Movie Review: Duplicity

Duplicity ***
Directed By: Tony Gilroy.
Written By: Tony Gilroy.
Starring: Clive Owen (Ray Koval), Julia Roberts (Claire Stenwick), Tom Wilkinson (Howard Tully), Paul Giamatti (Richard Garsik), David Shumbris (Turtleneck), Rick Worthy (Dale Raimes), Oleg Shtefanko (Boris Fetyov), Denis O'Hare (Duke Monahan), Kathleen Chalfant (Pam Frailes), Khan Baykal (Dinesh Patel), Thomas McCarthy (Jeff Bauer), Wayne Duvall (Ned Guston).

Duplicity is one of those movies where you cannot trust for a second what you see on the screen. The movie is an intricate puzzle, only gradually doling out all the pieces of information needed to fill in the gaps. These types of movies often infuriate me – as I do not feel that they really play fair with the audience – but this one gets by on the talent and charm of its stars, and the skill of the screenplay and direction by Tony Gilroy. This isn’t going to win any awards, like Gilroy’s debut film Michael Clayton did, but it is a solid entertainer. Sometimes, that’s enough.

The movie is about two spies with a history. When we first meet Ray Koval (Clive Owen) and Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts), he is a MI-6 agent, and she is a CIA-agent who both happen to be in Dubai. They meet, they flirt, they have sex, she drugs him and steals the information he is carrying. We then flash forward several years. They are employed by rival mega-corporations in their internal intelligence division. She is a mole inside one of them, and he is assigned to be her handler. Sparks fly. It seems like the company headed by CEO Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) has just made a major breakthrough of some kind on a product that will revolution something. The company headed by Richard Garsik (Paul Giamatti), wants to know what this product is. This is where Claire and Ray come in. She’s on the insider of Tully’s corporation, and he on Garsik’s. If she can feed the correct information to him, they can all get rich. Of course, there are twists and turns in the plot, and we are never 100% sure on who we can trust. We suspect that half of the people could be double agents, or triple agents, and everything we see and hear may just be all part of a game. Then again, that’s half the fun.

Duplicity takes place in a similar world as Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, although the two films couldn’t be more different in terms of style and tone. Whereas Michael Clayton looked at the rotting cesspool of corporate greed, and created a central character that may come to represent the feelings of many Americans as the financial crisis worsens, Duplicity plays it all as a game. Perhaps the film would be a little more fun without the current crisis – where we have come to realize that many corporations really do play it all as a game, and the losers are always us.

But you can’t really fault the movie for that. It is looking to be an escapist caper film, and at that it works wonderfully well – mainly because of the charm and skill of the two leads. It’s nice to see Clive Owen loosen up again, and allow himself to be more cheerful and charming. This is the first time in I don’t know how long I have seen the man genuinely smile in a movie – and he’s got a killer smile. If the character was an American, George Clooney would undoubtedly play him, and I can think of no higher complement than to say Owen matches Clooney’s immense charm and presence. He fits into this world effortlessly. This is also the exact type of role that Roberts excels at. She struggles when she has to play a “realistic” character, but few are as skilled as she is at the “movie star” type role she has here. Everything about her screams movie star, and she plays this role to pretty much perfection. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who could have done it better. They are backed by a skilled supporting cast – especially both Wilkinson and Giamatti who are not afraid to go wildly over the top and do so with great flourish here. True, nothing in this movie comes remotely close to reality, but you hardly care when you are having so much fun.

The movie would have been better had its third act been better structured. Once we realize what the new product is, we are inevitably disappointed. The product itself should have been kept as a classic McGuffian (the term Hitchcock used to describe something that was vitally important to the plot, that didn’t really matter. Essentially, it doesn’t matter what the product is, it just matters that everyone in the movie wanted it). The film regains a little bit of its magic in the final scene, which is expertly handled, but by then the movie has run out of a little steam. The movie is only 125 minutes long, but it feels longer. Still, it’s hard to complain too much about a movie that gives you as much fun as this one does. No, it’s not a modern classic like Michael Clayton. But it’s still better than most of the other movies out there right now.

