The Vault #66: The Long Good Friday

With power comes the illusion of total control, and shortly after that, the impression of oneself as God. When racketeer Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) strolls off the jetway at the beginning of John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday, he looks as sharp as Satan himself. Shand has a busy day of campaiging the American Mafia ahead of him, hoping to raise funds for a vast construction project in preparation for London's bid at the 1988 Olympic Games. As he meets one of his lieutenants, he grins with the satisfaction that no one but him knows exactly what is about to happen. Enjoying a decade of peace and counting amongst the city's various underworld factions, Shand rules each and every one benevolently, and the police to boot. As he looks forward to Easter weekend and the more distant future, he only stands to get richer.

When things are going so well, they only direction they can go is down; did I mention it was going to be a long Good Friday? Shand's power is, of course, relative. His arrival at Heathrow happens about five minutes into the film, after the machinery of his downfall has already been put in motion. Soon his right hand man is murdered, and another associate killed in an explosion meant for his mother. Bombs are sent to his casino and restaurant. Harold racks his brain but he's coming up blank; anyone with the moxie to go after him is long dead. He's losing control not only of his city, but of his men. And to make matter worse, the kindly Italian-American faction from the states may be getting cold feet.

Harold must leave his important investor's meeting, transitioning from pseudo-legitimate businessman back to ruthless gangster for a couple of fruitless interrogations. His level-headed moll Victoria (icily portrayed by Helen Mirren) babysits the gangsters while Harold scrambles for answers that don't readily come. Victoria, who brilliantly deadpans a line about playing soccer with Queen Anne, might be more fit to lead Harold's "corporation". This is not the British gangster of Guy Ritchie, all plan and dazzle, or Mike Hodges, stoic and reserved. Hoskins has neither style nor discipline in the lead role, alternatively weeping, slapping and stabbing his way aroung London in total disarray. His weakness is more than visible, it is his defining characteristic; he's Tony Soprano with a Napoleonic complex.  

The Long Good Friday is about a street war, yet there is very little violence or direct conflict; it's a film about a power struggle where we barely get a sense of the other side. MacKenzie and scribe Barrie Keefe do a good job visually reminding us of the story of Easter, when Christ was crucified and fought with the Devil in hell for three days. An early victim is lain prone, with stab wounds suggesting the goring on the cross; later, a civilian is found nailed to the ground through his hands. These obvious symbols are not meant to sermonize - it's entirely up to us whether Harold is the messiah or the Antichrist.

Atop his pleasure craft, barking about a "New London" like a New Jerusalem, he certainly is not a pious figure. And when it is finally revealed that his enemies are representatives of the IRA, an amorphous, unbeatable ideological faction, the flames of Harold's hubris are only fanned further. With none of his oldest friends left to dissuade him, he hurtles towards almost certain death, a conflict with hundreds if not thousands of loyal soldiers, defiant as ever.

The Long Good Friday is about a king suddenly deposed, left with only one option: blind, uncontrolled retribution. However, this is not the same old Mob story about masculinity and respect. Hoskins brings a humanity to the role that makes us look past his illegal deeds (what these are, besides gambling, it is never really made clear). They go after his mother, after all; we have to sympathize. And whether Harold Shand thought he was God or the devil, neither view was correct. He was a man trying to make an impression, just like the rest of us.

The Vault #65: Onibaba

A field of tall grass whips in the wind, beckoning travelers to its idyll. Elsewhere civils wars rage, a horse gives birth to a calf, and a black sun rises, but in this stillness there seems escape. That is, until samurai returning from battle get lost amidst the blowing reeds. Then they are sprung upon by two merciless women (Nobuko Otowa, Jitsoku Yoshimura), and murdered for their valuables. Their bodies are dragged to a sinkhole that yawns ominously from the densest section of foliage. The bones pile up, month after month, year after year, as the women glut themselves with rice and dog-meat, bereft of human contact or hope for the future.

There might be no more effective hell-on-earth scenario than the set-up of Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba (Devil-woman), but the veteran screenwriter was only setting the foundation with the hole, the fallen women and the blank landscape. The pair is mother and daughter-in-law, both waiting for the man that connects them to return from fighting. When they are disppointed to be joined only by the man's duplicitous comrade (Kei Sato), a dangerous love triangle emerges that threatens to disrupts the relative healthy murder-for-profit operation the mother has set up for herself. In order to split the young lovers apart, she preys on the young woman's religious superstitions, posing as a demon from another world who looks unkindly on lust.

Japanese period pieces, or jidai-geki, have long been compared with and adapted into American Westerns. Both take place in what is perceived as simpler times, without the complex mechanics of society mitigating the instincts and emotions of the characters. Onibaba reduces the world to three people, fed by a thin trickle of poor souls that fall into their lair. Though minimalist and allegorical, the film never loses its psychological realism, namely that the mother fears for her life and the young just want to copulate.

