INHERENT VICE

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This weekend I saw P.T. Anderson’s INHERENT VICE, and as usual immediately afterwards dialed some folks I know who saw it to give my two cents and (kind of) hear theirs. One filmy friend was glad to hear I liked it; remarking that it was just "so fun and easy to watch, shot so beautifully..."

...and I was waiting for him to finish that thought. When he didn't, I offered, obviously: "and a scathing critique of capitalism." He assented, though it was clear that he didn’t give two red fucks about the Marxist reading.

Which is fine. Perhaps the real genius of the film is that it works so well scene-by-scene; even when you don't know exactly who characters are or why they are arguing or what exactly they are smoking, you absolutely know enough to stay engaged.  But what you should really feel, and maybe some of you on a gut level did, is enraged.   Because a textual reading of INHERENT VICE makes clear that capitalism is a rigged game; the players are corrupt and the conspiracy is real. But like capitalism itself (symbolized gorgeously here as a convertible Cadillac) the ride is bumpy: a noir nightmare fantastically drenched in golden California sunshine. INHERENT VICE is manic and opulent and compelling enough—just enough—for you not to ask the right questions.  Because asking the right questions gets people killed.

That's why the real triumph of Joaquin Phoenix’s turn as hero is not finding a missing real estate mogul (literally sent to the looney bin when he decides to give away his money), or even in saving his distressed ex girlfriend (who reappears half way through the film oddly unscathed, the danger she felt in the opening scene somehow subsided; a red herring).  His real triumph is in freeing Owen Wilson from the dharma of capitalism, the indentured servitude he felt as a triple agent, indebted “both” to the Federal government and to some shifty conspiracy of unseen gangsters (read, for those keeping score: they are of course the same).  This may be wishful thinking on Pynchon’s behalf, as Owen Wilson gets free on the promise that his silence about “what he knows” stays absolute.   But as we probably have figured out, the word of murderous gangsters is worth about as much as that of the FBI, the LAPD, and almost everyone else in this film: nuttin’.

I have not read the novel, nor have I looked at reviews or essays on the film’s discrepancies (though I will certainly do so now).  My experience with Pynchon is also admittedly limited—having read just THE CRYING OF LOT 49 and the wikipedia stub for GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (it’s a good one).   But just based on the conceit of what’s going on here, those stories, and my own intuition I have to say this: Pynchon is probably the biggest Capital G Genius to ever wield a pen.  This is probably why academics love him so much, and also why he can be so inaccessible and redoubtable to us lesser minds.    In crafting a meandering story of justified paranoia, a peregrination through inherent vice in all its perverse incarnations, and in doing so in such a hilarious and color-saturated way, Pynchon shows the true power of subversive art—the last bastion of hope that may (probably not, but may) save us from the “conspiracy of dentists” pulling the strings; may save us from ourselves.  

Great film, and another homerun from PT Anderson, IMO. 

Darren Aronofsky's NOAH: Better Than The Bible

Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH may not be great or even a particularly good film, but it is a wonderful one.  Full of wonders--great and subtle--and unexpectedly wonderful filmmaking.  Mark my words, every D-girl in Hollywood right now is pitching biblical projects. 

Should we blame Mark Burnett, who financed 2013's stupid and stupidly popular drama THE BIBLE?  Or should we blame Mel Gibson--who proved the audience for scriptural cinema so large that a movie didn't need to be particularly enjoyable or particularly Jew-friendly to make millions?

Or do we thank them?  Do we thank Mel Gibson for making time to create THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST before its gloriously underrated sequel THE BEAVER?

With Noah I found myself surprised to be left in an excited mood for the forty days of bible stories likely to be flooding the box office for the next 1-3 years.  Call this the comic book revolution 2.0, a new era of content sourcing—raping and pillaging the first and final home of the public domain: the word of God.

It seems so obvious in a way: the Bible is full of such spectacle and stories so thematically plump that Jesus should sign Spielberg to a development deal.  Aronofsky pulls a lot out of the ample content—and his perseverating use of symbol (the Snake, the Apple, the Fall) reinforces what’s good about the bible-as-source: these are the stories behind the stories that we all know.

