Well, the movie awards season has now come to a close, with Argo triumphing at the end. I've read quite a few articles that claim Ben Affleck's lack of a Best Director nomination helped him win the sympathy vote - perhaps that's true, but Steven Spielberg failing to win Director suggests that maybe Lincoln's strength wasn't what it was thought to be. Of course we'll never know, and does it ultimately matter in the grand scheme (even in the not-so-grand scheme of filmdom)? No, but that won't stop plenty more discussion on the subject. We film buffs must get our fix one way or another.
Biggest surprise was obviously the tie for Sound Editing - the first to happen in quite a while - but Ang Lee winning Best Director was not far behind. Spielberg seemed the most likely prospect (like Daniel Day-Lewis, he's earned enough respect by now to be considered worthy of a third Oscar) but there was always the chance that Harvey Weinstein would come through for David O. Russell. Neither would have been a bad choice, but among the five nominees Ang Lee was perhaps most singlehandedly responsible for how well his film turned out. The other four had superb scripts, excellent casts, or both, but (not to slight its writer or actors) the real star Life of Pi was Ang Lee himself. Though his earlier films were very good (especially The Ice Storm), I haven't been a big fan of his newer Oscar contenders, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain. This made Life of Pi an even more surprising pleasure to watch.
I guess as a patriotic Canadian I am duty-bound to carp about how Affleck's picture short-changed Ken Taylor's efforts, but after all the whining that's already polluted the internet I just can't. Perhaps what actually happened would make a good movie too, but this film was really designed to be a caper flick in the style of those being made in the late 1970s (right down to the grainy photography of some of the Iran scenes). For most of the film it's clear we aren't meant to take it as a serious document. However, the clips and pictures at the end do suggest this (especially ex-President Carter's voiceover), which was a mistake and the only real grounds for complaint.
All this does create an interesting question, and the real reason for my writing here: what's acceptable to fictionalize and what isn't? A decade ago a lot of British critics were irked by U-571's crediting of the capture of the Enigma machine to the Americans, while most American reviewers weren't bothered too much (though perhaps they didn't know this was inaccurate). Critics, especially those like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jim Emerson and the late Pauline Kael, tend to jump on liberties like this only if a third-world (or non-white) nation is the one being short-changed. Just look at the differing reactions to 1987's The Untouchables and 1988's Mississippi Burning: both are pumped-up crime movies that only use the true stories for some period and location flavor. Most of each film is arguably fiction rather than fact (though some names used were real, and the ultimate outcomes were reasonably accurate), but the critical reactions were very different. De Palma's Untouchables was highly praised, with its liberties barely being discussed, while Parker's Burning was viciously attacked by the three aforementioned critics (Mr. Emerson routinely brings it up even today as an example of pure cinematic evil).
Why the split reaction? First let's compare the two movies:
De Palma's film depicts four (or really just two) men who gun down hordes of Al Capone's goons while they help put him in prison for tax evasion. Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness ultimately gets revenge on Capone's top killer by throwing him off a building. The District Attorney & local police are little help as they are all weak-willed, corrupt, or both.
Parker's film depicts two FBI agents who track down the killers of four civil rights workers by intimidating co-conspirators and speaking to previously passive locals. Ultimately they get one guilty man to talk by pretending to be fellow Klansmen who try to kill him.
You can see that while the overall plots have some truth in them, there's a lot that's been fictionalized in both films. (Recently it even was revealed that the climactic trick that Parker's FBI agents played actually did happen, or something very much like it.) The crucial factor is that, in Mississippi Burning, the (fictionalized) efforts of FBI agents are emphasized over the real-life work of civil rights leaders. White FBI agents over black civil rights leaders. Bad. Very bad. Or so the Rosenbamian school of critics say. Fictionalizing history is fine, but if a non-white character is negatively (or less-heroically) portrayed, that sets off the alarm. Mr. Rosenbaum & Ms. Kael attacked The Deer Hunter along very similar lines, citing its depiction of a fictional North Vietnamese torture of American prisoners rather than any American atrocities. (Commendably, Mr. Emerson did not share this view.) Mr. Rosenbaum even threw out Apocalypse Now over Colonel Kurtz' fictional story of North Vietnamese cutting children's arms off, conveniently forgetting that the rest of the film depicted equally fictional American massacres. Alan Parker's Midnight Express is also often cited (by all three of these critics) for its villainous Turkish prison guards. Certainly they are way over the top in their sadism, and can't really be taken seriously as villains. But would these same critics have complained if the guards had been American (perhaps in a Texas prison) but otherwise depicted in exactly the same way, beating on a college student imprisoned on drug charges?
