INHERENT VICE: “Think’s he’s hallucinating.”

Posted on by Mick McAloon

 

We didn’t get a chance to talk about Inherent Vice. How could we at ten-to one in the morning, as we stumbled out of the Prince Charles Cinema, at the back of Leicester Square, and made our way, appropriately as it turns out, through Chinatown? I don’t know if I was any clearer the next day. Even my morning swim couldn’t integrate the night’s images.  The movie was all jumbled up — in my head, I mean — and still is to some extent. That’s surely by design. Paul Thomas Anderson has cited The Big Sleep as an influence on how he approached Thomas Pynchon’s novel and the vagaries of its plot. In other words, confusion reigns. Trailing a decade’s worth of morning-afters in its wake, we might need at least another decade before we can get a clear perspective on it. Either that or repeated viewings. One thing is clear: Inherent Vice is already assured of cult status, it is its own all-nighter, destined for late shows and flea pits the world over — if either of the latter still exists. Anderson’s film suggests they do, or makes it imperative that they are brought back. For he treats the medium of film — celluloid, be it 35mm or 70mm — as though it were a missing person: what happened to it? What happens if we follow the money? What would it take to revive it, to turn a tantalising flicker into a flame? And what are we supposed to do with all this longing? All of which is a good place to start if we want to get a handle on Inherent Vice.

—Mick McAloon

A MOBILE CINEMA: NOTES TOWARDS A SEASON—PART ONE

Posted on by Mick McAloon

I’d like to propose a season of films—The City, the Country, the River & the Road.  The title is unashamedly poetic, and if I’m honest I’m not quite sure where it came from, or how it suggested itself.  Was I influenced by the fact that I was coming to Dublin?  I think I was.  But I was also thinking about cinema itself and its capacity for taking us to all of these places—often within the course of a single narrative.  Think of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups, which starts in a grey and overcast Paris and ends as its young truant embarks on one of the great runs in all of cinema, his momentum halted only by the sight of the ocean. Truffaut’s film was auto-biographical, his truancy redeemed by his discovery of cinema and by his befriending Andre Bazin. Well, not everyone can call upon such a friend, though we all should have access to the cinema and its treasures.

This started me thinking about the role of your organization—its mission, its goals—with its roots in Dublin but its remit to travel far and wide.  So I wanted to propose a season that might on one level enact this very goal, this on-going journey—or at least try to: a season that begins in the city—about the city, about what movies mean to the city, and cities to the movies—and then moves out to the regions, to the country, with films that reflect this movement, picking up passengers along the way.  And so I have selected some films that not only live up to the rich possibilities of my title but that might talk to one another in some way, if that is not too abstract a notion.  (I wonder how much I was influenced by my own beginnings: when I was younger, we took movies to the people: Consett Mobile Cinema.)

There is fiction and non-fiction.  From the latter I have chosen a particular strand—the essay film.  This is partly due to my love of the essay form itself; it also stems from my interest in the idea of the flaneur.  The essay-films that I would like to play are notable not only for the metaphorical stroll each director takes around their city but for the quality of the words as well as the images: Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg.  To this short list I have added Kieran Hickey’s documentary about James Joyce’s Dublin, Faithful Departed (1967), and a programme the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik wrote and presented for the BBC—Lighting Up New York.  The reason for choosing Hickey’s film is in some ways because it is a bridge to one of my fiction choices—Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.  (And where there are rivers and roads there should be bridges.)  Before Sunrise is set in Vienna, but its narrative unfolds over twenty-four hours on the 16th June—or Bloomsday as it is otherwise known.  Thematically, both films play on the idea of absence, or the eventual absence of the protagonists, while absence—“What happened to my city?—is surely the defining characteristic, and lament, of the other films I’ve already mentioned.  This is certainly true of the Davies, the Maddin, and the Gopnik.

But there is another, more recent film about New York that I have included: James Marsh’s Man On Wire.  One, I think it makes a perfect companion to Lighting Up New York.  But I also like the way it deliberately withholds—yet somehow redeems—a city’s overwhelming absence.  And nothing gets absence, or transience, like the cinema.  One only has to think of Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers & Tides, Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and another Linklater film, Before Sunset.  Even Chris Petit’s Radio On, which began as an Englishman’s attempt at a Wenders-like road movie, now seems like an historical document of how certain parts of England used to be.

