Malin Akerman & Patrick Wilson have all the emotional power of Ken & Barbie

This is the golden age of movie effects, or at least it should be. Computer graphics have been enhanced to the level that anything is possible, anything you can dream of can be presented as a plausible physical reality on film, a phenomenon that leaves directors, screenwriters & stuntmen drunk with the potential. Yet the problem remains that for the golden age to actually exist, these same individuals have to envision it, have to make it happen. Just as early motion pictures owe a great deal of their narrative structures to the imaginations of D.W. Griffith & Sergei Eisenstein, men who figured out how to transform a story into the new medium, the potential of today’s film technology is just waiting for someone to come along and imagine what it truly might be.

The problem, however, is that Hollywood – the whole professional lets-make-an-entertainment industry – is terrified of losing money (this year especially) and that the people they’ve trained & groomed & put into positions of power reflect the same timorous nature. Two sides of this problem were on view this past weekend – first in the film extravaganza Watchmen, one of the most ambitious movies ever, and second in the boom-bang-boom previews that ran endlessly before the 2-hour 48-minute long film began.

Director Zack Snyder has tried to do something new & brave in Watchmen, which is to reinvent cinema completely. Part of what results is awe-inspiring, genuinely breath-taking, as ambitious in its own right as was Todd Haynes’ Dylan faux-biopic, I’m Not There or anything ever written by Charlie Kaufman. And parts of it are leaden, tedious, so corny that they leave you guffawing, such as the sex scene in which Nite Owl II, having cured his erectile function disorder through a night of good old caped adventures finally gets it on with Silk Spectre II, woodenly portrayed by Malin Akerman (an actress who could take lessons in the thespian arts from Paris Hilton), while Leonard Cohen gravels through Hallelujah, the soundtrack turned so loud it’s the foreground.

Snyder has pretty much abandoned action-picture dynamics (think the new Bond films or anything with the word Bourne in the title) altogether, and instead has tried to make the graphic novel. Complete with Alan Moore’s long prose asides that in the original comics took up a full page in every episode. He’s abandoned cinematic pacing. What he wants is something that doesn’t look or feel like a film at all, that is as new to the genre as Watchmen was to the world of comic books when it first appeared a quarter century ago.

Narratively, Snyder has added relatively little, tho most of what is new, like a martial arts fight scene down a prison corridor by Nite Owl II & Silk Spectre II done as a parody of superhero fighting, distracts or detracts. He’s also sliced away relatively little, which given the size of the graphic novel is almost surprising. Where he really has added is a dimension you can’t get in comics, which is the score, from the strains of Bob Dylan singing “The Times They Are A’Changin’” over  the most leisurely opening credits I’ve ever seen – the first real hint that we’re not in regular old movie land – to Simon & Garfunkel singing “The Sounds of Silence” during the funeral of The Comedian to a punk version of “Desolation Row” in the closing credits by My Chemical Romance. As with Leonard Cohen during the film’s principle sex scene – as explicit as anything I’ve ever seen in a picture aimed at adolescent males – the presence of Simon & Garfunkel plays against the action, a moment of very strange irony that Moore’s gloomy plot misses altogether. 

Where the film really doesn’t work is in the acting. Snyder – rather like George Lucas – moves the cast about & has them say their lines, but often with no affect whatsoever. So that the only performers who shine through at all are veteran character actors: Jackie Earl Haley’s Rorshach, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian, a cameo by Matt Frewer (Max Headroom himself, this time with pointy ears) as Moloch, the villain befriended by The Comedian shortly before his demise, and Robert Wisden’s caricature of Richard Nixon, with a ski-nose right out of the editorial cartoons. It is really Haley who saves this film as film, and its very best moments are the ones where is he is free of his character’s gauzy, perpetually changing mask.

But I wouldn’t judge the actors here – save maybe for Akerman, who should be an early favorite for next year’s Razzies for that sex scene alone – on the basis of their work here. Hollywood spectacles are notorious for the first-rate actors – think of Natalie Portman in Star Wars or Kate Winslet in Titanic – who come across with all the personality of a sofa. Matthew Goode does his version of Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias as tho he’s channeling David Bowie from The Man Who Fell to Earth, but does this mean he’s as bad as he comes across here? I have no idea. Pretty much everyone but Haley, Morgan, Frewer & Wisden are defeated by the weight of this film’s machinery.

The end result is that Watchmen is like viewing a beautiful train wreck in very slow motion. You can’t quite look away – save for the moments when limbs are being severed, which is a regular enough occurrence. Watchmen may even turn out to be an important film as film for all that it tries to do, but that will never make it a good one.

Still, it has a decent shot at being the Best of the Bloated among this year’s CGI-enhanced action spectacles. With Terminator Salvation, Star Trek (the prequel) & something to do with poor Wolverine of the X-men franchise all in the offing, not to mention the new Transformers, G.I. Joe & good ol’ Harry Potter, we’re in for a lot of special effects, none of which will take place in the writing. Safe scripts, franchise-familiar characters – that’s the name of the game, alas. Snyder at least has taken the riskiest project and done his very best to give us something completely new to look at. It is enough to make you ask of cinema – is that all there is?

Harvey Milk taking the oath of office, 1978, photo by Bill Carlson

I knew in advance that there was no way the film Milk could live up to my own expectations for it. Like a Tolkien fanatic wondering what became of Tom Bombadil in Lord of the Rings, or a Harry Potter fan forever contrasting film to book, I have a hard – maybe impossible – time seeing Milk, the movie, except through my own personal experience of its narrative. Milk is perhaps the only “major” motion picture I’ll ever see in which I had, at one time or another, met every significant character in the film.

Some of the disjunctions between the film & my experience of its events seem just curious – a lot of the characters appear shorter in the film than their templates in real life, Cleve Jones & Ann Kronenberg in particular. Harvey Milk was taller not only than the 5’9” Sean Penn, but taller also than Dan White, the former cop & supervisor who killed him. There is one key scene in the film where 5’11½” Josh Brolin, who portrays White, is filmed from behind & below Penn’s shoulder, so as to give the impression that he’s towering over Milk in a threatening manner. It may be dramatically right to portray White as a bully, but it’s jarring to see the two of them in that physical context. I always thought that one of White’s myriad pathologies was something of a little man complex – he was pugnacious because he was compact.

