Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World is a conscious sequel of sorts to his previous film, The Wild Blue Yonder, utilizing the footage of composer and underwater photographer Henry Kaiser, whose images from Antarctica appear in both films. The film is also a very Herzogian nature documentary, an attempt to find in an unfamiliar natural landscape the themes and ideas that animate all of the filmmaker's best work: the hostility of nature to man, the fatalist heroism of exploration, the religious and apocalyptic overtones that Herzog can find in seemingly any subject. He explicitly contrasts his effort against fluffy feel-good nature documentaries like March of the Penguins: he does not want merely pretty or cute images, but images that reflect his own insights into the natural world, with its cruelty, harshness, and a beauty that is not comfortable but overpowering, awe-inspiring. Even when he does come across some of the little waddling, adorable birds, leave it to Herzog to locate, and focus in on, an "insane" penguin. Herzog questions a reclusive penguin researcher, a man who seems more comfortable with birds than people, about the incidence of homosexuality, unusual sexual behavior, and dementia among the species he observes. The researcher responds with laconic anecdotes about the penguin equivalent of prostitution, and explains that for these birds the only analog to insanity might be their occasional tendency to grow disoriented and go where they are not supposed to go. There is obvious poetry in this. For birds whose lives consist entirely of a narrow track between the ocean and the nesting grounds, the ultimate insanity is the individualist drive to set off in a different direction. Herzog finds one of these nonconformist birds and isolates him in a large expanse of white, vacillating between the two accepted destinations before finally setting off in a third direction, towards a distant mountain range and almost certain death. His quest is quixotic, comic, and doomed to fail, but it is also in its odd, waddling way a noble venture. He is the penguin version of the archetypal Herzog hero: the penguin Fitzcarraldo, the penguin Aguirre.

This suicidally heroic penguin is not the only Herzogian character who seems to have cropped up in real life down at the south pole. In fact, one of the film's primary themes is the way that this extreme place seems to attract extreme characters of all kinds, all of whom suggest different metaphors for why so many unusual, solitary people have gravitated to a single location. Over the course of the film, Herzog meets and conducts interviews with a staggering variety of people. There's the compulsive world traveler who endured military coups, malaria and rampaging elephants in a trip across Africa, and who now enacts, in Antarctica, bizarre performance art pieces where she stuffs herself into a suitcase. There's a plumber and builder who's proud of his multifaceted heritage and displays like a badge the unusual configuration of his fingers, which he has learned marks him as a descendant of the Aztec royal families. There's a worker who's introduced with the immortal tag, "philosopher, forklift driver." There's a physicist whose study of neutrinos has led him to a quasi-spiritualist view of the universe: these invisible particles, which are everywhere and can be measured in abstract ways but never apprehended, are like harbingers of "the spirit world" for him, which makes his work the process of quantifying God. His scientific instruments are decorated with ritual inscriptions and art, signifying this unexpected overlap between religion and science. Under Herzog's inquisitive gaze, Antarctica becomes a transitory colony populated exclusively with exactly the kinds of people who might be expected to populate a Herzog film. Antarctica is transformed in the same way as the Sahara Desert was in the hallucinatory Fata Morgana, a film that is subtly referenced with an early shot of a plane descending on McMurdo base in Antarctica.


In addition to profiling these odd and intriguing characters, Herzog brings to Antarctica the apocalyptic view of the natural world that has been woven through virtually his entire filmography. There is perhaps a streak of masochistic glee in this director, who has forged his career around visiting and documenting the harshest, most unwelcoming frontiers in the world, and who then, naturally enough, finds that they confirm his essential opinion of the world as a cruel, uncompromising place. Herzog is the ultimate documenter of natural selection at work, whether it is the fate of jungle explorers going beyond human boundaries (Aguirre: the Wrath of God), the level of superhuman achievement where athleticism becomes life-endangering (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner), or the borderline where admirable determination shades into maniacal obsession (Fitzcarraldo). He is fascinated by things humans are not meant to do, and places where humans are not supposed to go, much as the "insane" penguin is not supposed to head for the mountains.

He also sees in this harsh terrain the closest approximation to true religious experience that humans can reach on Earth, although he never traffics in any hackneyed "beauty of God's creation" nonsense. For Herzog, underwater shots beneath the Antarctic ice floes have the atmosphere of "cathedrals," with their hanging ice stalactites and bizarre, translucent inhabitants. He accompanies these images with stirring choral music, though the spirituality he imparts into these hidden landscapes is indivisible from the science that documents them. Herzog knows that it is possible to understand the foundations of life, to study one-celled organisms for their DNA structures, and to still possess a mystical, spiritual appreciation for the wonders of the world. Kaiser's images have a spectral, unbelievable quality, imbued with rich shades of light and color. Even when, on occasion, the images have a creepy horror movie vibe — a series of haunting shots of tentacled creatures that look like alien monsters, photographed in a small circle of light amidst the blackness — they are still beautiful and moving.


Ultimately, Herzog's union of religious and scientific experience results in an apocalyptic vision that holds a dim view of humanity's chances for survival. He points to the extinction of the dinosaurs and says, "we seem to be next." This is a continuing theme for Herzog, who has now made at least two films (Fata Morgana and Lessons of Darkness) in which a future alien species arrives on a decimated planet and attempts to understand the remains of its strange culture. He raises the question again here, wondering what these hypothetical aliens would think of Earth if they took Antarctica as an example of the planet's culture: they'd find little but a frozen sturgeon and a handful of fake flowers surrounded by a ring of popcorn, cheesy relics frozen beneath the ice.

At several points, Herzog's apocalyptic fervor even takes a detour into earnest environmentalism, although always through the voices of other characters rather than from Herzog's own narration. Several of his interviewees take the opportunity to speak about global warming, green living, and the importance of taking these issues seriously. They look into the camera, with grave sincerity, and impart stern warnings that the world is on the brink of devastation. It's uncertain whether Herzog shares their cause, mainly because he seems to think that nothing can be done, and that humanity is doomed no matter what. Herzog can hardly be called an environmentalist, and as usual he completely ignores the political implications of his film's subject. When he brushes up against these environmental issues — as when he speaks with an ice researcher who talks about humongous melting icebergs and the rising oceans that result — he seems more interested in capturing the man's enthusiastic love of ice than in the actual substance of what he's saying. Herzog is stringently apolitical, and almost always has been, even when dealing with subjects that seem to demand a political point of view. As a filmmaker, he is simply not interested. His concerns are broader, both more universal and more personal. Indeed, his agenda might be described as the union of the universal and the personal. The philosophizing forklift operator explains it in the perfect way. He gets the final words of the film, taking over as the Herzogian narrator with words that might as well be coming from the director himself: "through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies, and we are the witness through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory."

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, the writer's first feature as a director, is a brilliant work of metafiction. It's also confounding, disturbingly scatological, grindingly negative and morbid, self-indulgent, and at times almost impossible to watch without feeling an unpleasant sensation forming in the pit of one's stomach. Its brilliance and its tendency to irritate are not mutually exclusive, and in fact Kaufman blends the two together as thoroughly as he does the border between art and reality. The film centers around the theater director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), whose life is continuously disintegrating around him in the first quarter of the movie. He believes he is sick and displays many, likely psychosomatic, symptoms, and the cavalcade of doctors he visits do little to reassure him. When he asks one if his condition is serious, the doctor replies, "I don't know. But yes." Caden is obsessed with dying; he reads a newspaper headline and announces, "Harold Pinter is dead... Oh no, he just won the Nobel Prize." He is putting on a production of Death of a Salesman which features young actors in the principal roles, to remind the audience that even youth fades and eventually these young people will be in the same place in life as Willy Loman. He is not, then, a cheery soul, so it's no surprise when his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves him and takes their daughter Olive with her, going to Germany for an ostensibly short trip from which they never return. While abroad, her art career takes off: she makes paintings so tiny they have to be viewed with magnifiers. Throughout the rest of the film, Adele never appears in person again, and Caden only receives news of her indirectly, through articles in magazines, by peering intently at retrospectives of her paintings, or by visiting and cleaning her perpetually empty sublet apartment.

At this point, the film's artifice begins to grow more intricate and convoluted. Adele's departure is a "down the rabbit hole" moment that frees Caden (and Kaufman) from the mundane documentation of reality, and it is this event that triggers the film's increasingly bizarre contrivances and occurrences. Time moves unpredictably from here on, covering large swaths in surprisingly short spans. At one point, Caden believes that Adele has only been gone a week, and he is surprised to be informed that it's been a year already. The audience is surprised, too; there's been no clue to indicate such a long jump. This is only the first of several destabilizations in the film's structure. Soon, the adrift Caden receives a "genius grant" in order to produce an original theatrical work of his own, and he embarks on an ambitious but poorly defined project to create something "real" within the theater. He surrounds himself with actors he's worked with before, including Claire (Michelle Williams), who at one moment he's sleeping with, and at the next he's married to, raising a young daughter who Caden barely thinks of as his own. He refers to his "real" daughter Olive, as though this marriage and the daughter it produces is only imaginary. In film terms, it might as well be; it all happens as though in a dream, in only minutes of screen-time. Time is condensed and moves through unexpected wormholes like this, vortexes where the passage of years is indicated only by the seismic shifts in character relationships that accompany this timespan. It is hard to imagine a better cinematic representation of the way time works, seeming endless and eternal in individual moments though, in retrospect, the time of one's life seems to have flown by in an eye-blink.

