162. What Richard Did

Song - Troy (Sinead O'Connor)

Movie: What Richard Did (Lenny Abrahamson, 2012)

Lenny Abrahamson did not lose his cool! I was afraid he would go for a comforting ending, turning Richard (Jack Reynor) over to the police. Based on the film's title, I was also afraid he would go for one of those needlessly elliptical plots intertwining scenes of Richard before the incident and Richard after the incident, leaving the audience in the dark for as long as possible about what Richard did. But he tells the story fully chronologically and the film is better for it. The straightforward narrative highlights how unremarkable the events leading up to Richard's misdeed are, and how easily teens can ruin a life. Especially when they are white, affluent and popular and have never needed to face the consequences of their dumb actions. When Richard throws a couple of punches to his rugby teammate Connor at a house party, it is quite clear that this is not the first (or second, or third..) time he has thrown a punch.

One of the more underrated films of the past few years has been Lone Scherfig's The Riot Club, about rich Oxford students who can't be held accountable for their actions, because they can always pull the right strings. It's an sharply written and performed film, unafraid to sting in every scene. It's also driven by a righteous anger that few recent films have matched. It came out two years after What Richard Did, and is the better film. Abrahamson's direction is a bit too understated and too resigned to give the film the extra bit of acerbity it needs. But What Richard Did puts the audience a bit more on the hook than The Riot Club did. 

The Riot Club explicitly identifies the students at its center as (the offspring of) rich Tories and presents them as arrogant entitled assholes who are not liked by the majority of the British society. Yet because of their elite connections they can do whatever they want and be ensured that once graduated they will have the kind of careers that will give them power over the populace. They are untouchable people who can shape the rules of society in their favor. Richard is not an entitled asshole. He is in fact quite a sympathetic character, smart, sensitive and good at rugby. He makes outsiders feel included among his group of friends, is responsible  and able to help a girl who has had an unpleasant sexual encounter in a bar, and genuinely loves his girlfriend Lara (Roisin Murphy). He has courted Lara straight out of the hands of Connor, but that's something 18 year olds tend to do. Besides, Lara is clearly happier (Murphy is a really great actress with an ability to portray small shifts in her emotional state without doing much) with Richard, who is more mature than Connor and can have meaningful conversations about life with her. Richard's parents own a house in Dublin and a small vacation home on the coast, but while they are well off, they are not filthy rich or part of the elite. Richard and his family do not have the power to bend society to their will, but the film is partly about the fact that they don't need to. Richard is the kind of "promising young man" society is built for. There are unseen forces at play which just make sure that the rules bend over in favor of people like Richard, without anyone really needing to make some explicit intervention.

In the end I was reminded of the Rabbi Nachtner's story in A Serious Man (to be fair, I am often reminded of that, as it is one of the greatest scenes ever), about the Jewish dentist who had a moral and spiritual crisis after thinking he found a message from God in one of his patient's teeth. The Rabbi explains that these questions are like a tootache. "We feel them for awhile, then they go away." And so after obsessively checking the mouths of his other patients for a while, the dentist eventually simply stopped checking. He "returned to life", playing golf and having happy dinners with his wife. After killing Connor, Richard has a crisis of conscience. Lara leaves him, he can't eat, he loses touch with his two best friends. But he doesn't turn himself over to the police, potential witnesses remain silent, and eventually Lara comes back to him, he has drunken conversations in the park with his friends, and starts following classes at university. He returns to life.

161. Liberty Heights

Song - Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)

Movie: Liberty Heights (Barry Levinson, 1999)

"I still remember the first time I kissed Sylvia, or the last time I hugged my father before he died." So tells us Ben Kurtzman (Ben Foster) in the film's closing voice-over. I found this an interesting choice of words. We see Ben and Sylvia's first kiss in the film. It occurs during their high school ceremony, following which it's unlikely they will see each other again. Ben, the first of his Jewish family to go to college, will attend the University of Baltimore, while Sylvia (Rebekah Johnson) will follow her family tradition to go to Spelman, the oldest private black liberal arts college in America. Both families are scandalised by the interracial kiss they see at the ceremony. The Kurtzmans are already fragile anyway, as Ben's father Nate (Joe Mantegna) is about to face a 10-year jail sentence for employing prostitutes in his flailing burlesque. It's a sad ending to this film, but the wonderfully subtle wording in that closing voice-over offers a glimpse of hope, suggesting that Ben got to hug his father after getting out of jail, and that he kissed Sylvia more than once. 

