New York Film Festival: Redacted

As I got ready today to write my review of Redacted, the Brian De Palma Iraq war film shown last night at the New York Film Festival, I came across an interesting piece of news. Apparently, at the press conference there was a huge discrepancy between the director's claims that his own film has been "redacted" by Magnolia Pictures, the distributor; and the producers, who claim this isn't so. In order to explain this funny business, you have to know that the film uses actual photographs of Iraqi war victims, whose faces have been masked with what looks like a sharpie, because there is no clearance to use them for commercial use, which is the category that this movie belongs in. The debate on fair use and clearances is one for the lawyers. Although I must say only in America would executives be so concerned that the families of poor Iraqis blown to pieces are going to sue them for using a picture that has already appeared in the press. And if they are so concerned at respecting their dignity and their privacy, perhaps they should not show them at all, much less with an inkblot covering their faces.
In any case, the more interesting issues raised by this film are those of authenticity.
Redacted is sort of Casualties of War redux, except in Iraq and in the age of video and internet. Every single image in the movie is supposed to be shot by a witness holding a video camera, or by a security camera, or by a news network, or by documentarians. Certainly such immediacy is disturbing and endlessly interesting, since it makes witnesses or voyeurs of us all, as opposed to simply an audience looking for entertainment. HOWEVER, with a capital H, the movie happens to be a fictional dramatization of a true incident that happened in Samarra, where American soldiers raped, killed and burned a 15 year-old girl and massacred her family. So all the supposedly realistic footage is painstakingly designed to look real but it is performed (mostly hammily) by actors. The internet sites are recreated, fake newschannels invented, etc. The stylistic choice supposedly makes the audience confront reality without the safety blanket of "this is only a movie". But unfortunately, it also imposes certain limitations on the plot, which result in contrivances that defy belief. For instance, one of the soldiers is shooting everything he sees in his camcorder so he can submit his film to film school. To this end, he wears a tiny camera that records the rampage on the night in question, and nobody knows. Like we say in Spanish, now tell me a cowboy story. There is no authority around to censor him. It may be true that American kids are running around Iraq with no semblance of a squad leader telling them what they can or cannot do. But if Redacted is to be believed, the soldiers are not only sorely lacking in supervision, but they display an alarming degree of naivete about the danger of their surroundings. They act as if they were at Summer camp half the time, and they seem totally unsupervised. When the shit hits the fan, and the plotting of it is recorded by a security camera that seems to have stereo speakers, it is almost beyond belief that nobody has the power or authority to stop it. One could think this is a perfect metaphor for the kind of moral degradation we are going through as a result of this war, but my point is that it would have worked much better as a metaphor had it not tried so hard to look real, had it been shot in a more conventional way. The paradox is: the more realistic you try to make it, the more fake it looks, because the audience expects everything to be more real. In fictional conventional narratives we are able to forgive and accept certain conventions expecting that we will be rewarded with true insight. Art can achive more genuine results through artifice. (See: Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket or Paths of Glory). But when you try to have it both ways, it doesn't seem to work, or it smacks of exploitation. I'm of the camp that viewers need to know exactly what it is they are watching. I was not a fan of The Blair Witch Project because I don't buy the fake reality, and the same happened to me with Redacted, as well made and undeniably intense as it is. Or perhaps it's De Palma, who has the subtlety of an axe murderer and a tin ear for real reality. Even the way the kids talk to military investigators seems farfetched. I find it hard to believe that two soldiers that are in hot water for committing rape and murder, would be so disrespectful and so blasé. It doesn't help that the guys have nary a shred of real dimensionality to them. There is the decent college kid, the aspiring Latino filmmaker, the tough talking Black sargeant, and the two trailer trash from hell, which Sean Penn did by himself much more convincingly in Casualties of War. The young, talented actors give it their all. Had they been in the hands of someone with more psychological acuity, they would not seem like walking clichés.
So plenty of instances ring false. Which is exactly why the movie fails, for all its brutality, for all its intentions to make Americans confront the evil we have unleashed. Its manipulations are more transparent, and less emotionally effective.
Brian de Palma is a very proficient filmmaker and some of the sequences in this film have incredible tension and power. They are chillingly effective, particularly one where a car runs through a checkpoint, seen from the point of view of the passenger in the car. In fact, part of the film is quite entertaining: most of the soldiers are likeable and they speak the army macho patois with much conviction. We seem to have a tradition in American war movies of goofy camaraderie and potty mouthed repartee that we all come to expect. Though it may be very real, it's a cliché. But then things get ugly, and the plot is blatantly contrived in order to get someone to actually record the evil deeds with a camera. De Palma really goes to town with the violence, although it could have been more disturbing to learn of the incident without actually seeing it, through its consequences. I'm not advocating for prudishness. Redacted is a war film and war should not be sanitized. The entire point of the film seems to be that the war has been pre-sanitized for us by the government and the self-censored media, and had we access to the obscene brutality that goes on every day, as we did during Vietnam, perhaps we'd be more inflamed against the war. Still, the premise that the crime is recorded for posterity with a video camera makes the whole thing rather forced.
In the end, I was not moved nor outraged, but exhausted and underwhelmed.
The photographs of bloodied, maimed civilians at the end of the film are horrifying. That their faces are further desecrated by a black blot makes their tragic anonymity even more obscene. They are the only thing that is actually real in the movie. What is the point in obscuring their faces? Surely they are already unrecognizable, charred, maimed, blown to shreds. Is it only for legal protection? Is it for sensationalism? In either case, it is an appalling, disrespectful use of them. If the purpose is to shock American audiences into recognizing that we are at war, then why obscure the faces? These are human beings, and viewing them like this may provoke shock and outrage, but it does not afford them or us any dignity. It's war porn.

