FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE

loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies 

Anyone familiar with Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978) knows too well the abounding tedium of music documentaries. Despite its stature among the greatest of all rock docs, Waltz often serves merely to showcase how insufferably boring and pretentious rock deities can be when provided a platform upon which they’re invited to pontificate about their craft. If the musicians themselves decline to natter on about cultural legacies, rock critics with dubious credentials and penchants for hyperbolic appraisal are more than happy to fill in the blanks. Rock documentary belongs, on the whole, to a very sorry class of filmmaking. It’s almost certain that if you’re not interested in a particular rock band or artist, a documentary about that performer will not appeal to you. If the music in question does float your boat, you are more likely to find value in said film, though that isn’t to say that you’re very likely to find much value at all.  More often than not, the films lack imagination, trusting instead that the supposed genius of their subjects can be relied upon to form a coherent, engaging narrative. What’s more, these fawning portraits are then padded with lame duck concert footage, because, by the time a documentary crew arrives on the scene, the group in question is likely to be long past their prime.  If the band has broken up, grainy archival footage blandly suffices.  Most “rockumentaries” have more in common with the insipidness of This is Spinal Tap (1984) than with any great tradition of documentary cinema.

The growth of fan cultures, the escalating public interest in “reality”-based programming, and the democratization of professional-grade video equipment have conspired to birth a surplus of these documentaries in the digital-era.  All a band requires is a few obsessive devotees and some mild group tension for a documentary to practically unfurl itself.  Most vexing about these films is that their directors are so entranced by their love of the music that they neglect to vet the worthiness of the narrative.  Consequently, most fail to exceed the breadth and depth of their subject’s Wikipedia entries.  From this outpouring of enthusiasm a few are released theatrically every year, while the rest are intended as mere promotional tools, packaged alongside reissued albums or in limited edition DVDs for the faithful.  Their very failure at journalism or documentation makes these films most viable as facets of promotional campaigns. There are music movies and there are movies about music; both have their place, but only the latter can claim a potential for artistry.

When considered as cinema (that is, separately from their status as fan paraphernalia) quality rock docs are so few and far between that a nearly comprehensive list will fit inside of a short paragraph (1): Instrument (1999), The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), Lonely Boy (1962), Don’t Look Back (1967), Dig! (2004), Gimme Shelter (1970), Let It Be (1970), Hype! (1996), Meeting People is Easy (1998), Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004) (1).  For this group, an interest in the music under discussion isn’t required (and, really, who gives a shit about the discography of Paul Anka or The Dandy Warhols, let alone Metallica’s St. Anger album?) for audiences to feel satisfied with the product.  These films succeed because they effectively document the alchemical processes of creating, performing and selling popular music.  They are not laurel wreaths bestowed upon demigods, but are, instead, thoughtful considerations of art-making and performance, created by artists in their own right.  Each exhibits a detachment from their subjects, a critical distance that provides them a perspective unobstructed by idolatry. These films, rare exceptions to the rule of pop documentaries, refuse to regurgitate lore and legend.

It may be that Steven Galkin and Matthew Cantor, co-directors of loudQUIETloud: A Film about the Pixies, are indeed transfixed by the grandeur of their subjects. Ty Burr of the Boston Globe read the film’s verite unobtrusiveness as a sign the pair were “too awestruck” to challenge the band into accounting for their enduringly popular collaborations and acrimonious breakup (3).  There’s a great deal of merit to this interpretation, but the filmmakers’ timorousness has the (perhaps unintended) consequence of elevating the film from hagiography to a subtly probing snapshot of middle-aged rockers in pursuit of reunion tour fortune and glory.  Whether the group merely declined the invitation to wax nostalgically about their shared history, or the filmmakers simply lacked the desire or courage to ask, the film itself is a welcome respite from the dominant strain of such portraits.

After forming in Boston in the mid-1980s, the Pixies were modestly successful as an indie rock act, playing international festivals and releasing five acclaimed albums before disbanding in 1993.  After acolyte Kurt Cobain hyped them in interviews as a key influence, the group became known for instigating the now-familiar alt-rock formula of quietly singing the verses before screaming the choruses (hence the film’s title) (4).  At the time they called it quits, the band's influence on other musicians exceeded sales of their own albums as well as their mainstream recognition.  Rock music fandom has since caught up with the group. In 2004, their resurgent popularity among aging post-punks and the newfound enthusiasm of the Hot Topic set culminated in a reunion tour, the chief subject of loudQUIETloud.

Since the dissolution of the Pixies, songwriter/lead vocalist Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal have pursued recording careers successfully, the former with a slew of groups, the latter with beloved critical darlings, The Breeders.  Lead guitarist Joey Santiago stumbled in jumpstarting his own career, while drummer Dave Lovering took to performing as a magician.  Lovering is the semi-tragic figure of the four, and the most forthcoming during the film’s interview sections.  He admits that the offer to reunite with his bandmates came not a moment too soon, for his royalty checks had started to dwindle thanks to online file-sharing.

Later in the film, while grappling with the news that his father has died, Lovering launches an impromptu drum solo (likely the product of nervous energy and valium, though he denies intoxication to his bandmates) at the outset of their Chicago show, marking the lone moment of explicit tension within the ranks. Francis storms off stage, the band reconvenes, and Lovering chalks the whole thing up to a faulty PA system. The rest of the time they scarcely talk to one another. Struggling with newfound sobriety, Deal travels on a separate bus with twin sister Kelly, who at one point claims that she’s never observed a group of people for whom communication is so difficult.  An onscreen title informs us that the band has agreed to prohibit alcohol and drugs in the dressing room in deference to Deal's treatment.  Titles are the film’s preferred method for providing historical and personal context.  If the band won't tell their own story, the filmmakers will tell it for them via concise, one-sentence summations. It's not an uncommon strategy today, but in this case, informative titles provide too much contour for an otherwise (fantastically) shapeless portrait.      

