The Ghost Writer

Many respected directors have taken issue with U.S. foreign policy, sometimes justifiably. However, no active filmmaker may have as much personal beef with the American justice system as Roman Polanski, currently still in exile for a "misunderstanding" he was involved with back in 1977 (let's not continue to harp on it). However, in the 33 years since the diminuitive Polish auteur left the states for good, he's largely kept his mouth (or at least his camera lens) mum on the subject.  

That all changes with The Ghost Writer, a sly, character-driven thriller about those at the periphery of American imperialism. Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a thinly-disguised and testosterone-injected version of Tony Blair, is under siege for decisions he made about torturing terror suspects while in office (he's since been voted out). He's in self-imposed exile (sound familiar?) on an island off the coast of Massachusetts (one character quickly gets the Napoleon reference out in the open). The only way to turn to the tide of public opinion is by releasing a whitewashed memoir about why he got into politics, how much he loves his wife (Olivia Williams), and why Lang is not such a bad guy after all. In comes stock noir figure, the deadbeat wrtier (Ewan MacGregor), to rewrite a draft penned by a long time Lang-ally, who's recently washed ashore dead, presumably the result of an accident or suicide.

There are two obvious roads the film could travel from this setup. On the one hand, in moneymaking summer movie fashion, MacGregor could uncover a vast conspiracy, and end up running for his life through elaborate set pieces, dodging the bullets of assassins while digging for the truth. The other, more thoughtful route might sprout MacGregor a conscience while listening to Brosnan's ideological diatribes - a political film, one that might bore us to death.

Polanksi chooses an unconventional approach. For a movie ostensibly about espionage, torture and war, there is a bare minimum of action - we see most of it through the evening news. He instead keeps us with MacGregor for almost the entirety of the picture, and that means a lot of reading and writing, coupled with slow realization. This is, after all, a movie about a man impersonating another to produce the greater one's life story. The point is that political decisions and careers aren't made in the forum, in Parliament or at a press conference; rather in a darkened bedroom or on a deserted beach. Every public act has a ghost behind it, a secret agent pulling the strings. A prime minister's life being summed up by another is just the crowning bit of deception in a career full of it.

This all may sound a bit heavy, and descriptive of a film with a clear message. However, I'm taking The Ghost Writer a lot more seriously than Polanski himself does. He seems to be having fun, squarely in thriller mode, with MacGregor filling the flawed sleuth shoes of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. The Iraq war, the Bush administration, the whole war on terror are really just MacGuffins. The only difference between them and  Hitchcocks plot points is we recognize the little bits of The Ghost Writer as having been ripped from the headlines.

This isn't the dead-on satire of In the Loop or the kitchen-sink realism of United 93 - The Ghost Writer is far too beautiful, far too designed and fussed over for us to ever confuse it with reality. We're along for the ride, and by the third act, demanding sensation or plausibility. Without resorting to explosions or chases, Polanski gives us the sugar rush we demand from conspiracy thrillers. And then he puts a cherry on top.

The Vault #49: Law of Desire

Sex and violence are the bread and butter of every movie, in one way or another. Generally, the more a filmmaker cranks up either, the less serious the output becomes; the viewer is just having too much damn fun. Visceral experience can be overstimulating, to the point where analytical thought shuts down . We don't look for plot holes in Basic Instinct - our eyes are aimed a little lower. Legitimate romances tend to shy away from the carnal; like Botticelli's fig leaf, they avoid the lewd to achieve the sublime.

Who better to draw artistic meaning out of wrath and lust than Pedro Almodovar, a director who by his own admission focuses on getting a reaction out of the genitals as much as the head and heart of his audience. On paper, his 1987 feature Law of Desire (La ley del Deseo) is just an all-male Fatal Attraction, but the story of unrequited loves leaves a far greater impression than your average erotic matinee. 

Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) is a renowned film director, famous for both his heart-wrenching character studies and dabbling in homosexual pornography. He fawns on Juan, a younger lover who rejects his pleas for more intimacy. When Juan leaves Madrid for the summer, Pabloe becomes involved with the mysterious and obsessive Antonio (Antonio Banderas), who soon poses a threat to Pablo and those close to him, especially his transexual sister Tina (Carmen Maura). The drama lies in Pablo going from pursuer to pursued, and realizing inherent terror of having an overzealous admirer.

I'm not Almodovar's biggest fan; before I watched Law of Desire, I'd only seen his work from the past decade. His whole "women are magic" thing, usually revolving around Penelope Cruz, along with his sickeningly colorful compositions feel pretty amateur sometimes. However, with the excuse of it actually being the 80s, Law of Desire works just fine as an erotic thriller. By keeping it simple, Almodovar is able to show the dynamic storyteller he is.

Law of Desire might be a movie about a spurned lover being pushed to the brink, but it isn't one histrionic. Pablo and Tina are flawed characters, not unambiguous victims - there's a part of us that sympathizes with the crazed Antonio, a simple spoiled child dealing with emotions he can hardly comprehend. It's a movie that puts us in the odd position of fearing for the villain's life.

Ultimately, what I liked about the film is that I finally felt Almodovar was showing me something personal. Even if on the face of it Law of Desire is a genre picture, it deals in situations and emotions the director has actually felt as an openly homosexual artist. He turns the table on himself, revealing his own flaws, and in doing so, allows for us to have a higher opinion of him.

Shutter Island

"Pull yourself together, Teddy." When we first meet US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), he's puking his guts out. It's about as comfortable as he'll be for the duration. Daniels and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) are trapped in a nightmarish fog in Boston Harbor, on their way to the mysterious Shutter Island, a windswept rock home to Ashecliffe Asylum, a hospital/prison for the criminally insane. There Teddy will have to wrangle with  some serious migraines, hurricanes, a host of unreliable witnesses, and the formidable Dr. Cawley (Sir Ben Kingsley).

We never see the mainland in Shutter Island, except in vivid near-Technicolor flashbacks of Teddy's dead wife and his time in WWII (yeah, he's got some demons). For the duration of the film, Martin Scorsese has us cornered, and can do as he pleases. He bombards us with ominous cellos and abrasive white flashes, the perfect accompaniment for Teddy's visions of Dachau and dead children. It's a brilliant strategy, because soon the audience is hanging on every word the fidgeting, manic Dicaprio can get out; Teddy's the only person we can trust. As he begins to slip, so does the film.

As conspiracy theories begin to pile up, and Marty begrudgingly starts feeding us information about what is REALLY going on, a question began to form in the back of my mind: why? Scorsese has reached the point where he can make any film he wants, so why put one of Dennis Lehane's (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River) stranger novels on the silver screen?

Shutter Island is the very definition of pulp fiction (Tarantino's director of photography, Robert Richardson, is along for the ride, contributing that hyper-real vision of the past perfected in Inglourious Basterds), a tough cop caught maze of lies, but one can't shake the feeling Scorsese is trying to marry the high with the low. The film is detailed, dare I say fussed over. This isn't the low-tech nightmare of Taxi Driver or the rollicking B-movie fun of The Departed. The film is over-stuffed in every orifice, from it's atmosphere-soaked opening boat-ride to its propulsive lighthouse climax. Scorsese's taken a page from short-story directors like Hithcock or Fuller, and turned it into a 138-minute epic.

This comes out most in the performances, which are oddly textured for a thriller set at a loony bin. Kingsley would have been up for an oscar had Paramount not dumped Shutter Island in the February graveyard (more on this later). Patricia Clarkson, Max von Sydow and Jackie Earle Haley are all effectively unsettling in small roles. Mark Ruffalo is at his workmanlike best. And how can I not mention Dicaprio, who in his 4th film with Scorsese is looking more and more the heir to Robert Deniro's unhinged, violent throne. One of Marty's chief virtues has been conjuring brilliant performances, and Shutter Island is no exception. Even as the plot begins to unravel and make us scratch our heads, every convoluted word remains riveting.