Werner Herzog In Person

Encounters at the End of The World, a film and conversation with Werner Herzog.
Man, for the grief he gets into on every film he makes, Werner Herzog looks fantastically youthful. He is full of life and vim and many opinions. In his latest, wonderful documentary, Herzog goes to the South Pole and points his boundless curiosity at everything. What seems at first like a classic Discovery Channel documentary about scientists in the South Pole, turns out to be a highly idiosyncratic film. (NOTE: Everybody needs to see Grizzly Man).
Herzog brings his camera and adjusts his interests to whatever happens to cross his way. There seems to be no overarching structure but that of living in the moment and seizing opportunities, finding unexpected things and people in unexpected places, and yet the film is hugely entertaining. Herzog is fascinated by the motley bunch of eccentric explorers and scientists who have seemingly fallen to the bottom of the Earth and who share a desire to leave the world behind. His narration has a wonderful sense of humor and irony. None of that stentorian, heroic voice a la Morgan Freeman, waxing poetic about the wonders of nature. He has great comic timing, the freshness of a child running around with a camera and the sophistication of a mature artist. Herzog knows that the breadth of human experience in the natural world is painful and complex, and he refuses to fall into cliches. His choices are always fascinating. There is a marvelous business with emergency training for snow storms where people run around Antartica with their heads inside buckets (to simulate zero visibility conditions) and he lingers lovingly, bemusedly in the cartoony hilarity of something that would be horribly tragic if it actually came to pass. When he gets to cover the penguins, he asks a taciturn penguin watcher if penguins can go crazy and then happens to find one who apparently does. As he emphatically explained in conversation, he has little patience for people who think the universe is in harmony. He says it is a violent, disturbing place, but still he finds grace and wonder, both in humans and in nature. He is refleshingly wary of tree huggers and animal lovers who whine about global warming but don't care about the death of human languages. He is a true eclectic with a mischievous streak, announcing gleefully to the audience that he staged some of the scenes of the film, albeit with the purpose of getting to a deeper truth. He has a very poetic way with images. Everything with him feeds into a sense of wonder, and that is what he communicates. Fortunately, he is not a sentimentalist and has no patience for manipulative drivel on the order of March of the Penguins (which I find as repulsive as he does in its shameless antropomorphism).