Movie Review: Crossing Over

Crossing Over **
Directed By: Wayne Kramer.
Written By: Wayne Kramer.
Starring: Harrison Ford (Max Brogan), Ray Liotta (Cole Frankel), Ashley Judd (Denise Frankel), Jim Sturgess (Gavin Kossef), Cliff Curtis (Hamid Baraheri), Summer Bishil (Taslima Jahangir), Alice Braga (Mireya Sanchez), Alice Eve (Claire Shepard), Jacqueline Obradors (Special Agent Phadkar), Justin Chon (Yong Kim), Melody Khazae (Zahra Baraheri), Merik Tadros (Farid Baraheri), Marshall Manesh (Sanjar Baraheri), Nina Nayebi (Minoo Baraheri), Naila Azad (Rokeya Jahangir), West Liang (Mark), Shelley Malil (Munshi Jahangir), Tim Chiou (Steve), Josh Gad (Howie), Jamen Nanthakumar (Abul Jahangir), Jaysha Patel (Jahanara Jahangir), Aramis Knight (Juan Sanchez), Leonardo Nam (Kwan).

Wayne Kramer’s Crossing Over tries to do for the immigration issue what Paul Haggis’ Crash tried (and to some succeeded) to do for modern day race relations. This is to say, that Kramer’s film tries to look at just about every possible issue and complication with immigration in modern day America. But the film fails. If you thought Crash was heavy handed, you won’t believe what Crossing Over does.

The movie tells multiple story lines, that of course, all intersect. Max Brogan (Harrison Ford) is an Immigration Agent, who feels sorry for one woman he busts at an illegal sweatshop, who is sent back to Mexico. She has a young son, who Brogan picks up and takes back to her parents in Mexico, only to discover that the young woman tried to sneak back into America as soon as she was dropped off, and hasn’t been heard from since. Brogan’s partner is Hamid Baraheri, an Iranian immigrant, whose family is stuck between modern day America, and old world Iran. Hamid’s teenage sister has fully embraced America, and is having an affair with her Mexican boss, which enrages her family. When she and her lover wind up dead, Brogan suspects that the family is involved. Then there is Taslima Jahangir (Summer Bishil), another Muslim immigrant who has lived in America since she was two, but is not an American citizen. When she writes a paper for class asking for understanding of the attackers on 9/11, she is flagged, and the FBI visits her home, and threatens her with deportation. She is a threat to national security. There is Gavin Kossef (Jim Sturgess), a British Jew, who is working at a Jewish School, and trying to get his music career off the ground. He has tried everything to get a Green Card, and failed, so now he’s trying to claim that he is a religious worker. His ex-girlfriend is is Claire Shepard (Alice Eve), an Australian would-be actress in America hoping for her big break. She isn’t allowed to work in America without a Green Card, which she tries to get legally and illegally, but cannot. Then she meets Cole Frankel (Ray Liotta), an officer who decides whose application has merit and whose doesn’t. They strike a deal – for two months, Claire will sleep with Cole whenever he calls, and in return, she’ll get a Green Card. Cole’s wife, Denise (Ashley Judd), works the other side as an immigration defense lawyer, who is trying to find an adoptive home for an African child, and thinks that perhaps she should do it. She also, coincidently, is the lawyer defending Taslima. Finally, there is Yong Kim (Justin Chon), a Korean immigrant teenager, who is about to be naturalized, but still hates his adopted country. He finds comfort in a gang, which lead him down a dangerous path.

If Kramer had tried to tackle just one or two of these storylines, he may have had a good movie. But by trying to tackle them all at once, he hasn’t given any of them the proper amount of time to develop into fully felt stories, with characters we like or are interested in. At just over two hours, the movie feels packed to the breaking point. What’s worse is that he doesn’t even seem to know which his strongest stories are. Why we spend so much time with Claire and her problems, along with Gavin, I have no idea, as they are not very interesting characters, and their stories lack the dramatic heft of the others. What’s worse is they seem to essentially tackle the same issue. And really, I think he could have folded the two Muslim storylines into one, and made a much more cohesive statement. As it stands, Taslima, who has a dramatic story, is shunted off to the background. We barely even see Ashley Judd and the African child she wants to adopt, and Yong Kim is similarly absent for long stretches at a time. If you are going to introduce complex issues, like the ones raised in the film, you need to fully deal with them. This film doesn’t.

Say what you want to about Crash, but it was at least able to plaster over some of its flaws with superb acting from an excellent cast. Although Kramer has assembled what appears to be a good cast here, they cannot save him. Harrison Ford appears to be bored in much of the movie. He almost seems to try and growl like Clint Eastwood at times. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Ford is so ineffective in a dramatic role here – after all, when was the last time he actually challenged himself as an actor? Liotta can play creepy in his sleep, and sadly, that appears to be what he is doing here. He is supposed to have a couple of highly dramatic scenes, but they all fall flat. Jim Sturgess is charming, sure, as Gavin, but I’m starting to think he only has one character in him. Newcomer Alice Eve certainly is gorgeous, and the camera loves her as Claire, but she is saddled with a character that doesn’t have much to do. Talented actors like Judd and Bishill are criminally underused, and most of the other actors never get a chance to show what they can do. The only one who leaves a lasting impression is Cliff Curtis, who makes us feel for his rather clichéd character – the man torn between his old country and his new one. We’ve seen this before, but somehow Curtis makes it feel a little more real.

