A History of Violence

One-time horror maestro David Cronenberg’s latest is an allegory on the ethics of violence as a problem-solving method.   Viggo Mortensen does nuanced work as Tom Stall, a salt-of-the-earth small-town American who runs a small diner with his loving wife Edie (Maria Bello); it’s a healthy family, completed by their teenage son Jack and a small daughter.   One night near closing time a couple vicious murderers on the lam make the fateful decision to terrorize Tom’s place.   The events of the film flow inexorably from what happens next.   In the weeks that follow, some menacing men-in-black types begin to turn up around town insinuating cryptic things about Tom’s alleged past life.   I couldn’t help but see the film as an allegory for current events: a salt-of-the-earth Indiana town clearly meant to stand for America is terrorized by nasty outsiders intent on committing mayhem.   Cronenberg’s subversive twist is to raise the specter of a blood-sodden history for Tom, his symbol of innocent, heroic America.  

The film illustrates the atavistic nature of violence.   For example, Jack has trouble with a bully at school.   Before his father becomes a local hero for his handling of the situation at the diner, Jack’s method for disarming the blighter is to use witticisms.   Afterwards, however, his weapon of choice switches from “bon mots” to fisticuffs.   If humor represents a uniquely human intelligence, then surely violence is humor’s negation, a low form of expression.   What could be less funny than the irreducible fact of violence: that it is the willing perpetration on another of that which one would not have done to oneself?   After Jack badly beats the bully, Tom urgently advises his son that in this family we don’t use violence to solve our problems.   But the boy has seen different.

It began to seem to me that the film’s title was a play on words, a reference not only to a specific character’s history, but to a history of violence as problem-solving method that we share as individuals and as a nation.   As individuals it goes back to corporal punishment; as a nation it goes back to the original act of utile violence, the wiping out of the indigenous.  

As for the bloody denouement (the specifics of which I won’t reveal), my immediate reaction was one of disappointment.   Isn’t it rather like a Bruce Willis movie, I thought, i.e. violence as crowd-pleasing consumable entertainment (albeit writ on a smaller scale and staged without heroics), soothing Americans rather than challenging their basic premises?   If we understand this climax as a metaphor for the war on terror, then Cronenberg’s argument seems to end up being that violence is sometimes an ugly necessity; and I realized that he had slyly turned the tables and now my anti-war position was the one being asked to meet a challenge.   Or at least, that’s how I interpreted it.   Ultimately, the film is fascinatingly ambiguous, a product of the conflict between its subversive tendencies and the prerogatives of violent entertainment.  

This is one of the most thought-provoking films of the year, though ironically it can’t be recommended to those with a visceral reaction to violent imagery.   Cronenberg, a Canadian, may have held up a truer, darker mirror to contradictions in current U.S. culture and character than those on either side of the political spectrum care to peer into.

- Oct 17, 2005  

Thumbsucker

“Thumbsucker” is a loving film about teens and parents and their dreams.   In Oregonian “new devos” we meet Justin Cobb (Lou Taylor Pucci), an insecure debate-team member, fragile, bright, and troubled, who sucks his thumb.   It’s a filmic field day for Freudians, what with Justin arrested in the “oral stage” and its evocations of the unconscious and intimations of the Oedipal, which brings us to Justin’s parents, Audrey and Mike.  

Audrey’s incarnated by Tilda Swinton, great and fearless British muse of the avant-garde cinema, here playing as far against type as imaginable as an ordinary suburban American mom.   It works because her character’s meant to have had a high school artiness which years have obscured but not erased.   Though she’s made to look as plain as possible here, any image containing Swinton’s otherworldly visage is interesting per se.  

Mike’s (Vincent D'Onofrio) the manager of a Wal-Mart-type store.   A football star in high school, an accident derailed his dreams of going pro.   Though impatient re: Justin’s thumbsucking, D’Onofrio doesn’t play him as the stereotypical insensitive, overbearing dad but imparts to him a beefy soulfulness.   He’s simply got the jock’s utter inability to relate to angst.   It’s a credit to D’Onofrio and Pucci that we believe that the ex-jock and the skinny, cerebral teen are father and son, as we do that Mike’s efforts to understand Justin are made in good faith; his inability to do so a genuine source of pain.

Keanu Reeves pokes metatextual fun at his “Matrix” iconography as Perry Lyman, a philosophical orthodontist who not only ministers to the dental damage wrought by Justin’s habit but counsels him to give himself over to his subconscious, to find his “inner animal”.   (Justin’s turns out to be a fawn).   Vince Vaughn, cast against type as bespectacled, disheveled debate coach Mr. Geary, is spot on.  