(To be continued…)

—MM

 

 

UNDER THE SKIN: Bowfinger in Glasgow

Posted on by Mick McAloon

 

It’s not a particularly English thing to do, but the last time I butted in on somebody else’s conversation was at my local coffee shop. I couldn’t help it. The subject up for discussion was Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. It was obvious that Anderson’s film had provoked and bewildered the people next to me—a party of three, spanning two generations—and I felt duty-bound to intervene. In this instance, my interjection—polite, respectful, hesitant though enthusiastic—was met with a look of suspicion. You could say that the response was closed-off, buttoned-up—as they buttoned up and left the café. But I am undeterred. I have always felt that movies, unlike, say, religion or politics, are a safe zone through which one should be able to move without causing offence: any difference of opinion should be welcomed, no matter how intemperate or plain wrongheaded. Movies can take it, and so can we. As the saying goes, “everyone’s a critic.”  But after another morning spent fumbling with loyalty cards and listening to table-talk, I’m beginning to waver. Perhaps movies can take it; but I can’t.

Once again I was at my local café. I’d barely finished my first cup of coffee when two men sitting opposite me started talking about movies. “What’s opening Friday—anything interesting?” The Spiderman reboot – or Spiderman 2:2 – had received an early rave in The Guardian.  There followed a brief discussion about Brendan Gleeson‘s new film Calvary and – here’s the kicker: “I’ve avoided Under the Skin on your lack of a recommendation.” Well, you could imagine how desperate I was to have my say. If it wasn’t for the woman breast-feeding next to me, I’d have thrown the pram—her pram—out the window. But I had learned my lesson: the conversation could keep, until now. Besides, I didn’t want to disrupt the infant’s feed. But why should I be so surprised at this bland and indifferent response? At my local cinema, where I saw Under the Skin, I heard a number of customers, who were still undecided about buying a ticket, say the same thing: “it’s had mixed reviews, hasn’t it?” Who’ve they been reading?

Films like Under the Skin do not come along too often. And when they do, what have they got to look forward to? Three stars apiece from The Sunday Times and The Observer respectively. Is it wrong to expect critical commentary that rises above the level of the man-on-the-street variety? (Even though Under the Skin has some worrying things to tell us about the man-on-the-street.)

But here’s the irony: if ever a film deserved a Star rating, in the same way that films are rated for sex and violence, it’s this one: Under the Skin contains real stardom, though the film is at pains, perhaps disingenuously, to render such distinctions worthless: it’s what under the skin that counts. Or another way of looking at it (and the film is all about looking): how do we humanise someone? On this matter the film has it every which way: it has its cake, eats its cake, and – in one funny scene late on – throws up its cake. One thing is clear: Under the Skin is unimaginable without its star: Scarlett Johansson.

Jonathan Glazer, the film’s director, shoots Johansson with purpose-built, multiple hidden cameras and as though she were a Louise Brooks for the 21st Century, which she might well be. “Am I keeping you?” she says to one unsuspecting passer-by. Johansson keeps us throughout. Whether it’s the way she swings her van through Celtic supporters outside Parkhead, or the strange walk she employs —part indignant child, part communist march— I was utterly transfixed. I also like the way she holds herself at the wheel: ramrod-straight, with a mannequin’s impassiveness, but that breaks into something approaching giddiness depending on who’s riding shotgun. Then there’s Johansson’s extraordinary presence. Glazer, like Sofia Coppola before him, exploits her gift for being, though here the mode is one of alertness rather than, say, the inertia that beset her character in Lost in Translation but that was so crucial to that film’s mood, it’s jet-lagged wooziness.

