The Leopard aspires to, and largely achieves, the status of high—possibly epic—art. By contrast, Jirí Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains aspires to little more than a kind of wistful humanism. It is about a train station guard in an ignored part of the Czech hinterlands during World War II. He yearns for a woman he cannot attain and is played with an aching simplicity by Václav Neckár. The film is also about how something like tragedy sneaks up on him in the course of a film in which everyone, even the oppressive Germans, is given a fair, humanistic shake. It is entirely possible that this is the nicest movie I’ve discussed—though it ends in tragedy for its antihero. Neckár’s character stumbles into heroism without ever quite knowing that’s where he’s going. His innocence is perfect, and his fate is inescapable.
It is a film that revels in its smallness. It is, I suppose, an anecdote, an incident, rather than a fully worked-out drama. It is nominally a tragedy, but a good-natured one. It could as well end with Neckár’s character slipping back into peacetime and his own littleness, no questions asked. That it does not is a great credit to the film. One comes away from it thinking that tragedy—lots of heavy breathing and the imposition of large “meanings” on our activities in life—may very possibly be something of a fraud. The film proposes, rather sweetly (and subversively), that fate is more likely a matter of accident than of doom gathering inexorably around a protagonist. I’m not at all certain that I agree with that viewpoint. The conventions of tragedy are powerful and necessary to dramatic form and expectations. But let’s make an exception in one or two cases. We do stumble, often enough, into existential messes and sometimes lack the luck to stumble out of them. That’s the case with Closely Watched Trains. Can there be such a thing as an accidental tragedy—a fiction that leaves us sad but not devastated? Yes, of course, though I don’t think we want this as a regular occurrence. Once in a while it’s refreshing, though, especially when it comes in such a charming and impeccably presented form. There you have it in two films—vaulting ambition on the one hand, and on the other, sort of a tossed-off tragedy.
I’m going to let those two movies stand for the range of movies within the realm of “normality” and start working my thesis—with Quentin Tarantino and Reservoir Dogs (1992), which features an act of brutality almost unprecedented in modern movie history. Oversimplifying, it traces the bloody aftermath of a robbery gone wrong, and there are times when you want to avert your eyes from the screen and cannot. It is a masterly debut—soon enough followed by the full-on masterpiece Pulp Fiction.
Pulp Fiction (1994) is about the absence of Quarter Pounders in Europe (it has to do with the metric system). It’s about bringing people back from death. It’s about John Travolta dancing up a storm. It’s about blueberry pie for breakfast. It is seemingly about anything that happens to pop into Tarantino’s head, but intricately plotted so it seems to make sense—for at least as long as you are in its thrall, which exactly coincides with its running time. Above all, it is about sustaining high energy, without deteriorating into hysteria.
No, that’s slightly wrong. It is about a young, movie-mad director laying it all on the line and pulling it off, producing one of the most joyous movies I’ve ever seen. It is serious in its way, and controlled. Tarantino has never quite matched its freedom of movement (or imagination), except perhaps in his glorious script for True Romance. He has never flamed out, which is always a possibility for a high-wire act of his kind. I’ve come away from some of his movies vaguely disappointed, but I’ve never felt cheated by him, never felt him coasting. He’s the real damn deal. And he has set the tone for an era as much as anyone I can think of.
That era rightfully begins with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, in 1990. John McNaughton’s film is a flat, almost affectless, and seriously under-attended work, starring Michael Rooker as its title character. It is about killing people and going out for a hamburger immediately thereafter. Or about the interpenetration of the quotidian and the horrific in modern life. It is, of course, utterly charmless, and utterly fascinating, as it stresses the randomness of life in our time. We can, it says, brush against murderous death at any moment. It is very unblinking in its consideration of that possibility, and in the fact that there is no moral reckoning in sight.
