The Vault #54: Die Hard with a Vengeance

I hope this brightens up everybody's Monday.

There was a time not long ago, before Hogwarts and Pandora captured the imagination of the American ticket-buyer, when meat-and-potatoes entertainment ruled at the box office. Foul-mouthed, hard-drinking law enforcement officials sought redemption with a revolver and a late-model Chevrolet. All the audience demanded was a couple of chase scenes, a climactic expolosion, and a steady steam of wisecracks. Also, a black guy and a white guy should clash, then learn to love each other. These films might have been small-minded, immature and formulaic, but at least they weren't intended for children.

Whether you blame Spielberg's Jurassic Park or John Gaeta's "bullet time" (first seen in The Matrix), it is a sad fact that the era of the stupid-but-somewhat-believable action movie died just after the release of Die Hard with a Vengeance. That means John McTiernan's 7th film was released at the tipping point of the action-thriller. Plots were getting out of hand ("I'm going to take his...face...off!) and stunts bigger and goofier (think about Arnold and his horse-in-an-elevator shtick in True Lies), but effects hadn't got to the point where, for example, Shia Labeouf could be the star of a film about warring robot clans.

Vengeance was originally penned as a gimmicky action movie (entitled Simon Says), independent of the franchise, about a sadistic terrorist who plays a game with the NYPD, sending them on a wild goose chase of riddles, brain-teasers and suitcase bombs. Perhaps knowing Se7en was coming round the bend, or perhaps realizing the marketability of both Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, 20th Century Fox decided to throw the self-deprecating humor of John McClane into the mix. Along with his sidekick Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson), who informs us in his first scene that white people are "the bad guys", Simon Says went from smart thriller to ready-made sequel, replete with a racially mixed pair of heroes who "don't like each other but have to find a way to get along".

This was not the 1980s however, when 48 Hours and the like were genuinely interested in race. Jackson and Willis were coming off of star-making roles in Pulp Fiction; Vengeance was the first film in the franchise to have A-list stars, and its 90 million dollar budget speaks to the studio's confidence they had a hit on their hands. They even threw in Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons as the wry baddie behind it all. Fox owed it to all the McClane fans - the Renny Harlin catastrophe Die Hard 2 was a mess. It wasn't funny, the action was too complicated, and too much time was spent focused on McClane trying to repair his marriage (yet again).

Die Hard 2 (and the regrettable Live Free or Die Hard) made a big mistake - in the even numbered films, the villains are truly despicable characters, bent on nothing but destruction. McTiernan's baddies (literally blood relations if you bother to follow the plot) are thieves, and the first and third movies operate effectively as heist pictures. In other words, we have reason to root for the bad guys (money) just as much as the good (justice and stuff, or something). When Samuel L. grabs a gold brick, we cannot help but sympathize with him; McClane is hardly a model cop to begin with.

This is where movies like Face Off and Armageddon began to move away from the bread-and-butter of the Great American Action Movie. The heroes of those films were not grimy anymore. When you watch Die Hard, you laugh at McClane while rooting for him, because he's no better than anyone in the audience. There are things blowing up, and nobody's perfect. Sure, today Batman and James Bond have painkiller addictions, but those aren't "real" characters. The flawed cops have moved to television, on shows like Justified and The Shield (Fox loves its lawmen to this day). Maybe it was 9/11 consecrating the NYPD as sacrosanct, but you just don't see cops stealing cars from old ladies and bikes from kids anymore. Not that they do that in real life, but it used to feel like they did.

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The Press, Baby, The Press: Deadline U.S.A.

"A free press is like a free life; it has to be protected."

Remember pay-phones, typewriters and boxing? Neither does anyone else; they belong to a bygone era, when events were reported on twice-daily printed sheets of ink and paper. This month, Film Forum pays homage to "The Newspaper Picture", in which one or more muckraking do-gooders (with the help of their best fast-talking dame) uncover corruption, speak truth to power, and uphold the American way the only way they can; with the First Amendment. Like ER and General Hospital, these movies were made to ensure Americans that there were noble institutions out there, fighting for average Joes; what makes newspapers very different from hospitals, however, is that they have outlived their usefulness. The series exists to remind us of the newsroom filled with smoke, the hot lead and the danger therein, and the satisfaction of breaking the big one. Becasue Seymour Hirsh aside, who can remember the last time daily journalism was relevant?