By most accounts -- especially if you ask the legion of fans camped outside the venues -- the music hasn’t suffered since the hiatus, though the voices of Francis and Deal can’t work up the frenzy of 20 years ago.  All the same, they are adored by their fans, who at this point have the entirety of the band’s relatively scant discography memorized.  The entire tour sold out in a matter of minutes, another title tells us. Since the tour featured in loudQUIETloud, the band has played numerous festivals and are reportedly, as of early 2010, completing a comeback album.        

It seems perverse to describe the lack of melodrama as exciting in its own right, but the film’s intrigue exists in unvoiced frustrations and pent up resentments.  Multiple times, Francis tells rock journalists about the hows and whys of the band’s demise and rebirth, but he fails to state any of these feelings to his bandmates.  After telling an interviewer that he’d love to make a new record with the group, he neglects to tell everyone else. Interactions are uniformly respectful and deeply political.  These four have united toward a common goal, like divorced parents attending a softball game.  In an odd way, it’s comforting to know that these people might not get along, or at least that they’re not going to pretend to get along for the benefit of the cameras.  loudQUIETloud isn’t nearly Wisemenian in its commitment to the quotidian, but it’s a relaxed, unhurried snapshot of pop music-making.

Appropriately, the film’s most poignant moment is one of silence: A young fan -- who speaks of Deal in religious terms -- flags down her idol after the show and the two share a moment of mutual appreciation.  The adolescent girl had discovered the Pixies while reading a YA novel (Louisa Luna’s Brave New Girl) in which the band’s music and indie cred capture the protagonist’s heart.  Deal and her disciple chat amiably enough, but the girl forgets to slip her hero a cherished, highlighted copy of the book.  The scene ends as the girl sobs at having been so absent-minded.  The next scene features a solemn Deal (heretofore the most loquacious of the four) aboard the tour bus going through the book’s highlighted passages, which reference the music she made two decades previously (it's safe to assume a hanger-on or the filmmakers passed the book along).  It’s a weirdly cosmic moment, but Deal wears a silent, puzzled expression.  Confronted by such a tangible example of her impact upon a generation, what could she possibly be thinking? Like the rest of her bandmates, she just doesn't say. (5)

loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies / USA / 2006 / Color / 85 min. / Directed by Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin /  Featuring: Charles "Black Francis" Thompson, Kim Deal, Joey Santiago, David Lovering and Kelley Deal.

Notes:

1 - I’ll cop to not having seen these well-regarded rockdocs: Woodstock (1970), Stop Making Sense (1984), Cocksucker Blues (1972), Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2009), No Direction Home (2005), Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (2007), or (most embarrassingly) Buena Vista Social Club (1999).  Even if each of these count as genuine masterpieces, the final tally of great music documentaries would still rest at a pitifully low number.

2 – Indie icons Fugazi star in Instrument; Decline charts the emergence of American Punk in the southern California; Lonely Boy is the brilliant short doc, by Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, about the fabrication of Paul Anka’s career and personality (which can be viewed here); the surly Bob Dylan lets D.A. Pennebaker’s camera tail him in Dont Look Back [sic]; Ondi Timoner captures the feud between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols in Dig!; the Maysles do Altamont in Gimme Shelter; The Beatles disintegrate while finishing their worst album in Let it Be; Doug Pray exposes the effects of corporate and media malfeasance on Seattle's early 90's grunge scene in Hype!; Radiohead become an Important Band in Meeting People; and Metallica disintegrate and regroup while finishing their worst album in Some Kind of Monster.

 3 - The review, from an acknowledged enthusiast, can be found here.

4 - Cobain claimed that "Smells like Teen Spirit," was merely a Pixies "rip off" in Rolling Stone magazine shortly before his death: 

Fricke, David "Kurt Cobain: The Rolling Stone Interview." Rolling Stone, #674. 27 Jan. 1994.

5 - loudQUIETloud can be viewed in its entirety here.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #20 - PALINDROMES

20. Todd Solondz’ Palindromes (2004)

One of the two or three candidates for contemporary U.S. cinema’s most brilliant unsung auteur, Todd Solondz has, since 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, crafted four singularly unpleasant comedies that excavate the fertile grounds of suburban angst (1).  But what separates Solondz’ black comedies of middle class anomie from the smugness of Alan Ball’s similarly-themed work is his ear for realistically human dialogue and his fierce compassion for, and commitment to the integrity of, his characters.  What elevates 2004’s Palindromes to the top of his oeuvre is the intensity of the sympathy at its core.  It’s a culminating moment for the director in which his scarred humanism and caustically satirical eye harmonize perfectly.  It’s wrenchingly tragic and blisteringly funny in the same breath. 

By often mischaracterizing him as a sadist or misanthrope, Solondz’ critics have continuously failed to distinguish between the author and his characters or between his subjects and themes.  Sadism and misanthropy are issues of abiding interest to Solondz, but only the most superficial reading of his work could conclude that he, as a filmmaker, is as contemptuous or malevolent as some of his characters.  He extends even the most retched of humanity (pedophiles, murderers, would-be rapists) the decency of an emotionally accurate portrait, allowing his creations to speak unfettered by political correctness or narrative convention.     