The far greater absence, tho, is a narrative one – the absence of the People’s Temple massacre, the largest single-day loss of civilian life by anything other than natural disaster in U.S. history prior to September 11, virtually all of the victims having been San Franciscans, just nine days prior to White’s assassination of Milk and S.F. Mayor George Moscone. Because the Jonestown tragedy occurred away from the City, literally in the remote jungles of Guyana, it took days for the full extent of that tragedy – over 900 dead – to become known. It totally dominated San Francisco’s media in the days prior to White’s gunning down the two elected officials. If you were even remotely politically active in San Francisco, you knew somebody who had died in Guyana. Indeed, Krishna & I knew different people who’d been gunned down on the airstrip tarmac, the event that precipitated the mass suicide at the Jonestown enclave. Here too I felt at the time that if White’s attorneys were serious about making an honest case of innocence by reason of insanity, they would have explored the collective community shock during that week. The so-called “Twinkies Defense,” on the other hand, always struck me as a much more cynical strategy on the part of White’s legal defense team – they just wanted to give a homophobic jury something on which to hang anything other than a first-degree murder finding. “Twinkies,” the theory that White’s judgment was impaired by his junk food diet, presented an easier, if sillier, storyline for the legal team to present. There is no mention of People’s Temple, nor of Jim Jones, anywhere in Milk, even tho Jones’ church members formed an important part of the progressive coalition that got district elections passed & Moscone in particular elected to office.

I’m sure that the problem of how to handle all of this narratively has much to do with why it’s taken thirty years for a production of Milk to finally makes its way to the large screen. And director Gus Van Sant & screen writer Dustin Lance Black (mostly known heretofore for his scripts for Big Love) were almost certainly correct in omitting Jonestown from the narrative here. Which is precisely where films & “real life” diverge.

But with that very big caveat, Milk is a remarkably earnest attempt at giving a full sense of the narrative of Harvey Milk. It goes so far in its willingness to present the complexities as to show White, who resigned from his position on the new board impulsively because he wasn’t able to support a family of four on the full-time supervisor salary of $9,600 per year, asking Milk, who, in the theory of that decade, had no dependents, to push for an increase. Prior to district elections, the supervisor’s post was traditionally reserved for the idle rich, for lawyers like Bob Molinari or Quentin Kopp who could take the time away from their work & just function as rainmakers for the firm, or for successful business owners, mostly Republican. Dianne Feinstein was able to be a supervisor because her husband at the time ran a hospital. But what this film doesn’t say, at least not clearly enough, was that Milk did have a nonworking spouse in the alcoholic Jack Lira & wasn’t making it on his salary either. One of the characters in the film, in theory the manager of the camera store, also worked a second job at a copy shop in the Tenderloin so that he had at least one gig that paid. Harvey Milk died broke.

Milk is not Gus Van Sant’s finest motion picture – My Own Private Idaho would still be my own choice for that honor – but it is comparable in quality, say, to Good Will Hunting & miles ahead of Van Sant slumming for a paycheck in Finding Forrester. More than any other of these flicks, however, Milk is an important film, an important story, & I think these are the grounds by which this film currently is rated among the top 250 films of all time by members of the Internet Movie Data Base.

“Important film” is a cringer as categories go – we’ve certainly all seen I don’t know how many bad motion pictures about “heroic” individuals, most often as TV movie fare, that are uplifting precisely to the degree that they ring false. And Milk is unquestionably a passion play. We see Harvey in the closet as an insurance broker in New York, Harvey as a small-time entrepreneur in San Francisco, Harvey becoming politically conscious & then becoming far more politically aggressive than the “rich old queens” who supported San Francisco Democrats financially but never asked for anything in return. It’s a scenario through which Advocate founder David Goodstein plays George Washington Carver to Milk’s Malcolm X – and that parallel is not wrong historically. The film takes care to spend time showing how Milk put together his coalition of activists – this is almost half the motion picture – and doesn’t shortchange the tale of his vexed love life, including the suicide of Lira, his most recent partner, not that long before Milk himself was killed.

What’s different about Milk the movie is ultimately what was different about Harvey Milk the person. He did not, not once, not ever, “present as heroic,” so to speak. He was never the tall, dashing Castro clone, the good-looking beautiful face of the gay community. Nor, for that matter, did he come across quite as femme as Sean Penn makes him here. Had he been more financially secure & less politically inclined, Milk might have been one of those older gay men who in the 1970s were concentrated not in the Castro, but rather on Polk Street, really part of an earlier era (Polk Street was out of the closet by the 1950s, just up the hill from the Tenderloin where the merchant marine & many of the first-generation gay bars were). His taste in partners was certainly for younger men, but the image of Milk in a little Greek yachting cap & cravat is just preposterous – it’s precisely that he doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes – for gay men, for political radicals, for movie heroes – that makes Milk the film, like the person, something unique.

Which gets to the real reason for somebody not invested in this struggle – almost certainly the civil rights issue of the 21^st century – to want to come see this film, and that is Sean Penn. Sean Penn is completely fearless in his portrayal of Harvey Milk. It may well be the best acting job I have ever seen, on a par – or better – than the very best of Al Pacino or Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s brilliantly understated & assertive all at once. It’s almost inconceivable that this is Sean Penn, he of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the former husband of Madonna, friend to Fidel Castro & Hugo Chavez. Whereas Hoffman, for example, has portrayed gay men with outsized personae, such as Truman Capote or Rusty the drag queen in Flawless, Penn has to rein in almost all the easy avenues to manifesting his character as gay, Jewish, political, entrepreneurial & deeply insecure all at once. I’d say he gets it 98 percent right, and if Penn were just a few inches taller, he’d have most of the rest.

L-R: Viktor Bychkov, Anni-Kristiina Juuso & Ville Haapasalo star in the 2002 film Cuckoo

A couple of weeks ago I saw a film that I have not been able to get out of my head. Two of the other foreign films I’ve seen lately have been by the director Fatih Akin, German by birth but Turkish by heritage, a subject that films like Head On and The Edge of Heaven tackle with great insight. I’d read something somewhere that wondered, since the U.S. was able to elect an African-American as president, when precisely would Britain have a Jamaican, France have an Algerian or Germany a Turk? Then, quite by coincidence, I read Perry Anderson’s two long articles on the 20^th century history of Turkey in the London Review of Books. Then Akin’s films popped up, again a coincidence, and now I’m quite curious about this society that lives right on the edge between Europe & Asia and that, until the end of the 19^th century, was a world power. Turkey’s relationship to its own internal minorities, including the remnants of an Armenian population wiped out in a very deliberate act of genocide a century ago – an example that Adolph Hitler took note of – and the essentially stateless Kurds in the southeast, is no less problematic than Germany’s relationship to its own Turkish citizens. The problems of nations and peoples are no closer to being resolved in the 21^st century than they were in the 19^th. Or the 7^th, for that matter.

Yet the film that’s been haunting me isn’t either of Akin’s, tho I’d recommend them both. Instead, it’s a little Russian comedy called Cuckoo, filmed in 2002 by Aleksandr Rogozhkin, something Krishna picked up at Blockbuster. This film likewise touches on the same issues of nation vs. person but does so with an interesting twist. The three primary actors speak Sámi, Finnish & Russian throughout the film & never manage to learn one another’s tongue. The Finn asks the Russian his name & the Russian replies “Get lost,” which he is then called throughout the rest of the film.

