Films I Love #52: After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

Martin Scorsese's After Hours is a wonderful and oft-overlooked film from the legendary director. In fact, it's every bit as much of a remarkable portrait of urban living as any of Scorsese's more famous New York stories. The film is a nightmare, the frenzied documentation of one night in the life of bored, prosaic office worker Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne), who against his better judgment accepts the late-night invitation of Marcy (Rosanna Arquette), who he randomly meets at a diner. Paul's spur-of-the-moment but seemingly innocuous decision to go visit Marcy at her SoHo apartment, after midnight on the same night he first met her, turns out to be a down-the-rabbit-hole choice that sends Paul off on a wild and surreal journey of violence and sexual confusion. This is a dark, hysterical comedy of mishaps, misadventures and misidentifications, as Paul encounters one absurd situation after another. It's a kind of cautionary parable, as the staid, square Paul steps outside of the security of his comfort zone and finds himself utterly unprepared for the messiness and insanity of the world that exists outside his familiar circuit from office job to neat apartment.

The result is a skewed vision of New York as a garish, jumbled, confusing maze, a place where chance meetings place Paul into close contact with all sorts of fascinating/frightening characters, from a clingy, desperate middle-aged waitress (Teri Garr) to the aggressive and provocative artist Kiki (Linda Fiorentino) to a gay guy who clearly thought he was picking Paul up, and finds out otherwise much to his disappointment, to Marcy herself, with all her unexpected hangups and eccentricities, to a pair of goofy crooks (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) who serve as the film's plot device delivery system. By turns poignant, harrowing and darkly hilarious, After Hours is one of Scorsese's masterpieces, a seemingly light film that in fact gives form to the fears and insecurities of those who would shut themselves off from life in order to avoid risk. In Paul's case, his skittishness turns out to be warranted, or perhaps — and this is quite likely — it's his very fears that, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, prompt the unsympathetic city to chew him up and spit him out, very much the worse for wear, the next morning, back at his job and his familiar life, back to a well-trod path from which he'll likely never deviate again.

Mildred Pierce (episode 3)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

The third episode of Todd Haynes' new Mildred Pierce miniseries opens in the immediate wake of the second episode's tragic conclusion. The younger daughter of Mildred (Kate Winslet) died at the end of the second episode, which concluded with a discrete pan away from Mildred embracing her surviving daughter Veda (Morgan Turner), and the third part of the series doesn't gloss over this grief but draws it out, lingering lovingly and sadly over the details. In the opening shot, Haynes' camera pans across Veda's sunlit room, the morning after the last episode's conclusion, and the sunny cinematography, the bright child's toys and decorations, are enough to suggest that maybe it was all a bad dream, until the moment when Mildred's gaze lands on the empty bed of her other daughter, at the same moment as Haynes guides the audience's gaze to the same spot.

In the subsequent scenes, Mildred balances her grief against the practicality and determination that constitute her essential nature; even when she's at her darkest moment, sobbing and despairing, she has the presence of mind to think of the need for a black dress. Haynes frames this moment in one of the through-a-window shots that characterize his style in Mildred Pierce, with Mildred's husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) in the foreground and Mildred in the background with her friend Lucy (Melissa Leo), discussing her dress size and whether she should wear a veil or not. Soon, Mildred must lay out the clothes her daughter will wear to be buried, and she carefully lays out the clothes on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in a dress and placing a pair of socks down one by one. After the funeral, Haynes mirrors this sequence with a shot of Mildred similarly laying out her funereal black dress, straightening it out and hanging it up in the closet, putting it away as though she could put away her grief so neatly. In its quiet, methodical way, this opening is more devastating than a more showy, melodramatic evocation of grief, because it's so horrifyingly normal.

The emotions enter a more melodramatic register later in the episode, but Haynes' emphasis on details remains a constant presence. As in the first two parts of the series, Haynes keeps calling wry attention to the economics of the time, as even after Mildred gets her restaurant up and running, she still has to keep careful track of her money, counting every dollar. More than the first episodes of the series, Depression-era politics linger in the background here, with political speeches playing on radios and the end of Prohibition triggering changes for Mildred's business. The economics of the time are also at the forefront, as Haynes again takes every opportunity to demonstrate how much things cost at this time, taking particular ironic pleasure in a stop to a gas station where a full tank of gas costs a little over a dollar.


The bulk of this pivotal episode, however, focuses on the relationship between Mildred and the fading society heir Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), who has retained his status and the significance of his family name even while losing all of his money. As he result, he takes money from Mildred even while looking down on her, mocking her status as a lowly working woman. In that, he has a co-conspirator in Veda, who has her own pretensions of upper-class privilege, and who naturally rejoices at Monty's presence in her mother's life. The scenes between Monty and Mildred dominate this episode, as their initially passionate and intense relationship is corrupted by Monty's disdain for work, and his contempt for Mildred's working class lifestyle. In several scenes, the couple argues, trading cutting words as Mildred begins to realize that Monty is not the man she thought he was, until Monty defuses the situation by seducing Mildred.

Despite it all, Mildred still desires him, and Monty knows that at this point, sex is the one thing he still has to offer — though he jokes that he's a gigolo, it often seems to be more or less true. These scenes are painful to watch, to see this strong woman, who's worked so hard and dealt with so much, brought down by this guy who's outwardly smooth and suave but actually quite pathetic. The thing is, Mildred, unlike so many other movie incarnations of the "strong woman," doesn't turn off or suppress her sexuality in the name of her career or her family — she might be making the wrong choice with Monty, but she's making it because she remains a sexual woman throughout all of her troubles. Probably the most telling moment in that respect is the scene when Monty shows up at Mildred's restaurant, preceded by buzz and excitement over his presence, with Mildred's two other men, Bert and her business manager/lover Wally (James LeGros), wondering how such a high society legend heard about the restaurant. When Monty then casually enters the kitchen and addresses Mildred intimately and familiarly, bringing her flowers, Mildred turns and suppresses a wicked smile in a napkin. Rather than being embarrassed or awkward, she's thrilled, proud, showing off Monty like a conquest, taking pleasure in introducing him to Bert and Wally. There's a social-climbing aspect to this pleasure, sure, the thrill of having this access to high society that the others clearly envy, but it's also the thrill of showing off her sexual prowess.

Haynes ends the episode with Mildred finally rejecting Monty's advances, driving to see him and then back home again in a lovingly photographed thunderstorm that externalizes Mildred's anger and confusion. On the way there, toward Monty's spacious but disused mansion, where most of the rooms are closed up, the furniture covered in white sheets, the stormy night seems to glow with eerie headlights illuminating accident scenes and slick roads. On the way back, after Monty flippantly jokes about raping Mildred — she momentarily gives in only to push him off and run away — the night has become even more threatening, even more sinister. The night seems to close in on Mildred, dark and intense, the roads narrow and surrounded on all sides by dark tangles of trees and foliage that seem to press in on her. That's an appropriate place to end this transitional episode that bridges the gap between the opening two hours and the next (and final) two episodes, which promise to leap forward several years into the future. Haynes' Mildred Pierce continues, in its precise and evocative way, to ably balance the naturalism of Haynes' period details against the creeping melodrama that's starting to emerge from the character interactions.