Henry is by no means a film to be undertaken lightly. Yet I think it must be seen, for the perfection of its sullen statement of something ugly that has always been present in our lives but is only rarely seen in such close proximity to the ordinariness of our days. Formerly, this was seen as strange and exotic. Now, in this film and the few others like it that followed in its wake, it was brought home to us, ferociously yet calmly. It is a chilling cinematic statement of this undeniable fact of modern life.
So is Blue Velvet (1986), by David Lynch. In it, Isabella Rossellini, tormented almost beyond endurance by Dennis Hopper, gives one of the movies’ great insane performances. The two of them live in Lumberton, one of those idyllic small towns where the firemen wave gently from their passing truck and Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern experiment with puppy love at the local diner.
Oops, what’s this? Kyle discovers an ear severed from someone’s head in a field. That’s how casually evil announces itself here. That leads us to Ms. Rossellini, a lounge singer who is just possibly the most put-upon woman in movie history. Before this movie ends she will be stripped, raped and humiliated to the tune of banal pop ballads. As far as we can see, she deserves none of this punishment; she is merely its convenient target. By the time Hope Lange slips a robe around Rossellini’s quivering nakedness—the movie’s single act of human kindness that I can recall—we have been thoroughly harrowed by it. This is as close as the movies ever come to the merciless, if you will—and as close as Lynch ever came to greatness. It is not—let’s put this as mildly as we can—to everyone’s taste. But I don’t see how the skillfulness can be denied. It is simply unblinking in its contemplation of evil, or maybe the simple carelessness with which people use one another when they set their minds to it. It is, in its way, a masterpiece—at once insane and curiously, utterly rational.
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“No Animals Were Harmed…”
Amores Perros appeared in 2000. The title translates as “Love’s a Bitch.” It is the first film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is about dogs, dogs who bear no resemblance to chipper Benji or faithful Lassie. Three stories interlock in the film: In one, a boy cheats with his brother’s wife while entering his dog in grim fights; in another a model’s animal is trapped and suffering in a crawl space as she listens frantically to the sounds of his suffering; in the last of them, a hit man seeks redemption for the life he has lived. It is, to say the least, a brutally realistic film, yet one that is never less than intelligent, stylish and compelling. And unique. I don’t know of any other “animal picture” that is quite like it in its lack of sentiment.
It is a very hard movie—charmless. Yet unlike any other “dog” movie I know of, it gives the animals their due. It is true to their natures. There is no anthropomorphism here, except that which we in the audience rather desperately impute to these creatures—always, I think, wrongly. It achieves something like greatness through this refusal. A title at the beginning of the film solemnly notes that no animals were harmed in the making of the film. That doesn’t make the film any easier to take.
Then we have There Will Be Blood (2007). Of course there will. When characters aren’t singin’ and dancin’ and cracking wise, movies shed blood in copious quantities. And why not? They are a melodramatic medium lately, when we have seen virtually everything of man’s inhumanity to man in vivid and lengthy close-ups.
Daniel Day-Lewis is all ferocity in this film. Playing Daniel Plainview—wonderful name, that—he is merciless in his single-mindedness—a prospector hunting silver and then oil who achieves great wealth and no happiness with his relentless drive. What saves him for humanity is the good humor with which he slyly edges what I suppose we can call paranoia and something else: American
ism. Americanism run wild, I guess. He will stop at nothing to gain power, which he never defines. What he wants is simply more.
He is, in some sense, one of the most terrifying figures in the history of the movies. But we can understand him, if not sympathize with him entirely. Shortly after the release of There Will Be Blood, a few critics compared it to Citizen Kane. These comparisons were not completely misplaced. It definitely had ambitions of that sort. I thought, though, that it had a grimness about it that Kane lacked. (I think we sometimes forget what a cheeky movie Kane is.)
Still, There Will Be Blood is an awfully good try—by Day-Lewis; by the director, Paul Thomas Anderson; by everyone who worked on the film—as good, I believe, as anything we’ve had hereabouts in recent years. I met Day-Lewis not long after the film came out, and he turned out to be a mild-mannered, humorous fellow, as far from the character he played in the movie as it is possible to be. And why not? He’s an actor, for godsake. He had, at that moment, taken time off from acting to learn shoemaking. He seemed to me as amused by that choice as I was.
