The Substance

Substance Abuse: An Exercise in Horror

or

"Oh, That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt, Thaw and Resolve Itself Into a Dew! Or That the Everlasting Had Not Fix'd His Canon Against Self-Slaughter. Oh God!"
 

Submitted for your approval one Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a flickering fitness guru for the "beauty-is-only-skin-deep" believing house-bound. A body-suited drill sergeant, who kills with kindness and only for your own good. Every stretch, every kick, every high-step is designed to make you as good as you can be because, after all, it works for her and she's shy a half-century. 

But Time waits for no man...or woman, for that matter, and Elizabeth Sparkle is about to learn something that will shock her down to her leg-warmers and trainers. It's a little lesson in Inevitability, in Life and the Television Industry, and it will take her the way Ponce deLeon traveled for the fabled Fountain of Youth. It's a little known path between Desperation Street and the Avenue of Self-Deception, which are all just detours that spill out...into The Twilight Zone.

Apologies to Rod Serling

The DNA of The Substance is very much that of a typical episode of TV's classic "Twilight Zone" in that it takes a mercurial person comfortable with their situation and up-ends it to which they have to act in an atypical way, even fantastic way, which then, ironically, comes back and bites them in the ass.

Elizabeth Sparkle is the host of a television work-out program that she has been doing for years and years, long after her career as an Academy Award-winning actress. On her 50th birthday, she is given a card, a present, red roses...and the pink slip. She has been sacked. Her network (run by her cartoonish producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid) is (of course!) appreciative of her and her "long run" but, now, is another day and they're looking for a new host. A younger host. A sexier host. And, at 50, Elizabeth is not considered either of those things. She has lost some of her sparkle.

Most celebrities would consider product endorsements, a line of cosmetics or scents, maybe a tell-all book (how about a pod-cast?), but not Elizabeth. She stews. Then, a car accident—from which she emerges miraculously unhurt—lands her in the hospital, but bereft and in tears. A young orderly slips the sobbing Elizabeth a flash-drive with a note that says "It changed my life." The flash-drive has a presentation for "The Substance" and it's pitch is intriguing:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.

That last bit probably serves as the warning of side-effects.

Elizabeth calls the number on the flash-drive and orders. She receives an address and a key-card and rushes to a run-down, seemingly abandoned site that discourages investigation. Inside, she comes to a pristine locker-room (it's amazing how the Substance organization runs like Amazon—except they answer the phone faster) and eagerly rushes back home to her posh condo to sample her wares.

The Substance kit has everything she'll need but it's an odd mix of syringes and tubing (lots of tubing), bizarre containers of "food" and sutures and bandages and vials, lots of vials. It's a bit intimidating, but Elizabeth takes the stuff to her "panic room" of a bathroom and injects herself with the "Activator," tripping out and falling like a dead lump to the floor.

Like most drugs, The Substance should come with warnings. Like, watch it somewhere in a chair that has something to grip onto. Because "The Activator" sequence is a horrific exercise where Elizabeth's naked body starts to roil and heave and mutate until the skin of her back starts to split like a busted seam and from it's zippered wound emerges..."Sue" (Margaret Qualley)—as she will call herself—who is literally "Born Sexy Yesterday." Sue stumbles about the bathroom, taking it all in, but once she reaches a mirror and sees herself, she calms down, stretches, and gets down to business. She has work to do.

Like clean up the mess. She sutures up Elizabeth's back (filmed in excruciating detail), hooks her up to the "food matrix" package—Elizabeth's going to be unconscious for a week—and experiences some head-spins and nose-bleeding, so she instinctively goes to the "Stabilizer" package, pulls out the hypodermics and inserts a needle into Elizabeth's spinal column and withdraws some liquid from the "matrix". Once she injects herself with it, she is good to go.

That is, go to the audition for Sparkle's old job, which she wins handily. Producer Harvey agrees that she can be allowed to work every other week (she explains that she has to take care of her elderly mother, which is true in a way), and everyone starts prepping for the new exercise show that will be flashier, sexy, and more provocative with other things on its mind than just body management. Elizabeth's happy. Sue's happy. Even Harvey is happy. What could go "worng"?