The shy daughter of well-to-do liberals, Palindromes’ Aviva decides at 13 that what she wants, more than anything in the world, is to have a baby.  An exceedingly brief, fumbling sexual interlude leads to pregnancy, and the contented girl’s mother (Ellen Burstyn) cajoles her into having an abortion.  Disconsolate after the procedure, Aviva – unaware that surgical complications have left her barren – runs away from home, encountering a pedophilic truck driver and a foster family of evangelical Christians on her journey toward another pregnancy.  The wit and candor of the script are classically Solondzian in their audacity, but his most profound statement lay in the film’s casting: over the course of Palindromes, Aviva is played by eight uniformly brilliant actors of various genders, ethnicities, ages and dimensions.   Aviva’s appearance and voice change every few scenes, but her desire for motherhood and foggy understanding of adulthood are ever consistent.  The trick may have been used decades ago by Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), and more recently by Todd Haynes in the exasperating Dylan-hymn I’m Not There (2007), but Solondz thoroughly weds the potential gimmick to the underlying theme of his work: the existence of an inflexible core within us, which is heedless of our attempts at reinvention and self-definition.   

As Aviva’s cousin, Mark, cynically claims at film’s end: “People always end up the way they started out. No one ever changes. They think they do, but they don’t… You might lose some weight, your face might clear up, get a body tan, a breast enlargement, a sex change … makes no difference. Essentially, from in front, from behind, whether you’re 13 or 50, you’ll always be the same.”  The idea is anathema to the American narrative’s ideal of dynamic characterizations, asserted most obnoxiously in the didacticisms of screenwriting gurus Robert McKee and Syd Field.  We go to the movies to watch fictitious people change, in an attempt to renounce the knowledge that we most likely will not.  This is not an entirely unhealthy proposition, but the nearly complete absence of alternative characterizations is disproportionate to human experience.

Again, critics may confuse Solondz with his misanthropic creation Mark.  Though the two share a general understanding of human psychology (Solondz characters are static by rule), they differ in their philosophical assessments of the self’s perpetuity.  Mark’s defeatism is Solondz’ surrender and acceptance.  To audiences and critics queasy at the prospect of zero-growth characters, the difference would appear negligible.  Mark might deem the shared conception a tyranny of selfhood; Solondz, however, using the full weight of his story and characters, unearths an appreciation for human frailty from the contention that we are essentially who we are for the bulk of our existence.  Human lives would prove hopelessly erratic and uncentered if we continually subjected ourselves to the redemptions, epiphanies and upheavals that masquerade as growth in our narrative art.  The human condition, Solondz argues, is best honored via faithful, compassionate observation, rather than idealistic reshuffling prompted by misguided quests for meaning. 

 Notes:

1 – Larry Clark would be the other. Expect reevaluations of both in the coming decades.

HOLLOW BONES

Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones

Fifteen years after Peter Jackson’s international breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures (1994), New Zealand’s virtuoso of the digital spectacular rekindles his passion for fantastical landscapes and the charred innocence of pubescent girls with The Lovely Bones, based on the bestselling novel by Alice Sebold. 

Steadily attaining a foothold in Hollywood’s upper echelon since Creatures, Jackson has reached the film industry’s twin zeniths: he owns multiple slots among the highest-grossing films along with multiple Academy statues.  Appropriately, his aesthetic has assumed the grandiosity befitting his status alongside the Spielbergs and the Camerons.  Like the former, Jackson has an itch to intersperse small, “personal” projects between his slate of Megabudget Romps, but, like the latter, he’s also developed, stylistically speaking, a crippling sense of magnitude.  During The Lovely Bones, an intimate portrait of a family ravaged by tragedy is pancaked under the weight of PJ’s operatic style and broadly swathed dramatic instincts.  Jackson is clearly a superior storyteller to Cameron, and his King Kong remake beats the hell out of Spielberg’s most recent stabs at spectacle, but he’s lost the ability to fly low and maneuver his lumbering style into coexistence with delicate scenarios.  An auteur in the truest sense, his voice irrevocably booms across, over and through his films, producing an inhospitable environment for anything save Event Films and Summer Tentpoles.  This development is all well and good – and is more likely than not to leave audiences satisfied -- so long as he learns to avoid material such as Sebold’s novel.  

The Lovely Bones, as we’re told in breathy voice over by Susie (played with appropriate gracelessness by Saoirse Ronan), tells the story of how the Salmons family processes their eldest daughter’s unsolved murder.  The film is split in half dramatically: one section is set in a kind of sun-drenched purgatory in which Susie frolics with other murder victims and contemplates the division between life and death, while the remainder takes place in a dreary suburb where her family threatens to unravel after her killing.  Mark Wahlberg – enjoyable, but straining credibility as a middle-aged, middle-class Daddy -- plays the relentless father who refuses to let his daughter’s killer go unpunished.   A forgettable Rachel Weisz is Susie’s flaky mother and Susan Sarandon cameos as the alcoholic grandmother, though both never quite find suitable niches within the film. A subplot involving a romance between Susie’s former crush and a clairvoyant farmer’s daughter never really pays off or generates much friction.

The lone dramatic idea that Jackson and his screenwriters can muster is that the living and the dead must relinquish one another if they’re to find happiness.  Daddy and co. must move on and enjoy what’s left of their own lives, while Susie must refrain from meddling if she is to acclimate herself to the world beyond.  Most troubling about the film is the way in which happiness after death, a somewhat absurd notion crafted here from pure kitsch, is defined.  We spend a good deal of time lolling about Susie’s eternity as she agonizes over what’s become of her family.  It is an afterlife of luscious pastures, gazebos and lighthouses, the culmination of which (once the departed have learned not to fret the dealings of the living) is a blindingly white meadow for Susie and her newfound gal pals to trample through.  Pretty uninspiring stuff, and it all looks like a botched collaboration dreamed up by Thomas Kincaid and Lisa Frank.  One has to wonder if this is Jackson’s ideal resting place for the deceased, or if he’s merely burrowing his way into the metaphysical fantasies of suburban teenagers.  The film doesn’t ultimately say, thus frustrating viewers who attempt to orient themselves within the filmmaker’s jumbled formulations.

