North Country
I don't know why I didn't want to watch North Country in the theaters. It would have passed into rapid obscurity after middling reviews last year except that during Oscar nominations, someone smacked his head and said, "Oops!
We forgot to put women in movies last year!" and so they gave Charlize Theron a nomination for best actress, and that put the movie back on some people's radar. Mine included.
In
Essential Cinema: On The Necessity of Film Canons, Jonathan Rosenbaum distinguishes his project from those of other canon-builders by saying where others (e.g. Harold Bloom, or hell, his evil twin
* Allan) worship at the altar of a necessarily transcendent quality of Transcendent Quality (I am
so paraphrasing here), he insists that some movies you should watch simply for the importance of their content, not because they necessarily advance the art form qua art form. (
Jane Smiley, Ernest Hemingway, have at it.) So that was my attitude going into the movie: it's a fictionalized telling of the first class-action sexual harrassment suit, filed in 1989 against a Minnesota mining company. I like a good social drama, I like movies about labor, and I'm down for a good feminist yarn, and who cares if it ain't gonna give me insights about storytelling.
The movie is a bit clumsy with its storytelling, in telling ways. It's divided into two parts: the straightforward telling of how Charlize Theron's character Josey Aimes came to work at the mine and the harrassment she and the other women experienced there; and the courtroom unfolding of her sexual harrassment suit—specifically, her petition for class status.
The mine story is harrowing and believable in the best of Hollywood underdog stories. Degrading sexual mockery comes nonstop. Women are told they're humorless, to take it like a man, etc. When Ames complains about an assault from a co-worker, she's accused of trying to seduce him&mdashand the accusation comes from the man's wife. (The way that the harrassment shapes the community at large is rendered very well.) Classic Hollywood heartbreaker: Aimes' son calls her a whore. Ooch.
[Spoilers ahead, if you care.]
Unfortunately, the courtroom drama is simply inane. It's hardly news that realistically grinding legal proceedings don't lend themselves to drama, and since the end-title informs us that the case was not settled for nine years, it's reasonable that the filmmakers would choose to use the certification of the class as the fulcrum for the legal drama. But what is this thing? I'm no lawyer, but I feel fairly confident that you can't win in court because, during a lull in the proceedings, your
ALS-debilitated co-worker (Frances McDormand) in the back of the room has her husband read a defiant statement announcing that she joins the class, and then some women stand up and join the class, and then some men who work at the mine do too, and then some men who don't work at the mine do as well. I'm pretty sure that's not how it happens. In fact, it smacks of "we are running out of film", and I hope that the development of digital video will relieve us of such artistic compromises in the future.
Other parts of the courtroom scene are a bit more troubling. It comes into the drama a little creakily, but it's no surprise that the company's defence includes labelling Aimes as promiscuous by letting one of her workplace assailants, who knew her in high school, describe her rape by a teacher as consensual. The courtroom mechanics are preposterous, but the technique of using rape as a tool for economic control of women deserves the exposure. The scene, however, is played as a showdown between two men: Aimes' lawyer (Woody Harrelson!) and Bobby, her workplace tormentor. It devolves into a kind of cock-waggling I Deride Your Truth-Handling Abilities showdown.
The most pernicious thing about the movie, in fact, is its inability to show women as the heroes of their own lives. Included on the DVD is a deleted scene that dramatizes this exact problem: the lawyer confesses to Aimes that, behind her back, he met with the company president to discuss the possibility of a settlement.
Another key climactic scene comes when Aimes's friend's husband, played by
Sean Bean The Menschy Guy, challenges her young teenage son, who has turned against his mother in the face of the town's animosity. It's another showdown between two males, positioned as the emotional climax to complement the courtroom climax, and it suggests that the real accomplishment of the movie hasn't been women taking power in the face of the twin threats of rape and poverty, but the recuperation of
a situation that threatens patriarchal control into one that demonstrates its essential decency. Life lesson: be a man, not a member of the mob.
The same function plays itself out in the relationship between Ames' parents, affectingly portrayed by Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek. It's thrilling when Spacek, who has defended her husband's rejection of her daughter when she takes "a man's job", leaves him a note and a sandwich and checks into a hotel. But Mom's emancipation is just a tease for Pa's redemption: in order to keep the social order of his home intact, he has to defend his daughter against the mob of men at a union meeting.
The portrayal of the union hall as a mob scene was troubling, but not totally unbelievable. I would have liked to see the movie state more explicitly how useful it was for the company to have the male workers energized against their sister workers—assigning the blame pattern downwards, as
Utah Phillips likes to say. And it's good to see
Silkwood for a version of how a union makes it possible to speak truth to power in the workplace.