Kramer is a talented writer/director, who after three films, I still feel I can’t get a handle on. His first film, The Cooler, was an excellent comedy/drama about a man with perpetual bad luck (William H. Macy) who is used by his casino owner boss (a wonderful Alec Baldwin, who finally received an Oscar nomination for his work) to bring bad luck to guys on a hot streak. His second film, Running Scared, was a bloody, grisly, disturbing, violent action film – one of the best of its kind this decade. And now Crossing Over is a more earnest drama that tries to look at a complex issue in 2 hours. It is Kramer’s bad luck that what probably seemed timely when it was written and film, has now become somewhat passé (seriously, does anyone but Lou Dobbs still give a crap about immigration with the financial crisis at the moment?), but nothing can forgive scenes of such heavy handedness like the climax at the naturalization ceremony, where most of the stories come to a head. There is very little about this movie that actually works. In isolated moments, we see what this film could have been had Kramer pared it down to its essentials, but overall the film is a mess.

Movie Review: Polytechnique

Polytechnique *** 1/2
Directed By: Denis Villeneuve.
Written By: Jacques Davidts.
Starring: Maxim Gaudette (The Assassin), Sébastien Huberdeau (Jean-François), Karine Vanasse (Valérie), Evelyne Brochu (Stéphanie).

When used properly, there can be few sounds in the movies more jolting then a gunshot. In most action movies, hundreds if not thousands, of rounds of ammunition are expended, and we don’t feel a thing. That’s because the sound of the gunshots, for the most part, is turned down. The people being shot are meaningless bad guys. But in Polytechnique, each gunshot we hear is terrifying. From the opening scene which is simply a young woman using a photocopier, until we hear a booming gunshot off screen and see the woman’s chest explode, each gunshot we see and hear in Polytechnique hurts. When the bullet makes contact with flesh and bone, we feel the pain, and watch in stricken horror. This is what it is like to be shot.

On December 6th, 1989, a lone gunman walked into Montreal’s École Polytechnique with a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle and went from classroom to classroom to library to cafeteria and opened fired. In all, he killed 14 people, and injured 14 others, before turning the gun on himself. Apparently the shooter was angry with feminists, who he blamed for ruining his life, and so he targeted women in the school. Of the 28 people he shot, 24 of them were women. All of the people killed were women. The new film by Denis Villeneuve tells the story of what happened that day.

The movie never gives the name of the shooter, and so neither will I. It portrays him as a sad, lonely, pathetic young man who seems incapable of dealing with anyone on a normal level. We’ve seen these types of characters in movies before, and we’ve probably known some in real life as well. If he had turned his rage solely inward, and simply killed himself, it would be a tragic story, but one that everyone forgot about pretty quickly. But because he decided to turn his rage outward, and specifically targeted women, the event he caused has become infamous in Canada. Every December 6th is the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, because of him.

The movie is not an in-depth character study of the shooter, or anyone else for that matter. It simply tries to recreate what happened that day. We get a voiceover early in the film of the shooter reading part of his suicide note, and that is about all. He is angry with women, so he takes out his rage, as simple as that.

But the movie is not quite that simple. Villeneuve flashes between the stories of three students, only one of them being the killer. Another is Valerie (Karine Vanasse), a woman in the mechanical engineering faculty, who is applying for an internship, and has a professor state that it’s strange to have a woman applying for the position. Normally, they go with commercial engineering, because it’s easier. Although this man and the shooter are vastly different, they have both generalized women.

The other character is another male student, and a friend of Valerie’s. He’s there when the shooter bursts into the first classroom, orders all the men out, and then opens fire on the women (including Valerie). The guilt he feels for not doing something more to stop the shooting, even though there was nothing he really could do, devastates him.

In some ways, Villenueve’s film is not all that different from Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, which fictionalized the Columbine Massacre, without judgment or without giving reasons for the attack. It simply looks at the pointlessness of it all. Shot in stark black and white (perhaps for the same reason why Scorsese shot Raging Bull in black and white – as all the blood would be too much to take in color), the movie draws you in from the first scene, and keeps you glued to your seat horrified for the next 76 minutes (it is a very short film).


