Babel

Babel

or

"The Crash Heard 'Round the World"

A nice little movie that no one has ever heard of is John Sayles' City of Hope made in 1991—it presents a limited space in time in the life of Philadelphia where the decisions of every character over the disposition of a single city block affects every other character in a way that negates any sense that lives can escape the self-imposed limits inflicted by others (and placed on themselves). Everyone is trapped and without any hope. 

 

Paul Haggis, when he copied the form in Crash offered the same bleakness but leavened it with individual rays of hope. One can look at these movies and quibble about coincidences and manipulation, but speaking as someone who's lived in one city and worked, basically, in one field for most of his life, those aspects of rubbing too many shoulders has never seemed like much of a stretch. It's pretty amazing how a large city can become a "small town" fairly quickly and without irony.

Babel, though (named after the tower in the bible-story that created so many ESL programs), takes it one planet further. From its opening image of a Moroccan hunter trudging the desert to its last shot of a man holding a naked woman on a Japanese balcony, every single life is intertwined in a way that makes one wince, and actually creates dread over the next revelation of inter-connectedness (there's one character, whose absence sets in motion an unfortunate series of events, that we never see—supposedly she'll be in Babel II). It's a bit of a stretch, lessened somewhat by the global investigation of a mistaken act of terrorism. Nothing brings the world together like Homeland Security.

Still, if one can overlook The Big Skein that hangs over the movie like a shroud, the individual segments are involving, dramatically impeccable and present worlds that are never less than intriguingly realized. One wonders throughout where the stories will lead, even if the answer on an occasion or two is nowhere.

To reveal too much would be robbing the movie of any freshness it possesses, but suffice it to say that lack of communication is a key in all of them and that they are resolved (when they're resolved) by a recommitment to family (except when they're not). It's a bit messy in that regard. But, then, what world isn't?

Bardo: False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths

Everybody 8½'s Once in a While

or

Maybe Your Navel Isn't As Interesting As You Thought It Was (Please Don't Eat the Dieties)
 

There are only three directors in Academy Award history who have won back-to-back Oscars for Best Director: They are John Ford (one might expect that—he won four BD's in total, the most of any director), Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (yes, for Birdman in 2014 and The Revenant in 2015). That is quite an accomplishment—or, more precisely, achievement—and is one of those distinctions that will (as award-winners mock) lede their obituary ("Oscar winner George Clooney—Sexiest Man Alive 1997, "Batman"—died today in a freak accident..."). That is, ultimately, the most those things will affect your life—they don't guarantee work or continued success or even "top-shelf" status—but, there is the perceived burden of living up to it, despite what happenstance tilted the odds and eventuated the win. 

 

And you can't discount Iñárritu's talent; even when his narrative is shredding, there are still images of such resonance in his films that you just want to stare at for awhile, whether to admire them for their beauty, imagination or just to wonder "how in the hell did he make that happen?"

That's the case with his new one—it's on Netflix now—Bardo: False Chronicles of a Handful of Truths, which follows a journalist/documentarian of dual nationality traversing a void of magic realism through his life, relationships (with his family, his fame, and his country), and seeking answers. Sounds familiar. Feels like veiled auto-biography. And as for seeking answers, I'm right there with you, brother.

Shot (by the eclectic Darius Khondji) in wide-angle lenses that fold and bend space around the central protagonist, film-maker Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), sucking you into his vantage point, the film follows a journey through various scenarios concerning his life, all linked by surrealistic transitions—for example, he could never walk from a nightclub-bathroom meeting with his dead father directly to the Asilo de ancianos where his alzheimic mother exists in one leisurely stroll—where memory and fantasy merge and coagulate to form the narrative. Figuring that narrative out (or even if you need to) is part of the point—and the problem—with the film.

One clue is the opening. A desert landscape. The shadow of a man runs and lifts into the air, his shadow no longer attached to the ground. It's a shot hop. He does it again. He's in the air a little longer. Third times the charm as he never falls back to Earth, but merely glides over the desert and the movie begins. I've had that dream. I've enjoyed that dream, and the most amazing thing about that dream is the unconscious thought while flying that it was the simplest thing in the world to do. But, I've seen that dream played out in other movies.

