Ride With the Devil

What to post on July 4th? I've done versions of Yankee Doodle Dandy almost to death. There isn't a Capra film that feels appropriate. 

But a Western...I've got a couple that I want to spend a bit more time on—both dealing with the "Native Question" (not sure why there was ever a question to begin with). But, looking at some "ready-to-go" things I'd done in previous years, this one jumped out at me. A Western at a critical juncture in the Nation's History (and there's never really been a time that wasn't) when we were in danger of blowing up the results of "The Democratic Experiment" due to the same issues that destroyed past dynasties, autocracies, kingdoms, and dictatorships...even home-owner associations—the power of greed and the greed of power. You can say all people will be equal, but inevitably somebody's going to be more equal than others. And character plays a big part in how that works itself out (if you're paying attention).

 

Also it's a complicated story, in the way that American history—outside of the beginners' text-books—can be complicated, that tests preconceptions and prejudices. As a democracy should.

So, here is that most American of genres, the Western, directed by Taiwanese director Ang Lee, which actually seems apropos, telling the story of a nation of immigrants. It's a great movie that nobody went to see. As I said, it was "wrongfully overlooked" but also, I think, vastly underappreciated.

 

Ride with the Devil (Ang Lee, 1999) 

 

"On the Western frontier of Missouri, the American Civil War was fought not by armies, but by neighbors. Informal gangs of local Southern bushwhackers fought a bloody and desperate guerrilla war against the occupying Union army and pro-Union Jayhawkers. Allegiance to either side was dangerous. But it was more dangerous still to find oneself caught in the middle ..."

 

The story of Quantrille's Raiders and the Missouri Irregulars were a sorry part of the Civil War story, but its tales of guerilla raids between two groups, the "bushwhackers" and the "jayhawkers," criss-crossing the Kansas-Missouri border, it's history with Quantrille, Bloody Bill Anderson and Jesse James and the murderous raid on Lawrence, Kansas in 1863 have been explored, somewhat tangentially, as the first battles in the Outlaw West.

Director Ang Lee may seem an odd choice for a Western of this nature, but such was the case when he directed Sense and Sensibility. Versatile, facile, and able to make universally accepted films across genres, there seems little Lee cannot succed at whether period romance (Sense and Sensibility), spy-noir (Lust/Caution), martial arts flick (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), even cross-blending sci-fi/horror and superhero movies (Hulk).

Ride with the Devil, with a screenplay by James Schamus (now head of Focus Features) was not a box-office success when it opened, perhaps as it was an unconventional western with controversial elements: four young people, Jake Roedel (Tobey Maguire), Jack Bull Chiles (Skeet Ulrich), George Clyde (Simon Baker), and Daniel Holt (Jeffrey Wright) all find themselves fighting as Confederate guerillas during the Civil War as "bushwhackers," not so much as they believe in the Southern cause—Holt is a freed slave—but because of issues with loyalty, friendship and attacks on their families. Soon, they're conducting murderous assaults on established Union positions with deadly accuracy, which Lee stages with a brutal efficiency: quick cuts, fast pace and attention to the damage a round bullet can inflict.

Housed for the winter in a make-shift shelter, they are looked after by Southern sympathizers, with particular interest paid by a war-widow named Sue Lee (Jewel), who begins an affair with Chiles and offers support and food during the harsh winter. It's a nicely paced gritty portrayal of life led as an outlier, and the elements are mixed as to keep one guessing about what will happen next.

The revelation here is Tobey McGuire, heretofore usually playing callow youths (which is why he was picked to play Peter "Spiderman" Parker), here he's got a versatile range of situations, starting out as a disillusioned follower, then his own man of a kind, backed by a steely gaze that turns durn creepy at times, and an "on-the-edge-of-cracking" voice that lolls over dialogue. Nice work, and Lee makes the most of him, using the boyish qualities of McGuire for moments of humor, terror and combinations of both.

Wrongfully overlooked.

Margin Call

The Economy and how it grinds up people has been on my mind of late. Here are some movies I've written about in that subject matter. 

Written at the time of the film's release.

"When The Music's Over (...And the Band Plays On)"
or
"Momma, There's Wolves in the House"

Margin Call begins like The Company Men and Up in the Air—in the midst of a corporate slaughter—people being fired from jobs they've held a long time. Cut-backs. "Generous" severance. Thanks for your service.  Security will escort you out.

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) listens to it all, a little stunned, but tentative. "Uh, listen," he says in the middle of the administering of Last Rights, "I was working on something and I'm not finished yet." Doesn't matter. Go to your office. Empty your desk. Proprietary information. Your losing your phone, e-mail, etc."No, really..." he says.

Doesn't matter. He's out. On the way to the elevator, he runs into two of his turks, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley). "Am I safe?" asks Seth (as Seth is wont to do). But Peter walks him to the elevator to tell him how much his mentorship meant to him. Dale cuts him off. "I know. I was working on something. They won't let me finish it," says Dale as he hands him a USB drive. And as the elevator doors shut, he has just enough time to say "Be careful."

Fwump. 

It's the "be careful" that gets everybody's attention. "He said that?"

Sullivan begs off the traditional drinks for the battle survivors and takes a look at Dale's figures. Then he sees something. Digs, does some calculations and then stares at his projections screen. Over the next twelve hours, the world will go to Hell and he's the only one who sees the gate.

Margin Call is a boardroom thriller about our recent financial crisis, but its played like a mystery story. Everybody speaks in code. The night is dark and no one is betraying secrets. No one knows what's around the corner and everybody's looking behind them for the knife. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor (Who? This is his first film and it is an impressive debut*), it plays out like a conspiracy—it is—and if so much of it didn't anticipate the dawn, one would be tempted to call it a film noir; there is a palpable air of organized evil, built of greed and self-interest, that hangs over the film, for what is being planned is the crime of the century.

The cast is uniformly superb—how could it not be with the likes of Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Tucci?—but those performances depend on the great dialog generated by Chandor and the way he presents what should be dry material as drama and intrigue.  These are gangsters in Gucci, cold-blooded, playing the long odds and the fast kill, but instead of "going to the mattresses" they are isolated in fancy cars and well-appointed high-rise board-rooms, their views of the world their actions are affecting armored by safety glass. There isn't much soul-searching (they're business-people, so why look in a dry hole?) about what devastation their actions will bring, except for the immediate future and what it will do "for business."  Even then, loyalty to the corporate mantra of "be first, be smarter or cheat" trumps conscience. That would make a hell of a slogan wouldn't it?

If one could gripe (and there is little to gripe about), one could argue that, if anything, this reverse "Godfather"—where business-people are gangsters, rather than gangsters as business-people—is heavily romanticized. There are no "Masters of the Universe" statements coming from these mortgage titans (as one heard from Wall Street bar-recordings on "This American Life," where these mavens crowed about deserving bonuses from bail-outs because "they're smarter than everybody else"), but, rather, short-term hedges about "dog-eat-dog" survival. No cynical betting against failure schemes, but merely making the best out of a bad situation before everyone else does.  

As bad as Margin Call makes its protagonists, the truth is even worse—there were folks betting on things coming crashing down and profiting from it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a fix was in and that analysts saw it coming, not, suddenly, seeing it and going "Garsh, this looks bad." And the worst thing that's happened to these people is a little traffic congestion on Wall Street.

That is, if they're working at all.

* Hey, there. James from 2018 here.  Chandor was no fluke nor a flash in the pan. He followed up Margin Call with the Robert Redford masterclass All is Lost in 2013 and the woefully unappreciated A Most Violent Year in 2014.