Like Ben Hecht and Sam Fuller before him, writer-director Richard Brooks was a newspaper man first, filmmaker second. His third feature, Deadline U.S.A., shot in the offices of the NY Daily News, put him back on his home turf. Humphrey Bogart plays Ed Hutcheson, managing editor of the anonymously named newspaper The Day, which is being sold out from under him by its founder's unscrupulous heirs. Across town, a gangster (Martin Gabel) is on trial for racketeering. Bogey's only hope for keeping himself and his employees employed is starting a campaign not only against the mob, but the whole corrupt system; the thinking is that a paper doing important  and original work is a public asset, and cannot possibly be shut down mid-investigation.

It is accepted fact that the more famous a movie star is, the less actual acting is required of them. Brooks beautifully integrates Bogart's hard drinking, fast talking personality into the role of a street-smart editor. Outside of The Caine Mutiny, we're not used to seeing Bogey in a position of power, which allows the film to deliver one of its many messages about the media. While the media might be powerful, they are normal people like you and I, scraping for a buck. The 4th estate is the power, and voice, of the people. They're the only pillar of American life not corrupted by money, because they don't have any - which is why they went by the wayside in the end.

From the copy-editor to the type setter to the whisky-slugging secretaries, every soul at The Day has given their lives to the truth, and the pursuit of it; that is to say, they're all more than a little cynical. With everyone on full Howard Hawks quipping speed, Bogart himself can play softer, more paternal. Deadline U.S.A. culminates in a court-room soliloquy that would make Frank Capra shed a tear. There is actually something sacred and wonderful about the press worth preserving, and this noble quality inspires one of Bogey's most sympathetic roles.

Of all the newspaper pictures in the series, from The Front Page to All the President's Men, Deadline U.S.A. has the most resonance with the current state of the media because it is about the death of a newspaper. When the staff finds out (over the wire) that The Day is being sold, they go down to the saloon for a wake. It's a scene as believable today as it was then (minus the swell hats and bottles of rye), substituting any one of the numerous regional papers that have gone under. Brooks may have seen this day coming; Deadline U.S.A. could in fact take place in any anonymous corner of the nation -  a specific city is never mentioned.

In that unforgettable wake scene, one man imparts a piece of advice he got entering the business: "A journalist is the hero of the story; a reporter is merely a witness". Brooks certainly looks upon his old profession fondly, with Hutcheson the only brave soul willing to stand up for John Q. Public, even when the police and the courts do nothing. The film has has all the moral subtlety of Flash Gordon, but it's certainly unusual to see the press so unequivocally on the side of good. Just like all propaganda, Deadline U.S.A. is pure fantasy - which is to say it's a lot of fun.

The Vault #53: Close-Up

Re-enactment is oftentimes a necessary evil in documentary filmmaking. Evil because it stages action, but necessary to keep the audience engaged in the real-life subjects, usually only seen talking to the camera. Some of the best documentaries, like Hoop Dreams and Capturing the Friedmans achieve brilliance by virtue of the fact that the filmmakers had live footage of the drama unfolding. Others, like Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line, use nebulous re-enactments to challenge the "facts" presented by those interviewed. This subjective take is the best way to use re-enactment; shows like Unsolved Mysteries and When Animals Attack that present actors as the real people almost always come off as corny and fake. There is obviously a line between re-enactment and straight documentary - cross too often into the grey area, and the integrity of the truth presented degrades rather quickly.

Abbas Kiarostami's 1990 hall-of-mirrors Close-Up takes place entirely in that grey area. In real life, Hossain Sabzian, an Iranian peasant, struck up a conversation with an old woman on a bus. Within a few moments, he was claiming to be filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar). Sabzian's week-long rouse of the Ahankah family, which involved being invited into the home and borrowing a small amount of money, was a very serious crime, and also a very interesting one for the tabloids. Kiarostami sought permission to film the trial, and got it, with the idea of making a documentary about Sabzian and his borderline personality. What sort of individual dreams of being a film director?

What makes Close-Up so interesting is what Kiarostami (and Sabzian, and Makhmalbaf, and the Ahankahs) did after the trial was over. All the principal figures in the case, including the reporter who broke the story and the arresting officers, got together and shot meticulous, scripted re-enactments of the events in question. These scenes are not mere re-enactments - they have the depth and subtlety of wholly original material. We get to see the peasant living his dream in the moment, passionate about the cinema, rather than begging for his freedom before a judge. One can debate whether the Sabzian of the re-enactments or the real-life Sabzian of the court-room is a better actor, or more pointedly: was this man acting before a camera ever rolled?

