Reviews

Tideland is harsh and stripped-down compared to Terry Gilliam's earlier movies, that's for sure. I'm glad that Gilliam's magician cape has been lifted, though, because what stands revealed is a muscular Scorsesean torso underneath. His direction in Tideland is purposeful, sure-handed, as precise as a brain surgeon's scalpel, yet with the same sense of whelming confusion and malicious paranoia that he accomplished in the much less focused Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I've never understood what Heidegger was going on about with his phrase "Thrownness in the World" until I saw Tideland -- we are literally THROWN into young Jodelle Ferland's unsavory situation, having to puzzle it out right alongside her, with her own limited cognizance and hazy epistemological borderlines.

Tideland is composed of two three-person fugues -- Jeliza-Rose and her parents, then Jeliza-Rose, Dell and Dickens -- that has the singular distinction of not having one sane character. The most novel aspect of Tideland may be how Jeliza-Rose, Ferland's nine-year-old lead character, is portrayed not as an innocent, but as equal to the adults in her depravity and refusal to confront life outside her own head. In a way, she may be the least innocent of all -- when she seduces the adult, brain-damaged Dickens, you feel like he's the one being violated -- and it's not hard to imagine her being washed down the toilet bowl of the San Fernando Valley in a less whimsical sequel.

The film's lack of a point seems to be its point -- we're meant to experience a delusional state, not to judge it. Yet Gilliam suggests that this delusion is either about to become universal or has already set in without our knowing it. I've always said that what makes Kubrick or Polanski great horror directors are their atheism, and the same holds true in Tideland. Gilliam seems to be a humanist who considers us to be living on the unstable terra of religious zealots, like the witch Dell who sings about Jesus and the Second Coming. Yet she has learnt taxidermy so as to embalm everyone she's ever known in case they can be restored in the future -- which shows more faith in science than in Jesus.

I would say the Jewish people of today are a lot like Dell, as are the Christians who have been tricked into believing that Jesus is going to come back to the earthly Jerusalem -- the same one whose kingship he already rejected once -- sitting on the cannon of a tank. Gilliam may not be religious, and he may not believe in Jesus, God, or the devil and his unfunny jests, but he has an artist's instincts and clearly feels what's happening deep in his bones. Tideland may go down as the film that best captures the desperate souls of our time trapped in yet another farcical, manufactured apocalypse, where the promised millennium of peace becomes a millennium of torture, spiritual death and unfruitful, senseless madness -- not the kind of madness that you come out of with deeper understanding, but a madness that frays you like an old doll until there's nothing left inside or out.

The shot that has really stayed with me is one where Dickens and Jeliza-Rose climb to the top of a crater and see a construction crew building what looks an awful lot like pyramids. This ties in with Mel Gibson's comparison of America to a new Mayan civilization in Apocalypto -- a quiver is going through the world as people gradually realize that the age of reason has shown its true face: a new, all-powerful technological paganism that will make the ancient world and its sacrifices feel like pleasant childhood memories. There's also a running motif where Dickens obsessively lies in wait for a train that comes hurtling through the prarie, thinking in his addled mind that it's a shark.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

At the end, when he blows it up with a clump of dynamite, you feel sorry for the passengers but also have to admire his conviction. After all, what was the invention that ushered in the Industrial Revolution and the Faustian technological web we live in today, where scientists are actually on the verge of completing an invisibility cloak ( which Plato would say truly marks the end of civilization )? You got it -- the steam locomotive. A good film to watch along with this one would be Jacques Tourneur's cult horror film Night of the Demon, one of the first films to show the intersecting point of black magic and technology. The demon of the title, who is always seen on railroad tracks, spraying sparks from its wooly head, looks, I suspect, a lot like what the black nightmare train looks like to Dickens.