Everything, if you believe the altered cliché of "Nothing exceeds like success." Although Elizabeth and Sue "are one" they are experiencing different realities and so become of two minds about the situation, which results in bent rules, missed deadlines, and adverse effects on their twin. Things turn nasty very quickly, and given "The Activator Sequence" (which will seem tame in awhile) that nastiness is going to become bloody, gooey, and, at times, painful to watch.

Yet, you giggle throughout The Substance, not because it's inherently funny—maybe ironic—but because of the sheer verve of the thing...and the nerve. The twisted nerve. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is not playing subtle here, but her playbook is spot-on with some arresting images and a boldness that you can't help but admire. It will ultimately fall apart (heh) as the third act will descend into a frothing, spewing gore-fest that is so over-the-top, you'll feel the need to shower afterwards. But, before it goes down the drain, it revels in its satire and makes its point about society's age-adverseness and obsession with form over substance. And the lesson that even fitness gurus should know something about karma.

Fargeat settles the look of the film directly and comfortingly in the sci-fi realm with a steely one-person perspective with wide-angle lenses, emulating Kubrick, but more directly from John Frankenheimer's similarly-themed Seconds. For some reason, that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. And, thematically, she has aspects and far-away echoes from dissimilar films as All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. The reverberations of past films are all over this, but Fargeat keeps it fresh and innovative.

And the performances are quite good—Quaid's over-the-top, but I think that was deliberate, with Qualley providing just enough of that Manson-girl predatoriness that she seems to inhabit. And Demi Moore does some of the bravest image-flagellation since Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Kudos. Brava.

We should all be so brave. But, like any pharmaceutical ad, we should probably end with some warnings. The Substance is not for the squeamish. The Sunstance is not for those who are offended by extensive nudity, whether attractive or not. Or react to needles, or open wounds, or festering sores, or a vast amount of red-colored Karo syrup being sprayed like a fire-hose, use caution. Or if you don't like being taught "lessons" in movies that run the danger of changing your encrusted attitude (but don't worry, there's a lot of scary stuff at the end).

 

Always read the label and make sure you read the possible side-effects. Do not take The Substance if you're allergic to The Substance. Nor, should you take it if you don't know yourself very well. And, of course, you should always take it...with a grain of salt.

Disclosure (1994)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Disclosure (Barry Levinson, 1994) Handsome, but su-leeeeeeazy mounting of the Michael Crichton story about sexual politics in the work-place. With Michael Douglas heading the cast, the film could be confused for Fatal Attraction II, and one wonders just how far the makers were going for that, what with Douglas top-lining ...Attraction and Basic Instinct and Demi Moore, late of Indecent Proposal. Unfortunately, where those films whetted the national apetite for dangerous sex-capades, Crichton's cold-shower-of-an-idea seems tame.

At a cutting-edge Seattle software firm* experimenting in virtual reality, Tom Sanders (Douglas) thinks he's getting a promotion from his slick-as-shit boss (Donald Sutherland). He gets passed-over for Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore, all power-suit, push-up bra and stiletto heels), who's robotically quick with company-approved schpiel, with just a bit of predator to her. She's also an ex-girlfriend of the Douglas character.

Wuh-oh! Better watch out, Mike!

But because it's a two-hour movie, when Meredith invites him for an after-hours conference with some wine and her tongue in his ear, he goes--rather than saying, oh, I don't know--they've got e-mail at this high-tech Seattle firm?--"Hey, let me draw up a complete scenario of where we've been for that last three months with documentations and e-mail that to you, and then we can tackle it fresh in the morning." No, he doesn't do that, he's a little slow. Meredith, though, is pretty darn quick. When she starts unzipping his pants, what does he do? Stop her? Nooooo...When the simulated sex act begins? Noooooo. (I should mention that, at this point, Douglas does the patented Sharon Stone "pleasure" move from Basic Instinct--cock your head back so your neck is bent double and spasmodically open and close your mouth in a guppy fashion).

