Can We Pity the Dreamers While Despising Their Dreams?

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adaptations, baz luhrmann, film, reviews

The Great Gatsby
Baz Luhrmann
Warner Bros.

All great national novels are about failure. They have to be: Any attempt to describe a nation-state’s ideals without incorporating the folly of its myriad, competing realities cries out for ruination–if not from within, at least from without. So it is that a character like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby can seize a fragment of the American dream–the conviction that a man who owns nothing might through industry live to inherit the world–hold it too tightly, and lose all.

Yes, that was a spoiler. In the case of The Great Gatsby going without seems almost preposterous–like reviewing Titanic without suggesting the ship goes down at the end. But I will say this much: This review is not about fealty to the book, although I got the distinct impression while watching the film that director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge, Romeo + Juliet) understood how very much the major turns in his story arise first and foremost from the cadence of the written word. Why else would Luhrmann return with such frequency to scenes from his frame narrative, which has narrator Nick Carraway writing The Great Gatsby while describing it to his therapist? Why else, too, would Luhrmann allow CGI words to supplant visuals and subsume music when approaching some of the most iconic lines in Fitzgerald’s text? Simply put, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby oozes internal crisis, and by cleaving so much to the source material, at times the film has no choice but to defer.

Like the book, too, this film is emphatically a lament, a eulogy–and ascertaining precisely what it strives to eulogize is a better route to evaluating its success than mere comparison with the source text.

To this end, we are given to understand that Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) is a not-exactly-rich man (though from monied stock) broken by the experiences he bears witness to one frenetic summer in Long Island, New York. There, in a modest cottage on West Egg, he neighbours the most extravagant home of the “nouveau riche”, a palatial estate owned by the elusive Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), and swarmed every weekend by city folk eager to bask in the excesses of wealth on prominent (yea, even blatantly phallic) display.

Across the water, on East Egg, lives Nick’s cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), a “golden girl” married to a blatantly racist, philandering millionnaire (also of old money) named Tom Buchanan. As befits the times, Tom (Joel Edgerton) gets away with his racist commentary, and his philandering (and his egregious moustache, I might add), for Nick is no proactive interloper, but rather a watcher of surrounding events whose first articulated moral qualm with proceedings arises when it seems Gatsby has been gradually befriending him in the hopes of an opportunity to have tea with Daisy.

Such cultural double standards make bold and routine appearances in much of Luhrmann’s employment of Fitzgerald’s source material, and in conjunction with his choice to use decidedly contemporary music (rap, chamber pop, recent jazz re-workings of classic material), the reviewer may well wonder how much we both can and should take the socioeconomic hypocrisies of the 1920s as having direct correlates with hypocrisies today.

Whatever the answer, Daisy is offered no simple choice between two men. Rather, she’s made to choose between continuing a marriage with a man who was sleeping with another woman the day their daughter was born, and living with a man whose only request of her is that she completely recant ever having loved the man she married. An act of violence at one man’s hands brings about her ultimate decision–but it, too, is a conflicted moment for Luhrmann’s viewers, who at this juncture already know the other man, for all his talk of superior bloodlines, is also capable of brute force.

Similarly, while Tom’s regular lover remains a secondary character in this film, trapped in a lurid middle kingdom of the impoverished and downtrodden coal miners at a pit-stop between Long Island and the Big Apple, Luhrmann also takes a critical opportunity (through musical accompaniment as much as through visual attention) to align our sympathy at a vital moment with her.

And then, of course, there’s Gatsby: Gatsby, who believes himself a child of God in the most blessed of senses–a streak of cosmic brilliance destined to hurl ever upwards or else not at all. In his recollection of the past, he perceives that choosing to love Daisy was an act of choosing to inherit less than his full entitlement of the heavens. Even though a powerful vein of post-WWI PTSD ever lingers as a possible reason for his obsessive tendencies, how much are we really to sympathize with him in making all his future aspirations rely on another person’s complete concession of personal experience to his vision of her at that one, precious moment five years past?

Indeed, can we really sympathize with anyone in this world of big talk and fast riches? Does even our narrator, for all that we see he has been laid low with depression after the events that unfold that one extravagant summer, deserve our sympathy for being shocked–utterly shocked!–at the callousness and the cruelty of the company he keeps, after what we viewers are given to make of their deeply flawed characters from the start?

Certainly, Baz Luhrmann lines this adaptation with the kind of visual spectacles well befitting the circus-like excesses of the rich, the gaudiness of the urban working class, and the oppressive squalor of the abject rural poor. But as Nick stresses (over and over) that Gatsby was the most hopeful human being he had ever known, and ever would again, he (at least through Luhrmann’s directorial lens) hardly makes the point that this kind of hope was worth having or aspiring towards in the first place.

As many in the Occupy Wall Street movement just a few years back were not protesting the injustice and disparity of existing social structures, so much as the fact that they had not been given the opportunities they desired to come out on top of it, so too might Nick be said to be reaching for a green light on a distant shore that we should all have put out of mind… a long, long time ago. For a film expressly cautioning against living in the past, it’s difficult to tell how much Luhrmann’s opulent retelling of The Great Gatsby nevertheless relies on the hope that we will.

Familiarity as Filmic Virtue and Curse

Tags

film, genre conventions, genre fiction, science fiction

Oblivion
Joseph Kosinski
Universal

I came into this film having heard nothing but middling reviews: Great visuals! Predictable plot! Lousy script! And so forth. Consequently, my expectations were perhaps just low enough to appreciate the film for what it was: an action scifi. But to my pleasant surprise Oblivion was a more intelligent variation therein than I had imagined–and certainly, I don’t think enough credit was given this film for its self-awareness of scifi films come before. It’s this latter point that continues to interest me.

Cultural standards seem different, that is, for a scifi film and, say, a relationship drama. In the latter, if a disaffected male person wanders from a difficult romantic entanglement, goes on figurative or literal walkabout trying to figure out what it all means, and encounters a quirky female person who aggravates and unsettles him but ultimately makes him whole again, these moves are considered predictable conventions of the genre–interesting when subverted, but stable enough to be tangential to your viewing experience. The conventions don’t matter so much as what’s done with them.

The same does not seem to hold, though, for scifi, where the expectation of innovation is immense–and certainly, played upon by film producers themselves. I wonder, though, if this is necessarily going to have to change as more and more Hollywood output seems to hold to scifi/spec/scifantasy premises. Surely at some point we’re going to have to accept that certain plot devices are standard to the genre, and what matters more is how they’re used?