Also tragic is the way in which the geography of real tension, the domestic turmoil of the fanatically devoted father and the evading mother, is abandoned in favor of Susie’s paradise of digital de-lites. A born storyteller, Jackson occasionally scares up real juice as the Salmons clan struggles to keep themselves intact while the neighbor who murdered their daughter (the terrifyingly mundane Stanley Tucci) contemplates his next victim.  The opportunities are squandered, however, as Jackson is more concerned with exhibiting celestial reflecting pools and swooping camera movements that would both feel more innocuous in Middle Earth or Skull Island.  The quintessential Jackson shot – the camera arcing in a hovering sweep over the landscape, resembling the POV of a plummeting hang-glider – is disjunctive in this context.  It’s simply too bombastic for the material. 

Those familiar with Jackson’s upchuck classics Meet the Feebles (1989) and Dead Alive (aka Braindead, 1992) might chortle at hearing descriptors like “subdued” or  “unassuming” applied to them, but as excessive as each is in terms of content, there is a much looser, modest quality to their aesthetic and execution than what’s on display in the histrionic The Lovely Bones (1).  Jackson’s ascendant style since Feebles has little retrospective character.  His formerly delicate execution is no longer tenable due to his (well-deserved) stature as the Modern Spectacular’s greatest talent.  From the standpoint of the horror convention crowd, it’s a lamentable forfeit.  But, in this case, the Midnight Movie’s loss is the Multiplex Blockbuster’s gain.     

Beyond Tucci’s marvelously unsettling performance, The Lovely Bones’ chief source of satisfaction is its rough, ambling structure.  Gone is the carefully etched dramatic triangle of Jackson’s recent films, which navigate rather single-mindedly toward massive, conclusive battles.  Though laden with clumsy foreshadowing and banal metaphors -- both visual and literal – The Lovely Bones is refreshing and intriguing during the moments when the story refrains from announcing its intentions so directly, thereby allowing for anticlimaxes and diversions that offer something close to satisfying viewing.  Nestled within a glut of ham-fisted dialogue and cheesecake effects, these could be considered the film’s more novelistic qualities (2).  Still, as with the rest of the film, these virtues are swallowed by Jackson’s thunderous vision. 

The Lovely Bones / USA, UK, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 122 min. / Directed by Peter Jackson / Written by Jackson, Fran Walsh and Phillippa Boyens / Based on the novel by Alice Sebold / Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Saoirse Ronan, Stanley Tucci and Susan Sarandon / Wingnut Films, DreamWorks SKG 

Notes:

1 – The former is a backstage drama set in a bizarro Sesame Street populated by degenerate muppets; the latter is an inverse Night of the Living Dead, wherein the hero must keep his zombie mother from escaping their home. Though anarchically comic in tone, it may be the bloodiest film ever made, which, depending on one’s point-of-view, may be Jackson’s crowning achievement as a filmmaker.

2 – I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the source novel, though have heard from trusted sources that the most glaring divergence between the film and the book is in the depiction of the crime: in the former Susie is murdered in a bloodless sequence, while in the book she is brutally raped and butchered.  Make what you will of Jackson’s refusal to shoot such a sequence. 

MAN BITES DOG

Patton Oswalt in Robert Siegel’s Big Fan

“Hey Paul, how does it feel to get beat up by your hero?”

Most will never have to contemplate the most literal interpretation of the question, but Big Fan’s Paul Aufiero has indeed received hospitalizing blows from his idol, New York Giants Linebacker Quantrell Bishop. Played by a remarkable Patton Oswalt, Paul is among the most devoted of sports fanatics, the type obsessively rehearsing and rewriting talk radio tirades while struggling to slough off the quotidian aspects of life unrelated to their beloved teams. In the late 19th century, baseball enthusiasts shortened “fanatic” (from the Latin for maniacally zealous) to “fan” in order to describe their passion for the burgeoning pastime; 20th century guys like Paul and his sycophantic buddy Sal (the brilliant Kevin Corrigan) reinstated the moniker’s original berserker connotation (1). They and their ilk are full-time fanatics moonlighting as functioning human beings. But the arrangement between the worshiping and the worshiped is more fragile than it appears, and in Big Fan first-time director Robert Siegel documents the steadfastness of The Faithful as it’s shaken to the core.

After trailing Bishop’s envoy into a Manhattan strip club following a chance sighting in his native Staten Island (where "QB" and his posse go to score blow), Paul obliviously pushes the wrong buttons and receives the superstar’s coked-out wrath. Emerging from a three-day coma, Paul’s crisis of self breaks out when Bishop’s consequent suspension puts the team in danger of missing the playoffs. The carefully-composed structure of Paul’s life crumbles: His ambulance-chasing brother files a $77M lawsuit without his consent; he’s pursued by a detective seeking to prosecute Bishop; and he’s continuously heckled over the radio by archrival Philadelphia Phil (the hilariously caustic Michael Rapaport), whose Eagles are inching closer to supplanting the beleaguered Giants as division leaders.