It's easy to wish that things turn out well for these people. The film's view of segregated 1955 America is so bleak it makes you sympathise with anyone who had to navigate that society. It shows how ingrained segregation was in every aspect of society, how unnatural it was, and how incompatible with the emerging youth culture. It's very easy to see how in that context a teenage Jewish boy could be confused enough to dress up as Adolf Hitler for Halloween. It's quite startling to see Ben dressed in full Nazi-regalia angrily yell at his stunned parents (and grandmother) for not letting him go out of the house like that. Levinson lets the whole scene play out longer than it needs to and ads a 'coda' in which a still uniformed Ben laughs his ass off at some TV-show he watches. It's a scene that is deliberately I think a little bit exploitative and distasteful, as it makes the scenes in which Ben's parents are equally angry at him for showing affection to a black girl only more unsettling. They would not be angry if he comes home with a non-Jewish white girl, but many public spaces where he can find one are closed for "Dogs, Jews or Colored". And as his brother Van (Adrien Brody) experiences, at 'gentile' parties he and his firends either end up beaten or emotionally manipulated. 

Van's struggles lead to a subplot that lays its critique of confused 1950's masculinity on a bit too thick, while also being slightly sexist itself. Part of the problem is that Levinson approaches this subplot as if he is making a heightened and lush 1950's melodrama, which is not a bad idea, but it doesn't at all fit the style of the rest of the film, while Brody and model Carolyn Murphy are acting in completely different modes, none of which evoke the mood, period and emotions Levinson is going for. But even if they did, their subplot is so silly and tone-deaf that it wouldn't matter much. Much better are the scenes between Ben and Sylvia, who find that all perceived differences between white and black people vanish at a James Brown concert. The film makes a good case for art, in particular music, as a powerful tool of integration, in both content and form; The soundtrack consists of songs which are famous for having a specific connection to a particular culture. Often one of these songs will kick in when 'its' culture is depicted on screen, but will then continue into a scene in which another culture is depicted. I'm not gonna pretend that this is particularly groundbreaking, but I did like it. Which is also a good summary of the film and Barry Levinson's career as a whole. As a teen I thought Wag the Dog was one of the greatest thing ever. It's not, but it sure would be nice if there was more room nowadays for films like it, Tin Men and Diner.   

160. Barfly

Song - Bed of Roses (Bon Jovi)

Movie: Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987)

This film wants to show the despairs of alcoholism and it wants to make us believe that Henri Chinaski/Charles Bukowski is happy to be an outsider who rejects Big Publishing to remain an alcoholic with his fellow lowlifes in underground LA bars. The problem is that it is much more successful at the former, and that it exists with a screenplay written by Bukowski himself. I can see why he wrote a book a couple of years after the release of this film decrying Hollywood and everything it stands for. Barfly inadvertently makes him come across as a bit of a phony. It is too transparently invested in mythmaking to make you believe in the myth, while being at its most believable when it contradicts the myth. The film is such a harrowing depiction of an alcohol addict's complete inability to function that it's hard to believe Bukowski was as addicted to alcohol as the film wants to make you believe. 

These feelings towards the film sort of make me its villain. Barfly is at its best and most interesting during the section in which publisher (and fan) Tully (Alice Krige), having finally tracked down Henri (Mickey Rourke) tries to convince him to sleep with her, and more importantly, to give up his old life. It's quite notable that up until that moment we've mostly seen disheveled people living in semi-decaying apartments, frequenting run down bars. With Tully's arrival the film suddenly remembers that it's the 1980's and gets a shinier, cleaner look, befitting Tully's perfectly groomed yuppy outfit, her shiny cabrio and her oversized house on the hill.  Tully believes there is more to Henri than meets the eye. A great writer, or rather a writer she admires, cannot possible live the life he does, or want to. The quality of one's writing must reflect the quality of one's life, and the quality of one's life is determined by one's access to the moneyed elite. These scenes have a somewhat surreal feeling (not the only time the film goes for such an effect) and Tully's role in the film is to be a sort of Faust, offering Henri a look of the life he could live if he follows her to 'her world.' The film (and obviously Henri's) rejection of her and her worldview is the best visual and narrative representation of Bukowski's rebellious outsider status.