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We’ve Got to End Somewhere
For no particular reason, this brings me to Fargo (1996). I can make a case for its being my favorite movie. No, I’m not claiming it is the best movie ever, or even the best American movie. It is simply very much to my taste. As I’ve mentioned, I am a son of the Midwest, transported first to New York City in the 1960s, then to Los Angeles in the 1980s, rarely looking back but never entirely forgetting my roots, either. There were not a few films about life in the heartland, but I never cared greatly for most of them. They were variously patronizing or sort of sappy, in my estimation. They seemed to me created, on the whole, by people who wished to sentimentalize their pasts or to prove their superiority to them—that is, until 1996, when the Coen brothers, out of Minneapolis, gave us Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and this marvelous comedy.
She’s a cop. She’s pregnant. She has a voice as flat as the plains that shaped her. And she’s nobody’s fool. Her foil is Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who has come to a bar in the eponymous city to hire some guys to kidnap his wife and hold her for ransom. He means her no great harm; he just has a debt he needs to cover. Soon enough, people are getting killed more or less all over the place.
The Coens are, I think, the most important American film authors to come along in the eighties and nineties. They are mostly funny, sort of cheeky, but they have a serious side as well. They were good from the get-go (Blood Simple), and on the whole they stayed that way, though occasionally descending to the merely cute. I don’t think you can argue with the likes of No Country for Old Men, for example, or Miller’s Crossing. Their films are unpretentious (on the whole) and, it seems to me, good-natured, likable.
McDormand won a richly deserved Oscar for her work in Fargo, and the movie also won the screenplay Academy Award. It’s a deadpan comedy and all the better for its lack of affect. McDormand is married to Joel Coen and works more or less exclusively for the brothers. I wish she did more. I am grateful for what I receive. She is so eerily calm—unflappable—and endearing. She is a woman who can calmly throw up her breakfast and keep on trucking until all the crime in the neighborhood is settled and still remember that there is “more to life than a little money, you know.” And also remember to buy her husband—of all things, a wildlife painter—some night crawlers for his next fishing expedition. In some sense, it is a perfect comedy, or at least a rare one, for its calmness. It is, I think, the least frenzied successful such work in American movie history. Even when a leg is discovered in the wood chipper, no voices are raised. Marge wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Decorum is all.
I’m focusing on Fargo for another reason, too. We are somewhat less reliant on genres in our movies than was formerly the case. Or perhaps more intent upon working variants on them. I think that is the most important difference between films now and films of earlier eras. It is said that Darryl Zanuck could work out a year’s schedule for Twentieth Century Fox in an afternoon or two—so many comedies, so many musicals, so many melodramas, maybe one or two “important” films to compete for the Academy Awards. We were content with that—until, of course, the business of satisfying routine genre expectations passed over to television, and movies ceased to be an easily satisfied habit. Movies had to aspire to thoughtfulness for that increasingly significant portion of the audience that took reviews seriously and discussed movies with great earnestness, believed they were an “art form” to match any other. (It is interesting that this shift in attitude is so recent, a matter of just a few decades.)
I am going to resist naming a “best” movie in this book. You can’t go wrong with any of the movies discussed favorably herein; all of them, in my opinion, will give you pleasure and reward a second or third viewing. I’m going to end instead by proposing sound films of indisputable quality, beginning with Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (1982). It needs to be acknowledged that his long, hugely productive career is really without parallel in the history of film. Fanny and Alexander is a very long movie and an essentially benign one. Dickens can be evoked, and appropriately so. This is a family saga—informed, undoubtedly, by autobiography, but not dominated by it—and it is very leisurely in its telling. It achieves greatness for both its patience and its ease. Basically, it tells the story of a year in the life of a family in which a father dies and his widow embarks on a marriage to a truly awful bishop of the church. It imperils the family and tests it to the breaking point, though in the end it emerges stronger, intact.
