Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

With Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Spielberg established a new movie icon, a new larger-than-life hero in the tradition of the pulp adventure. The second movie in this new series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, immediately announces itself as a very different kind of movie, a very different take on the pulp hero. The film opens with, of all things, a musical number, staged like a Busby Berkeley set piece, with glamorous showgirls in glittery costumes arranging themselves in colorful, shiny patterns within the frame. The song, of course, is "Anything Goes," an appropriate anthem for a film that deliberately erases the line between good taste and bad, casting Indy (Harrison Ford) in an even more absurd, crazy adventure than his first cinematic outing. Within the first twenty minutes of the film, Indy has battled gangsters while surrounded by balloons in a club ballroom, leaped from a window with club singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) in tow, then jumped from a plane with nothing but an inflatable boat to break his fall, before careening off a massive cliff into the river rapids below.

Temple of Doom is also more exaggerated than its predecessor in terms of the supporting characters who accompany Indy on this adventure. While Raiders of the Lost Ark featured cartoonish Nazis as the villains, Indy's allies were the loyal and noble Egyptian guide Sallah and Karen Allen's tough, witty portrayal of Marion Ravenwood. The shrill, helpless Willie Scott is no Marion, though, and Kate Capshaw is no Karen Allen; her character here is basically the butt of jokes about feminine incompetence and greed. When Indy drags her to an Indian palace, investigating the disappearances of many children from a rural village, the first thing she thinks when she sees the wealth and splendor of the palace is to wonder if the maharajah is married. Even worse is the infamous Short Round (Jonathan Ke Quan), a Chinese orphan boy who accompanies Indy on his adventures, and who basically serves as a source of caricatured comic relief with his heavy accent and squeaky catchphrases. The infamous dinner scene — where Willie and Short Round are horrified as their hosts serve giant bugs, eyeball soup, a snake that spills out smaller living serpents when sliced open, and, most memorably, chilled monkey brains, served out of a monkey head with removable scalp — is another example of the film's wallowing in grotesque orientalism.


At its best, though, the film's melodramatic outrageousness can be strangely compelling. This is true even of the problematic aspects: the seduction scene between Indy and Willie is hilarious, since it consists of two profound egotists posing and sparring, culminating with Willie throwing her head back, closing her eyes and murmuring that she'll be the best he's ever had. Later, Spielberg indulges in a very different form of excess when the three heroes witness an ancient ritual in which a priest pulls the heart from a man's chest before thrusting the (somehow still living) man into a whirlpool of fire. This scene is all about operatic excess, taking the fiery spiritual climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a starting point and simply expanding its red-hued lunacy to even greater lengths.

That exaggeration extends as well to the vision of the slave labor mine that lurks within the temple, where dirty, chained-up children hack at rocks with hammers while being whipped by bare-chested overseers. At one point, Spielberg even conflates voodoo with Indian culture, because basically the evil cult depicted in the film doesn't emerge from any one culture or anything real whatsoever. The cult is instead a vision of every foreign culture, as viewed through the xenophobic eyes of the West, all blended together into a soup of strange customs, blood sacrifices, horrible food, and a pagan obsession with death and destruction. It'd be easy to say that Spielberg is parodying that particular lineage within the pulp fiction genres that he's drawing on, but that doesn't really seem to be the case: he's just delivering a potent and especially ugly vision of the stereotypical foreign bad guy, the villain whose very obvious distance from Western culture is the only source of his evil.


The best part of the film comes at the very end, when Spielberg drops all the campy strangeness and simply embraces the spirited action set pieces that made Raiders so boyishly exciting. The mine car chase sequence is punchy and thrilling, crisply edited and visceral, and Spielberg follows it with an equally tense and well-realized sequence with Indy trapped in the center of a rope bridge, sword-wielding villains advancing on him from either end of the bridge. Spielberg, whose action scenes always have a keen sense of place and spatial relationships, inserts long shots in which the bridge runs across the whole frame, showing Indy as a dot in the middle with the slowly approaching enemies, purple blots in their long robes, closing in on him. The action scenes stacked up towards the end of the film have all the tightly wound intensity of the best Spielberg action sequences, and this consistently exciting final act goes some ways towards redeeming the sometimes slack narrative, annoying characters and orientalist oddities of the rest of the film.