The set-up is fairly simple. It’s 1944, the last days of World War 2, and a Finnish sniper is being punished by his comrades, essentially sentenced to death. They’ve set him up for a suicide mission, chained him to a gigantic boulder, dressed him in a German uniform, and left him there to starve, or be eaten, or possibly shot or bombed as he’s more or less out in the open, unprotected save for a rifle that he uses only for its telescope. In theory he’s supposed to shoot as many Russians as he can before they shoot him. At roughly the same time, and not so far away, the Russian army has ferreted out a subversive and is sending him back to the main battalion and hence back to Russia where he almost certainly shall be shot. This officer’s crime? Writing poetry that appeared to praise peace. Two soldiers bundle him into a jeep and head off on their mission. As they proceed on the road, a pair of German fighters fly overhead. The two soldiers don’t recognize the planes’ markings, but the officer does. He asks if they can stop and let him relieve himself in the woods beside a stream. They do and while he’s off hidden in the bushes the planes return and bomb the hapless jeep, killing the soldiers instantly. While the blast wounds the officer, he’s able to make his way until he collapses.

At which point he is found by a young Lapp woman who literally drags him back to her nomadic encampment where she nurses him back to health with some reindeer soup made from milk & blood – there’s a great scene of milking the reindeer. A member of the last nomadic tribe in Northern Europe, her husband has gone off to war, never to return. She’s very resourceful, but also lacking in the personnel that literally make nomadic existence feasible. She doesn’t speak a word of Russian, nor, for that matter, Finnish. While she’s off burying the dead – she carries off a severed leg as matter of factly as if she were dumping garbage – the Finnish sniper is frantically trying to yank his chain and the spike that’s attached it to this boulder before some plane comes along and spots him in his German uniform. It takes days and the scenes of him methodically trying everything that comes to mind, grabbing at bushes to get together sticks to create a little fire, using the lens of his glasses to ignite it and the black powder from his bullets to generate a charge, are almost a film within this film. You would not at this point call Cuckoo a comedy.

It becomes one once he’s finally free and makes his way down to the encampment. He presumes the wounded Russian is militantly anti-Finn, the Russian presumes he’s a fascist – the Finn actually understands the implication of the word “fascisti” but can’t make the Russian understand that he’s not. The word “democracy,” or at least its Finnish equivalent, is not in the Russian’s vocabulary. Yelling out the names of anti-war novels (War and Peace, For Whom the Bell Tolls) or the names of authors doesn’t work either. The two men inherently distrust one another, but for the moment have to leave the other one alive. Meanwhile, Anni, the Lapp widow, thinks they’re becoming fast friends. They’re useful and she’s been without a man now for four years. She doesn’t feel particularly deprived by these circumstances.

Much of the rest of this film is watching the three characters develop relationships without understanding one another’s language. They talk to one another as if they’re being understood, but the listener invariably hears only what he or she wants to hear, and responds accordingly. They keep this up for over an hour. It’s a brilliant, even stunning tour de force.

This may sound like a very thin premise on which to build a motion picture, but it’s not a one-joke trick so much as a meditation on language, expectation and interpretation. I suspect that this film works best if you know one – but only one – of the three languages, tho my own feeble Russian vocabulary – never more than a hundred words to begin with – has eroded over the years, so it would be more accurate to say that I understand the sound of Russian more than I do the language. Sámi, on the other hand, sounds unlike either Finnish – which it is related to – or Russian. The script is carefully written, although I wonder if the jokes that come cross in English subtitles work quite the same way listening to this film in any of its three primary languages. For example, Rogozhkin, who wrote as well as directed the film, never allowed Anni-Kristiina Juuso, his Lapp star, to see the entire script (which was in Russian), instead giving Juuso her lines in Finnish – she’s a Lapp radio broadcaster in addition to her acting – who then translated them herself into Sámi.¹ A fair amount of the cognitive dissonance between the three gets muted – or I presume that it must – when one is reading subtitles all in one language. Is it really the same film? The broader acts of cultural misconnection – as when the Finn builds a sauna that the other two find useless, or when he tries to explain to the Russian that he studied philosophy in college and wanted to be a poet but lacked the talent – work much better in the context of the film than they do writing them out here.

I won’t explain how this film turns out – there are major plot twists and serious risks involved, not to mention a long mystical sequence when Anni wolfishly attempts to howl one of the characters back to life by blowing in his ear – other than to note that the rules of comedy prevail. Tho in the end, when you see the officer marching back to Stalin’s Russia in 1945, rather than to, say, south to Helsinki, you have to wonder if he has done any more than to delay the doom that awaits him.

In some sense, this is a film intended to be viewed by foreigners. Not in the way that a French flick with Juliet Binoche is targeted at the American market, but rather because it positions each of us unalterably as foreigners. If we can’t get all of it, it teases us with the possibility that we didn’t get any of it. Subtitles only complicate the problem.

You can imagine Wittgenstein just loving this film. This is, after all, something of his later vision of the problem of language. Just because we speak and write the same tongue, I think you can understand what I’m writing here. And you think you understand what I’m saying. Yet I know I have readers who profoundly don’t get it, or who get it exactly wrong. And I know that just because I’ve never – not once in over 40 years – been able to finish a poem by Richard Wilbur or Mark Strand without nodding off doesn’t mean that this is necessarily the only conceivable response to their writing. But the people who gush over such work might as well be Martians. It’s impossible to know exactly how to value what they’re saying, when what they say seems to be so totally against the evidence of this grey, bloodless conformity. Yet I was struck, moved even, by Kirby Olson’s confession in the comments stream the other day that he doesn’t “get” poetry that’s not funny – that closes off maybe 80 percent of literature, something he’s actually paid a salary to teach. And it explains why the poets he does value, even at their best, lack subtlety. The chromatic changes of a Larry Eigner poem are, for me, sometimes as intensely beautiful as a clear summer sky. And there’s nobody I’ve ever read, not even Dickinson, who comes close to Eigner’s ability to make statements of great complexity appear utterly simple.

Cuckoo does a great job of showing how people who can’t possibly communicate actually do get things done, not so much in spite of it all as through it all. A lot like an Eigner poem, it feels pretty simple when you watch it. But if you’re like me, you’ll be playing it over in your mind weeks & weeks later.

 

¹ I’ve been told – tho I have no way to judge the validity of this – that most Finns have never met a Sámi speaker. It’s true that there are just 20,000 Sámi who speak nine different related languages, tho Northern Sámi accounts for 75% of this. And they’re spread out across the northernmost reaches of Norway, Sweden, Finland & Russia. I’ve only once met a speaker of Lenape, and yet here I live in the center of what was once the Algonquin nation.