Mildred Pierce (episodes 1-2)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

Todd Haynes' new HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce is a fresh adaptation of the James M. Cain novel that had previously been adapted for Michael Curtiz's 1945 film of the same name. Haynes' expansive five-part miniseries, the first two parts of which aired on Sunday as a single two-hour block, takes its cues from the novel, rather than from Curtiz's noirish, overheated Joan Crawford melodrama. In the process, this new version expands into a potent, sprawling epic of the Depression era woman. Mildred (Kate Winslet) is placed in a difficult situation when she finally pushes her no-good husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) out the door, sick of his laziness and his philandering with another woman. Mildred becomes a "grass widow," caring for her daughters Veda (Morgan Turner) and Ray (Quinn McColgan) on her own, making do at first with the meager proceeds from selling homemade pies, while she searches for a job in an economy with very few real prospects.

The signal virtue of Haynes' film is its meticulous attention to the economic realities of its era. In countless small details in the first episode of the series, Haynes emphasizes how every penny, every nickel, every dime must be carefully managed. On Mildred's first shopping trip after her husband leaves, she places items into her basket, weighing each one in her hand as she looks at the price, and Haynes pulls in for a tight closeup on the shopping basket as she mentally calculates the total cost, finally discarding an item that would push her over her budget. Later, when she gets a job as a waitress, her new employers make a point of telling her that the cost of her uniform will be deducted from her first check, and that any discrepancies at her tables will also be deducted, and that she'll have to buy her own shoes. The costs tally up quickly. As Mildred tells Veda in the second episode, everything in their lives, everything they own, has a cost, and Haynes makes sure that that cost is felt concretely, that every penny of it feels like it matters.

Haynes is similarly meticulous with every aspect of the film. The 1930s setting is believably tangible without any showy period touches; there's simply a constant sense of physicality in such details as Mildred's drab and obviously cheap undergarments, or the fruit vendors lined up along a cobbled street, or the tattoos on the arm of a blood donor, suggesting that only a lower-class man would be donating blood in this society, in this era. Haynes evokes the era with a direct but stylish aesthetic, using mostly pale, muted colors that add to the sense of reality. He's constantly shooting through glass, through windows that slightly distort and filter the view outside, as when Mildred is seen, contemplating her dim economic prospects, through the filthy front window of a diner, her face made indistinct by the gray grime layered on the glass. This is a film that is very much about the economic realities of the Depression for a single woman trying to provide for herself and her family, so the film's verisimilitude is vitally important. It also definitively sets Haynes' adaptation of the Cain novel apart from the famous 1945 Joan Crawford film, which not only shifted the story's era from the Depression to the then-current mid-1940s, but also offered an overheated vision very far removed from the physical and emotional realism of Haynes' version.


In that respect, Kate Winslet's performance as Mildred is a key component of the film's effect. Comparisons to Crawford are perhaps inevitable, but misplaced since Winslet's performance is in an entirely different register from her predecessor in this role. There's no melodrama in Winslet's performance, no excess. It's a warm, nuanced embodiment of a woman who, in the early scenes of the film, simply and abruptly decides that she's sick of the life she's been living, and over the course of the first two episodes begins to realize what she'd like to replace that life with. The first shot of the film is a closeup on Mildred's hands as she prepares pies for baking; Haynes immediately thrusts the audience into Mildred's world, a world of work and effort. In the subsequent scene, what starts as a routine conversation between Mildred and Bert — one immediately senses that they've had similar tense discussions many times — goes off-track when Mildred unexpectedly and casually drops the name of the woman that she knows Bert has been going to see. It's a remarkable moment, the truth suddenly bubbling up from out of this routine marital conversation, and afterward Mildred doesn't even quite seem to realize why she forced this confrontation, she just knows that she's reached a breaking point. Maybe it's the casual way that Bert says, "I don't see what else I can do around here," the careful phrasing of which Haynes utterly mocks because the audience can easily see the dirty pans and dishes stacked around the kitchen, while Mildred sits at the table working on yet another pie.

The film provides plenty of opportunities for Winslet to portray the complexities of this remarkable woman. In one scene from the second episode, when Mildred and Bert discuss finally getting a divorce and making their separation official and permanent, their conversation covers a wide range of emotions. The splitting couple is initially acrimonious and on edge, exchanging harsh words about one another's choices in romantic partners — Mildred has become involved with Bert's former business partner Wally (James LeGros) — but they soon begin gently joking about their situation, trying to laugh it off, and in their banter is visible a glimmer of the attraction they once must have felt for each other. The moment of warmth and humor segues seamlessly into tears, with Mildred breaking down, her face screwed up in anguish. It's a wonderful scene, a powerful acting showcase for Winslet especially, and it suggests the broad emotional palette that Haynes is working with here, tapping into the rich essence of Mildred's story and mining it for genuine, heartfelt drama rather than overwrought melodrama.

In the final act of the first episode, Winslet's Mildred conveys a sense of utter horror and desperation as she comes to grips with the prospect of having to lower herself in status in order to provide for her family. This class consciousness is most powerfully felt in a scene where Mildred goes for an interview to work as a maid in the house of a rich woman. Again and again throughout this sequence, Haynes holds one uncomfortable moment after another, allowing several beats to go by as Mildred attempts to swallow her pride, to choke down the bile rising up within her middle-class soul at being treated like a lowly servant. It starts when she knocks on the front door of the house, gets one look from the black servant who answers the door, and is immediately told to go around to the back. The door slams in Mildred's face, and Haynes holds the shot of her standing there, stunned into immobility. He holds the shot again after Mildred meets with the woman of the house and is told that she can't sit down without being told, causing Mildred to look startled again and stand up. When a second later the woman tells Mildred to sit down, the way Mildred holds her body, rail-straight and poised, suggests her pride struggling within her, resisting these demands for obedience and subservience.


Mildred is a very proud woman, and also a very tough one, a woman both of her time and astonishingly modern, even now. The film's portrait of Mildred constantly suggests the tension between the modern woman she's being forced to become and the conventional housewife she'd perhaps once been. Part of this is a growing sense of practicality, accepting that becoming a waitress to feed her family is nothing to be ashamed of — though she still can't bring herself to reveal her new job to her daughter Veda, who has very un-practical ideas about social standing and propriety, setting the stage for the conflicts that will drive the later chapters of this saga.

Mildred's modernity is refreshingly conveyed in the scenes from the series' second episode in which she first meets the wealthy but terminally lazy Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce) and impulsively decides to accept his flirtatious invitation to join him at his beach house. The sex scene between the two newly acquainted lovers is earthy and intense, emphasizing the straining muscles in Monty's forearms as his hand rests on the bed, holding up his body. Haynes' camera drifts sensually across the lovers' bodies, exploring the junction points between them, emphasizing the sweaty and surprisingly unglamorous contact between the toned Monty (with his dark brown tan, a product of empty days with nothing to do but lay on the beach) and the middle-aged but still sexy and curvy Mildred. Haynes purposefully contrasts this passionate scene, and the relaxed post-coital conversation of the lovers, against Mildred's comparatively awkward and passionless encounters with Wally, who she falls into bed with out of mere convenience and confusion. Haynes plays the sex with Wally for laughs: Wally gropes Mildred and they stumble around the room, nearly collapsing onto the bed, and as Mildred putters around her room afterward, Wally sits on the bed, balancing an ashtray on his rounded belly, an irredeemable comic figure.