If you look at a lot of older Hollywood films - Gone with the Wind is most often cited, but you could also choose most of John Ford's Westerns or Preston Sturges' comedies - you'll find racial views that are pretty unenlightened by modern standards, and it's understandable to be bothered by them. Unfortunately there's now a school of thought that demands almost nothing but favorable portrayals of non-white characters, and if anything otherwise is shown, the film in question deserves to be condemned. Mr. Emerson even cited Matt Dillon's rescue of Thandie Newton in Crash - a white man rescuing a black woman! Evil! EVIL! (Certainly that film had a lot of faults, but that sequence is pretty low on the list.) Going back to Argo, some critics like Mr. Rosenbaum are taking it to task for its depiction of Iranians (he even listed it as the year's worst film). Yes, you do witness the protesters storming the building at the start of the movie (and the diplomats walking fearfully through a market later on), but the introduction to the movie lets us see why the protesters are unhappy with America and why they're doing what they're doing. As for the marketplace scene: we're seeing everyone through the diplomats' eyes, folks! When you're in fear of being captured at any moment, anybody you see will seem threatening to you whether they really are or not. This device has been used in countless movies without much criticism, so it's silly to single it out here.
What this all amounts to is this: if the real-life story had been about Americans being sheltered at the Indian or Kenyan embassy, would Argo's fictionalizations have been tolerated by American critics? My guess is no. My guess is that this film would have been condemned by a large chunk of them: not even the hardcore Rosenbamians like Jim Emerson, but even the softer politically-correct types like Michael Phillips. Please don't think I believe this film should be condemned for its fictionalizations - my point is that critics need to tone down their so-called sensitivities and realize that D. W. Griffith, John Ford and Margaret Mitchell are long gone. Not every unheroic (or not-fully-dimensional) black character is evidence of insidious racism.
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Play Misty for Me (1971)
I've decided to begin a look at the many films made by Clint Eastwood, starting at the beginning with Play Misty for Me.
The film begins as he goes to his job at a Carmel radio station where he gets a call from a woman who asks him to play the song ‘Misty.’ It is clearly not the first time she has requested this. After he comes off work he goes to a bar run by Dirty Harry director Don Siegel in his first movie role. Siegel claims that a solitary woman (Jessica Walter) that Eastwood is eyeing is waiting for someone and has been resisting advances all night.
Seeing this as a challenge rather than a warn-off, Eastwood tries his luck: he plays a game of chess with Siegel and slowly arouses her interest, or so he thinks. We can recognize Walter’s voice from the call to the radio station, and her fixed gaze on Eastwood as he looks at the game certainly reveals that she was waiting for him to show up. She eventually admits this to him, but not before letting him think he has worked a brilliant ploy.
She stays over at his house with a promise of ‘no strings attached,’ but – perhaps surprisingly to us – there is no sexual scene shown with them. Eastwood (the director) isn’t interested in salaciousness and there wouldn’t be any other point in having such a scene. His DJ clearly doesn’t take their relationship any more seriously than a brief fling, and he generally has a number of girlfriends going at once.
Walter, however, is quite aggressive, and brings groceries to his house for an impromptu supper. He’s upset by this – what if another woman was there? – but agrees to have dinner with her. Eastwood is a pretty narcissistic guy in this movie as he doesn’t seem at all worried by her obsessiveness: he’s used to having girls falling hard for him so her behavior seems only natural to him.
He continues this relationship but soon learns of an old girlfriend (Donna Mills, who reminds me of Jane Fonda without the abrasiveness) coming back to town and decides to get back together with her and give up his playboy lifestyle. In turn, he decides to wind things up with Walter but she won’t have it, often running into him and even wrecking a business lunch he’s spent some time preparing for.
Finally she turns violent – first against herself in a suicide attempt, then against Eastwood’s housekeeper who walks in while she’s vandalizing his house. After the latter outburst she is sent to a sanitarium.