Oblivion, for instance, seems extremely cognizant of the traditions on which it was built. Following a two-person clean-up crew on a world shattered by a decades-long war with an alien race identified as the “Scavs”, the film opens with protagonist Jack (Tom Cruise) explaining a mandatory memory wipe five years back, and its relationship to dreams he is convinced are more than dreams. There is no intended trick, then, in his later discovery that these dreams are in fact predicated on a real memory, and that the memory wipe itself is not a good thing. Rather, these narrative outcomes are promised at the outset–an obvious incongruity that should immediately frame the expectations of viewers not to trust anything Jack takes as truth.

And yet some folks were disappointed that the memory wipe / lost memories arc is predictable? I’d argue that the writing of this film does not try to sell it as anything more grandiose; we’re in a position of dramatic irony when Jack informs us of his memory wipe, and we know then that this story is about Jack ascertaining (and fleshing out) what we already understand in theory. Oedipus Rex is by this same metric a “predictable” play, as original audiences would have already known at the outset what Oedipus takes the whole damn production to figure out–but such criticism would entirely miss the play’s point.

I saw mindful resonance, too, of quite a few scifi works in Oblivion: “Sally” (Melissa Leo), the voice greeting Jack’s mission partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), should alert scifi viewers to Clarke’s SAL-9000 (from 2010), while the glowing red eye of drone bots (their very shape inspired, perhaps, by the Portal games?) should at least invoke 2001: A Space Odyssey for the general public. Jack being a lone maintenance worker on the planet’s surface, his nurturing of a flower smacks of WALL-E, while developments in his plot-line anticipate an audience familiar enough with works like Moon that the writing decidedly does not attempt to over-explain what’s happening. The human underworld promised by previews for this film (with Morgan Freeman as Beech) also invokes any number of dystopian/resistance societies (the bread-and-butter of countless scifi works), and of course, the ultimate plot device has many express correlates to Independence Day.

This is not to suggest that Oblivion is intended, either, as mere homage; it simply seems to be constructed in such a way that telegraphs to its viewers how mindful it is of its diverse scifi heritage. The plot devices and narrative crises in this film are in many ways a fairly coherent synthesis of scifi themes come before, so the pleasure arises in the variations this script brings to one and the same.

The drones in this film, for instance, are given a surprising amount of personality; we’re invited to spend multiple occasions actively wondering what the drones will do, and they’re constructed in such a way that makes their mood very clear from the positions of their “arms”. Moreover, when they’re put to combat purposes, they utilize a number of moves machines-with-guns in films rarely (if ever) do to win fights.

Fights in general in this film are intelligently constructed (a couple disorienting CGI location switches notwithstanding): Jack does not get easy wins, and incurs a lot of damage. There are no laughable shots, as with Looper, of people trying to shoot at close range and repeatedly missing. This is the kind of choreography, rather, that one should expect after Cruise’s long legacy in prominent action series. Even the final “fight”, a battle of wills that must be plausibly won by the human component, offers a reasonable risk of failure and relies on a judicious use of dialogue.

I was also left to wonder how much Oblivion might have been playing, quite consciously, on a kind of 1950s domesticity through its first third, where long shots of Jack and Victoria’s home in the clouds expressly situate Jack as the man-who-goes-to-work, Victoria as the woman-who-stays-home, and the whole situation as both idyllic and a direct threat to Jack’s individualism, his basic humanity. Certainly, for a time, the film invites viewers to be suspicious of Victoria (when really, they should just be suspicious of a giant pool in the sky, emptied and replenished at leisure in a time of water rations?), and I was worried that the film would go too far with this, Basic Instinct-style. It does not–and in how it reins in the fear earlier scenes invite, Oblivion does suggest a director and screenwriter mindfully playing on such structural expectations.

Suffice it to say, there are a finite number of plot types in any narrative genre, and when a film is about the survival of humanity, there are in turn a finite number of powerplays that might be explored therein. Are we exhausted as a culture with killing godheads on the big screen? Perhaps. But it remains a tried-and-true metric of scifi film–and in Oblivion, I don’t think it’s an exceptionally reductive one, either. Rather, what this film offers is familiar, but not insultingly so; the script does not suggest that every new development is meant to come as a great surprise to us, and director Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy) further seems to anticipate an audience with some understanding of where this film exists in the history of scifi.

What emerges, then, is a fairly coherent variation on the theme, and a challenge, too: Can we appreciate a scifi film that negotiates the familiar with fresh faces, as we routinely do in other filmic genres? Or conversely, are viewers right to demand that scifi as a genre ever aspires to something more?

The Relative Contentment of Late Middle Age

Tags

documentaries, history, human behaviour, michael apted, reviews

56 Up
Michael Apted & Paul Almond
ITV Studios

It should come as little surprise that, at 56 years old apiece, the thirteen continuing participants in Michael Apted’s septennial documentary series have started to slow down. By and large, this lot of 7-year-olds drawn from different social classes and geographical backgrounds in 1960s Britain has grown into a group of happily married mothers and fathers (and even grandmothers and grandfathers)–some with considerable means, some with modest means, and some with no hope of restful retirement yet in sight. None of them, shock of all shocks, is currently planning a solo mission to Mars.

(And yes, spoilers abound below.)

Neil, of course, remains the exception–a politician in part due to his drive to fix things, and in part just to make ends (barely) meet; a writer who has yet to see any measure of recognition for his work, which he considers his real life’s pursuit; and above all else, an intelligent, frustrated man who expresses hard-earned incredulity at the thought that any viewer watching his life unfold from episode to episode would think they have any idea who he is, what he thinks and feels, and what his true life’s path has been.

These are important points to consider: 49 years of intermittent, interview-style documentary following thirteen (originally fourteen) people as they grew and changed under various life experiences, and what exactly do we have to show for it? A few participants observe, for instance, that the programme’s original premise was badly slanted around the idea that class strata were still alive and well in modern Britain. One such critic, Suzy, came from a wealthy background, dropped out of school, married a solicitor, had three children, and in 56 Up expresses a feeling of loyalty to this series she also hates. Another, the barrister John, first featured as part of a trio of pre-preparatory school boys in the rich London suburb of Kensington; in 56 Up, he criticizes Apted’s original class groupings on account of the fact that John’s father died when John was nine, and John’s mother had to work to keep him in school until such a time as he could acquire a scholarship to Oxford.

(And if I’m not mistaken, another of the Kensington boys, Andrew [a solicitor] also comments negatively on the classist bent of the original film, but I cannot recall anyone of a non-affluent background making similar complaint.)

Whatever its original aims, the series has certainly taken on a more diverse set of cultural functions. While Suzy, like Neil, chafes at the notion that anyone would presume to know any of them on the basis of a few soundbites every seven years, Nicholas, the boy raised on a farm who went on to study and work in nuclear physics (and who has since settled into teaching electrical engineering), suggests that the series is not really about any of them as individuals. Rather, to him, the whole programme is more a broad demonstration of how much any person will inevitably change–in appearance, in aspiration, and in outlook–when given little but the passage of time.