While it's not bad, the rest of the film doesn't come close to these scenes, and is not helped by Mickey Rourke whose spEEhch cadEEhnce in the film feels like a combination of a bad imitation of Marlon Brando in The Godfather and Seinfeld's 'funny voice' in "The Voice". That's maybe a bit overstated, but for me his choice to speak like that throughout the film made his performance feel fake and contrived. Especially in contrast with the wonderfully direct no-nonsense performance of Faye Dunaway, 'Wanda', who becomes his partner in drinking. Possibly also his romantic partner, but this is left ambiguous, and of little relevance for their relationship anyway. Wanda and Henri are primarily together for beer and whiskey, not for sex and romance. 

159. Chungking Express

Song - California Dreamin' (The Mamas & The Papas)

Movie: Chungking Express - Chung Hing sam lam (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

I was not entirely surprised to discover that Faye Wong is Asia's greatest pop icon. Something would have to go terribly wrong if someone with such effortless cool and charisma, and talent for how to use it charmingly, doesn't become a superstar. And yet, I almost couldn't help but be disappointed by that discovery. This is the kind of film whose world you want to live in. Said world being one where the ordinary folks you meet at the snackbar at the corner turn out to be some of the coolest people on the planet. It's absolutely delightful, literally from the first until the last shot.

How can a film in which we see a heartbroken man consoling his furniture, while during his working shifts a 'quirky' woman sneaks into his apartment to rearrange it, be so incredibly good? Much of it has to do with the light touch, the warmth and spontaneity with which Wong films his characters and Hong Kong street life, the playful stylistic and narrative digressions, the palpable pleasure it takes in its own existence and the brilliantly uninhibited and earnest performances of every single actor in the film. But above all, the film has a sense of urgency, to express the joy and freedom of (living in) the world it depicts. It's about melancholic romantics seeking, and not always finding, love, joy and happiness. But there is a sort of understanding that having the ability and capacity to spend much of your time doing that, is a triumph worth celebrating in and of itself, regardless of the success rate. "Do you like pineapple?" is not a great opening line and most of the time it won't get you a partner, but isn't it awesome to be able to try anyway and see where it gets you? Chungking Express largely consists of a series of such impulsive acts, of which you can ask a similar question. Its answer is always affirmative, creating an exuberantly giddy mood, reflected by the restless, lively style of the film.

I am also a sucker for films in which people hang around after hours on the brightly lit streets of a buzzing metropolis and are swept up in that buzz along with the audience. Combine that with some fun dialogue, good music, a director drunk on style and a general vibe of camaraderie and I am all in. This is why After Hours (by a vibe of camaraderie I don't necessarily mean an optimistic vibe, rather one that communicates that we are all in this together) is probably my favorite Scorsese movie. Chungking Express is not as great as After Hours, but it comes really close, creating many moments whose magic can only be understood in the context of the film. It's impossible to explain in a short blog post (or in a longer one) how a shot of an airplane flying over a T-shirt drying on a clothesline can be both hilarious and melancholic. You will get it if you are on the film's wavelength, which should not scare anyone off. It's hard not to be on this film's wavelength. I suspect it will only grow in power. Its sense of urgency and its vision of freedom have been fully validated by current events, which include more than China's crackdown on the city. IMDb notes that the snackbar at the film's center has been transformed into a 7-11. 

158. Last Days

Song - Mooie Dag (Blof)

Movie: Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005)

Gus van Sant is one of the last examples of a healthy Hollywood studio system. He is happy to make mid-budget (comedy-)dramas as a gun for hire, add a bit of a personal touch to them, make some money and then disappear out of the mainstream for a couple of years to follow his own whims. Those whims seem to carry him towards languid explorations of death and alienation, which is not quite my thing. But I am a big fan of his mainstream work. Good Will Hunting is one of my favorite films, and To Die For, Milk and Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot are wonderful films you can easily imagine being much worse. I even quite like Promised Land and Finding Forrester. With the exception of To Die For (maybe the bitterest media satire since Network) all these films share a gentle, bemused humanism and have a proudly, independent and even sneakily countercultural spirit. They are implicitly or explicitly about the creation or sustenance of communities, values and lives outside of mainstream culture and about how these communities, values and lives are worth defending. It's worth noting that even the triumphant ending of Good Will Hunting does not involve Matt Damon getting a career, or even any kind of certainty. What makes the ending triumphant is that Will Hunting has accepted that he can be loved for who he is and all his eccentricities and flaws. 

