Monday, September 22, 2014

BLAST FROM MY OWN PAST: THE INNOCENTS - #727

This short review comes from my old column for OniPress.com, hence the link to the excellent Capote in Kansas. It was part of a larger piece that also looked at a bunch of Val Lewton-produced movies. It was posted in conjunction with Halloween 2005.



My first choice is one that should be interesting to Oni readers who tried this summer’s Capote in Kansas, because Truman Capote did some of the work on the screenplay. Released in 1961, The Innocents is Jack Clayton’s adaptation of the Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw. Keeping 19th-century England as its setting, The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a woman who has just started a career as a governess. Her first assignment is to take care of the orphaned siblings, Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), on their uncle’s country estate. Before long, Miss Giddens realizes there is something strange about these children. They share odd secrets, enjoy a morbid sense of humor, and often wander the house unattended late at night. She also starts seeing apparitions -- the images of the groundskeeper and the preceding governess, who died as a result of an illicit tryst -- and Miss Giddens believes their malicious spirits are what have been compelling the children to act so strangely. As a result, the governess gets entangled in the age-old horror movie conundrum: is she going mad or is what she believes really happening?

The Innocents is heavy on gothic atmosphere. It uses the empty corridors and cold statues of the palatial mansion to cast a dark shadow over every event. Clayton establishes the creepiness from the first moment, with Flora singing the eerie melody that will become a motif in the film over a black screen before the 20th Century Fox logo even comes on. Everything starts in darkness. Once the logo has passed, it gives way to an amazing title sequence: Deborah Kerr’s clasped hands and her praying for the souls of the children. Kerr is wonderful throughout, playing her role with a heightened sense of dread and the anxiety of always being one step behind the action. Clayton makes the film even more tense by having everyone else in the house react to her with near indifference. They don’t disbelieve her, but they don’t actively support her, either. The audience always feels they know more than they are letting on. It all leads to a final confrontation with Miles that plays out in strange -- and dare I say, haunting -- ways. I shivered as the final title came onscreen.


Monday, September 8, 2014

ALL THAT JAZZ - #724

Do you suppose Stanley Kubrick ever gets depressed?


As a child of the 1980s--or more accurately, an adolescent of the 1980s, which is when pop culture really opened up for me--the 1970s was always this strange brown smear lingering somewhere over my shoulder. To this day, I am not particularly drawn to most of  the music or the fashion, or even the comic books really, so if it weren't for David Bowie, punk, and the mavericks of American filmmaking, I'd pretty much skip over the decade completely.

So I am somewhat in awe of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz, released in 1979, and encompassing everything that was weird and wild about 1970s indulgence and theatricality. The elevator pitch for All That Jazz was something like The Death of Bob Fosse: The Musical, but it could just as easily have been The Death of the 1970s. This is where all the excess and the partying and the ugliness caught up with a generation.


Roy Scheider stars in All That Jazz as Joe Gideon, a stand-in for the writer/director/choreographer. Fosse has put together a thinly veiled fiction of his own life, of a period when he was burning the candle at every end he could conceive of, editing his film Lenny and preparing Chicago for the stage. The lack of sleep and the sex and the drugs eventually became too much, leading to a heart attack. All That Jazz is Bob Fosse staring down his own mortality, crafting his own memorial, and staging the damned thing as one last anything-goes hurrah.


And so it is in the film that we see Gideon's life as a frenzied parade of days, spurred on by amphetamines and cigarettes, jumping from the editing suite to the rehearsal room, balancing his ex-wife and main star, his daughter, his mistress, and whatever lady maybe struck his fancy that day. Like a dancer rehearsing, the repetition of these bad habits is basically Gideon practicing the methods of his own downfall. We watch the morning routine again and again--shower, pills, eye drops--the montage growing tighter as Gideon's body deteriorates, the eternal perfectionist honing the choreography until it’s time to do it for real.