From a simple base, one can build a more nuanced commentary. Shindo brushes past the murders in a wordless opening sequence - this brutal amorality is hardly his concern. Onibaba is more a film about sexual urges than violent ones; that peasants must resort to killing each other like animals in the jungle is a given of the period. This atmosphere, again, seems to lend itself to genre filmmaking, perhaps something along the lines of a zombie apocalypse. However, couched deep in the past, the mercenary and heartless nature of the women's actions simply reflect a time, as in Sansho the Bailiff, "before light had entered the world."

We quickly go from philisophical debates over the afterlife to full-on thrill-ride, as the daughter fears a demon has come to take her. The final third of Onibaba veers into psychosexual horror on par with the most disturbing we have to offer today. The rationality of everyday life, of the killing for rice, eating the rice, sleeping, than killing again, boils up like a spurned lover. Soon the tall grass has become a field of blades, the sinkhole not just the final resting place of bodies, but also souls.

Though it sways between horror and science-fiction at points, Onibaba remains first and foremost a film that asserts hell is other people, another of the many jidai-geki to transplant 20th century philosophy into medieval times. A nation torn apart by centuries of civil war serves as a fitting allegory for the underworld. A noble word is never said, a good deed never done, and ultimately, no escape is possible.

The Vault #64: Come and See

Americans have not repelled an invasion to their home country since 1812. That is to say, we have not experienced the abject terror of total loss - not just of one's own life, but also the of one's family and home - since war became a meticulous, mechanized destruction of everything in sight. When dealing with the two World Wars, American films are always firmly couched in righteousness, our boys the noble warriors doing the compassionate thing, helping out against Hitler and Hirohito. The madness of war is then always limited to the battle going awry, men dying unnecessarily, or abuse of power against helpless civilians. Away from the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb, somewhere in the heartland, each man's beginnings lie unharmed, unthreatened, intact.

All this means is that American films about World War II merely scratch the surface of the horror - those we "saved" had the far more traumatizing and life-changing experience.  Elem Klimov's Come and See brilliantly marries one transfiguration, that of the war, with the more universal one, puberty. Florya (Aleksey Kravchenko) is a teenager who gleefully throws his lot in with a group of Byelorussian partisans, only to find everything he once held dear, including his sanity, destroyed.

Many war films play as history first, drama second, giving the audience plenty of context for the particular events depicted. Come and See is set in a fairly obscure corner of the Soviet front - proper Russian troops are never  seen. The location of the enemy is largely theoretical until the final act - there are piles of burning bodies and shells dropping from the sky, but those elements do provide more atmosphere than antagonist. Klimov instead focuses on the experience specific to Florya, his personal journey from his boyish wonderment at finding his gun to the paralyzing fear that sweeps him as each of his comrades is killed off.

It is a passive odyssey, as circumstance and coincidence propel Florya on his way, first to an idyllic forest training camp, then back home to find his family butchered, across a nightmarish swamp, and eventually, to a burned hell-scape where the film's final atrocities are committed. The lost look in Kravchenko's eyes parallel the confusion and chaos of the conflict itself. Byelorussian seems to have been destroyed randomly and inconsequentially; Klimov symbolizes this in natural imagery at every turn, here a bird's nest being crushed underfoot, their the twitching eyes of dying livestock.

These images are pointed, never losing sight of their initial intention, which is to terrify children. Klimov makes a grand point about war by avoiding making one - the specific trauma to Florya is much affecting when we look into his eyes alone, shutting out the reactions and emotions of the sea of extras. In a matter of days, Kravchenko appears to age months, yet growing none the wiser. All this is leading the climax, in which this fear and shock is finally channeled into rage, and he first fires the rifle he's carried since the first scene. Florya's first act of retaliation is not against those German officers and soldiers directly responsible, but rather into a picture of Adolph Hitler lying on the ground amidst the debris.

At this point Come and See finally acknowledges the larger historical circumstances, as Nazi propaganda spools in reverse, Stormtroopers marching backwards into Germany, Hitler backing away from a podium, bombs flying back up into planes, the images used in Kurt Vonnegut's immortal anti-war classic Slaughterhouse Five. Only we see them now at the crucial moment when Florya has finally learned to hate. His beliefs were incorrect from the beginning. War is not about proving oneself to be a man, or forming personal identity; it is about destroying the other.

True Grit

From the outset, the Coen Brothers adaptation of Henry Hathaway's True Grit may have been doomed to disappoint. It arrives at Christmas with an oscar-heavy cast and lavish budget. Billboards dot America simply displaying the names of Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin (apparently now a star), underlined with the one word tagline: "Retribution". Photos or still images from the film are unnecessary; this is, after all, a film from the creators of Fargo, The Big Lebowski and Miller's Crossing. The brilliance and originality of this 2010 True Grit antedates its production, or even its script. The notion itself is foolproof. The Coens love genre play; they've never done a Western; it stands to follow any Western they put their hands on will turn to gold, and possibly ascend to the pantheon of American film sometime during the final reel.

