Hereafter

Written at the time of the film's release...

"The Sweet Hereafter"

I had a friend who disappeared for awhile, and when we made contact again after too long, he had an odd explanation: he'd become psychic, able to read people's thoughts, completely unbidden and unasked for, crowding in with his own, and had undergone a battery of tests to see if he was losing his mind. 

He hadn't, as much as gaining insight into other people's minds. For awhile he found ways to exploit his ability, writing a column, diagnosing illnesses (he claimed to be very accurate) and making a living as a working seer. But, he gave it up. It was too painful for him, and his clients were too needy...pathetic, even. Life is complicated enough in one's own mind to be peeping through the windows of others'. I don't know whether I absolutely believe him (I'm as psychic as a block of wood, and he was a writer), but his observations were so ironically down to Earth—"Oh, man!" he told me one time, "Ghosts are ASSHOLES! They're so obsessed with what's going on here—all the little 'unfinished business'! Why don't they just move ON?"—that I just accepted his stories, while keeping any true belief in check. He was my friend. I supported him.

George Lonegan (Matt Damon) wears gloves. Childhood circumstances and medical complications damn near killed him and left him handicapped—all he need do is touch someone, "make a connection," and he is jerked back to an old haunt, the "white corridor" of light that is the foyer of Death. He's been there before, many times, but the touch of an individual's hand takes him to the spirits of the recently deceased of that particular person's past, so that he may pass on their thoughts to those left behind. He wears gloves, so he can avoid these encounters. But he can't avoid the grieving. He used to be a working psychic, ("Look, I don't even DO that anymore." he consistently tells the persistently bereaved*), but he gave it up, despite the imploring of his exploitative brother, Billy (Jay Mohr, toned down and playing a recognizable human being). "You've got a gift!" he is told.  "It's not a gift!  It's a curse!" Now he works, driving forklift at a sugar warehouse in San Francisco, a "normal" occupation that might lead to a "normal" life. That is his wish. Life, not Death.

My psychic friend's story is highly reminiscent of Lonegan's (nice name, that) in Hereafter, Clint Eastwood's film of an original screenplay by The Queen scribe Peter Morgan. Morgan's subjects are fairly factual, so it's surprising to see him venture into the nether-territory of Bruce Joel Rubin (Jacob's Ladder, Ghost).  

But, he places it in the here and now, our world where Death can come specifically from all realms, natural and unnatural. The film begins with a spectacular effects sequence recalling the horrific tsunami in Thailand,** that viscerally places the audience into such a disaster.  But that is only the beginning. It is what comes after—the surviving of such an extreme occurrence, the coming back from it—that is the subject of the film. How, after Death has touched us, can we go back to a normal life...when what awaits us, normally, is our own ending? How can we live while still grieving?

I called them "The Death Tapes." I have no idea who has them now, I passed all the copies I had to friends who were interested (and who isn't?). I did a recording session that was being used for publicity purposes for a fairly terrible Joel Schumacher pot-boiler called Flatliners, about morbid medical students experimenting with near-death experiences—it is typical hyperventilating Hollywood exploitation—all chases and races-against-time, whereas this Morgan-Eastwood film is intriguingly commonplace. The interviewees were all people who had had NDE's;  they'd died, and were pulled back to the land of the living. They were from all walks of life—one woman had been electrocuted in a television studio, another was a Vietnam vet who'd been mortally wounded in a mortar attack. The particulars of how they'd gotten there were all different, but their itineraries were all the same. They'd gone to a corridor of pure white light, where they were met with spirits of their past, and informed, questioned about their circumstances and released back, back to life. They'd all been significantly changed by their experiences, but in different ways, as Death was no longer the  terrifying unknowable it had once been. Been there. Done that. The woman had been yanked back through no choice of her own, through the efforts of EMT's in the studio. The soldier had volunteered to come back, in a way. Asked in that blinding corridor if there was any reason for him to go back, he implored the Voice,  "I want to see my son!" which is significant for the detail—he knew his wife was pregnant, but there was no way to know the sex of the child in those years before ultra-sound (Sure, it was a 50/50 chance, but...still...). An expert (as much as one still breathing can be of such things) talked about children who'd gone through "the process" and other adults, speculating that, perhaps, it could be some spasming electrical processes of self-preservation. But the stories were so similar—the same corridor, the after-life "concierge," the specifically relevant memories of the deceased (and not the living—would a brain going through synaptic anarchy be so choosy?)—combine that with the myths of "pearly gates" and exit-interviews with St. Peter, and it becomes disquietingly consistent. Yes, we have the same meat in our brains, but chemically, we all have our own brand of soup. So, then, would everybody see it the same way? Don't know. And we won't know. Not until we "see the light."