Of course, Mildred's beachside interlude with Monty is followed by the tragic and heartrending conclusion to the second episode — culminating in a very lengthy final shot, a sustained look at Mildred's grief before a discrete pan around the corner to a dark wall — but even before this ending, the scenes at the beach with Monty resonate as a contrast against the rest of the film. It's a moment when Mildred is lifted out of her working class life, freed from the responsibilities of work even if only for a day. In a way, that's what attracts her to Monty, as suggested by the expression of mingled excitement and disgust that flashes across her face when she realizes that Monty doesn't actually do anything in his life, merely cashes the dividend checks he receives from his inherited family business. For Mildred, that's a glimpse of a whole other life, far removed from the bustling world of the restaurant, from the kneading of dough to make pies, from the necessity of counting every cent that buys her groceries. It all comes back to that grounding in the economic realities of the era in which the film is set, its emphasis on what money — and the lack of it, and the desire for it — really means.

Catch Me If You Can

Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is a breezy but smart thriller, a briskly paced film whose playful title captures the charm and ease of this story, but barely hints at the surprising emotional nuances that Spielberg finds in this 1960s con man who skipped across America inventing occupations and identities for himself. It's based on the true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), who runs away from home at the age of seventeen and immediately begins concocting grand schemes that are as much about creating a glamorous identity for himself as about all the money he makes through counterfeit check schemes. For Spielberg, Abagnale is still a kid when he runs away, trying to recapture an idealized image of happiness and family and security that he lost in his teenage years. The film opens with some unnecessary framing material set after Abagnale's eventual capture, but it doesn't really start until the scenes of the Abagnale family's 1960s suburban bliss.

Frank's father (Christopher Walken) is an honored man in their community, a local businessman who's recognized by his peers and respected by all. Frank Sr. is, above all, proud of his wife, Paula (Nathalie Baye), who he met during World War II in France. Frank Sr. tells the story of how he met her over and over again, how he saw this gorgeous blonde dancing in a small village and vowed that he "wouldn't leave France without her." As he tells the story over Christmas, dancing with his wife as Frank looks on, Frank knows all the words by heart, can fill in the blanks with ease. It's a story he cherishes, because it contains the essence of Frank Sr.'s philosophy, an ideology of entitlement that he passes on to his son: if you want something badly enough, if you fight hard enough for it, you will get it. Of course, the Abagnales' happy life eventually falls apart as Frank's father gets in trouble with the IRS and spirals into ruin and disgrace. His wife begins bringing other men around, and Frank knows that trouble is coming, but he still isn't prepared for the announcement that his parents are getting divorced. Unable to deal with it, he simply runs away.


Those early scenes, bright and idyllic as they are, are like TV sitcom visions of domestic contentment: the glamorous mother and suave father, an icon of paternal serenity even as his life collapses around him. Frank carries these visions off into the world, memories of the paradise he's lost and is now trying to recover. He is an intuitive mimic, and he is seeking alternate realizations of the glossy glamor of his childhood. He sees a pilot, in his crisp black uniform, surrounded by beautiful, cheery stewardesses in pale blue, and he immediately seizes upon this image as his own goal. Other kids would want to learn how to fly, to go through the work, to achieve that ambition, but not Frank. He doesn't want to fly, he just wants to be a pilot, and to him the two are almost unconnected. It's not the job he wants, it's the image of himself in that handsome uniform, surrounded by pretty, giggling girls. It's the sensation of walking down the street, turning heads wherever he goes. The film is set in an era when flight still seemed a little magical, and certainly very adventurous: the pilot is a kind of globetrotting hero, in control of these giant metal birds that only he really understands how to handle, living a life of adventure all around the world. When Frank occasionally reports in to his father with his adventures, his father is impressed by how "exotic" his son's life is. He says the word repeatedly, with a kind of reverent awe: where are you going tonight, Frank, he asks, somewhere exotic? Frank is able to continue and even improve upon the life of glamor and respect that his father lost when his finances fell apart.

Frank's opposite number is the FBI agent Hanratty (Tom Hanks), who makes it his mission to catch Frank as the con man's tricks grow bolder and bolder. Frank and Hanratty share a Christmas tradition, a telephone call from the lonely man on the road to the lonely man in the office. Both have nothing better to do on a family holiday. Both have shattered families. Hanratty still wears his wedding ring, as Frank points out, but he's not lying when he says he doesn't have a family; the air of sadness of a man with nothing waiting for him outside the office is unmistakable. The film is nakedly about the desire for family; it's not even a subtext, it's what drives everything Frank does, everything he wants. He doesn't even care about the money, not really. At one point, he pulls out a pair of suitcases that are stuffed with loose bills, carelessly tossed inside and crumpled up. Frank projects such a calm, self-assured demeanor most of the time that it's easy to forget, even for the audience, what an insecure child he still really is, but moments like that make it clear. He's got suitcases full of money that he doesn't know what to do with, and still he keeps going, keeps writing bad checks, keeps making up new identities: a doctor, a lawyer, a Harvard graduate, a Berkeley graduate. It's not about wealth for him, but what the wealth stands for: respect, security, acceptance, being able to impress people. He's after the vibe of that Rotary Club dinner — the first scene of the film after the framing material — where his father is honored by his town's most respected men, even the mayor himself.

Frank thinks he's found this restoration of family life in Brenda Strong (Amy Adams), a young nurse who he meets in a hospital, and who spontaneously inspires in him yet another lie, yet another identity: as a doctor. This, more than anything else Frank does, makes it clear that it's not money he wants. There's no money in this ploy, not really, but there's the respect of being in a noble profession, and there's the obvious adoration of Brenda, who's the same age as Frank, more or less, but seems like a giggly teen in comparison to his assured maturity, which makes him believable when he says he's a decade older than he actually is. (The casting of DiCaprio is ingenious in this respect: he looks awkward and ungainly as a teen in the early scenes, then seems to naturally grow into Frank's cocky-kid projections of maturity and confidence.)


Frank rediscovers, with Brenda and her family, the happy home life he'd lost as a child. They are almost surreal, this cheery, tight-knit family, and it's easy to forget the darkness lurking just around the corner: Brenda's Irish Catholic parents had kicked her out after she'd slept with a boy and gotten an abortion. Frank's seeming respectability wins them back over, not only to him, but to their own daughter. They're living a different kind of lie from Frank, lying to themselves about their own goodness, rejecting their daughter as a slut until she returns with a handsome doctor who wants to marry her. Spielberg kind of glosses over this subtext, but it's there nonetheless, lurking beneath the unreal cheeriness and familial closeness of this household. In a David Lynch film, the Strongs would be a parody of suburban nicety and inner hypocrisy, but one senses that Spielberg sees them in more of a rosy light. They're funny, this stern but sentimental couple who do the dishes together, their butts swaying in time to the music, dancing together as they do domestic chores, totally in sync and totally contented. Frank watches them and sees in them his own parents, dancing together in the living room on Christmas, totally happy and totally into each other.

It's a dream of family, an ideal, and Spielberg's cinema is perfectly suited to capturing ideals. This is such a rich film because Spielberg seems to identify so completely with Frank the innocent trickster, always in search of family, always in search of a childhood innocence that's gone forever. Everything in the film is seen through this lens. Everything is 1960s glossy, bright and airy, clean and pure. Only occasionally does Frank touch up against the grimier underpinnings of the fantasy life he's building for himself: a glimpse of a bloody leg during his doctor ruse, a negotiation with a prostitute that's a letdown after he thought he was having just another romantic encounter, the tears of Brenda when she tells him about her abortion and again when he has to leave her, to go on the run again. These are reminders that the fantasy is just a fantasy, that the glossy world Frank is erecting around him can only remain intact so long as he keeps his blinders on to everything he's running from, everything that's poised to destroy his dreams. Spielberg brilliantly constructs that glossy fantasy world, a con boy's dream of love and family, and he brilliantly explores the emotions of the man running through the fantasy, breathlessly exclaiming "catch me if you can" as though it's all a game, even if it's really anything but.