Films of this kind are not generally my dish of tea. But there is a power to it that is, in its quiet way, astonishing. Fanny and Alexander is a story of survival, a sort of hymn to the tensile strength that sometimes can be found in rather ordinary people when they are put to surprising tests. It is, significantly, a film that glows with a beautiful light (the cinematography is by the masterly Sven Nyqvist), and with a sense of foreboding as well. That glow is at the heart of the film’s welcome ambiguity. On the one hand, it is full of promise, offering us the hope of this family’s restoration to happiness. On the other, it represents a near-to-bitter irony; the film comes close to mocking all their hopes.
Yet we welcome the hard-won, close-run, somewhat muted quality of its conclusion. For an aging master, it is a quiet masterpiece—a triumph of the will, against all odds—that appeals to our best human impulses. The film has been accused of being a shade too cozy, a little too “benevolent.” That is perhaps true. But it is also a forgivable flaw. There are times in the movies when we want their characters simply to succeed in their emotional endeavors, especially when they are fairly tested by circumstances. That is emphatically the case here.
I’ve liked Fanny for the surprises it has brought me, if nothing else. And the reminder for me, as a critic, that the movies are a more joyous enterprise than we think they are as we go about our often dour critical rounds. Yes, Ingrid, they are “only” movies—that is to say, nothing—but sometimes they are everything.
Let me end with Jan Troell, who is, I believe, a major director, but one who has not achieved the reputation he deserves. He made a two-part epic, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972), both well received and nominated for Oscars. As their titles imply, they are studies of Swedish migrants finding new lives in America, and they are harsh and beautiful films. After these films, Troell faltered somewhat, with respectable but unexciting movies.
Then came a great film: Hamsun (1996). It is about the Nobel Prize winner of 1920, a great writer (his masterpiece undoubtedly being Hunger, an extraordinarily powerful work) who also happened to be a fascist, a more-than-active apologist for Hitler and a man who finally closes his eyes at the end of the film and unremorsefully pronounces himself “at peace with himself,” despite the fact that his life has been, by our standards, a horror.
You cannot gainsay the power of this work, or the enigma of it. When Hamsun finally confronts Hitler, the dictator wants only to spea
k of art, while the artist wants only to defend himself. The film leaves him in limbo (and his wife as well), unexplained. Peter Rainer, in his very fine piece about it, speculates that Hamsun—Max von Sydow, in a towering performance—may require hostility to function as an artist, and I suspect that he’s right.
He ends his life in disarray—an “imperial crank,” in Rainer’s fine phrase, a creature of hospitals and asylums, also a person of “dreadful waywardness” and a frantic “dabbler.”
He lived into his nineties, and was ever unrepentant. Hamsun, for reasons unknown, as far as the film is concerned, somehow conceived an abiding hatred of the English. They are the opposite, for him, of the Germans. He never abandoned this principle. He died clinging to it. At the film’s end, the horror of what he has done at last comes home to him. But it is, of course, too late. He can only weep. He must live out what Rainer calls “a dark fairy tale.”
I do not know how Troell came to such an unpromising subject, or how he brought it off with such hypnotic power. It will never be a popular or beloved work—only, I believe, a great one.
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That Wonderful Year—1987
While I was writing this book, I kept on my desk a marvelous book, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. It is essentially an enormous cheat sheet about film, carefully written and obviously capacious. I have virtually no arguments with its choices of movies or its solid critical observations about them. It has saved me from innumerable errors of fact, and it is altogether a pleasurable book to browse around in.
One day a few weeks ago, for no special reason, I found myself glancing at the pages devoted to 1987. It was a more or less ordinary year, as, frankly, all movie years are. Like everything else, the movies require a span of time before we can come to any firm conclusions about them.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 26