Caden ages before the audience's eyes as the film progresses and his theater project drags on for decades without reaching its finish, and Hazel (Samantha Morton) ages along with him, the object of Caden's unrealized romantic desire. She is the one who got away for him, the woman who he hesitantly romanced when she handled the box office for his earlier plays. She is a constant in his life, obviously in love with him and obviously a perfect woman for him, but he is unable to truly connect with her due to his self-absorption. She grows older on-screen along with Caden, standing by his side as his theater project begins to consume and reflect his life. In one of the film's more explicitly surreal touches, she lives in a house that is perpetually on fire, smoke wafting through its room and flames licking out of the walls, though it is never burned down completely. She accepts this as the price of having a home at all, a place to call her own no matter how damaged it is.


As Caden's life continues to spiral out of control — his marriage to Claire falls apart, he is tortured by his inability to connect with Hazel, and he receives distressing bulletins about his daughter Olive, who has been raised in Germany into a tattooed lesbian who believes all the hateful lies she hears about him — the theater begins to consume more and more of his attention. Within an abandoned warehouse in New York, he starts building a replica of the city itself, populated with an enormous cast who he instructs via an elaborate system of notes about the events happening to their characters, all of which consist of such morbid details as "your wife had a miscarriage." The play keeps getting more complex, and Caden becomes obsessed with getting ever closer to reality: from traditional cut-out sets with the "fourth wall" missing he progresses towards closed-off realistic building replicas, and eventually towards an all-encompassing totality in which the entire city is recreated in the warehouse. Naturally, this includes a replica of the warehouse itself, and within that a smaller replica of the city, a process that seems destined to continue ad-infinitum. Caden's artistic project is an irreconcilable paradox between solipsism and the reflection of reality. He says that he wants to mirror the world in his art, but these Chinese boxes of cities within cities are nothing but a retreat from reality, an attempt to get further and further from the uncomfortable facts of his own life. His art, though founded on idealistic notions of capturing mundane reality, is the ultimate escapism, as he flees from his life into ever-more piled-up layers of artifice.

This concept is a familiar one for Kaufman himself, who has often been accused of this kind of artistic self-indulgence, and who here seems to have decided that self-indulgence is in fact the essential and most true form of art. The artist is the person who builds an entire city just to understand and reflect his own life. In this sense, Caden is Kaufman's obvious stand-in, just as within the film itself Caden has his own stand-in: Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan), an eccentric old man who has followed Caden around obsessively and who is thus the perfect actor to step in for him in the play within the film. Sammy winds up being perhaps too good for the role, though. He hits on Claire and ultimately drives her away, then follows Caden by falling in love with Hazel. Meanwhile, Caden finds himself sleeping with Hazel's own stand-in Tammy (Emily Watson), doing with her what he can't seem to do with her real-life counterpart. Indeed, for Caden the term "real-life" is beginning to seem increasingly remote, as there is nothing that happens to him in life that is not immediately recreated in the theater, with actors playing himself and the people around him. The layers between reality and artifice pile up, and soon even Sammy has a stand-in, an actor roaming around playing Sammy, who's playing Caden, who in a sense is playing Charlie Kaufman just as Nicolas Cage did in Adaptation.

The film is at its best in its latter half, as Caden's reality and the play he's making become increasingly intertwined, even as he and the rest of the cast ages before the audience's eyes. The cast of his play is frustrated that they have been working for decades on a theater production that never gets to perform before an audience, but even this has a meta-level: the audience is the one watching the film. There is a subtext of the creative mind as God, creating entire miniature worlds of their own, and this concept comes to the fore with the arrival of the actress Millicent Weems (Dianne Wiest), who originally plays Ellen, Adele's housekeeper, but soon begins taking control of the entire production. She eventually takes over the role of playing Caden, and assigns Caden to play Ellen instead, giving him an earpiece through which she issues God-like dictates that control his every movement. Her final stage direction, issued amidst the post-apocalyptic wasteland that commenced once Caden's theatrical artifice developed into a fully realized alternative reality of its own, is a meta-command that definitively establishes her status as God, ending the film in the process. Kaufman's directorial debut is a fiendishly complicated and confounding effort, alternately aggravating and enthralling. It is not always clear if Caden/Kaufman is heading down the rabbit hole, or merely up his own ass, but the maddening, wild, scattered results on display are satisfying even if they aren't always easy to watch or understand.

W.

The biggest surprise of Oliver Stone's W. — and one of its greatest strengths — is that it isn't just a predictable leftist hatchet job on an already unpopular and widely ridiculed president. It surely would've been tempting, not to mention easy, for Stone to have simply indulged in beating a dead horse (or at least a horse with a 23% approval rating). Instead, W. is empathetic towards its central figure, who comes across primarily as a man of good intentions surrounded by people with agendas he doesn't see or doesn't understand, who has sometimes staggering ambitions but lacks the intelligence or ability to follow through on them. The film doesn't exactly overflow with new ideas or new perspectives on the current US president, and anyone who has followed American politics over the past eight years is unlikely to learn anything or encounter any truly startling thoughts about the second Bush to inhabit the White House.

What Stone is doing here is distilling the endless media chatter, speculation, and punditry of Bush's two terms into a coherent narrative, condensing Bush's life into a compact timeline, all of it leading to his time as Commander in Chief. Everything here, including the central conceit of Bush as a befuddled frat boy in over his head, is familiar. Stone's job is essentially one of editing, contextualizing, assembling a story from the sound bites of the news. Familiar quotes are shuffled around, moved to convenient places in the narrative, serving as markers of the historical reality behind this tale. Catchphrases like "misunderestimating" and "is our children learning?" show up here and there, reminders of Bush's gaffe-filled public speaking career. Stone de-emphasizes these lines, throwing them out there without comment, letting them slip into the fabric of Dubya's life without putting them into the media spotlight that surrounded the real president's every public slip-up. Even the famous pretzel incident makes an appearance, reimagined as a private moment, a simultaneously poignant and ridiculous close encounter with death, far from the embarrassing glare of the TV cameras that captured the real event. Stone's film invites an American audience to reconsider the things it has seen over the last 8 years, to think of them not as part of the nation's political history, but as incidents in a life, with all the attendant emotional undercurrents and personal dramas.

This narrativizing drive requires a tough balancing act, and Stone occasionally slips into hamfisted foreshadowing, hitting the notes too hard in establishing pivotal moments for Dubya. When he loses a congressional race to a Texan Democrat who plays up his small-town connections and Christian faith, Bush vows to never again be "out-Texaned or out-Christianed," and indeed he wouldn't be. Later, when he sees his father miss out on a second term after failing to go all the way to Baghdad in confronting Saddam Hussein, the son vows not to let the same thing happen to him. This narrative of political learning is sloppily done, reinforced too heavily by the over-obvious dialogue. This Bush is sometimes too self-aware, too conscious of learning lessons and molding himself into political material. Stone underlines his points too emphatically, not trusting the audience to get the idea without at least a few lines of soul-searching dialogue to make things clearer. At other times, though, Stone is able to mold an excess of material — stretching from Bush's frat boy days to the occupation of Iraq — into a coherent, propulsive narrative, even as he jumps in time between the Bush presidency and the earlier eras that led up to it.

By far, the film's greatest asset is its cast, who for the most part truly embody the political celebrities they're playing. Stone is smart not to get too tangled up in overbearing makeup effects, instead casting actors who can bring out the essence of the people they're playing in voice, demeanor, and a vague hint of appearance. Josh Brolin, for instance, looks little Dubya except in fleeting shots from a distance. Mostly, he suggests Bush through the trademark voice, that Texan drawl that Brolin absolutely nails, and in the way he moves his face and his body: the swaggering posture, the furrowed brow, the eyes that shift between squinting pensiveness and wide-eyed confusion. Brolin completely sells his Bush, as convincing as a boozing party animal, a fervent born-again trying to turn his life around, or an earnest, ambitious political figure. The rest of the cast is mostly just as compelling, with some achieving more of a resemblance to their counterparts than others.

