Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I don’t like to lump films together in one review most of the time... I like giving each piece room to breathe, and I like to give you guys room to have one talkback per subject if possible. But today, there are a ton of new films opening in limited and wide release, and I’ve seen three of them. I’ve got no interest in BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA, I never managed to snag an invite for NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST or HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE or THE EXPRESS, and I’ll see RACHEL GETTING MARRIED as soon as I can. FLASH OF GENIUS, AN AMERICAN CAROL, and BALLAST all also slipped by me for one reason or another. That’s eight films right there in addition to the three I did see, and my wife wonders why I get frantic at this time of the year about making it to the screenings that are scheduled each and every day.
With the three films I did manage to see, I had pretty serious expectations for all three, and in only one of the cases do I think the film really works. This is supposed to be the moment in the year where things kick into higher gear, where we start seeing really good movies every week, and when the awards-worthy pictures start rolling out. So why am I not more excited by all of these?
My heftiest expectations were for BLINDNESS, and it’s taken me a while to work out my feelings about this film. I was a huge fan of CITY OF GOD and THE CONSTANT GARDENER, and I heard only great things about the novel by Jose Saramago, especially with director Fernando Mierelles working with Don McKellar, whose screenplays include CHILDSTAR, THE RED VIOLIN, the end-of-the-world drama LAST NIGHT, and the frankly amazing THIRTY-TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD. That’s a hell of a pedigree behind the camera, plus Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Alice Braga, Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Yusuke Iseya among others in the cast. BLINDNESS looks like an easy grand slam on paper. But I found myself making excuses for it after I saw it. Wanting to like it more than I did. As I’ve mulled it over in the weeks since seeing it, it’s really settled in, this nagging realization: it’s terrible. And that realization is a crushing disappointment, all things considered.
If you’ve seen the TV spots or, even worse, heard the radio ads for this film, you’ve been sold a bill of goods. They’re selling it like a thriller about an epidemic with some big government vs. our heroes plot like CHILDREN OF MEN. Uhhhhh... no. I’m not basing my disappointment on the ad campaign, either, but rathing noting how inaccurate it is. It’s like Miramax realizes that they can’t sell what they’ve got, so they figure that if they lie reeeeal hard, they’ll at least have a weekend of potential earning.
My first problem with the film, and perhaps the most insurmountable issue, is that this material is just plain hackneyed at this point. How many times can we see someone regurgitate the Stanford Prison Experiment in fictional form, this LORD OF THE FLIES microcosm that has been done and redone and redone and redone. Can we just accept it as a given that, under extreme duress, groups of people play out these same power dynamics again and again and again?
What really shocked me is that Mierelles, a gifted filmmaker who was able to create immersive emotional experiences with his first two films, completely misses the mark with this one. This is a film where the viewer’s left completely on the outside of the experience. It’s not horrific or agonizing or engrossing... it’s more dreary and oppressive and just plain gross. It strains for deeper meaning at every turn, and struggles to find something new to say with the metaphor of blindness. Of course, Mierelles isn’t completely to blame. The screenplay by McKellar just plain doesn’t work, which is odd. LAST NIGHT was made for probably 1/10th of the budget of this film, but it managed to say more about the way people behave in the face of societal collapse than this movie does, and without resorting to a preposterous overreaching central conceit like everyone suddenly and mysteriously going blind.
There are moments early on where it works. The first ten or fifteen minutes paint a decent picture of banal dread, slowly mounting as we see the viral chain of custody play out, one person after another stricken blind in a matter of moments. This is an ensemble film, but if there are any characters you could call the leads, it would be The Doctor (Mark Ruffalo) and the Doctor’s Wife (Julianne Moore). He’s an opthamologist, and his office becomes a major flashpoint for spreading the blindness, as many of his patients are afflicted before, finally, he wakes up blind himself.
People are immediately rounded up and whisked away from population centers in an effort to keep the disease in check, and Moore makes an impulsive decision when she sees how they’re handling her husband. “Take me, too,” she says. “I’ve just gone blind. I can’t see.” The men in the HAZMAT suits aren’t interested in arguing. They’re too freaked out, and as a result, Moore ends up in a converted hospital with her husband, a building that has become a prison for all of the sick. And as it fills up, conditions get worse and worse. The people, suddenly robbed of a sense they’ve relied on their whole lives, devolve into squalor and chaos fairly quickly, and Moore has to play nursemaid to her husband, even as she feels him pulling away from her, driven by his shame at his condition. Nobody in the film gets a name. They’re painting in broad archetype here, with the obvious point being that a situation like this is an equalizer, forcing people who might never meet to have to depend on each other for survival. The hospital is divided up into wards, and gradually, power games start to play out as one of the wards decides that they’re not going to co-exist any longer. Gael Garcia Bernal plays a truly loathsome little man, a shameless opportunist who keeps escalating the situation until Mierelles treats the audience to a nightmarish rape montage that drove several people from the screening I attended.