Specifically, Fellini's 8½—a movie so diffuse in subject matter that it doesn't even have a title, it's just the eighth (and one-half) movie that Fellini made. Fellini didn't go into complex bifurcated titles, but so many of the navel-gazing movies ("Take a swig of success. Swish it around, spit it out. Otherwise, it'll poison you.") that have been generated over the past few months (was it the pandemic?; too much time in your own head?) that so many of them, especially when they point out hardships with their privileged lives, could all be subtitled with the one that adorned the meta-Nicolas Cage movie from last year, "The Unbearable Weight of Enormous Talent." But, they are all "flights of fancy." Whatever the director fancies, of course.

I have no problems with this, really. I think a movie is really—really—successful when it tells it's story through images, rather than spelling everything out in dialog. This is probably to do with the first "whack-you-over-the-head" moment about the unique communicative power of film, which, for me, was 2001: A Space Odyssey. I couldn't figure that thing out, but after some research I had an epiphany where the movie grabbed me by my theoretical collar, shook me, and said "Everything you need to know to figure out the story is right up there on the screen because I deliberately decided what to show you without any hand-holding dialog, okay? O-kay?" From then on, I was hooked for life.

So, fine, let Iñárritu wander about the "twilight zone-ish" "liminal state between death and rebirth" touching on such things as grief for a life that's barely begun (or one beyond its shelf-life), dual-citizenship, national identity, the battle of Chapultepec, the conquering of the Aztecs by Cortes, the philosophy of Octavio Paz, and the symbolic death of Centéotl (research), and discovering that what a bunch of extras on a movie-set are chanting is actually the name of a popular Mexican game show. All grist for the mill. But, if there's a grain of truth at the end of it, well, as somebody in the film says: You always want to explain things. Somethings are just what they are."

Is it all just the flashes of thought generated by a stroke-fueled coma? Does it have to mean anything so concrete? Is there a mystery that needs to be solved, or are we just hanging out in Marienbad waiting for something to happen—a murder, a scandal, an exploding helicopter, or even just a car smashing a fruit-cart?

Or is it just "Bardo: Stray Thoughts Realised with a Big Budget?" Iñárritu knows, and, evidently, he's not telling.

Biutiful

Written at the time of the film's release. With any luck there will be a review of Iñárritu's new film tomorrow.

"Cast-aways"

or

"Living on the Razor Blade"

 

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has directed three features starting with the much-beloved Amores Perros that deal with interlocking stories and the tangential way that things interconnect—all butterflies and hurricanes. Now, with Biutiful, he's abandoned that global gambit for a more focused film dealing with the ramifications of one life trying to do something decent in the underbelly of exploitation. Rather than Iñárritu going to far-flung locations to show the skein of inter-connectedness, it all takes place in Barcelona, the diaspora of the world, rather than spreading out, coming to one place. The world's economic crises—the current one and the on-going struggles of third-world countries, has created a surplus of one thing: refugees and immigrants, easily exploited by those trying to keep costs and prices down by keeping the labor lower.

The spider in the web is Uxbal (Javier Bardem, and he's amazing in this), part-time single father—his wife is a bi-polar, drinking, sluttish massage therapist and has lost custody of their two small children to him—and full-time black-marketer and employment agency for the disadvantaged. That's being polite. He works for a sweat-shop that ekes out its living by supplying warm bodies to various enterprises: the Senegalese sell crafts (and drugs) on the streets with increasingly ineffective bribes to the police in lieu of licenses, the Chinese make copies of movies and other cheap knock-offs, and...with Uxbal's brother's help...are farmed out for cheap labor on construction projects, which is the big score. He's sort of an HR guy, without regard to humanity or resources.

He also has an ability—as in The Sixth Sense, he "can see dead people." The recently departed are usually hanging around (sometimes literally) their bodies not knowing what to do or where to go, and Uxbal quiets their whispers, takes in their final words to help the grieving kin, and sends them on their way. For this, he receives a small fee from desperate families. Uxbal is teetering on the ledge of so many worlds, it is amazing that he is as  balanced as he is, sheltering his children from the encroaching corruption—that he is a gateway to—from all sides.

Oh. One other thing: he has pancreatic cancer that has metastasized and he only has a couple months to live. With so much blade-running, he's ignored his own health issues and condemned himself—but with so much responsibility, he won't just lay down and die. What he needs is someone like himself to allow himself to move on. He's a "dead man walking" on a tight rope. The only question is...what will send him over the edge.