Finally, after the two are in a quasi-missionary position, the panting Douglas grows a conscience and decides to leave the office, after which Meredith follows him screaming "Get back and finish what you started, or you're dead, do you hear me?!" Since the office is in Pioneer Square, just about every bar-patron and driver on the Alaska Way Viaduct could hear her. As does the cleaning lady.

Anybody think this is a bit dumb?

It is. It gets dumber, when the Douglas character sues for sexual harassment, and she sues back. Crichton is making a point about sexual politics in a predatory environment in the work-place, but the message gets a bit dulled, and then the film-makers make a last-minute bid for political correctness that works as well as it did in The Bonfire of the Vanities, that is, not at all. Crichton was a hell of a writer, but his female characters were usually lacking personality (not that his male characters were ever fully developed), but were particularly and inexplicably fickle in their thinking. He was hardly a person to be objective about the battle of the sexes.** 

Even the high-tech elements are a little suspect, with a virtual environment that evidently sucks so much CPU that it slows down the "Delete" process long enough to make it a race to amp up the drama.Disclosure is a by-the-numbers package deal combining the movie-making cachet of Crichton, Douglas and Moore, in the hope it would translate to big bucks at the box-office. In that way, it resembles nothing so much as the fly-by-night computer companies that took a collective dive when the hi-tech bubble burst. Both had similar problems.

No one was buying.

* One of those very rare films set in Seattle that is actually filmed in Seattle rather than Vancouver, BC. Even Battle in Seattle about the WTO riots was filmed in Canada. Okay, they did come to town for a week-end to shoot pick-ups. 

** His non-fiction book, "Travels" has a couple of episodes where I got the impression that the author was not only a chauvinist, but an unapologetic one.

A Few Good Men

A Few Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) This a time before "The West Wing." It was before "JAG." It was before anybody knew about Aaron Sorkin and the tropes of his writing. It was the third play that Sorkin wrote and his first big success, sold to producer David Brown for an amount "well into six figures" and a tenure as a writer-for-hire at Castle Rock Entertainment—he would work on the screenplay for A Few Good Men, Malice, and The American President.

But, A Few Good Men was the first one that launched the Sorkin brand. Based on a true incident (told to him by his JAG-sister Deborah) about a near-fatal hazing incident at Guantanamo Bay, the script is both a detective story and a story of personalities under pressure. It was turned down by Tri-Star Pictures for lack of star interest, but that all changed when Reiner, one of Castle Rock's founders, expressed interest in directing it.

Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway (Demi Moore), a lawyer of the NIS has been following up a complaint by PFC William Santiago about an incident at Guantano Bay, Cuba, but Santiago has turned up dead—supposedly at the hands of the subject of the complaint, Lance Corporal Harold Dawson (Wolfgang Bodison) and PFC Louden Downey (James Marshall). But, Galloway looks into the two's records, and finds them spotless and begins to suspect some foul-play. 

Dawson and Downey are transferred to a Washington D.C. prison for subsequent trial and Galloway requests the case, but it is assigned to Lieutenant JG Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) a Navy JAG lawyer who has never litigated a case, preferring to plea deal, instead—that may be because he's a bit of a flake, but also because his father was considered a great trial lawyer and that reputation sets a very high bar. Galloway, despite reservations signs on as Dawson's lawyer and Kaffee picks Lt. Sam Weinberg (Kevin Pollak) as legal advisor.  

Galloway is convinced that Santiago died as a result of a "Code Red," an internal disciplinary action not sanctioned by the military, a "hazing" of sorts to put peer pressure on a soldier not meeting expectations. The team begin investigations: Kaffee meets with the defendants and finds them good soldiers, but Dawson's attitude towards Kaffee holds a slight contempt for Kaffee being a less than spit-and-polish officer; the defense team gets the go-ahead to fly to Guantanamo where they meet with base commander Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson), executive officer Lt. Col. Markinson (J. T. Walsh) and Lt. Kendrick (Keifer Sutherland), Santiago's commanding officer. In the interview. Jessup denies ordering a "Code Red" (even though he does see it as a means of strengthening the ranks), but did approve Santiago's leaving the base "for his own safety" once the report to the NIS was made. The meeting is cordial by flinty.