But Villenueve’s film differs from Van Sant’s in one crucial way – and the difference is what makes Elephant a great film, and Polytechnique merely a very good one. In the film’s closing scenes, Villeneuve flashes forward and gives us the story of one of the survivor’s years later, as she is pregnant with her first child, and writes a note to the shooter’s mother. This voiceover tries to give meaning to everything that went before it – tries to give the audience some sense of comfort at the end of the film. And it strikes exactly the wrong note. Van Sant’s film provides no such easy moralizing or comfort, and as such it is haunting. Almost six years after I’ve seen, it still comes to mind. Polytechnique, while being a good film, shouldn’t have looked for meaning in an event that had no meaning. The shooter hated women, and took out his rage on them. And while we should never forget that, as I think the movie makes chillingly clear, there are some things that have no easy answer. This is one of those things.

Movie Review: Pontypool

Pontypool *** ½
Directed by: Bruce McDonald
Written By: Tony Burgess based on his book.
Starring: Stephen McHattie (Grant Mazzy), Lisa Houle (Sydney Briar), Georgina Reilly (Laurel Ann), Hrant Alianak (Dr. Mendez), Rick Roberts (Ken Loney).

For a film where a disease causes mass groups of people to brutally kill each other on the streets of small town Ontario, Pontypool is a strangely plausible film. Perhaps that’s because it never ventures outside of it’s one and only location – the basement of church that houses the studio for the town’s radio station. The reports that come in from around town are shocking, and hard to believe. And since the characters in the film never get to see precisely what is happening outside their walls, neither do we. It all seems so unreal.

Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) was, we gather, once a big time radio host. Now, he’s little more than a drunk, still going on the air to piss people off, but now he’s stuck in the small Ontario town of Pontypool, where no one seems to much care what he has to say. He doesn’t care that no one cares – he keeps right on saying whatever he wants anyway. He spends his mornings with his producer Sydney (Lisa Houle) and their tech guru Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly), recently back from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, reporting on school closures and local plays, and occasionally checking in with Ken in the “Sunshine Chopper” for traffic updates. It is all so perfectly boring.

But then bizarre reports start coming in. A riot seems to have broken out at the offices of Dr. Mendez, but no one seems clear as to why. The get some eyewitness accounts, but nothing official from the police or anyone else. Ken Loney reports that he is trapped in a silo, and people keep marching past chanting something. And the dead are everywhere. The BBC calls the radio station to find out what is going on. Does this have something to do with Canada’s history of separatist terrorist threats? Why are French Canadian riot police blockading the town? And why are they delivering cryptic messages, all in French, about the danger of speaking to their loved ones, with a warning not to translate the warning into English?

Pontypool is fascinating because of what we don’t see, not because of what we do see. We hear the reports of the rampaging violence, but we never actually see it. We hear muffled screams and chanting at times, but we never see people ripping each other apart. The film is almost a chamber piece, with only a few characters interacting with each other on a small set. That makes the performances all the more important, and the three main actors couldn’t be better. Stephen McHattie is something of a Canadian institution at this point. Maybe not as well known as Gordon Pinsett, but just about as good, McHattie has appeared in everything from Emily of New Moon to Watchmen, from Seinfeld to A History of Violence. Here, as a loudmouth DJ, we think we know what kind of performance he’s going to give, but McHattie constantly surprises us. Yes, he is a larger than life presence, but as the film progresses, he becomes more and more interesting. Houle and Reilly are more than up for the task of matching him every step of the way.

Director Bruce McDonald always makes interesting films. Sometimes, he may go a little too far in stylistic excess (as in his last film, the still good The Tracey Fragments), but I’m not sure if he’s truly capable of making a boring film. Yes, he works of Degrassi: The Next Generation, and pretty much every other Canadian show in history (although, sadly, not Corner Gas – I would have loved to see what McDonald would do with the residents of Dog River), but he does that so he can get his movies made. He is one of the most interesting directors working in Canada right now. Who else would make what essentially amounts to a zombie film, where the cause is the English language and understanding itself? What a fascinating concept for a movie. The amazing part is that McDonald actually pulls it off. Pontypool is a wonderful little film.

DVD Review: David Cronenberg's Crash

Crash (1996) ****
Directed By: David Cronenberg.
Written By: David Cronenberg based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.
Starring: James Spader (James Ballard), Holly Hunter (Helen Remington), Elias Koteas (Vaughan), Deborah Kara Unger (Catherine Ballard), Rosanna Arquette (Gabrielle), Peter MacNeill (Colin Seagrave).