So for its first half or so, All That Jazz is an episodic narrative of a driven man. We see Joe the Dictator, and Joe the Scourge, but also Joe the Father and Joe the Artist. Fosse's ego allows for a true warts-and-all portrayal. He is no more interested in painting himself as merely a fiery demon than he is in shying away from his own faults. Gideon can be just as genuinely sensitive as he is selfish. He’s also confused, as evinced by his ongoing internal dialogue with the heavenly Angelique (Jessica Lange), a manifestation of whatever conscience or moral compass or self-doubt he may have.


It's fairly straightforward in terms of story, though punctuated with one big song-and-dance number, a few more minor toe tappers, and regular callbacks to the faux Lenny Bruce monologue. Fosse can also be playful, unspooling a comedic montage here and there, including one in the hospital after Gideon's heart attack. It's this health scare that sets up the second-half of the movie, which essentially evolves into one massive hallucination, the drugged-up, knocked-out Joe putting on a musical that combs though his past faults and sins before taking center stage himself for a farewell rock extravaganza, complete with dancers dressed as the circulatory system, KISS-wannabes, and Ben Vereen. It's a coked-out take on the Everly Brothers, every bit as tacky as changing "Bye Bye Love" to "Bye Bye Life" sounds.


It's also pretty great. It's an audacious finish to a film that is audacious through and through. All That Jazz is a passionate, energetic, unvarnished portrayal of the creative process. It is one protracted impulse, a true cinematic bucket list by a filmmaker who had pushed his life to the edge and then dragged all of his baggage back and dumped it out for everyone to see. The other big dance number, "Airotica," is both a challenge and a statement of intent, pushing the envelope of what is allowed and then having Joe Gideon stand there and point at it and say, "See this? You can't do this!"



All That Jazz is two hours of "you can't do this." Fosse proves himself both fearless and ferocious, and he coaxes Roy Scheider into the same place. Together they pull off the high-wire act they prepare the audience for right from the movie's introduction. Together, the performers take a chance, and it pays off. Sure, some of it's corny and the art direction is dated, but as I said, All That Jazz is closing the door on a timeframe. Or more appropriately, zipping up its body bag. It's as potent a finishing statement for the decade as Robert De Niro telling Sugar Ray "You never knocked me down" in Raging Bull [review]. There was no going back from this, not with Star Wars and the newly invented blockbuster breathing down everyone's necks, but what Fosse achieved and proved was that the true dreamers didn't have to go into orbit to create their own kind of outer space.


Sunday, September 7, 2014

LOVE STREAMS - #721

Love is a stream. It’s continuous. It does not stop.”

And sometimes it bears human wreckage on its currents.


In 1984’s Love Streams, his final film as writer and director, John Cassavates stars as Robert, a novelist of some fame. An aging party boy, Robert keeps many women around at one time. As the drunken lout explains to his estranged pre-teen son on a disastrous overnight trip, a man has trouble sleeping alone. These are liaisons without connection, however, because Robert isn’t very good at reaching out. At the times he does during the movie, he tends to bungle it or stop short. If his stream isn’t dammed up, then it just flows according to his own selfish purpose.


Elsewhere, Sarah is in the middle of a divorce and about to lose custody of her child. Sarah is played by Cassavetes’ real-life wife, Gena Rowlands, a regular in his films, the director’s go-to for the kind of fractured, unstable women that populate most of his screenplays. Sarah has had mental health problems, though one may surmise her biggest problem is maybe she feels too much. She has a habit of dragging her daughter (Diahnne Abbott) around to see sick people because she believes their cheery nature lifts the spirits of the ailing. The girl has had enough and wants to go live with her father (Seymour Cassel). This switcheroo casts Sarah adrift. A bit of a boozer herself, she takes some terrible advice to go to Europe and in search of sex. It’s when she comes back that she will seek out Robert and their true association will be revealed.