Richard Dreyfuss, Thandie Newton, and Jeffrey Wright are especially effective, as Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell, respectively. Dreyfuss plays an only slightly caricatured Darth Cheney, because really there's not much you can do to exaggerate the vice president's naturally sinister smirk and leering, halting speech. He's perpetually hunched over here, his head bowed like a vampire about to feast on its next victim, and he has his one joyful moment in an extraordinary scene where Stone imagines him waxing ecstatic about the possibilities for American empire in the Middle East, gleefully conjuring little American flags to spread across a computerized map of the region. Newton's Rice is more of a caricature, as she plays the National Security Advisor like a hyperactive lap dog, darting around Bush's orbit and parroting everything her boss says. In a hilarious meeting with Tony Blair (Ioan Gruffudd), she flutters over the British PM's shoulder, randomly chirping stray words repeated from whatever Bush is saying at the moment. Wright's Powell is perhaps the most understated representation here, nailing both Powell's appearance and his quiet dignity. Stone gives Powell a moving, intelligent speech in trying to convince the other members of the Cabinet to abandon their plans for war in Iraq, but once the war is decided on, Stone also portrays how Powell used his intellect and eloquence to sell the case in the UN despite his deep reservations. Toby Jones' Karl Rove is also worthy of special mention. Rove is mostly a cipher here, a fiendishly clever political architect whose machinations sometimes seem to dictate Bush policy to a frightening degree. In the midst of the War Room debate over the Iraq war, Rove offers the idea that without the war, Bush will not be re-elected in 2004, a moment of naked realpolitik slipping out unexpectedly, providing a stark contrast to the other, more idealistic justifications offered for the war. Rove's outburst silences the room and prompts Powell to wonder aloud why a political staffer is even in on this discussion at all.

It is perhaps these War Room encounters that provide the film's most fascinating moments. These are Stone's plausible but largely imagined visions of what might've happened behind closed doors in the lead-up to the Iraq war. The overwhelming impression here is of a roomful of people attempting to convince each other of the rightness of the war, each providing their impassioned justifications and rationalizations. Only Powell offers a word of dissent. The rest of the Cabinet seems to be engaging in a trial run for selling the war to the public, practicing the kinds of arguments that might be used to win over a gullible populace to the cause. These scenes, and others like them, provide the film with its raison d'etre, really. While it's nice to see the documentary facts of Bush's life arranged into a tidy narrative leading to the Oval Office, the real appeal of the film lies in the ways it goes beyond facts, beyond the known into the imagined. The film justifies its status as fiction, rather than documentary, by delving into the psychological underpinnings of Bush the president: his stubbornness, his mistrust of thought and tendency to equate it with indecisiveness, and most importantly the lingering inferiority complex bred in him by a perpetually disappointed father (James Cromwell) who clearly invests more affection, respect, and hope in brother Jeb (Jason Ritter). Stone finds the roots of a presidency, and a war, in family dramas and emotional wounds, and the result is a film as messy and strange as the last eight years have been.

Burn After Reading

Burn After Reading is a kind of silly, twisted follow-up to the Coen brothers' last film, the relentlessly grim Western fable No Country For Old Men. Despite the tonal differences, both films place ordinary (if somewhat dim-witted) folks into a position where they are suddenly poised to have a lot of money, a situation that brings considerable violence into their previously routine lives. But the relationship between the two films is more than just a simplistic dichotomy between light and dark, comedy and tragedy, silly and serious; in their own ways, both films are tragedies, although tragedies of very different types. In No Country, violence enters the lives of the characters through a force of evil, the remorseless assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a truly terrifying individual whose murderous rampage nevertheless adheres to his own warped moral code. There are no such evil characters in Burn After Reading, in which the violence arises neither from evil men nor moral failures, but from a combination of profound stupidity, rampant paranoia, and institutional cluelessness and indifference to consequences.

In other words, it's a movie about America's intelligence system. The rambling plot wanders, sometimes aimlessly, around a loose set of castoffs from the CIA and the State Department, and the people they intersect with when a disc possibly containing secret intelligence information winds up in the hands of the effervescent gym employees Linda (Frances McDormand) and Chad (Brad Pitt). The setup promises hilarity, and to some extent it delivers, but the Coens keep the humor mostly low-key and subtle, rooted in the nuances of the actors' performances — it's all about the bubbly, earnest, but totally blockheaded stubbornness of Linda, or the head-bobbing, gum-snapping, relentlessly upbeat Chad, two dead-on caricatures of middle American feel-good nothingness. The film mocks them for their unabashed greed and silliness, but it reserves its harshest caricature for Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), an uptight, snobbish former CIA man who is ousted from the agency and whose misplaced bank statements trigger the film's plot. Cox is an insufferable prig who says he's spent his entire life fighting against "stupid people," and who takes obvious pleasure in correcting his inferiors for their every tiny mistake, and especially their grammatical foibles. Malkovich turns in a great performance, channeling every ounce of his own innate arrogance and smugness into this character's every phrase; his mannered enunciation of the very word "memoirs" indicates the esteem with which he feels his life story should be greeted.

The plot also pulls in the Treasury Department agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), a quirky paranoiac with a voracious sexual appetite. Pfarrer is sleeping with Cox's ice queen wife Katie (Tilda Swinton), but he's also romancing a variety of women who he meets for random encounters through Internet dating services, which is how he also winds up with Linda. The Coens weave the narrative patiently from out of this complicated web of relationships, letting the threads of blackmail, spying, sudden violence, and deceit interact with the parallel narratives involving the characters' various disintegrating marriages, serial unfaithfulness, and bald-faced lies. The personal and the public wind up blending together in interesting ways, reflecting the complete moral confusion of these people who can't seem to figure out what they're doing, what they want, or how to get it.


All of this confusion is, of course, being closely observed by the various intelligence agencies, who are keeping a close eye on everyone involved: they know almost immediately that Cox may have lost some confidential information, they know it may be handed on to the Russians, they know that several federal agents are involved in this mess, that there's rampant infidelity involved ("they all seem to be screwing each other"), and that the body count is slowly rising. But they don't care. J.K. Simmons plays an unnamed senior intelligence officer who receives periodic reports on the progress of this "clusterfuck," while his agents watch closely but never intercede, letting the mess escalate out of control and never getting a real handle on what's going on. "Come back with a report when it, uh... when it makes sense," he tells an underling at one point. Later, he reacts with horror when someone suggests collaborating with the FBI on this case, sputtering, "No, no. God no!" Simmons' deadpan performance delineates a fairly minor character in a film populated by larger-than-life caricatures, but his clueless CIA man nevertheless embodies the film's real satirical point and its primary target.

In this film, the stupidity of individuals — who cheat, steal, manipulate, and even kill to get their own petty desires — is only surpassed by the institutional stupidity of the government, which is near omniscient but so indifferent to life and everything else that it can't be roused to action by even the most horrifying events. The Coens depict the corridors of power from the ground level, opening each scene at the CIA headquarters with a series of quick shots of feet walking through unvarying hallways lined with unmarked doors. This detached perspective emphasizes the anonymity of the walker, who goes to deliver reports that ultimately have no effect — the CIA never steps in until after it's way too late. Simmons' disinterested manner is only penetrated once, late in the film, when he sighs with disappointment after learning that Cox has survived a gunshot wound and merely lapsed into a coma instead of dying; the Agency is peeved only when they're inconvenienced. Otherwise, Simmons seems blithely unconcerned about the whole affair, seemingly dismissing it all when he learns Cox's security level — implying that some supposed "secrets" aren't really worth bothering about, after all. This callous indifference to security and individual lives alike comes together in the pointed satire of the final scene, in which the Coens abruptly cut away from the climax of the mayhem and give the final word to Simmons and his assistant at the CIA. This duo ruminates on what they've learned from this mess, finally deciding that it's close to nothing, and ending with a vain promise to "never do it again" — a schoolboy oath so insincere and perfunctory that the two agents barely even pretend to mean it. It amounts to a disinterested shrug, a disavowal of responsibility and an implicit acknowledgment that the same thing could happen again tomorrow (and probably will) and again nobody would care.

A Girl Cut In Two

Claude Chabrol's latest film, A Girl Cut In Two, is two hours spent with some of the most smug, obnoxious, hypocritical people you'd never want to meet — and who, despite the time spent with them in their upper-class milieu, you never really do get to meet in any meaningful way. Chabrol, always a detached director, seems here less interested than ever in character psychology or the exploration of motivations, and more interested in surfaces, appearances, and language. One of the main characters, Charles Saint-Denis (François Berléand), is a writer who is obsessed with quotation, who likes to end conversations by using someone else's words; an odd tic for someone who produces his own original words for a living, but a very appropriate indication of the kind of distance that Chabrol is striving for here. The film continually raises questions about its characters and then refuses to answer them, discreetly looking away at pivotal moments, either directly (a cut to black prematurely cuts off the film's shocking climax) or indirectly (key conversations drift along on the soundtrack while Chabrol's camera wanders off elsewhere to shoot walls or flowers).