Chad Feldheimer marches to a different drum machine

One wonders exactly what motivates any artist to choose a particular project. It’s inscrutable enough if one is an individual artist. Why does one person write The Pisan Cantos and the next one a suite of haiku, or sonnets, or flarf? When capital gets involved, it gets funkier in a hurry. Why, for example, is Ed Ruscha a painter, a visual artist,  and not a writer? Why this word & not that one? Why this context & not that one? Why don’t we think of Ruscha when we consider the history of minimalism & the works of, say, Bob Grenier & Aram Saroyan?

These sorts of questions get even murkier when both capital & collaboration are involved. One reason that Once may be the best movie musical ever filmed, give or take Hard Days Night, is that it involved a relatively small body of collaborators and almost no budget whatsoever. The party scene was filmed in the flat of the film’s star, Glen Hansard. The older woman who sings is, in fact, his mother. The whole movie was made for just $100,000, done off of credit cards, and the filmmakers never had permits to shoot on the streets. No wonder Hansard is believable as a busker.

At the other end of the scale, way way on the other end, we have the bloated star fests like Armageddon or Ocean’s 7-eleven where far too many name actors get fat checks to mail in performances with scripts that they seem barely to glance at. At least Sinatra & the Rat Pack didn’t pretend to be thespians. They just needed something to do in the daytime before the clubs opened for the evening in Vegas.

Burn After Reading sure has that feel to it. There’s Tilda Swinton, one of the best actresses anywhere, imitating her mean bitch role from Michael Clayton, but with none of the having-second-thought nuances. There’s George Clooney, glad-handing (and more) every woman he meets with exactly the same wide-eyed big smile con-artist stare he used in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Instead of pomade, he’s switched to asking everybody what their floors are made of.)  Then there is Brad Pitt, better known these days as the afterthought in Brangelina, doing a send-up of sorts of his role as the clueless stud in Thelma & Louise. He’s really quite good, in a horrific sort of way. At least Frances McDormand isn’t reprising her laconic pregnant police chief from Fargo. But that’s because she’s channeling William Macy’s part from that same film. Indeed, the only actor here who seems to have bothered to act in this movie is John Malkovich. He’s tremendous as the tweedy CIA analyst with a giant bow-tie, right out of an Ivy League secret society (we’re treated to a Princeton reunion song in its entirety). Except that he’s a former CIA analyst & none too happy about this former stuff. And then something happens.

Now all of this nonsense doesn’t matter much because these squirrels have been set loose in what is pretty close to a perfect Rube Goldberg device, the narrative as sketched out by from the Brothers Coen, fresh off their second best-picture Oscar for No Country for Old Men & happy to sweep up something like nine digits of cash with the first big film of the autumn. One suspects that their story board looked just a little like one of Anthony Braxton’s scores. If the year’s movies were a multi-course meal &the summer fare were a bunch of oddly rich too sweet fare, like a giant bowl of ice cream right before the entrée of the Oscar contenders when winter comes on, then Burn After Reading would be the perfect amuse bouche, the tiny morsel served to cleanse the pallet of the heavy aftertaste of Batman et al. That’s a very modest goal, but the Coen Bros. wind their little contraption up very very tight. It’s fun to watch it spin through the motions.

There are two premises behind this movie. The first is a series of coincidences as to who knows who socially and in what roles, the makings of many a screwball Hollywood comedy. The second is a presumption about human nature – everyone, with just one exception, is venal, is screwing one another, terrified of commitment (if male) or about to file for divorce (if female). The only good person here – tho we don’t get to see too much of him – is a lovelorn defrocked Greek Orthodox priest played by Richard Jenkins, a superb character actor (he was the dead father on Six Feet Under).

So it’s not a thriller of good guys vs. bad guys, because there are no good guys really, just some folks with whom you might be more apt to identify (wide-eyed Clooney, wide-eyed McDormand) than with others (Malkovich & Swinton squint a lot). A lot of what makes this film work are the small bits of stage business or details that are ancillary at best to the main narrative, and which are often never explained, like why Clooney is interested in everyone’s floors & why he has to guess what they are (the people he asks are never really certain, like, is that really white pine?), or the large purple pillow he lugs around in a couple of scenes – apparently a sex toy of sorts, in that it allows the partner on the bottom to raise their hips & pelvis upward to interesting angles – but which nobody ever uses, mentions or otherwise identifies. Or that little invention Clooney’s constructed in his basement. I don’t believe my wife has laughed that loudly in a movie theater since at least A Mighty Wind. When this film comes out in DVD, I’m going to have to pay the closet confrontation scene frame by frame to see if it really is “muscle memory” that drives the plot. Malkovich also has a number of these bits as well, such as his various descriptions as to why he “left” the Agency, his attempts at dictating his memoirs and the great scene with his dad, who says nothing, because – we suspect – he couldn’t if he tried. We never do learn why Olson was in that meeting, or what Olson does or anything about him? The elements that articulate Malkovich’s depression – how can you be committing murder in your underwear & bathrobe that late in the day? – are all well done. There are also some details about Malkovich controlling his drinking by waiting until 5:00 pm to begin & by measuring just how much he pours into a glass that are smart & knowing as well as funny.

So this is a lark, as if the Coen Brothers want to show audiences that a comedy can actually be intelligent & funny, unlike, say, the drivel put out by so many former Saturday Night Live cast members. Not everybody gets out alive – it is a Coen Brothers film after all – but at least the brothers had the taste to leave their wood chipper at home. Now, one wonders, what if these guys actually decided some day to make a movie. Like something serious along the lines of Crash or Traffic or Nashville or Syrianna. Their ensemble-governing skills are perfectly suited to the task, but could they figure out where & when to tone it down? It would even be fun to see them attempt a chase-thriller like one of the Bourne films or the Bond franchise. You know that would be fun. Which brings me back to my ultimate question about Burn After Reading – why this film, with this cast, at this time? What were the boys thinking?

I finally got around to viewing How to Draw a Bunny the other night, and both the documentary and its subject are quite a bit better than its rating on Netflix might make you suspect. Bunny is a portrait of the late Ray Johnson, the inventor of mail art & an active member of the New York arts scene in the 1950s & ‘60s, close to Fluxus, part of the Warhol scene, and a man who lived the most austere life imaginable, even by Thomas Merton standards. His final performance piece in 1995 found him jumping off a bridge in Sag Harbor and swimming the backstroke generally out in the direction of Gardiner’s Bay & Long Island Sound. His body was later found in the water.

