Sternhagen speculates: “Why did Lang stop here? In the end did he decide not to pull the trigger? Did he disavow the film but find himself unwilling to destroy it? Or did he simply run out of money and was waiting to shoot the missing middle section and the final scenes?”
It is hard to say. As a film about obsession, about someone working to turn art into life (or more rightly death), The Trigger has much to recommend it. The acting is not as strong as it could be and the plot is far from perfect, but there is, as with even the most flawed of Lang’s movies, something there, something that refuses to be dismissed.
Directed by Michael Mann. Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Kris Kristofferson, Corinna Harfouch, Ewan McGregor, Judy Dench, Til Schweiger, Jürgen Prochnow, and Carey Mulligan.
I saw this movie at the Berlin Film Festival in February, on a dreary night, when new snow settled on the old in such rapid manner that even hard-faced and dead-eyed Berliners stopped in their tracks to marvel at the sheer volume of the white, or at least near-white, mess dumped on their streets. Water accumulated in my sensible shoes.
The theater was overheated, for which I was grateful, and smelled of wet socks, for which I was not. The projector failed already during opening credits, and we waited in near darkness for over twenty minutes for the show to resume.
I’m not sure what Hollywood’s fascination with Berlin is—and has any other city save Moscow endured more at the hands of America’s filmmakers? The shots of decaying facades, the obligatory filters that turn every bit of natural color into a steely gray, or a steely blue—Berlin, even twenty years after the fall of the Wall, still looks more Kafka than capital, if Kafka had written third-rate spy novels. Enter Michael Mann and his movie Burned, which was shot on location throughout. Mann, in whose hands even Miami can seem like something Sarah Palin might use for Caribou-hunting, has outdone his predecessors and invented a new shade for this vast city. It’s what can only be called a steely brown and it goes a long way to show us just how dangerous the German capital is.
The crowd didn’t seem to mind that color. When the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of the Cold War and of German reunification, appeared during the first thirty seconds of the movie, it was greeted with cheers. Beer bottles were raised every time a street sign or landmark appeared onscreen. In Berlin, it seems, people are grateful just to be noticed, even if only for the wrong things.
Hollywood’s A-list actors have regularly descended on Berlin. From Tom Cruise to Liam Neeson to Matt Damon, they have scattered lovers and corpses in desolate streets, chintzy clubs, bars that haven’t been cleaned since Hitler’s regime, and hotel rooms where you don’t have to look for bed bugs because they are already celebrating your arrival on the flower-patterned spread.
This time it’s Kenneth Branagh who has to enter Berlin and look for dark secrets, secret identities, and operatives who may or may not be working for the people they say they’re working for. We know that nobody is who they say they are and don’t trust Stanley Tucci, the US Ambassador, who appears to be a decent guy but has a thing for underage Eastern prostitutes, and we don’t even believe Kris Kristofferson, a former CIA operative who has stayed in the city that allowed him many decades of Cold War glory, when he grunts, “Of course it’s the truth, I made it for you myself.”
Branagh, as our hero Harry Trust, is a curious choice. He doesn’t have the star power of many of Mann’s previous collaborators, but he feels right in a way that no Robert De Niro or Tom Cruise ever has. In his younger years, Branagh often seemed overeager and nervous, preferring the grand gestures of the stage to the near non-acting the big screen requires. But he has settled comfortably into his once lithe body, his face has filled out and gained gravitas, and he moves with the knowledge that life is full of traps and that most big successes are only the preludes to even bigger failures. I liked his work in the Kurt Wallander TV movies on PBS, and here he gave his finest performance yet. He’s nuanced, weighed down by too much experience, yet not defeated. He’s on this mission only because his superiors want him gone without having to fire him, but he refuses to acknowledge that. He knows that spies can come back from the dead.
A woman he once had an affair with has been murdered. When he visits the morgue he doesn’t recognize her immediately. She has aged, just like Harry, and his memories don’t track. It’s a memorable shot, Harry tracing the lines of German actress Corinna Harfouch who is a star in her country but is not allowed the tiniest wink or smirk.
