Legion (2010, USA)

I’m beginning to wonder if Paul Bettany fired his agent some time ago in favor of taking career advice from his personal trainer. Because I’m having an honestly difficult time imagining anyone else who might have benefitted from Legion. Either that, or Bettany and director Scott Charles Stewart (both also involved in the upcoming Priest) have gotten religion in a really odd way – one that involves a lot of machine guns.

Frankly, a movie about machine-gun toting angels with killer abs (I’m pretty sure Bettany’s trainer designed the poster, too) wouldn’t be so entirely worthless if it weren’t saddled with an exceedingly dull middle section and some of the silliest dialog ever put to screen. (Writers, here’s a tip – if you need to use a lot of rousing speeches in your film, it’s best to be a bit more careful naming your characters. Because nothing deflates a stirring call to arms like punctuating it with, “understand what I’m saying, Jeep?”) However, the final twenty or so minutes nearly make up in dumbness what the first half does in dullness – we’ve got Kevin Durand as an S&M wing fetishist with an inexplicable accent, Lucas Black catching a baby as one would a football, Dennis Quaid and the lighter called “Hope”, T.V. actresses fighting the angel Gabriel off with a flare gun, and Bettany sacrificing pretty much every shred of dignity he won in his early career. Hope his trainer wasn’t waiting for points on the back end.

CIFF 2010 - Carancho (2010, Argentina)

Sometimes I like to see films without any prior knowledge of the story. When picking out screenings for this year’s CIFF, I saw that Ricardo Darin (9 Queens, The Aura) was starring in a new Argentine film, and I was pretty much sold on the spot. I’m a fan of Darin’s – his hangdog face belies a menace that is regularly put to good use, Carancho being no exception. In it, Darin plays Sosa, an ambulance chaser mysteriously bereft of his law license, but extraordinarily good with suffering clients. At an accident site, he meets Luján, a doctor working as a paramedic who has her own secrets to hide. Soon enough, the two fall into a nascent relationship, complicated as much by their distinct professional interests as by the demons they’re trying to hide.

Carancho’s best attribute, apart from Darin, who is typically good, is the energetic handheld camerawork, which excels at capturing the mood of frantic accident sites and hospital trauma wards. It’s surprisingly lovely in parts, too, such as a scene where Sosa and Luján share an early-morning coffee while cars whip through the frame around them. Less successful is the clumsy plotting, which hurtles the audience through the first stages of the story in order to get to the really juicy parts of this sad-sack love affair. But Carancho doesn’t really push things over the edge until the ludicrously obvious ending, which for me negated some of the stronger parts of the story, as director Pablo Trapero and his co-screenwriters chose to hit us over the head with an anvil rather than tie up their film in a more interesting, and realistic, way. As much as I’m generally not a fan of gritty melodramas (Tilda Swinton’s Julia comes to mind), this one could have been rescued somewhat had the filmmakers led more with the romance than with the tacked-on morality.

CIFF 2010 - Certified Copy (2010, France/Italy/Iran)

My one issue with Abbas Kiarostami’s beautiful Certified Copy is that I became so engaged with the “are they/aren’t they” mystery that I didn’t get as emotionally invested in the characters as I feel I should have been. It’s such a delicate balance, because the two elements needed to constantly feed one another in order for Copy to work at all. And the more I think on it, the less I consider this issue an issue at all, as I suspect that the film will open up a great deal with multiple viewings.

I don’t want to give anything away by describing the plot of the film, so I’ll just say that the bulk of it is merely a back-and-forth between two characters, Juliette Binoche’s high-strung Elle and William Shimell’s laconic James Miller, who spend a day together in the villages of Tuscany, debating the nature of art, family and love, and slowly absorbing one another into the narratives they spin. It’s brilliantly acted – Binoche has rarely, if ever, been better, and Shimell generally holds up to her quite well, though he does tend towards the brittle in a few spots – and gorgeously, painstakingly shot (all those reflections!), a film that holds up nearly as well intellectually as it does emotionally, and vice versa.

