GoldbergBlog

Quick Cuts: 7/30/10

Hit the jump for my brief thoughts on The Special Relationship, I Knew It Was You, Daybreakers, The Vicious Kind, Hunger, and the Pusher Trilogy.

The Special Relationship

This is the third part of Peter Morgan’s “Blair Trilogy” (the first two parts being 2003′s The Deal and 2006′s The Queen) and it centers on Tony Blair’s relationship with Bill Clinton over the course of the Lewinski scandal and Kosovo War.  Even though there’s not much shading to Blair (he’s the idealistic good guy), it’s a good story about how one man admires and respects another until he can’t.  It is interesting to see how Blair sticks by Clinton when the President continues to deny his affair with Monica Lewinski.  Morgan and Michael Sheen (who plays Blair) set the Prime Minister’s feelings up as hero worship.  But when Clinton falls and makes Blair look like a fool, Blair realizes that he’s alone and has to conjure his own strength.  If there’s anything that could be described as a “noble betrayal”, it’s how Blair pushes Clinton into the Kosovo War.

I was left wanting two things from The Special Relationship.  First, the film talks about legacy and its cruel endnote is Bush winning the Presidency and the twisted irony of Bush dragging Blair into an unjust war as Blair dragged Clinton into a just war*.  While this is a “trilogy”, I want to see this fourth movie because it is a huge part of Blair’s legacy and I don’t understand how the full story of his time in office can be told without it.  Get on it, Morgan.

Secondly, if there’s ever going to be a Hillary Clinton biopic, it needs to star Hope Davis.

*I know something as horrible as war shouldn’t be described in terms of justice.  What I mean by “just” and “unjust” is that Blair (as portrayed in the movie) wanted to stop human rights atrocities while Bush went to war in Iraq on intelligence he knew to be false.

I Knew It Was You

Actor John Cazale had a wonderful and all-too-brief career.  He co-starred in five of the most critically-acclaimed films of all-time: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Deer Hunter.  I Knew It Was You is a 40-minute documentary that’s not so much a biopic of Cazale (although it certainly covers his personal life) as much as it examines the craft of an under-appreciated actor.  The film is filled with interviews of those who worked with Cazale (including Al Pacino, Gene Hackman, and fiancée Meryl Streep) and well-known actors who deeply admire his work (including Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, and Philip Seymour Hoffman).  What makes this documentary wonderful is you have actors talking about acting but not in a pretentious way.  It’s done lovingly as they describe what made Cazale unique among his peers and the certainty that he would have had a glorious career had it not been cut short at the age of 42 by terminal bone cancer.  But the film isn’t about his death and it’s not a eulogy.  I Knew It Was You is a celebration, not only of Cazale’s life, but of acting.

Daybreakers

I’m getting sick of all the vampire crap that’s filling pop-culture right now, partly because a solid movie like Daybreakers gets lost in the shuffle.  Yes, its subtext of the exhaustion natural resources is a little heavy-handed, but I’m glad that the movie at least wants to say something and says it coherently.  What makes Daybreakers stand out is that it thinks through the logistics of a world where everyone is a vampire.  Alarms go off to remind everyone that daylight is approaching, cars have special tinting and cameras to allow daytime driving, and if people don’t drink blood they turn into giant man-bats.  It raises the stakes to not just have vampires die if they don’t drink blood, but to have them transform into giant monsters.  Of course, the joke is that they’re already monsters for farming humans.  Again, it’s a subtext message of cruelty towards other species, but the film’s blood-as-oil metaphor works better than humans-as-cattle, simply because cows didn’t transform into humans.  But no matter how well the subtext works for you, it’s hard to deny that Daybreakers is a clever little film and far more deserving of attention than a certain sparkly-vampire franchise that should go nameless.

The Vicious Kind

To what extent can you care about a character if you know how damaged he/she is despite his/her cruel behavior?  That’s the question of The Vicious Kind and the answer is Adam Scott’s searing performance.  Scott is best known for his comedic work, most notably as Will Ferrell’s douchebag brother in Step-Brothers.  But here he gives a performance that is miles away from anything he’s ever done.  He plays Caleb, a man who will pontificate that all women are whores and suggest that his friends should commit suicide.  But in between his projected anger and hatred towards others, he is being eaten away from the inside.  He can’t sleep, he’s suffering panic attacks, and he cries when no one is looking.  We should hate Caleb and yet Scott makes us feel the character’s suffering.  Our higher-thinking tells us that Caleb isn’t worth caring about, but on a primal level we empathize with his behavior.  He is the embodiment of every time we’ve lashed out at someone else because we were hurt.  Caleb has come to a place where he hurts so deeply, it’s the only behavior left to him.

With Caleb’s character in place, the film then asks us an impossible moral question: would you betray someone you loved if it meant it could save your life?  Can you reconcile with one person at the cost of obliterating your relationship with another?  Most leading characters are designed to be liked.  We should root for them on some level.  With a despicable protagonist, a gifted actor is required to make the audience empathize with that character, even if they don’t like that character or agree with his/her decisions.  Adam Scott is that gifted actor and The Vicious Kind is worth your time for his performance alone.

