Cave of Forgotten Dreams

"The most important discovery in the history of human culture," boasts director/narrator/provocateur Werner Herzog of the subject of his latest film. Of course the importance isn't the only debatable point in that statement - the culture and humanity are up for grabs as well. The Chauvet cave in Eastern France is the site of the world's oldest known cave paintings. Whether your focus is art, history or religion, the brief glimpse of these relics offered on screen is a rare treat, especially as it is presented in 3-D. Herzog uses this technology in haunting ways to take us up close to the paintings, across their contours and textures, plumbing the known, and mostly unknown, story of their origins.

It may be Herzog's straightest film to date. Where his films have previously made the mundane  eccentric (Encounters at the End of the World, Stroszek) or the eccentric mundane (My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser), Cave struggles to place the director's trademark signifiers of sanity or insanity on the ancient artisans. This seems to be the rare subject with which the audience and the filmmakers experience with equal awe. These are not like many neanderthal discoveries - to Herzog the perspective and motion depicted on the cave's rolling surface represents a kind of "proto-cinema".  The paintings in Chauvet are clearly the work of homo-sapiens, a term one interview subject notes is a misnomer; what does any of us really know?

If not sapiens (knowing), what is the appropriate participle? While the choral soundtrack booms against images of ancient hunts and primal conflicts in the animal kingdom, one question overrides all: what, if anything, separates us from the people who made these scratches on the walls some 32,000 years ago? The cave holds no human remains, only the skulls of cave-bear, some seemingly sacrificed at an altar. Is this so different from a church; has evolution slowed to a crawl over the past thirty millenia? Herzog answers this question with an anecdote about an Australian aborigine re-touching a relatively new, but symbolically important piece of rock art. The native didn't claim to be painting himself, but rather the spirits of his ancestors were guiding his brush.


The "proto-cinema" claim coupled with the title marking the zillionth invocation of film as dream and vice versa make Herzog's message plain. Combined with the contemporary technological innovation of three dimensions, Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a pseudo-scholarly retelling of the same stories portrayed in the caves. A woman's body is fused with that of a buffalo; an abstract flurry of handprints; a stampede of horses. These images may be from dreams as the director hopes, or they may have been accepted as mythology. We are no more equipped to explain their ultimate meaning than were the original creators. Man may not know, but he will always be able to represent, recreate, and imagine. And after all that, we look upon our creations, and wonder. 

Previous Herzog documentary like Encounters and Grizzly Man have seemed at times like provocations, jokes made at the expense of their subjects. Though there are a few moments of levity in the film (one archeologist is revealed to have been a circus performer), mostly the tone has shifted to one of reverence. An epilogue features a pair of radioactive albino alligators, and the everpresent Teutonic tenor suggesting as they stare at each other, they are like man staring at himself, across epochs. Reptile or mammal, any explanation of our existence lies a long way off, likely never to be discovered. Even as the image now has the ability to jump off the screen, we are no closer to understanding.

The Tree of Life

Introduction of conflict; entanglement of characters; climax; resolution. This is the natural order of narrative filmmaking. It is not common practice to blow the emotional and dramatic powder keg in the opening thirty minutes of a film and spend the next two hours showing us the delicately laid fuse. Of course, it isn't your everyday domestic drama that juxtaposes the death of a child with the Big Bang, the reign of dinosaurs over planet earth, and the eventual heat death of the universe.  One event occurs in biological time; the other geological. There are two beings that might consider both events in a single thought: God and Terrence Malick. The reclusive director's fifth film in 38 years, The Tree of Life, offers the pair a forum for debate.

Each Malick film has focused on the arbitrariness of an easily-flipped duality: Guilt/Innocence (Badlands); Love/Hate (Days of Heaven); War/Peace (The Thin Red Line); and Savagery/Civilization (The New World). This time around, the line is not so thin - the fundamental conflict in the film comes between the divine perspective and our own, and is initiated by a passage from the climax of the Book of Job, where God looks down on his skeptical creation and asks: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?". Malick's protagonists have been doomed lovers and misunderstood iconoclasts; yet, to this point, the blame for their tragedy has usually laid within the human realm. This invocation of Job opens the story that follows to cosmic implications.

