The Debt

When one first begins to watch John Madden’s film The Debt, there is one obvious influence hanging over it: Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Indeed, I suspect that Munich was the enabling condition in how the Israeli thriller, of which Madden’s film is a remake, originally got made. The two year time gap between 2005 and 2007 seems to fit perfectly…

There is no way for this film – about a team of a team of crack Mossad agents heading to Europe undercover to avenge an atrocity committed against the Jewish people – to even pretend that it isn’t standing in a very large shadow, and so one suspects Madden and his DP Ben Davis just went with it. A lot of the unglamorous, dimly-lit scenes in the streets of East Berlin seem uncannily like the look that Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski achieved in Munich. Both sought to emphasize how much the look and feel of Europe has changed between the mid-20^th century and the late 20^th/early 21^st century – how there used to be so much less glass, plastic, and stainless steel, and so much more brick, stone, and grim iron. Unlike today’s gleaming neo-liberal world which seems to consider last week ancient history, this world phlegmatically evokes the centuries of history that lie in virtually everything in Europe, and the subjectivity that comes with this knowledge. Likewise, the film’s violence is much more close and intensely visceral than one expects from a film of this sort. But I’ll get to that in due course…

Even more telling than all this, however, is the fact that Ciaran Hinds is cast as essentially the same character as in Munich, albeit older and sadder. There is also an Australian beefcake as another of the Mossad heroes, but whereas Munich had Eric Bana, The Debt has Sam Worthington, and it was here that my troubles with the film began. After Terminator Salvation, Avatar, and Clash of the Titans, Worthington’s presence carries certain connotations, and I was expecting The Debt to be far brisker and pulpier than it eventually was. Whereas I went in thinking only of Munich, by the time the credits rolled I was in a very different place, thinking of a totally different roster of influences. These include films such as Atonement, The Reader, and Sarah’s Key – films of our time which are still fascinated by World War II and the Holocaust as the defining events of the twentieth-century, but are nonetheless grimly aware that we are now heading into the second decade of the twenty-first century. By 2010, we are fully three generations removed from this era – four for the younger generation that watches the most movies today – and it is becoming progressively more difficult to come up with plots that make it viscerally and immediately relevant. Far more often, these films are about memory and closure at the end of one’s life, or in relation to an older relative’s. Atonement is about an author trying to honour her sister’s memory, but only once she’s on the cusp of retirement and senility; The Reader is about an established and disillusioned lawyer revisiting a boyhood love long after it has ceased to mean anything; and Sarah’s Key is about a mature woman who becomes determined to learn the truth about a wartime story which involves her in-laws’ apartment, even though all concerned are by now dead or geriatric.

Probably the most vivid instance of this sort of thing in the culture today has been the phenomenon of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The catalyst to the story is the oldest in the book – a reclusive millionaire hires our investigator-hero to learn what happened to his granddaughter – but again, it’s initially not about living results but about closure. Even the investigator, Blomkvist, is by now middle-aged enough and established enough to be more worried about salvaging his reputation and keeping his apartment than blowing the lid off anything. The real interest to the story, however, is Lisbeth Salander, who is in her mid-20s and whose life is still very much a volatile live wire. Her youth and backstory -- as we learn it in the next two books -- mean that the events at issue took place decades before she was even born, and in a totally different world from the digital age of which she is a child. Her intensity is such that she's able to give a jolt of new energy to a case which has gone old along with those concerned in it. Even its resolution, when the 50-something Harriet is finally found alive and well, feels rather flat and perfunctory in Lisbeth's absence.

In light of all this, The Debt hinges above all on Helen Mirren’s performance as the “30 years later” iteration of Jessica Chastain’s character, and her evocation of weariness with life – of having lived with baggage and issues for so long that one would be uncomfortable changing things, even for the better. By the time one is pushing 60, after all, one has already been through marriage and divorce, one’s career is for better or worse set, and you have grown kids just starting upon theirs. Even if one does re-enter the fray, one does so relying on experience rather than vigour, and the prospect of being killed in action is less horrific than merely sad and ignominious. The climactic fight scene, for instance, is deliberately the stiffest and most by-the-motions one I’ve ever seen, both participants not having nearly the passion for this they once did.