The people left behind—in both senses of the experience—(Richard Kind, Bryce Dallas Howard—she's a brunette, this time—Frankie McLaren, Cécile De France) are changed by the brush with death, but they all have the same goal—a "normal" life, or what passes for normal given the knowledge of extinction. But as that is something that unites us all, players and audience alike, isn't that "normal?"

It all sounds terribly depressing, doesn't it? But it isn't. There are moments of high drama to be sure, but moments of levity, as well. Rather than a dark and morose drama befitting the Hallowe'en season, it ultimately has the feeling more of a star-crossed romance. And Eastwood, who has been known to denature the color palette of his pictures, particularly in Letters from Iwo Jima and Changeling, returns to a more vivid color scheme here, as if to present life in all the glories of luminous sunrises and sunsets. Those looking for a spook-show, like the poor, unsure desperates who crowd the emporiums of the medium/charlatans in the film, should look elsewhere for signs of the occult, or speculation about what it all means.

Eastwood's movie gives us no definitive answers—Hereafter never crosses the threshold into Shakespeare's "undiscovered country," that final frontier we must all travel, the journey of the spirit taking flight unbound by the physical restraints of life, our mortal coil. It remains solidly in the realm of the comfortingly tactile, and concludes with a smile, a touch—simple, normal acts of being, that stave off the nullifying black and the welcoming light.

* The script by Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United, The Last King of Scotland) is extraordinarily precise in its use of words...in English and French (there are subtitles...Eastwood, who directed the all-Japanese Letters from Iwo Jima isn't afraid of them), and quickly you pick up that, more than usual, he uses specific ones, over and over, that tie his characters together...almost like they were a mantra.

** This sequence is exploited in the trailers and advertising for the movie, making it seem like it's a 2012 disaster-like "entertainment."  But, if I can be allowed a SPOILER-like caution, don't be fooled. This sequence...and another jolting one that recalls an arbitrary terrorist attack...are merely means to an end. The story is about recovery of such incidents, and in living a life of hope, despite the common glimpses through the opening of Death's Door.

 

Eastwood's version of the Thailand tsunami is the stuff of nightmares

Marathon Man

In these days of communicable diseases and precautionary measures for the greater good, folks on both sides of the aisle and of every color-stripe are being a little flippant with the "N"-word—"Nazi." 

So, just for a refresher course, we are going to sub-set the "Spies" series we're doing with movies where there are Nazi's (you know, "the bad guys"—Indiana Jones fought them in Raiders of the Lost Ark!) 

And we're going to call it "Nazi's...Nazi's everywhere."

Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976) On the celebration of Yom Kippur, two chance encounters in New York City create an interruption in already established conspiracy that will conclude in two two wildly disparate people facing off against each other in a duel to the death: two cranky New Yorkers escalate a road-rage incident into a fiery crash, while on a track around Central Park, two joggers engage in a running battle over who's fastest—the slower of them Thomas "Babe" Levy (Dustin Hoffman) eventually gives up. His brother, an oil company executive, whom he affectionately calls "Doc" tells him he never confronts anything and this is just another example. A student at Columbia, "Babe" is doing his doctoral on tyranny, part of which will deal with the McCarthy era, of which his father, H.V. Levy, became a victim, ultimately committing suicide. "Doc" tells him that it's the past and he should put it behind him.

But, "Babe" still has the gun.

Across the Atlantic, a courier named "Scylla" (Roy Scheider) is beginning to get suspicious about the circle he regularly deals with. When he meets his established contacts, they are surprised to see him when he shows up at his usual haunts in Paris. Maybe because they think he's already been killed. He's nearly blown up by a street-bomb, one of his contacts is garroted at the opera, and the same assassin tries the same thing to him in his Paris apartment, before he gets the drop on him and breaks his attackers' back. Something is up, and he beats it out of Europe to get to the United States.

In South America, meanwhile, events have created movement among individuals who have remained in place for a very long time, lest their activity draw attention. Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier) under cover of darkness is leaving his Buenos Aries retreat for the first time in years. He has never needed to, but events have put him in danger—he needs information, to secure verifiable funds (that have been interrupted) and to eliminate the forces that have kept him safe all these years. His past is catching up with him. And so he runs. To the United States.