From the lengthy interview with the Sag Harbor chief of police – and extensive footage of Johnson’s home in Locust Valley taken either by the police or shortly after Johnson’s death – the conclusion of suicide was pretty much obvious, but even the police – usually not your best aesthetic critics – could see that everything had been set up as if it were a happening – a  genre at which Johnson excelled. All of his works (for the most part, thousands and thousands of collages) were either boxed up or turned facing the wall, with the sole exception, in the uppermost, furthest back room of the house, of a photo of Johnson himself, staring out (imagine an inverted tomb for an Egyptian pharaoh). Johnson’s earlier events included his participation in a poetry reading in which his work consisted of removing his belt and beating a cardboard box with it for twenty minutes, all the while hopping around on one foot, looking considerably “less hip” than anyone in the audience in a suit & tie, his hair cropped close (at other points he favored a shaved head). Johnson was also the person who brought Dorothy Podber to Andy Warhol’s factory where, anticipating Valerie Solanis by four years, she proceeded to shoot a stack of Warhol's portraits of Marilyn Monroe.

Johnson himself dropped out of the New York scene with a vengeance the day Solanis shot Warhol himself. For one thing, Johnson had been mugged the same day. And two days later Robert Kennedy was assassinated. How Johnson survived, both in New York & later on Long Island, is not clear from the documentary. There is not much evidence that Johnson himself ever worked for a living, at least not after his parents died, and he actively made it all but impossible to purchase his art. Yet when he died without a will, there remained a massive estate of works and over $400,000 in cash.

What impressed the police most was that people from all over the world started calling, each with a story about Johnson that might shed some light on his behavior. Many of Johnson’s friends were famous – John Cage, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Chuck Close, Diane Di Prima, most of whom are either in the movie or in the extensive (and equally interesting) “out takes” included on the DVD. All of the stories were remarkable, the chief notes, but they were all very different and nobody it seemed knew Johnson well at all. Even his closest compadres like Christo, Chuck Close or his beleaguered art dealers Richard Feigen and Frances Beatty. For example, Beatty had been working for 14 years to get Johnson to hold still long enough for Feigen’s gallery to do a show. It was an impulse Johnson deliberately, repeatedly undercut. Much of the film, in fact, is a recitation of various would-be collectors negotiating with Johnson over the price of some collage. Morton Janklow, the corporate lawyer who became a literary agent, sat for a portrait that consisted of a silhouette, which Johnson then reproduced 26 times and used as the foundation for a series of intensely worked collages. Every time Janklow asked Johnson if he could buy the series, Johnson’s story changed. At one point, he added an image of Paloma Picasso, Pablo’s daughter & a famous designer for Tiffany in her own right. The image, a photo taken by Helmut Newton, is very 1970s. She stands wearing a dress that covers only one breast, the other half hidden behind a glass of what might be whiskey. Taken from wherever Johnson got it – Life magazine is a real possibility – Johnson declared that any portrait of Janklow – the silhouette is almost entirely unintelligible in at least half of them – that had been “Paloma-ized” was now worth double the previous price. Another time, Chuck Close talked Johnson down on price by 25 percent, only to receive the collage minus its lower right-hand quadrant. Close also tried mightily to get Johnson to sell something to the Met so that he could include Johnson's work in a show of portraits from the Met’s collection. Johnson was his typical impossible self, but he sent correspondence art – a photocopied bunny with a name attached – to the Met’s librarian, knowing the institution’s practice of saving all correspondence. It looked something like this:

And Close did include it in the show, tho to say that it was in the Met’s “collection” was stretching it more than a little.

I used to see Johnson’s work occasionally in various intermedia/Fluxus-oriented publications throughout the 1960s & ‘70s, less often thereafter. Unlike Basquiat, who was equally an outsider – more so socially than Johnson – but who transformed his role on the edges of the Warhol scene into a moment of brief fame & fortune before he died, Johnson is – like every member of Fluxus save for Yoko Ono – an artist who never got rich and certainly did not get his due during his own lifetime. Not that he made it easy for anyone who tried. Perhaps only Richard Lippold, the sculptor who was briefly Johnson’s instructor at Black Mountain – where else? – in the late 1940s, and who speaks as tho he had an affair with his student that lasted a quarter century, ever really got close. It was Lippold who brought the Detroit-raised Johnson to New York, and many of Johnson’s friends would have been Lippold’s also.

Much of the work around Fluxus, in particular, has always struck me as nostalgia for Dada, a kind of retro echo effect that suggests a derivative imagination, not for the most part first-rate work. Yet How to Draw a Bunny makes a superb case for Johnson as craftsman & visionary both. And as such, it’s an excellent example of how a film can really elevate the work of its subject (cf. Gustave Reninger’s Corso: The Last Beat, should it ever get distributed). Why is it that docs about these relatively obscure artists – or, in Corso’s case, famous but not taken seriously – so often provide much better treatment than do films about major artists like Kerouac or Bill Burroughs or Andy Warhol? Perhaps it’s because the film-maker understands his or her role not just in presenting the artist in question, but in making the case for a more serious, closer look than has previously been offered. With famous, successful writers and artists, it’s just presumed & accordingly the film never does the close reading, the serious work, it needs to accomplish. John Walter, director of How to Draw a Bunny, mostly has done anti-war films. But he’s almost made one of the best portraits of an artist I’ve ever seen. And he’s convinced me that Johnson is much more than a marginal fuck-up of the sort that make up the fringe of any large art scene. This film makes you realize that even when he was just emerging from the Black Mountain aesthetic, Johnson was already a powerful artist:

But as this film makes clear, that black square at the center of this work – the title is Calm Center – is, in fact, also a self portrait. Don’t take it from me. Ask Johnson:

Ben Kingsley, Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer & Thomas Kretschmann take a walk in the Siberian woods

Woody Harrelson is not the world’s most versatile actor. He has a fairly narrow range, but within it, he can be quite decent. In the hands of the right director, he can be brilliant, as he was when Milos Forman cast him in the title role of The People vs. Larry Flynt. He’s not brilliant as Roy, the Midwestern hardware store owner & evangelical minister, in Transsiberian, but he doesn’t need to be since, even tho he has top billing, it’s ultimately not a film about his character, but rather about Jessie, his wife, played by Emily Mortimer (Match Point, Lars and the Real Girl, Lovely & Amazing). She is tremendous as the chica mala, the one-time runaway turned addict & alcoholic who is rescued by this super square minister, offered a decent life, stopped drinking and finds herself now in Beijing, have helped a community gain electricity for the first time. A serious, but amateur, photographer, she’s documented the entire project. Now, instead of flying back to the United States, Roy has talked her in going back the long way, by train to Moscow on the Transsiberian Express. A train nut – he has the requisite miniature set in his basement back home – Roy wants not just to take this lengthiest of train rides, but to see a train that actually has to change gauge when it crosses the border from China into Russia. He also thinks that this will help to feed his new wife’s wanderlust & desire for adventure. The couple isn’t quite communicating as openly as they should, as an early scene regarding the use of condoms makes clear, and he’s hoping that this will give their relationship a new dimension.