This seems like an indictment of the movie, but it shouldn't serve as one. The movie was three-quarters great Hollywood underdog drama, with genuine social consciousness in the depiction of sexual harrassment in the workplace. It avoided the trap of portraying white-collar workers as somehow more decent: the company management is somewhat more silken-tongued in its sexism, but just as vicious. It's just that dramatically, it can't bring itself to show women as the agents of their own victory, and I suspect that that's a fundamental trap in Hollywood storytelling.
Matt Feeney on V for Vendetta
Uh-oh,
a pile-on's starting. At least
I've seen this one.
Nothing better illustrates the simplism of V for Vendetta, or better highlights the unflattering contrast with Brazil, than V's motto: "There are no coincidences." The comic beauty of Brazil's portrait of totalitarianism is that everything rests on random coincidence, which nudges the bureaucracy into its own blind and murderous momentum: A dead fly falls into a computer printer and—voilà—poor law-abiding Buttle is mistaken for dangerous subversive Tuttle.
In V for Vendetta, there are no coincidences because, of course, it's all a big, seamlessly executed conspiracy. The fascist supreme leader's (John Hurt) total control dates back to a terrorism crisis that the government itself concocted [...] The regime's very evil propagandist Prothero (Roger Allam) is also the former commander of the concentration camp where V was experimented on. So, V kills him. And the camp's indifferent chaplain is now not only a high-ranking Anglican bishop, but also a vicious pedophile. So, V kills him, too. (In other words, there are coincidences. Very convenient ones.)
The author, Matt Feeney, is a terrific critic who inspired me to watch Cruel Intentions and Wild Things with this piece and wrote a very nice tribute to Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming here. As one of two former owners of Los Angeles' only "I'd Rather Be Bowhunting" bumper stickers, I tip my hat to him. I hope Slate gives him a steady gig.
(via Hit and Run.)
V for Vendetta
I feel bad for V for Vendetta. It would not seem easy for a movie to fail by being at once too faithful and not faithful enough to its source material, by being too handsome and not handsome enough, and by being too smart and not smart enough, but V has done it. Maybe it was the fault of the man two seats down from me who shushed me during the preview for An American Haunting ("Ken Burns' Poltercrap!" I may have shouted), but the very expensive-looking thing on screen never even rose to the level of fourteen-year-old boy opening-night excitement.
It's easy enough to fail by not sticking to the source material, and Alan Moore's pre-emptive refusal to participate—he took his name off it before it was made, based on what had happened to other movies—seemed bratty and prima-donnaish, though, in the end, correct. It's more interesting to me how the source material bogs down the movie.
For starters, the titular terrorist V wears a Guy Fawkes mask through the whole movie. On the page, the frozen smile of the mask is iconic and haunting, depersonalizing the revolutionary ardor of V into a free-floating cloud of question and dissent that gets inside Evey and fuels her transformation. On the screen, however, it's as if Natalie Portman has to fight, love, and hide alongside King Friday from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for two hours. He doesn't really give a lot back, and he's a bad kisser.
The nature of V's resistance also seems better on the page of a comic book than blown up on the screen. V doesn't lead a slave rebellion: the film never quite makes up its mind whether the whole populace is suffering under the government's heavy boots, or whether a few outgroups suffer in secret gulags to justify the complacence and security of a middle class that doesn't take its government too seriously. The book, though it leans more towards the first scenario than the movie does, never solves this problem, but on a structural level, a comic leaves more up to the imagination than a film does. It's not just that there's more activity for the mind between the panels on a page than there is between the 29 frames per second; it's also that a big-budget film defaults to Triumph of the Will before your eyes in a way that a little-known graphic novel becomes Common Sense in your hands. A scrappy little thing can be inspiring and open-ended in a way that a heavily CGI'd extravaganza, twenty feet tall and luminous (I do love the Arclight) reifies and beautifies the violence of both the state and its antagonist.
Not to mention that the things just falls down at the level of storytelling. It's an action movie in which Hugo Weaving's V never comes into physical jeopardy, a police procedural in which Stephen Rea's unanswered questions never tantalize, a romance in which Natalie Portman's yearning never approaches the physical. It was opening night at the Arclight, and I never once whooped or hollered.
Except during the trailers. Can't wait for Take the Lead! ("You put your chocolate tango in my hip-hop peanut butter," I may have muttered.)
UPDATE: All is forgiven, Natalie.
