Nosferatu (2024)

Come To Me, My Melancholic Baby

or

"He's Italian!?"

Robert Eggers' new remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is respectful of the original—it's on the director's list of favorite films—but allows for Eggers' darker interpretations of myths, his sexualization of those myths, as well as his emphasis (as with David Lynch) on texture. 

 

Murnau's original (if we can use the phrase ironically) was a knock-off of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the names changed to protect the filmmakers from copyright considerations—although they were sued by the Stoker estate—and is genuinely creepy, owing to the German Expressionist manner of lighting and filming. Plus, Murnau was an extraordinarily clever filmmaker who could use rudimentary special and camera effects to create arresting images. But, then, so is Eggers, and his version of Nosferatu* is respectful, but also tries to achieve Murnau's evocation of dread through its own means, given the advantages of modern cinematography and (something Murnau didn't have access to) sound. More on that in a bit.

Eggers also has an advantage in that he's had over a hundred years of cinema to be inspired by in the years between Murnau's version and his. Watching his Nosferatu one can see the debt he owes to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (with its shadow-play and use of miniatures), but also in the addition of making the attraction between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) a predestined certainty—Ellen has been diagnosed as "melancholic" for her sleep-walking and agitation in her youth and it only intensifies once her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) falls into the orbit of the Count. This "love for the ages" concept wasn't originally part of the "Nosferatu" heritage.

The other major influence is from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Eggers shares Kubrick's love of framing his shots with the one-point-perspective, but here he employs it the way it was done in the Stephen King adaptation—that one-point-perspective leads the eye to a negative space, which is why the effect is so creepy and audience-disorienting. Here, all those tangential lines may lead only to an empty spot on the horizon...or a castle in the distance. There are whole sequences that give you a vertiginous feeling, as if one could fall into that screen, pulled by gravity and it's not a pleasant experience. For a horror movie, it's ideal. Unnerving, but ideal.

And he does something else: his camera may be fluid, but it's also austere. He'll frequently do a 360° turn of the camera and do it slowly, determinedly, placing the audience in the perspective of the character watching his environment, dreading whatever might be at the edge of the frame. It's been awhile since I've seen either movie, so I can't remember if it was Murnau or Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr where the camera makes similarly slow circular movements that, rather than make you wonder why you're making the trip, fill you with dread. They're nice touches and are nice little updates to the story-telling.

And it's a familiar story—anyone familiar with Stoker's "Dracula" knows it. A solicitor is sent to the castle of a count to finalize the selling of an estate. The man is sent through the machinations of his boss who is under the throes of the Count's influence, as the man is, in fact, a vampire. He makes his way to the new estate and begins to set upon the citizens there, most prominently, the woman closest to that poor solicitor.

This leads to visits by doctors, who, being scientists, cannot explain the malady and so a specialist in the "unconventional" is called upon, and it is he who deduces that the plague in their midst is a vampire and must be dispatched. This being Nosferatu, the names are changed, but the situations are basically similar. "Dracula" takes place in England; Nosferatu takes place in Germany. All the arcana we associate with vampires is stripped to the bone—no silver bullets or crucifixes (much in display but ineffectual), not even a clove of garlic is to be seen. Those killed by vampires die and stay dead, and although a stake through the heart is effective to kill them (if one comes prepared), the surest way is to distract him with a nice virginal meal until the sun comes up and...that vampire's toast.

The acting is quite good, with particular nods to the three leads, Hoult, Depp and Skarsgård. Hoult has the unenviable task of having to act like he has no idea what the audience is fully expecting to happen, but manages to make his Thomas Hutter still sympathetic when he makes the effort to complete his job even after all the signs tell him him should just turn around and go home. And Depp's performance is just plain scary. Her fits look truly traumatic with her eyes rolling back in her head and her body contorting and spasming into Exorcist-like exercises.

And Skarsgård's Count Orlok has been carefully distanced from Max Schreck's rat-like vampire. Described as "very old and very eccentric...he has one foot in the grave already" Orlok is a hulking figure, stooped and wrapped in a dark bear-like coat with a coarse, brushy mustache. He is barely visible in his first scenes, just a overpowering presence, but the more you see, the more he resembles a rotting corpse, his skin flayed off in places and as far afield from any semblance to a romantic figure (ala 1979's Dracula) as you could get.