This, certainly, is the role the Up Series has played for me, and though director Apted clearly invites his characters to engage in more hard-hitting criticism of British political interests and public policy debates past and present, on that accord the series ever seems to fall flat. Not, of course, that the director is alone in trying to forward specific aims through this series: 56 Up finds Peter, for instance, who dropped out of the series after backlash for his criticism of Margaret Thatcher and politics in general in 28 Up, returned with the express purpose of promoting his “Americana”-style folk band, The Good Intentions. (He is married to a wife he met at his place of employ, the civil service.) Meanwhile, the barrister John only returned to this series in 35 Up to provide publicity for his charities, and such good works certainly hold a prominent place in his segment here, too.

Generally speaking, though, this iteration of the series finds folks well and truly established in whatever lives they’ve chosen. Bruce, long burned out from a hard stint teaching math to East End London and Bangladeshi students, is now a very comfortable, cricket-playing father of two who teaches a far more privileged class of children. Paul and his wife work at a local retirement village, where they are also quite settled. Sue, a university coordinator who never attended university herself, has been happily engaged for fourteen years. Symon, the lone racial minority in this series, has reconnected with three of the children from his first marriage, and has now been re-married long enough, and busily fostering children this whole past decade, that even with career regrets he has plenty to smile about. Tony, too (the East Ender with a childhood desire to be a jockey), is still a cabbie, but the precarious British economy didn’t keep him from making property investments in Portugal, and though his marriage went through hard times in previous episodes, he cherishes his long-abiding wife alongside various material comforts.

Sensing a pattern? It’s not exactly universal, of course: Lynn, a school librarian before her job got the axe under budget cuts, now focusses all her time and attention on helping her children raise their children. Jackie, meanwhile, has been on disability but was recently cut off under new guidelines; in the wake of her ex-husband’s passing from cancer, and her mother-in-law’s current battle with cancer, her three grown boys (and new grandchild) are a clear fount of strength, but Jackie has little confidence in her ability to hold down a much-needed job with severe rheumatoid arthritis.

Nonetheless, Apted has very much chosen to emphasize the role of family in relation to this notion of late-midlife contentment that marks the bulk of this film. Indeed, a puzzling amount of screen time is dedicated to what all the nearby children of the show’s original participants are doing, and questions one might reasonably expect to be answered by an original series participant him or herself are often met instead by the spouses. Is it really in keeping with the Up Series as a whole to treat these participants less as individuals at this age, and more as cohesive genetic/proximal family units? How about Apted’s choice not to ask participants this time around about future aspirations, instead inviting them to reflect on the lives they’ve lived to date? Doesn’t this interview style necessarily impose a sense of closure on each participant, even as individual story-lines suggest the end is far from near?

Perhaps this really is a time of great contentment for many of the participants in this series (and if so, so much the better for them), but aspects of ongoing life’s work in many of 56 Up‘s segments suggest that this note of complacency is also just one way of looking at these thirteen lives–and an oddly culminating one, at that.

But perhaps this tonal shift should come as little surprise either. After all, Michael Apted is now 72; even if all remaining participants are still alive in seven years’ time, will Apted be in any condition to keep filming? If not, is it any wonder that 56 Up, for all that it offers such pleasurable visits with thirteen 56-year-olds we know both so intimately and also not at all, feels more like a series of statements about Apted than about any of the bright-eyed, wild-hearted, goofy little 7-year-olds we once thought we knew?

I doubt there are easy answers to such questions, which has perhaps always been part of the Up Series‘ appeal. I hardly need mention that life is a strange, messy, too-short/too-long business, but I will contend that, for all the weaknesses in Apted’s directorial approach, 56 Up provides a significant peek into that strangeness. Not a satisfactory one, perhaps–but if you can tolerate huge doses of mid-life contentment, a rewarding one just the same.

What Makes A Person Whole?

Tags

disability theory, film, reviews, writing from life

The Intouchables
Olivier Nakache & Eric Toledano
Gaumont

What it means to be able-bodied is a subject that could fill hundreds of textbooks–and it does. As filmic negotiations of the question go, The Intouchables, a buddy dramedy, operates in a realm of blatant contrasts, some of which rise above genre conventions; most of which fit into an almost fantastical, and certainly predictable, narrative arc. This doesn’t mean the film is without merit, but it’s fair to say The Intouchables opens more avenues for consideration than it ever meaningfully pursues.

Loosely based on a true story, The Intouchables follows a rich man named Philippe (François Cluzet) who became quadriplegic after a paragliding accident–an apt enough sport for his social class, because as he says, paragliding allows him to feel like he’s “pissing on the world”. After dealing with formally-trained, seemingly life-averse (all male) nurses, Philippe’s attention is drawn to a restless Senegalese immigrant named Driss (Omar Sy), who just wants a signature to prove he applied for the job so he can get his state benefits. (In real life, the male nurse is Abdel Sellou, a man who kept a lot of his personal history and backstory private even as the film took off.) Surrounded by caregivers providing vital physiotherapy, Philippe asks Driss if he enjoys living off others, and Driss predictably shoots the question back at him. Instant rapport. Driss gets a fancy bedroom and bathroom all to himself–a far cry from the tenement poverty his cousins and aunt endure–and Philippe gets a male nurse who won’t pity him.

If anyone expected Philippe to leave his gilded mansion at some point to learn how his nurse last lived, they’d be sorely mistaken: street-smart Driss instead shines as a sassy, almost caricatured new fixture in Philippe’s world of Faberge eggs, Vivaldi, German opera, and modern abstract art. Eventually Driss goes back to help his family, but The Intouchables is ultimately a story about Philippe finding love and renewed vigour for life through the assistance of a man who’s dropped all his own, easily outstanding commitments to drive fast cars and hire sex workers for massages. Driss is playing the old role of “helper minority” in this world, and getting paid for it handsomely.

Where women are concerned, Driss also routinely harasses one of his fellow coworkers, Magalie (Audrey Fleurot), whose reason for resisting his many come-ons is explained in the most reductive way possible–because how could even an already-partnered woman possibly refuse a man as charming as Driss? The film also exploits Driss-as-big-scary-black-man to get Philippe’s daughter’s boyfriend to shape up: a different, but no less over-the-top performance of brute masculinity. These might have been tedious subplots if they were the film’s only negotiations of the theme, but while the female characters aren’t exactly complex, I was surprised to find that The Intouchables does also remark upon some of the negative aspects of uber-masculine performance–particularly in the streets, where the association between emotional distance and a sense of toughness or self-sufficiency causes serious, if understated problems for Driss and his younger relatives.

