NOT EXACTLY ANTI, FAR FROM PRO

Okay, 48 hours have passed…I can begin to ease myself into life as a normal person again. I haven’t slept. After seeing ANTICHRIST and being total sapped of all enthusiasm, hope, and positivity – I am once again on the road to recovery, my heart beating normally, my mind not wandering to tableaus of still born deer, genital mutilation, blood…

Oh but we are getting ahead of ourselves. ANTICHRIST is of course Lars von Trier’s (THE IDIOTS, MANDERLAY, DANCER IN THE DARK) latest offering. And because I adore some of his films, and because the star power here is first rate (Willem Dafoe and -!- Charlotte Gainsbourg), and because I love horror movies and this seemed truly, genuinely, scary…well I was pretty damn excited.

To get this out of the way: I don’t understand the criticism of this film. And by CRITICISM I mean the critical reaction, positive and negative. There’s so much about how perverse, manipulative and over-the-top this film is. But I have to wonder who it is that is saying such wholly uninteresting things. There is nothing in this film that isn’t matched (or topped!) in J-Horror or K-Horror, nothing in fact really original at all about its metaphor-system or imagery or carnage. But this movie isn’t an egregious piece of trash either, and the hostility it’s gotten for being a dupe and a manipulative sham is undeserved. The reality is that it is too uninteresting to be anything so extreme.

So why my visceral reaction? Why the physical ailment that followed me around even two days after seeing this? The one thing I will give credit to ANTICHRIST for is its mood. About three minutes into ANTICHRIST things get a bit nutty involving a baby and a window sill, and thus begins the strange mood of the film. Sometimes this mood is exploited for horror movie purposes (MATCH CUT TO: shadows rolling over tree branches, the whip of wind) but I don’t think it’s wholly manipulative in like a personally affronting way. It’s well documented how Lars von Trier was fighting depression during the making of this movie, and I think there is evidence here of a real cathartic artistic process. But I wasn’t expecting that by exorcising his depression Lars was actually handing it off: and in this way was leaving the audience with their own bit of his foul outlook. So this may be manipulative but only in so far as von Trier made this movie for his own self, not for me or you or Michael Eisner, and I sort of wish more filmmakers approached their art with such solipsism.

Also, of course, I take issue with the criticism because what horror movie ISN’T manipulative. It’s almost an aesthetic criterion of the form, an attempt to handle or control an audience to produce a reaction. I guess where ANTICHRIST worked for me isn’t in my “reaction” to the film (frankly, I didn’t really like it) but in the feeling I got from it: namely, that things are terrible and everything is most certainly not going to be okay. Oddly enough, in the masochistic feedback loop of a horror fan, the cumulative experience is positive – even if the actual experience was literally awful.

Sounds like bullshit? Maybe, but we have to ask ourselves why anyone would go see a movie called ANTICHRIST without the tiniest desire to punish oneself. Anyway, the point is that the film was successfully atmospheric, so calling it “the worst piece of shit ever” (as one friend who saw it did) seems hyperbolic when plenty of movies come out that have neither plot NOR atmosphere. I'd take this film any day.

Of course that leaves plot, and this is where ANTICHRIST failed me, and this is where I think it fails in general – and why people can’t see past its abhorrent imagery and appreciate the brilliant cinematography and design. The plot of this movie is ridiculous. It starts out with a beautifully shot sequence of a husband and wife having sex to a swelling Handel aria…as their newborn in the other room climbs up onto a snowy window ledge and jumps to his death. Yes, this is awful, but it’s such a stock scenario right out of any given melodrama – what if…what if…we could have stopped him! It also ties in the film's psychological themes in the most straight-forward and uninteresting way; as if von Trier is announcing that sex is associated with violence and death, and if you don’t believe me watch this scene!

Unfortunately this film never evolves much further psychologically from this basic Freudian tenet. In addition to LIBIDO—the life force—Freud postulated THANTOS, our “death instinct.” Everyone is clamoring for a slice of NONLIFE, of UNBEING, of THE WOMB. For Freud, and for ANTICHRIST, Libido in tied to THANTOS in a Gordian Knot -- there is no solution for one that doesn’t involve the other. Listen, this is definitely not bad psychoanalytic terrain for a horror movie to mine; it’s just how does von Trier expect to find gold there when so many others have come before him?