But, it's his vocal performance more than anything that's fascinating. Speaking in a low, rattly and sepulchral growl (augmented electronically so it fills every speaker in the theater) every syllable is e-nun-ci-ated slowly only to be broken off by the driest asthmatic breath-intake you can imagine this side of an iron lung. If the theater allows such things, I would take a big bag of cough-drops or lozenges. Super-size the soft-drinks.

Face it, it's those new approaches to things are what you're looking to see the movie for, because the story has been done to death...and after...and has more lives than Christopher Lee's Dracula. Just when you think you can't squeeze any more blood out of the thing,** it comes back to haunt you. So, just remember: you're the one who invites him back.

 

In the meantime, Eggers' version will do...and do quite well...until the next vampire movie rises from the grave.

* His version? There have been other versions of Nosferatu—aside from the official remakes of the Dracula novel—including one that was released just a year ago. There's also Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and also 2000's Shadow of the Vampire, which told a tale of the making of the original with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe (who's also in Eggers' film) as Nosferatu player Max Schreck. Plus, little nods to the original can be found in vampire designs of the 1979 TV-version of "Salem's Lot" and in Taika Waititi's original What We Do in the Shadows.

 

** Geez, I didn't even mention the ghastly sucking sounds he makes when he's feeding on his victims.... 

The Last King of Scotland

The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, 2006) Talk about lucky guys--at last year's Oscars, Peter Morgan was nominated for his screenplay for The Queen, and the two leading actors of his screenplays won both Best Performance Awards: Helen Mirren for The Queen, and Forrest Whitaker for this film. They both had great material to work with. Morgan's talents for breathing life and personality into history (catch his HBO film, "Longford," while you're at it) puts to shame the recent spate of "highlights-biographies" (Ali, Nixon, Man on the Moon, Chaplin, Ray) that are like filmed Cliff Notes. And Whittaker is amazing in the film ("How'd they get him?" K. asked when he was first on screen. No, it's not the real guy, it's Forrest Whittaker), projecting the half-baked soul of Idi Amin Dada. It's a Supporting-sized role, but so large does Whittaker's portrayal loom over the movie that he dwarfs everyone else, even James McAvoy's starring performance as cocky Scotts physician Nicholas Garrigan, who goes looking for some selfish adventures and winds up being The Devil's Internist in Uganda.

And what starts as lucky breaks for a kid out of medical school turns into a nightmare of bad choices as the wildly paranoid Amin sinks deeper into madness, torturing first his enemies, and then those in his circle of confidence. In a country run by a lunatic, its a short trip from adviser to being strung up from a meat-hook (lest you think, Last King... is as genteel as The Queen, think again, the violence is bloody, and the torture is dwelled upon).

The director is Kevin Macdonald, a former documentarian, and he seems to have a problem with pace. Last King feels drawn out, and in need of additional editing (as did his previous film, the interminable Touching the Void, which managed to make an incredible story something of a drag). But the sense of place and time feels genuine--you might not believe afterwards that the story is actually fictitious.

Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation

Murphy's Law Enforcement
or
Join the IMF and See the World. On a Screen. From a Closet.

Tom Cruise is nuts.  Let's come right out and say it. He is flat-out bat-shit. In the first ten minutes of Mission:Impossible-Rogue Nation, he does this stunt where he is hanging on the side door of a very large Airbus turbo-prop as it ramps up and takes off from a runway in Belarus.  We watch as the plane taxi's down the runway and then takes off the scenery behind receding in the background.  You can do wonders with computer graphics these days, but the pristene nature of those effects immediately tells your brain "not happening." This, though, is real, because it is rough and less than the ideal that producers* and directors insist on.  Of course, Cruise is harnessed, attached to something with a parachute under his clothes, and the restraints have been CGI'd out, but DAMN! that's really 53 year old Cruise at cruising altitude, photographed by IMAX cameras to reassure you that, yes, that is really him on the edge of the plane. Like the previous film, where he did a short scaling of the tallest building in the world, the sequence is breath-taking, over-the-top, and just plain stupid. The only thing more stupid is the insurance company that underwrote the project, and let the star of the movie do something that ludicrous for real.