But there’s also something awful about the bible (besides, of course, The Crusades and its attendant mass murder, general intolerance, pedantic moralism, etcetera).  It’s mostly boring.  Even the good Bible stories like that of Noah are marred by long stretches of nothing—for example the 120 years Noah spent on the massive carpentry project that was building the ark.

How do you make 120 years of woodworking filmic?  ROCK MONSTERS AS CARPENTERS.

Most people’s biggest problem with NOAH is the huge creative decisions/blasphemies that Aronofsky employed to advance the story.  Having friendly Stone Monsters as part of the story isn’t in the Bible per se but it isn’t particularly NOT in the Bible either.  Seems to me like a credible way to convert so much lumber…but that’s really neither here nor there.

More to the point is the clever way these huge outside-the-box choices correct the intrinsic narrative problems of adapting material that is itself oddly weird/far-fetched/and sprawling.  After all, it’s the Bible—there’s a certain amount of cheesiness inherent to the stories simply because we know them (on a guttural, cultural level—regardless of your religious literacy) so well.  I loved the ludicrous scope of this project—tackling the unfilmable—because it doesn’t flinch in throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the story. 

This is similarly why Aronofsky was a good choice as a director (and I say this as not a particular fan of his films in general).  His innovative visual style (and excellent cinematographer Matthew Libertique) allows the film to speed through time, close up gaps, and ignore some less cinematic details.  You need style to tighten sprawling material, and Aronofsky—if nothing else—has style in spades.

Ultimately, Aronofsky's films are about the various strands and symptoms of madness: in PI, a certain mathematical precision; in REQUIEM FOR A DREAM, the Madness of Addiction.  In THE FOUNTAIN, he explores the unending madness of love, and in THE WRESTLER, teases the frightening madness of obsolescence.  Then, in BLACK SWAN, perhaps his most base film, he heavy-handedly explores the insanity of perfection.

Like all these films, NOAH unsurprisingly makes similar strives: this time, towards the Madness of Prophecy.

If the film fails in its third act to make the grip of that particular brand of madness compelling, that's fair enough.  NOAH is quite justifiably called less than a sum of its parts.  The final act, as the rains recede and the ark finds dry land once more, is capably enough delivered and true to the tone and spirit of the first ninety minutes.  Yet it doesn't quite work--we don't really fear Noah's sons' rebellion or care about the marital dynamics with a bland-as-always Jennifer Connolly.  Problematically, the inscrutability of everything happening is rightfully taken for granted, but then periodically invoked for narrative tension or silly dramatics.  After all, in a film this chock full of miracles and—well, rock monsters—it felt a little absurd every time a character intoned breathlessly "but that's impossible!"

But that’s what good movies can do, I suppose.  Make those things we know to be possible still fill us with skeptical wonder.

DALLAS' HOTTEST CLUB IS...

DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

A film by Jean-Marc Vallée

**

For many Thanksgiving Time means possibly-overcooked turkey and forced small talk with your aunt’s sketchy new “friend” Maurice; for me, the few days respite the holiday provides allows me to engage in something I love but have barely had the time for since starting at Stern: going to the movies.

Besides a late-night foray to see GRAVITY 3D (which was more a theme park ride than a film; and a B minus at that), I’ve seen just about bupkiss since September—so last night, leftovers in my belly, I headed to the theater to get me some good ‘ol fashioned culture.

But the box office was…lackluster.  I’m trying to go as long as I can in this review without massive offense to HUNGER GAMES fans.  Suffice it to say there wasn’t many options, and though I sort of vaguely wanted to see DALLAS BUYERS CLUB in the way I vaguely want to see most  “important” films (read: not really much at all, because I’m too lazy to feel things), I sort of approached it as a “this will do” option, a movie for lack of anything less terrible.