The major problem with the script is that we are kept in the dark with Hartnett's character for virtually the entire running time, and then DePalma throws in two rapid, blink-and-you-missed-them monologues, both of them revolving around characters we never see, that are the key to the whole plot. Scarlett Johansson gives the first one when Bucky discovers Lee's money stash, and Fiona Shaw gives the other before her suicide. In DePalma's original three-hour cut there must be flashback scenes where we see George interacting with Emmett Linscott as well as recreations of Lee's bank robbery. Without these the movie itself is a truncated corpse.

MAJOR SPOILERS -- INTERPRETATION OF THE ENDING -- READ AFTER YOU SEE THE MOVIE

Nevertheless, there is much more to The Black Dahlia than people are saying. It's psychologically ambitious at least, a failed attempt at a Hitchcockian peek into the void, which is better than just a failed cop drama.

You could read the entire plot as a set of twin castration fantasies that intertwine fatally -- Hartnett's, after he has his teeth knocked out in the early boxing sequence, and Fiona Shaw's, the matriarch of the Linscott clan, who is being cuckolded by her husband Emmett. Emmett is "virtually" sleeping with his deformed army friend George by sending him lesbian prostitutes like Elizabeth Short. These lesbians are actually metaphors for gay males throughout the film, penis substitutes -- the great insight of the film -- and this is why Josh Hartnett's emasculated character, who plays the eternal third wheel in Lee and Kay's marriage, is drawn to the semi-manly Hilary Swank, who he then must finally eliminate to rid himself of his womanly role and to be able to "fill" Kay. Likewise, when Ramona Linscott kills Elizabeth Short she is taking symbolic revenge on a secretive gay male power structure ( notice that Emmett and George met in the army, and are depicted in a painting together ) that has turned her into a sexually dissatisfied raving hysteric. Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart, even after the latter's death, are a repeat of the Emmett-George dynamic, with Scarlett Johansson as the replacement for Fiona Shaw, doomed to stand in as the "hole" into whom one male whispers his love for the ghost of another. And then there is a bigger gap at the heart of all this, the gap of existence itself, where the social structure is maintained by destruction, by building things up and pulling them down, the "firetraps" that Emmett builds under the Hollywoodland sign -- wars, manmade disasters, the psychotic money and power-mad elite.

What makes this especially troubling is that DePalma doesn't blame these elite, or imply that we could remove them and everything would get better. His whole point is that we CAN'T remove them, anymore than you can remove the springs of a watch and expect it to keep running. Evil is the engine of the whole show. Recall the scene where Josh Hartnett is shooting the Linscott's prized vases and chandeliers, and Ramona says something like "Please stop shooting the art; we rich don't own it, we merely pass it along." Corruption breeds the beautiful itself; they can't exist apart from each other; everything is tainted.

George, the Man Who Laughs, stalking the rundown housing project under the moon, thus becomes the unreal, undead component of our reality, such as third-world peasants or mutilated soldiers, the "casualties of war," that allows the whole demonic circus to keep going, so that the failed actresses of the world ( all of us ) can keep dreaming about the future and the artistic splendors that it holds -- until we end up in the meat grinder. The repressed will have their revenge, but they will take it on the other repressed ( third-world Muslims and American boys from the ghetto kill each other off, while the real manipulators buy new Picassos. ) The ultimate message is: YOU are the Black Dahlia, and you've already been marked for death -- and poverty -- by the elite. You just don't know it yet.

If all this were fleshed out a little, and we saw more of the bond between George and Emmett in flashbacks, then this could be the ultra-disturbing Chinatown/Big Sleep for the nightmarish Zionist-Bush era that DePalma wants it to be -- and then some. Or maybe it will grow on me the way it is now... After all, film noir thrives on omissions and blackouts.

Check this one out. This is a film that uses the truncated running times of the early 30's to its advantage. While it's a rule of thumb in film-making to slowly develop characters, Ace of Aces, perhaps because it's a programmer and simply doesn't have the time, skips the usual intermediate stages -- you know, like introspection. Characters here go from pacifism to bloodthirsty insanity in the time it takes to cut from one scene to the next.