Up until this point, Love Streams is effectively operating as two movies. There is Robert and his girls and his domestic travails, and there is Sarah and her court battles and her wanderings. Amazingly, when they finally do come together, they basically cross and split. Sarah lands at Robert’s house, Robert takes his son to Vegas. Even then, Robert plays their relationship closer to the vest, to the point that current culture would likely label it a spoiler. There’s no real ta-dah moment, however, the magician does not lift the sheet and show us his lovely assistant; rather, the information just kind of trickles out when Love Streams finally settles down.


Robert and Sarah are brother and sister, the product of whatever warped environment would produce two such opposite beings. The man who can’t love and the woman who loves too much. Alone in the world, the two settle down in Robert’s house and try to re-connect. He attempts to be a rock for her, she strives to bring affection into his life. Her solution is to fill his house with animals, making Robert into a emotionally bereft Noah. The film’s final scenes see him running around in a ludicrous hat bringing the goat and miniature horse and fowl in out of the rain.

I would argue that this back portion of Love Steams is really its most substantial. It’s when the two characters are forced to grapple with their problems. Robert in particular embraces responsibility and tries to give his sister some stability. She is more resistant than he is. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that she spends the film’s last half hour sleeping it off while Cassavetes indulges in two ill-advised dream sequences/hallucinations. For a filmmaker revered for his realism to resort to working out these issues through fantasy seems like a cop-out. How is a musical number more effective than a tête-à-tête between his two main characters? I get that Cassavetes is revealing an irony, that Sarah is beyond reason and, despite being the one who loves, beyond repair, but this struck me as too disconnected itself.


Such is Cassavetes’ jagged storytelling style, however. His films are often hard to fathom and even hard to take, as those who have struggled with the differing versions of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie or even Opening Night can attest. His narratives are rarely clean, and his expression as ragged as the fashions he outfits his actors in. Hence the choppy nature of Love Streams’ opening scenes, or the disconcerting shifts over time and even reality. In the filmmaker’s defense, he is striving to craft a cinematic voice that relies more on real life than it does motion picture history; I’d just argue he tries a little too hard here. There is almost a feeling of desperation to how it all comes together. Perhaps it’s because Cassavetes had been told he had less than a year to live just before starting it, maybe he needed a little more time to cook but feared he didn’t have it.


Love Streams is based on a play written by Ted Allan that Cassavetes had performed in several years prior. Here the two collaborators apparently attempted to bust the play apart and root around in its inner workings. This could account for some of the jumble. They are sifting through the parts rather than putting them back together. Love Streams works more as a performance piece than it does a story.

And what performances they are. The aging Cassavetes is a growling, wounded predator here, his weathered, leonine face at times contorting into a maniacal grimace, even as his sad, soulful eyes reveal a deep hurt. He doesn’t so much interact with his fellow cast as he does move around them, the creator and his creation melding, both orchestrating their own private world. It makes sense, then, that the bits that Robert can’t control are the most interesting. The material with his son (Jakob Shaw) has a palpable rawness that should chafe against old scars of viewers who are also children of divorce. And, of course, there are also the scenes with Robert and Sarah. One can sense the very real love between them, right from their first scene together, when Robert literally leaps into the taxicab to hug his sister. It’s the husband overjoyed to be working with his wife.


The pair draw much out of each other when they are interacting one on one. Their conversations feel unrehearsed, something beyond improvised, mimicking actual speech, delivered in the moment. Rowlands’ real bravura scenes, however, are when Sarah is on her own, manipulating the world to her needs, be it bullying train station attendants into helping her or seducing the man working at the bowling alley. That’s actually the best sequence in Love Streams, the time when the audience is compelled to react as part of the production. When the man behind the counter asks Sarah how she is doing, and she starts to unload, don’t be surprised if you find yourself thinking, “Oh, god, now you’ve done it...here she goes...”