It’s all one sided of course. Johansson is in on the game. She is the game! Her passengers are only being themselves—rambling, inchoate, charisma-free. The film’s tension—its considerable charge—arises out of this imbalance. But throughout, I could not divorce my experience of watching the film from my knowledge of its making. In my head it plays like a version of Bowfinger—Bowfinger in Glasgow—with Glazer and his crew following Scarlett every time she dons her wig and grabs her fur. (Did Johansson even know she was in a Jonathan Glazer film?) In this respect the movie is a stunt. But not only is Glazer the leading exemplar of the Bowfinger school, he is the film director as a kind of CIA handler, which makes Johansson his operative out-in-the-field. But what is their mission? An excursion into Ballardian terrain: shopping malls, super markets, high rises and motorways—contemporary life in all its strangeness? Or to get all David Thomson on you: is it a report from the land of “movie” itself — a movie star falls to earth only to reaffirm her (heavenly) allure? (If that is the case, Johansson really is an operative out-in-the-field and proof that “movie” and stardom—deep, mysterious stardom—are still capable of magic.) Or is it simply an artist trusting his instincts and the hunch that he’s onto something that deserves more than the tepid response—“the lack of a recommendation”—that the film has elicited from certain quarters. Eyes Wide Shut is the title of another strange and mysterious film that deserved better than it got (and Under the Skin is not without moments of Kubrick-like grace and precision); Eyes Wide Shut also describes the critical malaise I’m talking about. Under the Skin has its eyes wide open. The world looks different now.

—Mick McAloon

ROBERT DE NIRO: DETAIL IN SERVICE OF THE TRUTH

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Robert De Niro is regarded as one of the finest actors of his generation, but why was he so compelling?

 

Dear S,

It’s interesting how you frame the question in the past tense, as if De Niro no longer compels our attention. You’re not alone: David Thomson has spoken of De Niro’s “grievous decline”.  Perhaps it’s true and for me to insist otherwise would be foolish and sentimental.   I do know that your question is sincere.  You’re a lot younger than me and I guess you’re genuinely curious about De Niro’s early appeal.  Not that my youth coincided with De Niro’s great years: I came in at the tail-end—Once Upon A Time in America, Falling In Love—when video stores were in the ascendant, and it seemed as if there was an inexhaustible supply of great performances, in great films, that one could rent night after night. I remember being thrilled by each new discovery and buoyed by the prospect of there still being more to come. It was an education, of sorts.  Already you can see that I am being sentimental; I’m certainly romanticising my youth and the great days of Selecta Video.  So perhaps you were right to use the past tense. So where do we start?

De Niro was the A-list anti-star, but a star nonetheless. His reputation is built on that great run of films beginning with Mean Streets and ending with Once Upon A Time in America.  In between came The Godfather II, Taxi Driver, New York, New York, The Deer Hunter, 1900, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy.  You have to admit that’s a hell of a run.  And it’s not that he hasn’t done good work in the years since—Brazil, Falling in Love, Midnight Run, Heat, Casino, Jackie Brown, Silver Linings Playbook—it’s just that decade-long run was truly special. For one thing, he worked less, averaging a film about every eighteen months.  He was more selective about who he worked with: Scorsese x 5, Coppola, Cimino, Bertolucci, Leone.  The climate encouraged maverick talent; novelists and filmmakers were central to the culture; film critics had influence—and an audience.  (Or should that be the other way round?)

But what was it about De Niro that made him so compelling? On screen, he seemed incapable of false moments (he still does), even in films that are beneath him, such as New Year’s Eve.  Off screen, he made himself scarce, rarely doing press.  Of course, like most well-known actors or movie stars, especially those with long careers, he can be reduced to a set of ticks and mannerisms.  But can’t we all?

When I think of De Niro, I think of his fierce artistic will—how else do you account for that great run of films as well as the physical transformations? And I think of his soulfulness. There was something mysterious about him—his stillness, his watchfulness.    I think of his eyes, particularly in Taxi Driver and Once Upon A Time in America. And I think of the choices he makes within a given role, which speaks of his special insight into the character he’s playing, or perhaps I should say “becoming”. It could be an item of clothing, a gesture, or simply his way of listening to another person. Over the years I got so bored with journalists’ tired run-throughs of De Niro’s method acting resume, but without any corresponding insights. So they might tell you that he learned to play saxophone for New York, New York, but they never point out that his timing is off when he counts in the band—a rare lapse. Or that he trained to be a boxer for Raging Bull, without acknowledging the way he moves when he’s not in the ring. And all that tired talk of De Niro’s weight-gain but no mention of Jake’s laboured breathing. (De Niro is one of cinema’s great listeners and breathers.)