The girl of the title is the TV weather girl Gabrielle (Ludivine Sagnier), a charming, naïve young woman who soon attracts the attention of two rival men who already have a somewhat mysterious antipathy towards each other: the writer Saint-Denis, a local celebrity of sorts, and the spoiled, arrogant Paul Gaudens (Benoît Magimel), the heir to a fortune earned by his father and squandered in idleness ever since. The story is somewhat typical, as Gaudens becomes infatuated with Gabrielle, who leads him on but always stops short of returning his affections, instead throwing herself wholeheartedly at the much older Saint-Denis, a compulsive womanizer who seems mainly to be using her, enjoying her youth and her capacity for sexual molding. "I'll teach you," he says, and teach her he does, indoctrinating her into a sexually subservient role in which she'll do anything for him, from dressing up with a tail of peacock feathers to spending a night at a shady swingers' club where he passes her around amongst his friends. The material is sordid, but Chabrol's camera is discreet almost to a fault, suggesting a great deal without ever showing a thing. The film is inscribed with a curiously bourgeois outlook, in which whispers and rumors convey the plot more so than what is actually seen. In this upper-class country town, the sordidness of the inhabitants' lifestyle is papered over with a tastefulness that doesn't stop some of the more juicy rumors from being circulated in private: the incident involving Gaudens, some friends, and the kidnapping of a group of underage girls; the goings-on at a private little club where the upstairs room, never shown, seems to hide all kinds of debauchery; the suggestions of homosexual encounters in the pasts of both Gaudens and Saint-Denis. The connection between these two men, the source of their mutual hatred for one another, could lie in any of these distasteful little stories, which provide so little outrage from anyone. When Saint-Denis tells his puppy-dog-faithful wife Dona (Valeria Cavalli) about the rumors regarding Gaudens and the young girls, and the way his family connections got the whole incident covered up, all she can muster to say is, "I never judge anyone." This lack of judgment, this utter black hole of morality, sucks all of these people into its orbit; they won't judge, because they're all just as guilty.

Chabrol's bourgeois satire may be slightly passé to the extent that he's satirizing this amoral outlook — so the rich are despicable, you say? — but the film is more interesting and complicated in its consideration of chauvinism and the role of women. Chabrol has often been indicted for the misogyny of his male characters, and it's easy to imagine the same mistaken interpretations cropping up here. In fact, the film is a somewhat devastating critique of the limited options open to women in a society that continues to view them first and foremost as sex objects. The lovely Gabrielle experiences this subtle restriction firsthand, as no man she meets can fail to tell her how beautiful she is. Underpinning her every interaction with her boss or her male coworkers at the TV station is an unspoken sexual bargaining, communicated in looks and too-long touches, a sense that these men are constantly feeling her out, trying to leverage their influence on her career into sexual favors. As is characteristic of these people, they're too discreet to come right out and say it, but it's obvious anyway, apparent in everything they do and say. Gabrielle is surrounded by men who want her, which makes it hard to see why she might see something different in Saint-Denis, who she falls for almost on sight. Chabrol never explains this relationship, but he does convey its intensity: the only sexy moment in this nearly passionless film is a tight closeup of the couple sharing a playful, teasing series of kisses.


Despite this passion, what Gabrielle never seems to realize is that Saint-Denis is just another version of her slightly grabby boss, admittedly somewhat more suave and self-possessed but no less sexually manipulative or exploitative. And yet she runs to this man with giddy love, cheerfully lets him demean her, collapses into a zombie-like isolation and depression when he leaves her. Gabrielle is a bit of a naif, but she's also the only character in the film who lets a genuine sense of her feelings shine through, while everyone else is hiding in plain sight. At one point, when Gabrielle and Saint-Denis are at the height of their very public affair, she somewhat regretfully says that this is all having a great effect on Saint-Denis' wife Dona, who mopes around and cries all the time now. But when Dona appears in the next scene, she's in good cheer, teasing her husband and bantering with him and the couple's good friend Capucine (Mathilda May), a sexually voracious older woman who's frequently at the same sex club as Saint-Denis. Only Gabrielle seems to be really affected by things, although Paul, who's forthrightly childish in his spoiled insistence on getting his own way, seems to have the same capacity for emotional expression. The difference is that he's continually being pulled up short by an ambiguous friend, valet, or bodyguard who's always hanging around nearby, ready to stop Paul from going too far — which he accomplishes with a simple gesture, placing a hand gently on his shoulder, that is strangely imbued with a homoerotic subtext and emphasized by the way that Chabrol films these moments, the hand always emerging from offscreen with a jarring detachment from whatever's going on in the scene.

This detachment extends, in various ways, throughout the film, which is alternately intriguing and infuriating in its refusal to delve very far into these mostly unlikeable characters. The flat tone occasionally gives way to touches of wry, dark comedy — especially from the fey, needy Paul and his precisely caricatured upper-crust family — but for the most part Chabrol keeps the proceedings dry, even arid. One gets the sense that he directed the entire picture with one eyebrow strenuously raised, and no other expression on his face. Which is why the final sequence, in contrast, is so deeply moving, and so puzzling in relation to the rest of the film. As Chabrol unexpectedly literalizes and visualizes his title — that perfect metaphor for a girl not only torn between two men but torn apart by a societal framework with no respect for her — he lingers on a gorgeous, affecting, poignant closeup of Gabrielle, struggling to appear as detached and unconcerned as everyone else in the film, but still unable to keep a single tear from running down her face. It's an extraordinary moment, one that drives home just what a good choice Sagnier was for this part: capable of girlish glee and darker, more subtly shaded emotions alike, she possesses the film's only real beating heart, and she keeps it alive pretty much singlehandedly.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a refreshing new direction for a director who has usually, even when reinventing himself, retained his signature voice. This is not the case with this latest film, in which Allen's presence is more disguised than ever. There are traces of him in the occasional quirky flashes of neuroticism and nervousness that burst from his young protege Scarlett Johansson, and in the curiously stilted dialogue he gives to Rebecca Hall, but in many other ways it's very easy to forget altogether that this is a Woody Allen film. What's even more remarkable about this is that Vicky is, essentially, a comedy, but definitely not one modeled on any of the comedic forms so familiar from Woody's earlier films. To find it hard to identify Woody's touch in a dark drama like Match Point is one thing; for the director to be developing a virtually unrecognizable new comic style at this point is something of a wonder.

The film opens with Vicky (Hall) and Cristina (Johansson), two American tourists arriving in Spain for a summer spent in equal parts relaxation and artistic pursuits — for Vicky, a thesis on "Catalan identity," which never seems to develop beyond that vague two-word phrase, and for Cristina an equally vague quest to find herself in the arts, which she is passionately drawn to without having any real idea of what she wants. These underlying emotions are sketched out in economical prose delivered by a strangely disinterested narrator (Christopher Evan Welch, who seems to have been chosen for his entirely uninflected speech). This dry, self-consciously literary tone is off-putting at first, with its arch stylization and the flat cadences that give equal emphasis to the dullest events and the most private emotions. It soon becomes apparent, though, that the narrator provides the perspective of the girls themselves, a tourist's perspective on a foreign city, skipping through the details and always trying to tie together moments into a coherent story. The narration might be the story that Cristina, with her artistic ambitions and lack of clear talent, would write about the trip afterward, stripping every event of its immediacy and emotion and inserting ponderous descriptions of inner states at every turn. In this light, the narration begins to comment wryly on the action, the narrator's discretion ironically calling attention to his ellipses and elisions. These two girls are drawn to this foreign city and the ideas it stirs in them, ideas every bit as much influenced by their romantic notions as by the reality of the city and the people they meet. The film is about the way that tourism, and especially the particularly Western conception of tourism, eroticizes and exoticizes the foreign locales that the tourist visits.

The erotic tensions between these American girls and the city they visit soon become focused in the form of the painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a free-spirited man who walks over to the girls in a restaurant, compliments Cristina on her eyes, and then just as casually asks them to join him for a weekend of food, conversation, and lovemaking. The film is continually suggesting trios; the ménage à trois is its underlying structure, from the title forming a threesome between the girls and the city, to the shifting romantic dynamics between the girls, Juan Antonio, and his wild, passionate ex-wife Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz). The two friends, as characterized by the voiceover, are similar in some ways but opposites in love. Whereas Vicky seeks stability and comfort, as epitomized by her bland businessman fiancé Doug (Chris Messina), Cristina wants something more adventurous and passionate, though again she would be hard-pressed to explain what it is. As she keeps repeating in various contexts, she doesn't know what she wants so much as what she doesn't want, and in this she is the most typical Woody Allen character in the film, always questing after vague ideals of artistic expression and romantic perfection. Vicky, despite her professed differences, turns out to be similar. She believes she knows what she wants, but soon forgets as she is drawn to the forthrightly seductive Juan Antonio. Vicky's speech, for much of the film, bears a close relationship to the narration; much of her dialogue is stilted and artificial, her cadences and phraseology formal even in casual conversation. This is not a fault of Woody's writing or the actress' delivery but a crucial attribute of the character, who struggles to maintain a facade that is always threatening to crumble. In unguarded moments — like a stumbling, woozy back-and-forth between her and Juan Antonio before they make love — she becomes someone softer, more nuanced. Hall gives a startlingly subtle performance, and the gradations between Vicky's stiff overall demeanor and the moments where she forget herself are truly stunning.

This sensitivity to emotional complexity belies the blunt simplicity of the voiceover, which is always reducing such moments to clichés. The toneless narrator can only state facts, and his dry recitations are obviously redundant when they are followed, as they are several times, by lingering closeups on Hall's face, catching the mysterious quality of a smile spreading across her long face, or the way her dark eyes seem mesmerized by a beautiful guitar song. Woody proves himself much more attuned to the emotional stakes of his story than the narrator, and his images are constantly undermining the distance created by the voiceover device. The arrival of Maria Elena into the film is, in particular, a seismic rift in the very surface of the narrative, her volcanic presence and Cruz's smoldering performance complicating the film's emotional tone considerably. Even the simple moment when Cruz, her eyes ringed with smeared black eyeliner, glares across a table at Johansson, is infused with intensity and dark humor. Her very presence, her stormy disposition always ready to erupt, is an anomaly in this brightly sunlit film. That the film has room for two such vastly different but equally masterful female performances — not to mention the fine work by Bardem and Johansson — is itself proof of the range Woody is working with here.