The aesthetic of these films, in turn, very much determines their audience and their reception. These are obviously films for mature cinephiles – either adults who directly identify with their protagonists, or younger viewers who are educated enough to appreciate what is at issue – and as such their basically middle-brow mentality is unsurprising. The fast, loud, and unrelenting tones one finds in films openly pitched at the teenage market today are so vulgarly presentist that these films seem even smarter than they are by comparison. And yet somehow there is still a sense of cop-out; a pathetic declaration that once one has passed a certain age one should simply surrender to the burden of history and no longer even think of taking part in it. This is then legitimized by the impression such films give that all the bumptious, brutal, horrors of the mid-twentieth-century are safely back there, and totally over with now, in our tranquil twenty-first century world of neo-liberal consumerism. This is, we all know, utter rubbish, and it was here that a third point of comparison struck me.

The Debt is particularly telling when you compare it to Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book. The connection first struck me at the film’s mid-point, in its sole outrageous and provocative moment. Because the Mossad agents’ target is working as a gynecologist now, the only way to get to him is for Jessica Chastian’s character to pose as a patient, which thus entails putting her feet in stirrups and letting him minutely examine her vulva region. Watching him try to engage her in friendly small talk under these conditions, knowing of her mission as we do, is frankly hilarious in a warped way, and receives a brilliant punch line when he observes that “you had intercourse last night! That’s good. I think we’ll see results.” She has, you see, half-heartedly had sex with her other teammate, Sam Worthington having taken too long to make a move. It’s the sort of thing you don’t usually see is such staid, middle-brow films as this, and it reminds one that Black Book is also about an Isreali woman who has a husband, a couple of kids, a job as a schoolteacher, and whose wartime experiences in occupied Holland would seem totally remote from her current life. Diabolically brilliant cynic that he is, though, Verhoeven would never let it rest thus. The film’s opening subtitle – establishing that it’s 1957 – seems innocuous enough, and after more than two gripping hours of the movie’s flashback narrative, likely nobody would remember it.

Only in the last minute of the film, however, when our heroine ceases her recollection and heads off with her family, do we see that they are heading towards the kibbutz which she’s founded with the Holocaust loot she recovered twelve years ago, and which is now surrounded by a barbed wire fence and bristling with sandbags and gun emplacements. Suddenly it comes back to one that since this is 1957, the Suez war is still going on, and Israel will be on high alert for the Palestinian troops augmenting Nasser’s army. This in turn cues one to think of Israel’s obnoxious habit of continuing, to this day, to provocatively build settlements inside the West Bank, just as a general fuck-you to Palestine, and forestall any peace that might require concessions. The contrast with The Debt is total. Even with the best intentions, Verhoeven seems to be saying, you can never really escape from history, and in trying to retire peaceably to home and family after the buffetings of one war, you may in fact do your humble part toward starting the next.

Women's Horror

 I recently watched two very different horror films, one of which made me curious enough about the other to seek it out. Martha Marcy May Marlene was recommended to be me by a dear friend, and upon hearing about the plot, I somehow formed a vague impression that it was made by a woman. This turned out not to be the case – it was the feature debut of a young man named Sean Durkin – but the thought having been planted in my mind of a horror film articulated from a feminist perspective led me to seek out Jennifer’s Body, directed Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody, the latter fresh from her Oscar-winning success with Juno. In the event, the two films could not be more different, and confirmed for me again the dangers of pigeonholing by gender. The few people who heard of or saw Martha Marcy May Marlene tended to praise it rapturously, declaring Durkin to have masterfully caught a woman's nightmare, whereas the higher-profile Jennifer’s Body received excoriatingly bad reviews and basically fizzled commercially.