I’m not sure that I think can think of another movie that contains as much sex as David Cronenberg’s Crash and yet is so completely devoid of eroticism. That’s not a criticism - it’s a complement. One of the main problems with movies that seek to seriously explore human sexuality is that the sex gets in the way. There is something about watching beautiful people having sex on film that distracts from whatever serious intentions the filmmakers may have. But Cronenberg avoids that trap in Crash, by making the sex so cold and clinical, and so un-erotic to any audience member who doesn’t share the characters fetishes, that are we are free to concentrate on what the sex in the movie actually means.

The characters in the movie are hollow and empty. Long before the action of the movie begins, the characters have become emotionally dead. It is no mistake that we meet the Ballards, a married couple, separately, yet both engaged in sex. She is having sex in an airplane hangar with some random person, he in a camera room with one of his assistants. They come home and compare notes about their sexual exploits, and then have sex with each other. What you will immediately notice is that neither of them seems to be enjoying the sex - either with their random partners or with each other (and, that from the beginning of the film, Cronenberg is linking together sex and technology, but we’ll get back to that later). The Ballards are bored, not just in their sex life, but in all facets of their lives. There is obviously some sort of love between them, because they are staying together, but we don’t really see it. Maybe they’re just together because it’s easier than being apart.

Things change, at least for James (James Spader), when he is involved in a traffic accident. He gets distracted, jumps the median and ends up heading the wrong way down the street where he collides head on with another car. He and the driver of the other car, Helen Remington (Holly Hunter) are injured, but they’ll live, but Helen’s husband ends up going through both windshields, and dies bleeding onto James’ floor. The two will have a tense meeting in the hospital, both of them riddled with scars and limping around on crutches or canes, but it isn’t until the meet in the car graveyard, where their mangled cars have been destroyed. “In find myself driving again” James says, even though he complains that the number of cars on the road have increased since the accident. He and Helen drive away, and end up having quick, dirty sex in James’ car, which is the same color, make and model as the one that was involved in the accident.

This is when Helen introduces James to Vaughn (Elias Koteas). Vaughn is obsessed with car accidents, and the damage they do – both to the cars themselves, and the human body – and he leads a small, exclusive group of people who are sexually aroused by them. He re-stages famous accidents, like the one that killed James Dean. He lives with a woman, Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), whose legs have been horribly disfigured by an accident. They are being held together by braces. They accident has created some new orifices on her legs, that she and others, explore sexually (like the “portals” that are drilled into the backs of the characters of Cronenberg’s next film eXistenZ, Arquette’s wounds are both sickening real, and somehow erotic – they look very much like a vagina, and hence why they are penetrated).

Vaughn is probably the most Cronenberg-ian character in the film (is that the correct phrase?). Like the twin gynecologists played by Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers or Jeff Goldblum’s science geek in The Fly, he is essentially a mad scientist character, recreating everything in his own image. Sex, death, love, God all of them, in the form that most of us conceive them, has become meaningless for him. So he seeks out answers in another form, and they end up taking the perverse form we see in the movie. Physiology and technology are linked very closely in the movie. The changes that happen to both the cars, and the humans inside those cars, when an accident occurs are mirror images of each other. The cars become crumpled and bent, somehow broken like humans, whereas the human become harder and colder, more like the machines. This group of people has perverted it all in the search of answers. That they fail in undeniable, unless of course you think that they have found something that works for them. Obviously James and Catherine had problems at the start of the movie – we see them involved in separate perversity by fucking other people, and then describing it to each other. By the end of the film, they are just as perverse, or even more so, but they are connected again. They now share a perversity, rather than keeping it separately. This is probably as close as you can come to a “happy ending” for this story. Their marriage, will in fact survive, in this new perverse form, until of course, their fetish kills them.

I said at the beginning of this review that characters in the film are hollow and empty. Normally when I use that phrase in regards to movie characters, it is meant as an insult. But that isn’t the case here. These characters are supposed to be hollow and empty. Like characters in an Antonioni film, they walk through their lives unfeeling and uncaring. The fetish brings them to life in a way they were not before. They are no longer hollow and empty by the end of the film. They most likely aren’t going to live much longer, but at least temporarily they have found the answer they are looking for.

The performances in the movie are surprising effective, especially when you consider how internal most of the characters are. Spader has always struck me as a bit of a pervert anyway, and he makes James into almost a blank slate, completely driven by his desires as the film progresses. Hunter, one of the few major actresses who would even consider a movie like this, is quietly effective as the woman who eggs James on. Koteas is all raging id in the film, the most supremely confident in all that he does. He almost takes on the air of a cult leader. But the key performance in the film is by Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine. She remains an outsider to the group for most of the movie. She always appears to be looking away from James, not out of disgust, but because of something far different. She tries to join him in his quest, and valiantly tries, but I'm not quite sure she can. Even in the films last scene, after she has "her" accident, she still doesn't really seem to be drawn into it with James. She is the films most complex character.

