The Pulpit #2: Red Rock West

We may look back on the 1970s as the pinnacle of American filmmaking for the simple fact that one could go to one type of movie theater in those days, and see every worthwhile film in wide release. There is no question that the crop of directors that came after this period, whether they be of the crowd-pleasing John McTiernan/James Cameron/Paul Verhoeven set, or the Coen Brothers/Steven Soderbergh/Jim Jarmusch group, were aiming for one audience or the other. They never had the intentions of pleasing both. Some wanted to be as popular as Spielberg and Coppola; others wanted the critical appreciation of Cassavetes and Lynch. In the 30 years since, Hollywood productions have graduated from blockbusters to thermonuclear events, and art-houses have become their own cottage industry collage of ambiguous thrillers, dramedies about dysfunctional ethnic families, and travelogues about quasi-menopausal women enjoying a trip abroad. What we lost was the garbage. To make a western these days, it has to have the razzle dazzle hook of Cowboys and Aliens or the affected coquettishness of the new True Grit. Where's the middle, the un-ironic pulp that filled the back end of so many double features in days past?

There is some small solace to be found in John Dahl's Red Rock West. Mike (Nicolas Cage) is basically a good guy, as the screenwriter shows us early on when he turns down an easy opportunity to rob an unattended gas station. However, as soon as he hits the town of Red Rock, his character is tested when the local sheriff (J.T. Walsh) offers Mike ten thousand dollars to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Of course, Mike's not the man the sheriff was expecting, but he takes the money anyway, mostly so he can buy gas, snacks and a couple of six packs in a gleeful spending spree at a convenience store. However, after an unfortunate accident leaves him without transportation, and Lyle, the real hitman (Dennis Hopper) shows up, Mike has some explaining (and shooting) to do if he wants to get out of Red Rock alive.

When it was made in 1993, Red Rock West had no discernible niche, playing in one art-house before going direct to video. Cage plays a befuddled drifter with a questionable conscience doing wrong in the modern West, but the film does not have the black comedy or inventive narration of Raising Arizona. Hopper is a well-dressed psychotic with a penchant for monologuing, but Dahl isn't about to have him huff oxygen and shout "C'mon baby, do it for Van Goh!" And then there's Boyle, smoky-eyed and otherworldly as ever, a sex object that reminds us more of a spider than a woman.

Where the Coen brothers and Lynch make head fakes towards classic noir, mostly as a source of humor, Dahl follows through. His filmography, which includes films like Rounders, The Last Seduction and Joy Ride, is a treasure trove of works that, if directed by Robert Aldrich or Sam Fuller, and released in 1953, would be considered minor classics. Back then, noir was the best delivery system for sex and violence, but could only do so through the most pointed allusions. What Dahl realizes, given the standards and practices of the 90s, is that he can make something truly titillating without being funny about it. After all, then, as now, this is just a movie about four desperate people, a few bullets, and one big bag of money.

The best proof of this comes in the form of J.T. Walsh, veteran character actor finally given room to shine as the villainous sheriff. Always rational, and slow to anger, Walsh's Wayne might not be the most eye-catching of the four performances, but it is without a doubt the most controlled, considered and appropriate. Sure it's fun to watch Cage and Hopped melt the lens with their histrionic antics. Walsh contents himself with realism, the cool surface of a man playing his very dangerous cards close to his chest. It recalls Louis Calhern's sly attorney in The Asphalt Jungle - not an extraordinarily evil man, just a normal one who'd followed the wrong path.

It is truly a shame a filmmaker like John Dahl has been relegated to television the past few years. His original screenplays have a sensuality and tension all their own,  which he brings lovingly, and economically to the screen. He doesn't draw any attention to the apparatus itself, which lets us get all the more easily lost.

Certified Copy

Forget the Original - Just Get a Good Copy is the subtitle of the controversial book Certified Copy, a treatise on art and authenticity at the center of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film, Certified Copy, a treatise on art and authenticity. In the book, the author James Miller (William Shimell), an academic of unspecified expertise, argues that perfect copies of works of art are just as effective and moving as originals, and more transgressively, that the idea of a "true" original is a construction. Did not Da Vinci have La Giocanda pose for the Mona Lisa?

If it's a Socratic dialogue on this topic you came for, that's what you're going to get. No filmmaker living or dead tows the line between philosopher and filmmaker as the Iranian-born Kiarostami, who spent most the 90s crossing the eyes of international audiences (his films are greeted with some reservation in his home country) with reality-confusing films like Close-Up, Through the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry. And he isn't going to stop at a discussion - Miller's claims soon raise the ire of a French expatriate (Juliette Binoche) who owns an antique shop in Tuscany. On their subsequent jaunt through the countryside, the two take up the roles of an old married couple, and the copies, certified or otherwise, begin to multiply at an alarming rate.

The specifics of the illusions within aside, Certified Copy is Kiarostami's first film made in Europe, and it serves as a commentary not only on love, marriage and art, but specifically those subjects as represented in film. Most reviews of this film will mention Rosselini's Voyage in Italy, Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad or Linklater's Before Sunset as thematic touchstones, but this may be missing the point by a wide margin. Those films involve much younger couples than Certified Copy; the audience Kiarostami is turning the tables on this time will be considerably older. The film, which directly challenges the idea of a past and a starting point nonetheless seems more nostalgic than spontaneously romantic. Consider it Under the Tuscan Sun for the post-Derrida crowd.

And therein lies the rabbit hole; each of us wants for Miller and the unnamed woman (called "Elle") to be in love, to be happy together, even if forces unseen make it impossible, and even if those forces are the fact that Miller and Elle are simply characters in a film. Copy is as much Last Year at Marienbad as that film was The Rules of the Game, or Rules was The Merry Wives of Windsor. This is Miller's (and perhaps Kiarostami's) point: it does not matter whether a work is original or not, as long as the copy is good enough. At the same time, the director has challenged himself and his audience at meeting that minimum threshold with the casting of Shimell, an English opera singer, who finds himself David against the goliath of Binoche, one of cinema's greatest living actresses.

Elle always seems more committed to the game; James, ostensibly trying to make it to the train station, is annoyed when playing the role of husband, playfully detached when a perfect stranger. Perhaps he is less willing to play the game, or, being Elle's true husband, finds the whole game immature. What makes Certified Copy stimulating, start to finish, is its uncertainty, a quality that doesn't rely on misinformation or mistaken identity. It's a film about an intellectual exercise wreaking quiet havoc on its participants, culminating in the room where the two did, or just as likely, did not spend their honeymoon. Elle points out the window to some signifier, and James is unable to find it. She prods him, but he must admit his memory has lost some of its luster.

The first question is still unanswered: do they know each other, are they in fact man and wife? But the more important question, so important in fact he's written an entire book on the subject, is: does it matter? She begs him to stay, swoons as a lover on the pure bed linens. He stares into the bathroom mirror, but really out at us, while dusk falls on the vista behind him. At this point, all thoughts of artifice and performance dissolve. The moment is as authentic as we want it to be. Kiatostami leaves us at that.