Recognizing the generic limitations of this set-up, then, this question of ableism still runs an intricate thread throughout the film. Even Philippe (perhaps since he exists in real life) is given depth to his self-perception when he tells Driss about the loss of his ex-wife, adding: “My true disability is not having to be in a wheelchair. It’s having to be without her.” Without addressing many of these notions of ableism in depth, The Intouchables thus manages to hold up physical disability alongside familial disability (being without family, without a loved one), alongside gender disability (specifically around masculine performance), alongside class-based, racial, and immigrant-status-oriented disability. I don’t equate these discourses willy-nilly, but by lining them up (as the film certainly attempts) a clear-as-mud picture of what it means to be “able-bodied” necessarily emerges.

What makes us “whole” people? Is it the ability to use all four limbs, even if we know not to what end? Even if we’re emotionally stunted or motivationally paralyzed? Or is it the ability to work, to succeed, in a system that views many people’s bodies (immigrants, minorities) as somehow subpar? Are any of us “whole” in that sense so long as others in the system are not? And does the ability to perform gendered strength actually make us strong, or does it concurrently reduce our ability to act as we most want to in the world?

Against these questions implicitly posed by Driss and Philippe, there is one character in The Intouchables who by sheer necessity embodies self-sufficiency: Driss’s aunt, who has many mouths to feed and very little support to help her carry on. When Driss comes into some money of his own, there is not even a whisper of articulated intent to use it to help his family–but nonetheless, he watches her from a distance throughout the film, before heading home to do his part. Is it enough, then, even to be physically and mentally resilient, as Driss’s aunt so clearly is? Or is there an added lesson here: A reminder that even if we can get by on our own, “wholeness” remains a state we can never truly attain without others?

The Intouchables may have its limits, and it may creak and groan under genre constraints, but the questions it poses under the veil of light comedy are still good ones. I hope they go on being asked, and discussed.

L’amour, toujours l’amour

Tags

film, humanism, michael haneke

Amour
Michael Haneke
Les Films du Losange

In Iris Murdoch’s 1961 novel, A Severed Head, the protagonist twice invokes the notion of a physical intuition between lovers: “Our bodies, at least,” says Martin, when words prove unfit for the difficult circumstances, “were old friends.” Though there is some truth to this sentiment (particularly in the flush of new and easy love), there is as much, if not more, in the notion that even the bodies of seasoned lovers will need to renegotiate their intimacy, their knowledge of one another, again and again over time.

So says, at least, one early scene in Michael Haneke’s Amour, where an octogenarian pianist named Anne (Emmanneulle Riva) teaches her loving husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) how to lift her half-paralyzed body from a wheelchair after a failed operation following a stroke. When Georges, himself clearly of failing health and vigour, pauses halfway through the manoeuvre, you could almost mistake them for a Jubilee-anniversary couple, poised to dance to the music under which they were first wedded. Not so, though, and not ever again–for Anne is dying now, one piece at a time. The only pertinent questions that remain are “when” and “how”.

One cannot fail to see the hand of Haneke in the cinematography and set design of this film, his first since The White Ribbon (2009), but compared to most of his prior work, there is startling restraint here to Haneke’s use of symbolic flourishes and intimations of a deeper mythos. One gets, for instance, the motif of breaking-and-entering, but what has invaded Georges and Anne’s life is far from exceptional: that series of increasing, terminal indignities which almost invariably steals one partner in old age before the other. One could probably create a symbolic truth to Georges’ chilling nightmare, his daytime memories, and his ultimate dream sequence or delusion–but what need is there, when the plain reality of aging to death resonates enough all on its own?

We are invited, then, to view the subject matter of Amour as a reality that needs no exaggeration or enhancement to produce Haneke’s usual effect of estrangement, of narrative disruption. To this end, long takes are the norm for this 127-minute piece, lending individual proceedings a sense of realism only further reinforced by the abrupt cuts just before a sense of resolution might emerge in a given bit of dialogue, a fragment of physical interaction. Like life itself, the film’s pacing seems to suggest, nothing is tidy, and rarely (if ever) is anyone given the opportunity to tie up all loose ends.

The overall tone of each scene is similarly undermined by its surroundings, with the fresh pains and degradations of advancing disease deftly interwoven with the mundane cadence of a long, contented partnership–its own, multifaceted nature proving at turns endearing, petty, tense, and absurd. When Georges comes home to find Anne on the floor by an open window in their upper-level apartment, he understands all too well what she was attempting; yet when she presently asks him to describe the funeral he has just returned from, he obliges with clear resignation, offering an amusing tale that stands in for much of their conversation about the suicide attempt. Between the couple now, as citizens of uncharted territory for all their years already known to each other on fairer shores, lies as much understanding as incomprehension, and they navigate the chasm between the familiar and the terrifyingly new as best they can.

It isn’t surprising, of course, to find art playing a significant role in a Haneke film, so all the stories, paintings, music, and photographs in Amour are to be expected. What is surprising, though, is how acts of artistic disruption are here used as welcome (even merciful) reprieves from the escalating instances of violence depicted on screen. As an early shot of a concert audience looking into the theatre reassures us after the opening scene (where Anne is found dead by firefighters breaking into the apartment): This whole film is art. This is all for show. This is not the real thing. A later act of unexpected abuse is similarly followed with stills of the paintings found all throughout Georges and Anne’s well-loved home; these likewise seem to serve as a breath for the audience–a chance, if not to heal from the shock of what just occurred, at least to navigate it through something less raw, something perhaps more comforting and controlled. The whole effect suggests a level of directorial kindness unlike anything I have seen from Haneke before.

Such kindness is also shown to the “children” of this film–Georges and Anne’s daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), and Anne’s accomplished pupil, Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud). While the flush of busy lives marks their every conversation with the older couple in the grip of encroaching death, and while both are clearly out of their element when trying to understand the correct role to take in such proceedings (Eva at one point speaks to her father with some urgency about being concerned for them; Georges points out as gently but plainly as he can that he is too busy for her concern), neither is presented as at fault for their disorientation. Rather, Haneke seems to suggest that this is simply the course of things: for the young to work and savour accomplishment; for the older to seek well-earned leisure and acceptance; for the dying–with as much grace as they can muster–to die as they see best.