Siegel wisely restrains Paul from literally voicing his misery via ponderous, Travis Bickle-like narration or overwrought dialogue. Instead, the director rivetingly spends the film’s midsection perusing Oswalt’s agonized face in various states of disrepair. It’s a striking subtlety and confidence in his lead actor that Darren Aronofsky lacked while filming Siegel’s screenplay for The Wrestler. Those familiar with the short film “Untitled Patton/Byrne Piece” are acutely aware of the possibilities available to the comedian’s face, and Big Fan captures some of Oswalt’s most indelible visages (2). Audiences could reasonably anticipate a breakout comic role for Oswalt in Big Fan, but Siegel keeps him entirely in character, never chucking superfluous guffaws or misplaced Pattonisms into the mix. The disparity between the fastidiousness of his stand-up routine and the dim graveness of Paul illustrates Oswalt’s range as a performer, heralding great things to come.

Even if Aronofsky’s leaden direction undermined the egregiously overrated The Wrestler, Siegel’s maudlin screenplay contributed to that film’s failure in establishing a plausible emotional landscape. Big Fan, however, bears none of The Wrestler's flaws but exhibits many of its virtues: both share a keen sense of milieu and are most effective when observing their characters in authentic environments from an impartial distance. Mickey Rourke’s blubbering performance in The Wrestler is here replaced by Oswalt’s dumbfounded expression of helplessness as his world rapidly expands beyond understanding. There is a clear kinship between the films -- a fascination with the gaudier underbellies of American sport as well as the big dreams of the working poor -- but ambiguity and tone mark the difference between the juvenile The Wrestler and the more thoughtful Big Fan.

Our popular understanding of fandom has been reshaped the past few decades from an emphasis on athletics to an emphasis on culture and subcultures. Sporting events were the accepted locus of unbridled (secular) communal passion until the ascendency of geekdom during the 1990s and 2000s. The New Geekdom encompasses everything from comic book conventions and cartoons to science fiction and video games and it’s become a billion dollar business. The Geeks (Enthusiasts, Conventioneers, Devotees, Nerds) themselves had been around for decades, but until recently they’d never been catered to seriously as a market, and their habits were viewed with satirical derision by the mainstream. This isn’t to say that sports have been eclipsed by popular culture, but that culture industries have managed to catch up in terms of visibility in mainstream channels and the fealty they've inspired. They’ve done so by discovering and cleverly exploiting the economic potential of fostering a certain kind of uncritical enthusiasm in their target demographics, and it’s the largely uncritical devotion to sports teams and comic book characters that invites analogies between modern fandom and religious experience. Fandom often turns irrational allegiance into a virtue and adds a competitive, quantitative edge to obsession (i.e. “I’m more of a fan than you because I’ve XYZ’d more times than you have.”) The central pickle of Paul’s crisis is how he can reconcile the agony and ecstasy of his intense fidelity. He initially avoids cognitive dissonance by chalking the altercation up to a misunderstanding (he claims the media is “blowing this out of proportion”), but there is soon no escape from the fact that his most cherished (though illusory) relationship nearly killed him. As the beset Job had it, “the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” Paul’s deity is both Old Testament and New (3).

Fan culture, especially as it centers on athletics, has a shadow regard for its object as well. As much as athletes are valorized for superhuman prowess, they’re disdained and vilified for their greed and immodesty. After Paul’s assault, Quantrell Bishop is repeatedly referred to as “an animal.” This is common language used by dismayed sports fans when athletes are implicated in off-field acts of violence or impropriety and there’s always a racial undercurrent to the epithet. Having refused the distance between his own person and Quantrell, Paul is incapable of identifying his attacker as something less than himself. He just wants his hero back in the lineup so that the Giants can make the playoffs.

In this formulation rests the film’s surprisingly heartfelt appreciation for Paul’s devotion that counterbalances its bleak depiction of his alienation. Siegel and Oswalt never play Paul for cheap laughs or pat messages; the conflicted portrait of attachment and loneliness, proximity and distance, in simultaneous extremes is as irresolvable as its central character’s existential quandary. As Job described his persecution and unyielding faith: “He broke me in two... He set me up as His target… and my prayer is pure.”(4)

Big Fan / USA / 2009 / Color / 86 min. / Written and Directed by Robert Siegel / Starring: Patton Oswalt, Kevin Corrigan, Michael Rapaport, Marcia Jean Kurtz, Gino Cafarelli and Matt Servito / First Independent Pictures

NOTES:

1 – The etymology of “fanatic” can be found here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fanatic, and, if memory serves, its potential genesis is also discussed in Ken Burns’ documentary Baseball.

2 – The film was first made available as the title menu of Wholphin, No. 1, a DVD magazine of short films distributed by McSweeney’s. It can also be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwaujgtW47M

3 -- Job 1:21

4 – Job 16:12-17 

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #21 - STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

21. Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Along with Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris was granted an overdue Academy Award this past decade for a subpar work that will come to rest in the bottom tier of his oeuvre. Scorsese won his coveted Best Director Oscar in 2007 for the well-crafted genre exercise The Departed, while Morris, despite having been the greatest of American documentarians of the previous twenty years, received the 2004 Best Documentary statue for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a feature-length interview with the Vietnam War mastermind and former Defense Secretary that began life as an episode of the director's unfortunately short-lived cable program First Person. That film was celebrated and hyped by critics and audiences, due partly to the easily digestible truths it offered about the Vietnam War and that conflict's parallels to our current presence in Iraq. It is a remarkable interview to be sure, but as a film it lacks the imagination and depth of Morris’ 90s masterpieces such as Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. 

Of much grander historical and artistic import was 2008's Standard Operating Procedure, Morris' investigation of a United States military combating charges of having tortured Iraq War “detainees” at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2003. The film focuses primarily on the scapegoating of low-level MPs such as Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman by a Pentagon looking to distance itself from policies of sanctioned brutality and a media circus content to relay the Rumsfeldian theory of rogue servicemembers short-circuiting and violating their chain of command. Also probed exhaustively is what, exactly, the incident's famous photos, especially the one showing England holding a detainee by a dog leash, do and don't indicate about their subject. It's as much an analysis of institutional disavowal as it is an expose of the myriad contexts of a photographic series that horrified the world.