If Vicky Cristina Barcelona is at times a wonderfully nuanced drama about love triangles and squares and other oddball shapes, it's a also a subtly funny film, built from a very different mold from earlier Allen comedies. Its really hilarious moments are few and far between, mostly deadpan punchlines that hit all the harder for the sense of comic timing with which Allen spaces them out, and the casual way they're delivered. The dialogue in general has a pattering, back-and-forth quality to it that might be described as artificial realism, approximating the hesitant, unstudied feel of everyday conversation but stylized all the same. These rhythms are never interrupted or stretched for the sake of a laugh, and as a result the jokes build naturally and are dropped into the middle of conversations, where they can be noticed or not. This is a far cry from Woody's familiar comedic dialogue, where the jokes are telegraphed by the actor's vocal inflections and, frequently, where the character delivering the lines doesn't matter as much as the quality of the lines themselves. This film finds Allen mostly indulging a more subtle and character-based humor, in which the way the lines are read isn't nearly as funny as the situations and the way the characters react to them. At one point, as Cristina babbles about her life and ambitions, she suddenly gasps to Juan Antonio, "you better undress me before this becomes a panel discussion." The more obvious jokes, like the continual jabs at the clueless fiancé Doug's shallow obsession with technology, are kind of low blows, and mostly well-worn to boot. Woody may not have made (or heard?) jokes about cell phones before, but his sudden attention to such modern accoutrements now seems a bit behind the curve.

For the most part, though, Vicky Cristina Barcelona feels fresh and vibrant, mocking its droning literary narration while telling a tale that continually bursts beyond the borders of such staid explications. The film has little patience for academics or pseudo-psychology; when Vicky attempts to explain Juan Antonio's pursuit of free love as a compensation for his lost romance with Maria Elena, he simply shrugs it off, refusing to be cordoned off by such clichés. And when she says he only wants "empty sex," he rebuffs her succinctly and unforgettably: "Do you think that little of yourself?" The film is a celebration of life and vitality (and of course sexuality), as embodied in the characters of Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, even as it indicts its title characters for allowing their prejudices and restraint to get in the way of this unmediated experience of life. At its core, the film is about the way its two central characters apply a tourist mentality to the entirety of their lives, skipping over the surface and never letting anything touch them too deeply. Cristina, after briefly enjoying a seemingly idyllic romantic threesome with Juan Antonio and Maria Elena, blithely skips out on the pair, unaware of and unconcerned by the consequences. By the end of the film, both girls have flirted with and subsequently stepped back from the experiences offered them, preferring comfort and the known to the dangerous passions and adventures of the unknown. The narrator is, as expected, non-committal, but the final shot of the film is devastating: a two-shot of the girls walking through the airport as they leave Spain, their eyes blank and unseeing as they stare off into some vague distance, choosing internally to imagine rather than live their deepest fantasies.

Pineapple Express

Pineapple Express proves that director David Gordon Green was a surprisingly apt choice to direct a stoner comedy. In retrospect, Green's low-key, off-kilter sense of humor is a perfect fit for this material, and clearly producer Judd Apatow, who always seems to have a keen sense for the right people to surround himself with, saw the qualities that Green could bring to this film. The result is a smooth union of Green's meditative eye for character and detail with the propulsive momentum of a script that segues from stoner humor into increasingly over-the-top action set pieces. The layering of different sensibilities and genres could easily have resulted in a mishmash of conflicting styles, but one of the miracles of Pineapple Express is that it all holds together quite naturally. It's a buddy movie, a raucous and raunchy comedy, and an explosive action flick, and in the midst of all of this there's still room for the film to slow down on occasion for the light touches of character and quirky detail that strongly bear Green's mark.

In this, Green is helped by a pair of fine actors who develop a completely believable chemistry with each other — almost like romantic leads, a conceit that the film plays with frequently, much like the Apatow production Superbad. A common theme in Apatow's films is guy bonding, and his films often sideline romantic relationships to focus on guy/guy friendships. Even when sex drives the entire plot, as in Superbad, it's the friendships between the guys that ultimately matter. These films frequently exploit the male friendships for jokes on homosexuality, while also admitting that they're not totally kidding, that they really do love each other. They aren't afraid to hug or even kiss each other, and a real affection exists between the friends in these films that is seldom captured in the movies, and certainly not in Hollywood movies. It's consistently one of the most genuine and endearing elements in the Apatow-related films. In Pineapple Express, the heroes are the slacker Dale (Seth Rogen), who treats his job as a process server mainly as an excuse to smoke lots of pot and visit his high school girlfriend, and Saul (James Franco), Dale's clingy and brain-fried drug dealer. Saul wants to be buddies with his client, but Dale just wants to buy his drugs and get out, until he witnesses a murder and is forced to go to Saul for help.

The film's shift from languid stoner hang-out flick to action thriller is handled smoothly and almost seamlessly. The film is tonally varied, but it achieves its shifts not through sudden disruptions but subtle gradations — the silliest stretches of comedy are also shot through with both violence and emotional warmth, while even the bloodiest action sequences have their moments of quirky humor. In one of the best scenes, Dale and Saul make a getaway in a cop car whose windshield has been totally obscured by red smoothies. Saul has the pot-inspired idea to try to kick out the glass, and instead gets his foot stuck through the windshield. Green films the resulting sequence with judicious use of the long view, which really emphasizes the absurdity of what's going on whenever the cop car comes careening around a corner with that sneakered foot sticking out of the front window. It's like staging a kung fu battle and then suddenly having one of the fighters throw a lemon meringue pie instead of a roundhouse kick; the merging of slapstick and brutal violence is one of the film's signature comedic techniques. There were more than a few scenes that made me think of Green's brilliant credit sequence for Undertow, in which he staged a chase where the main character gets a nail stuck through his foot with a wooden board attached, and has to hobble through the rest of the chase as a result. This queasy, comical sensibility drives the action of Pineapple Express.

The film is at its best when it exploits this tonal eclecticism to the fullest, and it's tempting to ascribe these moments to the intervention of Green, whose previous work has always been marked by this kind of stylistic catholicity. The film's best moments are inevitably the ones that most seem like they could've come from any Green film: a montage of Dale and Saul playing leapfrog in the woods, a shot of Saul crying into his hamburger on a playground as a forlorn little girl stares at him, the interplay between a duo of surprisingly sensitive thugs (Kevin Corrigan and Craig Robinson), one of whom only wants to get home to his wife at a decent hour for once, while the other worries that his partner has gone soft: "See, that's what I mean... You used to be ruthless." These moments of warmth and subtlety flesh out the film, elevating it from a hilarious and fanciful comedy into something more. In this respect, Green and Apatow are natural partners despite their aesthetic differences; they both make deeply humanistic films in which even the throw-away characters are infused with the kinds of quirky details that bring them to life. Even the villains here, the bloodthirsty drug lord Ted (Gary Cole) and his pet corrupt cop (Rosie Perez) get some moments of funny interplay that allow them to step, if only briefly, outside of their required stock villain roles, in order to suggest the characters existing beyond the clichés.

This playfulness with expectations and stereotypes is present at every level of the film, from the unexpected complexity of the relationship between the two hitmen to the way the film increasingly shuffles its romantic subplot off to the side. The relationship between Dale and his barely legal girlfriend Angie (Amber Heard) is initially a bit of a joke on Dale's loser status, then it becomes something more important, and then its role in the film is completely undermined by a hilarious telephone call. In this way, the romantic relationship goes from being an important plot point to being dismissed entirely, in a way that totally subverts expectations. The film sets up a stereotypical plot where Dale tries to get the girl back after screwing up, but then completely reverses directions with a line that recalls one of the TV series Arrested Development's key recurring jokes: "I've made a mistake." The script completely pulls the rug out from under what looked to be a weepy bit of melodrama, cutting this tender moment short with a complete 180-degree turn.

The film is stocked with these kind of moments, nodding towards the clichés of various genres only to subvert or riff on them. The concluding action sequence is an orgy of over-the-top action movie pastiche, throwing these stoner buddies into the middle of a fierce gun battle where they somehow manage to come out on top, completely clueless but still kicking some serious ass — the awkward sidearm way they shoot machine guns is clearly not the right way to do it, but it's certainly the badass way to do it. I half-expected Bruce Willis to come crashing in at some point, yelling "yippee-ki-yay," but instead we got Danny McBride as the seemingly unkillable Red, who takes a staggering array of bullets but keeps coming. It's a brilliantly staged and hilarious scene, with the guys stumbling upon a fresh cache of guns whenever they run out of bullets, all culminating in the moment when Dale, having defeated the main bad guy, makes his play for a tough-guy catch-phrase. This all ends in the perfect way, with breakfast at a diner — the equivalent of Harold and Kumar's long-awaited White Castle meal from another great stoner adventure flick — where the trio of Dale, Saul, and Red essentially debrief each other, running over the film's best moments in a meta-commentary that co-opts the after-film discussion of the audience. These guys can't wait until the movie's over: they're bloody and full of bullets and waiting for Saul's grandma to come pick them up, and they want to relive all the kick-ass stuff they just did.