Temple of Doom is well-known as the oddball entry in the Indiana Jones series, at least before the fourth film, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's a deeply strange and flawed film that, to its credit, doesn't simply repeat the very successful formula of its predecessor but tries to do something different within the pulp lineage. It doesn't always work — an understatement, perhaps — but there's still something hypnotizing about the film's embrace of its own knowing excesses. It's a very inconsistent movie, of course, both in terms of quality and tone: sometimes harrowing and horrific, sometimes barreling forward with no-consequences action, and sometimes goofy and cheery, as when Spielberg nods to the elephant hijinks of Howard Hawks' Hatari!, a film that (as Adam Zanzie first tipped me off to) seems to be very important to his career and his approach to cinema. The film's final shot embraces all these contradictions, as Indy grabs Willie for a kiss (after pulling her to him with his signature whip; kinky!) while Short Round urges an elephant to spray them with water and repeatedly squeals, "very funny!" It's cheesy and ridiculous, especially when Spielberg then pulls back to show a crowd of laughing Indian kids running to embrace the couple. Spielberg's dealing with big, bold images and events here, and the film is packed with clichés and absurdities. That it sometimes overcomes its own ridiculousness to deliver a satisfying action set piece or some other fun bit of business is a tribute to Spielberg's keen instincts showing through.

Blood Simple

Blood Simple was the first feature of Joel and Ethan Coen, and it's a natural debut for the brothers, a darkly comic/tragic neo-noir that wallows in the greed, pettiness and stupidity of people driven by love and revenge to do terrible things to one another. In the film's opening minutes, Ray (John Getz) is driving Abby (Frances McDormand) away from her nasty, brutish husband Marty (Dan Hedaya), the owner of the bar where Ray works. Ray and Abby's love affair will trigger all of the film's grisly events, in one way or another, and the opening scene is already loaded with menace and the promise of coming tragedy. As Ray and Abby talk in the car, driving at night along a dark highway, they're bathed in pale midnight blue tones, the camera lingering in the backseat of the car, barely catching glimpses of their faces, so that their voices seem disembodied in the darkness. Abby is running away, not sure of where she's going, just sure she doesn't want to be with Marty anymore, and Ray, in his stolid way, simply keeps repeating that he "ain't no marriage counselor," but that he really likes Abby. It's obvious where this is heading, but Ray and Abby keep earnestly, nervously beating around the bush, delaying the inevitable moment when they'll fall into bed together. And the eerie mood of this scene, juxtaposed against the tenderness and vulnerability of the soon-to-be lovers, says all one needs to know about where this story will go once their affair begins.

At least, the broad strokes are apparent from the beginning. But no one could quite predict just how horribly off course this story of revenge and jealousy will go by its end, or just how many weird twists will crop up before the last drops of blood have been shed. When Marty finds out about his wife's infidelity from the slimy, smirking private investigator Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), he hires Visser to kill the lovers for ten thousand dollars. What ensues is a whole string of bloody events, most of them centered around tragic misunderstandings and acts of staggering stupidity. These people — all of them, with the possible exception of the wide-eyed, innocent Abby — are an unfortunate combination of utter incompetence and bloodyminded nastiness, and they go about slaughtering, assaulting and robbing from one another in the most ludicrous ways.

At the base of the film is the notion that people are programmed to think the worst of those around them, and that while this impulse is often proven true, again and again, sometimes it is tragically false. Ray is turned against Abby with ease, doubts planted in his soft head by the hateful words of Marty, who naturally has nothing but bile and spite for his unfaithful wife. What started as a love affair is then plagued by doubts and suspicions, by nasty words and bouts of jealousy founded on phantom fears. The unfortunate Abby barely enjoys a day of her new love before she's subjected to fights and suspicions that suggest that this new relationship is already heading down a path similar to the one that led her to the end with Marty. Abby is, however, one of those rare decent people who sometimes meander haplessly through the Coen brothers' cold, cynical universe. She is a premonition of the decency in McDormand's Marge Gunderson in Fargo, a truly good person despite some flaws, full of energy and vigor, eager to talk and to share her feelings. It's not her fault, one senses, that her wide-eyed ingenuousness inspires distrust and, eventually, hatred in the men she ties herself to. And it's not her fault that these foolish, inept men sloppily plot to kill and destroy one another with her at the center of their plots.


