Once Upon A Time In America
A few years ago, I saw
The Godfather at the
New Beverly Theater, and something incredible happened: I didn't like it. The revenge plots bored me and the performances seemed clownish, like SNL-level Italian stereotypes. (A few years later, Minky saw it screened alongside Part II and is now a fierce Godfather apologist.)
More recently, I had the opportunity to see
Once Upon A Time In America at the
Egyptian. It was my first Leone. James Woods spoke afterwards, as did some other people involved in the production. I was blown away. It's formally and intellectually ambitious at every level. The use of music and sound is very deliberate (a whistled theme recurs to link important passages, the phone rings some forty times across three locations and two time periods before it's picked up in Noodles' opening reverie). At the same time, it's not at all high-minded: the scenes set in the Jewish gangsters' youth are Rabelasian with scat and sex. The gangsters' portraits, while not as Method-cool as those in the Godfather, are there in service of Leone's exploration of American power and progress.
I've still only seen two other Leone films,
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and
Once Upon a Time in the West.
A very good essay about the latter, and Leone, is up at The New Republic.
Carandiru
I saw
Carandiru (dir. Hector Babenco) on Saturday, only knowing that it was from Brazil. It was interesting to find how my expectations of the film changed as it progressed, and it reminded me that I shouldn't always have to read all the reviews in advance.
Carandiru is the name of a large prison outside Sao Paolo that, we learn at the end of the film, was destroyed in 2002. Built to hold 2500 prisoners, it was crammed full with three times that many.
The main character and narrator is a doctor whose name we never learn. He is a handsome young white man who has come to the prison to do AIDS education. He serves as an audience proxy; we follow him in to the prison from the outside world, and we are given a very few intermittent glimpses of the outside world while he rides the train to work. But we know very little of his personal life.
An early scene as the Doctor departs the prison after his first day structured my first set of expectations about the movie. The doctor has spent the day drawing blood from prisoners for an AIDS test. He listens to their stories about how they came to live in Carandiru with serene acceptance, and the prisoners take limited responsibility for their crimes. None claims outright innocence, but most present some exculpatory evidence, submitting cheating wives or necessary revenges. At the end of the day, the Doctor, alone in the twilight, locks the door to the clinic and proceeds out to the exit. He is alone; locks click in reverberation and he appears threatened, for the first time, by his environment. This is the second time that the film has suggested imminent, random violence, but the first with so many of the tropes of terror: an audience surrogate, alone, with camera angles suggesting surveillance by an ominous third party. A trio of prisoners approaches from far off, and a guard refuses to let him leave until someone can vouch for him. Will the prisoners trap the Doctor? Will the bureaucracy of security seal his doom?
Nothing comes of it. The Doctor leaves and the prisoners stare through the bars, more forlorn than menacing. The movie rejects the cheap thrills of imminent random violence, and carries on in the spirit of the prisoners' tales told in the neutral clinic: chatty, friendly, and only suggestive of violence. In fact, the tone becomes so relaxed that the Doctor's role as an audience surrogate seems superfluous. If the inmates are so easy to relate to, is it really necessary to bring in a professional white man? It seems a bit untrusting of the audience. The Doctor offers AIDS education and the inmates take it, and for a moment the whole thing seems like an only slightly gritty instructional video, or at best a light and liberal lesson in the humanity even of people who do bad things and go to jail.
As the story shifts to the inmates, the relaxed tone and the lack of cheap prison-stabbing thrills gives way to portraying what I am going to call an ecology of violence. Minky likes to point out that John uses his individual actors to capture the living dynamics of a community in ways that other filmmakers can't do. Even Altman's vast ensembles don't do it with quite the mastery that Sayles does--although this is maybe another post. Here, as drug dealer Zico seeks permission from Ebony, the chieftain inmate who also runs the kitchen, to kill a customer of his who won't pay up, we learn how violence figures into this community, as it does any community. When Zico, unsanctioned, goes on to commit another unrelated murder and Ebony must address his actions, we see how all of none of the violence in the prison can be called senseless. Some of it is controlled and some of it is not. The film rebukes the use of violence for a kinesthetic reaction and instead studies it. It is no less horrible to see characters we are invested in die violently, however.
At this point, I've gone from irritation at what was looking like a series of slight and friendly prison vignettes to complete investment, but the Doctor's character still seems superfluous. And then the massacre happens.
Being a naive and comfortable citizen of the global North -- or at least having not read the reviews--I had no idea about the massacre of 111 prisoners at Carandiru in 1992. But it unfolds horrifically, as the riot squad shoots prisoners who can't get back to their cells fast enough, and then opens the cell doors and shoots those who could. Senseless violence overwhelms the ecologically meaningful violence of the first two acts, motivated by the privilege of carrying a gun, the Governor's election, and the riot squad's license to treat the prisoners as subhuman. The massacre scenes are intercut with talking heads of the surviving inmates, explaining what went on to the Doctor, who had taken 2 weeks off.
And here the movie redeemed any discomfort I had with the Doctor's role. He is still an audience surrogate, but the audience has been given an imperative: to tell the tale to those who could not see it. The Doctor is not more like us because he is privileged and professional; he is more like us because he can leave, and speak.