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised and entertained during the next 117 minutes of my life.  DALLAS BUYERS CLUB follows the life and livelihood of real-life Ron Woodroof—AIDS-afflicted , heterosexual good ‘ol boy in 1980s Texas.  Matthew McConaughey portrays Woodroof as he finds out he has HIV, and then negotiates his transition from cocky rodeo cowboy to humble freedom-fighter who protests for the human rights of the very same “fairies” and “fruits” that he had previously scorned.

As far as Hollywood bildungsroman, it’s by-the-numbers stuff.  We get it, Matthew McConaughey. You’re super-homophobic, but you’re also the good guy, and you’re going to learn things, and we are going to tear up when you do.  What saves this film from cookie-cutter tropism is the rigorous physical performances that allow McConaughey to be as physically repulsive as he’s ever appeared on camera, and puts Jared Leto in drag as a transgendered adult with a heart of gold (yawn).  Not entirely novel stuff, but at least novelistic—the detail and depth of these characterizations lets you latch on for the ride.

 

Maybe I’ve been in Stern mode a bit too long, but the one strand of the movie I found absolutely fascinating was the portrait it painted of business opportunities in the early wake of the AIDS crisis.  Hear me out. 

As society faced this completely bizarre, redoubtable, horrific disease for the first time, there was a stutter-step in our response to curing it.  Early trials of AZT testing—the greatest hope the FDA saw for treating it—were slow and cumbersome.  The “gay” connotations associated with HIV, coupled with the bigotry and myopic of the 1980s, was a major hindrance to recognition of the severity of the plague and the suffering of those afflicted.  Unable to wait for the fat-headed bureaucrats of the FDA to get their act together to approve and produce affordable treatment, many who tested HIV+ had to turn to a different kind of cowboy to address their health concerns—drug-runners who scoured the planet for unapproved (but not illegal!) medicines that could indeed slow the disease’s progress and mute the symptoms that AZT didn’t address at all.

This is a real thing.  These “buyers clubs” did pop up worldwide (customers would, for sometimes quite-lofty membership fees, be given all the supplements they needed to address their health concerns—but, of course, survival was never guaranteed).  The movie only tangentially considers the intriguing business opportunity component of these novel business models, which of course some see as predatory, and some see as salvation.  Regardless of your take, it’s clear enough that Woodroof created value for people who needed help, and did so profitably—he’s able to travel the world and improve his lot by helping to improve the lot of others.  While certainly Woodroof’s methods were unconventional and lacked the scientific rigor that the FDA applies to its approved drugs, the hundreds of people he helped would never accuse him of being some sort of charlatan.  For them, it was money well spent.

In the process (and ultimately what DALLAS BUYERS CLUB is really about) we are given a window into the very-real disconnect between the molasses-crawl of healthcare reform and the outstripping pace of medical crisis.  We see a businessman, an unlikely one at that, rise in this gap and provide a revolutionary service to customers in need.  In a way, it’s nothing more or less than the great American corporate fairy tale.

I offer these insights not to be flippant but rather the opposite of that.  In its best moments, DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, like the unforgettable recent doc HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE, offers the true-life, unromanticized realities of the early HIV crisis, rather than the AIDS-quilt wrapped feelgooderies of Hollywood past.  Only a film as straight forward and simple as DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, which fetishizes little in its sturdy narrative path, could achieve so much.

I will say, however, that Jennifer Garner was awful.

NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT

BREAKING BAD FINALE = B+

As I've not-famously argued, the SOPRANOS series ending was the most gratifying act of withholding in TV history.  A mouthpiece for creator David chase, it wasn’t so much a "thank you for watching" but a well-meaning "screw you, bitches--I'm out[drops mic]". By denying us closure on the moral argument that could only be solved by definitive life or death for Tony (i.e., is he a "good guy" or a "bad guy") Chase effectively chastises us for reducing his character--his art--to such base binaries, and for pontificating so fervently on how the series 'should' end.  It wasn't Tony who was whacked but us, the hungry audience, who suddenly is plunged into darkness and informed that that's all the story we get—there aint no more.  It hurt; it was brutal; it was genius.