Often, the Coen brothers have been accused of laughing at their characters, holding themselves above the stupid actions of these people, looking condescendingly down on their creations as they stumble about. It's sometimes true, though that cynical attitude is softened, if only slightly, by a countervailing sense that the filmmakers are sympathetic to these characters as well, that they feel bad for these people as they destroy themselves through their base emotions and desires. In this, the Coens' first film, their worldview is perhaps especially clear, and it's obvious that if the filmmakers are laughing at their creations, the laughter is always tinged with a sad awareness of the futility of all this violence. The film opens with voiceover narration by Visser, announcing the film's themes and indeed the themes that would continue to animate the brothers' films throughout their subsequent career:

"The world is full of complainers. And the fact is, nothin' comes with a guarantee. Now I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; something can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y'know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, and watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here... you're on your own."

That just about sums up the bleak worldview of the Coen brothers: their characters exist in an amoral universe, derived from film noir's bleak settings, in which everyone is out for his or her self, and one can't rely on help or sympathy from anyone else. Not even from the filmmakers, who watch these characters fumble around from an omniscient, detached viewpoint that suggests a God who's equally amused and disappointed by the follies of these people in their shortsightedness and petty emotions. The murders in the film are purposefully staged so that it's obvious that the characters think they're being clever, that they've planned everything out and have thought of everything. At the same time, the Coens take pains to reveal the opposite: the slip-ups, the stupid mistakes, the missing information. They highlight details like Visser's lighter, or blood spots on a car seat, or a hand touching a surface, sure to leave behind incriminating fingerprints. Again and again, they revisit the bar where the film's first murder takes place, and each time they do, with different characters, things have been changed around and each character tries to understand what has happened, to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. To some extent, the film's tragedy is caused by this lack of understanding, and by the willingness of these misguided fools to leap to conclusions and act rashly anyway.

Where the Green Ants Dream

Werner Herzog's Where the Green Ants Dream is an oddity even in the filmography of a director who has more or less made nothing but oddities of various kinds. It's an elliptical, mystically infused tale of a confrontation between a tribe of Australian aborigines and a mining company that wants to drill and blast on land that the aborigines consider sacred. It is, they tell the mining company's representatives, the place "where the green ants dream," and if this place is disturbed and the ants are no longer able to dream, it will be a disaster for the entire world. Needless to say, the company is not overly concerned, and immediately begins trying to figure out how to go ahead with their mining anyway, and how to get the aborigines out of the way with the least fuss. They try bribes, but when these are rejected they drag the tribe into court, where there's little doubt how the establishment will decide, with the Commonwealth of Australia itself lining up on the side of the mining company.

It is, of course, equally obvious where Herzog's sympathies lie. His depiction of the aborigines sometimes draws on the "magical negro" cliché, but he does seem to see these people as genuinely spiritual and good and noble. There is little condescension in his vision of aboriginal life: Herzog, with his complex relationship to the natural world and his fascination for man's confrontations with wildness, has great respect for these people, who seem to understand things in a deeper, more spiritual way. It's the whites in the film who are lost, struggling to understand, their minds a confused jumble. The mining company's head geologist at this location, Lance Hackett (Bruce Spence), gets the brunt of Herzog's satirical wit. Hackett is plagued by metaphysical doubts and torturous theoretical thinking. He ties his mind into knots trying to grasp the nature of an ever-expanding universe, trying to come to terms with Earth's place in the vastness of space. The aborigines cut through these kind of knots with the simplicity and finality of Alexander severing the Gordian Knot: they say that the whites ask too many questions, that they don't understand things on an intuitive level. This is why the aboriginal leaders Miliritbi (Wandjuk Marika) and Dayipu (Roy Marika) seem so calm, so tranquil, why they don't expend their energy in long, rambling discourses. When they speak, they are direct and to the point, in their minimal and heavily accented English, describing their ideas in the simplest possible terms. Hackett, meanwhile, struggles to communicate to them the necessity of the mining company's operations, finds himself unable to describe the procedures of drilling, and thinks he's being deep when he stumbles across Philosophy 101-level conundrums like "maybe everything we're seeing is an illusion."