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind is a simple but evocative documentary, a film that chronicles the history of American rebellion, resistance and progressivism, using monuments, gravesites, plaques and other commemorative relics to chart the various social, political and economic struggles of American history. The memorials that Gianvito captures in his sumptuous images — invariably backed by bright blue skies, fluffy clouds and lush green vegetation — are mostly public, with many familiar names and events highlighted, but the way he presents these finds has the feel of gathering evidence, silently making an argument through the accumulation of details. The film progresses roughly chronologically through American history, beginning with monuments to battles against Native Americans and moving on to chronicle slave rebellions, women's rights reformers, and especially the often violent struggles of the labor movement. Gianvito makes his perspective clear early on, when he films a sign about how colonial forces "defeated" the Indians in a battle: after an abrupt cut, the word "defeated" has been crudely papered over with a cardboard cutout replacing the word with "massacred." It's an acknowledgment that, within these nominally objective markers of history, there is a distinct slant, one that Gianvito is endeavoring to replace with his own slant and his own perspective.

For most of the film, though, the filmmaker simply observes and edits together these memorials and graves into a kind of alternative history of America. There are familiar names here, names inscribed in any high school history textbook, but their graves, their grand monuments, are scattered in with the more modest memorials to other martyrs and thinkers, names not so familiar, names and events that don't get taught in American classrooms. Gianvito, building on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, is paying tribute to the people, both famous and forgotten, who contributed to this country's history of struggle and reform. The sheer proliferation of small civic plaques commemorating the various massacres and tragedies of the labor movement itself makes a statement: so many plaques stoically recounting 19 dead here, 38 wounded there, a list of names with ages, some of them as young as six years or even six months old, another monument that documents how each of the men was killed (bullet through the heart or head) and who they left behind when they died. All the facts and figures, the years and dates, the cold hard recitation of facts about people who lived, fought and died for something they believed in. All the graves, all the forgotten heroes who died to get an eight-hour work day, to protest unfair business practices, to earn benefits that they would never enjoy themselves, but which would be passed on to future generations. One man was, his grave tells us, killed "by capitalist interests for organizing and inspiring his fellow man," a worn inscription that Gianvito finds important enough to emphasize by, for a moment, digitally enhancing the letters on the grave so they stand out clearly enough to be read.

These still, quiet images of graves and monuments are alternated with equally languid images of the wind whispering, whistling and murmuring through trees, fields of flowers, and undulating meadows of tall grass. The film quickly falls into a slow, steady rhythm: an image of untouched natural splendor, then a gravesite, surrounded by tranquil fields, buried in grass or shaded by trees, sometimes with lichens and mold wearing away the stone, sometimes with insects creeping along the cool surface of the tombstone. These images, mostly filmed in the American Northeast on bright, nearly cloudless summer days, are gorgeous and peaceful. There is rarely any direct sign of human presence — only in one shot does Gianvito capture, almost incidentally, some tourists walking along a path, distant from the grave he's shooting. The absence of any visitors to these monuments suggests a forgotten history, even if Gianvito is freezing these sites in place at moments of stasis. Many of these graves are marked with flowers and other signs of recent visitation, so the film's stillness and lack of population feels artificial, stylized, a bit of poetic license to make a political point: how easy it is to forget, to ignore the past, to walk by the lessons of history without pausing to consider them.


Some of these monuments are clearly marked and public, others are shrouded in trees, hidden away in private corners, decaying with age and rot. Gianvito introduces an image of an empty field with a paragraph of text citing a labor martyr and his unmarked grave, hidden beneath the field with no sign or monument to announce his presence or his role in history. A monument to one of many labor massacres is mounted at the base of a lamppost in a shopping mall by a major thoroughfare, a perfect example of capitalist practicality co-opting a memorial to its enemies. The film, by juxtaposing monuments placed in prominent, public view with those that are more obscured, calls attention to the vagaries of history. Gianvito, without saying a word, is asking us to question why and how we remember, and what we remember: who gets enshrined in history books, who gets a big tourist site memorial, and who gets shuffled off into a corner, buried in an out-of-the-way cemetery with only a small marker to commemorate their lives and actions.

At one point, Gianvito films a sign whose text briefly describes a 1759 slave rebellion (failed, naturally). He holds an angled shot of the sign for long enough for its text to be read, and then cuts to a different angle, revealing the very different sign in the background: an Exxon gas station sign, with cars speeding by on a highway between the rebellion memorial and the list of gas prices. The revelation recontextualizes this monument, revealing its awkward positioning by a road where it could hardly be read by all the cars speeding by, and revealing its proximity to the signifiers of modern American prosperity and commerce. By and large, these signs of progressive history are positioned within a society that is rushing ahead, not pausing to read the epitaphs on these obscure graves, not caring to be educated about the revolts and struggles described by roadside plaques. Even when modernity isn't so intrusive within the frame, it's often in the background, as Gianvito's meticulous sound design lets in the roar of passing trucks, the hum of a lawnmower, the distant buzz of what might be the titular wind, or else the traffic on a nearby motorway.

It's only at the end of the film that this timeless, methodical examination of history's uneasy position in the present gives way to a full-on embrace of the now. After filming several high-profile capitalist brands — McDonald's, Walmart — through the film's signature waving leaves and branches, Gianvito introduces a briskly edited sequence of present-day protests against the Bush administration and the Iraq war. It's an attempt — perhaps a strained one — to link the film's history of struggle to modern resistance and protest. Gianvito's evocation of different flash points in American history — the oppression of Native Americans, the slave rebellions, the fight for women's suffrage, the violence against labor unions — suggests that oppression is a constant, and so too is the resistance against it. In this context, the ineffectual Bush-era protests clearly lack the gravity or the air of importance of the other historical touchstones of Gianvito's film, but his point with this coda remains powerful: the need to struggle, to fight for the next advance, the next small victory for the under-represented. This poetic, evocative film beautifully captures the urgency of such struggles while paying tribute to those who struggled, won, lost, lived and died, and were feted or forgotten by history.

Duel

Duel was the first film of Steven Spielberg, made for TV and adapted from a short story by pulp author and screenwriter Richard Matheson. It's a remarkably simple, stripped-down film, a teeth-gritting suspense thriller that unrelentingly increases the pressure on the traveling businessman David Mann (Dennis Weaver) as he faces off with a vicious truck driver who seems intent on killing Mann. Spielberg slowly builds up the suspense, seemingly from thin air: the first time the truck appears, Spielberg's low angles and uncomfortable closeups of the truck's rusty grille and thick, rotted fenders already suggest something sinister. The film begins with innocuous jockeying for position on the road, as the impatient Mann, late for a meeting, passes the truck, only to have it pass him in return, promptly slowing down again as soon as it's in front of him. It wouldn't play as anything other than ordinary highway machismo if it wasn't for Spielberg's menacing camera angles, which make the truck loom over the much smaller car, its grille like a hungry maw, its whole surface grimy and rusted, its driver obscured so that the truck seems like an inhuman, mysterious threat. When Mann pauses at a gas station, the truck pulls up next to him, and Spielberg shoots from above, looking down over the truck's cab at Mann and his little red sedan, emphasizing how he's dwarfed by his adversary.