Asking the difference between God and Man leads to the exploration of a single consciousness, that of Jack (when old, played by Sean Penn; for the bulk of the film appearing behind the sullen gaze of newcomer Hunter McCracken), the oldest son of the O'Brien family. Jack looks back on his  early years, from birth to adolescence, in tiny vignettes, often remembering the cruelty of his father (Brad Pitt) and the saintliness of his mother (Jessica Chastain). Rarely is a memory complete; many fade or cut out incomplete. Some are merely the exchange of expression or a flash of playing ball in the backyard with his younger brothers. Many of these are captured with the fish-eye lens of director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, whose invasive steadicam gives us the convincing sensation of being a scrambling infant in a roomy four-poster house. The POV pastiche is reminiscent of Gaspar Noe's life-in-a-death-trip Enter the Void; however here illicit sex is merely hinted at with the tearful larceny of a lace slip.

Nor are these events meant to be strictly objective - some capsule reviews that include genre have pegged The Tree of Life as fantasy. Chastain at one points floats above the earth, then appears in a glass coffin a la Sleeping Beauty. Jack floats in his submerged living room, then opens a door and finds himself on the Bonneville Salt Flats. The only thing solid in these remembrances is Pitt's menacing, quarried jawline, jutting forth in a manner that suggests a sequence detailing the evolution of primates may have been left on the cutting room floor. Though it may not be realistic, and human relationships in the director's films rarely are in the truest sense of the word, the mother-father relationship provides a lower inflection of the God-Job duality. Introduced as the way of brutal nature (Pitt) vs. the way of spiritual grace (Chastain), a debate that gets to the core of Malick's scholarly inquiry: moral awakening in view of the existential notion that we are ultimately nothing. The brilliance of McCracken's performance (or Malick and his small battalion of editors' efforts) is that it develops slowly throughout, until we see a boy reaching his teen years with both a knowledge of right and wrong and an understanding for the cold discipline of his father.

A common thread in writings of Heiddeger and of Malick on Heidegger is the notion of man as a discrete being, isolated in nature. This view is largely fed by our perception of right and wrong, and puts us ever at odds with the indifferent universe. Linda longs to "talk to the earth" in Days of Heaven; Private Witt asks, "what's keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?" Humans are in denial that their lives, and ultimately deaths, are the same as volcanoes, and hammerhead sharks waiting for the delicious chum presented in the form of an ailing brontasaurus (yes, really) - they're all part of the glory, each one like the sunflowers seen in one of the closing shots. Those too are temporal.

And so the film closes, Jack, now old, wandering an imagined beach that will be interpreted as everything from a dream to purgatory. Jack's visions have stretched from the beginning of the world to the end, from his happiness to his despair, from the unflinching gaze of god to the blinking fear of a child. No resolution is provided; Malick may be a Christian, but he is hardly the provider of easy answers. As authoritative as this account of existence may seem, our guide is, after all, just another soul on that beach. The magic light on the screen emanates from a bulb in the projection booth; he's still mystifying us.

The Vault #70: The Thin Red Line

"In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain't no world but this one." - First Sgt. Edward Walsh, The Thin Red Line

Though reports of boos and walkouts have surfaced, there is no question Cannes is buzzing today about only one film: The Tree of Life. The film stars Sean Penn as Brad Pitt's son. It is shot by virtuoso cinematographer Emmaneul Lubezki. It may begin at the dawn of time and include footage of dinosaurs, comets and solar eclipses. Some of it may take place in Jessica Chastain's uterus. The buzz has nothing to do with any of the above curiosities, however. The Tree of Life is the fifth feature from director Terrence Malick, a man coming off of two high-concept failures, who somehow still demands our respect.

