Fat City

There's going to be a Lambcast recorded this weekend for a much-beloved John Huston film, and I've been reading up on Huston to get ready for it. I have a "Now I've Seen Everything" feature on the director (in two parts) that might be perused. And there's little orphan of a review for an orphan of a movie that too many people have forgotten, but I think is a great Huston film.

Fat City (John Huston, 1972) Fat City got a lot of positive critical attention when it came out in '72 and one sees why. It must have been surprising for a lot of critics that, after a couple of movies (The Kremlin Letter, Sinful Davey, A Walk with Love and Death) that seemed to be desperate to reach a youth market or cater to the looser restrictions on subject matter, that the veteran director could still pull off a gritty down-on-your-heels story and make something new out of it—the old dog still had some tricks up his sleeve, and could do a change-up of genre and tone and come up with something as impressive as the young turk's starting to enter the field, like Friedkin and Coppola.  

But it shouldn't have surprised anybody.  Huston was a gambler by trade and by hobby, and was never afraid of taking on different approaches to telling a story. Sure, he could take a misstep here and there, especially when he tried to do something "of the times," rather than in his own perennial classicism.  It was always story for Huston, and he was never afraid to take things in complex directions.

Fat City is a tale of two boxers—Tully (Stacy Keach) and Ernie (Jeff Bridges) one on the way up and one on the way down, but the only difference between the two, career-wise, is in the timing.  Ernie is in the early rounds of the bout, all puppyish energy and vigor. Keach's Tully is in the later stages of the fight, battered, bruised, and tired, having known defeat and the occasional victory, always just out of reach of a right jab. When we first encounter them, Ernie has yet to have his first professional fight.

Tully is a couple years out of the ring, barely subsisting. He's scarred over, but that hardening of tissue, mostly keeps the sense-memory of past victories ringing in his head. Both mean are trying to get into the ring, one with no way of knowing what will come when he's in it, and the other all too aware of the toll it will take...but, anything is better than his current situation. As it's said in The Shawshank Redemption, you either gotta get busy living or get busy dying. In this case, living is fighting. And for the older pugilist, there's still some fighting to be done, rounds to go before he sleeps.

Huston has had many great male performances under his direction, from such as Bogart, Gable, Clift, Brando, Connery, Finney, but I don't think I've ever seen a better performance in one of Huston's films than Stacy Keach in this.* In whatever you've seen him in, nothing prepares you for the internalized pain that Keach conveys in every aspect of his performance. And there's one moment that will stay with me for the rest of my life. During the fight-centerpiece of the film, when Tully makes his comeback, he's knocked to the canvas, but never counted out. He spends an interminable nine seconds on his knees and elbows, head hanging—and there's a moment, a long moment, when you wonder if he's going to get up—if he even wants to get up. Then, he rolls up into a rickety stance to complete the last few seconds of the round. The fighters retreat to their corners and Keach sprawls on his stool, as the cut-men treat a bleeding gash over his left eye.

Huston stays on Keach's face, and there is no expression on it—none. So, you go to his eyes, which are dead, betraying no light and no spark. There may be nothing going on in his mind except the most primal reptile instincts to survive; his head is a black hole, nothing leaves, and there may be nothing to leave.  He's a shell, hollow and broken. That look will show up again in the film, as a final note, lacking in grace, the soundtrack empty, giving a brief glimpse of death, a living one, yes, but a death that still haunts.

Keach in Huston's Fat City

 

* Everybody is good in this, but one should also note Susan Tyrrell's feisty, free-wheeling performance of a drunk bar-fly that is on par with Keach's and feels so real you want to throw up your hands and give up.

The Ninth Configuration

The Ninth Configuration (aka Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane) (William Peter Blatty, 1980) Blatty started out his colorful career as a writer—turning out "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home!", "I, Billy Shakespeare", and the first version of this story ("Twinkle, Twinkle, 'Killer' Kane!") before turning to screenwriting for films with Blake Edwards and others. He went back to novels after flirting with Hollywood, and his first, "The Exorcist" became a best-selling phenomenon, and the resulting film, which was the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, won him the Best Screenplay statuette that year.