But psychoanalysis aside, the plot’s biggest failing is more in another psychological realm – the whole Behaviorism/exposure therapy conceit is TRULY RIDICULOUS. It’s actually like insultingly bad. First and foremost, I cannot accept that Willem Dafoe is both Gainsbourg husband AND HER THERAPIST. I mean…why? Why couldn’t this movie just be about a man helping his wife through the stages of grief? Why does it have to be couched in prosaic, clinical psychological concepts? Because the truth is it goes against fundamental psychological treatises to have your therapist also be your lover. It actually sort of negates the entire therapeutic scenario. And while you may feel like this is a small thing, it actually is a huge problem in the film.

Actually, it would have been fine if the film took a different turn than where it eventually ended up. I figured they were setting up Willem Dafoe as “the evil one” because of this just totally ill-conceived therapeutic strategy (along the lines of: if he’s a bad therapist maybe he’s also…a bad person). But instead they fall back on what is probably the most uninteresting of all possible scenarios. Willem Dafoe is our hero…it’s the bitch who is crazy. It’s FEMALE SEXUALITY that’s the snake in the grass (the fox in the hole??...aha!). This is so insipid, so prosaic, so easy. I don’t even care about the argument IS LARS VON TRIER A MYSOGYNIST because the climax of this film is too uninteresting to really be taken seriously. Trier was building towards something pretty interesting – the sexual aggression that exists between a couple, before and after terrible personal tragedy. But by shifting it in the end to make one good (Dafoe) and one bad (Gainsbourg) it simplifies this to the point of nullity. How much better this film would have been if the two were just violently attacking each other on a truly two-way street…well I’m not sure it would be MUCH more appealing but at least the psychological perspective would be subtler. At least there would have been a point.

Instead Lars von Trier gives us a beautiful-looking film that has no point, and it’s a sad thing. In some ways I feel he must have known this, because he makes reference to almost every horror movie under the sun. It taps into BLAIR WITCH and THE EVIL DEAD’s cabin-in-the-woods; it has a SAW moment involving a rusty grindstone; it channels Takashi Miike’s AUDITION (among others) with its gore and body fluids; it has a Hitchcockian blackbird and a tell-tale heart and a million other horror movie tropes. I didn’t mind this stuff because it at least looked good, but I was hoping that all that homage was being used to better present what is ORIGINAL. Then I realized there isn’t much that’s original, and I went home, and I didn’t sleep for two nights.

So who knows? Maybe that in itself is a measure of the film’s success, or maybe I just need Ambien?

The Sorrow and the Pity 2 : Electric Bugaloo

I’m a serious Coen Bros. fan so it was only a matter of time before I got my jew-y self over to the multiplex for the jewtastic and jexrageous (and did I mention Jewish-themed) A SERIOUS MAN. Like their last film BURN AFTER READING the Coen’s have provided a challenging little nugget – hard to love, unabashedly quirky, yet (in my opinion) eminently defensible as a movie that offers something wholly unlike what we’ve seen before.

Which may seem like filmy jibberish, after all a good movie is a good movie, right? We can watch the masterpiece that is FARGO and say, unequivocally: this is a good film. We all saw NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and joined in the chorus of praise and awards – no reservations there. But when BURN AFTER READING came out, the Coens’ train came to a sudden and deafening halt. Suddenly it seemed that, for a creative team responsible for so many quote unquote important movies, what happened that they would produce a movie so…so…frivolous.

Of course, for me, BURN’s frivolousness, its joyous insignificance, its rejection of the very concept of oeuvre, is what it made it such a success. Very few people liked this film, but I did…although I would be hard pressed to say I loved it. It’s literally a film that gives you a few funny characters and zany situations and then self-destructs. I remember almost no plot details, I don’t have any real desire to return to it, I thought Brad Pitt was kind of annoying…yet for everything it wasn’t, BURN was exactly what the Coen’s wanted it to be: frivolous, disposable, violent popcorn. And this coming on the heels of No Country’s Academy Award deluge…this my friends is not at accident.

For there are no accidents in the Coens’ world, especially not in A SERIOUS MAN – where every step or misstep is the explicit work of HASHEM. We may not understand why things happen the way they do, but Judaism and the Coen’s own perversity remind us that cause and effect is a celestial process. Ours is not to ask why, after all.