Cronenberg has moved on from Crash, and in recent years has directed two much more mainstream films in A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. Both of those films are great (in fact, A History of Violence was my favorite film of 2005). Recently, it was announced that Cronenberg plans to direct Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington in an adaptation of a Robert Ludlum novel. Although both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises still show a Cronenberg-ian flair (both easily fit into his filmography, and confirm his auteur status), and I have faith that the new film will as well, I hope at some point Cronenberg returns to the type of filmmaking on display in Crash. Many people could direct a great spy thriller, but only Cronenberg could direct Crash.

DVD Views: Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) ****
Directed by: Arthur Penn
Written By: David Newman & Robert Benton.
Starrng: Warren Beatty (Clyde Barrow), Faye Dunaway (Bonnie Parker), Gene Hackman (Buck Barrow), Estelle Parsons (Blanche), Michael J. Pollard (C.W. Moss), Denver Pyle (Frank Hamer), Dub Taylor (Ivan Moss), Gene Wilder (Eugene Grizzard), Evans Evans (Velma Davis), Mabel Cavitt (Bonnie's mother).

I’m not sure how many times I watched Bonnie and Clyde as a young teenager. Probably at least five and perhaps twice as many as that. From the time I was around 12 or 13, I showed an interest in movies. My mother, much to her credit, decided to start showing me some older films that she had liked as teenager. I think the logic of showing me something like Bonnie and Clyde was to try and keep me away from some of the more modern, even more violent films that were coming out around that time (Natural Born Killers for example). Well, she failed, but I will always appreciate the fact that she got me started.

As a teenager, I was drawn to Bonnie and Clyde for several reasons. The first time I watched it, I remember sitting there waiting for the ending, which I had been promised was the among the most violent in cinema history. Yet, I was drawn to the film time and again because of something else. Yes, I enjoyed the violence in the movie. I enjoyed the fact that these were outlaws, and yet they were young and sexy, and that you felt genuine sadness at the end of the film when they died. But there was something else that kept me coming back. When the 40th Anniversary DVD came out, I naturally bought it, and yet it was only recently that I actually sat down and watched the film again – probably for the first time in 10 years. I found that the intervening years changed my perspective on Bonnie and Clyde, and yet my appreciation for the film had not diminished. It is now, as it was then, one of the best American films ever made.

The opening scenes of the movie are still as much fun as I remembered them to be. From the moment we see Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway), for the first time, lounging around her bedroom naked we are drawn into the movie. As a teenager, I was mystified by the strange camera angles, editing and zooms being used in this scene (this, of course, being before I had ever heard of Francois Truffaut or Jean Luc Godard, let alone seen their films), but it seemed new and exciting at the time. Now, it’s not so new, but it’s just as exciting. We meet Clyde (Warren Beatty) at the same time Bonnie does, starring down from her window, still naked, as he stalks around the car parked outside. From the moment she says “Hey, boy. What you doin’ around my mama’s car?” and he Beatty smiles that knowing smile, we feel that sexual energy between the two of them, and we are hooked.

The film’s first half is a rollicking ride. The pair plan and carry out a series of robberies that are almost a comedy of errors. They show up at one bank and Clyde discovers that it shut down the week before, so he drags the lowly bank manager outside to explain it to Bonnie, so he’s not humiliated. They rob a grocery store, and a huge hulking man attacks Clyde with a meat clever, before Clyde pistol whips him and takes off. There is a comic edge to each of the films violent scenes in this half. The comedic edge to the film gets greater when the pair hook up with C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), a kid with a slightly off centered smile who idolizes Clyde, and nurtures a crush on Bonnie. Finally they hook up with Clyde’s boisterous brother Buck (Gene Hackman) and his shrill wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons). The films mixture of violence and comedy reaches its apex when the police raid a house where they’re all staying and Blanche runs out into gunfire shrieking and waving a spatula around.

If you were to pinpoint a moment where the action in the film goes from light to dark, its scene where the gang kidnap a young couple (Gene Wilder and Evans Evans). At first, the young couple is scared, but soon they loosen up and are laughing and joking right alongside the gang (Wilder, who was funny in many films, may never have been better than he was in what amounts to a mere cameo here). The scene, and the movie, suddenly shifts gears when Wilder reveals what he does for a living – he’s an undertaker. Into this happy little “family” comes darkness, as Bonnie seems to realize that they are doomed – there is only one way for this to end – death.