And this is the problem (if you want to call it that) with Iñárritu, the writer/director—he doesn't know when to stop. For all the digging he does to bring his audience down into the mire of man's inhumanity and crimes against brothers, he can't help but take it to the realm of not just the fantastic...but the unbelievable ("magic realism" aside). We can believe the exploitation of workers and sweat-shops and slave-barracks because we've seen it, but to pile on a ghost story seems a desperate bid to make things mystical and "significant," when the story already has heft and worth. By gilding the mass-produced imitation lily, he undercuts a searing look at human desperation that would have been fine on its own.

Maybe...just maybe...he wanted to cushion the impact of our race to the bottom by providing a happy landing for its protagonist. But it seems a bit like hedging his bets to provide that, while reducing the importance of the very people he's trying to give a face to. Which "big picture" is more important?

The Revenant

In the Country of Mann
or
"This Isn't About the Hunting, Is It?"

The Revenant does in 2 1/2 hours what Anthony Mann* used to do in a trim 90 minutes...and he'd throw in a B-actress love interest to boot. The story of Hugh Glass (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio), who survived a bear attack while serving as a guide for a Fort Kiowa (in what would become South Dakota on the Missouri River) pelt-hunting party (which went from 100 men at the beginning to ten at the end), then endured a 200 mile trek to the fort, it is an amazing tale straight out of legend, but has been transmorgrified into a tale of revenge for the big screen. That's not the way it actually happened (the two men who were charged with staying with Glass and left him for dead ended up with no consequences at all), but it's a movie, and the current climate of cinema seems to have demanded that it turn into an obsessive tale of revenge throughout its core.

I wish I could say that the movie thrilled me, but it did not. Perhaps I've seen too much revenge-motivation in films lately (blame those evil superheroes) that I'm a little sick of it—bored by it, even. Maybe it's not just superheroes. Maybe it's the reality show-machinations we've been inundated with or the greedy-gus corporatization of America where it's not enough to make a good life for yourself until you've kept somebody else from having it that has generated this feeling of not just "keeping up with the Joneses," but "getting even" with the Joneses. Do we have to live like a soap opera or The Godfather? I reject that handily. And I object to the real triumph of Hugh Glass in the wilderness being turned into a turf war (that, after all, is what was happening with the Natives—something Iñárritu seems to want to indict them under in this scenario, as well).

The Revenant is receiving all sorts of accolades—and garnered a mail-satchel of Oscar nominations—and one has to give it kudos for being so doggone persistent in recreating the squalor of the world of the Western trapper (credit veteran production designer Jack Fisk for that)—but I think a lot of that hyperbole is for those folks who were a little left behind by the obtuseness of Birdman, and are playing catch up for how good writer-director Iñárritu can be. Here, he's just a little more obvious and on-the-nose than usual, producing great craft, but to a story that says more in the actual truth of it than it does in his dramatization.

It is 1823 and a party of animal trappers are exploring the northern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase by the Missouri River. The group is led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, last seen auditioning for headliner at a Nuremburg rally in Star Wars, squiring Sioarise Ronan in Brooklyn, and exploring the future of dating in Ex Machina, the guy gets around), their guide is that Hugh Glass who is aided by his son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), when they are caught by surprise during a hunting sortee away from the group by the sound of gunfire. The group is under attack by the Arikara tribe led by Elk Dog (Duane Howard) who is looking for his daughter Powaqa, whom he believes was kidnapped by the trappers. The natives decimate the trappers—the Arikara are portrayed as being VERY good shots, with some rather wicked looking arrow-hits, and the trappers have a tendency to fall down even after a single arrow hit in the leg—and a dozen of them are able to get to their keel-boat to distance themselves with what pelts they can accumulate.

They're in a very bad way. Under pursuit and under-supplied, they have barely enough wares to make the trip worth its while. Then there's "The Griper." Every platoon has to have one, and Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) is the self-appointed nay-sayer and whiner, the guy who thinks he should be in charge. He'll pick a fight with anybody and when challenged, backs off, complaining about his treatment. Fitzgerald does a little antler-locking with Hawk and it's only Henry's and Glass' interference that keep the two from coming to blows. Hardy, who has been so good for so long, is fiercely committed to the role, creating a sand-paper-irritating character that makes you crave his demise by any means possible. I'd give him an Oscar just so he'd shut up, already.