I could not help but think of Allan King’s documentary, Dying at Grace, while watching Haneke’s fictional account of the fitful humours and indignities surrounding the inevitability of death. Though Anne ultimately passes in a much more abrupt fashion than any of the five terminal patients presented by King in their last days and hours, Anne’s deeply nuanced portrayal by Emmannuelle Riva most definitely makes the comparison favourable. If the Oscar for Best Actress were anything but a Hollywood popularity contest, Riva would (and should) win hands down, for delivering to us a human being who remains evocatively complex at every stage of bodily decay.

Even if she doesn’t, though–what of it? In time, achievements fade, physical prowess vanishes, and death becomes less a figure for artistic fancy and more an imminent and indifferently cruel reality. There is less a lesson to be drawn from Michael Haneke’s Amour, then, so much as a general call for self-awareness and compassion in light of the full, agonizing scope of human life.

Oh, and love, of course. How much bleaker this film would be, I wonder, without that.

Histories Old, New, and Make-Believe

Tags

fiction as truth, film, politics, reviews, war

Zero Dark Thirty
Kathryn Bigelow
Alliance Films

If I were to take my Google image search for this film at face value, I’d have to believe the great majority of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty centres on the actual infiltration of Osama bin Laden’s Abottabad compound, and none of it–not any of it–on the government-sanctioned torture of suspects wanted in connection with terrorist activities involving US targets. Yet to read reviews and reports about real-life fallout from this film, which Bigelow has said she hopes will be regarded as a “first draft of history”, the exact opposite seems true.

My own impression is that, despite the producers’ focus on the hunt for Osama bin Laden as a triumphantly patriotic chore (particularly as seen in trailers), the terrain occupied by members of the intelligence community in this film is itself a kind of no-man’s-land as uneasily controlled as the tribal territories of Northern Pakistan. Though the torture-based interrogation sessions in this film are both frequent and frequently discomfiting, the most gut-wrenching for me was easily a boardroom scene where intelligence agents are chatting about their work while, in the backdrop, then-presidential nominee Barack Hussein Obama candidly declares that the US does not torture, and vows to ensure that the “detainee” program currently in place will cease operations if he is elected. While two central agents to the film, protagonist Maya (Jessica Chastain) and old guard Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), pause to listen to some of this interview, they quickly check out when on-screen rhetoric veers from their day-to-day reality–and in a way that suggests this has always been par for the course.

Surely, we know that it is. America’s history is nothing if not rife with intricate, border-indifferent landscapes of covert ops intended to take out anything seen as a political, economic, or genuine security threat to the United States of America. Heck, the US has even used the people of other nation-states for medical testing, and as Zero Dark Thirty acknowledges, medically vital operations like polio vaccination campaigns have most likely been co-opted at times for intelligence-gathering purposes (with the consequence being a greater distrust of this otherwise life-saving practice in Pakistan).

This last especially calls attention to a clear strength of Bigelow’s film, for Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t really aim for journalistic “balance” in any grotesquely rigid, fifty-fifty sense. To this end, though an exceedingly tasteful summary of 9/11 is directly followed by a torture-based interrogation two years later, primarily at the hands of seasoned specialist “Dan” (Jason Clarke), there is no simple back-and-forth between “good” and “evil” action in the scenes to follow, or even an attempt to equate one heinous act with another over time. The culminating emphasis, phrased fairly well in the film’s final, unanswered question, seems to be less about deciding whether what happened between 9/11 and the assassination of Osama bin Laden was “right” or even “necessary”, and more about simply acknowledging that These Were Things That More Or Less Happened, And Therefore, Things We All Have To Acknowledge Going Forward.

Even the placement of Parks and Recreation goofball Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) in pretty much his TV-show alter-ego “Bert Macklin, FBI” among the Navy SEALs that took down Osama bin Laden doesn’t really detract from this overall message. Indeed, if anything, the backstory any Parks and Recreation viewer brings to his character here (as a man who both takes down al Qaeda and makes weeping, frightened orphans in the process; and who then salvages vital intel and loots private property alike) only calls into sharper focus the general ignorance–wilful or otherwise–of average North Americans toward all proceedings, decisions, and broad, long-game perspectives espoused by global intelligence communities in relation to our at once amorphous and also quite concrete notions about the need for national security.

And that should most certainly give viewers pause. After all, it’s not as though these intelligence agents, operating fluidly, globally, and at a cadence well-removed from day-to-day political (dare I even say “democratic”?) practice, are entirely immune to criticism and repercussion. Indeed, in Zero Dark Thirty CIA Station Chief Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) is at one point made a token example of department accountability in response to public outcry over civilian deaths from US drone attacks–a gesture in the right direction, no? But when Maya sympathizes with Bradley for being scapegoated by the government, it’s clear we’re supposed to sympathize with him, too. And in a way, I suppose I did–not because his hands were clean, but because no one’s were. Because (speaking broadly now) there’s an insidious game being played right now on the world stage–a game so long in operation that dismantling it, from either side, seems almost impossible at this juncture.

If Zero Dark Thirty leaves me with any crystal clear message, then, it’s that in a system of international violence negotiated primarily through politically and covertly-determined measures of acceptable risk, all notions of global “peace” and “justice” will continue to make great talking points for political candidates–but hell if they’ll ever be enough to change the world.

I wish I knew what would.

Oh Goody, A Writer Likes A Movie About Writing

Tags

film, martin mcdonagh, reviews

Seven Psychopaths
Martin McDonagh
Alliance Films

Whereas Kaufman’s Adaptation is a movie-about-movies that unravels as control over the script shifts from one screenwriter to another, writer/director Martin McDonagh creates something a little different with Seven Psychopaths: a series of self-aware, character-oriented working notes towards a movie about a few distinctly damaged people whose stories waver for almost two hours between “real” and merely confined to the protagonist’s booze-addled brain.

Colin Farrell plays our alcoholic lead, a screenwriter named Marty (oh, we get it, McDonagh; we do) struggling to create seven psychopaths to populate his film. Luckily Marty’s buddy, Billy Bickle (Sam Rockwell; I’ll leave you to figure out where you’ve heard the character’s name before), is eager to help, offering up stories of two different “psychopaths”–the Jack of Diamonds, a contemporaneous L.A. serial killer who targets mob killers, and an unassuming Quaker (Harry Dean Stanton) who stalks his daughter’s murderer to the end of the world and into (we assume) the next. Oh, and as if this isn’t enough to earn Billy partial screenwriting credit, he also puts out an ad for other psychopaths to drop by and share their stories. What a guy!

Though Marty is deeply resistant to Billy’s rather haphazard notions of film writing process, this ad does in fact introduce Marty to an old man with a rabbit (Tom Waits) whose story of lootin’, lovin’, and losin’ most certainly merits a place in Marty’s script. So Marty’s not doing too badly, although his own contribution to this list of psychopaths, a nameless Vietnamese man (Long Nguyen) who comes to America seeking vengeance for atrocities incurred during the American Conflict in Viet Nam, is a little on the simplistic side.