Temporada de Patos (Duck Season)
A day in my childhood that I remember very clearly I would not, at the time, have called childhood, not at all. I had my bicycle at school, and found myself with three friends. One was a boy who could not leave soon enough. The other two were girls. One of the girls had a crush on me, and I had a crush on the other. In a patch of grass by a small bridge over a drainage pipe, they covered me in purple flowers and we recognized to each other, in so many words, the futility of our situation. We hid in the first girl's bedroom as the day turned dark, whispers straining to become innuendos. At last I drove home to find an angry father. "Did you ever have one of those days..." I began in my defense. It didn't work.
In the apartment where Duck Season is set, the passage of time is as undependable as the electricity, which cuts out in the middle of a couple of video games, handing the day over to magic and love.
"Quince minutos, nada mas."
Fifteen minutes, no more, says Rita as she arrives towards the beginning of the movie, complicating and catalyzing the two boys' time outside time. If the apartment is an Edenic space, she plays both Eve and serpent with neither blame nor expulsion. "Fifteen minutes" means nothing, of course, as sex and drugs flow from her presence and weave into the day, free from the cumbersome conventions of moralizing.
Instead of wringing melodrama from the conflicts of the characters, the conflict arises from time against timelessness. The arrival of a pizza delivery boy in his twenties (significantly named Ulises as T. reminded me) allows the boys to stage a fight over paying for the food, but serves really to introduce a theme of disappointment and the threat of the passage of time. "El asunto es ver quien se chinga a quien",
the issue is who fucks over who, says Flama, gazing into the painting of ducks over which his parents have chosen to stage a custody proxy battle.
The structural challenge of the movie is keeping the gang of four together. The kids have nowhere else to go, and affection for each other, but how on earth does the pizza delivery boy justify staying in the apartment when he so clearly needs his job? The movie has a sufficient number of gambits to keep him put, but the answer is this: he is no less subject to the magic of a timeless day than the children. My straining suspension of disbelief betrays my father's
No in me, and tells me where my childhood ends.
More Crash Hating
Since I didn't see
Crash, I feel it's proper to explain why I felt so
justified in not bothering. I will happily add your picks to the examples below:
Left-wing
Crash-hating (thesis: by
dwelling on universal culpability for racism,
Crash excuses it, closing off the possibility of political and social action that would fight racism and inequality.)
Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Nathan NewmanRichard Kim, The Notion
Armond White, New York Press (last two via
Left Behinds)
Right-wing
Crash-hating (thesis: Los Angeles isn't really that bad. People do get along, honest! Here I find the evidence accurate but the intention dishonest: yes, L.A. mixes up people, but that's insufficient to disprove that power here is divided on antagonistic racial lines. The Lopez piece is just funny.)
Matt Welch, L.A. Times
Steve Lopez, L.A. Times
Altogether different:
Tom Hayden (thesis: people who say
Crash is a bad movie are covering up that Los Angeles is a racist cauldron. Here I find Hayden's evidence useful to marshal in the left-wing
Crash-hating column, though Hayden himself clearly does not hate
Crash.)
Up next: commentary on a movie that I have seen! And maybe even enjoyed! Maybe.
Crash vs. Volcano
(I've been on a comments tear at other people's blogs about Volcano and Crash, so I thought I'd reproduce my comment 46 from michaelberube.com over here. See also this discussion at Left Behinds.)
Thank you, thank you, thank you for pointing out the importance of Volcano as a precursor to Crash! Much more so, I think, than Short Cuts and Magnolia, though those vastly superior antecedents also bear mention. But what’s wonderful about Volcano is that it has both a much more cogent argument about race in Los Angeles AND Tommy Lee Jones kicking the ASS off a volcano.
Now, Michael, you probably remember Volcano’s argument about race as the treacly end bit where once everyone is covered in volcanic ash, they all look the same. Well yes, that’s there, and hey, outta the mouths of babes! but the setup for that is actually a much more politicized account of spatialized segregation in Los Angeles than that offered by Crash.
You see, the heavy in Volcano (besides the volcano) is the developer who opposes the extension of the subway to the Red Line because it will bring poor brown people near his fancy condo tower. That’s a real conversation that happened in Los Angeles and helped thwart a cross-town subway. L.A. is just now moving past it. Compare that to Crash’s account of spatial segregation, which is the bit how in order to meet people who look different, you need to bend their fender. (Compare also to the Cronenberg ‘Crash’, which also recommends auto accidents as a good way to get to know people better.) Anyway, while critics pointed out that people mostly have their prejudices confirmed in Crash, Volcano provides a much better ending, because the racist developer gets his beautiful condo tower BLOWN UP to stop the volcano—in essence, Tommy Lee Jones kicks the developer's ass as a byproduct of kicking the ass off the volcano. And the racist developer’s girlfriend leaves him for being a racist, which is the kind of comeuppance that you should have in a good liberal movie.