Last Days' Blake (Michael Pitt), a character based on Kurt Cobain, has not accepted that, and now he is going through life like a half-dead unkempt zombie mumbling to himself, barely noticing anyone around him. It['s probably a rather good depiction of someone who has utterly and completely given up on life after years of addictions, insanity, the pressure of fame and who knows what else. Sadly, it's just completely uninteresting and rather exhausting to follow Blake around for 1,5 hour, though you sort of admire how little Van Sant cares about audience expectations. 

Even more admirable is Michael Pitt's discipline; he has an utterly thankless role. Most of the time we seem him from the back, in the dark, or from the side. When we see him from the front, he is either far away from the camera, or his hair hides his face. In one shot, just when he turns to the camera, he takes a puff from a cigar, smoking it with the palm of his hand obscuring half his face. Throughout the film he is talking to himself, but most of it is unintelligible. When he is not doing that, he is sitting, or crawling despondently, in an almost slow-motion. Twice in the film he picks up a guitar to play. The first time the camera moves slowly away from him as we see him through a hazy window, while the diegetic sound of the guitar is overwhelmed by non-diegetic music. The second time, he is in a dark room at the edge of the frame, barely allowing us to see him. I am rather indifferent towards Nirvana and Cobain, but felt like inviting comparisons between Blake and him was rather unfair and unnecessarily unflattering towards Cobain. 

Out of context and from a technical point of view that dolly shot the first time we see Blake play guitar is really great. There is another great shot in which we see two people sleeping on the first floor of the house, with behind them a TV showing a karate match, while outside of the window we see Blake yakking around in the garden. The rest of the film isn't too bad to look at either. Van Sant has a good eye and his approach is not entirely unreasonable. He has obviously tried to make a film that fits and mirrors Blake's state of mind and that is as detached from him as he is from life. That this ultimately doesn't lead to anything worthwhile may be the point, but it's not a particularly insightful one. If you want to see an actually great Van Sant art film that tries some similar things, Elephant is the way to go. 

157. A Matter of Life and Death

Song - Knockin' On Heaven's Door (Guns N' Roses)

Movie: A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

A double feature of The Best Years of Our Lives and A Matter of Life and Death may give you a better understanding of the horrors of World War 2 than almost any film actually depicting those horrors. A Matter of Life and Death only gives you a small glimpse at the beginning. In the final days of the war Peter Carter (David Niven) is flying over the British Channel as his plane is about to go down. Expecting to die, he is trying to have one final conversation, tinged with courage and melancholy, with his radio operator June (Kim Hunter). Miraculously, he survives the plane crash. Even more miraculously, the plane crashes at the beach where June is working. Much less miraculously, they immediately fall in love, only for Peter to be visited by a messenger from Heaven, telling him an administrative mistake had been made. He was supposed to die in the plane crash, but due to the British fog, Death couldn't find him. Now he hast to make the case for his life before the heavenly court.

The film is both more mysterious and fantastic and more grounded in reality than that description makes it sound. We never find out how Peter survived his crash or how that crash brought him straight in the arms of June. But the film also immediately makes clear that the messenger from Heaven is only a hallucination, the consequence of a neurological disorder Dr. Frank Reeves (Roger Livesey), a friend of June, is trying to diagnose and cure. It never really becomes clear what that neurological disorder is exactly but what matters is that it is real and curable. What matters even more is that June is never scared or put off by what Peter tells her, and that both she and Frank fully believe that he is seeing exactly what he is telling them, and have a plan for how to help him. They do so with kindness, care and a real sense of urgency, as if nothing in the world matters more than helping a hurt man.  