 

Blatty returned to writing, taking his 1966 "'Killer' Kane!" book and re-configuring it as "The Ninth Configuration," shopping around a screenplay for a potential film but with the caveat that he direct it. There were no takers. So, Blatty put up his own money for half the film's budget—the other half funded by Pepsi-Cola*—and Blatty began shooting in Hungary without a distribution deal.

Which is crazy. But, then, crazy is what The Ninth Configuration is about. And some of it is inspired craziness.

"Some time in the 1970's" Colonel Hudson Kane (Stacy Keach) is being assigned to oversee an overcrowded veteran's mental health facility in the Pacific Northwest, with the mission to determine who's genuinely insane and who's faking it to get out of service. He is informed by the acting head Col. Fell (Ed Flanders) that the patients are all eccentric. Kane knows this already; when he arrived, the first guy who claimed he was in charge was an inmate and he was pretty convincing. It's no wonder the military staff is having a hard time keeping order. But, order is just an idea that a group of people agree upon. These guys can't agree on anything.

There's Lt. Reno (Jason Miller), who wants to put on a production of "Hamlet" but performed by dogs ("Someone has to do it!"). Maj. Nammack (Moses Gunn) thinks he's a super-hero. Then, there's Billy Cutshaw (Scott Wilson), former astronaut, who, on the way to the Moon, suffered a mental breakdown. Kane takes a particular interest in him, as Cutshaw engages him in arguments about the existence of God and who seems to really want answers and challenges Kane on his own beliefs. When Kane asks Cutshaw why he aborted his mission in space, Cutshaw merely gives hima St. Christopher medal.

Kane decides that his best strategy is to let the lunatics run the asylum, which may not be effective, but is very entertaining. Blatty has an interesting trope in his writings and The Ninth Configuration is no exception—he starts out funny, softening the audience up, and then turns deadly serious into matters that far outreach whatever set-up he has. Blatty's Configuration stretches the scenario as far as it can possibly go before it snaps. The film has divided its very niche audience for decades (a problem compounded by the various edits of the film over the years), but it has some ardent supporters among the larger film community.

It also has some fairly amazing shots, that, at times, makes you snap your head 360° with just how audacious they are (Blatty was a first-time director when he made the film) and reminds one that his later film of Exorcist III was as good as the original, and probably better. If there is a weakness, it might be in Stacy Keach's performance that was directed to tamp down any telegraphing of what was going on at the film's core. 

And there is, at the core, that theological question—why is it easier to believe in the devil because evil exists, than it is to believe in a God with the presence of so much good. That's the central theme (as in The Exorcist) and it persists here, as well, with Cutshaw challenging Kane to give an example of a purely unselfish sacrificial act to prove the point of a deity. Kane doesn't have much of a response, but his deep dive for memory may be what causes later issues.

But, there is a neatly framed argument that he gives for the existence of God:

"In order for life to have appeared spontaneously on earth, there first had to be hundreds of millions of protein molecules of the ninth configuration. But given the size of the planet Earth, do you know how long it would have taken for just one of these protein molecules to appear entirely by chance? Roughly ten to the two hundred and forty-third power billions of years. And I find that far, far more fantastic than simply believing in God."

Blatty may be fudging on the numbers, there—it's something to ask Neil de Grasse Tyson—but it's an interesting argument, even with an infinite amount of space. It's certainly easier than getting dogs to play Shakespeare...or monkeys to write it.

* Pepsi had funds in Europe that could not leave the country of Hungary, so the filming took place in Budapest, rather than the location stipulated in the Pacific Northwest.

The Bourne Legacy

Written at the time of the film's "a-bourning."

Baby, We Were Bourne To Run
Or
Pursued By Our Inner Damon's

The "Bourne" series laterals the ball to another player in The Bourne Legacy, the fourth film of the series, which, by now, has nothing to do with the Robert Ludlum books on which they are titularly based (which is fine, as I read the first one decades ago and found it one of the worst reads ever).