Richard Dix is a sculptor who is accosted in his studio one day by "girlfriend" Elizabeth Allen, who, in the space of about three seconds, threatens to break up with him if he doesn't give up his fancies about art and get his head blown off in WWI ( and there is the tantalizing suggestion that she is sexually unsatisfied with him and is using the war as an opportunity to slake her lust. ) Three more seconds go by, and suddenly Dix has metamorphosed into the Red Baron, gunning down his hapless victims from his elevated perch in the sky. Meanwhile we get lots of superimposed heraldic animal heads, dragons, lions, falcons and such layered on top of the soldiers in their bunker, leering, grimacing beasts of war that give the film a haunting medieval flavor. When the soldiers talk to each other, the tone is unlike any other war film -- we aren't meant to reflect poignantly on their impending deaths or get to know them as individuals so that we're caught up in their fates. Instead their conversation is fairly eloquent-sounding ( a lot of these guys are swanky Brits ) yet subtly drained of meaning so that we hear their witty, boastful words almost as the squawks, barks and roars of barnyard animals. Not one character is sympathetic.

This is a film whose transitions are so abrupt that the end result comes close to something like Kleist's play The Prince of Homburg, a jagged, neurotic ride through an insanely arbitrary world. Collective behavior, individual psychology, love relationships, religious impulses all seem to waver and bend like phantom images in the sun. When Dix and Allen get together at the end and fall in each other's arms again, you feel sick.

I thought that, after so much time had passed, I could go to the theater with an easy mind and an open heart, unburdened by fears of another Tarantino knockoff. Back in the day, I sat through more than a few. And I'm not just talking about that one with Charlize Theron. Anyone remember Bulletproof Heart or Love and a .45?

Needless to say, my hard-won innocence was betrayed. To the writer Paul Porizkovich, or whatever your name is, wheedle as many lunch offers at the Ivy as you can, because you'll be back in whatever bilgewater you crawled out of soon. I'd have more respect for someone who went around spray-painting babies than I do for you. Are there really still people walking around Hollywood thinking, "I have a great idea! I'll make a gangster movie like The Usual Suspects or Pulp Fiction, but in this one the wallpaper'll be really funny!" When are those Iranians going to enrich their uranium already? Oh, they just did.

The only member of cast and crew who comes out of this one unscathed is, shockingly, Josh Hartnett. He's also the only one who is still building a career and can be forgiven for appearing in such roadkill. The one smart move the director makes is to have his character's nose broken so that Hartnett's resemblance to Jean-Paul Belmondo becomes unmistakable. My girlfriend says he's the only male actor that she has a crush on, resulting in much scoffing from me -- too bad she refused to see this movie where she was unexpectedly vindicated. He gets the full star treatment here and pulls it off as well as anyone could under the circumstances. Despite his reputation as a grunting caveman with a unibrow, even Woody Allen couldn't have recited this verbal diarrhea any better. And I'm talking lines like, "It's a condition I have called ataraxia" and "Did anyone tell you should never put the word you're defining in a definition?" and "On your face, there's a nose, and underneath that nose, there's a mouth."

Everyone else looks like a waxwork in a museum about to be burned down for the real estate. Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman do their overrated shtick which basically amounts to rolling vowels around and being poised and boring to show their almighty experience before the camera; both of them need to either take a huge risk or go away fast. A facelifted Bruce Willis brings back horrifying memories of Billy Bob Thornton's uncreased new visage in The Ice Harvest ( their faces now resemble children's hindquarters. ) And Lucy Liu goes for Young Shirley MacLaine but, flitting around the decade-younger Hartnett, comes off more Old Asian M.I.L.F.

Without breaking a sweat, Hartnett wipes the floor with all of them -- and if that isn't more tragicomic than anything else going on in the story, then I'm Paris Hilton's latest conquest.