In his trial, Sabzian talks about the immense power a director gains over his actors - how he relished bossing around the Ahankahs, and being respected in the process. Then Kiarostami gets his turn with the same cast. As much as the family was wronged the first time, they allowed themselves to be manipulated agina, this time glorifying and documenting the first violation. So, if in the real footage Sabzian comes off as crazy, desperate for attention and delusional, what does it say about the Ahankah family in the re-enactment? And furthermore, why does Makhmalbaf himself show up at the end to participate in the charade? As the actual director transports the fake across Tehran on a motorbike, we here Kiarostami's crew muttering that they've lost sound, and that it's hard to keep a small vehicle in frame. What the hell is going on here?

Iran circa 1990 was hardly a free society; the government controlled the flow of information at every level. For example, Close-Up would be impossible to make in the United States because cameras are not allowed in court rooms. This kind of absolute power over perception (and thus reality) is analogous to that of the film director, if only over his own work. Kiarostami, Sabzian, the reporter, even the poor Ahankahs - they all want the same thing: creative input. Like Taxi Driver, Close-Up examines one marginally insane individual as a microcosm of an entire society's deepest desires. Of course everyone agreed to participate in the film; it was a way for each of them to control their own image.

It should also be noted this was not Kiarostami's first or last trip into metafilm; camera crews and actors are often featured players. Unlike 8 1/2 or The Player, Close-Up is not a satiric, winking look at movie-making; Sabzian's desire to tell a story, his own story, is part of us all, whether we are behind a camera,  or merely wish we were. Of course, looking at the product, which builds off of Kiarostami's vision as much as the protagonist's unrehearsed ramblings, it's clear that a film never emerges from a single perspective. We may want our own story to be nice and straightforward, but the message, conveyed in the film's radically different sections, is clear: reality can be pretty hard to control.

The Grown-Ups: Revolutionary Road

Over a decade ago, Leonardo DiCaprio was leading the trifling life of a child star. Despite legitimate performances in films like This Boy's Life and What's Eating Gilbert Grape, "Leo" was still synonymous with the eye-candy served up in Romeo+Juliet. James Cameron saw this, and paired the young DiCaprio with ingenue Kate Winslet to create the most profitable romance novel ever brought the screen. In 1997, and for the 18 "My Heart Will Go On"-saturated months that would follow, it seemed impossible that either actor could outrun the iceberg, or the ludicrous international fame it had brought them. Since Titanic, Kate and Leo have taken on bigger career challenges, as though to prove they are not, and never were, Jack and Rose.

All of that serious work paid off, as it paved the way for the two to share the screen again in Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates. The stars are not the only ones reliving their past - Mendes, who won an oscar for American Beauty, find himself back in the suburbs. However, instead of rose petals and Nazi memorabilia, he find himself dealing with abortion and ennui on the very real cul-de-sacs of 1950s Connecticut. Yates is a much better dramatist than Beauty scribe Alan Ball, which is to say he has some grasp of reality. Road is Jack and Rose without the big, tragic ending - the end of youth and the beginning of middle age. That's not to say the film lacks romance - it just happens in flashbacks.

After they meet at a crowded party just after WWII, and share how special they are, Frank and April Wheeler move into the most unique house on Revolutionary Road, in an otherwise anonymous suburb of New York City. Borrowing the art direction from Mad Men, Sam Mendes and crack cinematographer Roger Deakins paint a world all too familiar, where Leo works as a functionary at a machine production company (they've got one foot in this new "computer" craze - wink wink). In the city, everything Frank does, from shining on his boss, to drinking with his coworkers, to bedding a secretary, is played out and mechanical. At home, April's acting career has fizzled out and the daily drudgery of caring for two children has taken over. Whatever they were in that first smoke-filled room is gone forever - so the little woman comes up with a plan to bring the magic back. They will go to Paris, where she can work and he can find out what he "really" wants to do with his life.

Despite the fact that Yates wrote the novel in roughly contemporary times, there's something anachronistic about the story. While other 1950s nostalgia like Far From Heaven take the unconscious and immersive approach, here the Wheelers are painfully self-aware of the phoniness, the morbidity and the "hopeless emptiness" of their surroundings. April wants to get out, so much that she considers her own children an afterthought (a sentiment echoed by Mendes, Winslet's ex-husband, who keeps the child actors in frame as little as possible). This is not Eisenhower's America - it feels much more like Stein's lost generation crushed under the weight of domestic responsibility. Much the way The White Ribbon re-envisions and contextualized Germany before WWII, so does Revolutionary Road telegraph the coming unrest of the 60s.

