212. Who'll Stop the Rain

Song - Who'll Stop The Rain (Creedence Clearwater Revival)

Movie: Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)

Who'll Stop the Rain combines all the characterstic elements that made American cinema fun and interesting in the 1960's, 70's and 80's into a highly entertaining thriller. From its own time period it's got Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), a troubled anti-hero who struggles to live according to his values in a, in his view, rotten society. He is a soldier in Vietnam, about to return home, when his old friend John (Michael Moriarty) asks him to smuggle some heroin into America. The heroin is somehow connected to 'Washington' and Ray's paranoia sets in the moment he sets foot on the San Francisco harbor. It soon turns out his fears are grounded in reality and when the deal goes wrong he has to flee across the West Coast, together with John's wife Marge (Tuesday Weld), an independently minded bookstore worker who is married to John in defiance of her dad, and is also addicted to pills. 

The film shares some of Ray's pessimism and it directly presents Vietnam War trauma as the catalyst that sets the plot in motion. That's a bit clumsily directed with a couple too many flashbacks to undefined battle scenes, full of death and destruction, set in slow motion, that are meant to be poetic, but come off as tackily sentimental. Little else in the film can be called sentimental, but it's not above the sort of glorious tackiness and excesses that would define so many 80's movies. Reisz luxuriates in the glossiness of the arrogantly rich parts of Los Angeles (where Ray has come to try to sell the smack) and in the fantastically gaudy behaviors of its citizens, here represented by Eddie (Charles Haid). It's hard to believe that Anthony Zerbe, playing the federal agent in trail of Ray, has even more fun than Haid, colorfuly insulting his two dim henchmen, and super schmuck John. Reisz is happy to let the actors do their own thing, enabling even those with the smallest role to have a couple of memorable moments  All of this gives the film a wonderfully impulsive energy (at certain points it almost plays like a dry run for Midnight Run) that you wish was just a bit more stylistically charged and over the top. If the scene at Eddie's house doesn't quite get there, though the playful score brings it very far, the climax with its cacophony of folk music, gun violence and bright lights, does. It reminded me a bit, and this is a compliment, of the Wonder World super weapon scene in Beverly Hills Cop 3, even if it's (mostly) not played for laughs. 

That climax takes place around mountainous terrain in New Mexico, in Ray's hiding place he built in the 1960's to serve as a sort of commune away from the civilised world. The place includes an intricately designed sound system that enabled parties to be heard across the entire valley. Now it serves as a place (you know you are near it when you reach the giant peace sign painted on a rock) of refuge for Ray and Marge, who in anticipation of their next steps, dance to old traditional folk songs, share their fears and regrets, and slowly get more and more affection for each other as they make use of natural resources and analogue craftmanship to survive. Cops, criminals and dumb yuppies eventually destroy their serenity, leading to the aforementioned climax and the bleak final moments that remind you that this is indeed a film made in 1978. A couple years later, Nolte gets in the car. Nolte, by the way, is fantastic, in particular during the scenes in New Mexico, where he has to play Ray as mellowed by his love for Marge, without letting him lose his hard edge. His greatest moment though comes before, at Eddie's house, doing some silent face acting that is as almost as great as Robert De Niro's famous eyebrow movements in Goodfellas. 

211. High Fidelity

Song - Bloedend Hart (De Dijk)

Movie: High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000)

I've been rewatching Seinfeld in the past few months, seeing it for the first time when I am around the same age as Jerry and co. It's astounding how much better it is than I remember it, and I already liked it a lot. It's of course ridiculously funny, but I didn't expect it to also be so perceptive about its characters' general way of being, and their fears, insecrurities, hopes and joys. The show is rightly famous for its great use of irony, but through its use of irony it's also a very sincere portrayal of how  dumb, exhausting and gloriously ridiculous people can be when they are in pursuit of dates, love, friendship, and all kinds of other good experiences, without knowing exactly what they want, and about the genuine pleasure and happiness they get out of their ability to pursue these things. That makes them neither assholes nor paragons of goodness, but just rather relatable people who are sometimes wonderful and sometimes insufferable. Last year on this blog, I discussed Chungking Express in similar terms, and I think that Seinfeld and Wong Kar Wai's film do share much of the same pleasures. 

Contemporary thinkpieces about Seinfeld would do well to take a look at the show from this perspective, and consider that there are elements of it that make it aspirational and hopeful. It's an improvement that these days cultural perspectives have more room to address the racial and class privileges of the Seinfeld characters. But it's absolutely not a sign of progress that they can't imagine a world in which those privileges are expanded to more people. Poor and non-white people in America/'the west' have huge barriers to overcome, and it's positive that pop culture is increasingly addressing those barriers, but instead of just reflecting the real world, pop culture can also imagine a better and more fun world. At the moment, it's miserably failing in that regard, while mistakenly deluding itself that this is progressive. It's not a coincidence I think that Seinfeld was extremely popular among many people from former Yugoslavia in the 1990's. 