Herzog thus depicts the confrontation between the aborigines and the whites in purely symbolic terms, as a conflict between ancient spirituality and modern commerce and civilization. The languid, hallucinatory rhythms of his images consistently reflect the former. The film opens with grainy, ragged images of a tornado forming above a desert, its black funnel rotating with the slow grace of a spinning ballerina, drawing up dust and dirt into its orbit. It's a scary, beautiful image, one that recurs towards the end of the film, its purpose utterly mysterious. Throughout the film, Herzog returns to images of mystery and strange beauty, like the sight of a green plane descending into the hazy desert, reminiscent of the similar heat-hazed images that opened his desert hallucination Fata Morgana. In one of the film's more bizarre subplots, this plane takes on a strange symbolic resonance for the aborigines, tied into a legend that's recounted to Hackett by a slightly crazed and very Herzogian etymologist who has stationed himself at a location where the Earth's magnetic field is supposedly at its most warped. This man tells Hackett about the life cycle of the green ants, sexless creatures whose mating ritual involves a massive swarm flying over the mountains, where only two individuals within the entire swarm acquire sexual characteristics and mate. The plane becomes a mechanized giant green ant, flying towards the mountains to ensure its species' continuation.


All of this is, to say the least, highly dubious as mythology or biology. Herzog reportedly invented the legend of the green ants rather than deriving it from any genuine aboriginal customs. In this respect, the film is not actually about aboriginal culture, but about Herzog's own vision of their culture, a vision informed by his own preoccupations and concerns, his ideas about nature and spirituality and progress. This gives the film a kind of schizoid looniness, with typically Herzogian characters drifting in and out of the narrative. There's an exaggeratedly racist mining company foreman (Ray Barrett) who wants to bulldoze the aborigines out of the way. A black former air force pilot (Gary Williams) is mostly drunk all the time — reflecting the miserable conditions in which these people live within their designated reservations — but still harbors dreams of getting a plane up in the air again. In an almost entirely unconnected subplot, an old woman (Colleen Clifford) wants the mining company to help her find her missing dog, who may have wandered into the caves opened up by the drilling and explosions. She sets up watch at the mouth of one of these caves with an umbrella shielding her from the sun and a wad of black, feces-textured dog food congealing in a dish beside her. She mirrors the attentive watch of the aborigines, driven by her own personal quest just as they are by their spirituality.

In a way, this is what Herzog is really getting at here. He's always been fascinated by people who possess mysterious inner motors, driving them towards obscure destinations that no one else can even see or imagine. He finds — or creates — in these aborigines a similar inner drive, a deep and ancient spiritual understanding of the world that sets them apart entirely from modern culture, even when they don the accoutrements of society. Thus, they make even familiar modern technology and comforts seem strange and alien, turning a beeping digital watch into a puzzle to be deciphered. They look uncomfortable but dignified in the modern suits they wear to court during their final confrontation with the mining company: they are clearly out of place in this context but maintain their dignity despite the unfamiliar surroundings. They are stubbornly resisting modernity, and Herzog of course respects this, respects people who are out of sync with their time and place, people who retain their essential distance from Western civilization.

Herzog's respect for these characters is refreshing, even though they always remain characters rather than genuine representatives of aboriginal culture. Herzog isn't that interested in documenting their actual culture — though he would venture into the genre of ethnographic documentaries later in the 80s and during the early 90s — but in documenting the kinds of clashes and misunderstandings that result from these encounters between Western modernity and people who represent earlier ways of living and thinking. One of the film's most poignant moments is the appearance of an aboriginal man who is described as a "mute," not because he actually can't speak, but because he is the last representative of his tribe, the last person on Earth to speak a dead language, unable to make himself understood to anyone. He nevertheless gets his moment in court from Herzog, standing up in a suit and addressing the court in a language no one else can speak, and which no one else will ever speak again after he is gone. This kind of complete separation from the modern world, a disjunction so profound that no one can bridge the gap, is what fascinates Herzog here. It is this kind of person to whom Herzog is so poetically paying tribute.