In some ways, Copy is as much of a cipher as Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which I saw the day prior at the Chicago International Film Festival (in the same theater, actually), and it’s no surprise that these were two of the most lauded films to come out of Cannes this year. Having seen both, however, I am (still?) somewhat surprised that Uncle Boonmee rather than Copy took home the top prize (Binoche won Best Actress), as the latter film seems more like typical Cannes material. And I expect Copy to end up on more of the big year-end lists than Uncle Boonmee, if only due to relative accessibility. Which is the better film? I find it nearly impossible to say at this point. Copy is striking and engrossing, whereas the Thai film is meditative, somewhat distant. I have the feeling that Uncle Boonmee will stick with me far longer, but Copy may end up having more personal resonance. One thing’s for sure – the one-two punch of these films has shaken me out of my movie doldrums, and highlighted just how poor this year’s domestic offerings have been.

Double Standards in Revenge Narratives

Roger Ebert loves The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And he hates the recent remake of I Spit on Your Grave (he’s not too fond of the original, either). In his review of Grave, he condemns the revenge narrative for being nasty and exploitative, lingering on the violation of the central female character as much, if not more than, as on the ways in which she later exacts revenge on her violators.

But here’s the thing – I don’t understand how these specific narrative elements in Grave really differ all that much from similar aspects of Dragon Tattoo. In both, we see a young woman sexually assaulted and humiliated in protracted sequences that are framed so as to make the audience complicit in the heroine’s assault. The revenge these women take upon their assaulters is poetic in its brutality, but, as I state in my review of Dragon Tattoo, do these sequences really balance out the gruesome acts that call them into being in the first place? Why must we watch our heroines be repeatedly violated in the most degrading of ways – and why must this violation be filmed so artfully – before allowing them their retribution?

Which got me to thinking. Apart from John Schlesinger’s weird Sally Field vehicle, An Eye for an Eye, I cannot come up with a single female revenge narrative that is not based on a personal, bodily violation of its heroine. It’s the very thing that makes An Eye for an Eye weird – that it follows the conventions of male revenge films, with a heroine who is not exacting revenge on her own behalf, but for the honor a loved one (in this case, her daughter, who was . . . raped and murdered), which is to say, his/her own honor. Male revenge films almost never spring from the personal, bodily violation of their heroes. Rather, they involve a man – usually a father figure – taking revenge for damage done to family and loved ones, and on the way, fashioning of themselves the über-patriarch. Just off the top of my head, there’s Jonnie To’s recent Vengeance, Mel Gibson’s 2010 flop Edge of Darkness, Kevin Bacon in 2007’s Death Sentence, Taken with Liam Neeson, pretty much every film Steven Segal has ever made, and the upcoming Faster with Dwayne Johnson.

Some additional notable female revenge narratives? In The Brave One, Jodie Foster is physically and sexually assaulted, and later takes revenge for both this action and the resulting murder of her fiancé. Enough has Jennifer Lopez as a beaten wife who learns to fight back. There’s Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, in which Uma Thurman’s Bride character takes revenge for her betrayal and the murder of her fiancé – but who begins her bloody spree by killing the rapists who violated her while she was in a coma. Compare this with the more ideological revenge that Tarantino’s Basterds take upon the Nazis in Inglorious Basterds, and there is in fact little to compare. (Though Melanie Laurent’s character proves an interesting figure, as she is avenging her family, though she does not entirely escape sexual humiliation at the hands of Christoph Waltz,’s Col. Landa. There’s also Marcellus Wallace’s rape and revenge in Pulp Fiction, though it is a minor plot point, and not the driving narrative – perhaps Tarantino is more interested in bending some of the vengeance film rules than are most mainstream filmmakers.)

What about male revenge narratives that center around the violation of the male body? The Crank films sort of qualify, though Stathem’s Chev Chelios is most certainly not sexually violated in either of them. Tim Robbins’ character is raped in The Shawshank Redemption, but his “revenge” is more upon the powers that be than on his attackers. (Interesting note – there are 110 “keywords” associated with The Shawshank Redemption on IMdB.com, including “pie” and “hat”, but not one of them is “rape”. Also, looking up “rape and revenge” as an IMdB keyword search is not a recommended 3 a.m. activity.)

Others? I can’t think of any. A few searches and some canvassing doesn't yield much fruit, which to me means that wherever the narratives of male violation and revenge live, they’re largely disregarded or forgotten. (There is, however, some material to be found on television – both the little-remembered Kingpin and the lauded OZ used male sexual violation as a motive for revenge.) But the female narratives of violation vengeance? Well, they get green-lit for remakes by filmmakers both unknown (Steven K. Moore and I Spit on Your Grave) and lauded (David Fincher and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). And it seems that, as Ebert’s reviews of these two films proves, we sometimes let pretty window dressing distract us from how unnerving these narratives really are.