Imagine the rattle and hum of the blogosphere if the internet as it is currently configured had existed in 1998, when Malick's third feature, The Thin Red Line, came and went rather quietly from multiplexes. It was his first in 20 years, and every actor big or small wanted to be in the adaptation of James Jones' fictionalization of Guadalcanal. Besides Penn there was John Travolta, George Clooney, Nick Nolte, Woody Harrelson, Adrien Brody, John C. Reilly, Jared Leto, and John Cusack. The prestige of the director, the name recognition of the cast, and the status of being a Big Important Hollywood War Epic should have had The Thin Red Line destined for a bushel of Oscars and an automatic bid to every critic's top ten list. Of course, then art had to go rear its ugly head.

Jones' original text focuses on the inner lives of over a dozen grunts and officers making a dangerous frontal attack on Hill 53. Malick's original script layered each of these perspectives equally. He worked with as many as six cameras rolling at once, with almost every actor and extra on set at all times. What might have been a six hour film (that also included Billy Bob Thornton and Mickey Rourke) emerged, despite the star power, centered on relative unknowns Jim Caveizel and Ben Chaplain. Caveizel as Private Witt is the quintessential Malick archetype, a starry-eyed dreamer forced into adversity. Chaplain longs for his wife, his visions of her the only ones in the film not pierced by the smothering greens and blues of the jungle island.

In these two characters we see Malick's universal themes - first, the existence of two worlds, or sides in "this war at the heart of nature" (a concept introduced in the film's opening lines) and, second, the doomed love affair. In Badlands, Days of Heaven and The New World, one character generally carries both burdens. Here, the message is diffuse, and furthermore, Chaplain and Caveizel together may make up only one third of the movie's running time. There is Woody Harrelson's heroic death; there is the battle of wills between Captain Starrels (Elias Koteas) and Colonel Tall (Nolte, in far-and-away the finest performance of his career). Each of these men is given an interior life, each becomes the star of the movie for a moment, and then disappears. This is certainly faithful to Jones' novel, but ultimately muddles the final output.

It certainly does not help matter that audiences saw The Thin Red Line mere months after experiencing the patriotism and pageantry surrounding Saving Private Ryan. That film opened with a 25 minute "realistic" battle sequence that garnered the respect of "The Greatest Generation" then settled down into an all-too-safe justification of World War II. In terms of sustained confusion, anger and fear, I have to imagine The Thin Red Line comes much closer to the actual experience. War is a lot messier than Private Ryan would have us believe - it never ends with one battle, never turns with one mission, never follows a clean narrative line all the way through. SPOILER: when Witt finally loses his life, the manouver is hardly explained - there is always the next enemy position, the next piece of real estate, and if enough men are sent to their deaths, that side will emerge victorious.

The Thin Red Line may be at once Terrence Malick's most Hollywood and least accessible film. Despite focusing on the Second World War, a thematically rich genre and period, it lacks the emotional center and larger historical commentary of his previous and subsequent works. Large sections of it feel more like a collage than a film, and the faithful will always wish the longer version was available. As is, it is a beautiful, if uneven, work of art that re-introduced the mercurial filmmaker to a generation that had all but forgotten him. A necessary step to those dinosaurs that eat Brad Pitt after traveling through time.

The Pulpit #3: They Live

As his career dwindles down to its last embers, it may be easily lost that John Carpenter was one of the finest directors of his generation. Equal parts Steven Spielberg and George Romero, the filmmaker's most prolific period was comprised of playful genre films like Big Trouble in Little China, The Thing and Escape from New York. It was the Reagan eighties, and everyone was having too much fun to notice that these films all starred Kurt Russell. Though maintaing his trademark grind-house sensibilities, Carpenter's final film of the decade is a far more studied project. Yes, the "Rowdy" Roddy Piper vehicle They Live is a transcendent commentary on the times in which we live.