But, it's Glass who suffers misfortune. Separated from the troop, he unfortunately gets between a mother grizzly and her two cubs and the animal savagely attacks him (the sequence, done with special effects and CGI—of course—is a wonder, horrible and savage, while having a fascinating quality of animal logic—or illogic—to it, and just when you think it's over, it goes on and on). He's found alive, but just barely, and Henry's men do their best to patch him up—Fitzgerald, sensitive soul that he is, notes that Glass' cries of pain might lead the Arikara's right to them. Travoising Glass up steep terrain doesn't make their escape any easier, so Henry charges two men to stay with Glass until they can get a rescue team from the fort to help. Glass' son Hawk won't leave his father's side, and Fitzgerald and the youngest member of the party, Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) volunteer to stay with the guide.

Captain Henry (Gleeson) and Fitzgerald (Hardy) very much alive.

I guess when you're down to ten men, you can't be too picky about volunteers. Fitzgerald is convinced that Glass is done for and is more than willing to finish him off and move on. But Glass' son will have none of it and is the only thing keeping Fitzgerald from abandoning his post and the crippled guide.

Glass didn't have a son, historically, but inserting one into the narrative up's the ante for drama and provides one more subsequent reason for the movie-Glass to swear vengeance beyond what really happened—in reality, he just wanted answers and his rifle back, actually.  

Motivated by the movie's events DiCaprio's Glass gropes out of the sloppily constructed grave Fitzgerald has prepared for him and starts the slow trek back to the fort, evading hostile Natives (still searching), crawling initially, then trudging using a stout branch as a make-shift crutch, and using all the survival skills a lifetime has taught him. This part is true. And except for Glass' radical method for fighting infection and necrosis, it's pretty much the way legend has it. The "revenge" factor is thrown in, as is a back-story that has Glass in moments of fever and dream envisioning the spirit of his Native wife (Grace Dove), killed in a raid by soldiers of a more European military costume, letting the Cavalry off the hook this time.

One of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's magnificent panoramas.

"As long as you can still grab a breath, you fight" is the chief mantra of The Revenant and so there's a lot of breathing on the soundtrack (and, in fact, the film begins and ends with that sound, disembodied from image). But, mid-way through the film another comes into play: "Revenge is in the creator's hands." If, indeed, the Creator cares. The creators of The Revenant care, obviously, but that might be to tie the film into the movie-trend of revenge at all costs. But maybe it's time for there to be a moral re-alignment in films. What made the recent Spectre interesting was its denouement on Westminster Bridge where James Bond has the drop on long-time nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld and is emplored by the villain to "finish it." With the authorities standing nearby, Bond merely unloads his gun and says "All out of bullets. And I have better things to do." Even Christopher Nolan took that most vengeful of super-heroes, Batman, and gave him the valuable lesson he never learned in the comics—living well is the best revenge. We have better things to do.

So do we all. Perhaps, revenge should be relegated to villains and not those we consider heroes, who would have better things to do than be compulsively vindictive. Hugh Glass, Jim Bridger, John Fitzgerald, and Captain Andrew Henry all lived without it.

The Hugh Glass marker—Shadehill Lake, SD

A portrait of the real Hugh Glass

Leo in another western
(cleans up real nice, don't he?)

* The reference to director Anthony Mann comes from a series of "psychological" Westerns that director Mann, screenwriter Borden Chase (and others) and star James Stewart made in the 1950's, which showed the deterioration that Nature and Man can cause in even the most charitable of people and showed the parallel between the "civilizing" of raw country and the "civilizing" of man's baser instincts. They're all great films: Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, and The Man from Laramie. Oh, and there's a trick at the end that's owed to a Howard Hawks subterfuge employed by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep and John Wayne in Rio Bravo. Unfortunately, the person portrayed as dying in 1823 actually died in 1832. Yeah, don't let facts get in the way of enjoying the movie...just like a political campaign.

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Walking the Walk and Talk
or
Every Man His Alcatraz (or That Obscure Object of Film-Making)

Riggan Thomas (Michael Keaton) is an actor who's been on a stale streak for awhile after making a name for himself in a string of superhero movies (as an act of integrity he didn't do the fourth one) and is now trying to make a forthright comeback of sorts by ambitiously staging a play on Broadway that he has written, is directing and is also starring in. The play, based on a Raymond Carver story* is as far afield from "Birdman" (the superhero character he played) as one can get, and the staging of the play proves to be problematic what with difficult actors, difficult material, and that the lead may be a bit crazy—cuckoo, if you'd rather. Left alone, which he rarely is, Riggan hears the voice of "Birdman" in his head berating him for past failures and current insecurities and, then, every once in awhile, Thomas displays a knack for telekinesis—moving objects without touching them.