CIFF 2010 - Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, Thailand)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the first of director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films I’ve seen, though I have Tropical Malady at home right now. (For about a month now. And it’s the second time I’ve had it.) I’m no stranger to atmospheric, challenging mood pieces, but it’s hard to know exactly what to think about Uncle Boonmee, even a few hours later. Perhaps a few days or a few weeks would help, perhaps not – it’s certainly a challenging narrative, being that there’s little narrative at all. Uncle Boonmee is dying, and his sister-and-law and nephew come to his farm in the north of Thailand to help care for him in his final days. But they’re not the only ones around – Uncle Boonmee is visited by ghosts, beast-ghosts, and visions of what are seemingly memories of his past lives. As is somewhat expected by such a description, the movie is quite dreamlike, but Weerasethakul anchors it with strong emotional currents and an excellent atmospheric sensibility (the film is far creepier than I expected – I blame the Monkey Ghosts). In many ways, it reminded me of Pen-Ek Ratanaraung’s Nymph, which I saw at last year’s Chicago International Film Festival (maybe it was all that Thai jungle), but with a far greater resonance. I’m still not quite sure what it all means, and I am a bit surprised that the Cannes jury took to it like they did, but I think I liked it – quite a lot. It’s a cipher, but a very humanistic one.

The Social Network (2010, USA)

The Social Network, like Zodiac before it (forgive me for skipping The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but I just couldn’t get past those sweepingly Epic-with-a-capital-E trailers), is a film that is ostensibly about real people, but which is curiously devoid of real feeling. It’s a bloodless film, full of bluster but little passion. The razor-sharp script by Aaron Sorkin might actually exacerbate this problem – Sorkin has no problem building a world full of hyper-intelligent people, but he sometimes lacks the ability to make us care about them. Coupled with Fincher’s obsessive nature (for a movie about computer nerds, it’s painstakingly and artfully filmed), the audience is often left wondering whether there is anyone in The Social Network - a movie based on real people, about real events - who actually resembles a real human being. Jesse Eisenberg is a terrific nebbishy, assholish Mark Zuckerberg, but his character starts to lean into caricature without a stronger director’s hand to pull him out again. Andrew Garfield fares best as Zuckerberg’s business partner and best friend, Eduardo Saverin, but he has the easiest and most naturally sympathetic role to play. The Social Network, for a movie that runs over two hours, is also strangely abrupt - Christy is suddenly crazy, Sean Parker is transparent to everyone but Mark, and the movie stops rather than ending.

Structural and conceptual issues aside, there's another point nagging at me, one that has been made already about The Social Network, but seems to be representative about the bulk of Fincher’s work. There are virtually no women in the cast of The Social Network - certainly no women characters of note, and only one that isn’t displayed as a crazy, or at least castrating, bitch. As pointed out in my Zodiac review, Panic Room and Alien3 are the only of Fincher’s films to date (again, please give me leeway for Benjamin Button, and feel free to point out any faults it poses to my argument) that feature decent female characters – or any female characters that aren’t either totally disposable or downright crazy (I’m looking at you, Marla). And even with these two somewhat notable exceptions, the female leads in Panic Room and Alien3 generally get the crap beat out of them and/or terrorized thoroughly – not quite to the extent of having their heads chopped off and sent special delivery, but homes invaded, children threatened, giant monsters bursting out of abdomens . . . you get the idea. These are also two extremely de-feminized portraits of the heroine – Jodie Foster’s female-ness in Panic Room is defined only by her mother-bear instincts, while Fincher’s installment in the Alien franchise transforms Ripley further into a super-soldier, including removing one of her most defining feminine features – her hair. (Though Fincher does let Ripley have sex – not that the encounter ends terribly well. In this way she seems almost like a praying mantis, just that Fincher flips it around so that the other bad-ass mommy present, not Ripley herself, does the post-coital killing.) The fact that Fincher’s next project is the troublesome – at least in a feminist sense – American remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo only lends more credence to my growing belief that the man just does not like women, or at least female characters. They’re dangerous vixens (The Game, Fight Club, The Social Network), terrorized wives and mothers (Se7en, Panic Room), and most often have gruesome acts of violence perpetrated upon them (Alien3, Se7en, Panic Room, Zodiac, and, unless he’s putting in a lot more hugs than exist in the original Swedish version, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). I admire Fincher for his work as a stylist, and I still think many of his early films are excellent genre exercises, but this trend leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.