That woman, once code-named Red Pigeon, was believed to be a useful double agent, betraying secrets to Moscow her American handlers knew to be false. After the end of the Cold War many thought her to slide into irrelevance, but Harry insists that she must have known something that made her death necessary. Of course, he’s right.
In many ways, Michael Mann has never been an original filmmaker. His stories have been told twice and thrice and often many times more, yet I haven’t missed any of his offerings yet. There’s a quietness in even the loudest of his productions, an eerie sense that all the mayhem is happening to people who—just like those dead-eyed Berliners—would rather stop and stare at the mounds of snow just as they’re being buried by them.
And I, for one, am glad to stare with them. Miami Vice was not about Sonny Crockett blowing up scores of baddies, and The Last of the Mohicans did not revel in bloody rituals. Instead, watching Daniel Day-Lewis hunt deer in buckskin, noiselessly, effortlessly is a revelation. In Collateral, even the parlor trick of giving Tom Cruise a gray head of hair is a touch of brilliance.
Mann’s movies’ outcomes are never in doubt. He is the rare filmmaker who seems to forget the story while he is making it. In this, he is a direct descendant of Don Siegel, the B-movie auteur who found his freedom and virtuosity in the run-of-the-mill sixty-minute flick. In Heat, we never believe that Robert De Niro could escape into retirement. In Collateral, we know that Tom Cruise cannot go unpunished. And so it is in Burned, too. Harry will win, and he will lose it all, and Mann never stoops to bore us with unnecessary plot twists.
Harry, who can’t trust anyone, stumbles through Berlin and its steely brown autumn. Of course, Red Pigeon was onto something (I won’t spoil the fun, but it involves Middle Eastern rogues). Of course, Harry gets beaten often and badly, and of course Stanley Tucci is so deeply involved in her death that “double agent” seems too quaint a term to describe him. And still I watched in awe, even forgetting my wet socks.
British actors, it must be said, seem to make the most reliable movie Germans. I was waiting for Gary Oldman to jump out at me with some showy throat-clearing consonants Hollywood imagines to sound German. Instead it was Ewan McGregor, reprising his role in The Ghost Writer, as an author steeped in espionage and with a brutally shortened life, who tries himself at appearing Teutonic. Judy Dench, in a cameo even shorter than Kristofferson’s, is equally convincing at sounding, if not German, then strangely foreign.
The German actors who make appearances are another matter. Til Schweiger, who had a forgettable and silent role in Hollywood’s Replacement Killers, and could recently be seen as a quiet killer in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, is not allowed a single sentence. He is offed quickly by a reluctant yet efficient Harry. Jürgen Prochnow, still known stateside as the doomed captain of Das Boot, plays an old Nazi, who assumed a false identity and tended gardens for fifty years and is now brought to trial. Soon I was waiting for some well-known German actor or actress to play a cyborg; alas, not even Middle Eastern rogues employ cyborgs in these cash-strapped times. However, all Middle Eastern rogues, as far as I could tell, were played by Germans.
As Harry runs from, and dispenses with, unshaven baddies —which, it must be noted, are never as bad or as effective, let alone intelligent, as a cleanly shaven Stanley Tucci, thus making a convincing case against facial hair—he picks up a damsel in distress (a subdued and utterly convincing Carey Mulligan). She is, of course, not i
n distress, but out to make Harry’s life hell on earth, until she falls for our hero. We know how such things end from Casino Royale, but a dying Carey Mulligan, signaling to Harry her undying love, still produced countless sobs in the crowd.
So convincing is Michael Mann’s vision of Berlin, that, when I finally left the theater and hurried through ice, snow, and slosh to the nearest subway entrance, I wished for some more brown shades. The reality of snowed-in Berlin was a touch brutal after watching Burned, the city streets less convincing than what I had just watched on the silver screen. Steely brown had made it almost believable. Bearable too.
Directed by Werner Herzog. Featuring interviews with Quincy Jones, Janet Jackson, and Pat Buchanan.