So why did Shutter Island, a movie with the finest pedigree money can buy, end up getting released on February 19th, when its competition at the box office would be Valentines Day? The only possible answer lies in the ending, which sadly suffers from what Roger Ebert once dubbed "Keyse Soze Syndrome". Lehane is known for his twists and turns, but this one is particularly jarring, and the most confusing to date. No matter how good a twist is, it always comes off as cheap, and at the end of a film by a living legend, it's like getting shot in the back. You will not leave the theater completely satisfied, at least not the first time you see it. But you'll definitely want to go again.

Claws without a Brain - The Wolfman

From a screenwriting perspective, Se7en (1995) is a rare bird - at once formulaic, subversive, influential and, most importantly, profitable. In the aftermath of its release, scribe Andrew Kevin Walker contributed to the subsequent David Fincher films The Game and Fight Club, as well as uncredited rewrites of Stir of Echoes and Event Horizon. This filmography should clue you in; the guys thrives on horror. The grimy mystery he cashed in on after Se7en, 8MM, was a disaster. One more poor film (Sleepy Hollow) sent Walker to the back burner, where he remained for a decade, until this past weekend, when his remake of The Wolfman (co-written by David Self (Road to Perdition)) hit theaters.

Needless to say, I went to this movie solely for the promise of Walker, and his ability to write effective horror. He seemed perfect for Wolfman, and a reboot of a horror classic with a February release should have been like putting the training wheels back on his sadistic mind. However, in the hands of director Joe Johnston, director of classics like Mighty Joe Young and Jurassic Park 3, nothing is safe. 

We open in Hollywood's stock photo of Victorian England; plenty of fog, ignorance, facial hair, creepy scientists and references to Jack the Ripper. Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) returns to his childhood home to bury his brother, who was murdered by a mysterious creature roaming the hillsides on nights when the moon is full. Talbot is welcomed by his creepy father (Anthony Hopkins), his brother's intended (Emily Blunt), and an inspector with a hunch (Hugo Weaving). Soon into his inquiry, Lawrence is bitten and find himself the hunted rather than the hunter. Nothing groundbreaking, but we're looking for sexy kills and thrills, not art.

As a creature feature, The Wolfman acquits itself nicely. All the scenes of werewolves terrorizing people, whether in the woods or the crowded streets of London, are exhilarating. CGI is used effectively and unassumingly to augment Stan Winston's makeup effects. The gore is short and sweet, maintaining a PG-13 rating but keeping the audience at the edge of their seats. The problem is, there's maybe 20 minutes of wolf action in this picture  - the other 80 do not hold up too well.

The anchor of the film is Hopkins, who as sir John, plays old-man crazy/evil to a tee (oops, I spoiled it; he's evil). All the gem lines of the screenplay come out of his mouth; he provides all the non-supernatural entertainment. Blunt is okay as a damsel in distress, and this whole schlock fantasy villain thing is old hat for Weaving at this point. The main problem (and it' a big one), is that Benicio Del Toro seems to think The Wolfman is a respectable movie.  His performance lacks even a whiff of camp. It's cold, detached, and thoughtful, like the Benicio of Che and 21 Grams. Hey, buddy, this is a remake of a B-horror movie! This is not being submitted for the Academy's consideration.

That said, there are some glimmers of hope for Walker. One dream sequence borders on memorable, as past events are mashed up and confused in an insane terror; there are those memorable one-liners and disembowelments. For the most part, The Wolfman delivers on its promise - a good amount of gore in a relatively brief amount of time, and a couple of really good scares. Next week: Shutter Island.

Red Riding

In the BBC's new crime trilogy Red Riding, there's political corruption and a serial killer on the loose, but the two are not necessarily related. This is Yorkshire, where the rotting horizon is broken only by a half-dozen slate-gray cooling towers of the local power plant. Unspeakable evil might lurk behind every door or under every chicken coop, but your average citizen is too beaten down to care, while the police brass profit from the chaos. This is a ruined world, with no hope of recovery, where those in power echo, "this is the North, where we do what we want." Might has never been as brazen to make wrong.