When last we left Jason Bourne, he'd jumped into the East River to make a desperate escape from his pursuer/handlers, a nice turnaround from when the series started with him being fished out of the water with no clue as to his identity. We start there again, but this time, we're Bourne again in another body of water with Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) on a training mission way out in nowhere, Alaska (all the better to see Russia, apparently), while the events of the previous Bourne trilogy play out in the States, sending a panic through the intelligence community and an order to purge the Treadstone Project (or is it Operation Outcome...or Operation Blackbriar...only Tom Clancy could keep track of this...and then he'd start a book-series (ghost-written) on each one!).  

Whichever project is being scorched to the Earth, the talents from the previous movies (Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, David Straithairn) are dealing with the ramifications of Bourne's re-appearance, another intelligence head* (Stacy Keach-welcome back, sir) puts another middle-management type (Edward Norton) in charge of damage control (an impossible task in any recent spy film).**

As it becomes readily apparent on Renner's training mission, we didn't know diddly about the Bourne project (whatever name it was), as there are other agents like him, who are not only trained, but drugged to enhance their physical endurance, but also mental faculties (take the green and blue pills, but the yellow one you should really take with water or it gets stuck in your throat, evidently). Just as Cross is about to rotate stateside, he and another agent get a drone-launched nasty-gram stating unequivocally that the mission is over.

That's how it starts, and goes all over the world, subsequently, even while it doesn't really go anywhere.  Oh, things happen, and things explode and people run around a lot (Rachel Weisz is a really good runner, by the way), but it's mostly just movement without any story momentum.  Most movies have a beginning a middle and an end, but this one is content to merely have a beginning, a middle and a chase.  

Tony Gilroy (who cracked the code for the first film—taking the germ of the idea and stream-lining it into a bare essentials man-on-the-run movie—directed the brilliant Michael Clayton and the disappointing Duplicity, one of those "I-get-the-drift-but-it-doesn't-work" movies) co-wrote this one and directed, employing the same kind of Paul Greengrass "run and shoot" style, but taming it down a bit, so it can be followed, as opposed to experienced in barely discernible flashes.*** 

It's a risk because the Greengrass adrenaline-fueled style keeps one from asking too many questions about the slowing-down factor of injuries and leaps in story-logic.  All well and good, I suppose, but one still gets the sense that Legacy is half-baked, with the kernel of an idea, some complications to keep things from getting too stale and large holes in the script filled with "a fight breaks out," "a chase happens," and "hero jumps from a fire escape into a window." 

These all happened in the previous films, but I'll be damned if I can remember which specific ones—I suspect the answer is: "All of them." They all blur together as the most memorable things are the action sequences, and there's a remarkable...uh...consistency to them. The stakes are only the agent's own and most of the film's have very little resolution to them. Legacy has none. It just ends.

While one can admire the proficiency with which it is done, there's nothing all that memorable about this one...or the last one.  Even with fresh faces and a new idea of two, it's the same old thing, hardly worth being "Bourne" at all.

* You know, one could make a case for the excesses of "Big Gov'mint" just by noting the cast of good character actors in the "Bourne" series and all the different intelligence branches and mid-levels.

** Who fixes things in these films-and why haven't the unemployment rates dropped as a result?

*** This helped by a change in the style of Dan Bradley, who seems to have taken a film directing class in the interim, because his second unit direction in the chase sequences actually have some shots that feature relationship perspective going so far as to even including both participants in the chase in the same frame.  That's some kind of break-through after his disastrous work on Quantum of Solace.

Nebraska

Making Things Right
or
And Everything Looks Worse in Black and White

There's a story that Peter Bogdanovich got sick of telling during all the press junkets he did for The Last Picture Show about why he shot in black and white rather than color. Truth was, that he started test-shots of the Archer City location (author Larry McMurtry's home town) in color, but the town always looked too good, and didn't have the sense of bleakness that he wanted. The story goes that he went to Orson Welles (who was staying at his house) and mused maybe he should shoot the movie in black and white. "Of COURSE you'll shoot it in black and white!" Welles barked back. After repeating the story over and over again at press interview after press interview, the last few times Bogdanovich simplified his answer: "Because Orson Welles told me to."