Martha Marcy May Marlene has all the flaws and all the virtues of a first film. One of the most vivid things I noticed is the degree to which Durkin is in love with the image for its own sake. He shows an affinity with old Dietrich and Garbo melodramas in the way he often simply lets the camera linger on heroine Elizabeth Olsen’s face, revelling in the spectacle of her sheer physical presence, and only allowing us to guess at the roiling emotions inside. In general I’m all for the digital simulation of actors via performance capture, but I’m still not convinced it can ever capture the experience of watching shots like this.

Durkin likewise shows an almost preternatural gift for atmosphere and implication, and establishing a dialectic between them. During the sequences set on cult’s commune farm, the atmosphere sometimes seems almost as utopian as it’s supposed to be. The white-painted wood of the house and barn, the green of the grass and surrounding treeline, the unaffected naturalness of the people there – it seems to confirm that here is a place where you can be simple, natural, and virtuous, away from a life in the modern world which has allowed you none of these things. Durkin wisely abstains from any one melodramatic scene which contradicts all this and reveals a horrific nightmare beneath the surface – it’s only in the gradual accumulation of small details, intercut among the seemingly positive atmospherics, that we grasp what a nightmare this cult really is. One of the first images in the film establishes how meals are separated, with the men eating first; we later see how they slip drugs into the food of the new arrivals; and then the truly chilling line about how all the babies on the commune are boys. It’s the oldest and most fundamental axiom of horror: what you imply but don’t show will always be scarier in the viewer’s imagination.

And it’s on this point that Jennifer’s Body is pinned down. It implies nothing, but just lets everything hang out as blatantly as possible. Unlike many critics, I genuinely enjoyed the film, but I acknowledge it’s not a sure-fire sell. Whereas Durkin with Martha Marcy May Marlene was crafting a truly original movie that only incidentally lent itself to the horror genre, Cody and Kusama were very much having fun tweaking and punking the conventions of the teen gore-fest horror film. The film casts Megan Fox as a vain, slutty, high-school cheerleader who becomes demonically possessed and begins gruesomely devouring all the boys she can beguile, leaving it to her bookish, bespectacled, and perpetually-put-upon best friend (played by Amanda Seyfried) to stop her. This plot is so obviously run-of-the-mill genre fare that it’s perfectly excusable to have some feminist fun subverting expectations, but by the end one suspects Cody and Kusama have had a bit too much fun, and in the process neglected to make sure that it all hangs together coherently.

The casting is key to both films, and for better or for worse, Jennifer’s Body is defined by the fact that it stars Megan Fox in her first non-Transformers leading role. It does not settle the question of whether she is a real actress. What it does do, however, is prove indubitably that she has star power. Kusama is only slightly more restrained than Durkin in devoting long, spectacular takes to the sheer spectacle of her, and she dominates them totally. Amanda Seyfried may be a far better actress (witness her turn in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe the same year), but very few human beings can upstage hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of CGI robots just by leaning over a car engine...

Martha Marcy May Marlene, in turn, is defined by providing an organic follow-up to John Hawkes’s Oscar-nominated performance in Winter’s Bone. This latter was a revelation from a man who had been a working actor in Hollywood for twenty-five years – often in blockbusters like The Perfect Storm or critically-lauded films like Me and You and Everyone We Know – but had yet to become more than a vaguely-recognizable face. Teardrop in Winter’s Bone changed that, bringing an air of lethally-focused danger to a character who, on paper, might seem like a disposable piece of white trash. The depraved power in his eyes of that role transfers somewhat to Martha Marcy May Marlene, and you have no difficulty accepting Patrick as a modern-day Charles Manson who can bend a whole community of followers to his will. Even more worrying, however, is his chief subordinate Watts. Whereas Patrick exudes a certain detachment and wisdom to go with his menace, Watts is a sheer enforcer – viewing women as mere animals to be wrangled and feeling an unqualified sense of his right to do so. The very first sequence in the film, with him putting animalistic speed and intensity into chasing down a stumbling and irresolute Martha, made it crystal-clear to me that this film had very much been made by a man.