More atmosphere than continuous narrative, Red Riding is divided into three very different films unified only by their setting and some background events. In 1974, maverick journalist Eddie Dunford (Andrew Garfield) investigates connections between a local constructions magnate (Sean Bean), and the disappearances of three young girls. 1980 follows the special unit led by unflappable detective Peter Hunter (Paddy Considine) assigned to find the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer responsible for the death of 13 prostitutes. In 1983, the disappearance of another young girl unearths a bevy of secrets best forgotten, as a deadbeat solicitor (Mark Addy) and a guilt-ridden cop (David Morrissey) try to put the killings and the kidnappings to rest.

The chief triumph of Red Riding is that from the paranoid noir of 1974 to the ersatz uplift of 1983, the whole remains unified. What starts as a claustrophobic, first person account from the perspective of Eddie Dunford (a philandering snoop in the tradition of Jake Gittes in Chinatown) gradually widens its scope to the whole of Yorkshire. Red Riding is an intimate epic, built from pillow talk and quiet confrontations in smoke-filled rooms. Given over five hours with dozens of characters, these small moments snowball into something one would never sense watching a single section.

It is almost as though the three directors (Julian Jarrold, James Marsh and Anand Tucker) were assigned to make a different film about the same events (even though there is minimal overlap). 1973 focuses on the personal journey of Dunford in to the abyss, in classic 1970s 16mm, echoing films like Z and All the President's Men. Marsh, in 1980, sees the events as a grisly true-crime film, in documentarian 35mm, objectively blue and white, colors of the badge. In the final chapter, laden with expressionistic lighting effecs, Tucker employs the RED camera for a more emotional effect.

In theory, we've been down this road before, and recently. HBO's The Wire,  and films like City of God and Gomorra have given us plenty of corruption and organized crime preying upon the lowest and most unfortunate rungs of society. They've employed the same sort of ensemble cast, giving the juiciest parts to newcomers, and riff off similar noir and cop movie tropes. However, as much as those projects have broken ground, they return to complete their stories. Red Riding, like its predecessor Zodiac, leaves things hanging in midair, breaking certain plots off altogether, to bewilder, and perhaps frustrate the viewer. And moving beyond Fincher's masterpiece, Riding moves elliptically through time, often adding irony when we see a plan hatch we already know to have failed. And that's why Red Riding is an atmosphere, not a story; there's no beginning or end for the people of Yorkshire, just an endless, grinding middle.

This doesn't mean the characters lack development. Each director gets a handful of incredible performances. Especially moving are those characters we see in multiple films. We first encounter officer Bob Craven (played ruthlessly by Sean Harris) as a young thug in the west Yorkshire police - by his end, he's a middle-aged paper pusher clinging to forgotten power. Detectice Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) evolves from owlish yes-man to quiet hero over a period of ten years. These three-dimensional portraits make Red Riding a revelation in comparison to other mystery/procedurals.

Of course, that's because Red Riding is a world unto itself, as rich as Dickens and vast as Tolkien. In a place where the truth of events is fleeting, the facts of life are plain as day. It's a place where noble men cheat on their wives, all sex leads to betrayal, and a priest is the last person you can trust. If James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential had come to the screen unscathed by Hollywood, it mike look a little something like this. A landscape polluted and empty, only populated by men looking out for themselves, no matter what the costs, be it children, family or life.

And won't someone think of the children? In a movie kicked off by a series of kidnappings, the only young people we see are murdered or compromised (remember, children are the future). One such youth, BJ, a homosexual prostitute, is perhaps the film's most noble figure, marching to mete out what little justice he can in the climax of 1983. As with Omar on The Wire, the only pure character is forced to live life as an outcast, popping up here and there to help, but never to be accepted. At the close of the three-act opus, BJ stands alone on the beach, in a moment that echoes blind Tsurumaru on the cliff at the end of Ran. Someone has escaped to a place of beauty. They're finally safe, but ultimately alone.