The subtext of this highway duel is masculinity, as suggested by Mann's phone conversation with his wife when he calls her from the gas station, before the action begins in earnest. They'd had an argument the night before because they'd been at a party where a friend or business associate had obviously been all over Mann's wife — "he practically raped me," she says, as the couple's two kids play innocently nearby — and Mann had done nothing to stop the harassment. With the incident behind them, she's willing to let it drop now, but it's obvious that it was a failure of masculinity for Mann, a failure to protect his wife and defend her honor, a failure to assert his strength and dominance as a man. (His name is even Mann: get it?) A sexual failure, too, the failure to maintain his exclusive sexual possession of his woman. This brief conversation colors the entire film, as does the radio program that Mann listens to during the introductory scenes, a conversation in which a man worries that he's not the "head of his household," that his wife really runs things. Mann, when a gas station attendant tells him, "you're the boss," makes a similar joke, wearily tossing off, "not at home," suggesting that he, too, feels like his masculinity is not entirely secure, that he's also not the head of his household.

These concerns are echoed in a later scene where Mann, during a respite from the truck's assaults, comes across a school bus that's stranded by the side of the road. The bus driver wants Mann to push the bus out of the dusty shoulder, but Mann simply gets their bumpers locked together and gets stuck himself, as the kids in the bus make faces at him and mock him, their laughing faces captured in uncomfortable closeups that emphasize Mann's humiliation. When the truck suddenly appears and easily pushes the school bus back onto the road, the symbolism couldn't be more obvious: it's a visualization of impotence, as Mann's car fails to have the power or vitality to do the job, while the big, powerful truck just charges in and pushes.


Maybe it's this psychological subtext, but there's something very Hitchcockian about Spielberg's debut. The film is populated with colorful Hitchcockian bit players — especially a vibrant old lady who runs a roadside gas station slash rattlesnake farm — and has moments of suspense and dark humor worthy of the master. At one point, at a café, Mann's reveries are interrupted by the loud clatter of silverware as a waitress tosses down a place setting and asks for his order, the woman seeming to loom over Mann as she's shot from a low angle: everything begins to unnerve the poor guy, who looks around the café trying to figure out which one of the men here with him might be the truck's hateful driver. More generally, all these wide open spaces, coupled with the general situation of a man pursued by a vehicle seemingly intent on his death, evoke the crop duster showdown of North By Northwest. But the film Duel resembles the most, in some surprising ways, is actually The Birds. Much as in the Hitchcock film, Duel is about senseless, incomprehensible violence, about something innocent turning on the protagonist and seeking his destruction without any apparent reason. Just as the birds have no purpose, no cause for their sudden violence, the truck driver in Duel remains inscrutable, his face always obscured — the most Mann ever sees of the driver is his boot and his forearm. This sudden violence makes no sense, it's a nightmare of helplessness, as inexplicable as it is terrifying.

Spielberg, even at this early stage, has a real feel for these scenes of suspense and action. The editing is crisp but not choppy, alternating between wide angles and long shots that show the car and the pursuing truck winding around twisty mountain roads, and closeups that capture the contrast between the implacable, monstrous facade of the truck and the sweaty human desperation of Mann in his car. Throughout it all, the sun beats down on the cars, bright and huge, spreading its white glow diffusely across the whole sky, refracting in the chrome and dirty glass of the dueling vehicles. The film feels hot and dusty, with Mann trapped between the steaming heat of the sun and the clouds of dust kicked up beneath the tires of his car.

That atmosphere, coupled with the mysterious, almost apocalyptic aura of the unyielding, unstoppable truck, makes Duel a consistently powerful debut film from the soon-to-be blockbuster director. The film does bog down during its middle section in the café, where Mann tries to grapple with what's happening to him. His internal monologue, delivered in voiceover, is awkwardly handled and doesn't add much to the film that isn't conveyed much more potently without words. This is a concept that requires few words and few adornments, and once Mann returns to the road, pursued by the unrelenting truck that haunts him, the film picks up speed again and never slows down until its fiery conclusion.

Inception

Christopher Nolan's Inception is a purposefully twisty film, a film that prides itself on its elaborate structure — a structure that exists on the meta-level of the narrative as well as constantly asserting itself within the film itself. Mirroring the film's plot about sci-fi thieves who enter people's dreams to steal (or plant) crucial bits of information, Nolan weaves through one layer of dreams/narrative after another, constantly sending his characters leaping from one false reality to another, and thrusting the audience through similarly discombobulating shifts. And yet, for all these dreams and dreams within dreams, and maybe dreams within dreams within dreams, the film telegraphs its supposedly most important revelations well ahead of time, and in the end all of its intricate structures and flashy surfaces seem designed to disguise the rather conventional story being told at its center.

Early on, after the dizzying, action-packed opening sequence, it becomes clear that Inception is at heart a heist picture. The ace dream "extractor" Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are hired to do a seemingly impossible job for the businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe): to plant an idea in the head of Saito's corporate rival, Fischer (Cillian Murphy). To do so, of course, Cobb and Arthur will need to gather a team, which triggers the obligatory extended sequence in which the pair goes around gathering together their fellow conspirators, including the "architect" Ariadne (Ellen Page), who will build the dreams, and the forger Eames (Tom Hardy), who will pose in other identities within the dreams. Once this team is assembled, the dream extractors enter the mind of Fischer, enacting an elaborate plan that involves putting the businessman to "sleep" multiple times, moving from one dream to another within his sleeping mind, constructing multiple layers of reality where the various characters are sleeping, dreaming within a dream, all while their "real" bodies are sleeping on a 747 bound for Los Angeles.

The bulk of the film is taken up by this complex web of dreams within dreams, and Nolan stages it all as an unrelenting action race against time. You see, Fischer had had training to protect against extraction, which means that his subconscious is "militarized," and that means that people are constantly shooting at the heroes. And if they die in the dream, they'll go into limbo, even though under normal circumstances they'd just wake up when "killed" in a dream. And... well, there's a lot more, but that's a big part of the problem. The film is awash in complex concepts and reversals, in intricate rules and exceptions to those rules. Mostly, though, it all just plays out as a big, thudding, deafening action extravaganza, like the wildest physics-defying action sequences from The Matrix stretched out to feature-length (kind of like The Matrix's sequels, come to think of it). When the extractors arrive in a dream layer that is, for some inexplicable reason, set in a snowy wilderness with a heavily defended fortress at the center, it seems less like a movie than a video game, maybe a level of a Call of Duty shoot-em-up. That's what the various dream layers start to feel like after a while, like levels in a game — and when you get right down to it, while it's lots of fun to play a video game, no one really likes watching someone else play a video game. Nolan is playing a very big, very expensive, very complicated video game here, and it's exhausting to watch him play it through to the last level.