Werner Herzog has made a career out of celebrating madness. He doesn’t glorify it or condone it; rather, he Teutonically whips back the curtain and cranks the footlights. It’s up to you to decide whether you’re revolted, fascinated, or unexpectedly moved. His decision to make a documentary about the life and death of pop star Michael Jackson is, in many ways, his natural artistic throughline: here, Herzog explores not just the madness of one individual, but of an entire culture. This is Herzog’s King Lear.
“Whether he was a pedophile swaddled in the suffocating robes of celebrity culture,” Herzog monologues over footage of Jackson playing with his monkey Bubbles, “or an abused boy-child whose socially internalized self-hatred made him an easy target for opportunists, Jackson was not a pop star but rather the embodiment of American tragedy. With his single white glove and increasingly bizarre surgical adventures, Jackson was both the guiding light and the sleazy underbelly of Reagan-era America.”
Herzog is not focused on Jackson’s guilt or innocence as a child molester, but rather the simple reality of his stardom in a country that was constantly pivoting between the poles of overheated religious rhetoric and velociraptor-like consumerism. Herzog essentially asks: What person does such a society choose as its figurehead? He’s Bad, therefore, is neither a biopic, straight-up documentary, or Errol Morris-style cultural critique. By featuring the usual Herzogian detours, it becomes a delicious combination of all three. Instead of the coda of the albino alligators in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog swings into late-1980s Florida, where Republican strategist Lee Atwater is mastering his aggressive push-polling tactics.
“Among the sunny citrus groves and treacherous everglades, we find Atwater combining racial invective, sexual hate politics, and religious extremism to create a threshing machine for rational thought and debate. Atwater’s needless destruction of the United States’ democratic process in a time of relative national prosperity mirrors the gradual self-mutilation and bizarre personal behavior of multimillionaire Michael Jackson.”
Herzog overlays this monologue on an increasingly powerful intercut between “Bille Jean,” 1980s news footage, and still photos of garish, overpriced items from Jackson’s home. As the sidewalk panels light up under Jackson’s feet, we begin to feel that we are witnessing a gorgeously choreographed sequence of destruction. It’s not just Jackson who is walking on surreal ground; he is simply the sequin-laden stand-in for an entire society.
The fact that Werner Herzog now lives in the US but is also inherently an outsider to the culture humanizes his portrait of Jackson. Instead of portraying him as a freak or punchline, Herzog sees Jackson as a man caught in vicious, puzzling circumstances. Much like his portrait of Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, this is not a voyeuristic snark-tour, but rather a heartfelt examination of the inherently unanswerable question: Why?
Whatever your personal feelings about Jackson, it’s difficult not to feel moved by the silent montage of Jackson and the women in his life. We watch as he sits with Elizabeth Taylor at a dinner party, meets with his eventual look-alike Diana Ross, and wince-inducingly kisses Lisa Marie Presley onstage. In the absence of sound, we see an alienated man doing his best to connect with his idealized version of love, and failing. It’s fitting, therefore, that the final scene in the movie is taken from one of Michael Jackson’s first appearances on television. Again, Herzog nixes the original interview soundtrack in favor of his voiceover as we watch a seemingly healthy, happy young boy speak into an interviewer’s microphone.
“Perhaps the best way to remain unknown is to become world-famous,” Herzog laments. “In this way, Michael Jackson succeeded. In all others, he failed.”
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson from the novel by Chris Bachelder.
There are so very many ways for bad movies to come of good books, and so many of those ways have to do with distance: that is, with directors too insecure to stretch away from the text even when the new medium demands it, or too daft to realize they have wandered off the text’s most essential paths. Making a great movie from a great book, on the other hand, requires an unbroken chain of small miracles—which is why so few such things exist. And yet and yet and yet: here now before us is Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent adaptation of the timeless Chris Bachelder novel Abbott Awaits.