Standard Operating Procedure is a departure aesthetically from The Fog of War, which relied heavily on archival footage (as did the show from which it was developed) and a circular Philip Glass score. Instead, SOP uses the painstaking re-enactments that Morris has developed since The Thin Blue Line (1988) to illustrate the crimes themselves; he also evinces a burgeoning skill with computer effects, used here to present graphically the mind-boggling amount of photographic material that a CID agent sifted through while ascertaining the time-line for and extent of the abuse. Both films' interviews utilize Morris' ingenious Interrotron, which encourages interview subjects to look directly into the camera due to the lens' placement behind a video screen presenting the filmmakers' image -- it could be described as a teleprompter whose words are replaced by a live video feed of the interlocutor's face -- that renders a rattling intimacy between film and viewer (1).  While the footage of McNamara peering directly at the audience while describing Armageddon revealed a chilling detachment, SOP's testimony of military police on the ground in Iraq is much more disarming, both morally and emotionally.

What the respective statuses of Fog and SOP (the former won awards during the pinnacle of public disenfranchisement with the war and grossed over $4M at the domestic box office; the latter fizzled out at less than $500,000 in ticket sales, failing to connect with a shame-fatigued public and disinterested critics) seem to indicate is that we are only comfortable with exploring truths about our foreign policy insofar as they can be held at a historical or allegorical remove: we may righteously import McNamara's lessons gleaned from Vietnam so long as we've had thirty years to mull them over and reach a politically correct, self-congratulatory consensus (2). SOP, however, came out either too early or too late: possibly too early for us to look the event squarely in the eye (it may take the next war or the next series of incriminating photographs before we can find the film useful) or too late in that it came on the heels of a clot of Iraq documentaries that were far more successful, noteworthy or less morally inflammatory in their pat celebrations of grunt bravery and condemnations of the war itself. (3)

SOP also jars loose what we’d come to accept about the events at Abu Ghraib, even upsetting the political left's antagonistic interpretations of the abuse. The film countermines the spoonfed dogma that a few bad apples had perpetrated the attacks and acknowledges an institutional basis for the cruelty, but it also describes the moral failings and self-pitying justifications of the servicemen and women that led to their being turned into criminals and pariahs. Both hawks and doves found Morris' conclusions difficult to swallow.

"It's important for the American people and the world to know that while these terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military, they were also brought to light by the honorable and responsible actions of other military personnel." - Donald Rumsfeld (4)

Emphasizing the role played by "a small number of U.S. military," effectively obscures the systemic nature of the torture, as well as the direct involvement of private contractors who had more or less instructed the military in interrogation techniques without binding themselves to its disciplinary procedures or rules of war. This is what cannot be teased out of the photographs. Throughout the film, phantom contractors and their CIA cohorts appear as faceless wraiths haunting the halls of Abu Ghraib, much as their presence in the infamous images of naked pyramids and hooded men masturbating is spectral and evasive.

Also disconcertingly obscured by Abu Ghraib: Media Event was our reliance on photography to determine truth, which has become an obsession of Morris' (his "Zoom" column at the New York Times' website is always fascinating [5]). We were outraged and horrified by the photos, but didn’t stop to think much about them, or what they don't contain. This is also the central conundrum of Michael Haneke’s brilliant Cache, another film, albeit fictional, about unfortunate, unintended record-keeping and its role in reconstructing events and unveiling motive. It was the photographs, rather than the events themselves, Morris argues with his film, that led to England becoming the public face of a crime in which her role was vital but inessential. Rumsfeld would resign two years after reports of the abuse began circulating but the phantom contractors fail to register in the public imagination; Lynndie England, on the other hand, was dishonorably discharged immediately and sentenced to three years in prison.

As a portrait, it’s haunting and vivid (Robert Richardson's slow motion cinematography underscores the horror) and damning. We will look at it in ten or fifteen years -- just as we've only now absorbed the lessons of the Vietnam and Cold Wars -- after we’ve begun torturing Iranian or North Korean POWs, and say that history is now repeating itself. We'll blame whoever is in the photographs, and forget the men -- the contractors and public servants -- behind the curtain. And while hindsight may be 20/20, what we won’t be able to say is that during the tragic fallout of Abu Ghraib we acknowledged fully its moral and historical implications in anything close to their proper dimensions; we focused instead on a series of grainy digital photographs and relied on them to tell us everything we needed to know. That’s a moral failing, but it has become, and may continue to be, standard operating procedure.




Notes:

1 - An interesting interview with Morris detailing the machine can be found here, while a diagram of its function can be found here.

2 - SOP's tally is still almost double the box office take for Taxi to the Dark Side, the Oscar-winning documentary released a year before SOP, but far far far less than any of Michael Moore's documentaries, let alone the average studio drama.
 
3 - The year before SOP's release, three of the five Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary were for films specifically about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: No End in Sight, Operating Homecoming and (the winner) Taxi to the Dark Side.
 
4 - A transcript of Rumsfeld's reaction to the publication of the photos (it cannot properly be called a response to the events themselves, which Rumsfeld himself is culpable) can be found here.

5 - A link to his "Zoom" series can be found here.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #22 - THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS

22. Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) 

It is the last great Wes Anderson film, and sadly may also be the last great Wes Anderson film. 