Hunger

This is such an odd beast of a film and that’s partly why I love it so much.  The film spends the majority of its first act introducing characters who you believe are the main actors, but instead are simply representatives for each side of the England-Ireland political struggle in 1980.  It’s easy to mistake them as protagonists.  The film tells so much about them and yet upon reflection, you realize that they didn’t actually affect their circumstances.

The main character, who is introduced about thirty minutes into the film, is played by Michael Fassbender.  People who don’t know his name are going to be learning it very soon.  He’s signed on to star in a variety of projects and has multiple movies set for release.  His success can be traced back primarily to his performance in Hunger (and later Fish Tank).  It’s not simply that it’s a great performance.  It’s a rare performance.  It’s not about big dramatic moments or even when he’s starving himself to death as he begins a hunger strike.

The biggest moment in Hunger is simply a conversation between Fassbender’s character and a priest who’s trying to talk him out of beginning the strike.  Their conversation is done in one long take.  It’s two people talking to each other across a table.  It’s highly unusual to put this kind of burden on an actor.  Usually he or she can depend on an assist on the editing, the cinematography, and the music.  Director Steve McQueen simply sets the camera down, gets his lighting right, frames the shot, and then gives it over to the actors.  The scene doesn’t even qualify as “stage” acting because that kind of performance usually relies on physical movement in order to accentuate emotion that their voice alone can’t convey to the people in the cheap seats of the theater.

Speaking of McQueen, he’s the other star of the film.  The imagery in the movie is astounding as is the use of sound.  The way he holds shots, trusts his actors, and gives himself over to telling the story with as little dialogue as possible is remarkable.  The introduction of the movie centers on a guard working at the prison where Fassbender’s character and his fellow IRA members are being held.  The guard keeps looking at his bruised knuckles and we can see that he’s being consumed by guilt yet is stuck in a harsh reality.  If Hunger worked like a conventional film, the movie would most likely be about this guard.  I won’t describe how the guard’s story resolves itself other than to say that it’s mind-blowing.

By the time the movie reaches Fassbender’s hunger strike, it feels perfunctory.  That’s not to say it’s dull, but it’s yet another example of how the movie subverts expectations.  It’s not done as in-your-face drama, but showing martyrdom at its most feeble.  I saw Hunger months ago and I’m still turning it over in my head.

The Pusher Trilogy

This is another odd set of films.  Originally set up as a single gangster movie, the trilogy quickly evolved not as a glamorization or even dramatization of the underground crime in Copenhagen, but of individuals trapped in that world.  Rather than tell an overarching narrative, each of the Pusher films centers on a specific character within the criminal world and then shares a themes across all three films.

The first movie, Pusher, is the most straightforward.  You have Frank, a drug dealer, who loses his supply after he’s arrested by the police.  Unable to pay back what he owes, the movie has Frank desperately moving through the streets of Copenhagen trying to collect what money he can before crime boss Milo exacts his revenge.  It’s frantic, fast-paced, and the most streamlined of the three movies.

Director Nicholas Winding Refn didn’t intend to make a trilogy, but when he fell into debt in the mid-2000s, he returned to his breakout film and produced two sequels: Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands and Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death.  These two films could not be more different than the first movie.

Pusher II centers on Tonny, Frank’s friend in the first movie (until Frank believes that Tonny sold him out and beats the shit out of the guy with a baseball bat to the point where it’s unclear if Tonny survived).  Rather than a fast-paced narrative, Pusher II is more episodic and has Tonny shambling from situation to situation as every single person he meets treats him like crap.  Tonny is the son of a high-ranking criminal, but his father sees him as weak and stupid.  And Tonny isn’t a bad guy.  He’s not too bright, but he’s not a monster by any means.

Matters become worse for Tonny as his “friend” botches a job and then leaves Tonny holding the bag.  So why doesn’t Tonny ever stand up for himself?  Because what’s the point?  No one will think better of him and when enough people tell you that you’re weak and stupid, it’s easy to believe it.  But it’s the only film in the Pusher trilogy that’s has an uplifting ending.  All three Pusher films center on how people approach the dire circumstances they didn’t create, but are now the victims of.  Do we try to survive it?  Escape it? Or negotiate it.

Pusher III is about Milo, who is the only character in all three films even though his appearance in the second film isn’t much more than a cameo.  Milo’s struggle takes place within a 24-hour time span as he tries to recapture a wayward dealer (not Frank), get out from under some new players in the crime game, and cook for his spoiled daughter’s birthday party.

Milo is the most powerful character in the trilogy.  He has money, he’s experienced, and he’s about as responsible as you can be in the treacherous drug-dealing world.  And Pusher III is about why none of that matters.  It’s the story of a man getting left behind in his world.  We see that he’s only as powerful as his latest drug deal and that he’s at the mercy of budding crime lords when it should be the other way around.  The movie also functions as a criticism of the entire gangster world.  Frank and Tonny can be, to some extent, written off as pawns.  But Milo is a king, but the grasp on his throne is just as tenuous as the criminal activities that Frank and Tonny work.  And when Milo has his own moment of reckoning, his proactive response isn’t triumphant like Tonny’s.  It’s arduous and futile.

I don’t know if I’ll ever re-visit this trilogy, but it’s a unique take on the crime genre that’s worth checking out.  (Also, while I know the film is realistic to the point of casting actual criminals in some of the supporting roles, it’s still comical to see that the films usually don’t go longer than five minutes without someone snorting coke).

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.