Or more accurately, smashing objects without touching them. Riggan is a bit out of control, mercurial, and seems more than a bit unstable, all the while he's trying to keep his vanity project together. An accident (or is it?) on the stage one day eliminates the actor he's having the most problems with and replaces him with an improvement—Mike Shiner (Edward Norton), one of the better actors working, but also one of the most annoying, for his insistence on "truth" in performance. 

Is Thomas rolling his eyes, or is he willing something to happen?

Complicating matters is the presence of Riggan's daughter (Emma Stone) recently out of rehab, Shiner's wife (Naomi Watts), also in the play, a crusty theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) who is determined to trash the play sight unseen for Riggan's impertinence for trying to prove he's an actor instead of a celebrity, and Shiner's narcissism that hogs the limelight (and is in conflict with Riggan's narcissism). Through it all, Riggan's friend and lawyer (Zach Galifanikis) serves as buffer and punching bag.

Those who've followed the movies of Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful) know that Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is as close to a knockabout comedy as he can get. The self-possessed tribulations of actors amid the various roles they play are the stuff of both comedy and tragedy—tragedy in the intimate conflicts they struggle with within and without, and comedy in the lack of perspective they can possess entangled in those struggles. We're all actors. We all play roles, and sometimes we get lost in the performance of our lives—our self-made traps, self-imposed prisons. Every bird-man his Alcatraz.

Now, here comes Thomas, in the performance of his life, confined to a two-block radius of Broadway, trying to achieve more than he might be able to, and performing a dialogue with more than himself, trying to stretch himself in a flight of fancy while his past tries to sabotage it. He wants to soar, but the Birdman of his past keeps pushing him to the ground. 

Michael Keaton has never really retired from movies—he's been doing small parts here and there—but he hasn't top-lined a movie since his own fine directorial debut, The Merry Gentleman. But, it is good to have him back in something with a bit of substance. And, of course, he's perfect for this—an odd semi-meta-performance (at one point he says "I had a dream that I died in a plane-crash, and the picture they had in the paper was Clooney."). But, Batman never really held him back—fact is, he was always a better Bruce Wayne than Batman, a performance too still and cossetted in black rubber—it just didn't show him at his manic, quirky best. He's also better, like here, in an ensemble: in The Other Guys, one of his small parts of late, he has two scenes—one where he's playing off Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, where he is funny and exceptional, and the other—a monologue—where he falls flat. He is a character actor, at his mercurial best bouncing off the talents of others, and he and Norton have great scenes that are joys to watch for how good both are, in completely different styles. The part is tailor-made for Keaton, and he rises, literally, to the challenge.

At one point, Iñárritu stages an action set-piece that looks like the chaos
of every CGI superhero movie ever made

And the director doesn't make it easy for him. The thing is about theater and Iñárritu keeps the locale focused in and around New York's St. James Theater (you get to know every nook and cranny of it) and shoots the movie in a seemingly seamless stream of long "takes," where the actors have to really act and for quite a sustained while, then migrate in steadicammed transitons of "walk-and-talks" that Scorsese used frequently and became famous as a fast, busy way to throw out exposition on TV's "West Wing"—it's just that nobody's tried this so steadfastly since Hitchcock's Rope—not even the supposedly continuous Cloverfield could resist interruptions of static to cover the gaps.   

At times, as is the writer-director's way, the film is very obtuse, trying to communicate something while not being obvious about it to the point where it's obscure and slightly unreachable. Throughout the course of the movie, he also makes no distinction between reality and fantasy, between inner and outer dialogue, so it's often not easy to trust the image or the sound on-screen: does Riggan have telekinesis or is this all in his head and just some manifestation of control that he thinks he has over his Universe? Why does the film resolve the way it does, with a self-inflicted act of violence, for the visual joke of the Birdman's costume, or is it being precious with a well-worn cliche about self-defeating actions?  Sometimes the deflection doesn't quite work, but just as often, as in the film's final shot, it makes for a sublime moment, not too obvious, and a fine melding of fantasy and reality.

* I don't know whether it's interesting or significant or not, but Riggan's adaptation is taken from the heavily edited version of Carver's story and even includes a monologue not written by Carver, but by his editor Gordon Lish.

Still-life Superhero:  Keaton's Batman never moved much and had his
performance cossetted by leather.