All of Nolan's blaring action set pieces and dream levels would perhaps be more bearable if one sensed there was something of substance to be found by navigating this maze. But, much as in The Prestige, Nolan's last attempt at a "personal" interlude in between Batman films, all of the film's narrative shenanigans don't really add up to anything in the end. It seems like a superficial attempt to dazzle with complexity for its own sake, despite a conceit that's tailor-made for such narrative pyrotechnics. Comparing Inception or The Prestige to Nolan's breakthrough second film, Memento, it's obvious that what's really missing is a deeper emotional connection to the film's structural gimmicks. The reverse-time structure of Memento, so often wrongly derided as a shallow gimmick, was actually a clever and substantial way of reflecting not only the character's short-term memory loss, but the resulting disconnect between his morality, his actions, and his reasons for those actions. Cause and effect were reversed and disassociated for that film's protagonist, and the film's structure reflected that.

Inception is lacking in that kind of depth. Nolan's love of structural puzzles seems to have consumed him, to the extent that the gimmicks now drive the film, rather than allowing the narrative structure to be defined by the story's themes and characters. Cobb is driven by his relationship with his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), and their children, who he's been estranged from. His fixation on Mal and his desperation to get back to his children are his major motivating forces and, more or less, his only character traits. But there's no depth to these emotional foundations. The film slowly metes out pieces of information about Cobb's past with Mal, using this relationship as material for "twists" that are so broadly telegraphed they're never even the least bit surprising. What should be the film's emotional core winds up being used for shallow suspense, and it fails even at that. Mal is never fleshed out enough as a character to make her anything more than a plot device, despite Cotillard's best efforts to make the character interesting. That's typical of the film as a whole: the performances are fine and even effective, but the characters are largely non-entities, hurtling through the film's claptrap constructions without pausing to take a break. The characterization is so thin that it's refreshing when the actors do even something small to enliven their generally functional parts, like Ariadne's little satisfied smirk after Arthur uses a tired movie trick to steal a kiss. Any little scrap of emotion, anything that feels the least bit real, is to be cherished in a movie this empty.

Within this oft-dazzling but ultimately insubstantial film, there are powerful moments, most of them early on, when the film's grandiose dream imagery still feels relatively fresh. Too often, Nolan signifies the unlimited imaginative potential of dreams by, well, blowing lots of things up, but there's no denying that certain sequences are viscerally thrilling, like the scene where Ariadne first explores the dream world, changing its architecture around her, creating steps to walk up and using mirrors to craft whole new landscapes. Nolan doesn't move much beyond this visually, though. His film's vision of dreams is surprisingly staid and unimaginative, rooted more in other movies — the weightless kickboxing cribbed from The Matrix, the crumbling dystopian cities of countless sci-fi movies, the frenetic action movie chase scenes of James Bond or Jason Bourne — than in a real feel for dream logic or the surreal imagery of our minds. For a film about dreaming and reality, Nolan is dreaming surprisingly small, content to deliver predictable heist movie beats dressed up in a flashy surface that he presumably hopes will be mistaken for the substance missing from the film.

Blood Simple

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

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

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


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

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

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

3 Women

Robert Altman's 3 Women is a bizarre, unsettling, darkly funny and mysterious film. It is virtually indescribable, proceeding according to its own skewed, dream-like logic, presenting the frequently absurd dialogue and characters with an utterly straight face, balancing carefully between portentous, densely symbolic drama and loony black comedy. The film centers on the relationship between two women, both named Mildred: the relentlessly chatty Millie (Shelley Duvall) and the shy, awkward young Pinky (Sissy Spacek). The two women meet at a job, working at a spa caring for elderly patients, and the girl-like Pinky, who seems more like a child than an independent young woman, instantly idolizes Millie and latches onto her. The two women soon become roommates, despite Millie's offhanded nastiness towards the other girl, and Pinky's attachment to her new friend only becomes more intense and creepier. The third women of the title is Willie (Janice Rule), a slightly older woman who runs a local bar where Pinky and Millie sometimes hang out. The pregnant Willie says little throughout the film, though her disturbing paintings of monstrous, Egyptian-influenced figures locked in combat show up everywhere. Together, the three women represent three generations of womanhood, with Willie as the grandmother, Millie as the mother, and Pinky as the child. This linkage between the women only becomes clear during the film's coda, but before that point it's obvious at least that Pinky is like a free-spirited child, excited by everything, always asking innocent questions, playfully blowing bubbles in her drinks.

The film is a strange character study of these three women who, in different ways, are dissatisfied with their lives. Millie is a chipper, cheery woman who presents herself as a popular girl with an endless string of boyfriends and suitors, but in fact she's strange and lonely, unable to connect with anyone. Her stories about herself don't match up with reality at all: it's clear that no one wants to be around her, and rarely does anyone even acknowledge her constant stream of non-sequitur anecdotes and self-promotion. Her outgoing persona is a mask, disguising her inner loneliness and desperation, and she has a whole vital fantasy life about how all these guys want her, how she has countless men wrapped around her fingers when in fact she can barely get anyone to acknowledge her existence. Although Pinky outwardly seems very different, she is similarly lonely and strange, similarly disconnected from everyone around her. At work, everyone ignores her as thoroughly as they do Millie, and she seems immature, arrested in her development, like a child sent out on her own before she was really ready.

The relationship between the roommates reverses, however, following a confrontation over Willie's washed-up former stuntman husband Edgar (Robert Fortier), who's clinging pathetically to his TV cowboy persona. Millie comes home with him one night, and when she yells at Pinky for judging her desperate promiscuity, Pinky throws herself off the balcony into the pool below, a pool decorated with Willie's sinister paintings, seeming to writhe with the waves and ripples in the water. When Pinky emerges from a coma some time later, she's assumed Millie's personality, writing in Millie's diary, hanging out with the guys at the apartment complex who Millie had always wanted, even coming on to Edgar. She begins to seem like a more successful and well-liked version of Millie, garnering the attention that Millie had always wanted so badly herself. Faced with this change, Millie begins shrinking into herself, losing her flirtatious demeanor, becoming more like the indrawn girl that Pinky had previously been.


Altman presents this drama of psychological transference and doubling with a detached, unsettling directness that enhances the strangeness of the story and the characters themselves. The film is a complex web of symbols, from Willie's paintings with their exaggerated sex organs and violent poses to the constant use of water to overlay the characters. At various times, there seems to be a filter of water wavering across the frame, turning the women's faces blue, its waves flickering up and down to cover the screen and then recede. Sometimes these shots might be motivated by the presence of a fish tank, but more often the water appears without any obvious motivation, as though there were waves constantly churning in the characters' heads, foreshadowing Pinky's watery plunge and subsequent mental realignment.

Doubles are also important here. Millie and Pinky work with a pair of twins (Leslie and Patricia Ann Hudson) who don't talk to anyone but each other, who are locked into their own private world, maintaining an abstracted distance from everyone around them. Pinky wonders aloud what it would be like to be twins like that, and raises the possibility that maybe they switch places every day, deciding which twin they'd like to be that day. Pinky obviously wishes for that kind of fluidity of identity, the ability to become someone else, to trade places with Millie, who she worships so deeply. The film's second junction point, after Pinky's near-drowning, is preceded by a lengthy dream sequence in which Pinky dreams of superimpositions and doubles, seeing Millie's face doubled as it had been in the mirrored surface of Pinky's hospital room, seeing Willie doubled in her grief over Edgar's cheating, seeing the face of a plastic witch from Willie's bar superimposed over the face of Pinky's mother, who Pinky insists isn't really her mother. When she wakes up from this dream, she seems newly vulnerable, more like her old self, and this prepares her for her final transformation, when, in the film's mysterious coda, she seems to have formed a makeshift new family with Millie and Willie, taking on the role of obedient but sullen daughter.