The barrel-chested (and barrel-armed, and barrel-jawed) Piper plays a curiously coiffured drifter named Nada, who lands in a Los Angeles shanty town looking to work construction. After entertaining the proletarian gripes of fellow day-laborer Frank (Keith David), Nada counters that he believes in America, and eventually everyone will get their chance. The set-up for a modern day Horatio Alger story? Not quite, because it turns out the kind souls running the shelter are also a terrorist cell, plotting to expose society for what it really is. They do this, conveniently, through the distribution of magic sunglasses. Once Nada puts them on, he sees through all of society's subliminal messages, most of which tell people to obey, stay asleep, or consume.

While your realistic-minded satirist might chalk all this negative reinforcement up to an evil corporation or a right-wing political agenda, They Live adds a juicier dimension to Nada's new vision; about half of all human beings are actually aliens, and they're the ones propagating these capitalist messages. The white picket fence and the chicken in every pot are carrots put before us, the horses, prodding us along, keeping us blind to the truth.

Of course "Rowdy" Roddy didn't come here (read: star in this movie) to give an impassioned speech on the floor of the Alien-Robot Senate. He came here to "chew bubble gum and kick ass." You can probably guess what he's fresh out of. From then on, it's a shotgun toting Carpenter action movie, devoid of much social commentary, except the spare moment here or there when we're reminded every promotion at work is done more to keep us quiet than to reward us.

Aliens are selling us shampoo on television. They're railing against the violence in movies (specifically those of Messrs. Romero and Carpenter). And alien Ronald Reagan reminds us, once again, that it's "morning in America". And all the while, the viewer is lapping up a professional wrestler shoot cops and businessmen in a Hollywood movie. There is certainly more than one joke in play in They Live, and the more important one seems to prefigure one asked in the Clinton-era blockbuster The Matrix: if our whole world is a lie, do we want to wake up? In the 80s, this entailed wearing cool sunglasses and killing aliens; in the 90s it meant giving up all the creature comforts and living in a bowels of a post-apocalyptic sewer.

Therein lies the genius of They Live. We may be asleep, and our lives of desperation may be so quiet we are unable to hear our own cries for help; however, is life so significant in the first place that we must find the truth? Carpenter realizes there is a time and place to consider these "big questions" - and a movie starring a professional wrestler certainly isn't it. Piper isn't the sort of performer to wring his hands or furrow his brow like Kevin Costner in Waterworld or Clive Owen in Children of Men, two other end-of-humanity-as-we-know-it films; he simply reloads. There's undeniable excitement in big explosions and flying through plate glass windows - he certainly isn't going to sleep through that.

Broken Embraces

Broken Embraces finds its auteur Pedro Almodovar in a playfully self-aware mood. There are at least two movies within movies and three characters who consider themselves screenwriters; just about everyone else views themselves as an actor at one point or another. It concludes with the lines "Films are to be finished, even if you do it blindly." Almodovar certainly has his eyes wide open, if only to see the looks on our faces. Yet, post-modernism aside, Broken Embraces is a legitimately touching film about love and regret, with another nested neatly inside of it.

Director Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar) has gone by the name Harry Caine for many years. Yet, when a former producer of his dies, he opens up to his young assistant about a film he once made, a woman he once loved (Penelope Cruz), and the tragedy that befell them both. He is, at this point in his life, blind, now relegated only to typing scenarios, never to look through a camera again. Despite his disability, he is approached by the producer's son Ray X (Ruben Ochandjano) about a new project - however, Ray has things on his mind besides filmmaking. Through flashbacks to the original production (hilariously entitled Women and Suitcases), we get a sense of Ray's agenda and all that Mateo/Harry has lost.

These flashbacks remind us more than a little of Fellini's 8 1/2 (a movie Harry will later mention when running through a list of his DVDs) - Mateo had constructed a fantasy film glorifying the beauty of the producer's mistress Lena (Cruz), with whom he was also having an affair. At the same time, the producer sent Ray as a spy, doing a "documentary" on the production.