If I thought all of the misery and the shit and the suffering added up to something, I’d be more willing to take the ride. There was a film I saw at Fantastic Fest called EX-DRUMMER that was morally repulsive in an almost gleeful way, but there was a point to it, and there was so much raw energy and skill to the filmmaking that I set aside my own gag reflex while judging it. With BLINDNESS, the film knows how to provoke certain reactions, but the characters are such ciphers and the drama is so blatantly symbolic with no semblance of real life that I can’t get past the surface. Technically, the film is slick, but it’s inert. More than anything, this one frustrates because it represents a real setback for a filmmaker who seemed to be so promising, so boundlessly inventive, with his first few movies. Here’s hoping this is a mere speed bump, and that his next film wipes away the memory of this one.
I wouldn’t say I disliked RELIGULOUS. I just wish I liked it more overall.
And, no, I’m not going to use this moment to write a long treatise about my spiritual or religious beliefs. I’ve seen many critics take reviewing this film as an opportunity to climb up on a soapbox for a little preaching of their own, either pro or con religion and faith. I will say that I think those two things are different, and that difference is one of the main subtexts to this film by Larry Charles. I’m not sure I’d call it a documentary in the strictest sense of the word... it’s more a piece of exploratory journalism. It actually reminded me of another documentary that just came out on DVD this week from Magnolia Pictures called BIGGER STRONGER FASTER, which is all about steroid use in American culture. The director of that one, Chris Bell, started out to make an anti-steroid movie, but along the way, he found himself constantly challenged by what he learned. Bill Maher’s taken a lot of shit already for being part of RELIGULOUS, particularly from people who assume that all he’s doing is attacking people who believe in something. That’s not really the case, though, and because there’s more going on, I’d say RELIGULOUS is worth at least a look. It’s frustratingly incomplete, but a lot of what’s in the movie is worth seeing and certainly designed to spark conversation.
Look, religion is one of the touchiest subjects there can be in terms of debate. People’s faith is very personal, and one of the biggest problems I have with religion is the idea that we put such strict names and rules to something that is essentially impossible to define. You’re talking about something that people believe, something that’s impossible to quantify in any tangible or scientific sense. And the easiest way to turn a simple conversation into a screaming match is to tell someone that what they believe is wrong. I don’t mean saying, “Well, I believe something different,” either. I mean telling them, “Nope. What you believe is stupid and wrong and I’m going to laugh at it.” And that seems to be what I see happening more and more these days. People don’t just disagree; they feel an almost pathological need to tear down someone else’s belief system completely. What is it about someone else’s faith that threatens people so much? And, conversely, why is it that people of faith feel so often that they have a mission to jam that faith down the throat of other people, as if they can’t be content in what they believe until they have absolutely forced you to believe it, too?
Maher speaks at the start of the film about the oddity of growing up in a house where two religions were present. His father was Catholic, and his mother was Jewish, so Bill had these two influences playing out in his early life, even if he wasn’t totally aware of it. It’s obvious as he talks that religion was a hot potato in his house, and that’s probably why so much of his early stand-up material dealt with the subject in some way. Most of those early jokes were fairly harmless, jokes that were funny no matter what your faith. In recent years, though, Maher’s become more and more strident in his attacks on religion, calling it a form of mental illness. I think he idolizes guys like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and the fact that these guys have found the audience they have shows there is a hunger for this school of rationalism over the supernatural. That growing unease between the two extremes has made mass culture increasingly unpleasant, especially for people whose own faith falls somewhere in the middle.
I think Larry Charles was the best choice Maher could have made for a collaborator on the film. Charles did an excellent job with BORAT, and I was afraid that Charles was gong to do a lot of “gotcha” type set-ups on this one, but instead, he seems to have really pushed Maher to interview people instead of attacking them. The best material in the film comes when Maher really engages with the people he’s talking to. I don’t think I could have taken two hours of watching him shit on other people’s beliefs, and that’s really not what the film is. More than anything, he seems determined to lay bare the contradictions and hypocrisy and just plain screwball logic of these stories people adhere to with such passion. The people he seems to have the best experiences with are the ones who acknowledge that there are imperfections to the dogma of their particular religions, but they choose to maintain their faith anyway. And, unsurprisingly, the people who come off the worst in the film are the ones who reject any challenge or conversation in favor of easy regurgitation of bumper-sticker-style religion, who seem to have little or no understanding of what they’re actually saying or why they believe what they believe. The reason I’m not crazier about the film is because I don’t think it ever really pulls its thesis together, and Maher certainly never earns the rant he lurches into as the film’s closing moments arrive. There’s an anger in those moments that the film doesn’t really earn, and it almost undermines everything that comes before it.