Every time I watch a Coens film, I feel like the filmmakers are testing themselves and their capabilities, and it’s a challenge that is always pleasurable to behold. If the Coens were seeing just how unserious a movie they could make with BURN AFTER READING, in A SERIOUS MAN I get the sense that they are playing with the very idea of causality. As in life, in A SERIOUS MAN there is no accounting for what will happen. Just when we think Sy Ablemen is our antagonist, Sy Ableman dies. Just when a moral choice is explored, a doctor’s phone call renders the choice unimportant. When we are finally able to repay a debt, a tornado appears to wipe everyone’s slate clean. An escape is a dream sequence; a dream is a fantasy. Irreconcilable differences become reconcilable, or at least begin to seem so, watching ones stoned child read from the Torah on his Bar Mitzvah. And if these seem like a random list of unconnected events, that’s because it is. And if it seems a bit easy to pile erratic plot happenings onto one giant, chaotic heap of a film: that’s because it is.

But even if the plot is “easy” in the sense that it doesn’t burden itself with excessive structural demands, this doesn’t mean that it is unintelligent. And it doesn’t mean that this film as a whole is anything less than an important Coen Bros. offering. There are a few missteps: the Yiddish-language prologue doesn't really have a clear conneciton with the rest of the film (besides it jewiness) and the structural device of breaking the chapters up according to rabbis, while it helps to drive forward the plodding action, is indeed a bit obvious. But even if it isn't perfect, I am pretty sure it’s seriously good.

Where the Wild Things Are just sort of, you know, ADHD

I’m sort of lost in the wilderness with this movie, so I’m hoping writing out my thoughts helps me work through some of my unresolved issues with this film – which for the life of me I do not get. Worse off, I can’t understand how people can sit through that film and come out with the idea that what they saw was successful on any sort of filmic or narrative level; that is worked; that it edified in any appreciable way. I don’t get why people liked this film, which is a big problem, because part of my job is knowing why people like certain films. (Although, to be honest, while dear Manohla all but went down on Jonze’s adaptation of Sendak’s children’s classic, the overall critic response has been, at least, divided.)

Lance Acord (Jonze’s right hand cinematographer) is a brilliant professional who has made a huge impact with his camera work. The general plucky intellect he brings to his vision perfectly matches Jonze’s own whimsical indulgences, and what we get is rare and perfect for a film like this. But here’s my gripe – Max rows his way on over to the Land of No Noons -- that is, as one photophile friend pointed out, a place where it’s always “magic hour,” always sunrise or sunset, always an orange and amber explosion drenching everything with meaning and metaphor and brilliance. This makes everything look fucking beautiful, do not misunderstand, but isn’t some of what’s going on in Max’s messed up brain NOT beautiful. Isn’t there room of drab decay, not only to vary our color palette, but as part of the metaphor system at work here – which is an exploration of the full gamut of a child’s psyche, the raging forces of his id? I fear that drenching the movie in so much light is bound to backfire, as it did in (the truly awful)) American Beauty – its sort of glorious to behold until you look back on it later and think: huh, that is sort of easy and manipulative and really…not that good.


Then again they could have gone the King Kong route and make everything absolutely horribly surreal (see the empire state building scene for one of the worst cinematic sunsets ever). But, like King Kong did, this movie really raised another question in my own mind (and, I’ll point out again, the minds of many highly-regarded professional critics) – where did the money go? Although movie budgets are kept notoriously close to the studio vest, it’s pretty commonly held that this is a movie that cost Warner Bros. one hundred million dollars. Sure, a hunk of that goes to Gandolfini-–and god bless the big lug—but seriously man! This is essentially an independent film, plodding and slow and deliberate: why do we need such extravagance? The monsters looked GREAT but the film in general didn’t deserve such brilliant design, didn’t deserve a budget that is ten times the GDP of the nation of Tuvalu. I suppose this is the old we’re-in-a-recession-yet-films-like-Beverly-Hills-Chicuachua-still-come-out debate, but I guess my caveat to the whole thing is that I don’t care if movies cost one hundred million bucks or Tuvaluan dollars or for that matter the actual island of Tuvalu itself – as long as they’re worth it.