The overlapping fictions here create two impressions of Lena - one the abused romantic, the other a conniving gold-digger. Almodovar gives Mateo/Harry's version precedence, but these flashbacks can hardly be viewed with objectivity. The opening scene, set in the grim present, has the blind Harry seducing a beautiful young woman he conned into walking him across the street. Anything we hear and see of the once vivacious and sensual Cruz is from the perspective of a womanizer. It is no coincidence that Ray, shooting on video, a stock more conducive to the ugly truth, is a homosexual (like this film outside the film's actual director); he isn't one to fall for her charms.

Alternating gears between Hitchcock, Fellini and Bunuel, Almodovar is mostly coasting through this tragic love story. Its twists are hardly unpredictable, it's acting and aesthetic no more than what we've come to expect from this filmmaker. It aims to squeak by mostly on references; when Harry asks to hear Jeanne Moreau's voice, his assistant blithely responds, "I don't have her number". The film may generate a knowing grin every once in a while from the cinephiles in the audience, but will probably leave most people groping for the profundity of all of this.

Not to worry - there is not much there to be found. Broken Embraces is just another in the long line of Penelope Cruz vehicles Almodovar feels he owes the world due to her profound beauty and (apparent) prowess as an actress. Although it is quite telling that she admits in the film to having no training or talent whatsoever; she elicits our strongest reactions when in the cheesy comedy within this meaningful drama. In constructing all the shells for this game, Almodovar himself may have forgotten which one holds the treasure.

The Vault #69: Paths of Glory

Pressured by "politicians and newspapermen" to make headway in The Great War, General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) pressures his field commander, General Mireau (George Macready) to execute a nearly impossible attack on the Ant Hill, a German position on the bomb-shelled Western Front. Hungry for promotion and always one to please, Mireau goes ahead with the suicide mission, even while acknowledging the likelihood of over half of his men becoming casualties. When the attack fails, Mireau orders a court marshal with the penalty of death for three soldiers from the regiment. Their defense in the hopelessly rigged proceedings is provided by Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas). Those in the second and fourth estates might grimace at the death and destruction in failing to take the ant-hill, but at least the French will not have been called cowards.

Paths of Glory began as a vanity project for its star, but will always be remembered as the first true original from director Stanley Kubrick. After directing the B-noirs Killer's Kiss and The Killing, Kubrick was attached to the project by virtue of his producing partner, James Harris, owning the rights to the story Douglas so desperately wanted to bring to the screen. Though it offered a perfect opportunity for some of Douglas' trademark fiery idealism, it also initiated Kubrick in what would become his signature theme, which one critic has dubbed "the limitations of a rationalized consciousness."

Nothing is as maddeningly rational as the military, and Paths of Glory allows the director to plunge bluntly and economically into the circularity of human logic. It has the pacing and purpose of, well, a court marshall. Yet unlike some of the director's more criticized works, this is a story with a hero, not merely the milling of ants in a farm. Dax is self-aware, unlike the heroes of, say, Barry Lyndon or Dr. Strangelove. He clearly realizes what is going on around him is insane, and the tragedy comes in his inability to stop it.

If there was ever a war we might dub a "Stanley Kubrick War", it was WWI. All subterranean trenches and dust, without a German soldier ever gracing the camera, the front in this film feels more like death row than the tip of a spear in an ongoing campaign. All these men, whether on trial or not, are condemned to die, although one character quips they couldn't possibly be afraid of that, otherwise they'd spend the rest of their lives "in a funk". Until the end, there are basically only two locations - the battlefield where the great unwashed prepare for the reckoning, and the palace where manicured Generals decide what pattern in which to send them off. No home-front, no scenes with family, or flashbacks to before the war. That is, until the end:

Enough has been said about this scene already to fill a book, most of it begrudging that Kubrick did in fact possess a human heart. It has no real narrative purpose in the film; Dax has already gotten his vengeance against General Mireau and spoken his mind to General Broulard. The three soldiers have been executed and the battalion has been ordered back to the front. The only thing left to do (and I suppose the thing which so many of the director's detractors wish he did more often) is to remind us of the human cost, which is done with little more than still photographs of soldiers taking in the young girl's performance. This one image bridges the divide between Germany and France, between man and woman, between brave warriors and scared children, between World War I and all human conflict. And then it's time to move out.

