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. 

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.

PLASMA RIFLE ENVY

Humanity Covets Alien Firepower in Neill Blomkamp's District 9

As the faux-documentary footage near the beginning of District 9 reveals, years ago a race of large, insect-like aliens visited earth only to be quarantined -- after a failed stint a living amongst humans -- in a Johannesburg shantytown. Unable to return to their mothership, which ominously hovers over the decrepit slum, the “prawns,” as they’re known, are eventually placed under the jurisdiction of a large weapons conglomerate known as MNU. The plot details the moral reawakening of corporate wonk Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley, oddly resembling filmmaker Spike Jonze), who is nepotistically placed in charge of relocating the troublesome shantytown residents to a tent-city concentration camp further removed from human civilization.

Following this set up is a messy social allegory in which Van De Merwe is accidentally infected by a serum that slowly transforms him into a prawn. Forced thereafter to live amongst The Other, he conspires with a scientist prawn (the only intelligent member of the race that the film offers us) to steal back the confiscated serum, which also, most conveniently, is capable of powering the aliens’ mother ship back to their home planet – where that is exactly, or what it might have been like, the film doesn’t say. And gradually, after so promising a start, we arrive at the standard paradigm for the racially-charged action picture: abusive white man is forced to live among The Other, realizes his host's humanity, and through his own heroism manages to facilitate his former foil’s emancipation. It’s a tired formula, more than a little offensive, and the innovations to it that this film offers only underscore the cliché’s insensitivity and lack of historical perspective.

The film’s most obnoxious problems rest in its dramatic treatment of the alien race: the film argues that our inhumane treatment of the aliens has led to their barbarism, yet also holds that same barbarism up for laughs, as the poverty-stricken prawns are viewed with derision, save for the aforementioned scientist, more or less the archetypal noble savage. So, which came first: human atrocity or the aliens’ own coarse nature? Neglecting the history of the prawns – or, more precisely, communicating it entirely through munitions – leaves the question frustratingly stunted.

Most problematically, the filmmakers (this is Neill Blomkamp's first feature) and MNU's nefarious corporate suits have a parallel interest in the subjugated aliens, namely their superior weaponry, which, through complex biotechnology, can only be operated by prawns themselves. Thus, within the story, there are black and gray markets for prawn flesh, which criminal gangs seek to ingest and MNU hopes to synthesize with human DNA, both with the goal of facilitating the use of the alien weaponry by human hands. Similarly, the filmmakers covet the extraordinary (and extraordinarily stylish) firepower of the prawns; as Wikus’ left hand becomes entirely prawn, he’s able to gun down corporate mercenaries and warlords with extreme prejudice. The candy-colored laser guns and pulsating explosives in the prawn arsenal clearly resemble the imaginative cavalcade featured in first-person-shooter video games, which boasts increasingly sadistic means of eliminating enemies (1). Human bodies (those of the evil bad guys) are shredded, exploded and lacerated with this firepower, dwarfing the effects of the shotguns and sniper rifles sported by the human baddies. The quest for brutal alien technology would easily make for great science fiction, but the filmmakers’ helpless indulgence in fetishized weaponry deflates any higher thematic ambition, leaving the film with a blown opportunity at its core. Even Tarantino’s most recent self-professed death-trip Inglourious Bastards can’t claim but half of District 9’s body count.

Both the faux-documentary approach (persistent, yet violated as narrative convenience dictates) and the shaky, hand-held camerawork strike against the film, the former amounting to lazy exposition, the latter, ostensibly reinforcing verisimilitude, achieving a confused mis-en-scene. Still, there are occasional bits of well-choreographed, adrenaline-pumping action, but they are rare in the film and scarcely compensate for the objectionable narrative development.

Lastly, the highlight of the film must be the digital rendering of the prawns themselves, which appear as lifelike and textured as any computer-generated creature has ever looked. The seamless situation of these finely wrought beings within a grainy documentary image makes the achievement of Peter Jackson’s Weta workshop all the more impressive. But while Weta held up their end up the bargain in creating a wholly realistic (light years beyond the computer constructs populating Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series) alien race, Blomkamp has ultimately failed in injecting these creations with a commensurate humanity, not realizing that his would-be allegory depends on it.

District 9 / USA, New Zealand / 2009 / Color / 112 min. / Directed by Neill Blomkamp / Written by Mr. Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell / Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope and Sylvaine Strike

Notes:

1 - It’s worth noting that there is a tracking shot late in the film which resembles the camera angle of FPS games – gun perched firmly in the bottom of the screen, as the background skirts by wildly – a shot not entirely uncommon in contemporary action pictures, a truly depressing cliché that shows no sign of fading away. Fitting, though, that it would show up in this picture considering Blomkamp was Producer Peter Jackson’s pick to helm the abandoned big screen adaptation of the uber-popular FPS Halo.