Love on the Ground

The opening minutes of Jacques Rivette's Love on the Ground are as direct an invitation to his audience as this great director has ever extended: a group of people are silently led by a pair of guides to a humble apartment, where the crowd discreetly lingers to the side and observes a trite melodrama in which a man attempts to juggle his two lovers, who have accidentally shown up at his apartment at the same moment. The man and the two women ignore the intruders lurking nearby, these silent watchers, seemingly unseen, tucked into the corners of Rivette's frame. It is as though the director has invited the film's audience into the fabric of the film itself, to silently observe from an intimate perspective. It soon becomes clear, however, that the audience within the film is actually watching a play, performed in an apartment, and as the play progresses the silent, solemn atmosphere begins to break down: the actors forget their lines and improvise humorous bits of business or clever dialogue, and the audience reacts with appreciative laughter. The appearance of real life being observed with documentary-like objectivity is shattered, and in its place is playfulness, spontaneity, wit.

This interaction of multiple levels of reality — theater, film, audience, actors, "real life" — is typical of Rivette, and he achieves a very potent, playful expression of these key themes in Love on the Ground. The three actors in the opening scene are Emily (Jane Birkin), Charlotte (Geraldine Chaplin) and Silvano (Facundo Bo), and it turns out that their free-wheeling performance in these opening scenes is as sloppily enthralling for the visiting playwright Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) as it is for the film's audience; the fact that the performers are pilfering from and improvising around one of Roquemaure's plays only intrigues him further. He invites the trio to come live at his palatial home for the next week, where they will rehearse a new play he is writing for them, to perform there within a week's time. They agree, and the rest of the film becomes a complex Rivettian game in which reality, theater and film are continually intersecting and weaving together in confounding ways. The actors find themselves playing parts in a drama that they soon learn was modeled off the real history between Roquemaure, his friend the magician Paul (André Dussollier) and Béatrice, the mysterious woman they both loved, and whose disappearance shattered them both.

It quickly becomes apparent that Roquemaure is staging this play as a cathartic reenactment of what happened between the trio, with the real events very thinly disguised by false names. Charlotte plays Barbara, an obvious stand-in for Béatrice, even as she becomes Roquemaure's actual lover as well, while Emily, playing a male character named Pierre, goes to bed with Paul, on whom her character is based. It's like sleeping with herself. Only Silvano, playing the playwright's stand-in, largely stays out of these sexual entanglements; he's only there for the money. The confusion of names and alternate identities and artistic identities is complicated further when, in the film's second half, both sexual liaisons and roles prove to be fluid: Emily briefly takes over the role of Barbara, even as Charlotte is becoming ever closer to the real Béatrice by allowing herself to be seduced by Paul. Even the mannered, Igor-esque manservant Virgil (Laszlo Szabo), who would have fit in nicely on the fringes of a Universal horror film, engages in manic, playful seductions of both women.


Rivette thrives in this kind of chaos, using the film's complex layers of reality as a pretext to stage one clever, fun sequence after another. The actors often seem to be improvising, something Rivette heartily encouraged, and many of the film's best moments have an energetic spontaneity that simply seems to burst forth from the performers. Chaplin and Birkin are phenomenal throughout, and each of them is given their best spotlight in independent scenes of drunken revelry: Charlotte attempts to makeout with a Cupid statue, while Emily threatens and teases the harried Virgil, angrily popping an egg in her fist at the scene's climax. The two women are descendants of Rivette's most iconic female duo, the eponymous heroines of Celine and Julie Go Boating, and Love on the Ground is in some ways a sequel to the earlier film. Just as Celine and Julie became involved with an occult mystery, Charlotte and Emily explore Roquemaure's mostly empty mansion like a pair of impish Nancy Drews, creeping through its abandoned rooms in order to discover its mysteries. These mysteries are both magical and horrific: the former because Paul seems to have an uncontrollable ability to trigger lifelike visions for the women he encounters, the latter because the women are half-convinced that Roquemaure is a kind of Bluebeard who actually murdered the mysteriously missing Béatrice, whose room is so lovingly preserved behind a locked door. They both wonder if the ghost of Béatrice is haunting their production of a play based on the missing woman.