I don't think Alexander Payne shot Nebraska in black and white for that reason, or because it might recall the cover of the same-titled Bruce Springsteen album.  But, I think the bleakness is there, running as an under-current through the film as a view of life—not rosy and pink with vitality, green with verdancy, but shades of gray and the occasional extreme of black or white—the palette for a story of folks with limited choices in the nuances of life...and truth. But, lest you think this one's about old folks with one foot in the grave, or Alzheimer's or something like that, it's not. Not really. It's about living life before you run out of it, and grabbing any kind of dignity out of that life, despite Nature's determination to take it away in any way it can.

And not to mention your relatives and acquaintances.

It's also a damned funny movie, in the same low-key, sometimes painful way that its writer, Bob Nelson, wrote sketches for the late, lamented "Almost Live!" show which seemed to focus more on human dysfunction, rather than Pacific Northwest eccentricities. The old saw "familiarity breeds contempt" is apt here, as the extended Gates family, long separated (for good reason, apparently), is blandly caustic, bringing up family histories and past imperfections as grist for the family grinding mill.

The Gates clan watch a baseball game: Rance Howard (far left);
Bruce Dern (asleep in the back) and Will Forte (placating, far right)
"Wow, this feels too much like real life" said one of the patrons in Nebraska's audience.

The story's simple and seemingly uneventful, but mindful of David Lynch's The Straight Story. Woodrow Gates (Bruce Dern) is picked up by the police walking the highway in Billings, Montana. "Where ya goin'?" says the Sheriff. "Headed down the road there,' says Woody, none too helpfully.

O-kay, there's a little detour to the police station, where his son David (Will Forte) comes to pick him up. "So you told the Sheriff you were walking to Nebraska..." Woody's wife (June Squibb) won't drive him, he doesn't have a car, and he won't be given money for the bus. The reason he wants to go to Nebraska (Lincoln, specifically) is because he got a certificate in the mail from a magazine promotion company saying that he could have won a million dollars. Woody doesn't "buy" that it's a way to get him to buy magazines; he thinks he's won it, so he's walking to Lincoln to get his million. Why didn't he just mail it in? "I'm not going to trust the mail with a million dollars." Makes perfect sense. Walking, though, doesn't.

There's no sympathy at home. Wife Kate won't entertain any of this "I didn't know the son-of-a-bitch wanted to be a millionaire! Know what I'd do with a million dollars? I'd put him in a home!!" Brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk) thinks Dad's senile and doesn't want to hear of it. Only David will entertain the notion of driving Woody to Lincoln, if only for the chance to connect with the old man. They set off with some hitches and fits along the way, eventually stopping at relatives' to get a breather from what would seem to be a continuing series of minor disasters. But, his old stomping grounds bring no comfort, as word soon gets around that Woody's driving to Lincoln to get a million dollars—a sum that strikes everyone dumb...and a little bit stupid. Old debts are brought up, and quite a few people want a part of that million dollars whether they deserve it or not...and for some reason, nobody thinks twice about how Woody might have come into that money—the amount leaves them a little blinkered. And envious. And opportunistic.

For David, it's an opportunity to gain some perspective (just the ability to see Woody's past surroundings adds a little knowledge) and, as he's stuck in a pattern of "getting by," some insight into both Dad and himself. By the time the two ride off into the last shot—one of the loveliest and most potent of the past year's movies, a black-and-white sunset—a nice, warming resolution has been reached. But not too warming. It is a sunset. And it is in black-and-white, lest it betray any cheer or a rosy sensibility. Payne, evidently, did make a color version of Nebraska to satisfy some niche contractual requirements for the studio (Paramount Vantage), but has expressed hope that it never sees the light of electronics.

OF COURSE, it won't. It would be a completely different movie, and a less effective one.