I hope they filmed it last, at least.**

M:I-5 (which is what this one is numerically, making it match the name of an actual intelligence agency) sees most of the known M:I operatives—Ethan Hunt (Cruise), Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), William Brandt (Jeremy Renner) and Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) endeavoring to keep a "package" from leaving Belarus via said Airbus.  It is your typical Impossible Missions Force strategem (a formula made famous in Bruce Geller's TV-series), with much malice aforethought, gadgetry galore and split-second subterfuge. It's brilliant...until it goes wrong, and it inevitably does. Then the team, so close to the goal, has to punt, improvise, and suck up the bromide mentioned a couple times in the film—"desperate times, desperate measures." Like clinging to a soaring airplane, while your tech-guy is waiting to be in satellite range, so he can auto-remote the Airbus with instructions written in Russian.  It's no wonder a Senate sub-committee meeting in secret opines that "the success rate your unorganized methods garner look suspiciously like chance," and one has to agree.

"Your organization is incompetent, but I want all of you working
for me in the CIA," says Jack Ryan Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin).

For instance, what was the plan going to be if it was successful and didn't need Hunt to jump on the plane so precariously? Were they going to blow up the plane remotely?  Since the plane is carrying nerve gas, "Bye-Bye, Belarus." Were they going to try to fly it remotely? Given they're using Russian satellites to communicate with the plane, and they're having reliability problems, not such a good idea. The problem is there is no plan, other than to somehow get Hunt on the plane in order to perform the stunt, or else...what is he doing in the neighborhood, anyway? It's another instance, post-Nolan "Batman", where a terrific visual trumps story-logic (and to be fair, Skyfall had the same leaps in story-logic—its villain Silva allowed himself to be captured in order for his plan to work? Why didn't he just stay on his island and let somebody else do it?

M:I-5 has a lot in common with Skyfall—a government committee is looking into defunding the head-less organization (the latest leader played by Tom Wilkinson, was killed in Ghost Protocol) and folding its assets into the CIA (headed by Alec Baldwin, who spends most of the movie at least a few steps behind IMF's Ethan Hunt, trying to capture him and disprove that a criminal spy organization called "The Syndicate"*** exists). That "Syndicate" is described as an "anti-IMF" (presumably because everything they do succeeds without a hitch) made up of presumed killed or "disavowed" agents who are working for a spy-mastermind (Sean Harris), who begins this movie by infiltrating one of the IMF's message-centers and hijacking one of the org's notoriously self-destructing mission-statements. As a result, Hunt is captured (is this guy working for the CIA?), and readied for torture to reveal...what, exactly?  Hunt isn't even sure "The Syndicate" exists until they expose themselves by kidnapping him. What can he tell them? How he did the plane stunt?

"I'm not telling..." says Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise)

At least, the torture sequence introduces us to Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), who works for the Syndicate (but actually—shhhh!—is working undercover for M:I-6—no, not the next movie, the British secret service) and has won the trust of its leader, despite managing always to be there whenever things don't go according to plan). Ilsa is fast, lethal, and lots of fun to watch in fights and, frankly, you care about her more than anybody else in the movie. In fact, she's so good that after freeing himself and aiding in busting up his torturers Hunt can only look at her and go "I don't know you, right?"  Maybe he has her confused with the Emily Blunt character in Edge of Tomorrow.

Hunt goes missing for awhile after escaping, while both "The Syndicate" and the CIA are trying to find him, and he's trying to find the rat-faced head of "The Syndicate." He recruits Benji for help in Vienna where it is suspected that the Chancellor of Austria will be assassinated at the Vienna Opera House during a performance of "Turandot." It's at this point that the movie begins to really take off as writer-director Christopher McQuarrie (he wrote The Usual Suspects and Cruise's Valkyrie, and wrote and directed Jack Reacher) begins to borrow chock-a-block from other movies.  The "Turandot" sequence is straight out of The Man Who Knew Too Much with a couple added twists—there are three assassins prowling the opera house, and Hunt (with Benji monitoring from an electrical room) has to figure who's who...are they going to assassinate the Chancellor, or are they going to assassinate the assassins? In which case...who do you shoot? Talk about triangulation. The drama plays out while Puccini plays below on-stage all the while waiting for that one note where the bullets will fire. Even the gun-men are following the sheet-music waiting for the note circled in red (there's a direct correlative shot to the one Hitchcock devised in The Man Who Knew Too Much gliding over the notes to that one section.