All of this basically explains my current reaction to High Fidelity. Seeing it a long time ago, I really really liked it. Watching it now, coincidentally at the same age as John Cusack was when shooting it, I thought it mostly sucked. Nobody who starts a review of High Fidelity with a two-paragraph aside on an unrelated pop culture phenomenon can honestly say they find the film fully worthless, but it's kind of amazing in retrospect that it was released two years after Seinfeld ended. It feels completely derivative of it. Cusack's Rob Gordon is a Seinfeldian self-absorbed character who is largely clueless about romantic relationships, has barely got his life together, goes on and on about topics of little relevance, and gets irrationaly angry about minor details. The main difference is that Seinfeld lets you make up your own mind about what's on screen, while High Fidelity holds you by your hand and tells you exactly when you should find Rob sympathetic and when you should find him loathsome. Too much of the film is one big exposition dump that doesn't understand that breaking the fourth wall is more powerful/shocking/funny when it's done sparingly. It's for example much less interesting to present the four incidents that led to Rob's breakup with Laura (Iben Hjejle) as a story that he tells the audience directly, than as a series of interactions between the two actors. Obviously the film is largely about how Rob's subjective experience of his relationships differs considerably from the reality, but there are ways to show that without letting him drone on and on to us. 

More surprisingly, I also thought High Fidelity has a somewhat banal depiction of how pop culture affects people's lives. To continue the comparison with Seinfeld, there the characters constantly riff about the movies/shows/concerts/etc they see. They make stupid jokes about them, make references to them in ordinary conversation, act in the way their pop culture heroes do, and use them as conversation fillers with strangers. In High Fidelity, Rob constantly blurts out what his favorite books are, his top 5 records, his top 5 artists, jobs, first singles, and whatnot. But we never get an impression of why "Johnny Cash's autobiography Cash by Johnny Cash" is his favorite book, how it has influenced his life, or what he gets out of Nirvana. Most of the pop culture references are presented in a highly generic way and could easily be replaced by others. There is one scene where Rob listens to The Velvet Underground after an unhappy encounter with his ex, and it it's only time in the film that it feels like there is a specific connection between Rob's experiences and feelings and the pop culture he interacts with. If the film had been more directly about how Rob, as an individual, is a shallow manchild, this would be less annoying. But it is more interested in using Rob as a figurehead for how 'we' are affected by pop culture and romantic fantasies, trying way too hard and too self-consciously to be a generational statement. I am no fan of that, and recently also got nothing out of The Worst Person in the World, despite very much liking other films by Joachim Trier. 

I also probably just don't care for Nick Hornby's perspective. After watching this movie I saw a clip from the new High Fidelity show, with Zoe Kravitz taking on the role of John Cusack. It involved a huge debate with her record store buddies about whether they should sell a Michael Jackson record to a customer and whether Jackson is more problematic than Kanye West. The dialogue is such that it manages to smugly present the record store owners as a bunch of highly obsessive and knowledgeable music geeks with strong opinions, but refuses to see the audience on their level, belabouredly spoonfeeding us every stale and obvious argument they are making. It's the kind of boringly joyless bullshit the film is also full of. Zoe Kravitz and John Cusack may be among the top 5 most sympathetic actors of their generation. It takes some effort to make them actively annoying.

210. The Gambler

Song - The Turn Of A Friendly Card (The Alan Parsons Project)

Movie: The Gambler (Karel Reisz, 1974)

Using university lectures to provide insight into your leading character's motivations and the film's broader themes is one of the oldest tricks in the book. It's especially beloved by the French and I always enjoy it, even if it can sometimes feel like blatantly cheap exposition, or is used to give the film an unearned veneer of intellectual heft. The Gambler contains two such scenes. In the first one Axel Freed (James Caan) makes a basketball analogy to explain why Dostoyevsky's assertion that "he deserves the sacred right to insist that 2+2 make 5" is a great expression of free will and embracing the possible over the rational. In the second one, he explains how a poem about George Washington makes a larger point about Americans being boringly risk-averse. In both scenes, the film errs on the side of cheap exposition, but James Caan turns them into something more. 

Caan plays Axel as a genuinely great professor of English, who is not only able to explain classic literature to his students by providing interesting and original interpretations that connect to their daily lives, but also conveys how much these works mean to him. When Caan reads from the material he teaches, you can sense the joy he gets out of luxuriating in the words and meanings of his favorite authors, and in making his students get it. Axel gets two more monologues outside of class, one in honor of the 80th birthday of his grandfather, a rich furniture magnate, the other as a joke to playfully annoy his girlfriend. Both are wonderful feats of oratory, with Caan knowing exactly where to pause, where to put an inflection, which word to emphasise, how to create momentum, to make sure his story has maximum effect. That Caan gets all this exactly right is key for the film. It shows that Axel knows what he is doing, hat he is an intelligent, well-adjusted man who could have a happy and good life if he wasn't a compuslive gambler, and that his gambling addiction is not a consequence of external factors. It's what makes The Gambler a really good character drame.