To Make A Long Story Long

This is my year of sloooooooooooooooooooow movies.
Silent Light, by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. Reygadas is our auteur, our artiste, which means his movies are heavily pretentious. I was not a fan of Japon, and because of that, I didn't see Battle in Heaven, but Silent Light did very well at Cannes so I ventured out to the New York Film Festival.
For a while, Reygadas got his reputation by staging sex scenes with very ugly, old or fat people. He must have understood that this kind of novelty quickly wears off, even for masochistic cineastes.
The movie is the story of a love triangle among members of the Mennonite community in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Reygadas used all non professional members of the Mennonite community (some of whom he had to cast in Canada and Germany) and the actors are mostly wooden, as most unprofessional non-actors are. I have never understood the predilection of certain filmmakers for non professional actors. In my book, when dealing with dramatic narrative, actors are always better than real people. In this case it makes sense to use real Mennonites, because otherwise you'd have a pretentious version of Witness, and that is something nobody needs.
The movie starts with a sunrise in almost real time, so you know that you are in for excruciating slowness and you adjust your expectations accordingly.
Watching a sunrise in real time in real life is a miraculous experience. Watching it on a screen is a bore, regardless of how beautiful the sky and how chirpy the crickets. This is an important difference between cinema and real life. In cinema we cut to the chase and we can still get to experience the wonder. Call me a philistine, but I fail to see the point of a sunrise in real time in a movie. Nowadays I get less upset at these kinds of artistic overindulgence. After sitting through the 8-hour Bela Tarr extravaganza Satantango, I am almost inured to slow films.
Yet, even with its pretentiousness, I actually found Silent Light very absorbing and quite moving. It was interesting to observe the Mennonites, who are deeply religious, but apparently not as prudish as one would think, in their secluded life in Mexico, where nobody seems to bother them. Reygadas chose beautiful people for his film and he coaxed some authentic emotion here and there from his actors. It is obvious that this film does not pretend to be something realistic, because the authenticity of the peole makles the story seem very artificial, imposed on them. My question is, does the director get off on manipulating people who are not trained for the physical and emotional rigors of acting? This is an aspect of his movies that disturbs me. Am I the only one who smells the faint whiff of exploitation? Abbas Kiarostami also prefers non professional actors but I think he is careful not to cross certain boundaries, and somehow, because of his far superior writing, he gets something much more interestingly human in return (but also very slow).
I liked the movie better before I saw the director in the Q&A session. I objected to two things. 1. He was dressed as if he had just woken up and went to the corner for a bagel. There is nothing more studied than such willful, seemingly careless disregard for the appropriate attire, and I find that obnoxious. 2. He mentioned the word "Bressonian". Pre-ten-tious.
The Man from London, from Hungarian Bela Tarr, the granddaddy of slowness.
This movie is based on a story by Georges Simenon. Again, a relatively conventional, deeply ironic story about a man who steals a briefcase with stolen money, told in the stately sytle of Bela Tarr, in gray and gray, with endless travelling shots; every shot a composition like a painting and almost as motionless, strange locales and quirky characters. Except that this film is entirely humorless, except for the typical little dancing session at the bar between drunks, and kind of pointless. It's hard to feel any kind of emotion for the main characters because the staging is so artificial, the acting so exaggerated. Bela Tarr has a fondness for shooting some of his actors from behind so you only see the nape of the neck for like two hours. Then he stays on a distraught face for more hours. Satantango at 8 hours was less boring and less plodding than this film and it had far more life. You will excuse the sacrilege but Bela Tarr makes me want to take his movies and chop them off to humanly bearable rhythms. I'd bet they'd be even better if they were shorter and faster.
I appreciate the filmmakers that insist in bringing the moving image to a standstill, but for the love of God, I don't quite see why.