Still, I get why that anger burns so bright for Maher. I think there are many, many terrible things that have been done in the name of one prophet or another, this messiah or that, but I think there is also a moral code that many of the world’s religions have imprinted on people that has led to a whole lot of charity and kindness. I’d like to think that even without religion, those same impulses, both good and bad, would play out in people, and maybe in equal measure. I think anytime you have groups of people, certain patterns play out. That’s part of what BLINDNESS tried to say in its own hamhanded way, and religion is just one of those social group structures that has led to those same problems. I find that in my own experience, I have little or not tolerance for organizations and groups and hierarchies, but I have boundless faith and love for individuals. RELIGULOUS is a hard film to summarize or to offer up any in-depth criticism of, but that’s because it’s not really a conventional movie. It is, more than anything, a litmus test, a match that will light a fire under most viewers, and how you feel about it in the end will depend largely on how willing you are to have that conversation at all.
The final film I’m reviewing this weekend is APPALOOSA, the new film directed by veteran character actor Ed Harris. I haven’t read the Robert Parker novel that this was based on, but I’m pleased to report that this is a simple pleasure, unadorned and lovely, a real no-shit Western. It’s not a post-modern take on the genre. It’s not a reinvention. They’re not being ironic about it. It’s unapologetic, and it’s a great example of the best-case-scenario of what can happen when a really gifted actor gets behind the camera and directs other actors.
The opening scene of the film works beautifully. No credits, no nothing. Just three men on horseback riding up to the yard of a ranchhouse. The owner of the ranchland, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), walks out with a gun slung over his arm to talk to the man on the middle horse, US Marshall Jack Bell (Bobby Jauregui). The Marshall tells him that he needs to take some of Bragg’s men back to town to face charges for raping and murdering some travelers. Bragg tells him that isn’t going to happen. When the Marshall orders his deputy to arrest the men, Bragg shoots all three of them in the faces, barely moving as he does so.
He does it the way you’d swat flies that were bothering you, without the slightest twitch of conscience. He orders the men who were going to be arrested to bury the bodies, then heads back inside. And just like that, we’re off and running. The town that sent Marshall Bell (the character, not the bug-eyed character actor) to arrest Bragg’s men, realizes that they may be in trouble when the Marshall never shows up again. Bragg’s men treat the town as their own personal playground, and with no Marshall in town, they feel free to forget all about the rule of law. The local businessmen and the figurehead mayor realize this can’t continue, so they hire help from the outside in the form of a pair of ringers: Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and his right arm, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen).
And if you want to know what the film’s “about,” above and beyond the story (which is a deliberate but well-constructed yarn in its own right), it’s “about” the relationships that certain men build, where they form a partnership that supercedes everything else, a code that exists that is more binding than law. It’s about the way that code changes everything else they do. And when you’re making a movie about that, and it stars Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen, and Harris is directing which means that there’s all the room in the world for these two to just act the shit out of every unspoken silence, every action beat unfolding as a duet between these two serious badasses. This film is all about the soul behind the gunslinger, and it’s verrrrry subtle stuff.
I’ve heard a few people complain that it’s “just” a Western, but I far prefer this approach to last year’s problematic and much-hyped 3:10 TO YUMA. That film’s got some great chemistry, but the script is one frustration after another, characters acting out of convenience instead of their already-defined nature. APPALOOSA is a film where everything happens because of the way these characters are defined. Bragg is the immovable object that is set in the path of Virgil and Everett, and the first part of the film is all about setting up how they put their irresistible force to work on the problem of taking back Appaloosa from these outlaws, as a way of defining how they work together when everything’s right.
That is, of course, so that when things go wrong, and they do, we understand just how wrong they go.
Virgil Cole makes the simple mistake of falling in love. He meets Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a new arrival in Appaloosa, and he’s flattened by her sense of culture. She represents a world back east that Virgil’s got no place in, no sense of, and he is pretty much useless from the moment she shows up. Everett knows exactly what flavor of trouble she is, but he also knows that his relationship with Virgil and his adherence to the code means that he cannot comment on her. He can’t warn Virgil off. All he can do is back Virgil’s play or walk away. No middle ground. Virgil calls the shots, and as soon as she’s in the picture, his judgment slips. It ultimately puts everything up for grabs, including ownership of the town, everyone’s lives, and the code itself, this stress caused by this woman, and what kept me hooked is the way the film so clearly builds a sense of tension thanks to the way we know these characters are going to have to react as things keep building.
Harris has a real feel for the classic oater, and he gives his entire cast the same room to play that he creates for himself and Viggo. Zellweger’s good as a consummate survivor, a woman whose morals depend on the company she keeps, and who turns out to have more in common with Virgil than he suspects at first. All the tough guys and townspeople are well-cast and well-played with familiar faces. In particular, Lance Henriksen shows up with his glower at full wattage, the only guy I can imagine going toe-to-toe with Harris and Mortensen side-by-side. Jeremy Irons doesn’t play quite as large a role as you might think from the way the film begins, but the way he blows with the wind is interesting, and by the end of the film, I’m not sure I’d even call him a villain. Robert Knott and Ed Harris did a nice job adapting the script from Parker’s novel, and even if the film doesn’t innovate, it’s a solid and rewarding genre treat, and my favorite of this weekend’s movies that I’ve seen so far.
Lots out there to see, and I plan to catch up with a few of them myself this weekend. What have you guys seen so far, and what are you still planning to see?
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