Implicit in this ending is a commentary on gender roles and expectations, on the place of women. By the end of the film, the three women are inhabiting an older ideal of the family unit, but notably without any men in the equation. With their quirks and their idiosyncrasies, these women never quite fit in anywhere, so they have to create their own space, their own family to replace the absences that are otherwise in their lives. Millie didn't know her parents, who didn't want her and abandoned her to various foster families. Pinky rejects her parents, who are surprisingly old considering their daughter's youth, and who seem utterly disconnected from the world, reacting even to the news of their daughter's coma with a curious abstraction and lack of emotion. And Willie's only family is Edgar, a philandering drunk who cheats on his pregnant wife and pathetically lives in his past, when he at least flirted with fame and success by appearing as a stuntman on TV. Clearly the families these women have are inadequate, and by the end of the film the women only have, and only need, one another.

All of which implies that 3 Women is a very heavy movie, but in fact it both is and isn't. The heavy symbolism and dour mood is constantly being subverted by the goofy, absurdist, intentionally banal dialogue, which everyone delivers with a deadpan nonchalance that only winds up making it more disarmingly comical. There's something purposefully off about the film's tone which enhances the sense of wrongness and disconnection in these people's lives. Millie in particular is a source of loony comedy, as she's constantly babbling about hula dancing, "hot dates," and her low-budget recipes for tuna casserole, pigs-in-a-blanket and cheese on crackers. There's something helplessly funny about her, and about Duvall's earnest performance, like the way she very sincerely explains the difference between English mustard and French mustard as colors, or the stunned expression on her face as she watches the childlike Pinky gulp down a whole glass of beer after pouring salt into it and blowing away the top of the foam. The film seems especially disconnected from reality during the visit from Pinky's supposed parents (John Cromwell and Ruth Nelson), who bring along a prayer placard — "for the kitchen," the mother helpfully explains, in a line that is unaccountably funny in context — and who seem generally unattached to the same reality as the other characters. But then all of these characters seem to be inhabiting their own individual realities, separated from normal society and fully invested in the odd alternate world of Altman's film.

The Town

Ben Affleck really likes Michael Mann's Heat. Like, really, really loves it. Like, it's his favorite movie ever. How do I know this? Because Affleck's second directorial feature, The Town, follows the template of Heat so closely, is so deeply indebted to its example in every way, that it might as well be a remake. Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the brains behind a gang of Boston bank robbers who run briskly paced jobs that could be mistaken for professional robberies if you ignore all the idiotic things that the script has these supposed crack thieves do over the course of the film. Heat was driven by the grudging professional respect and mutual intelligence of Robert De Niro's ace thief and Al Pacino's dogged police detective, so Affleck tries to develop a similar rivalry/bond between MacRay and the FBI agent trying to catch him, Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm). In some ways this is doomed to failure — Affleck and Hamm is simply not De Niro and Pacino, and there's nothing anyone can do about that — but the problems run deeper than that. Affleck can't develop the same epic but intimate scale that Mann so effortlessly infuses into his films, where the canvas might be sprawling but the characters within it are sharply defined. The characters of The Town lack that definition, and the relationships between them are consequently shallow. When Frawley half-admiringly calls his adversaries "the not-fucking-around crew" — after an armored car robbery that went so spectacularly, laughably wrong that the crooks ultimately escape only because the script says they must — it doesn't feel earned, it doesn't feel organic.

That's the case with a lot of things here. The Town isn't as deep or as smart as it clearly thinks it is, but it does have its charms. Affleck has a good feel for action, and his robbery scenes have energy and vigor to spare. Taken as a lightweight heist flick — its obvious cribbing from Heat aside — it's at least mildly enjoyable, and does a good job of conveying the hopeless cycle of these poor Boston guys who seem to have crime passed down to them in their blood from their equally lowlife fathers. As the Irish gangster Fergie (Pete Postlethwaite) tells MacRay's gang at one point, he looks at them and sees their fathers; he's an old guy who's been in this racket long enough to see gangs of sons replace their fathers. That's probably the film's most compelling subtext, this emphasis on the continuity of crime from one generation to the next within this cramped part of Boston that no one ever really gets out of.

Less compelling is the budding romance between MacRay and the bank manager, Claire (Rebecca Hall), who his gang had briefly taken hostage during the robbery that opens the film. Affleck seems to be going for the unlikely but surprisingly tender romance between De Niro and Amy Brenneman in Heat, but Mann developed those characters so that they were disarmingly right together. The romance in The Town just consistently feels unlikely and silly, despite a warm and nuanced performance from Hall as her character deals with the stress of the bank robbery's fallout. The drama is, in general, rather generic, just stock bits of childhood trauma that provide the characters an opportunity for ponderous soul-baring speeches. MacRay's mother left him when he was a kid, and Claire had a brother who died when she was young, though this bit of information then becomes merely a source for the clever catch phrase that Claire uses to alert MacRay to the feds' presence in her apartment when Affleck decides to rip off the farewell scene between Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd in, you guessed it, Heat.


That's not all he rips off. The film frequently feels like a collection of scenes and scenarios from Mann's heist classic. The final robbery, at Boston's Fenway Park, degenerates into a street battle between cops and crooks, with assault rifles blaring. In the midst of this chaos, the final run of MacRay's best friend James (Jeremy Renner, giving an edgy, slightly sinister performance that deepens the character far more than the script does) feels more than a little like a recreation of the final moments of Tom Sizemore's character in Heat. In the film's final act, MacRay even develops a thirst for vengeance that drives him much as De Niro's Neil McCauley in Heat.

But this is precisely where the biggest difference between The Town and its source arises. It's obvious, from his film's denouement, that Affleck is more of a romantic than Mann. Virtually no one could watch the final act of Heat without desperately hoping that Neil makes it out alive, that's he's able to evade capture and find his private paradise with the woman he loves, away from the life of violence and crime he'd made for himself. And virtually no one could watch the final act of Heat without knowing that Neil is doomed anyway, that his mythical "one last gig" will not be his last because he's gone into hiding on some tropical island. Neil is such a compelling character, as defined by Mann and De Niro, that one always wants to see him make it, even knowing he won't, and even despite everything's he done in his life. Affleck obviously watches Heat with that same yearning for Neil's success, and this is doubtless why he decided to give his own film a kind of happy ending for his own character — as though he could vicariously live out the escape and rebirth denied to Neil. Neil's desire for vengeance undid him, but MacRay is able to get his vengeance, he's able to get his escape, he's able to get his redemption by using his stolen money for good, he's even implicitly able to get his girl, who may come join him in his exile someday. Affleck is ducking away from darkness and complexity, delivering a would-be heartwarming ending in which the longtime crook redeems himself and gets away clean. It's singularly unsatisfying, and not only because of the cheesy sunset shot of a bearded MacRay looking out over a lake from his remote cabin.