Hanna

The past decade of War-on-Terror espionage films has ranged from boring (Body of Lies) to explanatory (The Kingdom) to overtly political (Green Zone), with very little room for fun in between. It's enough for one to wax nostalgic for our good friends Boris and Yuri, martinis shaken, never stirred, and any number of romantic European locations riddled with bullets and crawling with quasi-Aryan henchmen. Islam and the Arab World are interesting topics that must be tiptoed around and never made openly camp. That's what makes Joe Wright's Hanna so damn enjoyable - those same toes get shot off in slow motion by a 16 year old girl.

The otherworldly Saoirse Ronan plays Hanna, a freakishly strong and fearless girl living with her father Erik (Eric Bana) in the arctic circle. For the first fifteen minutes, it's unclear what century it is, as the two hunt and spar in the untouched wilderness, living in a hut without electricity fit for Nanook of the North. Erik is training his daughter for something, what is not immediately clear, although she insists she is ready. Reluctantly, he digs up a CB radio and encourages her to flip the switch, warning her "nothing will be the same". Eager to see the world (apparently she has never left the Great White North), Hanna activates the device, which alerts comely CIA agent Marissa Ziegler (Cate Blanchett) of the girl and her father's whereabouts.

From that point forward, it's a blood, guns, bullets and octane situation until the final credits roll. Marissa focuses her attentions on Erik, while sending a group of skinheads after Hanna, who is pursued from a secret CIA installation in Morocco across Spain and France into Germany. Hanna is more than capable of handling these foes however, as is her father. Hanna often feels like a stylistically coherent version of Kill Bill, all bundled up with a propulsive score by The Chemical Brothers. Set piece meets set piece seamlessly, with the minimum number of words used in the exposition. Unlike Tarantino's sprawling two-film "masterpiece", Hanna knows its own purpose - to deliver thrills as economically as possible.

This all might not seem like much, but the attraction of talent like Blanchett and Bana to the project should illustrate the dearth of good genre films being produced in Hollywood these days. No one has to give speeches about state secrecy or man playing god - Bana kicks the living shit out of a few guys, while Blanchett spits her lines in a venomous southern drawl, modeling her character on equal parts Clarisse Starling and Cruella Deville.

Her performance is but one of the cartoonish accoutrements to be found in this film, which essentially amounts to a two hour chase sequence. Hanna is a welcome departure for Wright, who reboots his career nicely after three Oscar-pandering efforts in Pride and Prejudice, The Soloist and Atonement. Those films were not without aesthetic appeal, but the subject matter certainly seemed like a chore for Wright. He now revisits the tracking techniques used in Atonement's lugubrious World-War-Two-in-a-Single-Shot scene to create a a thoroughly exciting bus to subway fight. There, the magnitude of the explosions and destruction evoked Greatest Generation warm and fuzzies without applying in any specific way to the story; here, the stakes are primal and immediate. In the span of two films, Wright has gone from cold architectural frieze to exuberant comic book.

Hanna is a film released in April that is doing pretty well on word of mouth, covering its modest 30 million dollar budget. This is in fact the ideal number for any Hollywood film - enough to get the top talent, but not enough to rely on CGI. The action is often just one character running after another, on a real live street. This action feels more physical than fantasy - it leaves us breathless without thinking about the man hours spent on animation. There's nothing more exhilirating than looking down the barrel of a gun and wondering how you're going to escape. Unless, maybe, you've got your finger on the trigger.