The qualities that save this film from being another trite coming-of–age tale are distilled in a remarkable scene that manages the unique feat of grossing us out at the very same time that it makes peaceful our troubled hearts.   Suffice it to say that it involves Audrey and a TV star at the rehab clinic where she works as a nurse.  

I loved “Thumbsucker”.   It is a joyful film; its joy is earned in that it flows not from a phony escape from the pain and fear but rather from learning that they are a part of the journey that you’ve the strength to manage; and from a good-humored self-acceptance that on those occasions when you can’t manage, it’s not shameful to suck your thumb.   The film is a tremendous aural experience as well thanks to a transcendent score by self-described “choral symphonic pop band” Polyphonic Spree, which lifts it into the azure, and a sprinkling of wistful songs by the late Elliot Smith.   Based upon a Walter Kirn novel, it’s the feature directorial debut of Mike Mills and clearly was an important project for Swinton in that she co-produced.    

- Oct 10, 2005  

Green Street Hooligans

This film on British football “hooligans” is never uninteresting but is finally undone by its confusion as to what it’s trying to say.   “Green Street Hooligans” offers no sociological analysis for this venerable working-class subculture in which organized groups of fans (called “firms” in cockney parlance) live to rumble with rival firms.   Rather, it seeks to honestly portray the demimonde, albeit through the eyes of Elijah Wood’s American journalism student, Matt, who’s so passive that he takes the rap when the Harvard authorities discover his well-connected roommate’s coke (and I refer not to the soft drink).

After Matt gets the Harvard heave-ho he hops across the pond to call on his sister and her Brit husband.   A fateful meeting with his brother-in-law’s brother, Pete (Charlie Hunnam), a hooligan with the Green Street Elite (“GSE”) firm which boosts West Ham United, leads to Matt’s first footie match and his first scrap.   Soon the diminutive Ivy Leaguer proves his mettle as a tactician and street fighter, becoming a bit of a local legend.   In voiceover, Matt tells us that once you discover that you’re not made of glass the urge becomes to see how far you can push the envelope.   This is all a bit tired in that by now the “exhilaration of violence” is an idea too familiar to retain any irony.  

This story of a sheltered, book-smart boy who is made into a “man” through a brush with street culture would seem a middle-class male fantasy.   However, it turns out that our director is a woman, Lexi Alexander.   It’s interesting to read that she was once in a firm herself, as her film portrays them as exclusively male bastions.   Alexander knows these people well and she’s especially good at portraying the ties that bind the members of this surrogate family.   Even those of us who don’t think it’s clever to punch or be punched are made to feel what attracts Matt to the firm: the camaraderie of the tribe, the joy of throwing up a pint at the pub and chanting the GSE fight song.  

I enjoyed the often amusing portrayal of the cross-cultural relationships between the Brits and the American.   When he’s first learning about feuding football firms, Matt comments that it’s just like the Red Sox vs. the Yankees.   The GSE mates are prejudiced against “Yanks” as clueless, useless wankers, and yet there’s a part of Pete that doesn’t begrudge Matt his privileged background.   In fact, he takes him under his wing and develops a deep loyalty to him.   As Pete, Hunnam gives the film’s most memorable performance, imparting to him dimension and heart.  

The main problem here is that while Alexander clearly admires the hooligans’ code (“stand by your mates”), she also wants us to mourn its predictable consequences when there is an inevitable martyrdom towards the end.   From there we move swiftly into the realm of the fantastical with an improbable denouement in which Matt, back in the states and now with a bit of steel in his spine, confronts the soulless rich kid who got him booted from Harvard.   Alexander’s determination not to judge her characters is admirable, but when it comes to their ethos of violence, the film fails in that it can’t make up its mind whether it is to be a celebration or a cautionary tale.  