The entire film is not wholly original (is anything, anymore?), but like any assassination film, it's all in the execution, something that McQuarrie does very well. It helps that he has a star who's nutso and so gung-ho that he doesn't have to do a lot of sloppy editing to make a cohesive action sequence. Just pump him up and let him go, and he's like an excited puppy with a chew-toy. And Ferguson if a fine, subtle actress capable of not-so-subtle fight moves who is fun to watch throughout.

So, there's that plane sequence, and the Opera stage-piece (which has a lovely moment when Hunt is nearly run over by a piece of scenery containing one of the marksmen he's looking for, a credit to McQuarrie that he's set the geography enough that you can appreciate it), and a brilliant extended sequence where Hunt has to hold his breath in a submerged tank for 3½ minutes (that is, if everything goes *cough* right) to replace a key programming card to a security system that won't detect Benji as an imposter as he walks into a secure vault—it isn't enough that Hunt could simply drown. He also has to avoid large spinning something-or-others that are supposed to keep either the water or suspense churning. 

This is followed by a car-chase with driver Hunt a little the worse for wear for his underwater stunt, the mayhem caused by his inability to drive, rather than by any skill, and after he and Benji end up skidding along via the roof of the car, it is followed by a motorcycle chase...because it seems to be in Cruise's contract that he has to ride a motorcycle in every single one of his movies. These are inter-cut with little reaction shots, the stunned silence of someone on the other side of the communication device rendered speechless, and occasional set-up shots for pay-offs later in the movie.  All engineered to appear un-engineered.  

Because Tom has to ride one in every...single...movie.

Then, there's a neat little confrontation sequence that feels out of place: the final confrontation in a London outdoor cafe between Hunt, Ilsa, and the bad guy who remains unseen, but who speaks via headphone through Benji, who is wired with explosives. Supposedly this sequence wasn't scripted at the time shooting began; nobody knew how (exactly) the movie was going to end. Oh, they knew how it was going to end-end—with a pair of nicely book-ended call-backs of earlier sequences—but that confrontation sequence has a nicely unpolished feel to it for all involved; where most of the movie feels like it is on well-oiled rails, this sequence feels rough and could go anywhere and wrongly with the next cut. It's surprisingly effective at keeping an audience's complacent doldrums away.

Really, this latest Mission: Impossible is a well-done little actioner, not wholly original, but entirely professional—an entertainment machine that runs on all gears, even slipping a few of them, just for the sheer loopy enjoyment of it, brightened by the full wattage smile (that has only slightly dimmed with a shade of world-weariness) of its Peter Pan-ish star, who seems to have no fear...and no shame. Bravo.

But Tom...Tom, there must be EASIER ways to leave The Church?

Maybe the next one should be called "Mission: Impossible—Death Wish."

* Have you noticed lately that producers are tagging onto their names "p.g.a." (for the Producer's Guild of America).  Is this another ego-grab for the most ego-driven profession in movie-making (like a doctor of Philosophy insisting on having P.h.D. behind his name?) or is this a requirement.  I've only seen it showing up this Summer, even though the PGoA has been around since 1962.  Still think it's odd that an organization that used to fight Unions...has a Union.

** They didn't. According to a New York Times video , director Christopher McQuarrie insists this was the last shot:

*** "The Syndicate" is a throwback to Bond's "S.P.E.C.T.R.E." or UNCLE's "T.H.R.U.S.H" or "Get Smart's" K.A.O.S., and was a part of the original "Mission: Impossible" TV series when the IMF wasn't going after dictators, generalissimo's, and villains who resembled Martin Landau or Leonard Nimoy.

The Theory of Everything

2b ‹ ¬2b: That is the Question
or
"What if the Hokey-Pokey IS What It's All About?"

Before Benedict Cumberbatch played Alan Turing as he does this movie season, he was the first person to play Dr. Stephen Hawking in a dramatization of the theoretical cosmologist's life for the BBC.

Now there's a feature film about Hawking, which is just a bit more fascinating than the BBC tele-film and, frankly, might be one of the best written films of the year, The Theory of Everything.

Based on the memoir of Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde (played by Felicity Jones—in a fierce performance), it tells the same story as the BBC film but from the human, not theoretical side, and finds a fascinating sub-text and motivation that joins both work and personal lives portrayed. For the story of Hawking's amazing work as a theoretical physicist despite the debilitating effects of ALS is well-known, but the personal story is not.