The following two scenes are among the films best. Bonnie takes off one morning through a cornfield, and Clyde chases after her. Seen in a high angle shot, the shadows of the clouds sweep across the cornfield, placing Bonnie and Clyde in darkness. This shot, one of the most famous in the movie, was an accident, but it perfectly captures the mood of the film. The scene that follows, a family reunion of sorts with Bonnie’s family, is shot with a slight haze on the film, giving it a dreamlike quality. As Clyde tries to lie to Bonnie’s mother, about giving up the life and finding a small house within a few miles of her, she replies honestly with “If you try to live within three miles of me, you won’t live very long”. The mood of the film has now clearly shifted, and each scene that follows leads inextricably towards the death of Bonnie and Clyde.

The death scene in the film is among the most famous in any film ever made. Bonnie and Clyde are gunned down in a hail of gunfire that lasts almost 30 seconds. Each of them has dozens of gunshots explode through them, Clyde has part of his scalp ripped off, and they fall motionless in a bloody heap on the ground. At the time, this scene was shocking, not least because of the way it was edited – almost 60 different cuts are made in that time. Now, with rapid editing that makes even this scene seem slow, and violence like this being included in lots of films, it doesn’t shock in the same way it once did to audiences in 1967. What it does do however is end the movie on a tragic note. We still feel for Bonnie and Clyde as they slump to the ground, bloody messes. We still don’t want them to die, even if we realize that they must. Director Arthur Penn does something interesting after the gunfire stops – he doesn’t pull out and survey the entirety of the scene – instead he simply shows Bonnie and Clyde’s killers emerging from the bush and looking at what they did. There seems to be no joy in their faces as they do this, even though this was their goal all along.

When the movie came out in 1967, it was shocking to audiences, and embraced by young moviegoers, who saw Bonnie and Clyde as stand-ins for their generation. They rejected the long held notions of the generations before them, and so did Bonnie and Clyde – who essentially give the finger to “the man” throughout the movie. That the film is not historically accurate isn’t the point, is it? In short, who cares? This movie isn’t about the real Bonnie and Clyde, but about the characters of Bonnie and Clyde in the movie.

But the movie wouldn’t have lasted this long if the only thing remarkable about it was the violence, and the element of ‘60’s youth rebellion in the film. What makes Bonnie and Clyde still powerful is the fact the film takes its time to set up the characters, to get to know them, to sympathize with them, and draw out the connections. Theirs is not a love that is based on sex – Clyde is impotent after all, and the two only once actually manage to do it – but rather a deeper connection. For her, Clyde was a way out of her boring life in Texas – her escape from becoming just another bored housewife. For him, Bonnie made everything mean something. For the first time, he starts to care about something outside of himself. I still may not be 100% sure of what intrinsic quality the movie has that keeps me coming back to it, but I do know that the film is a true masterpiece. Few films in history can match it.

God and the Cinema Part II: 2001: A Space Odyssey and A.I.

In my second post on this subject, I decided to concentrate on not one director but two – Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. The reason for this is mainly, I wanted to talk about two films – Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Spielberg’s A.I., which is a project of course that Kubrick initiated before handing over to Spielberg.

2001: A Space Odyssey is quite clearly an atheist film, even if it did make Pope John Paul II’s list of the most “spiritual” films ever made. To read God in Kubrick’s film requires an almost deliberate misreading of the film itself. It opens with Apes, who are drawn to a black monolith on earth. They then learn how to use tools, and use them to savagely attack one another. Kubrick then flashes forward millions of years into the 21st century, when the apes have now evolved into human beings capable of space travel. It is quite clear: the story of humanity is not how far we have fallen since Adam and Eve, but of how far we have advanced since the time of apes.

The movie is all about humans and their tools. From the bones the apes first use to the space ships the astronauts use, to even HAL 9000, who is in effect, the ultimate tool. HAL was built by man in his own image, but HAL is even smarter than his creators. Or perhaps smarter is wrong word, but he is certainly more logical. That is why HAL can mercilessly kill off the astronauts, or tries to stop them from shutting him down. In his own view HAL is the most important “member” of the crew, and therefore, his own existence takes precedence over everyone else. That HAL eventually has to be “killed” could easily be seen as Kubrick’s way of saying that humanity will likely have to suffer a similar fate.