On Violence and Restraint in The Dark Knight

I don't want to take exception too stringently with Keith Uhlich's angry, opinionated takedown of The Dark Knight from The House Next Door, one of my favorite daily blogosphere stops. He's entitled to his opinion, and some of the fanboy brush-offs of his review have been hilarious in their stupidity and short-sightedness. I disagree pretty intensely with most of his feelings about the film, but much of what Uhlich says is hard to argue with because it's so subjective and personal, intimately connected with his own visceral responses to the film. Do Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine spout "gloomy old man platitudes?" Does the film's dialogue possess the "solemnity and verbosity borne of a beat-down Western warrior spirit?" Is director Christopher Nolan "a high-minded con artist — the Barry Lyndon of the Hollywood elite?" Is the film a case of "shallow artistry" at work? I didn't think so, but any defense of such vague, rhetorical argumentation would basically have to boil down to a game of "yes it is"/"no it isn't," so I'll leave the review's more high-flown language alone, for the most part.

I also don't think that The Dark Knight is a perfect film, and I don't want to quell debate over the film's merits. The fanboys flooding the comment threads of every negative review with variations on "you suck" do nothing for film criticism in general or the discourse about this particular film. Quite to the contrary, I think Nolan's film is complex and ambiguous, susceptible to multiple readings that include the negative ones, and I find it a worthy subject for further discussion. I hope there will be more negative reviews like Uhlich's, provided they stimulate more intelligent conversation. Consider this my own humble contribution to that discourse. I want to take exception, primarily, with one aspect of Uhlich's argument that I think is particularly off-base and deserving of greater scrutiny than the knee-jerk name-calling that flooded into the original review's comments thread. The relevant passage is quoted here:

For a movie purported to be so, well, "dark," The Dark Knight spends a more-than-noticeable amount of time turning its gaze from the horrors it perpetrates. There's an early scene where The Joker holds a mob boss at knifepoint, telling a made-up backstory as to how he got his facial scars. The buildup is suitably intense, but Nolan whiffs the follow-through by having The Joker's mouth-slitting finale occur offscreen. It's the pencil gag all over again, only rendered ineffectual, monotonous, the "now you see it, now you don't" philosophy injected ruinously into the film's aesthetic fabric."

There something, let's say, interesting about a critical perspective that simultaneously lambastes a film for being "sadistic" while also criticizing the filmmaker for not showing more onscreen violence. This contradictory criticism aligns Uhlich, ironically, with that peculiar breed of fanboys disappointed in the film's PG-13 rating, thirsting for Saw-level blood-splatter and gore. The film itself has little patience for such base urges, and the violence in the film is depicted with an economy and tact that communicates the horror of the Joker's actions while never satisfying the desire to ogle his atrocities firsthand. This isn't flinching away from horror, it's tastefulness, a quality that has long been absent from mainstream filmmaking, and a quality that Uhlich doesn't seem to miss. Conditioned on one bloody violence-porn fantasy after another, have we really come to a point where we feel compelled to criticize the rare film that depicts violence without splattering the screen with it?

In point of fact, the film never "turn[s] its gaze from the horrors it perpetrates" in any real sense. Nolan's quick cuts away from the Joker's bloody actions do nothing to dull the impact of those actions, which are brutally felt in the imagination and the intellect. In the scene mentioned in the above quote, Nolan builds up the tension to an almost unbearable point, emphasizing the feel of the knife blade in the corner of the mobster's mouth, holding this moment for an uncomfortably long amount of time, cutting away only when the Joker finally does the inevitable with a flick of his wrist. Are our imaginations so limited that we need to actually see the act in order to feel it? Judging by the reactions in the packed theater when I saw it, the moans of horror and sympathetic pain, I think Uhlich underestimates modern audiences. In fact, it may be that an old chestnut that some may have thought was outdated — that seeing an act of violence is never as horrifying as imagining it — still has some life in it after all. There was a time when filmmakers were praised for such restraint, for doing as much with what's not shown as with what is. In another negative review of the film from Salon, Stephanie Zacharek makes some fairly misguided comparisons between Nolan and Alfred Hitchcock, but at least she appreciates the film's tact in its treatment of violence, even while failing to understand that this is one of the few areas in which her comparison holds true.

The film's treatment of violence is given further complexity by the way that Nolan handles DA Harvey Dent's transformation into the divided Two Face. For a film that supposedly flinches away from violence, The Dark Knight addresses Two Face in a startlingly head-on manner. Dent's appearance in the second half of the film is profound evidence of the impact of violence on an individual human life. Dent's plight, given real emotional heft by both the screenplay and Aaron Eckhart's sensitive performance, is externalized in the violence done to his face, and here Nolan confronts the horror with raw physicality. This is not the cartoonish, outlandish Two Face of the original comics or, Heaven forbid, Tommy Lee Jones. The right side of Dent's face is a mess of raw, exposed muscles, bone, and nerves, making it impossible to ignore the character's origins or the violence done to him. This is not the impersonal blood and guts of Saw, but a deeply felt document of the effects of violence on both external appearance and internal persona. If Nolan had flinched away here, if he had hedged in showing the grisly violence done to Dent in order to make him become Two Face, then I could better understand Uhlich's criticisms about Nolan's supposed squeamishness.

The Dark Knight

Heath Ledger's Joker is not actually in The Dark Knight as much as the film's marketing would have one believe, but he is nevertheless at the film's core, as its motivating spirit and one half of its dualist moral compass. If director Christopher Nolan's first Batman film, the origin story Batman Begins, took as its model the famously dark Frank Miller stories of the mid-80s, and especially Batman: Year One, this new installment takes off from Alan Moore's even nastier The Killing Joke. Miller's Batman may have launched the darker, grittier take on the bat-eared crimefighter, but Moore's slightly later short story considerably ups the ante, positing a Joker who only wants to prove that anyone can be driven to madness, and a Batman who exists as a moral flipside to this evil clown, only a few short steps from the same fate. In Moore's story, the Joker's origin becomes a dark mirror of Batman's own, as hero and villain are linked by the kind of circumstances that drove them to what they eventually became. As far as the Joker is concerned, it only takes "one bad day" for an ordinary person to be pushed over the edge into insanity; the story's ambiguous ending suggests that, while the Joker was proved wrong in this particular instance, there might be something to his theory after all. The infamous final panels show Batman and the Joker laughing together over a joke, cackling and doubled over, sharing a moment of insanity together.

There is no such moment in The Dark Knight, but Moore's ideas drive the film and underpin its moral inquiries. A great deal of the well-earned praise being heaped upon Ledger's portrayal of the Joker stems from the fact that this performance completely nails the qualities of the character in his most iconic comic book appearances. This isn't the dapper, mannered Joker that Jack Nicholson brought to the screen in Tim Burton's original Batman. Nicholson's performance was too controlled; he's scary, but only in the way a typical criminal killer is scary. Ledger's Joker, on the other hand, perfectly captures the unpredictable menace of the Moore/Miller Jokers — this is a villain who is motivated by a warped ideology, who only wants to introduce chaos into the ordered lives of the people around him. Even the catchphrase the character uses reflects the differences in the two portrayals. Nicholson's Joker famously asked, "Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?" It's a great line, poetic even, and so memorable that it's probably my strongest memory of Burton's film today. But Ledger cuts to the chase, and there's no poetry when he asks his victims, before giving them knife scars to match his own: "Why so serious?"

In keeping with this anarchic, ragged outlook, Ledger's face is smeared with greasy makeup, his lips permanently twisted upwards in a sinister smile by the bright red scars stretching off the sides of his lips. His green hair is similarly unruly, long and unwashed and twisted, and his makeup gets progressively messier the longer he's onscreen. This film's major theme is chaos versus order, and the Joker is a true apostle of chaos, positing unsolvable moral dilemmas for both Batman and the citizens of Gotham City, encouraging the spread of his own nihilistic philosophy. Ledger is so terrifying here because he truly inhabits this spirit. His cackling laugh, his halting speech, the way his tongue is continually flicking against his lips; it all adds up to a performance of uncompromising rigor, a truly inspired image of madness. His Joker is believable, realistic even, in a way that the clownish Nicholson performance never was; this Joker seems to have leapt from the comic pages to take on corporeal reality, and he's much creepier for the naturalistic touches that flesh him out. He's also often hilarious, and some of the best aspects of Ledger's performance are pantomimed. The actor reportedly spent the most time working on the Joker's voice, which is perfect with its slightly whiny, hesitant rhythms, but he's at his best with the physicality of this character, the way he moves, the way he cocks his head, the way he telegraphs his actions like a stage clown. When he's approaching Bruce Wayne's childhood friend Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal, improving upon Katie Holmes' dismal turn in the first movie), he clumsily brushes the hair away from his ears with his fists, a gesture of suave seduction made gruesome and slimy. In a later scene, he turns the Joker's demolition of a hospital into farcical slapstick, dressed as a nurse, fumbling with a reticent detonator and then nervously skipping and flitting about when the explosives belatedly go off. The character is exactly how he should be, both funny and sinister, eliciting gasps of horror and nervous laughter in an early scene where he performs a "magic trick" involving a pencil for a group of mobsters.