The Vault #48: Morvern Callar

In 1975, Michaelangelo Antonioni made The Passenger, an ostensibly vehicle for Jack Nicholson that finds the charismatic star silently driving, staring and moping his way through the South of Spain, despite being liberated by good fortune and another man's death. The Passenger is a singularly sullen road movie, but it's hardly the only one. Nicholson did it again in About Schmidt; Badlands, Two-Lane Blacktop and The Brown Bunny fall into the same category.

What makes Lynne Ramsay's 2002 Morvern Callar stand out is that this time, our dissociated and callous protagonist is a woman. Samantha Morton plays the titular Morvern, a hard-partying supermarket clerk whose artsy boyfriend has committed suicide, leaving her with a few thousand quid for the funeral, and unpublished novel, and a mixtape. Morvern only puts the music to its intended use, as she puts her own name on the title page and empties her man's bank account to go on a bender to the #1 destination for moody clubbing: Ibiza.

It is important to note that Morvern Callar is drug addict, popping ecstasy pills almost every time the sun sets. Following a supposedly loved-one's death, she barely mourns, then runs off to sleep with strange men she meets in clubs. There isn't anything sympathetic about Callar per se, and Ramsey doesn't give us a big break-down scene. Morton's minimal performance, with its bipolar mood swings, barely-literate world-view, and complete immaturity is enough to keep the audience interested, and even root for this completely despicable character.

If there's little sentimentality outside of the immersive and meticulous soundtrack (heard mostly when Morvern has her headphones on), there's even less in the way of plot. Ramsey, formerly a photojournalist, creates the sublime out of the ordinary, making Eden out of gray Great Britain and sweaty, sticky Spain. There's a critical disconnect between the situation in which Morvern finds herself and the way she reacts to it. Though the story is set in a depressed, rainy town and an oversexed spring-break getaway, Ramsey's camera finds a way to make them both transcend their reality.

It's appropo of the drug she so enjoys that Morvern is oblivious to her surroundings. Don't make the mistake of thinking Morvern Callar is somehow a drug film; this isn't the fast paced action of Go or Spun. The Passenger and The Brown Bunny are more pertinent reference points, because they deal with mourning. Morvern may seem to be having fun living the good life, but she's empty, confused and destroyed on the inside. Morton does a brilliant job of bringing these emotions out in the smallest moments, and somehow justifying her character's selfish binging.

Morvern Callar is a about a woman set free, but it's hardly happy. The book deal done and her depressing day-job behind her, where does she go? Ramsey does a good job of making every man in the film seem small, a joke, worthless; love and companionship seem out of the question. Morvern can go  ten thousand miles and find the same club, the same pills, the same kind of people. The only special things left are the moments of pure joy, the darkness, and the music. Unfortunately, that ends when the credits roll.

The Vault #47: Che

Appropriate to start a post on biopics with a cliche: the biopic is Hollywood's most well-worn genre. No surprise then that it tends to be the least successful. Pick someone too famous, and you have no choice but to go by the book and not take any risks (Milk, Ray). Pick someone too obscure, and you give yourself free reign to fall back into the same old formulas and melodrama (A Beautiful Mind). Sure, there are ways to do historic figures in an interesting way (I'm Not There), and to make the everyman sublime (Raging Bull), but for everyone of those, there's Frida, Pollack and Walk the Line. At best, these films become elaborate schemes for actors to win awards, while creative types take a back seat.


What makes Ernesto "Che" Guevara such a perfect subject for one of these films is that, as outsized as Guevara's image is in history, the details of it are still rather blurry. Over four hours long and exhaustive in historical and political detail, Stephen Soderbergh's opus never gives us the popular image of the revolutionary leader, red-starred beret perched above piercing eyes. When anyone, anywhere thinks of Che, this is what they see, while his role in the Cuban revolution, his relationship to Fidel Castro and his steadfast ideology ("belief in mankind") take a back seat. In the collective unconscious, Che was the noble warrior, leading an army of rebels against an unjust dictatorship. We do not see him as he was, as Soderbergh and star Benicio Del Toro portray him, an asthmatic intellectual made symbolic leader by no choice of his own, ultimately lead to ruin by his assumed image.  