It’s the unvarnished power of moments like that one that makes Love Streams so fascinating, even if it’s ultimately unsatisfying. I felt challenged throughout the movie. Not just in that I was trying to figure it all out, but in that I was trying to stay with it, not to jettison from the experience, not to give up on these people who are alone and floundering. I suppose that is John Cassavetes’ greatest gift, the way he shows us that even if love and, by extension, life is constantly flowing, the true triumph is to not just let it carry us where it may, but in pushing against the current, to strive to be active in it and not passively drift. That was how he built his career, after all. He lived and died celebrating the different.


Monday, September 1, 2014

REDUX: VENGEANCE IS MINE (Blu-ray) - #384

They’ll hang you for sure.”


It wasn’t that long ago that I first watched and reviewed Vengeance is Mine, so I’ll direct you back to the original piece for a more in-depth look at the film, which has just been re-released on Blu-ray.

I don’t have any new great insights to add to my original thoughts. Funny enough, I kind of watched Shohei Imamura’s 1979 true-crime movie this time around as a more straightforward piece than I had back in 2013. It struck me as less of a puzzler and more of a blueprint for other epic-length bad-guy-on-the-run biopics like the two-part Mesrine movie [review 1, review 2]. Even down to how the narrative sort of drags the longer we spend with the fugitive in exile.


My main attention was drawn to Ken Ogata, and the evolution of his sociopathic murderer, Iwao Enokizu. His portrayal of Enokizu before his first killing strikes me as comparable to Robert De Niro’s work for Martin Scorsese. Post-War Iwao is impetuous and forceful, like De Niro in Mean Streets but with a real mean streak himself. After his first stint in prison, he is more like Max Cady in Cape Fear, [review] precise in his anger, and toying with the people around him. His New York Yankees cap and dark Hawaiian-style shirt even have a Scorsese flavor. His posture is slack, his limbs loose, his tone of voice hides a carefree laugh under his threats--this is a guy who believes people should just fall in line to whatever whim strikes him.

Such braggadocio disappears once Enokizu has gone on the lam, however, he becomes a more focused and deadly presence, tightening up in both word and presentation (clenched shoulders, suit and tie). There are still shades of American gangsters in his character--one can’t help but think of Dillinger when Enokizu sees himself in a movie theater newsreel; you almost expect him to get pinched with his gal (Mayumi Ogawa) when they exit--but watching the performance over the near two-and-a-half-hour running time is basically watching a bad dude calcify in his evilness. Enokizu is hardening. He may pick up lovers and even stage robberies, but he’s never having fun. This man is no Clyde Barrow, he’s too uptight. Enokizu is closer to Ted Bundy. Handsome and charismatic, but also calculated and cold, he seethes with a sense of entitlement. His biggest problem seems to be that he deserves something but not being sure what it is.

It’s a remarkable performance from Ogata, assured in its subtleties, and complete from start to vision.


Outside of the surreal final scene, Vengeance is Mine can be viewed as a rather straightforward criminal procedural, with a bravura sense of self not dissimilar to the best of American cinema in the 1970s. It’s the coda and some of the sidebar interpersonal material, particularly the relationship of the killer’s father and wife (Rentaro Mikuni and Mitsuko Baisho), that adds a slightly different flavor. But then, dear ol’ dad is a Catholic and expects divine retribution, so we’re not even too far from Scorsese there, are we?


In terms of the new release, the Blu-ray of Vengeance is Mine is certainly an upgrade, updating the previous transfer for current technology (1080p, MPEG-4 AVC encoded, lossless mono soundtrack). Colors are vibrant and detail is fantastic, allowing the viewer to study all corners of the frame. The production team also allows for a subtle grain that re-creates the authentic look of 1970s film stock.

For the audio commentary fans out, Criterion has also added a commentary track by critic Tony Rayns that was not included on the 2007 DVD edition. The other extras, including the booklet with an extensive chat with Imamura, remain, as well.


This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review. The stills shown are taken from the standard-definition DVD release and not the Blu-ray under discussion.