It should be clear by now that this is very much a message movie, that aims to give direction and comfort to the Brits after the war. But while there are moments when it plays as the most expensive PSA ever made, it's also a staggeringly great and ambitious film and an artistic and technical high-wire act, pulling off complex shots and special effects and visual, tonal, narrative and thematic shifts few films would even think of. Especially mindblowing is a shot in which we see Peter looking at a lamp from the point of view of his eyes. The lamp is perfectly framed within his eyelids, making it look like an iris. Its a visual representation of the closing of an eye seen from the point of view of said eye closing. To even conceive of a shot like that is genius. To actually pull it off, is something else completely. There are more examples of such virtuosity (the camera obscura!), but on top of all that this is also a deeply compassionate film, using the language of British patriotism to make a call for global solidarity and brotherhood in the context of the shellshocked vulnerability of the people and societies surviving the war, and their inability to make sense of it. The plane crash and the neurological disorder are good metaphors for its view of the war. The world survived, but it was a lucky escape; we have no real idea how that exactly happened, or what it exactly survived, but we somehow got to work together to make sure it never happens again. 

It's easy to imagine how moving the first scenes of heaven (connected to our world by a giant mechanical staircase) must have been to audiences in 1946. Filmed in black and white, we see young pilots getting in, ready to check in and get some food. They are greeted by kind and professional female nurses and administrative workers, showing them the way around their new residence. These scenes are an immediate reminder of the sacrifices made by both men and women during the war, but also a comforting fantasy. It gives the audience a possibility to imagine a less grim ending for their dead countrymen, to see them not just as dead bodies under the ground but as lively souls who still have opportunities for joy and happiness. Just when you think the film may present a too rosy picture of death, it sends its heavenly messenger to England to find Peter. Through a nice meta-joke ('One is starved for Technicolor up there') the Earth is immediately contrasted from heaven. Even more so when the messenger finds Peter and June making gentle love among the colorful flowers and fields. 

As Peter's hallucinations increase (during which, from his POV, time stops and the people around him are frozen in mid-action), he learns that the trial's prosecutor will be Abraham Farlan, the first American to be killed by a British bullet, who objects to a love between the English Peter and the American June. Abraham Farlan is a completely fictional character, which gets to another brilliant gambit of the film. Its heaven is occupied by all the great thinkers, lawyers and statesmen of history, from Plato and Socrates to Lincoln, Walter Scott and Cardinal Richelieu. But we don't see any of them (except for John Bunyan in a very brief cameo), only hear the characters gossip about them, giving a rather wonderful impression of heaven as the greatest salon ever, filled with great pontificators exasperating each other. It must have been incredibly tempting to include a couple of scenes where we see them doing that, or to turn the trial of Peter into a rhetorical battle between the likes of George Washington and William Shakespeare. But that approach would have ruined the magic, besides for the film's intents it is important that the debate takes place between everymen. That does lead to the film's one somewhat false note. Just before his operation, Peter finds out that dr. Frank is killed in a motor accident, allowing him to become his defense counsel.    

The trial is set in a majestic courthouse in which Abraham and Frank debate each other from two giant plateaus on either side of it, and where there is room for all the people in heaven to attend. The trial largely serves the same function as Charlie Chaplin's famous speech in The Great Dictator, but it's better integrated in the film's story. Moreover, it's a wonderfully edited sequence. Each cut during the trial makes dramatic and emotional sense, while also enriching, complicating and complementing the points made by the counsels. Starting off as a debate on Peter and June's love for each other, it quickly moves to become a discussion on the similarities and differences between Britain and America, the ways in which personal and national identities are intertwined (and to what extent they are), Britain's place in the post-war world, the ideal of America, and the need for cooperation and love between the two nations, and the rest of the world. 

The trial is attended by nurses, soldiers, nuns and all kinds of other people who participated in the war effort. Some of them are the same people we saw in the first impression of heaven, but this time there are also Asians, black people, Indians and many other races and nationalities in the audience. In the jury too, which consists of a Frenchman, A Dutchman who fought in the Boer War, a Russian who fought in the Crimean War, a Chinese man, an Indian and a Irishman. After both Frank and Abraham note that the jury is stacked against the British, and Abraham sings the praises of American individuality, Frank demands an all-American jury. He gets one consisting of a French-American, a Dutch-American, an Irish-American, a black American, an Asian-American and an American of vaguely Eastern-European origin. Its a sincere argument for the melting pot, made with visual elegance, one which you'd wish more contemporary films would make. It's also a refutation of Abrahams' ideas about national identity. He illustrates those by dropping a glass on the floor, and arguing that it's in the glass' nature to break, a nature it can't escape no matter how hard it tries. There are obviously no Germans in the film's heaven, but the film's ultimate message that individuals can overcome their nation's history, culture and identity can be seen (though was probably not intended that way) as an olive branch towards peace and reconciliation. 

156. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Song - Space Oddity (David Bowie)

Movie: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

It's wonderful to think that the Americans and Soviets invested in the space race out of a sincere belief in the advancement of humankind. Certainly, many people at the center of their space programs subscribed to the Utopian ideals of space exploration. But it's hard to escape the fact that without the need for Cold War domination, we likely wouldn't have heard of Yuri Gagarin or Neal Armstrong. The famous match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey expresses this idea much more elegantly than I do here. The cut, from a bone thrown in the air by a monkey who has just discovered he can use it to destroy his enemies, to a satellite circling the earth, is audacious, cheeky and effective. I couldn't see anything in the film, independently from it. Yet this is not (purely) a pessimistic film. It's both incredibly cynical and incredibly hopeful.

Every object here is presented as the absolute zenith of technology and design, with the film spending a lot of time ogling the various satellites, spaceships and other nifty inventions floating through space, set to Johaness Strauss' Blue Danube. The film fully emphasises the majesty of space and the majesty of getting things up in space to work the way we intend them to work. And not only do they work, they also look beautiful and graceful doing so. Kubrick shows them in all their glory, slowly unveiling the enormity of these things, and their mechanical complexity without ever letting them hit a snag. They move fluidly through space. And their interiors are equally stylish, looking as if they are created by the hippest 1960's designers. (Quite a pity that the funky modernism of the 1960's didn't actually make it to 2001). 

Watching this film now, these scenes are even more impressive as you get the feeling that after 2001: A Space Odyssey the (western) world stopped trying to find new ways to imagine space, astronauts and the infinity. Every new presentation of space seems to take this film as its lodestar. The conspiracy theory that Kubrick faked the moon landing is obviously stupid, but watching this film you sort of get where it comes from. Representations of space in contemporary culture are much closer to the aesthetic of 2001: A Space Odyssey than to the televised images of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. That is true for both fictional and non-fictional representations, for rather obvious reasons. The line between fictional and non-fictional storytelling is increasingly blurred, and that's even more so when it comes to space. A space documentary can't just go and film real footage, it has to 'imagine' much of its look. Besides, the space documentary has been popularised by Carl Sagan, who apparently helped shape the look and feel of this film. 

What differentiates most modern films from 2001: A Space Odyssey is that they try to make their characters feel as epic as space. As astronauts they are often presented as better than other ordinary human beings, clearly superior in intellect and behaviour, doing things that go beyond our wildest imaginations. While they are awed by space, they mostly are in control of the situation, unless something goes wrong. In this film they are for the longest time absolutely overwhelmed by space and modern technology, and they are presented as rather unremarkable people who, failing to comprehend the meaning of alien life forms, engage in meaningless small talk and bureaucratic briefings in which people are asked to fill in the right forms and follow the right protocols. When they eventually reach the monolith, that's supposedly the evidence of E.T.'s, they gaze at it with the same befuddled expression as the apes at the beginning of the film did. 

Those early scenes in particular emphasise the banality and insignificance of the astronauts' actions and dialogue so much they become dryly funny. I especially loved a scene in which one astronaut on his way to Jupiter receives a video message from his parents reminding him of the potential administrative hurdles connected to a raise in salary. The same 'frivolity' is later applied to a couple of death scenes to much more chilly effect. The film makes them so impersonal and sudden that it reminds you that Kubrick's reputation as a cold filmmaker is not entirely unearned. But nothing he could have done would have made those scenes, and his ideas that computers are dehumanising us, come across more effectively. The good news is that we can still outwit even the smartest supercomputer. But only when we've done so, and stop depending on technology, will we reach our true potential and be capable of going to infinity, and beyond. That (long) sequence does descend a bit too far into abstract imagery for my liking, but that's a minor complaint in a film this glorious.