What all of that speculation and good will towards the unseen fails to recognize is that True Grit is an adaptation of True Grit, the 1969 film starring John Wayne. Hathaway's Grit is best remembered by filmgoers as the one where Wayne was fat and old, but likely dying, and thusly pried the Best Actor award away from the all-time skin-crawling performance by Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. You will wonder at the back of your mind going in: why remake True Grit? The Coens are the toast of Hollywood: they could have chosen any of the small melodramas of Budd Boetticher (The Tall T, Ride Lonesome) or the pyschological labyrinths of Anthony Mann (The Naked Spur, The Man from Laramie). Instead they pick not even and second or third tier Western, but a third or fourth tier John Wayne movie.

The stated purpose was to be a bit more faithful, especially in the casting of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year old girl looking to avenge her father's death. She hires the irascible Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to find the criminal responsible (Brolin) in Indian territory, and soon the two are joined by an upstart texas Ranger by the name of Le Boeuf (Damon). Those looking for that signature Coens quirk will only find it in the early scenes, where Maddie stays at the undertaker's and uses some educated words to outsmart a cotton trader. Once the three hit the trail, we may as well be watching the original True Grit, save some of the flash of the action sequences, which are few and far between.

What made the original True Grit watchable and relevant at all was the relationship between Cogburn and Le Boeuf (there played by by newcomer Glen Campbell, known mostly for his singing voice). One towered over the other, literally larger than the landscape and even entire movie around him. By 1969, Wayne, like Cogburn, was on his last legs, and the world around him was falling into the hands of greenhorns and whippersnappers like Campbell. Here Cogburn and Le Boeuf seem a little more like Butch and Sundance, constantly sniping back and forth. Damon is spectacular, but Bridges' attempts to appear world weary seem forced, and his inebriated phases will only remind audiences of The Dude. Again, it is curious that in choosing to remake a John Wayne movie, the Coens chose one in which Wayne's presence was the featured attraction. They might have been better off storming the castle, re-imagining canonized material like Stagecoach or Rio Bravo, if only to have more versatile material.

Instead the new True Grit focuses on Mattie's perspective, the lamb in the lion's den, no surprise for a movie executive produced by Steven Spielberg. It also traps the film in a PG-13 netherworld, never quite dark or violent enough to feel like a true update of the original. It's a little too cute, and nowhere near facetious enough. True Grit is not a genre spoof in the style of The Man Who Wasn't There or The Hudsucker Proxy. The Coens have made a genuine, straightforward film about frontier justice. It does not suit them.

Joel and Ethan Coen have progressed beyond playing in the corner of the sandbox. Their films are events, and each affords them the opportunity to challenge their now large audience, confronting them with material sensational and outside of the ordinary. True Grit fails to do this at every level, instead delivering yet another Lone-Wolf-and-Cub story about making things right in the wilderness. As a "thoughtful" Western it lacks the thematic punch of Unforgiven, the self-awareness of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, or the just plain fun of 3:10 to Yuma. Like The American, another "serious" and "important" Oscar contender, True Grit demands our rapt attention, then has very little to say.

The Vault #63: The Hole

A prison is a battlefield where violence is discouraged. Some men are institutionalized, perfected for their surroundings, while others object, and search for a way out. Social standing and personal history are largely irrelevant in both places. The overwhelming feeling is masculine, muscular, and eventually, exhilarating. In the way the chaos of war become dangerously fun on celluloid, prison is a game or, at a minimum, a return to middle school, where friendships blossom over the course of an afternoon, and are destroyed just as fast.

Of course, in a French prison, we get all that plus generous helpings of imported sausage and rice pudding. Jacques Becker's Le Trou (The Hole) tells the story of one unit out of many, a tightly-packed cell of four men, who are planning their escape. As they are about to embark upon their plan however, a fifth inmate is transferred in. They must decide if they can trust this newcomer; in other words, they must know if he too faces a fate of long imprisonment, or if his crimes are negligible. Claude Gaspard (Marc Michel) is being tried for attempted murder, but it is clear his account of the facts is far from the truth. Whether he faces a few months or the rest of his life in prison is unclear, but the rest are too eager; they bore full steam ahead.

More accurately, they smash, claw and dig ahead, tunneling further into the bowels of the gothic building, discovering more and more passageways and obstacles lie between them and fresh, free air. The beginning of the project is captured in an unbroken four-minute shot, as each conspirator takes his turn breaking the floor of the cell with a short iron bar. Gravel and plaster fly in every direction; the sound is unbearable. The documentary feeling is palpable; it is only heightened by Becker's use of non-professional actors, including Jean Keraudy in the role of Roland, the mastermind and an actual participant in the events depicted in the film.