So perhaps the best thing I can do is refer you to the films themselves, and to some of his most inspired choices, where De Niro is more than just the actor of his generation.  He’s that rare beast—the actor as artist, where the choices he makes are invariably true, unerringly specific, and so vital to these movies’ artistic accomplishments that it’s hard to imagine them having been made with anybody else.  Would it be wrong to say that he’s as much a presiding intelligence in these films as his directors? De Niro as auteur?  I’ve heard Tarantino make that argument—and he’s not far wrong.

Mean Streets (1973) —

Did he ever act with such wild abandon again?  Of course, Scorsese gives him a helping hand, not one explosive entrance, but two: the first, literally, as Johnny blows up a mailbox, and the second to Jumping Jack Flash: Has there ever been a character in all of Scorsese’s oeuvre and his extensive use of the Stones back-catalogue more suited to their ramshackle symmetry?

clownish swagger

Inspired moment #1: Johnny Boy dancing to Mickey’s Monkey outside the car when it’s all falling apart.  Johnny Boy’s the joker in the pack, and De Niro the movie’s wild card! Sometimes, even Harvey Keitel can only look on in astonishment and wonder at De Niro, as if to say, where did this kid come from? But it would be wrong to talk about De Niro’s performance here without acknowledging Keitel’s great work, his simplicity and rock-solid presence.  The entire movie is a beautiful duet, best summed up by two scenes: the ‘improv’ in the “back room” early on, and the way they each lay out handkerchiefs on the gravestones in the cemetery—the Abbot and Costello of the Lower East Side.

bob & harvey

De Niro & Costume

De Niro’s choice of costume for his characters has always been impeccable. Johnny Boy may be wild, but he’s fastidious about the way he looks, and you can see this is not only in the way Johnny Boy dresses but in the way he readies himself in preparation to greet his friends in that second entrance—that is, once he’s put his trousers back on.  But there are countless examples of De Niro’s great costume choices: in Goodfellas, for example, when De Niro’s Jimmy Conway is arrested.  What struck me about De Niro’s costume choice here—a yellow jersey, jeans—was the level of detail for such a seemingly offhanded moment that takes place within a montage of arrests.  It can only be for a few seconds of screen time, but that yellow jersey speaks volumes.

De Niro & Detail

tan jacket

Talking about De Niro’s wardrobe tests for Falling in Love, and how he finally decided on the type of jacket his character would wear, Meryl Streep said… “[the jacket] was tan, it was ignorable, but that’s different from unimportant. Details are important, and Bob knows that.”

Taxi Driver (1976) —

Inspired moment #2: After shooting Sport (Keitel), Travis sits down in the middle of the street, between parked cars; it’s a strange and disconcerting moment—Travis’s body descending into trauma?—all the more so for being so unexpected.  Where did this detail come from? It seems so unforced: an actor’s truth transcending genre and pulp style.  In Scorsese’s early movies, life is always intervening and his actors respond in kind—at least that’s what it feels like.  But we’re also watching hungry, ambitious actors at the top of their game. Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson described Taxi Driver as “buzzing with star-turn acting”, which it is, though I’d call it an anti-star-turn very much attuned to a specific time and place: New York, 1970s, the Actor’s Studio: from street to (acting) class to screen, and hipper than anything Hollywood had to offer.   It was Farber/Patterson, in the same article, who wrote one of the best things I’ve ever read about De Niro: they refer to him as “a high-class actor…whose acting range is always underscored by a personal dignity.”  We must not forget that Farber, a great painter and critic, moved in the same circles as De Niro’s artist parents and would have recognised a fellow artist’s dedication to the truth: Negative Space, Farber’s singular collection of film writing, is dedicated to De Niro’s mother, Virginia Admiral; while De Niro, in those days, was the actor as termite-artist, prestige-resistant, burrowing through the Hollywood canvas.  (cf. New York, New York.)

