Rhymes With Cars & Girls

I thought Gone Baby Gone was a very good movie but I was left cold by what (I gathered) was supposed to be the central, heart-wrenching moral conflict at the conclusion of the film:

Should Casey Affleck call the police on Morgan Freeman - who conspired to kidnap a little girl - thereby returning the girl to her mother? Or should Casey let it slide because (we’re supposed to conclude from about 7 seconds’ worth of screen time, the nice house he lives in, the fact that he’s Morgan Freeman, the fact that his wife is white..?) Morgan Freeman is ‘giving her such a nice home’ or some such?

To me it isn’t even close. Not in the slightest was I tempted to think ‘he should leave the girl with Morgan Freeman’. In fact, I was afraid that he would, because movies always seem to have screwed-up morality. So I was glad that he didn’t.

The movie labored to show us how much of a self-centered druggy the mother was, to try to load this conflict as much as possible. The problem is that the more of a druggy they made the mother, the more likely that in real life child protective services would have taken the kid away in the first place, meaning there’d have been no necessity for the kidnap plot, and no story. So this aspect of the drama straddles the line of unbelievability.

My question therefore is who is this story for? What audience did they have in mind that, they assumed, would be inclined to the ‘leave her with Morgan Freeman’ position? Perhaps it is sort of a left-wing version of the Elian Gonzalez case: make the mother a white-trash skank, make the kidnapper Morgan Freeman, and some faction of the audience will draw upon their biases, connect the dots and say ‘yes! he should leave the girl with Morgan Freeman’.

Ultimately this is a problem for the film because it reduces the universality of the theme it attempts. If you don’t come to Gone Baby Gone with the same baggage as the people who made it, and the people they (apparently) assumed would share their assumptions when they made it, then however much you may admire the craft that went into it, it will likely fail on some level for you.

Oscar-winner for Best Picture No Country For Old Men is probably the worst, least satisfying Coen Bros. movie that I have seen. (I believe I’ve seen all of the full-length features they’ve directed; this includes The Man Who Wasn’t There, which was pretty interesting at times.) The story seems determined to withold any sort of payoff or satisfaction from the viewer. The main character (the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones) goes through the motions of an interesting character arc, but since he does not interact very much with the actual story our emotional involvement is minimal. The result is bleak, misanthrophic, and anticlimactic. The only impression we’re really left with is that this is “that movie where the guy shoots people with a cattle gun”, which is how I suspect it will be remembered two decades from now (if at all).

Contrasting this with The Big Lebowski, which will still be quoted and watched over and over decades from now, and it’s more than a little bizarre that the latter was considered a failure while No Country is an Oscar Winner.

The story on which the film is based appears to have an interesting theme: as far as I can tell, it is a lament for the loss of honor in the world. It is not clear that the Coen Bros. understood this, however, given how fascinated they seem to have become by playing up and mythologizing the role of the killer character. (Which worked; after all, it got Javier Bardem the Oscar too.) This made for an oddly schizophrenic movie, something mostly indistinguishable from an unstoppable-killer flick with the (much more interesting) sheriff’s personal struggles lurking underneath, trying to get out. This could have been forgivable if the surface storyline of Chigurh chasing Polk had been more interesting or come to any sort of satisfying payoff, but the Coens’ ongoing attraction to nihilistic themes seems to have precluded them from going this route. Instead the Josh Brolin character is dispensed with offscreen (I am still not quite sure who killed him to be honest, and don’t much care) and the money-bag Macguffin that was supposed to be the plot thread holding our interest is tossed aside as a distant memory.

Some fans of the film have praised the dialogue, but in practice the cleverness and wit is few and far between, and indeed the fact that I had already seen all the memorable quotes on the internet basically constitutes its own proof that the movie does not have very many others. We are left with a story about nihilism for nihilism’s sake, and the disappointment caused by the fact that the backbone of the story - honor - is still visible underneath, but in the end, remains undeveloped.

What is noteworthy is that three years ago, Tommy Lee Jones starred (and directed) as a border lawman in another - much better - postmodern Western with similar themes of honor, manhood, and father-son relationships: The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. That film, too, contained the dark humor, violence, bleak landscapes against which to set a semi-mythological tale. But it also had a soul, giving us an emotional investment in the characters, and when comparing the final payoffs between the anticlimactic No Country and the surprisingly touching Three Burials, there’s just no comparison. Of course, again, the latter was a failure while the former is an Oscar Winner.

But if I were going to rewatch one of them, I’d love to settle in with The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada anytime. In fact I may just re-order it on Netflix. By contrast, I shall probably never be watching No Country For Old Men again, if I can help it. Life’s too short.

Sheila brings up overacting. I agree with her on this:

i think meryl streep is best when she’s over-the-top in comedies

Because my favorite Meryl Streep performance ever (almost by default, since it’s really the only one I can say I’ve consciously liked, as opposed to endured) was a hammy ‘Jewish mother’ in something called Prime.

Sheila’s post links to a longish discussion of over-the-top performances. I’d like to nominate John Lithgow for a Lifetime Achievement Award. Some might say he deserves it for his extended 3rd Rock From The Sun performance alone, but many fans of that character may not realize that Lithgow established his over-the-top cred way before that.