The real trouble is, Billy Bickle’s in a bit of a pickle (couldn’t help myself, sorry) that undermines our early view of him as a slow-witted stutterer (nod to The Usual Suspects, maybe?). See, in the course of running a dog-kidnapping scam with a well-intentioned Christian named Hans (Christopher Walken) who has a wife with cancer in the hospital (Linda Bright Clay), Billy has picked up a Shih Tzu named Bonny. The trouble is, this little fluff ball belongs to a gangster one might rightly call a psychopath (Woody Harrelson), and this fellow is on a murderous war path to get his dog back.

As it turns out, Billy was not entirely ignorant of the dog’s true owner when he first made the grab, but the flimsy motive around which this whole plot arises is really not the point in Seven Psychopaths. Rather, all these wildly unlikely situations and exaggerated backstories exist and build off one another to call attention to something else: How weird action movies are, and yet, at the same time, how surprisingly sincere. To this end, the protagonist wades through conversations about a variety of film conceits–stereotypes about writers, industry incentives for action sequences, the desire to forward deeper truths regardless, and even excuses for the paucity of strong female representation in the action genre as a whole. Nor is our protagonist alone in this struggle: as the movie’s storyline and Marty’s script progress, Marty finds he has both an angel and a devil on hand–the former (Hans) appealing for peace, nonviolence, balance, and inward-looking revelation in the movie; the latter (Billy) pushing for a script littered with epic showdowns where shotguns make heads explode and chicks get riddled with bullets for maximum effect.

The result is… well, a little of everything, and whether any of the movie is “real” even within its own confines, or whether it simply exists in the on-screen screenwriter’s head… well, that hardly matters either. Certainly, some of the sequences in Seven Psychopaths, involving thoughtful conversations brought to abrupt ends by sudden death, seem to allude quite strongly to the works of Tarantino, but overall, McDonagh’s applying a much gentler form of generic resistance. As a commentary on filmic conventions, Seven Psychopaths would be my preference over Adaptation (although clearly McDonagh’s work arises from a film tradition strongly forwarded by Kaufman’s piece in the first place), but as a bloody, irreverent bit of action fluff, this film, in large part due to strong performances by many of its big-name actors, is surprisingly tender.

Indeed, taken as a whole, Seven Psychopaths seems to say more about the broken, searching nature of average human beings than anything, anything at all, about people who genuinely operate outside the realm of love and compassion for their fellow living creature, man and dog alike. Colour me shocked, I suppose–but only a little. This is the writer/director of In Bruges, after all. How many heads blown up by shotguns did you really expect?

Holy Somethin’: Carax’s Elegy for the End of “Mechanical” Film

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film, leos carax, reviews

Holy Motors
Leos Carax
Pierre Grise Productions

Sometimes the year provides a resounding, if entirely unintended, recursion of symbols, themes, and archetypes. Watching Holy Motors, Leos Carax’s first film in ten years, you might recall that a limo was already given cinematic prominence in Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis; the notion that everything is connected, already foregrounded in the Wachowskis’ and Twyker’s Cloud Atlas; and yes, we’ve even been anticipating another cave-dwelling monster in Jackson’s long-promoted version of The Hobbit.

Holy Motors melds all and more in a film extending from two thematic histories: the one-man-as-all-men narrative, espoused through films like Wenders’ Wings of Desire (with angels listening in and recording human thoughts) and Proyas’ Dark City (where a group of humans takes on different roles while aliens document proceedings in search of the human soul), and the elegy for the end of traditional film (seen, for instance, in Hugo and The Artist).

Or perhaps, for Carax, these are just different sides of the same thematic history. Indeed, while Holy Motors concedes that attempts to aggregate human existence will still exist after the end of “mechanical” cinema, the film’s embodiment of these older storytelling vehicles serves quite literally to drive the plot forward, while also providing the film’s central setting. How are we to envision the next great storytelling landscape, I wonder, after becoming so accustomed to the luxury of traversing from human life to human life in the back of a sprawling white limousine?

(That said, I do wish all storytelling vehicles came with fully-stocked minibars. Note to self!)

If you’d like to view this film with as little knowledge of the plot as possible, I recommend skipping this paragraph and the next; almost saying anything about this film’s plot is already too much. Nevertheless, Holy Motors follows Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant), introduced to us first as a dreamer, then as a businessman, and finally as an actor on a cosmic scale. Driven from appointment to appointment by Céline (Edith Scob), Oscar plays a wide range of human beings in medias res, and is surrounded at every turn by others also playing their parts in various “real life” sketches. These sketches extend from the oppressive mundanity of panhandling, to small scenes of fatherhood and death, to the high-intensity rush of murder (and back again), to–well, let’s just say a couple of these sketches serve less as emblems of individual lives, and more as metaphors for social constructs as a whole.

One of these, involving a monstrous little man who eats flowers, terrorizes the blind, then literally hauls off a model to his underground cave and puts her in a niqab, seems to teeter between parodic caricature and serious indictment of France’s ongoing Islamic immigrant anxieties (and also the superficiality of the American industry fashion; both are represented hyperbolically here). The other is a dance in motion-capture suits that shifts quickly from predictable action shots to the kind of scene not usually documented in CGI–a scene explicitly depicted by its end as alien and therefore vulgar. As commentary on the direction of digital film, I suggest that this particular sketch speaks for itself.

The film’s fantastical “twists” are not limited to these two instances, though; nor even to the central conceit of weary, immortal actors trudging in and out of various human roles. Suggestions of a hierarchy underlying these actors’ work–for which they get paid, have bosses, and operate under strict schedules–do not ever resolve into more than broad hints about the purpose of it all, and yet these broad, even contradictory hints (is there “no beholder anymore”, as Oscar suggests? or are we the beholder, as the film’s opening sequence suggests? or are the actors themselves the beholders, as one romantic interlude suggests?) are sometimes dealt in sledgehammer-like blows. Is the film absurd at times? Yes. Absurd enough to pull off the gambit? Not, I would say, in its entirety.

Certainly, there is aesthetic charm to components of this piece–and moments, too, when one sees a laughing indifference to conventionality that just works for Carax. But there are also, surprisingly, a great many predictable and heavy-handed thematic beats. (Consider, in contrast, Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass.) Understood as tribute to the great wealth of “mechanical” film history, and distributed just as the film industry enters a fully digital era, Holy Motors puts a human face to the age-old cinematic desire to convey existence in all its forms. Understood as an attempt unto itself to convey human existence, though, and Holy Motors proves an uneven effort–wavering between a potentially nuanced exploration of different “real” lives, and the allegorical use of human beings as little more than (inept) vehicles of broader social commentary.