The story starts in Cambridge in the 1960's when young physicist Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne from Les Miserables and My Week with Marilyn) meets Jane at a Cambridge mixer. He's gangly, awkward, but smart and funny. She's an English rose, tentative but hopeful. He's studying theoretical physics; she's in the humanities ("medieval poets of Iberian Peninsula"). She's CofE ("I have a problem with the whole celestial dictatorship premise" he offers); he's a cosmologist ("It's a kind of religion for intelligent atheists"). The one thing they have in common—tenacity.

While she pursues the Iberian poets, and he, his area of inquiry (inspired by his instructor, played by David Thewliss, after a visit with theorist Roger Penrose—played by Christopher McKay), they pursue each other, culminating in a Cambridge dance where, eerily, magically, the white shirts and frocks glow under a black-light. "You know what causes it?" Hawking offers.  She doesn't, and braces for a long, complicated answer. "Tide," her says simply. "The phosphorous in the detergent causes the glow under ultra-violet light." It's a funny answer for a beautiful image. And it might even distract from seeing that the physicist's hands are already starting to twist.

Tide. And he decides after some deliberation to focus his thesis on time. But, as Chaucer, and a great many who came before, observed, both wait for no man. Hawking's balance is becoming erratic, and he has difficulty holding the chalk to write his equations on a blackboard. A brutal fall in the Cambridge courtyard puts him in hospital and a spinal tap produces a diagnosis—ALS, a motor-neuron disease that will cripple him, but leave his mind intact. As he's told by his physician, "The thoughts are not affected. It's just that no one will know what they are." In one of the many wonderful images of the film, Hawking sits in a bath staring at his increasingly claw-like hands, as if willing them with that enormous intellect to straighten.

The prognosis is two years. Hawking hides himself away, grieving, determined to focus on his studies while he still has the time to do so. He refuses to see Jane, determined that she not have to endure what, for him, is a death sentence. He breaks off any idea of a romance that is doomed from the start.

But, she is as tenacious as he.

Hawking's story is an amazing one. But, it is incomplete without the story of the woman who stood by him when he was unable to stand. As he amazed the world with his theories and leaps of imagination—let alone his ability to communicate them to a large public—she was his caretaker, wife and mother of his children, sacrificing everything to keep him alive and thinking. Think he has courage? What about her?

The Theory of Everything is something of a revelation to me, as Hawking's story is inspiring, but his divorce from his first wife (and subsequent marriage to his nurse) always struck me as an abandonment of the woman who struck with him for thirty years through his worsening physical condition and annoyed me in my judgmental way. I'm not one to know the circumstances, as I'll never know what it's like to a) be a genius and b) be trapped in a non-responsive body. What The Theory of Everything provides is the missing component in the equation: the first marriage to Jane Wilde lasted 30 years; when they first met, fell in love, married, they were making the best of a bad situation that was only supposed to last two.

Think of that and the place it put Wilde, who loved him, in. That Hawking lived so long (and still abides) is a miracle unheard of. But, it is not what Wilde, in love with, and devoted to, the fully functioning man could expect or hope for. Hawking's long life was a life sentence for her, one she did not sign up for when the crisis hit for them both.

It evokes an odd mixture of guilt and empathy to consider what that might be for her. Two years might have been manageable for a woman in love in her 20's, but had she known that Hawking would live so long, would she have made the same brave, selfless decision?

At what point does tenacity have its limits for any human being?

And at what point does dependency become empathy?  Love is a two-way street—in the view of so much sacrifice, sacrifices have to be made.

The Theory of Everything is not a normal love story, it is, actually, much more than that. There is no "they lived happily ever after" here ("ever after" evoking both triumph and dread). Love is not simple, like in the movies and romance novels where things fade to black before things get interesting. Love is complicated and messy...and thrilling and horrible. Sometimes it can only be endured by the strength of that needing and selfless bond of love, and the combination, the chemistry—the equation—of the two people who share it (on either side of the equal sign). Love is tough stuff. And, like aging, it is not for wimps.

The Theory of Everything evokes such wondering, dark thoughts as it unspools and for days after, exposing love in all its complications. I found it refreshing from the steady shining eyed twaddle of romance films, and for the first time in years, I dropped tears, watching it.

Highly recommended.

Stephen Hawking is now 72 years old.

Jones, Hawking and Redmayne