Not that Le Trou is entirely procedural or objective. Claude soon becomes bound to his new friends, even expressing his desire to stay in the prison more than return to the outside a fugitive, where everything his feelings of loss would be inescapable. The cell is bright, the conversation spirited. As the passageways to escape grow darker, wetter, more medieval, the hole itself becomes symbolic of the uncertainty and dread each man faces in leaving his warm and relatively safe home in incarceration. Becker ingeniously keeps the other men's pasts blank so we only see these feelings of conflict at play in Claude, the main character. The rest are given over to their task completely, working in shifts to make the final push through concrete, reinforced steel and sewage.

Unity is uncommon in escape films not set in POW camps. Following the model he helped create in Grand Illusion, however, Becker's characters are just as committed to each other as they are their own freedom. When Claude and another inmate finally do peek their head out of a manhole outside the prison, at the very brink of freedom, our instinct is to shout "run! run!". This is after all, a mid-century foreign film - tempting fate is not necessary for it to come calling. Claude and the other man instead crouch, frozen, unable to move, but also enchanted by the early morning light and the innocuous passing taxicab. No matter how important the other three might be to them, who would willingly retreat in to the dark, dirty hole? 

Clint Eastwood rides off into the sunset in Escape from Alcatraz, the only memento of his existence a flower, which mocks the warden in its own defiant way. Becker's question might be: what becomes of him? And further, what kind of life is that of a fugitive, alone, on the run in perpetuity? In Le Trou, the escape is not some grand and glorious thing, but rather an unpleasant undertaking, only made bearable by the camaraderie it necessitates. When Claude stands alone at the end of the film, relieved, Roland utters a simple "poor Gaspard". Better to be together under lock and key than alone.   

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's last movie was about a performance artist of sorts, a "broken-down piece of meat" clinging to the one thing he did best, getting beat up in public. Unlike Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain before it, The Wrestler was a quiet, stripped-down, depressing short story about faded glory. This may have been a means of lulling us to sleep, for this December marks the return of pin-prick editing and camera set-ups five feet too close for comfort. Because easy postmodernism shows no signs of slowing down, we're still on the stage, only this time with the Lincoln Center Ballet.

Black Swan is Aronofsky's 4th film set in the New York metropolitan area, and the first to deal with the city's cultural upper crust - he's no Woody Allen. Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) is an obsessive ballerina - scintillating already, right? - chosen to be the lead in the new production of Swan Lake. You know the story - the director, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) tells us up front it's been "done to death" - a beautiful white swan can turn into a princess if given the gift of true love, only an evil black swan seduces her prince. The white swan despairs, and leaps to her death. The theatrical twist is that white and black swan are traditionally played by the same dancer. Thomas has serious doubts about Nina's ability to be the erotic, evil swan, but she's the best dancer in the company, so he starts working to loosen her up. If you know what I mean. Do I need to tell you she spends a lot of time staring into mirrors, or that the primary color scheme of the film is black and white?

The vanity commensurate with Nina's rise to stardom soon turns to paranoia, which sends Black Swan into pure genre territory. No to say that it loses its way - the plot and characters of the film are far too stereotypical to assume that a modern-day The Red Shoes was every Aronofsky's intention. There's Barbara Hershey as the Mommie Dearest type, complete with a room full of creepy portraits of her daughter. Then Mila Kunis as the sexy, free-spirited threat to Nina's limelight. Oh, and a black-clad Portman alter ego who shows up at the most inopportune times. Forget protecting her place in the production, by the end of the film Portman is clinging desperately to her individual identity. It's an existential horror movie as much in line with philisophical Persona as the far sillier Suspiria. 


The term horror might seem out of place in a movie about a ballerina with one or two screws loose - this is where Aronofsky's relentless style finally makes itself at home. Black Swan takes place at the close quarters we first experienced in Pi - only now, with the perceived threat of violence, when we most want to be able to look around and see what's coming, we are denied. Where The Wrestler put us in the headspace of a man filled with regret, longing and pain, Black Swan shoves us into a phone booth with bulimia, manic depressiveness and defensive rage. The ballet sequences are particularly overwhelming, as the camera dances with her, swimming in and out. Throw in ample measures of Tchaikovsky, and you may feel the need to leave the theatre from time to time.

It might seem like a pointless exercise to retell Swan Lake on Freudian terms with the setting, well, a production of Swan Lake. Watching a young maiden in death throes is much less pleasant on the New York subway, unaccompanied by French horns. The only defense of Black Swan may be as kitsch, or above average body horror. Lesbian titillation aside, there is little pertinent being said about the feminine psyche. It's popcorn entertainment, but at least it comes with a breath-taking performance from Portman.  There's always room for another movie about insanity.