These first two-thirds of the film are very effective: we can see Walter’s increasingly dangerous obsessiveness, but it’s not made so obvious that we can’t believe Eastwood takes so long to notice. That Eastwood himself is willing to be a pretty self-absorbed guy also makes this believable.
The final half-hour is not quite as good. This is partly because it has been imitated so many times since, but also because Eastwood as director is not quite as steady here – especially in the final showdown. Previously restrained in not using too many heavy-handed closeups or zooms to get the menace across, he indulges in this a few times, along with a rather improbable plot twist (and an even more improbable discovery made by Eastwood’s character).
He also features a walking-in-the woods montage (punctuated by the only sex in the film) that is too long, but he partially salvages things by often shooting it very wide so we can see the woods around them and can look around to see if they’re being followed (earlier in the film we have just such a shot with a very nice payoff). He also shows them in a pretty good crowd scene afterward where we watch even more carefully, but the sense of danger isn’t as potent as in the film’s first hour or so. It just seems too obligatory a sequence.
The final confrontation between Eastwood and Walter delivers some excitement but, again, not as much as it should. The editing is a little off here and the falling figure at the end is too obviously a dummy. The very last shot, at least, is well-done: it provides a nice mirror to the opening shot and lets us see Walter as a sad figure rather than as the purely murderous nut she has become by the end of the movie.
When watching this film a viewer today will inevitably think of Fatal Attraction, though there is one very important difference between the two films: in the latter, Glenn Close is less obviously dangerous than Jessica Walter is here, which is why the violent climax of that film felt so false. The finale of Play Misty for Me is a little more believable because Walter’s character is more prone to angry outbursts from early in the story.
Jessica Walter has been frequently, and justly, praised for what she did in this film. It’s too bad that she wasn’t in very many films – perhaps she was too convincing in the role. Eastwood, in contrast, is often overlooked for his onscreen work here, but he’s also very good as the film’s straight man who’s careless with the affections of women.
As a director he does quite well by not overly-sensationalizing the story. There’s no pumped-up musical score or a lot of ominous close-ups. Perhaps the best example of Eastwood’s understated approach to things is his first meeting with Walter at the bar: instead of frequent cuts to close-ups of her eyes or something we might get from another director, we usually see both of them in the same shot as she watches him play his game with the bartender. This is all we need to understand what’s happening, and it’s in keeping with the style he has used ever since – essentially to make everything clear but not obvious to us.
Eastwood is rather difficult to classify as a filmmaker – perhaps why he took so long to be recognized properly. There are no postmodern winks at the audience, flashy directorial flourishes or posing ambiguities that we might expect from a European director (or their American imitators), but no excessive ramming home of the story’s themes that we might get from an old-style director like John Ford. The emphasis is on the storytelling and characters, which is decidedly old-school, but with the actors (particularly the supporting players) generally better-used than you might find in a 1940s film.
Over the years this movie has often been called misogynist but, if anything, it’s an argument for men to be more careful with their relationships and to pay more attention to those who care for them. Yes, Jessica Walter’s character is a very troubled (and ultimately very dangerous) woman, but Eastwood also gets himself into this problem partly because of his cavalier attitude towards her. He doesn’t underline this point too heavily but it is there. Even this early in his career he was gently criticizing the mindless macho attitudes and qualities that so many careless critics accused him of celebrating instead.
The film begins as he goes to his job at a Carmel radio station where he gets a call from a woman who asks him to play the song ‘Misty.’ It is clearly not the first time she has requested this. After he comes off work he goes to a bar run by Dirty Harry director Don Siegel in his first movie role. Siegel claims that a solitary woman (Jessica Walter) that Eastwood is eyeing is waiting for someone and has been resisting advances all night.
Seeing this as a challenge rather than a warn-off, Eastwood tries his luck: he plays a game of chess with Siegel and slowly arouses her interest, or so he thinks. We can recognize Walter’s voice from the call to the radio station, and her fixed gaze on Eastwood as he looks at the game certainly reveals that she was waiting for him to show up. She eventually admits this to him, but not before letting him think he has worked a brilliant ploy.
She stays over at his house with a promise of ‘no strings attached,’ but – perhaps surprisingly to us – there is no sexual scene shown with them. Eastwood (the director) isn’t interested in salaciousness and there wouldn’t be any other point in having such a scene. His DJ clearly doesn’t take their relationship any more seriously than a brief fling, and he generally has a number of girlfriends going at once.