When, at the end of the film, the lone surviving astronaut Dave becomes the so called “Star Child”, it does not represent anything truly religious, but rather it is simply the next step in the evolutionary progress. Are we so naïve, or egotistical, to believe that organisms went through billions of years of evolution solely to produce us? That we are the most advanced being that has ever existed, and ever will exist. The monoliths are placed on the Earth, and then moon pointing us out past Jupiter, by someone or something that is more advanced then we are. You want to believe it’s God, then go right ahead. I can’t argue with that reasoning, although I do think you’d be deluding yourself to think that was either Arthur C. Clarke’s (who wrote the novel) or Stanley Kubrick’s point of view. The end of the movie brings us full circle right back to the beginning again. When the film opened, the Apes did not have tools, and in a way they did not need them. They lived on earth without them. Now, David has evolved into another being that once again does not need his tools. The movie’s ending is really not The End, but rather, it is a New Beginning.

I could go on about 2001, which is after all one of the greatest films in history, but now I think it’s time to move on to Steven Spielberg’s A.I. To many, the film was a disappointment. Spielberg fans found it too pessimistic. Kubrick fans complained that Spielberg had softened the movie, particularly the ending, from what Kubrick undoubtedly would have done had he made the film. To that I say “Are you fucking kidding me!!!???” In many ways, A.I. has more in common with Kubrick’s films than with Spielberg’s, so if you’re more of a Spielberg person, I can at least understand why you didn’t enjoy the film.

A.I. essentially takes the Pinocchio story, and turns it on its head. In the original story, Gepetto represents the benevolent creator God that religious people like to comfort themselves with. He creates Pinocchio, and loves him even when he makes mistakes. He gives him life, but also gives him free will.

In A.I., the Gepetto role is essentially played by William Hurt, as Professor Hobby. His motives for creating David may be similar to Gepetto’s, but somewhere along the way they become colder – almost clinical. He creates the robots to love humans, to make their life easier, without thinking about his own creation. At one point he says “Didn’t God create Adam to love him?” If Gepetto represented the God who loves us, then Professor Hobby is the God who created us simply because he could.

A.I. and 2001 actually have quite a few things in common. Both are clearly evolution tales, albeit of a different stripe. When the end of A.I. comes, it like the ending of 2001, represents the next stage in the evolutionary progress. The difference being that at the end of A.I. it is no longer humans that are evolving, but rather it is the robots. If Kubrick thought in 2001 that the death of humanity was inevitability – that in order to progress humans first had to die – than A.I. takes an even darker look – humanity will die out, and our only legacy will be what we created. For the robots who come and rescue David at the end of A.I. from his watery grave where he spends thousands of years praying to the Blue Fairy to make him into a real boy (which, foolishly, is where people thought this movie should end, because it would somehow be darker, more Kubrick-ian ending, for a robot to spend eternity under water then for the entire human race to be wiped off the face of the planet), David represents their only link to humanity. The robots have evolved so much that they no longer remembered who it was who first created them. Generations of robots have been created by other robots, who eventually lost the knowledge of how they came into existence in the first place. Spielberg, wisely, never explains why humans became extinct. Natural disasters, disease, pestilence, nuclear annihilation, global warming could have all been the cause. Or perhaps, like HAL in 2001, the robots came to the conclusion, that they were more important for the planet, and wiped the humans out (whatever the reason, it is clear that earth has gone through some sort of climate change in the past 2,000 years, as David goes into the water, and comes out ice).

Both films share a preoccupation with mankind and their tools. From the bones, and the spaceships and HAL in 2001 that were covered earlier, to all the robots in A.I. What is Gigolo Joe for example, except for a thinking, feeling man shaped vibrator? And David himself is a tool that allows people to be parents when they otherwise could not be. Where the two differ, is that in 2001, the humans evolve beyond the use of their tools, whereas in A.I., humans are essentially replaced by them. Why does the world need the imperfect humans, when it has the perfect robots, after all? A.I. also takes a much more pessimistic view of humanity than 2001 did. The humans in Speilberg’s film are cruel, thoughtless monsters. This is something Spielberg continued to explore in subsequent films like Minority Report (another film with a misunderstood ending), Munich and the much undervalued War of the Worlds, which in part, sought to dispel the notion that in tough times, humanity pulls together. It is no wonder that some people consider Spielberg to be just as much as an atheist director as Kubrick.

2001 also more explicitly rejects the idea of God. For Kubrick, God is just another word for human ignorance – if you cannot explain it, it must be God. Spielberg’s film, for all its darkness and pessimism never goes that far (hell, for we all know, humanity was wiped out by the Rapture!).

But why I decided to include these two films in this series is simple – both reflect a world that is devoid of God. For Kubrick, it is because God emphatically never existed in the first place. For Spielberg, it could just be that humanity has essentially replaced God with themselves. For a torture agnostic like me, that makes both films endlessly fascinating.