I have referred on this blog a couple of times to the famous quote about how there is no such thing as an anti-war movie. Well, in the same vein it's also really hard to make an anti-gambling movie. I always greatly enjoy the colorful characters, the stylishly written bullshitting, and the allure with wich the casino's and gambling cities are presented. Combine that with some great location work (the shadier, the better) and wonderful performances and it's hard to go wrong. The Gambler mostly doesn't go wrong, and during the first hour or so, James Caan gives an immensely compelling performance.  Unfortunately the film (knowing a little bit about him, this can probably be attributed to screenwriter James Toback) has some weird (socio-cultural) hang ups that eventually force Caan to act out some incredibly dumb situations, most notably the incident that incites his downward spiral and the ending scene. I imagine that one of the reasons for the 2014 remake is to present these scenes from a more enlightened perspective, but I am not in a rush to see it. If you want to make a modern version of this film your main actor should be Ben Affleck, not Mark Wahlberg. 

209. The Leopard

Song - Vous Permettez, Monsieur? (Adamo)

Movie: The Leopard - Il gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Are you a shell of your former self wandering around in disilussionment? Do you feel like the world you thought you knew has passed you by? Are you completely alienated from your contemporaries and peers? Then you might be a protagonist in an Italian 1960's classic, perhaps Fabrizio, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster). His feelings aren't wrong. With Giuseppe Garibaldi gaining ground, a revolution seems imminent, which may be the beginning of the end for the Italian nobility. And so, as the film begins, Fabrizio sets out on a journey across Sicily, attempting to do some wheelings and dealings to save the wealth and position of his family and class. Most of his actions turn out to be fairly inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and despite Italy being a unified monarchy at the end of the film all the old noblemen still hold high positions. With only their titles and colors of the uniforms changed, they still attend grand balls, while Garibaldi and his men are fighting on the ground for the middle class. 

This is very much the kind of film where much of the real excitement happens off-screen. We get a scene of Garibaldi and his redshirts engaged in an epic battle for a Sicilian city, but we spend most ofmi our time with Fabrizio, who is not capable of making much of a difference, partly because he always seems a step behind, partly because it's not clear what difference he could really make. His attempts to preserve the Italian nobility are futile, because the nobility seems to succeed just fine without much intervention being needed. A great example of how the film makes this visible is the scene where the prince and his family arrive in the city of their summer palace and are greeted like kings by the local population, Throughout this procession we see in the background a giant graffiti slogan exclaiming 'Viva Garibaldi'. As much else in the film it's an incredibly cynical reminder of how revolutionary activities can quickly turn into mere symbolism. The film's willingness to push its cynicism to the brink is also evident at the final ball, in particular during the scene where Fabrizio points to a group of young women, noting they are the sad consequence of decades of inbreeding among his class. This is followed by a static shot that frames these women slightly off-center, making their movements a little chaotic and unnatural, while much of their dialogue is drowned out by the music at the ball, making them come off as a bunch of primitves in gala dresses.

It should be clear by now that this is not a film of great narrative propulsion. It's interested in Fabrizio's inner turmoil and in using that as a (often darkly humorous) guide through 1860's Italy to showcase the decadence of its aristocracy. At the same, time it also seems to reflect Visconti's own pessimism.  There are quite a number of scenes which play like barely-veiled polemic commentaries on modern Italy. Ultimately, the film's highlight is Tancredi (Alain Delon), Fabrizio's nephew. Delon plays him as one of film's greatest slimeballs, a shameless opportunist who is both contemptous of the idealism of the Garibaldians and oof his uncle's inability to keep up with the times, but plays both sides to reach to the top and marry the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). I liked the film quite a bit, but found its grave grandeur sometimes a bit too much, making the more frivolous and lighthearted scenes between Angelica and Tancredi quite a welcome respite. The ball that ends the film is in their honor, but its main focus is on Fabriizio's realisation of the total corruption of his society. It's a rightly famous sequence filled with waltzes, opulent rooms, and impecable dresses, all in the service of highlighting the moral degeneracy of its subjects. 