The matter is complicated by Jessup's regard in the military—he is in line to take an important position with the National Security Council, and there's more than a whiff of evidence to suggest that Kaffee was picked to head the team for his proclivity for plea deals, thus ensuring that the matter never makes it to trial. Indeed, Kaffee brings up the matter with Dawson as prosecutor Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon), knowing Kaffee's inclinations, has made an offer of six months in prison for the pair along with dishonorable discharges. Dawson refuses the offer as cowardly—he was following orders—refusing to salute Kaffee when their meeting concludes.

Knowing he is not playing his strengths, Kaffee tries to resign from the case, but is convinced to go through with the case. At the grand jury hearing, Kaffee offers a plea of nor guilty, setting up a formal trial for which he is ill-prepared while the minutiae of details pile up and Markinson—Jessup's executive officer—goes missing. It becomes clear that—as Kaffee sums up—"We're going to get creamed, aren't we?" and he's going to have to do battle with well-ordered, disciplined—and colluding—witnesses. The participants and the atmosphere are hostile.

A Few Good Men—and Reiner—benefit from a cracker-jack cast, many working outside of their comfort zone. Reiner, with a solid script and a solid cast, seems to up his game and, benefiting the military formalism, demonstrates a disciplined directing style, more than displayed in the restrictive courtroom scenes where the drama intensifies into shouting matches and acting fireworks, particularly between Nicholson and Cruise—Jessup's testimony, which is the fulcrum and climax of the story; the only false note is the series of shots that suggests Kaffee doesn't know what he's doing and doesn't have the evidence needed to goad Jessup into a confession (of course he does and it's false drama to suggest he doesn't). 

Nicholson is 100% on point—even sitting in a witness chair and shot from his chest-medals up. Cruise, on the other hand, was going through his "awkward phase"; he quickly became a star in Risky Business, but his next few years he spent trying to prove himself as an actor, frequently overdoing the histrionics, like a high jumper trying not just to clear the bar, but set records.* 

And it's funny:  A Few Good Men is famous for that "You Can't Handle the Truth" scene with its fiery speeches and dagger-projecting looks. It's good stuff. So good that Jessup's speech defending his actions frequently turns up as inspirational memes. The words may inspire. But, Jessup is a flawed human being and a flawed commander, because simmering under the speeches is an overriding arrogance. 

It's actions, not words that define character. Military leaders lead by example, lest their orders be seen as empty directives. While thinking of this film, John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy burbled up in me memory—particularly his 1948 film, Fort Apache and 1950's Rio Grande—and the character of Captain Kirby York (played by John Wayne in both films), who, in the first film is passed over for the command of a frontier fort by an arrogant commander (played by Henry Fonda), who is subsequently killed in a massacre by his own foolhardiness and rigidity. For the good of the Cavalry and "the Corps," York defends the man whom he had disagreements with, and in the second film, York—now in the position of leadership—is in danger of becoming the very same type of martinet commander played by Fonda in the earlier film. That conflict forms the emotional spine, and the qualities of character and leadership were very much a consideration of Ford, who struggled with those same issues in his own life as a commanding director on-set.

What makes A Few Good Men an interesting exercise is that Cruise's Kaffee can be accused of the exact same flaw of arrogance. That the two should lock horns makes for compelling drama and makes the film just a bit more mature than a cursory look would reveal.

* When I did a "Don't Make a Scene" of the Jessup—"You can't handle the truth!"—testimony, it was rough going: I could always find a frame where Nicholson looked great, but Cruise—trying to act up a storm—frequently was caught looking a bit silly. I poured over his shots frame by frame trying to present him at his best—I think I accomplished it—but, the asides and mugging (which might be effective on the screen) was, when frozen, looked like he was preparing to get to his good part without actually getting there. He's calmed down quite a bit—even if he's now constantly in motion hanging onto the sides of airplanes and being batted around on wires—but his tendency to over-do was a real issue for years. The thing is that star-making turn in Risky Business showed just how good an actor—and charismatic a star—he is.

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.