BREAKING BAD goes for something different.  In a show that leaves little (and certainly decreasing) doubt that Walter is indeed a "bad guy" by the end, it's finale spends entirely too long lionizing him in what amounts to be a distractingly neat conclusion.

What's neat about a self-firing, oscillating machine gun taking out a room of neo-Nazis, freeing Jesse and catching Walt with shrapnel which will finally--finally--end the reign of Heisenberg?  It doesn't require CHOICES.

Choices are the engine of human mess, and BB turned out to have surprisingly few of them.

Skylar was painfully annoying, but her washing up on the "victim" side of aftermath beach is fascinating.  Arguably she's still perpetuating the deceptions Walt planted, yet we aren't given insight into her feelings (except, what, she's taken up smoking? I'd probably have taken up meth).  The show seems as uninterested with Skylar as it always has-- not as a real woman, but as the wife that will or will not catch her husband in "the act".  When she does catch him, Gilligan wisely makes her complicit, but only so our story can continue.  But he never bothers to explore what that complicity means, how it changes her, or how it was there all the time.   She's a cipher.

As is poor RJ Mitte who I hope goes on to meatier roles than Walt junior.  Poor little druglord's son.  His histrionics on the phone in the penultimate episode illustrate the problem I had with his character all along -- his moral puberty never comes; he never gets beyond "my dad’s the best" until he gets to "my dad’s the worst."  This  peculiar Oedipal dialectic may actually be quite interesting psychological fodder, but BREAKING BAD doesn't give a shit about Walt Jr's psychology.  This is why we don't get scenes with him alone, or with his friends, or really doing ANYTHING besides reacting to his parents deceptions/truths/postures.  It's actually a patently odd omission in hindsight -- we don't know jackshit about who Walt Jr really is, and it's a missed opportunity six seasons later.

One that BB’s finale eschews in favor of its perseverant focus on Walt Sr.  Sure he's the antihero and center of this story, and Bryan Cranston does great work here (though he's always Malcolm in The Middle-dad to me).  But we are so aligned with Walt's POV through BREAKING BAD's endgame that we don't experience the genuine abjection the other characters have come to know so deeply.  And spending so much time getting Walt's rationale through Walt's eyes (if not literally than certainly story-wise) we can't quite fully chastise him for his choices.  Sure he's a bit of a dick, but wasn't he doing it for the family?  Why else does his final “confession” somehow SEEM so false-- "I did it for me.  I liked it."   That fact, which we know, which we always so strongly known, suddenly seems like the lie.  After all, he’s trying so hard to get that money to his family.  For his ego?  For a judging deity?  For Skylar?  That's the power of BREAKING BAD's myopic narration.  We don’t believe the most obvious thing of all—Walt’s quite simply, in Jesse’s words, “evil.”

I'd usually be the last one to suggest moralizing as a positive creative force, but in a show called BREAKING BAD its a bit disingenuous to imply that the particular brand of Bad that Walt has broken is anything as ambiguous and morally gray and even borderline meritorious as the finale implied.   He doesn’t/shouldn’t get the hero’s ending, even the antihero’s ending, with his final plan a success, Jesse free, his family guaranteed money, the pieces all just right before he can look over his meth lab equipment in satisfaction, and die in peace.  And as much as I’ve been horrified by the nihilism and bloodshed of these last six episodes I feel gipped in a way that it was in service of delivering what is—if surely not a traditional “happy” ending—as happy as an ending as BREAKING BAD could muster.

SOPRANOS denied us emotional catharsis through sleight of hand nonsense (Meadow parallel parking) and a brain-dead, hackneyed soundtrack (DON’T STOP BELIEVIN) rounding out its precious final moments.    BREAKING BAD forces emotional justice, forces closure, onto a story that demanded chaos.  With the refrain of the final Badfinger song “Guess I got what I deserved” over Walt’s death scene, Gilligan is almost embarrassingly juvenile in his foot-dragging affection for Cranston or for Walter White, or likely some amalgam of the two.   If you think DEATH is what Walter White deserved after these six seasons, you haven’t been watching. 

Walter White got off easy, and so did we.