What's obvious is that Affleck wanted to remake Heat without dealing with the complicated morality or deep, contradictory characters of Mann's film. The Town still has its moments, like the way James takes a sip of soda from a discarded fast food drink before making his suicidal final run at the cops: the kind of small, surprising, humanizing detail that is sorely needed in this film. The performances are largely solid, particularly Renner's James, who has an at times creepy bond with his childhood friend, and Postlethwaite as the kind of sinister, subtly nasty hood who might have fit well in one of Guy Ritchie's first couple of films. The only real exception is Blake Lively, as James' sister Krista, delivering a mumbling, over-the-top performance of such spectacular awfulness that her big dramatic moments induce only giggles. The problem with the film is not the cast, however, but the generic unoriginality of its script and the lack of anything substantial or un-borrowed to flesh out these clichés.

Minority Report

[This is a contribution to the Steven Spielberg Blogathon, hosted by Icebox Movies and Medfly Quarantine, running from December 18-28.]

It is fitting, and much remarked-upon, that for a film about seeing the future, eyes and vision are incredibly important to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. The film literalizes the idea of seeing the future, removes the concept from the realm of the metaphysical and places it into the context of a gritty forensic police thriller. The future world it imagines, by way of Philip K. Dick, is one in which a trio of powerful precogs — savants with awesome mental abilities — are harnessed by the police department to prevent violent crimes before they happen. The precogs see — literally see — murders that are going to happen in the future, and their visions are harnessed through computers into video records that can then be played back, manipulated, and enhanced, their details thoroughly dissected by the precrime investigator John Anderton (Tom Cruise).

The business of cop shows, the sifting through of evidence and unearthing of clues, is translated into this futuristic milieu as Anderton analyzes these videos in order to discover the soon-to-occur murder's location and actors. Spielberg stages the introductory scene of Anderton leading an investigation as though the detective was conducting a symphony, using a complex computer system that responds to his every movement. He waves his hands and video fragments dash across the screen. Segments are looped and repeated, details are zoomed in on and snatches of sound are amplified, and every nuance of the video becomes a potential clue pointing towards the scene of the future crime. Detective work becomes a process of looking deeply and intently, examining the image — in other words, the detective becomes a figure analogous to a film editor, or perhaps a film critic, an analyzer of images, fitting together the bits and pieces of a scene in a way that makes sense and reveals the meaning of the scene.

The film's literalization of seeing the future is so potent because it's a metaphor or a model for the cinema, but even more poignantly it's compared to home movies. Anderton spends his days looking into the future, but his nights are spent immersed in the past, in home movie recordings of his young son, who disappeared and is presumed dead. We never say that we are seeing the past in the same way as we talk about seeing the future, but when we look at home movies or a photo album, we are in fact seeing the past, visually engaging with memories. When Anderton pulls up the footage of his son playing on the beach, selecting it from a larger collection like a connoisseur, he engages with it in much the same way as he does with the precogs' visions of the future: looping and rewinding, revisiting key passages as though hoping to extract some meaning, some tangible clue, from these images of his laughing, energetic son. It places Anderton's work in heartrending relief, as an effort to find the truth in these video images of the future, the truth that eludes and mystifies him when trying to make sense of the loss of his son through video records of the past.


The directive to look, to see deeply, is also central to the character of Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most powerful of the precogs. Agatha wants a witness, wants someone to look closely at a particular vision of hers, a vision of a crime that has long been thought "solved," the murder prevented before it happened. Agatha's quest becomes linked to Anderton's when Anderton sees himself in one of the precogs' visions, and sees his own name come up as the next would-be murderer for the police to apprehend. Anderton is forced to go on the run, eventually joined by Agatha, who he liberates from her weird imprisonment in the tanks that house the precogs and make them look like exhibits at an aquarium, an aspect of the whole precog system that everyone seems, curiously, morally blind to until Anderton rips Agatha out of this housing and is forced to confront her humanity.

That moral blindness is another form of seeing and not seeing, the motif that Spielberg seems fascinated with here. Is it really possible that this future society is so indifferent to the humanity of the precogs that a system where these people are permanantly chained, physically and mentally, to a computer system that channels their visions, is not only accepted but is soon to be unveiled on a larger scale? Before Anderton goes on the run, he and his fellow cops make some nods to the moral and philosophical dilemmas at the root of precrime — how do you arrest someone for a crime that hasn't actually occurred? — but they easily shake off the deeper doubts of FBI agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), dismissing his concerns as inconsequential whining. In (broad) contemporary political terms, Witwer is the bleeding-heart liberal concerned with rights and morality, while the rest of society seems poised to side with the law-and-order conservatives who view the sacrifice of these abstract values and ideals as secondary to the gains of preventing murders. Spielberg never taps too deeply into this subcurrent of the story, but it's there nevertheless, teasing just below the surface.

Instead, there's a lot more fun with eyes and seeing. Anderton, grieving for his son, buys his drugs from an eyeless man whose hollow, empty sockets unseeingly bore into the center of the suffering Anderton. Later, he goes on the run but his eyes identify him wherever he goes. In this future society, eyescans are so routine that even advertisements scattered around on billboards scan the eyes of passersby in order to target spoken ads at individuals. As a result, wherever Anderton goes, his name is being shouted out amidst cheery slogans; Big Brother sees him everywhere because big companies see him everywhere. There's something to be said here, probably, about the reversal of the usual couch potato dynamic of consumers staring at ads. Now the ads stare back, and get personal, the logical outgrowths of online ad targeting and spyware. Spielberg, again, doesn't really go there, just leaves it as intriguing loose thread. For him, the eyescans are a plot device, necessary to give Anderton an obstacle to overcome.


This problem results in the ingenious sequence where Anderton goes to a disreputable doctor who gives him an eye transplant, which in this society where eyes are the windows not only to the soul but to one's entire person, is the equivalent of a new name and a new identity. Spielberg stages a brilliant sequence where the blind and blindfolded Anderton, who has to shield his eyes for some time after the surgery, is forced to hide from an army of spider-like miniature police robots. Spielberg's camera follows the robots on their skittering journey through the dilapidated building where Anderton is hiding, the camera seeming to creep through walls, finally arriving at the room where Anderton tries to slow his pulse and hide his breathing by submerging himself in cold water, before being forced to reveal his new eyes for the robots to scan.

All of this is set-up and preparation for the film's best gag, the slapstick chase sequence between Anderton and his own eye, a slippery connection to his past identity that he finally holds onto by the barest thread. Literally. This sense of humor — black, grisly, sometimes positively naughty as in Anderton and Agatha's visit to a virtual reality sin palace — enlivens the film, as does Spielberg's predictably fluid action staging. Minority Report is tense and visceral, balancing man-on-the-run suspense with bursts of action and those moments of piquant humor that give this dark film a surprisingly playful sensibility.

The finale drives home the film's multiple takes on seeing — to see the future, to see the truth, and not always at the same time or in the same sense — while first imprisoning Anderton in a way that mirrors the fates of the precogs at the beginning of the film, then unleashing him for the climax. Spielberg, as always, can't resist tying things up for the finale, resolving the darker undercurrents of the film in a tidy denouement where the bad guy is caught, the precog program ended, and everything set right. The rest of the film raises unsettling propositions about justice and morality: that justice could miscarry; that the illusion of moral certitude is just that, an illusion; that predicting the future can be the same as creating it, as Anderton is, paradoxically, set on the path to murder by the prediction that he would commit a murder. The film's ending tiredly suggests a more benign justice that will, eventually, win out in the end, but the torturous, unlikely machinations required to reach this happy ending only wind up enforcing the limitations of justice and law. Spielberg, no matter how hard he tries, can't erase the disquieting implications of his own film, and Minority Report is all the richer for this final lingering tension.