The film's magical and supernatural elements extend to its obsession with doubling and mirroring, an obsession that begins with the convoluted assignation of names and roles and replacements in Roquemaure's play, but hardly ends there. Charlotte continually sees herself doubled when she is around Paul, his presence seeming to trigger hallucinatory visions of herself as though reflected in a mirror. Charlotte and Emily also both encounter separate characters played by the same actress, Eva Roelens, who relates to each woman a different tale of woe, about being betrayed by a man, of course. Rivette, always sympathetic to his female characters, makes this film's dominant subject the ways in which women can break free of and subvert the controlling tendencies of men. Charlotte and Emily have free reign here; together, they are not only the narrative's center, but they even get the upper hand in the end.

One of the reasons that Rivette's characters, and especially his female characters, often feel so vibrant and free is that they are usually unconstrained by the limits of strict plotting. In this film, the plot is treated as a loose and open-ended framework in which the characters (and the actors playing them — and the actors playing the actors!) can interact, form temporary alliances and relationships, improvise, play, have fun. Roquemaure's play has no set ending, and nobody has any idea of what will happen in its unwritten fourth act until the night of the first performance; the same can be said of Rivette's film. The final half hour is dedicated to the performance itself, and the film's audience gets to find out what will happen at the same time as the audience that Roquemaure assembles at his home for the play. And of course this finale represents the ultimate spillover between the film's multiple levels of reality, in which the real dramas involving Roquemaure, Paul and Béatrice (and the actors as well) intrude upon the performance. The play and its aftermath becomes a struggle to take control of reality, to stage life itself as a grand piece of theater, to write one's own ending, happy or otherwise. This has always been Rivette's agenda, to blend film, theater and life itself into one big messy, ecstatic stew, bubbling over with emotions, both performed and deeply felt.

Meantime

[This post is a contribution to the Politics & Movies Blog-a-thon, running from November 4-9 at The Cooler.]

Mike Leigh's Meantime is a brutish, nasty movie about brutish, nasty people, a thoroughly unpleasant cinema of abjection that burrows deep into the unpleasant, aimless lives of its protagonists like a maggot digging its way into rotted flesh. The film centers on a family who live an entirely government-supported existence: terminally unemployed, accepting the dole week after week, living in squalor, doing nothing all day but watch TV and wander the streets as hooligans. They get drunk when they have the money, and otherwise they simply cause whatever trouble they can or find something, anything, to pass the seemingly endless bland hours that face them. For father Frank (Jeff Robert), this existence is the proof of his incompetence and failure, an entire lifetime spent to get him to this dismal place. To make matters worse, his two sons promise to be only a continuation of his own failure: Mark (Phil Daniels) is a snide, nasty thug, an aging juvenile delinquent who doesn't seem to be outgrowing this phase, while Colin (Tim Roth) is "slow," with no hope of finding his way off this miserable path. Leigh documents, with unflinching honesty, the drudgery and ugliness of this life. The film expresses with its every image the hopelessness and worthlessness that these people feel, discarded and left to rot, with no hope of finding any work, the dole keeping them alive at just barely the level of subsistence.