Lithgow had a rather impressive run of Needlessly Super-evil Villains (with or without Needlessly Fake British Accents) in cheesy action pics like Ricochet and Renny Harlin’s (soon to be sequelized?) Cliffhanger. For a while in the ’90s, if you needed a cheap but convincingly over-the-top evil villain, Lithgow was the go-to guy in my book.

I’m so evil even the other bad guys think I’m evil.

But for his crowning achievement, there was Brian de Palma’s so-bad-it’s-brilliant Raising Cain:

I’m not crazy! I’m the one that’s crazy!

Other career highlights (as if we needed any more):

• reprising the William Shatner (!) role in the “monster on the airplane wing” segment of the Twilight Zone movie
• the Footloose preacher who won’t allow dancing
• many more I’m sure I’m leaving out.

Is John Lithgow over the top? No. He got over the top long, long ago and started back around. Pretty soon we’ll hear him coming up on us from behind. With a fake British accent, which we won’t care is fake. Because he’s that good.

Handy tip to keep in mind if you ever watch Death Wish (1974) for the first time: The criminals are the guys that can’t stop wiggling around.

In the Death Wishiverse, normal law-abiding people stay relatively still (sitting, or walking in a fixed trajectory), whereas criminals bounce/shimmy/hop/skip/galavante around in wild, unpredictable paths. Slaloming around subway-car poles, touching everything, touching each other, whispering in each others’ ears. Writhing. Like the zombies in 28 Days Later or the dancers in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, of which they are clearly precursors in all their skinny Jeff Goldblum speed-freak glory.

In fact, Death Wish is probably best understood as a dance piece.

I make this note because without this viewing tip, Death Wish would simply go over your head as you miss its depths and subtleties. You’re welcome. Let’s hope that the Stallone remake will adhere to this useful motif.

You can’t tell from this still photo, but I assure you the guy on the right is the criminal, because of how much he was wiggling leading up to this moment.

It was only recently that I understood how much my movie-obsession comes from my dad.

The weird thing is, my dad’s not really that big a movie buff. At least, not nearly as much of a movie buff you’d think he’d have to be for me to say my movie-obsession comes from him. It’s not as if he’s into Godard or has Quentin Tarantino’s personality or anything. But it was through and because of my dad that I got exposed to, and became fascinated by, movies at an early age.

My dad likes the blockbusters. Lucas. Spielberg. Sci-fi. Special effects. Jaws. Star Wars. This was back in the ’70s, the early ’80s, when special effects were interesting because they were hard to do well. He also would interest me in the directors: “Spielberg did this one movie called Duel…”, or “American Graffiti is by the same guy who did Star Wars.”

And so maybe I am underestimating how much he loves movies. He always liked to tell us about how/when he saw this or that movie. He liked to explain movies. He liked to get us interested in them. I know that he first saw Alien on a business trip when he had nothing to do. I know how long we stood in line when he first took us to see Star Wars. Hmm, I guess he is a movie buff, just not the snobby kind.

I have so so many memories like this: I’m in the family room watching some dumb TV show - Diff’rent Strokes, perhaps, or The Dukes of Hazzard. In walks my dad. He’s got the newspaper or TV guide under his arm. “Do you mind if we switch to channel 2? There’s a movie coming on that I really want to watch.”

I never minded. I totally trusted my dad’s taste. It never let me down.

So I’d watch with him. This is how I was introduced to what I think of as, in a sense, ‘the canon’: 2001, Dirty Harry, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. All the great movies from the past that seemed to tower over modern movies like gods. I’d pepper him with questions: why is this happening? why is he doing that? what’s going to happen next? My dad would explain. I was his audience. He probably doesn’t know to this day how closely I paid attention. Or how, in some sense, I’m just like him: I notice myself doing the same thing when I’m around my daughter.

So when I watch these movies today, they still stir up something in my heart. They’re not just movies, they’re movies I watched with my dad. Big, big difference.

There’s something else:

At first, I never got to see the end of these movies. Because of course that would take me past my ‘bedtime’. To my endless frustration, I’d have to go upstairs before seeing what happens to David Bowman as he approaches the monolith, or whether Richard Dreyfus gets on the spaceship. Dirty Harry steps on Scorpio’s wound in Kezar Stadium - commercial break comes on - “Okay, I think it’s bedtime.”

NOOOOOo!!!!!!

But of course eventually I got older and was allowed to stay up later and later. It was a constant battle that I would inevitably win. Every additional 15 minutes I got to stay up and see more of 2001 was an accomplishment, like a benchmark on the way to my adulthood. “If he just won’t say anything through this commercial break, then I’ll get to keep watching till the next commercial break, and maybe that’ll get me to the end.”

When I finally was allowed to get to the end - the Star-child, or seeing Richard Dreyfus fly away on that plane at the end of Graffiti, or Dirty Harry throwing away at his bad - it was as if I had truly earned something. It also felt like I had pulled an all-nighter. It was almost 11 o’clock. I would be exhausted and heady and feverish from the thrill. It’s said that George Lucas intentionally filmed Graffiti in the wee hours of the morning so that everyone would have that exhausted-yet-excited look about them. I got that exact same feeling watching it.

That’s how it was watching movies with my dad. You want to see how I felt, watch American Graffiti. That movie is now so wound up with my dad that just watching a piece of it instantly makes me think of him - and almost instinctively, a subconscious voice appears in the back of my head:

“I hope he lets me stay up till the end of it this time.”