Saying that, none of this would come across if not for the virtuoso performances of DiCaprio and Winslet. I cannot remember the last time I saw two characters and their relationship realized with such verisimilitude; they really make it seem like they know something the supporting cast does not. Perhaps there is something outside of the coffee klatches and idle gossip. Unfortunately, the only person who agrees with them has been certified insane, a troubled young radical (another excellent turn by Michael Shannon). Frank and April really are alone among the natives, which gives Frank pause and begins to tear them apart. One begins to wonder if there's any "real" selves for the Wheelers to find.

Sam Mendes has always been able to deliver visually striking films - but where Road to Perdition and Jarhead were varnish around an empty core, in Revolutionary Road he finally found a subject of depth and feeling commensurate to his compositions. Ironically, most of the film is an ongoing conversation between man and wife; it sounds more like a play than a movie. Strip away Kevin Spacey's vain voiceover in Beauty and the cameo roulette of Away We Go, perhaps the Brit is really an actor's director, capable of gut-wrenching scene after gut-wrenching scene. You can't blame Mendes for the screenplays he's been handed previously. With the right material, he delivers a searing drama with ramifications for its time period and our own. Some things are worth waiting for.

The Vault #52: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Western has heard its death knell on many different occasions. From its vaunted position as serious filmmaking in the days of John Ford and Howard Hawks, the genre has meandered through the hands of hyperbolic (Leone) to the ultraviolent (Peckinpah) to the allegorical (Eastwood). As society has grown more cynical, and we gain greater distance from the historical setting and values that underpin the form, the Western has become nothing more but a setting for action films like American Outlaws and the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma. At the same time, tried-and-true “serious” frontier films like Appaloosa seem more and more tone deaf.

There’s no question that if the Western is to continue on (and no matter what anyone says, it will), it needs to be rethought. HBO’s Deadwood did an impeccable job of starting from scratch, finding the truth of the period; however, we never really got to the meat-and-bones confrontation of good and evil, or even a definition of those terms. That’s because while Deadwood was a western in appearance and setting, it was ultimately a television show concerned with politics and human nature, not the oft-quoted confrontation “between savagery and civilization.” In other words, Deadwood is too real – it eschews American mythos entirely. Like Romantic poetry or the postmodern novel, the Western was a product of its times, but not necessarily an accurate depiction of them – for it to continue, it must retain a semblance of both.

I can think of only one film that takes all this into account, balancing traditional storytelling with knowing winks at the audience; at once affirming our stilted view of bygone days and winking at the audience to say, You know, this was not the true way of things. Combining the astute sense of history and mythology described above with a production of unparalleled beauty, The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is the finest film of the past decade.  

Director Andrew Domenik (Chopper) found gold in the pages of history professor Ron Hansen’s middling work of historical fiction, which tells in painstaking detail the life of Jesse James. The novel seeks to debunk the lies spread in the many dime novels written about James in his lifetime, and sarcastically adopts their adoring tone. Using these tall tales a springboard, Domenik illustrates the gaps between James the legend and James the man, even suggesting that it was Jesse’s fame and popularity that had as much to do with his downfall as his misdeeds. After all, Jesse’s killer, Robert Ford, was little more than a gushing fanboy, the Mark David Chapman of his day, looking for a reputation of his own.

The second layer of Assassination, so prominent it might be called the first, lies in the casting. Brad Pitt, whose romantic entanglements have been the go-to cover of US Weekly for as long as anyone can remember, plays Jesse James, who quips at one point he, “hasn’t heard a lick of gossip.” Casey Affleck as Bob is probably better known because of his brother. Paul Schneider, of romantic comedy fame, plays a loverboy. James Carville appears as a politician and Nick Cave as a musician. Just as we are reminded of the truth behind the image of Jesse, each actor is cast in a slight variation of their public image (again, not the truth). All this meta-trickery makes Jesse James feel like a bit of a parlor game – many critics felt it was more of a cute mirroring than a film in its own right.