Short Review Of A Longwinded Movie

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Richard Ford is a movie even more pretentious and ponderous than its title, which is a pity because it is based on the fascinating story of the poor schmuck who killed the legendary criminal, thinking the world would thank him for it and got nothing but contempt in return. It's a great subject for a film but it is unfortunately bogged down by a cloak of pretentious, incompetent artiness that squeezes any hint of life out of it. The only person who looks alive in it is Sam Shepard, who plays Frank James. He seems to be the only one who actually belongs in that world.
The incredibly exquisite cinematography is by the masterful Roger Deakins, yet it's a testament to the preciousness of the movie that even the stunning beauty of every single shot begins to rub you the wrong way after the two hour mark. The film plods with no rhyme or reason for the sake of its own poetry. It's a real shame.
This movie would have worked if someone had the cold blood to chop off all the solemn fluff, and if someone had had a clearer idea of how to tell a story. A good cast is wasted, twisting their tongues around the authentic patois of the period, which was mostly unintelligible to me because it was mostly mumbled. Brad Pitt is fine, but no more than serviceable, as Jesse James.
I was happy to see James Carville, aka Serpenthead, play the governor of Missouri. He's a damn fine actor.
I don't get Casey Affleck's performance. Is he queer? Is he just weird for the sake of being weird? Was he born mysterious? He does gets better as the movie inches slowly along but one never gets a clear understanding of his character. After all, the movie is really about him, but the director is too busy being an artist to give his main character emotional coherence. A fine mess.

Eastern Promises or Oh, Viggo!

Viggo, Viggo, Viggo, Viggo.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes my review of Eastern Promises, the new David Cronenberg film.
Okay. Not so fast.
I like David Cronenberg because of his unwavering commitment to exploring the problem of human evil, which he knows is infinite and endless and which he doesn't ever shirk away from. He rather revels in the voluptuousness of violence. Critics have complained about the excessive violence in this movie. It is a bit much, but I think it serves a purpose, as opposed to the retarded violence which is the rule in most Hollywood blockbusters. In Eastern Promises all violence is accomplished with sharp instruments, and it is brutal.
And Cronenberg wants you to look. He wants you to admit there is a place in the human heart where evil and savagery reside. He is fascinated by our dual nature, and has found in Viggo Mortensen a magnificent, precisely calibrated instrument for his investigations.
I have to tell you that I knew everything that was going to happen in the movie because the reviews I read made sure to tell it to me. I feel like suing the bastards. Even so, I was completely transfixed with it. As stories go, Eastern Promises relies a bit too much on some strategically placed coincidences. It seems for instance, that everybody in London is a Russian or has a Russian uncle. But that's nitpicking. Cronenberg is a wonderful storyteller and he has a way with images. He is one of the few current filmmakers whose imagery remains in your memory long after you've seen the film, and not necessarily the most violent imagery. After Dead Ringers, you'll never look at your gynecologist and his instruments the same way again. The same goes for cars and their accidents, with the original Crash, a wonderfully perverse movie. My favorite scene in Eastern Promises involves Vincent Cassel, who plays Kyril, a mean mess of a mob guy, inflating balloons for a birthday party.
Cronenberg used to be more of a meat and potatoes horror guy; now he is making more conventional moral stories. There is a new preoccupation with redemption in his films, and that's where he loses me a little, but I don't fault him for trying not to be so damn dark.
Eastern Promises is very rewarding because it is a good story, if you suspend your disbelief a couple of times, with wonderful actors in it. Viggo Mortensen plays Nikolai, a Russian mob driver, and he is a marvel of powerful understatement. He is even better than in A History of Violence. He drives the boss' son, Vincent Cassel, a chaotic mess of flamboyantly reprehensible behavior. Cassel chomps the scenery with great gusto (and great humanity), and they both play off each other beautifully, like a Russian mob odd couple. Viggo is the smart clean up guy and Vincent is the total fuck up. He is quite a monster, but the filmmakers give him a backstory of closeted gayness and impotence, and I think the impotence would have been enough, but I guess it helps to fuel his self hatred and the disgust of his disapproving, ruthless father, played, with an aura of benevolence by Armin Mueller Stahl.
Naomi Watts shows up as a good girl both attracted and repelled by these evil people (and who wouldn't be attracted to Viggo?) and Sinead Cusack is her mother and everybody is great.
The plot is a little confusing and full of revelations and betrayals that are a little hard to keep track of, but that keep us happily busy. I enjoyed much more its few subtleties than its obvious turns.
But there is a lot there to please: there is Viggo and Vincent and Viggo naked and tattooed, and if you can stomach it, a lot of gruesome, messy life.