An Unwieldy Journey: The Trouble with Looking Back

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fantasy, film, peter jackson, review

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Peter Jackson
Warner Bros.

There was a moment, just before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey began, when I realized that I was genuinely excited to see what a film would look like in 48-frames-per-second. I thought about audience reception around the first moving pictures–and then the first sound films, the first talkies, the first colourized films, the first films shot in colour, the first films with CGI, the first 3D films, and–well, you get the idea. The possibility of a new experience: is this not what so often drives our entertainment choices?

I had similarly thought it wise, before attending this film, to rekindle some of the childhood pleasure I had derived from The Hobbit, read at nine and quickly followed by the Lord of the Rings trilogy (on a dare from my father, who claimed to have read the whole blasted thing over a weekend; I did not break his purported record). To this end, I read the first chapter aloud to my sister and her partner on our drive to the theatre, and some chuckling arose anew at many of Tolkien’s playful turns of phrase. “Playful” being the key word here–for such was very much the tone of Tolkien’s The Hobbit even after his later, post-LotR revisions. In hindsight, though, I think this reminder of the source material only reinforced my issues with Jackson’s version; as a viewer, I would have been better served if I’d first left Tolkien’s book well alone.

Let me state quite plainly, then, that there are two ways of viewing this first of three films by Peter Jackson: first, as a film version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and second, as a prequel to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. This latter perspective is wisest, I suspect, though even here there are several problems with the film; the former perspective, conversely, is a recipe for disaster.

In either reading of this film, a few things stand out: Structurally, poor pacing yields a bloated prologue, all-too-frequent scenes of characters just standing around looking at each other significantly, and the routine forfeiture of sustained, rising tension for the easy pulse of hack-and-slash action shots. Musically, the soundtrack only makes the film’s frequent transitions to full-on action sequences all the more predictable, while thematically, at least two pivotal character choices lack clear justification, and a few of the film’s Moral Lessons could not have been presented more bluntly if, indeed, a bludgeon had been brought down mid-scene on viewers’ heads. The film is 169 minutes long, and even cutting half an hour would have helped immensely.

As for the novelty of 48-fps, it does indeed give many scenes the look (as reported in early reviews) of a made-for-TV historical reenactment, the likes of which I recently viewed in a BBC documentary titled Pompeii: The Last Day. In other scenes, the CGI stands out distinctly from its hyper-real surroundings, and the frame rate curiously imbues many characters with an uncanny speed not seen in real life. (However, since I found myself comparing these unusually jerky movements with those from silent era films, working on 16-fps, I could not entirely fault the film for this detail; though it certainly calls attention to the artificiality of these scenes, I will not go so far as to say that it ruins one’s possible enjoyment of the feature as a whole.)

And then there’s the basic world-building, which is really my greatest issue with the piece: for whether you read this film as Jackson’s LotR prequel or as an express adaptation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit, there remains something profoundly out of place about Jackson’s characterizations. Put simply, whether you look in comparison to Jackson’s LotR trilogy or Tolkien’s source material, the most central dwarves and hobbits of An Unexpected Journey are not dwarves and hobbits: they’re men. Whereas Tolkien built different species with different aims, failings, strengths, habits, customs, and predilections, Jackson here has just made the qualities of men de facto ideals for the lot. (Indeed, only in the Elven race will you still find any real distinction between species; these folk may still be very different from Tolkien’s capricious wood-elves in The Hobbit, but they’re at least understandable as extensions of Jackson’s elves in LotR.)

Indeed, nowhere is this (literal?) homogenization better seen than in Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the leader of a gang of thirteen dwarves whose quest to reclaim their clan’s treasure and ancestral home drags poor Bilbo Baggins from a happily adventure-free life into service as a “burglar” at the (uninvited) recommendation of a wizard named Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen).

After all, in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, dwarves are an order of mountain-dwelling metalworkers of the highest calibre, who blend their very prosperous labour (even absent an ancestral home) in almost Snow White-style whimsy with a love of music-making, mischief-brewing, and often altogether bumbling ways. When they enter Tolkien’s The Hobbit, they are noted first for the colour of their hoods and the weight of precious metals about them, and our very first introduction to their leader involves him accidentally getting caught at the bottom of a heap of dwarves at Bilbo’s doorstep.

(Similarly, in Jackson’s LotR, though Gimli does not carry or apply himself to a musical instrument, he is still known best for his brash and silly ways, which can absolutely transition into reverence and grief as the situation requires, and then switch seamlessly back again.)

Yet in An Unexpected Journey, we do not meet Thorin with the other dwarves who barge humourously upon Bilbo’s supper; while the rest are goofy to some extent, Thorin enters separately, long after all lighthearted dwarven festivities have ended, and under a pall we are immediately invited to read as proof of his rightful place as king. While Tolkien’s Thorin spends part of that first evening trying (and failing) to outdo Gandalf at blowing smoke rings, you will not be alone in mistaking Jackson’s Thorin for this trilogy’s Aragorn, so serious is this “dwarf” in bearing (yes, even Gandalf seems afraid at times), and so fully does he wear his resentment towards the dragon, Smaug, who took his kingdom from him, as well as those who brought his grandfather to ruin.

Thorin’s grandfather, Thror, was another key sign that something was very much thematically amiss in this film, for Thror is introduced in such a way as blames his greed for Smaug’s devastating interest in the wealth of his kingdom. This is a decidedly human framework of sin and its consequences, and it does not sit well at all upon the mantle of Tolkien’s naturally-proud-to-the-point-of-absurdity dwarven race (which even Jackson leans upon in his version of LotR).

Similarly, “lead” character Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is stripped of most all opportunities to demonstrate skills specific to being a hobbit; his narrative arc in this film is entirely about proving himself capable of more traditional heroic characteristics, up to and including killing (well before The Hobbit‘s spider scene!). Anyone familiar with Tolkien’s The Hobbit should therefore find this a complete deviation from Tolkien’s unlikely hero subarchetype: instead of tricks and games and general wit being foregrounded as points of prowess unto themselves, in Jackson’s film, the two occasions for such cleverness are still firmly matched with violent acts.

This is especially seen in the fact that Bilbo makes his character-building choice not to kill at a juncture when it would be quite obviously cowardly to kill–unlike in Tolkien’s version, where Bilbo chooses not to kill at what is all too often considered an extremely normative juncture in action narratives. Oh, and again: did I mention Bilbo ultimately kills in this film?