Which brings us to one of the chief criticisms leveled against the film from the outset – that Domenik was just mimicking his hero, Terence Malick, and that Assassination has all the shallow beauty of a 19^th century landscape painting, without any greater meaning. Though the filmmakers were reported to use Days of Heaven as a visual reference, their goals could not have been more different. Assassination meanders through golden sunsets and syrupy clouds for its own picture-book reasons – to convey the sense of nostalgia, of bygone days, and the outmoded American myth that was Jesse James. It should be noted that the glowing narration, filled with the pulpy lies of the era, is most prominent in these photographic sequences.     

As much as Assassination is a commentary on fame and our accepted image of the West, it says just as much about the film-making process, which brings the gloss of importance and permanence to everything it touches. The narrator through whom the film is filtered might as well be Ford or Hawks, the seminal images of James equated to the famous shot of John Wayne framed by the doorway at the end of The Searchers. Jesse James was not the man we thought he was; the same can be said for the stars of the film. And as much as Assassination plays on our assumptions about the people involved, it constantly reminds us to not confuse the artifice with the reality, lest we suffer the same fate as Ford.       

The finale of Assassination, which continues for half an hour after James' body is put in the ground, gives a warning to all the voyeurs no doubt relishing the film to that point. Ford is alone and in a strange town, hated by all and respected by none; eventually, another fame-seeker takes him out of his misery. Hugh Ross (the narrator is, ironically, a no-name) reminds us Robert Ford would find no fame or reputation, either while alive or posthumously. No children would be named after him, no one would pay 25 cents to stand in the rooms where he once slept. And as for Ford himself, he would die on the dirty floor of a gin mill, "trying to find the words". In its final moments, Assassination reminds us that the words, and not the facts, of history are ultimately what defines it. And cinema is the most powerful language of all.

Exhibit A in The People v. Marlon Brando's Sanity

The film world tends to take care of its own, especially the best and brightest. There are two notable exceptions: Orson Welles and Marlon Brando, who appeared in his final film looking like this. This is an industry, after all, founded on vanity and artifice - no one should go out looking like a wrinkled, beached walrus. Why did this happen? He was a sex symbol once - yet by the age of 55, he was persona non grata in Hollywood. There were reports from the set of Apocalypse Now that he had become difficult, not memorizing his lines and gaining about 40 pounds, a paunch that has forever changed the way we view a bonified classic. Was he crazy, stupid, indifferent, or all three?

I watched The Missouri Breaks with the hope of it being a lost western classic, in the counterculture tradition of Tell Them Willie Boy  Is Here. It stars Brando and Jack Nicholson, and was directed by Arthur Penn, of the famed (and overrated) Bonnie and Clyde. Well, it turns out Penn is more of a technician than an auteur, delivering a boring train heist and some tedious vistas before finally pitting outlaw Nicholson against regulator Brando in a barely believable showdown. I suppose we're on anti-western ground because there's barely a drop of blood or a gunshot to be found until the final 20 minutes. Generally when a director cuts down on the violence, they ratchet up the social and sexual subtext, but Penn just leaves the film empty. So I do not have much more to say about The Missouri Breaks as a piece of filmmaking.

What may draw the interest of western buffs and modern moviegoers is Brando's performance, a marionette-ish cross between Heath Ledger's Joker and Chris Tucker's character in The Fifth Element. Flamboyant, drunk, cross-dressing, switching indiscriminately between a Texan twang and Irish lilt, Brando's Lee Clayton is a comic book caricature before such things existed on the silver screen. Get a load of his insane cackle.  This is the only time Jack Nicholson has given a shouting, drunk performance and not been the biggest over-actor on set. Breaks was obviously conceived as a vehicle for Nicholson's charms (did I mention there's a by-the-book love story?) and Brando's unchecked scenery-chewing. A little sexy leading man, an unrealistically crazy old guy; nowadays, this is the basic formula for every Al Pacino movie. However, seeing Brando lower himself to this in between Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now is more than a little sad. Why on earth did he do this?  He must not have cared, and unlike Coppola, Penn had no previous relationship as a basis to talk even the slightest bit of sense into him. So instead of making a boring, lifeless film, The Missouri Breaks endures as a record of just how crazy the greatest actor of his time had become.

Again, I'm reminded of the turn movies have taken towards the graphic novel, and wholly imagined worlds. At least in the 70s, bad movies were in dialogue with great ones, the way Breaks channels Shane and Stagecoach. Now, it's on to the next comic book franchise, and washed up actors make independent films. We're missing out on Dustin Hoffman embarrassing himself on a horse.