"Babe," meanwhile, couldn't be happier. While doing his research on his paper, he meets Elsa Opel (Marthe Keller), a Swiss student who is beautiful and charmed by him and he's so smitten, he can't believe his luck. Not even when, on an outing in Central Park, they are mugged by two very well-suited men; muggings aren't that rare, but usually by perpetrators less formally dressed. Babe tells Doc about Elsa and the mugging, and Doc wants to meet the girl.

Babe is surprised by a visit from Doc, and the two banter and bicker and make plans for an extended visit, Doc playing the protective older brother, wanting to meet these girl that babe is over the moon for. He has others plans that he doesn't let Babe in on, for Doc is also Scylla...and he's been at his game long enough that he doesn't believe in coincidence. Not with so much happening, of which Babe is innocently unaware.

The introductory dinner initially goes well; Doc picks an up-scale restaurant that leaves babe feeling like a fish out of water—he doesn't even own a tie that is required for so formal a setting. And Doc is clearly taken with Elsa—he flirts, he compliments, puts on airs as when he mysteriously says of the ordered wine "the great Chablis of the world are almost always green eyed. In fact, they're the ones that most resemble diamonds," a remark clearly intended to flatter Elsa and she's caught off-guard.

That's the point. Doc/Scylla is speaking in code. He suspects Elsa has something to do with his business in New York and the mugging makes him sure of it, but he doesn't tell Babe that. What he tells him is that Elsa is likely an exchange student on a foreign visa who wants permanent residency by coercing babe into marriage. Elsa leaves the restaurant in anger and Babe is hurt that Doc would insult her in such a way and have the opinion that Elsa wouldn't be attracted to somebody like himself without a hidden agenda. 

The meal ends on bad terms, but Doc has another meeting to go to and the stakes have just been raised.

Doc has arranged to meet Dr. Szell in a public setting, for those he's an old man, his past belies his frailty—he is the hunted Nazi Doctor Szell of Auschwitz, known as "der weiße Engel" (the White Angel) and for the past few years, his location has been protected by American interests for the information he's provided about war criminals, and for his services he has been provided anonymity and a steady flow of the diamonds obtained from his victims at the camp. One of the victims of the earlier traffic accident was his brother who was the first person in the diamond pipeline, retrieving the stones from a safe deposit box. With his death, Szell has come to this country to retrieve the diamonds, and, having no more need for the pipeline, has been systematically eliminating them.

Doc tells Szell that he is not welcome in the States and threatens to "out" him if he doesn't return to hiding. Suspecting that Elsa and the mugging have something to do with the elimination of the pipeline and his own assassination attempts, he warns Szell to stay away from Babe, as well. But, Szell is in for a penny, in for a pound. The stakes have changed.

Using a spring-loaded blade secreted in his coat-sleeve, he guts Doc like a fish, leaving him bleeding out and makes his escape. But, Doc somehow manages to make it back to Babe's apartment, dying on his floor. If he was attempting to warn Babe, he doesn't have the strength to tell him what has happened, and Babe, shocked and grieving, can only call the police and wait, stunned. 

The police take their time poking through Babe's apartment, asking questions, but he's clueless—there is no reason why his brother would be murdered and also, why he would make it to his apartment, knowing he was mortally wounded. Good question. The police are joined by plainclothesmen led by agent Peter Janeway (William Devane) who ask the same question. Why did Doc come back? Did he say anything to Babe before he died? No, Babe says. He said nothing. But, the question keeps being asked. Are you sure? Yes. He said nothing. Janeway tells Babe that his brother was a government agent and a colleague (and perhaps more?) but, despite the new revelations, Babe can't recall anything.

But, Scylla is dead. His warnings are going to go unheeded, and more people than just Janeway want to know what it was he said when he was dying. For Babe, his life will be put in jeopardy, involving kidnapping and torture—by dentist drill handled by a Nazi doctor in one of the most squirm-inducing sequences in movies (and the immortal line "Is it safe?")—and will be given a first-hand education in how dangerous and cruel the world can be...outside of history books. And he will run. And run for his life.

"Is it safe?"

On the technical side, Marathon Man was the first film to take advantage of the new stabilizing camera rig called "Steadicam." As operated by inventor Garrett Brown, the gimballed gyroscope system kept the camera from bumping in hand-held shots, giving the resulting footage a gliding quality, producing an organic freedom that couldn't be achieved with the conventional tracks and wheels. The running scenes benefited greatly from the new camera rig allowing free-moving close shots without the bump-and-jitter smearing that resulted from even the steadiest operator.