Now, don’t get me wrong: I definitely expected Jackson to flip events of The Hobbit all out of order–and furthermore, to insinuate a whole slew of new scenes meant to tie the two trilogies together. I was even (grudgingly) resigned to a lack of Tolkien’s iconic barrel-rolling scene (Jackson’s LotR made the Elven race too dignified instead of trickster-ish to expect otherwise from this much-too-early-scene of the dwarves in the Elven kingdom; maybe barrel-rolling will appear at another juncture in the next two films?).

But having Gandalf accuse Bilbo of being too much a mama’s boy (even though Bilbo’s mother, Belladonna Took, is first praised as the spirited sort, in a line right out of the book, during Gandalf’s opening encounter)? Well, that’s just plain un-wizardly, to say nothing of its un-hobbit-y flavour, too. Is it really necessary to deride and diminish hobbit values in order to boot-kick Bilbo into adventure’s way? Tolkien’s text says “no”!

And making Bilbo someone whose sole interest becomes proving his worth to man-dwarf-king Thorin? That again demonstrates an atypically human valuation of hierarchy and valour among both hobbits and dwarves. (In Tolkien’s The Hobbit, this is so very much reversed that Bilbo is more often seen in close kinship with a “lesser” dwarf named Dwalin–again, against heroic stereotype, and so entirely emblematic of The Hobbit‘s original charm.)

In short, tonally and thematically, Jackson’s film doesn’t seem to bear much (if any) resemblance to the source material, and so (despite lingering failings therein) it makes much more sense when read as a Jacksonian LotR prequel. To this end, Jackson has even plugged in or enhanced other Tolkien characters–Radagast the Brown, the Necromancer, Azog the Pale Orc, some hunter Orcs, the Great Goblin King (with a CGI jowl that I guarantee will be the sole focus for audiences in each and every one of his short scenes)–while turning Bilbo into little more than a plot vehicle for this broader storyline.

And to be sure, for all of this tie-in material (as with the costuming and set design for much of the film), Jackson and his team absolutely get some credit; he is very clearly constructing something new with The Hobbit and related Tolkien narratives, and “new” is not inherently bad. However, as this film’s manifestation of 48-fps technology also suggests, “new” is not inherently good, either.

The best I can therefore say about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is that it exists. And unlike the last attempt to turn this deceptively simple novel into a film, barring some major socio-economic calamity Jackson’s version will be completely issued within two years’ time. I can’t say that I’ll see these films (I prefer a greater diversity of perspectives when so very many characters are meant to represent such a massive fantasy world), but I expect that they will find an audience among fans of Peter Jackson and the many wonderful, dedicated actors involved in this project–if no one else.

A “Dangerous Ascent” to Uncertain Ends

Tags

experimental fiction, horror, mark z danielewski, reading

The Fifty Year Sword
Mark Z. Danielewski
Pantheon Books

I think I confused one of my friendly neighbourhood librarians this week. While checking out Mark Z. Danielewsi’s latest, book-length novella, The Fifty Year Sword, I observed how difficult it was for libraries to house texts that confound “book-ness” itself. This library has a wealth of graphic novels, for instance, including a couple by Chris Ware–but his latest, Building Stories, is a collection of story objects that would not fare well on library shelves. Even describing this collection to the librarian proved a daunting task, and the conversation did not end on a note of mutual understanding.

I consider these limitations when interacting with works like Danielewski’s, because in some ways experimentalism is more difficult when an author first restricts him- or herself to certain formal conventions. In this case, The Fifty Year Sword has the external appearance of a book of heft, but within its covers lie very slender textual components (many spreads with no more than a single line upon them; text only appearing on even-numbered pages), and a rising narrative prominence of artistic images (composed of stiff paper and thread, and sometimes utterly supplanting the need for words). Certainly, The Fifty Year Sword was first published as a chapbook, but this new printing has a life of its own–and though the cynic in me wants to suggest this second “life” simply allows publishers to reap more profit through hardcover pricing, aesthetically I find that the format “works” overall.

(I say this as a library user instead of a purchaser, though–so take that as you will. Go! Confuse your own librarians with questions about content and form!)

The Fifty Year Sword is a ghost story told by (at least) five voices interrupting one another to construct sentences gradually building the scene of a party reluctantly attended by a heartsick woman named Chintana, the “bitchwitch Belinda Kite”, five orphans in the care of an exhausted Social Worker, and a Story Teller enlisted by their host to entertain the wee sprogs. The veil of realism runs surpassingly thin in this construction (the way horror stories told around campfires are similarly populated by characters reduced to the plot functions they most immediately serve), and this strangeness insinuates itself on other textual levels, too, not least of which being Danielewski’s flagrantly errant spellings of words simple and overly intricate alike.

The Story Teller’s unusual tale, then, is the crux of this yarn (the literal threads in the art surrounding this text not to be forgotten when using that word!)–and he spins it with plenty of forewarning in lines like “I am a bad man with a very black / heart. And it was only that badness and / blackness which forced me to seek out / what I have // carried now for many / years and brought this night for you.” (76)

At this juncture you might think the Social Worker inclined to intervene, but she seems overwrought with exhaustion, such that Chintana–a secondary guest to these proceedings–bears keenest complicity for allowing the Story Teller to continue recounting the story of his search for a most heinous weapon–a story that unfolds in the presence of a narrow box “with angles of black, / six feet long, easy, with an ochre sash / for a handle above the odd engraving- // T50YS // The four hinges faced in towards / him. The five metal latches faced out / towards the orphans.” (72)

Doom, therefore, is inevitable in this text–but whose? and when? At its best, Danielewski’s melding of word and image creates some delightfully tense moments exploiting the turn of the page in a way that still remains respectful of the reader’s intelligence. His attention to textual detail also intimates connections and foreshadowed events that–even if they do not ultimately come to pass–have still serviced readers well for the ride.

And a ride The Fifty Foot Sword is–though not one that I feel invites a return (except perhaps to inspect the images anew). Rather, where Danielewski’s last work, House of Leaves, was hailed by many as an experimental novel with multiple layers, this novella feels very much like a more lyrically elaborate variation of the campfire standard: something to be told without being scrutinized; something to be experienced without being thought upon too much; something simply to establish a feeling that lingers in you–as a shiver or mounting sense of dread–long after the book’s been set down.

Is a book still a book–a really good book at that–if it does not as readily reward rereading? Are all stories ghost stories at heart? Do characters always need clear motivations or agency to garner our sympathy or interest? Does the feeling a book instills in its readers matter more than the content itself?

These are questions The Fifty Year Sword asks in wending, poetic dialogue surrounded by artistic artifacts, and so being described as a “gimmick” text by some is quite likely inevitable. The work is, however, also an experience unto itself–both structurally and tonally–and in that respect (however fleetingly) it most certainly succeeds.