The enormity of Ledger's phenomenal performance — and, let's face it, his tragic death — have tended to overshadow the rest of The Dark Knight, but there is a lot going on in this film that doesn't involve the Joker. In fact, Nolan's second Batman movie is in every way an improvement on the already auspicious Batman Begins, building upon the first film's establishment of the Batman mythos to further riff upon the ideas of morality and justice inherent in most superhero tales, and doubly so in the Batman legend. In keeping with the film's emphasis on pairing, much of the film's drama stems from the contrast between Batman (Christian Bale) and the new Gotham District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). For Batman, Dent represents a way out, a chance to retire the costume and the vigilantism in a city that no longer needs his services. Nolan's Batman is perhaps most unique, most differentiated from other incarnations of the character, to the extent that he does not want to continue bearing this mantle. The ultimate goal of this Batman is to bring his city to a place where he is redundant, where civilian justice can resume its ordinary workings free of corruption. If Batman and the Joker are two sides of a particularly ugly coin, then Batman and Dent are similarly related, both seeking justice in fundamentally different ways, one through the law and the other with his fists.

This theme of duality is carried through the film in various ways, from the Joker's either/or moral dilemmas, to Dent's eventual fate that causes him to encompass both sides of a scarred coin in one person. Nolan's choice of comic texts to work from was wise, and he draws liberally from the best Batman stories in order to explore that archetypal superhero subject, the nature of good and evil. The film's view of these opposing forces is not always black and white; the Joker's treatises on disorder and anarchy often have a subversive logic to them, while Dent and Batman sometimes seem to be slipping away from unambiguous goodness. This is especially true of the film's unexpected political undertones, in which the superhero turns to warrantless electronic surveillance of ordinary civilians in order to apprehend the Joker. It's hard to tell exactly where the film stands at times like this, though Bruce Wayne's advisor Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) is an uncompromising voice against such questionable methods. The film is hardly an unqualified endorsement of Batman's exceptionalist pursuit of his own brand of justice. There's a suggestion, carried over from the Miller and Moore comics, that the appearance of Batman as a figure of good in Gotham City gave rise to corresponding figures of evil, equally stylized and exaggerated villains who responded to Batman's dress-up games and took them to even darker places. The Joker intimates on several occasions that he could not exist without the Batman, and he seems to be right. It's easy to see how the outrageousness of a crimefighter dressed like a bat would inspire a new breed of evil to oppose him. The Joker and Batman develop in relation to each other, inspiring each other's methods. When Wayne says, "I see what kind of man I would have to become to defeat him," he's only mirroring the Joker's own development as a response to his bat persona. The film's basic thrust is a vicious circle, in which the villain and the hero must constantly morph in response to each other, moving ever closer to one another as they battle. This is the trap for goodness that the film posits, a trap that casts Batman's endorsement of illegal law enforcement procedures in a new and more sinister light.

The film is continually underpinned by such moral inquiries, but its main appeal still lies in its energy. It's a dark and potent thrill ride, even more exhilarating than Nolan's first Batman film. The director seems to have learned some lessons from that first effort at helming an action movie. His fight sequences are still brutal, kinetic, and rapidly edited, but they're also much cleaner and clearer, not as hazy and confused as the action sequences from the first film. Nolan's direction has improved tremendously by the simple step of pulling his camera just slightly back in these scenes, giving his fight scenes greater spatiality and clarity. There aren't as many of the "who's punching whom?" moments that sometimes marred Batman Begins, and the car chase scene is equally improved, as well as being intimately connected with the plot here; the similar scene in the first film just seemed like gratuitous eye candy. The film also shares its predecessor's deliberate sense of timing. Nolan instinctively recognizes what many other action directors never do, that an action movie works best when its thrills and violence are modulated, not delivered nonstop but with careful timing. The Dark Knight is just as carefully paced as Batman Begins, letting the plot develop naturally, and not milking too much screen time from its two sensational villains. The temptation might've been to smear the screen with Ledger's terrifying Joker, or with Dent's transformed visage in the second half, but the film is better for its restraint. This is a smart, exciting movie that hits all the right notes.

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress is a film marked by profound tension, and not just the tension stirring within and between its divided characters, but the tension it creates within the genre of the period romance from which it draws both its story and its style. Based on a mid-1800s novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, the film relates a classic, even archetypal, tale of misplaced love. The young "libertine" nobleman Ryno de Marigny (Fu'ad Ait Aattou) is preparing to finally settle down and marry the lovely Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), but there remain questions and rumors about his passionate ten-year affair with his Spanish mistress, Vellini (Asia Argento). This is a story of sexual passions invading the lavishly decorated drawing rooms in which the film is primarily set, of visceral, physical desire overwhelming even the most well-meaning "pure" emotions.

The main agent of this infiltration is Argento herself, who quite literally seems to have come from an entirely different, more lurid film than her surroundings. Set off against the wan, pallid Aattou, who's so heavily made up with powder and reddened lips that he looks more feminine than his lover, Argento is a vivid, powerful presence, unrestrained by either social conventions or the strictures of good acting. She delivers a totally unhinged performance that never fails to sell her unconventional magnetism and attraction, even if it's not always convincing as conventional dramatic acting. She's the epitome of the earthy seductress: her sneering lips with a hint of fuzz above them, crooked teeth, hooked nose, piercing black eyes, and a curvaceous body that, with her complete lack of self-consciousness, is allowed to simply be, to move naturally and without modesty, in sex and in the way she walks alike. It's certainly no mystery why Aattou falls in love with her, even though he calls her an "ugly mutt" on first sight. It's not quite as obvious why she should fall for this handsome but taciturn young man, surely like hundreds of others in Paris at the time.

Then again, this may be part of the point. Aattou unmistakably belongs to the world of the chic Parisian salons, the drawing rooms, the polite society that sneers at a "creature" like Argento, looks down on her as subhuman. Argento simply does not belong, and doesn't want to. She's a much more modern creation than anyone else in the film — Breillat's framing of the otherwise uninhibited sex scenes mostly succeeds in obscuring Argento's copious tattoos, but even so she can't help but reveal a fleeting glimpse of the ink on her back, just above her butt. When measured against the film's overall carefulness in obscuring this body art, it doesn't feel like an accident, but a conscious acknowledgment of the extent to which Argento's very persona shatters the film's commitment to period realism. Her character often seems to have come directly from a hard-edged 50s Western, a tough saloon gal thrust into a Victorian romance. In one of the film's most striking and memorable scenes, she smokes a tiny stub of a cigar in a dark parlor, blowing smoke rings while she watches the men play dice. This scene is masterfully orchestrated, with Argento first facing a mirror, letting out wisps of gray smoke, in sharp focus with the whole rest of the room blurry in the mirror behind her. Later, when Aattou is at the table playing, a smoke ring wafts across the frame from offscreen, briefly encircling his face, a tangible reminder of Argento's out-of-frame presence, her fierce seductive power.

In scenes like this, she calls to mind no one so much as the Mexican actress Katy Jurado, from countless Westerns but especially as Gary Cooper's former lover, and the subject of enduring scandal, in High Noon, a film that has unexpected resonances with Breillat's film. Argento has the same force, the same sultry Mediterranean quality, as Jurado, but there are crucial differences in the two films' treatments of the love triangle. While Cooper leaves Jurado, without second thoughts, for the virginal, blonde, blue-eyed, and white Grace Kelly, Aattou only thinks he is in love with the very similar Mesquida, a noblewoman standing in for Princess Grace. It may be, of course, that Breillat did not have such specific examples in mind, though she is quite obviously responding to the archetypes that govern High Noon, and indeed most of Western culture in general, with regard to women, race, and sexuality. Argento is the film's real woman, one who unabashedly enjoys sex, who is as aggressive and self-assured as a man, who is unrestrained by the fear of what society might have to say about her. She is also olive-skinned; Argento is Italian, but believably plays a Spanish interloper in Parisian society, especially as compared to the artificially pallid Aattou. She is, essentially, the woman one is supposed to have a fling with but never marry. Even Aattou, when he first sees her, dismisses her as "pure vice," based solely on her superficial appearance. In contrast, Mesquida is the virginal wife, pure and almost completely impenetrable, in both senses; she is a mystery within the film, barely present in its first three-quarters and opaque even after the couple's marriage, her thoughts demurely hidden in contrast to Argento's messy openness and emotionality. This too is a reversal of sorts, a subversion of the typical story where the focus is on the wife whose husband is unfaithful to her. This is not the story of the poor wife, but of the husband and his mistress, and the overpowering love they feel for each other.