Jennifer’s Body’s virtues lie in its not mere inversion, but ridicule of this kind of thing. Coming from a Canadian cinema studies context, where the cringe-inducingly misogynistic Ginger Snaps is often touted as a national success, it’s refreshing to see a comparable story be so breezy and insouciant about its gruesomeness, and how the two girls react to it. The film is deliciously ambivalent, rather than expecting us to go with our “good girl” hero and moralistically spurn her friend once her monstrosity manifests itself. Likewise, it doesn’t end on an all-is-well note once the “good girl” has killed her best-friend-turned-monster, but rather has the demonic power pass to her, leaving her free to do some slaughtering of her own. Also, the monster-catalyst is not mystified as some pseudo-Christian condemnation of female sexuality, but as an obnoxiously pretentious yuppie “indie band” who have learned the Satanic arts so they can hurry up and get the point of being so famous that they can drink, smoke, fuck, snort coke and trash hotel rooms to their heart’s content. There’s no subtlety, but it works on a certain exhibitionist level.

The chink in Martha Marcy May Marlene’s armour, likewise, comes from the fact that Durkin’s command of subtle implication mysteriously deserts him during the scenes where Martha is back in the “real world,” with her sister and brother-in-law. Possibly displaying his neophyte status, Durkin takes no chances on us not seeing these people as inhumanly hateful and narrow-minded, totally oblivious to anything beyond their careers, house prices, pharmaceutical treatment, or safety in conformity. Sarah Paulson is too archetypally cast as Martha’s sister, forever given to crying out “what’s wrong with you?!” or slapping her in the face for nibbling while cooking; and Hugh Dancy is used to reflect the lazy American sense that British yuppies signify even more hatefully than American ones, because they bring spiteful class condescension into the equation. The sledgehammer effect of these scenes shakes, but mercifully does not sink, the film.

Overall, in spite of its missteps, Martha Marcy May Marlene fully deserves all the accolades that it has received, and one fervently hopes it marks the beginning of fruitful careers for Durkin and Olsen. It’s a virtually original work that seems unbeholden to any clichés or conventions. Jennifer’s Body, in contrast, works in the same sense as does Amanda Seyfreid’s next critically-reviled horror film, Red Riding Hood. The sheer pleasure lies in watching its joyous vulgarizing, nee vandalizing, of well-worn conventions, rather than its achievements in narrative, acting or mise-en-scene. This is the sort of Hollywood product, however, that critics chronically refuse to extend the benefit of the doubt to. It was the same with Kusama’s film Æeon Flux in 2005, which was critically excoriated but which I appreciated in a certain arch, symbolist, sense. After all, if one is going to start a movie with the premise that it’s the year 2415, and that the surviving 1% of the world’s population inhabits one hyper-controlled walled city called "Bregna," then you’d be a fool to go with a conventional visual aesthetic. Kusama’s next film is apparently called The Rut, and will star Chloë Grace Moretz as a young girl compelled, apparently for want of paternal affection, to venture into the woods to experience the kill-or-be-killed lifestyle of nature. I’m willing to bet that the “father’s love” aspect will be a pure MacGuffin, and that we’ll see more bizarre, critic-baiting, treatment of our stylistic and narrative expectations. I’ll certainly watch for it with interest.

Cradle Will Rock

Cradle Will Rock was Tim Robbin’s third and last film to date, and it turned out, paradoxically, to be both his best and his worst effort. It was his best because it broke fascinating new ground, which I’ll get to in due course. It was his worst, however, because he simply did not learn the lesson he should have from Dead Man Walking: that he could only improve as a filmmaker by scaling up into more iconic and archetypal human emotions, and abandoning the hysterical attempts at political urgency which had marred Bob Roberts.