Along the way, they meet a pair of backpackers, Carlos & Abby, fresh from teaching ESL in Japan, or so they say. Inveterate travelers, Carlos & Abby have been everywhere & know all the nuances of negotiating not just the train, but the police & customs, never a simple thing even in post-Soviet Russia, the markets & the curious train apparatchiks who rule with an iron fist but fail to fix toilets. Jessie likes Abby, who reminds her perhaps too much of her younger self, a kid fleeing unstated sexual abuse at home, but she really connects with Carlos, a natural risk taker from Spain who instantly recognizes the chica mala or bad girl in Jessie’s past. When only Carlos returns from a short stopover in Irkutsk, the Siberian city on the banks of Lake Baikal, where he’d tagged along with Roy as the preacher photographed decommissioned antique locomotives, Jessie gets frantic. She gets off at what must be the next stop and waits in the small town’s hotel, hoping that Roy will be on the next train a day later. Carlos & Abby decide to detrain & wait with her. Things happen that I won’t recount here. Suffice it to say that when Roy does show up & Jessie joins him on a later train, Carlos & Abby don’t get back on & Jessie soon finds herself surrounded by Russian cops asking very uncomfortable questions. From here things turn into one of the more tense thrillers I’ve seen on screen in awhile, including a train crash & some graphic & bloody torture. It helps that the principle detective here, Inspector Grinko of the Russian equivalent of the DEA, is played impeccably by Ben Kingsley. But the second hour of this two-hour film is thoroughly harrowing, almost entirely focused on Jessie.

Ultimately Transsiberian is about what we know about others, and what we let others know about ourselves. We don’t know all the secrets that drive Jessie, and it’s never clear that anyone in the film understands fully just who Carlos & Abby are & of what they might be capable. No one, not even the police, are quite what they seem. This is true even for Roy, whose knowledge of hardware stores & love of “choo choo trains” proves to be a lifesaver, and whose love of Jessie is unconditional enough to accept any secrets she might harbor. It’s Jessie who has the much harder time sorting through this web. Roy might accept her unconditionally, but she sure doesn’t. Yet she is willing to trust Abby, which leads to a final scene that underscores the complexities of the entire film.

Making Jessie a photographer & giving her a past more hinted at than described, clearly are intended to make us identify with her perspective throughout the film. She is still trying to sort out her past & this improbable marriage. And she’s the one who has to make sense of everything else that is going on, just in order to stay alive. Mortimer is continually asked to express two or three emotions almost simultaneously & does so with the most subtle pallet of expressions one might imagine, especially played off against the much broader acting style of Harrelson. Somehow it works, Mortimer makes it work, even when the screen play or Brad Anderson’s direction seem less than perfect.

The film is hardly flawless – there is no way, literally, that final scene can occur without a whole bunch o’ narrative explaining why Abby wasn’t shipped back to the U.S. the instant she could stand (or why the wolves hadn’t feasted & scattered the booty), the disappearance of most of the train is never quite explained, or why, if the bad guys have a camp sufficiently set up to include helicopters, they don’t send more folks out to capture our protagonists. Giving the lead characters the names of Roy & Jessie is too precious. And if you’re going to make your protagonists serious Christians, shouldn’t Christianity actually drive their behavior? Transsiberian isn’t a film that can stand up to too much of this sort of probing. But it’s an effective neo-Hitchcockian diversion, the scenery is fabulous (train buffs probably will be blown away by the details), and the film gives a very real sense of what it feels like to deal with daily life in Russia. Still, the best reason to see this film is to watch Emily Mortimer give a master class in what a three-dimensional acting performance can be. She’s completely believable and sympathetic, even when you’re appalled at her actions & what she’s willing to let happen to keep a secret. This is a small film that is going to play at art houses or in larger cineplexes that no longer need to devote 17 screens to The Dark Knight. It’ll go to DVD & that will be that, which is too bad. Emily Mortimer gives a performance better than many that win Oscars, but I don’t know how many folks who will get to see it.

One of the happenstances of being on vacation is getting to see a film a second time that one would not necessarily choose to see twice, in this instance The Dark Knight, about which I wrote here. I did not, as it happens, find much that I had missed the first time – notably who were the hostages dressed as clowns in the final confrontation scene. And how one particular officer telegraphs being “bought” by the other side even in the first scenes of the film.

More interestingly, tho, was how the violence plays a second time. As before, the only true moment of gore other than the creation of Two-Face is the self-stitching scene with Bruce Wayne & Alfred early on in the film. Now, however, all of the later scenes of violence – the blood & guts suggested rather than shown – is continually being foretold, seconds, even minutes before. The disappearing pencil trick, for example, is very different when you know where it is going. As a result there is only one surprising moment of violence in the film – when the Batman wannabe bangs against the window. And, with these other moments expanded, the film feels far more violent and dark than on first viewing. The second time through, it really does feel as tho the Joker’s perspective is very close to that of the director.

Javier Bardem & Rebecca Hall are at the center of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

There are some spoilers in what follows. Proceed with caution.

What makes Vicky Cristina Barcelona the perfect summer bon-bon is something that the film is missing, even more than all the things it has in great quantity – good writing, decent acting, eminently sympathetic characters, a fabulous soundtrack of Spanish guitar, the architecture of Antoni Gaudi for backdrops, almost perfect pacing. What it doesn’t have, for once in Woody Allen’s career, is Woody Allen. It’s not that he’s not a presence, complete with all the signature tics of his film style – a voiceover narrator, a film that loves to talk, people forever puzzled about love, even the latest in his line of screen muses in the presence of Scarlett Johansson – but Allen’s not on screen & nobody is a stand-in for Allen, not even Javier Bardem’s archetypal Latin lover, the painter Juan Antonio Gonzalo, the male at the center of this very female-focused film. As a result, Allen has done something new: made a movie about Other People. And done so very credibly.

The premise of the film is quite simple: two young American women, vaguely post-college, spend two months in Barcelona. One, Johansson’s Cristina, is an arty type, having just completed a 12-minute movie that has made her wonder what her art form should really be. The other, Rebecca Hall’s Vicky, plays the straight girl, the best friend who’s engaged to be married to a young corporate type, with the single notable anomaly that she’s working on a Ph.D. on Catalan identity. “What are you going to do with that?” one of the film’s secondary characters asks her.

“She’s going to get pregnant,” advises this character’s wife, Patricia Clarkson, the relative who has offered her home to the two girls for July & August, “and that will answer all of her questions.” Except of course, obviously, it won’t. And that really is the story of this film, as it gradually portrays a world in which everyone is well-intentioned, everyone is unsatisfied in love (even Clarkson has a thing on the side with her husband’s business partner), all the women have secrets and the definition of a good life appears to be the willingness to keep asking questions & accept complexity & ambiguity.

