’m struck by the intelligence of Lumet’s direction.  He mostly permits us to suss out the dynamics and back-stories of this family just by letting us observe them. Hirsch is a red diaper baby; Lahti the child of wealth and privilege who rebelled against her upbringing.  Late in the movie we witness a reunion with her long-estranged father.  It is beautifully played, the actors expressing so many things at once: regret, anger, the living after all these years with the pain of a redemption that can't come, the eyes that plead for each to understand the other.  In this small scene with this father and daughter we get a feel for how the war tore the society asunder at all levels.

While we get a feel for how crazy a life on the lam is for the kids, we also observe how to them it just seems normal.  We see how much the father and mother love their boys. They are essentially humane people.  Even in the desperate days of the anti-war movement, they were never able to dehumanize ordinary Americans in a way that would allow them to be harmed as "collateral damage", the way some militants did (such as their erstwhile comrade who turns up all these years later wanting them to rob banks: he sees it as a way to finance what's left of the "movement").

The tragedy is that it was precisely this love for humanity that led them to plant the bomb which ended up maiming an innocent man.  Why’d mom and dad do it? the 10-year-old asks his big brother one day, and I love the way Phoenix answers him in just one sentence, and in a way that even a child can understand: the government was pouring napalm on people.  If viewers of my generation can't imagine why planting a bomb ever seemed like anything other than an insane idea, in that irreducible line we are also made to understand the corollary.  The government was pouring napalm on people.  Wouldn't you do anything, everything you could to stop it?  (In this way, too, the picture is in keeping with one of Lumet’s primary thematic concerns: people taking a stand against injustice.)

It feels like a real family, what Lumet and the actors have got down on film here. The birthday dinner scene in which they spontaneously begin to dance to James Taylor is one of the great joyful moments I’ve seen in movies recently.   

There’s a nice bit that shows how an antiauthoritarian stance can complicate parenting: when Hirsch won’t let his son attend a classical performance, it's because classical is the music of the white, privileged male and “it’s not rock & roll”.  Phoenix calls him on it, telling him he’s full of shit, and when the old man chafes the teenager says, hey, YOU were the one who taught me to be antiauthoritarian.

I also really like the relationship between River and Martha Plimpton, who plays his girlfriend.  Like them, I was a teenager when this movie came out.  In that fascinating way in which a film can’t help but record the time in which it was made and the world in which the actors were living, I felt like I was watching people who had the same experience I did of being an 80s teenager. 

Rating: ****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)