The film opens in a very different milieu, however, as Frank and his wife Mavis (Pam Ferris), together with the boys, go to visit Mavis' sister Barbara (Marion Bailey) and her husband John (Alfred Molina). John and Barbara are more successful, living in a nice suburban house and dreaming of redecorating in various ways. The scene seethes with barely contained hostility, as Frank and Mavis can't hide their contempt and jealousy, while Barbara scurries around making sure that the good china isn't used. Mavis tries to serve the tea for her sister, and is told nastily that she's using the wrong tray — probably because she doesn't have the luxury of being so picky about how she serves her food at home. Leigh handles the scene with a claustrophobic intensity that carries over to the rest of the film. Close-ups are frequent, highlighting the twisted leers and shifty eyes of the protagonists as they trade barbed quips. All these characters seem to be constantly trying to hurt each other, testing out new lines designed to cut deeper and deeper, to draw blood, to pass their own pain onto others. Leigh emphasizes the tight spaces in which these people live, even in the supposedly luxurious suburban home. The camera rarely pulls out for long shots except for a few exteriors, mostly switching between extreme close-ups and cramped medium shots filled with multiple colliding bodies. In one scene, tension builds up over the use of the family's one bathroom, and Leigh simply peers down the hallway with a static shot as the family members pace outside the bathroom door like vultures, waiting to pounce whenever the door is opened.


Mundane incidents like this drive the film, all of it captured with Leigh's direct, confrontational style. The film is every bit as grim as his later masterpiece Naked, with a similar streak of pitch-black humor, but it doesn't have quite the same fatalist poetry. For the most part, Meantime is more grounded, less prone to apocalyptic rants and grandiose philosophical pronouncements. The result is that the film is not as artful as its later counterpart, and purposefully so. If Naked is a fully realized artistic statement on poverty, homelessness, and depression, then Meantime is the unmediated reality behind the art, its semi-documentary ugliness spewed up onto the screen like the aftermath of a particularly nasty bender. The film pauses to visit with other denizens of this rundown community of apartment blocs, including in one harrowing scene a confrontation between the oafish skinhead Coxy (Gary Oldman) and the shy, mumbling Hayley (Tilly Vosburgh). For the most part, though, it keeps its focus on the nuclear family at its core, and especially on Colin. Roth gives a phenomenal performance as this quiet, withdrawn young man who barely realizes what's going on around him. Colin is only slightly less cognizant than the other people in the film, only a few steps further along the path of generalized abjection and ignorance that surrounds him on all sides.

This is all, to say the least, a bit much to take, and only Leigh's morbid humor and insistently probing camerawork keep the film from being suicidally depressing. There is only one scene, towards the middle of the film, where any of these people show the least sign of self-awareness or intelligence, the least shred of dignity or beauty. It is a surprising scene, even a shocking one, because it represents a sudden awakening, one that would fit nicely with the philosophical dialogues of Naked but which seems out of place in these squalid surroundings. The unlikely source of these musings is a manager (Peter Wight) at the family's apartment building, coming to investigate their complaints about shoddy windows. When he comes in, Barbara happens to be visiting, and a mysterious chemistry seems to develop between this man and the visitor, and the two of them begin chatting, increasingly ignoring everyone else in the room as though they weren't even there. His poetic language inevitably recalls David Thewlis' Johnny in Naked, as the manager talks about the artificiality of the concept of money and the necessity of establishing more meaningful relationships between people than the mercenary bonds of economics. He seems almost desperate to find a connection, to get his audience to have a conversation with him, to tell him about something deeper than household repairs. Only Barbara engages him, though, and despite the obvious attraction between them she seems befuddled by his line of thought, feebly defending the idea of money and the necessity of "fiscal policy," a concept she learned in college but obviously knows little about beyond its name. Still, this brief interlude is practically magical in the context of a film where nobody speaks to anyone else about anything of importance. An actual conversation about actual issues becomes an earth-shattering event, one that the family venerates with a respectful and awed silence.

This is a fleeting moment, but one whose impact lingers throughout the remainder of the film, an unspoken subtext underpinning everything these characters do. This bleak, unforgiving movie is in many ways a trial run for the even greater Naked, another film about people with no prospects, no future, and no hope of redemption. Leigh is undoubtedly a downer, and his films engage with political and social realities only to the extent of documenting the ways things are and why: he sees no way out for these people and thus offers no solutions. This unwavering commitment to actuality, to giving center-stage to the forgotten and ignored, is Leigh's greatest strength. These are people who, in mainstream cinema as in life, have no voice and no representation, and Leigh's humanist attention to these downtrodden sectors of society is the only attention they're likely to get.