Never mind George Bush and his cowboy diplomacy. Never mind that Tommy Lee Jones roomed with Al Gore at an Ivy League school. In The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrade, staged, fictional as it may be, you will see, in a most unlikely era, perhaps the most authentic cowboy-concept the screen has ever produced.

The cowboy as portrayed by Jones is once again, as he used to be, the Western paragon of honor and authenticity, knowing what's right and unfazed by man's law. The twist is that the world has become so debased that this sense of honor now looks like google-eyed lunacy. It is literally one man against the world; not one man against a group, or against a microcosm, with a good woman waiting at the end of the line and children who will restore order and civilization ( the only time we hear a child speak in this film, he yelps "Go--amn bastard a--hole!" ) This cowboy is as alone as God. He may, in fact, be just that, and his outwardly vile actions -- such as his queasily comical attempts to preserve Melquiades's body -- may or may not prove to have some larger point, or even a prima causa.

*SPOILERS ALERT*

Pete Perkins and Melquiades Estrada are in love, but this isn't Brokeback Mountain -- it is a brotherly love that they share. Melquiades refuses all possessions like a Tibetan monk, giving Pete his best horse on a whim, living in a shack with a bare lightbulb, and dying with a buck and change in his pocket. When he's killed by Barry Pepper's Border Patrol officer, Perkins will undergo what apparently seems a mission of revenge, dragging Pepper and the body of Melquiades across half of Mexico in order to return the body to his wife in his hometown of Jimenez. But does Jimenez exist? Did Melquiades even have a wife? The mission becomes a quixotic -- I use the term advisedly -- search for a city that doesn't exist to honor a love that isn't sexual, satisfies no needs and therefore cannot be seen. When Perkins and his prisoner reach a scrubby area with a few rock formations that might have once been houses, Perkins pretends to recognize Melquiades' description of Jimenez, a place between two hills "so beautiful that once you see it, you'll never forget it." Pepper thinks he's crazy. This place is not pleasing to the eye. But in the end, he will be left weeping and begging Melquiades's forgiveness with the fervor of Dreyer's Joan of Arc. And the last line from his mouth, the last line we hear from a man who is stranded in the middle of nowhere with a mutilated foot and scars up and down his face, and the last line in the movie is "Are you going to be all right?"

*END SPOILERS*

There's no other way to say it -- this is not only a film that reclaims the cowboy from those who use the image unwisely and inauthentically, but more crucially, takes back Christianity as well, the kind of Christianity that isn't bruited about to win votes, power and money but reveals itself through actions like a chain that connects past, present and future to an unknown source. The cowboy is the samurai is the monk is the knight of infinite faith. Recasting the events of the film back in your mind, you realize that the movie was about the salvation of Barry Pepper's soul, here idealized as the average American -- a product of his sterile, telegenic environment, one hand down his pants and the other on the trigger of a gun, unable to satisfy his wife because he is closed off from his potential, but with a kernel of goodness that can only be brought out through a sort of limit-experience, which is where "crazy" Pete Perkins comes in.

It is telling that Pepper nearly dies of a rattlesnake bite before having the poison sucked out by a Mexican woman he'd previously clobbered in the face when she attempted to cross the border. The next shot shows a brief glimpse of the reconciliation of all opposites, as everyone sits together and shucks corn, reminding me of the moment in The Little Foxes when all the patient, suffering characters gather on the patio for one brief moment before Bette Davis's mercenary shrew breaks them up again. There's a couple dozen more shots that deserve mention but space is limited. Suffice to say that Jones is not just a solid actor's director, like Eastwood, but an inspired visionary who can achieve exotic Baudelairean effects.

If it's really true that Tommy Lee Jones is gearing up to direct Blood Meridian, for which the times are more than ripe, and for which he is indeed the man required, this macabre yet blissful vision is the ideal primer. It gives us a little something to hope for, illusory as it may seem, before dropping us into hell -- which, like Martin Scorsese, Jones unmistakably believes in and fears.