Breillat continually emphasizes these tensions and contrasts. The film's very structure is designed to introduce disjunctions between the sexual and the austere, the genuine love and the fragile imitation. The bulk of the film's middle section consists of Aattou recounting, to Mesquida's worldly and knowing grandmother (Claude Sarraute), the story of how he met and embarked on a ten-year affair with Argento. This reminiscence is contained within flashbacks long enough to forget the framing device, but Breillat continually returns, for brief interludes, to the sedate parlor where the story is being told over the course of a single long night. These interludes are often severe breaks from the reality of the story, with Breillat cutting directly from the lovers intertwined in convoluted sexual positions to a shot of the old woman lounging on her couch listening to this decadent tale. The grandmother positions herself as a wise, sophisticated figure as she listens and then, at the end, still accepts Aattou as a suitable husband for her granddaughter, believing him when he says (quite earnestly) that he is done with his former mistress for good. Of course, one can't help but wonder why this intelligent, experienced woman doesn't realize what must inevitably happen, why she doesn't realize just how deep Aattou's love for his mistress really is — it can only be social blindness to the possibility of such love even existing. At one point, several of the upper-class characters express amazement at the idea of a relationship that lasts for ten years without the bonds of the law (marriage) compelling the lovers to remain together.

It is this debased conception of both love and marriage that Breillat sets out to attack, not from a coolly feminist point of view but from a stance that privileges the extreme emotional states of the lovers, as well as glorying in the physical pleasures that love can hold for both partners. In one scene, Aattou makes love to Argento while recounting to her how one of his society conquests is disgusted by the very thought of sex, how she keeps her legs closed, looks away from him, gets no pleasure from the act. Argento's response is articulate and moving: "some women don't know what it is to feel love." The wedding scene is equally eloquent about the film's ideas on sexuality and romance, posing another dichotomy between openness and oppression. At the beginning of the wedding, a child reads a passage from the New Testament that was, he says, selected by the bride and groom. It is from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 19, about the nature of marriage: "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female... For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh." This is immediately followed, with a jarring cut to a priest shot from a low angle, by a homily in which the priest explains the essential subservience of women, who are by nature subject to men, created for the sake of men, and marked with signs of men's authority over them.

The disjunction between these two very different religious responses to marriage is all the more striking for the fact that they are both based on the exact same story, in Genesis, of God creating Eve from Adam's rib. The first quote, besides its expected focus on the man as the active partner (he is "joined to his wife," not the other way around), is surprisingly egalitarian, presenting marriage as a fusion of two bodies back into the one they originally were. This is a very sexual view of marriage, one that is borne out by the rest of the story that the child reads. When Jesus is questioned further about what he says, he basically responds that not everyone is cut out for this fusion, and that if one is better able to live as a eunuch, so be it. In contrast, the priest's stern homily is a more sinister interpretation of the Adam/Eve split. For this priest — and for the dominant religious hierarchy in most of history — marriage is not an equal fusion of two souls, but a master/servant relationship that returns the missing "rib" back to its proper owner. That two such different interpretations could arise from the same Biblical material, and that the one more damaging to women should be the one to take hold, is a major thrust of Breillat's commentary in this scene.

As should be obvious from this cursory gloss of the film's themes and structures, there is a great deal of intertextual and metatextual commentary going on within The Last Mistress. Breillat cleverly, sometimes wittily, uses the surface conventions of the period drama to riff on the treatment of women in relationships and the suppression of female sexuality by both religious and societal forces. The film itself, on its surface, is not always successful in its exploration of churning tensions, and it especially boils over perhaps too much during a shrill and melodramatic sequence in the Algerian desert. Still, the film is never less than interesting even when it outreaches its grasp, and every scene seems calculated to generate further thought about the multiple implications of this story. It's a fascinating and deeply thought-provoking work.

Iron Man

Iron Man, the first of Marvel Comics' superhero properties to be adapted to the screen through their new in-house production apparatus rather than through licensing, is a strong start for the company's ambitious new effort at cinematic universe-building. Not just economically, although that should be rather obvious from the film's blockbuster performance for the past few weeks, but creatively, in terms of successfully translating a complicated character with a long history into an equally complicated and compelling onscreen hero. The film isn't entirely successful, to be sure — it's especially marred by a silly and over-the-top final battle scene — but it does succeed in the kind of grounded, patient storytelling that Marvel seems to be adapting as the new standard for their film productions.

In particular, Marvel and director Jon Favreau have learned a lot of lessons from Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, which became a new model for superhero filmmaking by keeping its title character in the developmental stages for the entire first half of the film. It signaled a new kind of superhero movie. While older superhero films tended to view the origin story as a bothersome hurdle to jump as fast as possible in order to get to the "good stuff," these new tights-and-capes films are taking a more leisurely, painstaking approach to superhero origins, which inevitably gives the films a more grounded, realistic feel. Just as in Nolan's film we saw millionaire Bruce Wayne slowly accumulate the experience, fighting skill, and technology that would enable him to take on the mantle of Batman, in Iron Man we see Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) building the eponymous suit of armor not just once, but twice. These scenes are grounded in realism and, importantly, in physical process, even if the actual physics and mechanics behind the suit's operation are obscure and fantastic. Even if they could never be real, these scenes still feel real, and that's the crucial touch that brings both Nolan's Batman and Favreau's Iron Man to convincing life. These are both heroes who essentially make themselves through ingenuity and technological progress, rather than with super powers, and it's admirable that both of these films spend considerable time in the workshop with their heroes. In terms of the ratio of screen time given to making the armor suit as opposed to actually using it, Iron Man is a film more about building than about fighting, even if the wanton destruction of the typical urban battle scene at the end tends to obscure that point.

Meanwhile, since Stark spends so much of the film out of his armor, Downey is a very welcome presence here as the man beneath the iron mask. Stark is a great, complicated character: a compulsive womanizer who can even be downright nasty towards his conquests, a budding alcoholic, and yet also a businessman with a conscience, who when he learns of evils committed in his name, decides to actually do something about it. Downey is a surprisingly perfect fit for the role, bringing a sarcastic wit and easygoing screen presence to the conflicted would-be hero. The film shines especially in its humor, an essential aspect of superhero comics that doesn't often translate so well to the screen. But Downey seems equally comfortable with his character's verbal sparring (especially with his perky assistant Pepper Potts, admirably embodied by Gwyneth Paltrow despite her underwritten role) and the film's occasional deadpan physical humor, like a recurring gag with a puppyish robot in Stark's studio, or some painful-looking snags in the development of his suit's propulsion units.

Of course, the film isn't without its own snags, most notably on the villain front. Many have pointed out how the film's Afghani warlords are essentially stock Hollywood "darkies," fitting the evil dark-skinned mold perhaps too perfectly. But it's worth pointing out that not only are these evil terrorists depicted as terrorizing their own (also dark-skinned) innocent civilians, they're shown to be doing so with American-made weapons, supplied directly from American companies. Moreover, these villains don't wind up dying in an explosive final dust-up with Iron Man, but rather die off-screen, eliminated by American political expediency once their purpose had been served. The real villain here isn't the dark other or the stock Arab terrorist, but the American weapons manufacturers who supply these evil men, and the American political complacency that allows such atrocities to occur routinely as long as US interests are protected. This bit of real-world political mirroring goes some way towards defusing the accusations of stock racism, and it's important to remember that even though the film's political message is sometimes obscured and confused, it always remains basically an anti-war polemic about a weapons manufacturer who decides not to make weapons anymore.

I have more reservations about Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) as a villain, though in that case not because of any problematic racial elements. He's simply a boring enemy, as melodramatic as a soap opera's evil twin brother, and almost as unlikely. He's especially unconvincing in the inevitable final showdown with Iron Man, which eschews the slightly more restrained and realistic battle scenes of earlier in the film for a full-on superhero urban destruction scenario, complete with cars hurtling through the air, buildings recklessly smashed, and iron suits flying everywhere. And what to say about the ridiculous processed voice that Stane has when he's encased in his own armored suit? When a film has to remind us of who the villain is by making his voice sound evil, things are not looking good. It's the only time when the film reminds us of the over-the-top silliness that superhero flicks too often descend to, like the similarly ridiculous Batmobile chase sequence that Nolan unnecessarily shoehorned into Batman Begins. These moments sabotage the tone of these films, which otherwise walk a tight rope between realism and fantasy.

For the most part, though, Iron Man is an auspicious debut for Marvel's in-house film productions. It sets the stage for many things to come in the Marvel film universe, especially in terms of the introduction of S.H.I.E.L.D. and a surprising cameo after the credits, one that will have special relevance for fans of Marvel's Ultimate line, and one that also foreshadows the already-planned Avengers movie for the future. More importantly, it's a fine movie on its own merits, capturing the excitement and adventure of the best superhero tales, bringing both Iron Man and Tony Stark to vivid life. The film's overall tone is perhaps best encapsulated in the scene when Stark first takes his second, slickly designed suit out for a test flight; the joy and excitement on Downey's face, seen inside the suit surrounded by computerized readings, is inevitably passed on to the audience.