If anything, Bob Roberts was more excusable on political grounds. It was, after all, 1992, and with the Reagan/Bush dark ages having dragged on for twelve years, it was perfectly understandable for Leftists, liberals, and anyone with a conscience to be on the verge of snapping. Also, the film’s crudity was substantially leavened by the sheer evil brilliance of Robbin’s own performance as the titlular character. The stupidly manipulative, oh-it’s-all-hopeless-the-system-is-against-us bits were the same sort of thing one always finds in liberal dramaturgies, from The Ox-Bow Incident to The China Syndrome to Redacted. It’s the facilely optimistic belief that things should always turn out happily/peacefully/amicably/etc. in the world, and if they don’t then humanity/society/polity/etc. has grown so depraved as to be beyond redemption and all we can do is cry in anguish. The segments of Bob Roberts that simply savour the spectacle of Robbins, however, implicitly concede just how limited and anti-aesthetic all that is. The sheer nuanced detail of Robbins/Roberts allows us the sardonic pleasure of watching the human comedy play out in all its grimness, as the total cynicism of the evil neo-con yuppie wins out over the doddering, well-meaning, Gore Vidal liberal. It’s depressing, but paradoxically, depressing in an electrifying way, rather than in the simply infantile, whiny way of Ox-Bow/China Syndrome/Redacted-type films.

With Cradle Will Rock, however, the context was different. Clinton had now been in office for seven years, and Hollywood’s treatment of political themes had become identical to his: disingenuously inveighing against liberalism and big government in a cynical play for Middle American votes, or box office dollars as the case may be. This sort of thing reached its apotheosis with Robert Zemeckis’s Contact, in which actual news footage was manipulated to make Clinton a character in the film, James Woods turned in another cartoon villain performance as the evil big-government bureaucrat, and one buffoonish Republican congressman frets over whether the aliens believe in God. These were not propitious times in which to undertake a reappraisal of the Leftist politics of the Federal Theatre, and the only wonder is that the film wasn’t more of a train wreck than it was.

Cradle Will Rock is marred from the very first by the Montaigne-ian aspect of liberalism: the dogmatic refusal to be dogmatic. In this spirit, the relative justice of a totalizing ideology like Communism is not really of concern to Tim Robbins, so much of the fact that it is an all-totalizing ideology, and thus must be critiqued, however much you may agree with its ideas. To actually bring the course of the film into alignment with its ideological sympathy would be too shocking a notion – one might actually have a solid, uplifting work that left viewers feeling galvanized and confident, and that would of course be unacceptably dogmatic. One must, this doggerel goes, leave them feeling frustrated and unsatisfied if a work of art is to have fulfilled its purpose. Cradle Will Rock actually contains a running gag where Hank Azaria’s playwright character is lectured about his work by the ghost of Bertolt Brecht, but Brecht himself would likely be turning in his grave if he could see the point to which Hollywood liberals have mongrelized his ideas.

The result of all this in practice is that one is forced to sit through scene after inept scene in which sympathetic Left-leaning figures are needled and browbeaten, and not allowed by the script to stand up for themselves; ambivalent figures are introduced solely for the purpose of defaming Leftism; and hysterical anti-Leftist figures are coddled by the narrative due to the naïve liberal shibboleth that you have to “show both sides.” This stubborn refusal to distinguish the dynamics of art from those of real-world politics leads to a remarkable cast – including Vanessa Redgrave, Emily Watson, Joan Cusack, Bill Murray, Susan Sarandon, John Turturro, and more – fumbling about with crude dialogue and contributing nothing to the proceedings. If Robbins’s goal had been to make a My Son John-style anti-communist film, these scenes would require only minimal rewrites.