- Oct 2, 2005

Caterina in the Big City

In this Italian comedy/drama, the teenage Caterina (Alice Teghil) moves from a small town by the sea to Rome when her father Giancarlo (Sergio Castillitto), a frustrated academic and aspiring novelist, tires of trying to teach recalcitrant teens in the rural Montaldo Di Castro.   The family moves into a neighborhood that one imagines is just down the street from, say, Trevi Fountain, where in headier days frolicked Anita Eckberg.   However, this film is less interested in taking us to the tourist spots than in limning the private spaces of Rome’s youth, where they go about the business of identity formation in much the same ways as teens everywhere: enjoying their music, nurturing their dreams privately, sharing thoughts with friends. Caterina must attempt to fit in at a new school where she’s viewed as a hick by her peers, many of whose parents are prominent.   She initially falls in with Margherita, a bohemian outsider whose mother is a noted writer, and later with the popular clique led by the vacuous Daniela, daughter of a rich fascist minister.   Daniela may not be what Arendt had in mind when she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to characterize the likes of Eichmann, but that’s the phrase that springs to mind when we see Daniela mindlessly throw up the straight-arm salute at a fascist gala.   The film makes an analogy between the popular clique and fascism in that the intoxication of being an insider lies at the heart of the appeal of both.   The strategy of illuminating the universality of the teen experience rather than the Rome-specific leads to one of those tired montages set in a fitting room in which they try an outfit on Caterina, shake their heads “no”, try another to nods and smiles.   The young scholars are as bored, disaffected, and ill-behaved as in any U.S. classroom, and, as in our culture, their idea of “la dolce vita” revolves around shopping and parties.   The film is more interesting when treating the specifically Roman, such as the comparative width of their political spectrum.   Even the most oblivious youth there seems cognizant of politics as a matter of class struggle rather than the tepid center-to-right spectrum which obtains in the U.S. (though you could argue that this lamented narrowness is perhaps quite a good thing indeed: it stops us having fascists as serious political contenders, for one).   Castillitto is very good as a man who gives lip service to his contempt for the elite while aching to join them.   The parents of Caterina’s friends form a clique which transcends political differences, that of the world of letters and politics, and he knows in his bones that it’s a club from which he’ll always be excluded.   Tergil’s performance likewise rings true.   There’s a sweet lilt to the romance languages when spoken with the shyness she brings to her line-readings.   “Caterina in the Big City” isn’t essential viewing, but it’s a nicely observed coming-of-age story which also makes some interesting comments on political life in what remains the Eternal City.   Directed by Paolo Virzi.

 - Sep 25, 2005  

2046

Wong Kar-Wai’s “2046” is something of a sequel to that rapturous meditation on love in Hong Kong in the early 1960s, “In the Mood for Love” (2000).   Tony Leung is once again compelling as the existential journalist Mr. Chow.   In voiceover Chow recounts his memories of his return to Hong Kong from Singapore in the late 1960s after the death of the love of his life, Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung).   He holes up in a hotel and writes a short story about the future called “2046”, which, as it was in “Mood”, is the number of the room wherein take place his assignations.  

The film concerns the passage of time, which we tend to equate with progress.   But what if over time humans grow more dehumanized, more alienated from each other, our work, ourselves?   In Chow’s story, people speed about on an elevated train through a shimmering cityscape, unable to alight.   Robots provide intimacy which has been literally dehumanized.   2046, we are told, is a place that people go to recover lost memories, because in 2046 nothing ever changes.  
     
Despite attempts to fill the void left by Su Li-Zen by becoming a suave ladies’ man, Chow remains essentially isolated.   Both he and Ms. Bai (the lovely Ziyi Zhang of “Hero”), a prostitute, want a true friendship, but filthy lucre is both the basis for and the saboteur of their relationship.   Another friend is Ms. Wang, the landlord’s daughter (Faye Wong, with whom we fell in love in Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chungking Express”), who co-writes “2046” with him.   In Chow’s visualization of the story, Ms. Wang appears as one of the love-bots, as does the lost Su Li-Zhen (Cheung in a cameo).  

One of the central metaphors of “2046” is history as a moving train.   Unseen others control the train and thus the future.   Hong Kong’s been under various foreign thumbs for so long, and therein lays yet another significance of the number 2046: it’s the year when China's agreement allowing independence for Hong Kong expires.   Signifiers of that history of foreign control abound: Ms. Wang’s Japanese boyfriend signifies the Japanese occupation during WWII, and one of Chow’s sharpest memories is of the violence surrounding the demonstrations of 1967 against British colonial rule.   Hong Kong culture itself has been westernized: Mr. Wang, the landlord, enjoys opera, and several scenes take place at a Christmastime suffused with the warm tones of Nat Cole.

With “2046”, Wong has given us more food for the eye, mind and heart.   Here as in the rest of his oeuvre, Wong’s people struggle against roboticization to find connection in an absurd universe; they reach, in their way, for freedom and love.   If “2046” isn’t a major work of art on the level of “Mood”, it is nonetheless a poetic coda.

- Sep 19, 2005