208. The Broken Circle Breakdown

Song - Zeg Me Dat Het Niet Zo Is (Frank Boeijen)

Movie: The Broken Circle Breakdown (Felix van Groeningen, 2012)

The Broken Circle Breakdown is in the first place a superior melodrama. It tells the story of Elise (Veerle Baetens) and Didier (Johan Heldenbergh, who wrote the play the film is based on) who fall madly for each other through their shared passion of bluegrass music, the American Dream, and the ideas of freedom and opportunity associated with all that. They get to live their dream on a Belgian farm they've built themselves, where they make passionate love to each other, grow their own deliciously fresh food, and make a modest living singing joyous bluegrass covers together with their raggedy group of string musicians. Life only becomes better when they get a daughter, but tragedy strikes when little Maybelle dies of leukemia and Didier and Elise struggle to make their love and their music survive their grief. Van Groeningen tells this story completely non-chronologically. He constantly cuts between different periods of their lives and even the storylines within each of these periods flash back and forward without much regard for linear time. Van Groeningen doesn't always manage to keep full control over this structure, and there are certain scenes and moments whose placement in the film doesn't always make sense. That's OK though, because van Groeniingen is above all interested in conveying the passionate intensity of his characters, their love for the life they are having and the hurt caused by the breakdown of that life. 

Van Groeningen achieves much of this by giving Heldenbergh and Baetens full permission to shine, getting two incredibly committed unrestrained performances without a hint of irony. The film wants to show that Elise and Didier had, and lost, the greatest possible life they could've had. It wouldn't have been able to do that if Heldenbergh and Baetens had even a hint of hesitation or disbelief in their performances. They make you believe that what seems like cowboy cosplay is Paradise for them. In doing so, they also help turn the film into something much more than a good melodrama. This is one of the best films I've ever seen about how Europeans look towards America, and American culture.

Belgium and Netherlands are small highly industrialised and urbanised countries. While Belgium has a bit more diverse landscapes, most of ordinary life still takes place in and around offices, supermarkets, commercial properties, universities, bars and clubs, modern infrastructure, new technologies, and all the other amenities we have come to associate with contemporary urban society.  Succesful/ordinary citizens are expected to be able to navigate these spaces, and most stories about life in the Benelux are implicitly or explicitly about how they do so. For these reasons, outside of the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands are probably the two countries in Europe most susceptible to romantisicm about America, its promises of escape, and the pursuit of happiness and freedom on your own individual terms, outside of a society organised by mainstream political and commercial forces. The Broken Circle Breakdown imagines how it would be for Belgians to be able to live this life without needing to escape their country. Van Groeningen fully immerses you in Didier and Elise's life in their Belgian 'outback' with great attention for detail, from the way his heroes build and design their house, to the way they produce food, and from how they make love to how they take care of their kid, make money and entertain themselves. There is even a wonderful scene where we see Heldenbergh and Baetens get married with the role of priest being performed by a bluegrass bandmate who drawls their vows in a performative Texan accent. It's not clear whether their marriage is legal for the Belgian administrative state, but what matters is that it is accepted by Didier and Elise and by their community.

In this context, Maybelle's illness is about more than just the loss of their healthy daughter, it's about the loss of independence from the Belgian mass society. Didier and Elise are visibly annoyed at having to cede control to doctors and scenes that take place in public roads, hospitals, and city squares have much less clarity in their images, are slightly quicker edited, and less sharply/warmly photographed. These become quite sterile, unnnatural places and the transitions to them always feel a little jarring, most notably when after hearing so many traditional bluegrass songs we suddenly cut to the children's ward at the hospital where the theme song of Mega Mindy (a popular show produced by the famous Studio 100, a giant media conglomerate that has had an immesaurable influence on children's/family entertainment in Belgium and The Netherlands) is blasting from the speakers. It's also notable that while Elise and DIdier have to travel a lot between town and country, we only see them when they depart or arrive, never in transit. We never see how the landscape changes or a visible connection being made between farm life and city life. They are two separate 'realms' not connected by any cultural/societal conditions, but by natural ones. The weather is what binds our heroes most to their countrymen in Antwerp and Ghent. When they talk about being Belgians, they almost always talk about it in relation to the rain and cold.

Now, if you thought being a strong character-driven melodrama with great music and an original view of national/cultural identity isn't enough, the film has another layer up its sleeve. We see George W. Bush twice give a speech on tv, the first time declaring the war on terror, the second time praising the approval of a bill that blocks further stem cell research that could help patients like Maybelle. We don't see Bush pretending to be a cowboy, or giving some anti-government speech selling individual liberty and personal responsibility, but the film knows that the promise of Didier and Elise's dream life is perhaps the central idea behind American conservatism and that this has shaped so much of country/bluegrass music/culture. This shapes much of the conflict in the final third of the film, and though sometimes it can feel it's laid on too thick, it's worth seeing the big political proclamations not as blunt didacticism, but as expressions of great personal confusion. It can be quite startling to find that what 'we' love and hate (about America) is so closely connected to each other, or, even, comes from the exact same place.