There are two plot strands, however, which intertwine to form the film’s real DNA, and these not only redeem the film from the stupidities outlined above, but elevate it above Robbins’s achievement with Dead Man Walking. It is, after all, no great conceptual challenge to be sombre and serious about such a sombre and serious subject as capital punishment, however much genius is required to actually make the film. To be raucous and anarchic in the face of sombre and serious things, however, is a far greater test of an artist’s skill, and that’s what Robbins achieves in the segments of Cradle Will Rock which deal with Orson Welles and Hallie Flanagan, played by Angus Macfadyen and Cherry Jones, respectively. As played by Macfadyen, this Welles is a thundering, megalomaniacal, drunken, and rapacious iconoclast who nonetheless has the genius to back it all up. In a vacuum, this could render him just another object of sententious “critique,” but is saved from that fate by the way he’s given a comic foil in Cary Elwes’s John Houseman. Between them they generate enough loud, fast-talking, broadly gesticulating comic energy to keep Robbins’s politics at bay, and create a real life of their own for their characters. On paper, a scene of them questioning the seemliness of eating at such an expensive and upscale place as 21 Club could have been as lame as so much else in the film, but is redeemed by some business with Welles’s flask. And a childish ego-contest, shouting “Isn’t!” “Is!” “Isn’t!” “Is!” at each other, manages to be more articulate than anything else in the film.

 

Cherry Jones’s Hallie Flanagan is the opposite extreme to this. She represents the film’s one sublime stroke of political genius: to simply reverse the usual moralistic denial of politics which one gets from the Right, and award it to the Left. Anyone who has ever read the Chronicles of Narnia stories will have a feel for how appallingly simple it is for arch-Right-wing Tories and born-again evangelicals to deny that there is anything political to them, and declare that they are simply morally innocuous stories for children. They're really about being “nice” and “good,” and all the monstrous misogyny, racism and chauvinism is simply in the minds of Left-wing spoilsports and churls. With brilliant perversity, Cradle Will Rock simply reverses this, and has Flanagan blithely deflecting questions about a children’s play Revolt of the Beavers, declaring that it’s all about a mean and unkind beaver getting his comeuppance, and the themes of insurrection and redistribution of wealth are just illusory projections by Right-wingers. Jones’s performance in these scenes is amazing. She keeps her head very steady and rarely blinks, so that one can’t tell if she is very determinedly sticking to a script, or if she has such wonderful gifts of self-persuasion and tunnel vision that she actually believes what she’s saying.

The film which these segments bring most vividly to mind is Robert Altman’s MASH, which is in itself pretty illustrious company for any film to keep. Cradle Will Rock, however, actually surpasses MASH in the sense that Altman’s film was subversive purely due to its adolescent, insouciant, anarchist sensibility. One could not imagine Pierce, McIntyre, and Forrest having a real discussion of ideas any more than one could imagine them donning uniforms and saluting. It’s this, however, that Robbins more or less accomplishes in Cradle Will Rock. The Welles/Houseman segments match MASH for anarchic glee, but have a real, coherent political line to them rather than just a vague anti-everything absurdism. Moreover, Flanagan compounds this by creating an almost exact Henry Blake analogue. The sort of benignly blank-eyed authority figure, whose verbiage may outweigh their acumen but who thankfully is in your corner, is exactly the sort of character that Roger Bowen (and McLean Stevenson on TV) created, and is always a treat to watch when done right.

Ultimately, Cradle Will Rock can’t be called a success because the central helix of Macfadyen/Elwes/Jones takes up too little of the film’s running time. Too much is wasted on digressions that either don’t work or aren’t followed through. Writing William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies into a film about Orson Welles sounds like a no-brainer, but to introduce them and then make nothing at all of it is just absurd. A scene near the end has Hearst and a steel tycoon Gray Mathers discussing how they can set the course of art in the future by patronage. The scene would function perfectly as a set-up for an allusion to how Welles’s first foray into cinema would humiliatingly deflate Hearst’s pretensions, rising inexorably to the top of the canon in spite of the fact that its signature line, “Rosebud,” was Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’s yoni. As it is for this bit, so it is for Cradle Will Rock as a whole – moments of genius, but ultimately a missed opportunity.