The precipitous decline into neurotic hording that has spoiled the consummate auteur's work since The Royal Tenenbaums (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou in 2004, The Darjeeling Limited in 2007 and this year's Fantastic Mr. Fox) can most easily be attributed to the departure of Owen Wilson as Anderson’s writing partner.  The bewildered innocence of Bottle Rocket’s Dignan and Max Fischer’s wound-concealing hubris in Rushmore have been supplanted by a savage, unforgiving wit that inches out most recognizably human emotions.  After Tenenbaums, an inverse gravity has taken hold in the Anderson universe, with knick-knacks and tchochkes occupying the films' center and the human beings marooned at the periphery.  His films have, with the aid of recent collaborators (and navel-gazing filmmakers in their own right) Roman Coppola and Noah Baumbach, become so insular and mean-spirited as to be uninviting for audiences looking to engage with anything beyond the director's contempt for his characters or his penchant for obnoxiously superfluous detail. Tenenbaums was the last film he's made that felt like it existed beyond his bedroom walls.

The Royal Tenenbaums is an ambitious, funny, warmhearted, thoroughly original and clever film that created its own vision of a timeless New York City (rivaling, in its purity, Kubrick's dream of the city in Eyes Wide Shut) without forsaking the actuality of the soon-to-be-suffering metropolis.  Anderson’s melancholic, autumnal Big Apple was the perfect American Fantasy for 2001, preserving our iconic city’s capacity for self-definition and eschewing its miseries in as unassuming a manner as possible.  The intimately epic saga of a once-regal family of near-geniuses whose talents and identities have begun to fade, The Royal Tenenbaums sports all of Anderson's now-restrictive trademarks (eclectic pop soundtrack, a cruelly dry wit with an absurd twinge and an immensely deliberate production design) without succumbing to their narrative limitations.  It was supposed to signal the arrival of a filmmaker whose eye for character and design were equal in strength, coming into his own as an authentic American voice; it now seems like the last gasp of a once-promising collaboration.

Each member of the Tenenbaum clan is lovingly and carefully assembled, and, fittingly, each performer (Gene Hackman, Ben Stiller, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke and Wilson, Danny Glover and Alec Baldwin as narrator) has arguably never been better.  Their shared history has the breadth of a novel and the punch of a short story.  Anderson's characters since have tended to be monomaniacal cads surrounded by sycophantic morons; they elicit neither sympathy nor interest. The characters of Tenenbaums, however, are fraught with humility, distrust and love for one another in a manner that is genuinely moving and bracingly funny. 

The film may also hold the decade's best soundtrack cue: as eldest son Richie Tenenbaum recovers from a ghastly suicide attempt, he checks himself out of the hospital and boards, still clad in hospital-issue scrubs, a New York City bus to the tune of Nick Drake's ethereal invocation "Fly".  The stone-faced Richie returning home to his frayed clan is perfectly synchronized with Drake intoning "please / give me a second grace / please / give me a second face". It's a desire for turned corners and new leaves that inspires smarting familiarity.

How depressing it is to think that Anderson may be long out of perfect moments such as this, let alone films, such as this one and its two predecessors, that are so full of them (1).  Here's hoping, however, that he allows himself a second grace.

1 - Those would be his debut Bottle Rocket (1996), a comedic heist movie possessed by a mischievous charm and Rushmore (1999), his comic masterpiece detailing a fuzzy love triangle between a kindergarten teacher, a prep school overachiever and a depressive tycoon. 

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #23 - IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

23. Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000)

“We won’t be like them.”

So promises a cuckolded husband to the woman married to the man who’s sleeping with his wife in 1960’s Hong Kong. Shaken by their partners’ mutual infidelities, Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and So Lai-zhen (Maggie Cheung) develop an intimate, though chaste, refuge together, the most visible product of which is distressed, silent longing. Wong’s tactile direction gives an aching body to the frustrated interlude. It’s the pinnacle of his sensualist cinema, wherein all of the elements sing in conspiracy: the voluptuous colors (of the décor, the light, the wardrobes) pursue a rhythm all their own, the lyrical decoupage moves masterfully between truncated episodes and Christopher Doyle’s photography captures perfectly the subtle physical details out of which the protagonists construct a companionship.  It’s heartbreakingly beautiful watching the betrayed fumble a tentative love of such promise, but the intensity of their affections surpasses the limp pronouncements and tired postures of a thousand empty screen romances. It was the decade's first great love story, a documentation of a love that might have existed. 

 

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #24 - CHILDREN OF MEN

24. Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (2006)

Using an Eastern European long take aesthetic, a Mexican director situates a British novelist’s science fiction tale about an African refugee -- whose pregnancy is humanity’s first in almost two decades – within the contexts of U.S. anti-immigration fervor and War on Terror atrocities. That Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is terrifically entertaining without sacrificing an inch of its political breadth is something of a miracle. In collaboration with the great director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (who also shot Malick’s The New World), Cuaron uses a series of frenzied long takes to create a zippy cousin to Bela Tarr’s forsaken glacial drifts, but it could be said both are charting historical degradation of a sort. In Cuaron's film, a gun-phobic former radical, the droll Clive Owen, escorts the planet's lone fertile human (the race's sterility is never explained, though numerous potential culprits populate the narrative) through a looking glass of squalid immigrant detention and urban warfare in an effort to get her unborn child to The Human Project, a team of scientists hoping to repopulate the dying earth. It’s an art film and an action picture: a nightmarish chase picture set in a barren future of nearly unremitting xenophobia, war, paranoia and fascism. Cuaron should be forgiven an occasionally condescending approach to both race and radicalism and applauded for an attempt at drawing parallels between domestic (immigration law, class conflicts) and foreign policies (the war on terror, preemptive strikes). Aesthetically, Children of Men boasts the greatest, most haunting sci-fi production design and photography since Blade Runner. Despite its prognosticated bleakness, the film is anything but cynical: after a decade of apocalyptic action films in which humanity must survive its own ravages, Cuaron’s vision is the only one that elects to preserve earnestly the hope that not only will human bodies weather future cataclysm, but that a shared sense of Humanity might as well.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: #25 - TONY MANERO

25. Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (2008)

I wrote a thorough analysis of the film here, but it bears repeating that Larrain's synthesis of surreal gallows humor, carefully wrought handheld cinematography and an unnerving central performance made it the most harrowing, revelatory film seen on American screens in 2009. The story of a murderous John Travolta impersonator in Pinochet-era Chile, the director's second feature secures his place as one of the decade's most brilliantly perceptive discoveries. Inexcusably absent from most lists of this year's best films, Tony Manero is likely to simmer (or perhaps fester) in the recesses of the arthouse imagination in the years to come, eventually overtaking 2009's relatively pallid contenders for immortality such as Fantastic Mr. Fox, Up in the Air, Precious and District 9. Larrain is a poet of the shared historical world; by neither pandering to nor betraying his status as an artist, he captures a horrifically familiar hierarchy of art, sexuality and politics while obeying the imperative of his unique sensibilities. Only the great films refuse disloyalty to audiences and themselves equally.

25 WORTHY FILMS, 2000-2009: AN INTRODUCTION

Each year, almost every “Most” or “Best-Of….” round-up begins with a missive in defense of list-making as a critical activity.  Often this precedes a defense of the arrived-at final number of included titles: Is 50 too many? Why not 65 or 33? What’s so ontologically magical about the number 10? For lists concerning decades, what immediately follows is a sheepish acknowledgment of the arbitrariness of decades, centuries, millenia, etc. as useful parameters for discussing the relative merits of artwork, events or persons.  My own belief is that as arbitrary as these numbers may be, we’ve agreed (more or less) that they ought to mean something and they’ve thus come to mean quite a bit.  This is shaky tautology to be sure, but as far as this chronicler is concerned, a decade is a worthwhile chunk of time to look at, largely because we’ve come to believe it so.  If, in the course of life, we think of ourselves as constructing and participating in 10-year increments, then these increments should reflect the value of this intention by virtue of their tendencies and idiosyncrasies.  It’s a suitable, if permeable, temporal boundary that defines our lives and our shared history to a large extent.  Our willful submission makes this possible, and defensiveness on the subject is largely pointless and self-defeating.   

As I haven’t seen a fraction of this year’s important films, I’ll forgo a list of 2009’s best titles.  I am much more familiar with the decade’s key works, and feel justified in posting a list of films made between 2000 and 2009 that might conceivably be considered “the best,” “my favorite,” or, to abandon brevity in favor of description, “the most artistically revelatory and/or profound.” In a word, they are “worthy” films. That is to say they’re worthy of being discussed and remembered as representatives of their time. I stop short of using “significant” as a criterion so that I can indulge the films I love rather than the films I feel I ought to think about or respect or otherwise consider independently from my mind’s pleasure center.  As several critics have claimed, Miami Vice and Avatar heralded separate but equal technical sea changes for Hollywood and are therefore worthy of “best-of” consideration. For me, however, Vice and Avatar are each little more than high-gloss junk and I’d just soon as soon leave them off of a list that feels excruciatingly brief, even at 25 entries.  

The number 25 represents nothing more than a suitably round number for such a list, but one sizable enough to preclude unbearably painful omissions.  Limiting myself to 10 was maddening, resulting in a list far too meager to encapsulate a decade.  Using 100 feels appropriate only when considering a century, the symmetry irresistible.  Even 50 felt excessive or indecisive.  A few critics, especially those publishing on the internet, have, after happily casting off the pretty number mandate, chosen to stop whenever they felt all worthy films had been discussed.  To each his own, but I find the pleasure in these endeavors is the selection and ranking process.  A final tally of 25 ensures both a painful selection process and a spaciousness befitting ten years’ time.

IMAGE 2

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up

A significant portion of Kiarostami's 1990 masterpiece Close-Up is dedicated to this image and its variations. The man looking into the camera, Hossain Sabzian, has been arrested for impersonating Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbalf and having convinced a well-to-do family that their home and children are ideal subjects for his next picture. Kiarostami documents the trial (the source of this image), interviews all participants, re-stages (using non-actors portraying themselves) portions of the crime and orchestrates a tender encounter between Sabzian and Makhmalbaf himself that poignantly concludes the film.

If Close-Up is essentially about anything, and it's debatable whether or not it can be satisfactorily reduced or encapsulated, it is about Sabzian's performance as Makhmalbaf: his own interpretation of it, its impact on intended and unintended audiences, and the parallel attempts by the court and Kiarostami at discerning its meaning.

Here we are given a close-up of Sabzian in the courtroom as Kiarostami -- his off camera voice registers enough for the filmmaker to be considered another central character -- asks him to recount the ruse's disintegration. The close-up, however, is complicated by the background presence of an observer, a visual approximation/stand-in of the filmmakers, the court (he's clad in official garb, though his precise position is undocumented), and the audience. Throughout the film's last third, this repeated angle features the sober-eyed Sabzian recounting the details of his alleged crime while the figure behind him displays an array of responses, ranging from the pensive to the indifferent. The filmmaker could easily have isolated his ostensible subject and consequently limited his story's focus; instead he lends half of the frame to a mere observer at the proceedings. Despite the film's title, this frame inhabits the no-man's-land between the close-up and the two-shot.  Kiarostami's image presents explicitly the phantom occupants of any film's close-ups: the audience.