None of this is new to cinema – Stealing Beauty, which made a star out of Liv Tyler, does the American-goes-to-Europe-to-find-herself more sensually than VCB (and is a far more accurate portrait of the life of an artist), Desperately Seeking Susan does the straight girl-bohemian girl bond with more zest & it would hard to find more stereotyped Spanish characters than the Bardem’s painter-Lothario & his firebrand ex-wife (from whom Bardem has gotten all of his painting ideas) portrayed with startling gusto by Penelope Cruz. The amazing thing here is that it all works. This is a film all about pacing & balance, with lots of intricate pieces in play at any given moment, in which the characters are forever talking & yet, when Vicky looks over at Juan Antonio as they listen to some Spanish guitar, the whole history of female-male desire is palpable in just her eyes. It’s a great moment & Hall is a terrific actress.

Hall, who received some minor film award nominations for her role in The Prestige, but is largely new to the movies (she comes from a British theater family), is one of the two anchors in this film, the other being Bardem. Bardem’s importance is obvious – he’s involved with all three women – but Hall’s is more subtle & her role more demanding. While Johansson’s Cristina is openly game for everything, up to & including becoming part of an ongoing threesome with the two Spanish painters, Hall has to play somebody more locked into her sense of right & wrong & appropriate. As the film progresses, Johansson’s character grows more certain of herself as a person who is willing to take risks, while Hall’s character discovers that she has depths that will never addressed by a “normal” life. By the film’s end, she’s willing to lie to her husband about how she got shot & you realize that she may very well go on and get pregnant, but that she certainly won’t rely on Doug to provide the depth & meaning to her world.

The only characters in this film about whose internal lives you don’t get some insight are Clarkson’s husband, Mark (character actor Kevin Dunn), & Hall’s husband, Doug, played by Chris Messina (Ted from Six Feet Under). Do they also live lives of quiet desperation or are they the stick figures presented here? The one hint Allen gives that he understands their plight also comes from a third male figure, a young American in a Spanish language class Vicky attends who is just getting started in his career at the embassy & is perfectly willing to hit on the American newly wed. He hasn’t reached the point where he can exteriorize his own insecurities with a boat, a swimming pool or little red sports car, but he’s testing the waters of life just like everyone else.

Of the minor characters, the most interesting is Juan Antonio’s father, a poet who refuses to publish, appears to live alone, & who talks openly about his desire to sleep with Juan Antonio’s ex-wife. Seeing Juan Antonio with his dad is what first softens Vicky’s attitude towards the fellow who, she is sure, just wants to get into her pants. Asked why his dad won’t publish, Juan Antonio replies that the old man “hates people” because “they refuse to love.” No further explanation as to what gave rise to that opinion. As an allegory, that doesn’t quite work. But as a narrative thread that is spun out but not completed – like the language student – it adds a layer of indeterminacy that serves this picture well.

This is one of those films in which the main characters, Vicky & Cristina, learn things about themselves and that is the plot. What they learn is not particularly comforting – Woody Allen doesn’t do comfort – but that they are capable of growth is perhaps the most optimistic message Allen has ever had.

The Dark Knight is a very good motion picture, a superb one in many respects. But count me out of any attempts to raise this film to the level, say, of The Godfather or even Lord of the Rings. Or, for that matter, the last film in which Heath Ledger & Christian Bale both appeared, the Dylan biopic, I’m Not There. There is something missing right at the core of this event.

I’m tempted to say that what’s absent is emotion. Where you really notice it is in the remarkably sanitized & muted demise of one of the key characters. It’s entirely off-screen as the heroes of this film rush to rescue another key character. There’s plenty of explosions, but it’s difficult to tell which are the ones that almost get our rescued one & which perhaps claimed the other. Everyone appears affected by the death, but not really. Batman is confused. The film’s other primary protagonist responds counter-intuitively, to say the least. Out of grief, that one decides to stand for everything the late one opposed. What’s wrong with that picture?

But to call this emotion is to confuse the effect with its cause, the less-than-perfect narrative skills of Christopher Nolan. The key to The Dark Knight, I fear, is its PG-13 rating. There are an enormous number of explosions, lots of shooting, more than a few key deaths, but very little blood or gore. The very worst of it is some stitching Bruce Wayne does to his own bicep fairly early in the going. The Joker, tho he talks a good knife, never actually deploys it onscreen. His own scars, which at one point he suggests are the consequence of child abuse, are covered by paint, coming across most of the time as a blur. His very best moment is his most femme, waltzing out of a hospital in a nurse’s uniform & red wig as the building implodes behind him.

The alleged gore that greets Two-Face is right out of The Terminator¹ and borders on the cartoon gore of Indy Jones or Ghostbusters, tho this is definitely Aaron Eckhart’s breakout motion picture. But one of the reasons he stands out is one of the deeper problems of the picture. Against Heath Ledger’s decidedly creepy & very hot adaptation of the Joker, Nolan has made the decision to keep everyone else, save Meister Eckhart, very very cool. The blue flame explosion that occurs in advance of the title at the beginning has it exactly right. Morgan Freeman is hardly used at all, Gary Oldman, again playing against type as the good cop, has exactly one meaty scene & that on his back², Michael Cane plays Bruce Wayne’s manservant in a much lower key than he did in Batman Begins, and Christian – “It hurts to smile” – Bale, the latest in the Robert Mitchum school of under-emoting, tones it down even further, if possible.

Eckhart tho, because he has the most complex role in the film, is allowed to ramp it up a little. And tho he’s not Laurence Olivier, nor even Heath Ledger, he does a credible job. He & Ledger are the two bright lights in this otherwise very dark & muted landscape.

Consider, by way of contrast, how the death of Sonny, played by James Caan, impacts The Godfather, how it transform every character, from Brando to Pacino all the way to John Cazale’s pathetic Fredo. This is exactly what we’re supposed to be feeling as Bruce Wayne tries to figure out whether or not to go on & as Two-Face does his flip into evil. But I didn’t feel it at all. Perhaps because you (I) never buy these characters as in any way people. Oldman & the one who gets blown up are really the only two exceptions.

What replaces characterization, the human element, is pacing. This is the strangest aspect of The Dark Knight . It keeps basically to the same rhythm from beginning to end. Whether it’s a chase scene under the el (with the Joker alternately driving a garbage truck & in the back of a moving van with rocket-propelled grenades – how does he do that?), or a swank fundraiser with the hoi polloi for the new DA, this film never lingers. Consider, again by way of contrast, how pacing was used in the latest Bond flick, Casino Royale, going from the hyperventilating opening chase to the feels-like-real-time game of poker. The Dark Knight feels more like a sluggish version of a Bourne film, the same incessant drift from scene to scene, but without the constant threat of capture.