Also, the sound design is very special. Except for some studio scenes and a few others, most of the film's dialog is dubbed, the ambient sounds stripped away to focus on little detailed sounds designed to enhance or draw attention. It's a subtle thing, but every-so-often, one notices that the world is awfully quiet, in which case, be on the alert.

The film isn't nearly as air-tight as William Goldman's novel (Goldman did his own adaptation), leaving some loose threads, and condensing it down to essential scenes, nuggets of intensity, making it primarily a thriller, then veering into horror aspects (and film-strategies) when the action turns violent (which it does sporadically, creating ghastly effects). At the time I first saw it (in theaters), having read the novel, I was a bit disappointed, but the film has grown on me over time, especially in the grittiness of it that belies its slick veneer of polish.

As such, it's more of a sprint...not so much of a marathon.

Black Sunday (1977)

Black Sunday (John Frankenheimer, 1977) From the twisted mind of Thomas Harris (who would later write "Red Dragon" and "The Silence of the Lambs") comes this entry in the "disaster movie" cycle of the 1970's. Only this one seemed entirely credible. Harris' first novel (and the only one that doesn't have Hannibal Lecter in it) conceived of a terrorist plot by a cell of the PLO called Black September (the group behind the Israeli athlete massacre in Munich in 1972) to kill everyone in the stadium hosting the Super Bowl.

The film had the promotional tagline "It could be tomorrow!"

Robert Evans bought the movie rights in his independent production deal with Paramount after leaving the studio, Ernest Lehman was contracted to write the screenplay (it would prove to be his last, with additions by Ivan Moffat and Kenneth Ross) and John Frankenheimer hired to direct—he had just finished a sequel to The French Connection and was starting to be noticed (again) as a gifted film-maker, especially when it came to thrillers. From the beginning, Frankenheimer wanted to set Black Sunday apart from the normal string of disaster movies in vogue during the 70's* by making it seem as true-to-life as possible, giving it an almost documentary feel.

The movie begins with a night-time raid on a September cell by a ruthless Mossad squad (led by Robert Shaw's agent David Kabakov) that is brutally efficient in taking out the terrorists, with one notable exception: catching September agent Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) in the shower, he lets her go with only an appraising gaze.

Big mistake. Dahlia has a plan...and a means to carry it out. She has been "grooming" the aid of a court-martialed Vietnam vet, Michael Lander (Bruce Dern), who is on the psychological edge—suffering from PTSD as a Vietnamese POW, and by the resulting collapse of his marriage upon his return, he is chronically suicidal. Curiously, that hasn't stopped him from getting a job driving the promotional blimp for the Goodyear Tire company. Bad for them. Good for Dahlia. She convinces Lander that if he is going to commit suicide, he should do it in the most spectacular way possible, striking back at the country he's convinced has betrayed him, taking out as many Americans as possible in a terrorist attack on the Orange Bowl during that year's Super Bowl.

Meanwhile, the Mossad has brought in the FBI—in the form of agent Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver) on the results of the raid. Kabakov is starting to realize his error; Iyad is a former Baader Meinhoff member now offering her services to the PLO...and he had her dead to rights. She's now dropped off the intelligence radar and the Israeli's want the assassination mission completed, something Kabakov takes on as his personal responsibility. A recording that was found at the compound leads the investigators to suspect some sort of action is imminent and that the tape was meant to be discovered after the attack...but where and when the recording isn't specific.

The movie begins to take two parallel paths, following both the terrorists in their preparations and the FBI/Mossad investigation about what they might be doing. Their first idea that something is about to happen comes from a report from the Coast Guard to the FBI—twelve crates have been unloaded from a freighter to a man and woman wearing masks, but when the CG tried to intervene they were outrun. Kabakov travels to Long Beach and sneaks aboard the freighter under cover of darkness to interrogate the captain who needs a little persuasion to talk. But, when the captain answers a telephone, he is killed in an explosion and Kabakov is injured by the blast.

Those smuggled crates contain statues of the Madonna—made out of plastique that will be shaped into a large bomb to be brought into the Orange Bowl by the blimp and detonated, releasing thousands of steel flechettes, enough to kill everyone in the stadium. An initial test in the desert convinces Lander that the explosion will be uniform enough to cause the most devastation within the bowl-shaped stadium. With the plot proven in theory, Lander and Dahlia start work on the details to be ready for the next Super Bowl, while Kabakov and Corley are delayed by the Mossad agent's hospitalization. But, an aborted attempt by Dahlia to kill Kabakov in his room, convinces them that what could have been a few unrelated clues is a very real plot, one that their suspects are trying to see to completion by eliminating the investigators.