And I just can’t help but feel this wasn’t. Beautiful opening as Max chases his family dog (though I sort of felt bad for dog?) and great unshowy work from Catherine Keener. But when Max gets to the island there just doesn’t seem to be much to do. The monsters should each represent an individual strand of Max’s inchoate urges –he feels no one is listening (Alexander); he longs for direction (Carol); he, uh, loves owls!(KW) – yet to me they come off as interchangeably whiny, babyish, neutered. From wild to mild in one, brilliantly lit, fell swoop.

There was so much talk about this being an ADULT movie, about how this isn’t meant for kids, about how it’ll be sad and scary and dark. Was it though? Nothing was scary – not for Max and not for the audience. We just march right in as Carol destroy those giant…um…tumbleweeds, jump into the action, become king, never look back. Darkness is an almost laughable notion in this film, for even the nighttime on Magic Hour Island cradles a big, bright, sleepy moon. And I mean that tonally-speaking as well; what is dark about Max destroying his sister’s room or hirsute muppets blithely deforesting an island? A dark children’s movie is The Neverending Story or, like, Bambi. What has been toted here as dark played out, for me, simply as boring (which by the way is what I heard most of out the mouths of the children who populated the theater I saw this in– not, I’m scared but I’m bored.)

Newbie Max Records seemed to work against himself in the film – he seemed so determined to be a good actor (and by many accounts he was) that he wasn’t exactly a realistic child. Best illustrated in the film’s final moment – which just kills me– Spike Jonze’s direction just rises to the surface and is spot on the nose in all the wrong ways. Seeing Catherine Kenner fall asleep while he slurps down Chef Boyardee, Max scowls in a moment of narcissistic annoyance. But then his sneers fades…he remembers what he has learned…he smiles at his sleepy mom. A moment so singularly prosaic, so cultivated, that I could just imagine the before-the-cameras-roll rehearsal, as Spike makes angry faces for Records to mimic playfully, than mellows out for a smile that will end the film. It’ll be my finest work thinks Jonze, as his child-actor beams at him through the lens.

But it isn’t his finest, not by a long shot. Like music-video-cum-moviedom’s other man-child Michel Gondry, without the structural discipline of Charlie Kaufman’s genius scripts, Jonze seems a bit lost-at-sea. A friend of mine who liked the film quite a bit told me I was ‘primed for disappointment” going in with such high expectations, which is really a comment that I keep returning to. Isn’t that why we go to films at all, because we respect the creative team? And especially here – delivered by the man who gave us Malkovich and Adaptation, and penned by Eggers, a writer who (even if he’s not as important as we thought in, say, 2000) is at least intelligent. Why should I have had anything BUT high expectations? I don’t judge a movie based on my expectations, rather by the actual experience of paying $6.75 for junior mints, and then sitting in a tiny chair while trying not to fall asleep. And for Wild Things that was a bit more of a struggle than it should have been. If expectations rule the day, I would have hated Inglorious Basterds (which I loved) and I would have issued a jihad against the makers of District 9 (which I liked quite a bit). This summer may not have been “great” or even “good” for movies, but it definitely had some wild rides. Eggers and Jonzes’ was just flat out tepid.

As a somewhat-aside, am I also the only one that sees a bit of a calculated, impure something underneath Jonze’s work? His childishness, somehow unlike Gondry’s, seems a bit more barbed – as if he saying: well I’m going to make it like this and to anyone who doesn’t like it I say I’M GONNA EAT YOU UP. It’s the old enfant terrible song-and-dance. Gondry is a child because he seemingly really is that way, really thinks that way. Yet to me Jonze is different -- he seems to recognize he’s found a niche – and he exploits it well. There seems to be a whole lot of young people out there that have found that their daily dose of intellectual self-congratulation is much easier swallowed with a cool glass of jouissance, one that reminds them how good it feels to be a child and not have to be so cerebral all the time. God bless Jonze for making movies for these people – I suppose I’m one – but I see now that his less-perfect offerings (I maintain the Kaufman-penned Jonze flicks are as good as it gets for film) expose his artifice a bit more than his art.

Oh well, bring on ANTICHRIST! Out this weekend!! Now there's a "dark" children's movie.