Che was long, which lead to most (myself included) missing it in theaters; the fact is, Soderbergh's vision is really two different movies. The first (subtitled "The Argentine"), which follows Guevara from humble beginnings as a medical student with some communist sympathies in Mexico City to recruiting peasant farmers in the Cuban jungle, follows the conventional biopic route. Framed by his trip to the New York to address the United Nations in 1964, Che recounts his first meetings with Castro (Demian Bichir) and enlistment in the cause to an American reporter. The New York sequences are photorealistic, shaky, and in tune with some of Soderbergh's mumblecore work (The Girlfriend Experience was to follow). However, the bulk of Part 1 is classic Hollywood hero material. Che making meaningful speeches; Che realizing his destiny; Che and Castro realizing victory over Batista due to strength of purpose and strategic prowess.  


Think about the way Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins created their Nixon; sniveling, swearing, sweaty - the screen Nixon is always as evil and conniving as the one in our mind's eye. Directors and actors too often take this tact - the first and most obvious sign of Che's (italicize) worth is that, despite depicting an incredibly divisive political figure, it never takes a side. The first half of the film has the quality of a History Channel documentary - it delivers an immense amount of information, but we are not being told to think one way or another (whether the same can be said of Soderbergh's treatment of Castro is another question).  

Che and Fidel were heroes; they changed the world, or at least thought they did. By 1965, Guevara was hungry for more, and set into motion an elaborate plan to sneak himself into Bolivia and initiate a Communist takeover of the government, using the same guerilla tactics that had worked so well before. Many things were not in his favor including 1) Bolivia was not a tropical island nation; it's altitude and climate were terrible for Guevara's health; 2) Che did not have a native ally as he had in Castro to help lead the movement and 3) Because of his international renown, Guevara was hunted by a specially trained combat team funded by the American government, which wanted to stop another takeover at all costs. Che was hunted down before he could get the revolution off the ground, and executed.  


Part 2 of Che, subtitled "Guerilla", is a completely different animal. Adapted from a script originally penned by Terrence Malick (who was working as a freelance journalist in Bolivia at the time), Soderbergh takes the objective optimism of the first film and turns it into a subjective nightmare, full of blue filters, dialogue-free sequences of mindless trudging, and animals indifferently observing the decline of Guevara's mission. Forgotten by Castro and without a political leg to stand on, "The Bolivian" is a darker version of Don Quixote, as Che fails to get his message across to the country poor, who eventually turn him in to the military.  

If "The Argentine" is a remarkably accurate account of an incredible moment in history, "Guerilla" shows what happens when we put too much faith in such moments. Guevara and Castro may have been called revolutionaries, but only Che believed himself to be special. Fidel barricaded himself on his island, without much care for the rest of the world, while Che believed in the cheers of the masses, and felt there was more to be done. It is telling that in the final shot of the film (a flashback), Che looks hopefully out to sea; when he glances at Castro, the rebel is staring at the deck of the boat, unmoved.  


While making the Cuban and Bolivian revolutions largely procedural, Soderbergh does toss in a handful of moments like the one above, where the audience is allowed to question the premise of Che's mission. A traditional biopic might be overflowing with these, or emphasize his relationship with his wife and five children (the six year period in which he formed and raised his family is entirely elided between the two sections). Soderbergh is sparing with the heavy-handed, but he knows these moments that shout "movie!" are necessary here and there, like at the end of "The Argentine" when Che sees his men triumphantly driving to Havana in a stolen car. Chiding them for both stealing and indulging in the false capitalist desire of a gleaming red Cadillac, Del Toro utters a single word: "unbelievable". Che may have had the rare ability to live outside the moment, but the film does not make the mistake of sharing that perspective.