Upon Kabakov's release from the hospital, the investigation becomes more intense: Kabakov threatens a Los Angeles based importer to tell him that the shipment was for explosives to be delivered to a woman named "Kaza," then meets with an Egyptian intelligence official (Walter Gotell) who eventually tells him that this "Kaza" is actually Dahlia Iyad; when she is seen on January first in the Miami vicinity, the team start concentrating their efforts there and their suspicions begin to point to one target—the Orange Bowl, the Super Bowl.

The film then becomes a race against time and a fight against obstacles for both sides—the path is smooth for neither the terrorists or the security forces and one is kept guessing along the way whether the plot will come apart at the seams due to its own dicey nature or whether it will succeed in spite of it because the game authorities just choose to "bureaucracy" themselves into suicide. Both sides are firmly dedicated to a fanatical extreme and by the time Frankenheimer has ramped up the tension of the final denouement, you're just about willing to believe anything can happen.

And that's where director Frankenheimer is the biggest co-conspirator in the whole plot; he knows how to set things up to make the audience put the framework together, and by game-time, he has the audience both wanting to see the plot come together at the Super-Bowl, but also to see it quashed in as viscerally satisfying a way as possible. His editing has been moving at an ever-quickening pace culminating with a shootout on a Miami Beach, but, the realization of the target becomes known, the film settles into a complicated rhythm due to all the pieces coming together. And at that point, he pulls out every visual trick in the book to try to convince you that there is a goddamn blimp flying into the middle of the freakin' Super-Bowl and using every suspense trope right down to a sputtering, burning fuse.

It's pretty amazing what the film-makers got away with back in the innocent days of 1977: First off, yes, Frankenheimer did film at the genuine Super-Bowl game—Super-Bowl X (Steelers/Cowboys), to be exact—with permissions from the NFL and the two vying teams to use their logo's**—and the shots of the blimp hovering into the stadium were filmed the days before and after, with a lot of crowd cooperation going on for the scenes of panic. In fact, at one point, there's a shot of Robert Shaw sprinting along the side-lines where he is nearly strong-armed by a very real stadium security guard who didn't recognize Shaw and maybe didn't realize the movie was being filmed (the many film camera's were disguised to look like CBS-television cameras to ensure that one wasn't caught inadvertently due to all the footage being shot).

One or two effects shots are a bit dodgy amidst the hundreds it took to construct the sequence and some of the process work stretches credulity—as if the methods used to subdue a runaway blimp weren't incredulous enough—but, that last half an hour of the film does have one on the oft-cited "edge of one's seat." When I see a film of this nature (and it's successful in its purpose) my left leg has a tendency to bounce in a nervous response that would resist any amount of sticky gum on the theater-floor and Black Sunday had that effect (and it had nothing to do with matching John Williams' "thrummy" tension music at that point in the proceedings).

At the time of the film's release (it's opening was basically swamped by the juggernaut of the first Star Wars movie), the film and story was a competent, if fanciful, thriller of the paranoid variety on the cusp of the "disaster" cycle of films. Now, it's a cautionary tale, a blueprint for terrorists to some—it and Tom Clancy's "Debt of Honor" are regularly brought up in terrorism discussions—a call for vigilance by others, but, unfortunately, no longer fanciful. We've seen worse, for real.

And it's tagline—"It could be tomorrow"—rather than a come-on, now sounds like a threat.

* After the heady rush of Irwin Allen hits of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, they were starting to ebb in popularity and ideas—another entry of that year was the rather ridiculous Rollercoaster (rather than a disaster movie, it might have been a "bad accident" movie) and a previous terror-in-the-football-stadium was the previous year's Two Minute Warning, which was "legacied" into the genre for the fact that it starred Charlton Heston.

** And, if we are trying to keep it in the real world, Frankenheimer used his clout with Goodyear Tire Company (he'd worked with them in filming 1966's Grand Prix) to get the actual Goodyear blimp—with the company's actual logo—to make it feel more like a credible event. Now, that is truly amazing. And a step above Harris' novel; the author sidestepped the issue by calling it "the Aldrich blimp," creating a fictitious and non-litigious company to sponsor the air-ship.