The book itself was published to widespread critical acclaim; in the words of TNYRB literary critic Mateo Campana, “There is in this world only one marriage, and all of us live it, and this novel is its definitive account.” Sam Lipsyte called it “a sly and soaring novel about fear and tenderness and family,” and Keith Lee Morris alleged Bachelder to have invented an entirely new genre known as “Existential Domestic Cosmology.” It is perhaps a surprise that a director best known for his hyperkinetic camerawork and large ensemble casts should have chosen this seemingly small, quiet project—particularly now, when wisehearted looks at marriage seem most often relegated to the small screen, whether as drama (think Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as Eric and Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights) or as comedy (say, Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen as Phil and Claire Dunphy on Modern Family.) But as it turns out, Existential Domestic Cosmology is a genre in which Anderson feels entirely at home.
The central casting dilemma for Abbott Awaits was neatly solved by turning to the most consistently brilliant member of Anderson’s informal rep company: Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman’s many-shaded silences and unusually animated expressions (he reportedly lost forty pounds for the jowl-less role) allow Anderson to sidestep the distasteful consequences, all too common in adaptations, of excessive (i.e., any) reliance on voice-over. Riskier was Anderson’s decision to cast Maya Rudolph—his real-life life partner and the mother of his four children—as Abbott’s wife. Rudolph steers clear of SNL-style mugging and Bridesmaids pratfalls, coming through splendidly as an intelligent, conflicted, complicated woman searching for her share of grace. The cast is rounded out by the usual subjects acquitting themselves well in smaller-than-usual parts. We have Philip Baker Hall as a creepily intense pet store owner, and John C. Reilly as an obtuse but well-meaning neighbor; Melora Walters and Michael Penn as scientists researching fireflies, and Luis Guzmán as a refrigerator repairman; Ricky Jay as chief of staff at the butterfly conservatory, a spry and clean-shaven Burt Reynolds as a plumber, Julianne Moore as an obstetrician, and Alfred Molina as an unforgettable anesthesiologist.
The film’s scenes tend to run shorter than Anderson usually works, but his infamously long tracking shots function perfectly as a form of directorial patience: they allow him to explore nook after cranny in the life of Abbott, a university professor off work for the summer and thus home for the last three months of his insomniac wife’s pregnancy with their second child. Abbott spends much of his time cleaning up after their toddler daughter, scrubbing ancient raisins off of high chairs and raspberry vomitus out of car seats. He wrestles rolls of cat-sprayed carpet out to the curb, succeeds as often as he fails in attempts to deal with household emergencies, and spends his scarce free moments on the Internet looking up obscure trivia, diagnosing himself with diseases he does not actually have, and forcing himself to confront the suffering of others: he clicks on link after link, finding his way to photographs of children disfigured
by Chernobyl, to footage of what appears to be a weeping fetus, to interviews held with the families of trapped miners, all so as to incline himself (sincerely if artificially) toward the gratefulness he knows he should feel for the life he has.
Hoffman’s acting chops are well up to the task of endowing Abbott’s many internal paradoxes (“Abbott is not a prude about porn. Or, to put it another way, he is a prude about porn.” / “Abbott would like to think he’s a good guy, and yet his wife is up there sobbing, and he’s down here with the superglue.” / “The following prepositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.” / “What kind of fool would cherish this? What kind of fool would not cherish this?”) with precisely the clarity and humor and genuine affect found in the source material. This is not to say, of course, that Anderson never veers from the novel, but when he does, it is in wholly justifiable ways: the story makes as much sense in his beloved San Fernando Valley as it did in Bachelder’s Western Massachusetts, and if you’ll permit me the smallest of spoilers, the narrative is actually strengthened when Anderson, unlike Bachelder, allows Abbott and his wife to finally go ahead and buy the couch they’ve spent the whole movie searching for. (The fact that they buy it from a show-stealing William H. Macy makes the scene all the more satisfying.)
Nonetheless, the movie as a whole would likely have failed without strong work by Anderson’s crew, particularly cinematographer Robert Elswit and set designer Conny Boettger. In perhaps the most notable example, a single silent take renders up every nuance of Bachelder’s phrasing: following Abbott’s painful fall on his way up the basement stairs, we see “[t]he shirts [...] strewn, as if they had grappled at the top and then tumbled down. Their backs look broken. A blue one has an arm outstretched, as if trying to break its fall, or to reach for something out of reach.”
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