So it just doesn’t quite work, at least for me. I should note that I think the balance between cool Christian Bale & hot, agitated, psycho-giggling Heath Ledger does. They counter one another quite effectively & their scenes together improve throughout the course of the film. When the Joker tells Batman he’ll never kill him because “you complete me,” you realize just what a great film this could have been. Ledger is the most memorable villain since Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, all of nine months ago, tho both pale against Anthony Hopkins’ original performance as Hannibal Lecter. Will Ledger get a supporting actor nomination from the Academy? Almost certainly. Will he win? Only against a very weak field.

 

¹ And if you forgot that, seeing an advance preview for Terminator Salvation, due out next year, starring not Ahnold the Govenator, but none other than Christian Bale (!!), ahead of Dark Knight, brings it all right back.

² Oldman’s amphetamine-fueled bad cop in The Professional (a.k.a. Leon) shows just how over-the-top he can go, much hotter & wilder than Ledger. One of the genuinely great character actors of our time, Oldman’s muted, even slack performance here clearly is a choice.

Warning: spoilers ahead. If you plan to see Hancock anytime soon, you probably don’t want to read this until you have done so.

Hancock is a mess. I can’t recall the last time I saw a major sci-fi flick with this many narrative holes – narrative canyons, really. Example: one week after a botched bank robbery that cost him his hand, the mastermind of the job is already in prison, outfitted with a prosthetic hook & teamed up with the two cons who most dislike our film’s eponymous hero. We learn that this minor mastermind (groomed to look like the replicant in Bladerunner who failed his psych test) is, by training, a psychology professor who originally put together a gang of grad students. Absolutely nothing ever comes of this seemingly significant & interesting detail, even as the trio break out of Norwalk & come hunting for Hancock.

Example: Our hero “gives himself up” to the law for the incidental damage he causes to buildings, trains, freeways and goes off to jail, and goes to court accompanied not by his lawyer, but by his PR guy. Yeah, I know: adding an extra character and giving him/her lines means having to pay them. But what’s wrong with this picture?

Example: Aforementioned PR guy, Ray Embry (played by Jason Bateman, a bland everyman for Will Smith & Charlize Theron to bounce off of), makes Hancock a superhero uniform to upgrade the street wino image Will Smith’s character has heretofore cultivated. It’s bulletproof so long as the character inside it is. How does it do that? Where did Embry come up with this? It’s a detail, but hey, that’s where the devil is in this production.

Example: Embry is trying to get his PR career off the ground. His wife appears to have no employment. They live in what has to be a multi-million dollar home in LA. Nice trick if you can do it.

Example: In a key scene at the hospital, Embry comes up with an ax to rescue Hancock from the one-handed psych prof. Not just one of those dainty little fireman’s hatchets you might find behind glass and under the word “Emergency.” A big, long-handled lumberjack ax. Nice to have when you need it, but where exactly do they keep these in your hospital?

Oh, and did I mention yet that there’s a second superhero in this plot, one who never rescues any of the citizens from scofflaws and whose only goal in life appears to be making meatballs on Thursday? And watching crime stories on local news. Why & what’s that about? It’s not like these are tossed-off details such as the bank robber’s degree in psych or the fact that Attila the Hun was totally cross-eyed – it’s a major element of the story but it’s never explored. In many ways, this is the most interesting character in the film. And an enormous narrative opportunity not taken.

I thought, while sitting there wondering if this would all make sense, well, sometimes the details you’re given in the original material – such as a graphic novel – create these problems themselves (just watch them try to shoehorn all the extraneous detail into The Watchmen if & when that classic ever makes it to the screen). But it turns out that Hancock isn’t an adaptation. TV writer Vincent Ngo created an original script – then called Tonight, He Comes – that was then rewritten by X-Files veteran Vince Gilligan, who added, for example, the second superhero.

Then there is the biggest gap of all in this film – its rampant homophobia. This occurs in at least four separate places and ways in the movie. The PR guy shows Hancock a series of comic book covers to get him into the idea of a superhero uniform and asks Will Smith what these remind him of. Every response Hancock gives ends on the noun homo. It’s in character & played for laughs & I probably wouldn’t be bothered by it if it weren’t for the other two incidents. Incident two involves a prison fight that is resolved by what most state penal codes would refer to as sodomy by an object (a human head). It’s played for laughs also, even as it propels two of the major baddies toward the film’s final conflict. When asked how it felt later, the psych prof has to prod the victim to “use his words.” In short, this biker type is the victim of a rape conducted by Hancock. The film may remind us of this, but it never suggests that Hancock’s actions are in any major way reprehensible. The third instance is the bully who is terrorizing the Embry’s kid. Why make him a longhair francophone whose name Michel rhymes with the female name Michelle? How does anyone with that profile become the leader of a gang, even in the white upper-class enclaves of LA? What is that about? Finally, there is the film’s favorite epithet: asshole. From beginning to end, that word is never very far from the surface.

Have I mentioned that I think this film is worth seeing? It is, if you can get beyond the homophobia, the narrative chasms & more gore than is usual in the sanitized violence of superhero films. The principle reasons are the acting of Charlize Theron, who is tremendous even if her character is an opportunity the film wastes, and Will Smith, who does a better-than-good job with a range of complex emotions here and is far less loveable than in any of his previous films. (If you thought George Clooney was unloveable in Michael Clayton, you have yet to see Will Smith blow his nose.) When ten-year-olds call Smith an asshole, it has a certain ring of accuracy.

I haven’t seen Theron in Ǽon Flux, her previous sci-fi effort, nor in The Legend of Bagger Vance, her earlier effort with Smith. So this is a side of her that was new to me – and she completely pulls it off. Not unlike Naomi Watts in King Kong, Theron tends to own every scene in which she plays, regardless of who else is on screen nor how strong they’re supposed to be. This is not always a plus. One of the hardest parts of the film to believe is why this woman would have taken up would have taken on Embry, a puppy-dog PR tyro who was then just a widower with an infant. At one point, Embry asks her about her past – you would have thought a married couple might have had that discussion awhile ago – but her back story is, as I’ve said, the Grand Canyon of this film’s missed opportunities. Somebody who just rolls her eyes when you ask about her relationship with JFK has more to say. For example, what did she tell Embry when they first met? And how do her relationships handle her failure to age?

This is not an unenjoyable bit of summer fluff. The premise – that being a superhero brings with it a major psychic toll is a theme that’s been around for some time (viz The Watchmen or The Dark Knight) and, since 9/11, it’s become rampant at the Cineplex. The idea of the one-of-kind being also being alcoholic is as old, at least, as The Man Who Fell to Earth. Hancock brings together & expands the range of these genres. And brings with it some first-rate acting that is just a pleasure to watch. But if you try to make this film work in your head, it’ll just drive you crazy.