Walter, however, is quite aggressive, and brings groceries to his house for an impromptu supper. He’s upset by this – what if another woman was there? – but agrees to have dinner with her. Eastwood is a pretty narcissistic guy in this movie as he doesn’t seem at all worried by her obsessiveness: he’s used to having girls falling hard for him so her behavior seems only natural to him.
He continues this relationship but soon learns of an old girlfriend (Donna Mills, who reminds me of Jane Fonda without the abrasiveness) coming back to town and decides to get back together with her and give up his playboy lifestyle. In turn, he decides to wind things up with Walter but she won’t have it, often running into him and even wrecking a business lunch he’s spent some time preparing for.
Finally she turns violent – first against herself in a suicide attempt, then against Eastwood’s housekeeper who walks in while she’s vandalizing his house. After the latter outburst she is sent to a sanitarium.
These first two-thirds of the film are very effective: we can see Walter’s increasingly dangerous obsessiveness, but it’s not made so obvious that we can’t believe Eastwood takes so long to notice. That Eastwood himself is willing to be a pretty self-absorbed guy also makes this believable.
The final half-hour is not quite as good. This is partly because it has been imitated so many times since, but also because Eastwood as director is not quite as steady here – especially in the final showdown. Previously restrained in not using too many heavy-handed closeups or zooms to get the menace across, he indulges in this a few times, along with a rather improbable plot twist (and an even more improbable discovery made by Eastwood’s character).
He also features a walking-in-the woods montage (punctuated by the only sex in the film) that is too long, but he partially salvages things by often shooting it very wide so we can see the woods around them and can look around to see if they’re being followed (earlier in the film we have just such a shot with a very nice payoff). He also shows them in a pretty good crowd scene afterward where we watch even more carefully, but the sense of danger isn’t as potent as in the film’s first hour or so. It just seems too obligatory a sequence.
The final confrontation between Eastwood and Walter delivers some excitement but, again, not as much as it should. The editing is a little off here and the falling figure at the end is too obviously a dummy. The very last shot, at least, is well-done: it provides a nice mirror to the opening shot and lets us see Walter as a sad figure rather than as the purely murderous nut she has become by the end of the movie.
When watching this film a viewer today will inevitably think of Fatal Attraction, though there is one very important difference between the two films: in the latter, Glenn Close is less obviously dangerous than Jessica Walter is here, which is why the violent climax of that film felt so false. The finale of Play Misty for Me is a little more believable because Walter’s character is more prone to angry outbursts from early in the story.
Jessica Walter has been frequently, and justly, praised for what she did in this film. It’s too bad that she wasn’t in very many films – perhaps she was too convincing in the role. Eastwood, in contrast, is often overlooked for his onscreen work here, but he’s also very good as the film’s straight man who’s careless with the affections of women.
As a director he does quite well by not overly-sensationalizing the story. There’s no pumped-up musical score or a lot of ominous close-ups. Perhaps the best example of Eastwood’s understated approach to things is his first meeting with Walter at the bar: instead of frequent cuts to close-ups of her eyes or something we might get from another director, we usually see both of them in the same shot as she watches him play his game with the bartender. This is all we need to understand what’s happening, and it’s in keeping with the style he has used ever since – essentially to make everything clear but not obvious to us.
Eastwood is rather difficult to classify as a filmmaker – perhaps why he took so long to be recognized properly. There are no postmodern winks at the audience, flashy directorial flourishes or posing ambiguities that we might expect from a European director (or their American imitators), but no excessive ramming home of the story’s themes that we might get from an old-style director like John Ford. The emphasis is on the storytelling and characters, which is decidedly old-school, but with the actors (particularly the supporting players) generally better-used than you might find in a 1940s film.
Over the years this movie has often been called misogynist but, if anything, it’s an argument for men to be more careful with their relationships and to pay more attention to those who care for them. Yes, Jessica Walter’s character is a very troubled (and ultimately very dangerous) woman, but Eastwood also gets himself into this problem partly because of his cavalier attitude towards her. He doesn’t underline this point too heavily but it is there. Even this early in his career he was gently criticizing the mindless macho attitudes and qualities that so many careless critics accused him of celebrating instead.
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