Raging Bull (1980) —

Bouncer

Inspired moment #3:  When Jake and his brother Joey (Joe Pesci) attend St Clare’s annual summer dance, Jake sees Vicky (Cathy Moriarty) leave with a local mobster (Frankie Vincent). But it’s what happens next, when Jake helps a doorman evict someone from the club: it’s another lovely detail—casual, off the cuff, and exquisitely judged—that tells us about Jake’s place and standing within the community.  Detail in service of the truth. And let’s not forget Jake’s culinary advice—written or improvised?—to his first, beleaguered wife, as she cooks a steak: “don’t overcook it—it defeats its own purpose.” 

The King of Comedy (1983) —

King of Comedy limo

From its homage to John Cassavetes’ Opening Night—a freeze-frame of a fan’s hands pressed against the window of a limousine—to its dissection of fame in the 20th Century post John Lennon’s assassination, The King of Comedy is a forerunner to Larry Sanders, with its behind-the-scenes look at a talk-show, and celebrities playing versions of themselves. Which makes Rupert Pupkin the patron saint of cable and reality television. So an argument could be made that Scorsese and De Niro’s fifth collaboration—and a commercial failure on its release—is the cornerstone of HBO’s present dominance. And—Hey Now!—don’t we see traits of Rupert Pupkin in Jeffrey Tambor’s Hank?  (Check out Season 2 episode Hank’s Wedding.) Rupert could certainly have played the role of Larry’s sidekick, if he hadn’t harboured such crazy ambitions to be out there on his own.  And Rupert is out there—a more psychotic version of David Brent, which brings us back to Larry Sanders (cf. The Office), HBO and the question of influence. (And I haven’t even mentioned The Sopranos.)   This is one of De Niro’s greatest performances, perhaps his best: inspired, uncompromising and—pre Midnight Run—very funny.

True Confessions (1981) —

Falling in Love (1984) —

Two Ulu Grosbard films. True Confessions was written by husband and wife team John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, and based on Dunne’s novel. Tonally it belongs to the 1970s—Chinatown is in its sights. You believe De Niro’s priest has said a thousand masses, and heard a thousand confessions; while Falling in Love is like a made-for-television movie devised by Lee Strasberg. Which is to say that Grosbard, a man of the theatre, is an actors’ director: the performances are full, rich, nuanced and textured. De Niro and Streep are heavy-weights in fluff and the film as comfort-inducing as the best carrot cake and coffee, but I much prefer it to Brief Encounter, to which it is often, and unfavourably, compared.

Heat (1995) —

Talking about the differences between De Niro and Pacino, Michael Mann described them in terms of colours: Pacino is “deep red”, De Niro “cool blue”.  For me, “cool blue” takes it. Pacino rips and roars—“Sit down, Ralph!”— while De Niro gives one of his great minimalist performances: his presence balancing Mann’s tendency towards verbosity: who needs Mann’s inflated dialogue when you’ve got De Niro? Mann certainly doesn’t.  But then the abiding impression the film leaves is a wash of “cool blue”.

Casino (1995) —

Aside from a rare moment of levity—once again suited up but with his trousers off (cf. Mean Streets)—De Niro’s Ace Rothstein is cold, dead-eyed, cool and controlling, and Sharon Stone’s Ginger like a slot machine that can’t stop giving out, much to Ace’s displeasure. Was this his last great leading role?

Jackie Brown (1997) —

“Sadness” is not a word one normally associates with the exuberant Quentin Tarantino, but there it is…Jackie Brown is both lovely and tough and features one of De Niro’s (and Tarantino’s) saddest characters.  Louis Gara (De Niro) gives off a sadness that I don’t remember from Elmore Leonard’s novel, Rum Punch.  It’s as if he’s experienced so great an internal collapse—too many joints, too much time in the joint—that death would be a welcome relief.  And when it comes, it’s heartbreaking: filmed from behind, a static camera, we don’t even see De Niro’s face: it’s all in his back and shoulders—forfeit, collapse, resignation.

—MM