Reviews

The crickets are chirping amid the stillness of what must be a balmy summer night. Bathed in moonlight sits an old farmhouse, its high gabled roof and slatted walls shining brilliantly against the dark outline of a quaint picket fence. And there, in sharp silhouette is the slim figure of the Hunter perched on a tree stump facing the house, conveniently dappled in shadows from a nearby oak. He slowly begins to croon a smooth a cappella rendition of "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," his baritone voice filling the night air with dread and premeditation. Also cloaked in shadows is old Rachel Cooper, sitting in her chair on the screened porch breathing silently, ever vigilant, staring towards the voice piercing the darkness, her shotgun laid ready across her lap. Perhaps they can see one another, perhaps not. As the Hunter once again sings the refrain, Rachel even joins him in canon, the blend of their voices beautiful but eerie, ancient foes locked in eternal conflict, watching and waiting. Suddenly, the night dissolves in an instant as the screen covering the porch clots with blazing reflected light--a child has innocently approached Rachel with a burning candle, not realizing the mortal significance of the stalemate she has disrupted. Rachel frantically blows out the flame, but it is too late: the Hunter has vanished from his perch, and surely lurks invisibly somewhere close in the darkness, anywhere, everywhere, waiting with a patience as old as time. Rachel gazes into the abyss and hears the echoed hoot of an owl. The owl too is perched on a tree, his snowy blank face like a mask, imperial and emotionless, floating disembodied in the night. He shakes his feathers and spies a lone young rabbit scurrying clumsily on the ground. When the rabbit screams, Rachel's expression falls in weary recognition, her large eyes sad, and she says to herself, "it's a hard world for little things."

In The Night of the Hunter, it is indeed a hard world for little things. To siblings John (Billy Chapin) and little Pearl Harper (Sally Jane Bruce), it must seem like an unending nightmare fraught with immense evil and unspeakable loss. That their world is so mesmerizing and beautiful for us should almost make us feel guilty if this was not the work of fiction that it is.

John and Pearl seem like ordinary kids growing up somewhere in rural West Virginia along the Ohio River Valley during the depression. Their father, Ben (Peter Graves), robs a bank for ten thousand dollars, kills two people in the process, and before his children's eyes hides the money, is arrested, and is subsequently convicted. It so happens that his cell mate, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), is a prolific but opportunistic serial killer of widows who is nabbed for stealing a car, the full extent of his crimes apparently unknown to authorities. Tattooed alternately along the knuckles of his hands are the words "L-O-V-E" and "H-A-T-E", and it is not a coincidence that the hand that holds his ever-present switchblade is labeled "HATE". He saves that hand for women in particular. He has adopted the nickname "Preacher", professing a religion he and the Almighty "worked out betwixt us." Though Preacher wheedles and begs, Ben Harper takes the secret location of the ten thousand dollars he stole to his grave when he is swiftly executed by the state.

Preacher is not a subtle character, but upon his equally swift release, he is somehow able to dupe just about everyone into believing that he is actually a former prison chaplain who bonded with the late Ben Harper before his execution. With a broad swagger, he ingratiates himself into the lives of not only his ex-cellmate's children, but prominent members of their gossipy tight-knit community, and even their mother Willa (Shelley Winters). His masquerade is so persuasive that in almost no time at all Willa accepts his hand in marriage (the one tattooed "LOVE", no doubt).

Of course, the markings professed on his right hand are a lie: Preacher is not interested in love, or Willa, or anything except the ten thousand dollars Ben Harper hid somewhere. Willa doesn't know or care where the money is, and indeed, is only interested in love. At the conclusion of a marriage possibly even shorter than its courtship, Willa sits bolt upright tied up behind the wheel of her car at the bottom of the river, her hair flowing gloriously amongst the long river weeds, a deep, jagged slash across her throat.

Preacher knows the newly orphaned children are the key to the money, but when they narrowly escape his clutches and sail down the river, the cat and mouse game really begins. Preacher becomes the titular Hunter, and his obsessive pursuit of young John and Pearl leads us through an odyssey of astonishing beauty and madness. Along the way, an elderly lady named Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish) becomes their protector, proving herself an unlikely but ultimate adversary to Preacher, a woman who is as committed to goodness as he is boundless evil.

Charles Laughton directed The Night of the Hunter at the height of his acting career. It was the first and only film he ever directed. Upon release, it was widely considered a failure, but today is often lauded as one of the best films ever made. Following a basic Southern Gothic formula, The Night of the Hunter is a savage antithesis to the preachy moralizing and sentimental pedagogy of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Preacher is no Atticus Finch, but the reverse is equally true.

The Night of the Hunter has a special place in my heart due to its heightened characterizations and a visual aesthetic that has been charitably labeled "expressionistic" but is actually nothing but baroque exaggeration. Like the smooth voice of the preacher, this film is hypnotic, casting a spell of affection it may not entirely deserve. There is something profound and exhilarating watching The Night of the Hunter for the first time--the scenes where the children glide down a shimmering river fill me with thrill and mystery, and the silhouette of the preacher riding a lone horse along the glowing horizon singing his hymn with patient omniscience stills the very blood in my veins. Too canny to be classified an avant-grade experiment (a la Eraserhead) and too dreamy to totally suspend disbelief, The Night of the Hunter is a startlingly gorgeous work of art that challenges us to find good in the face of evil, beauty within ugliness, and light in the darkness.

Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow's head should have stayed in that Pandora's box at the end of Se7en. Avoid at all costs. Bad science, bad logic, bad show.

War produces the true natures of men: some lose their humanity altogether and become monsters, while others embrace a kind of moral courage that cannot be defined or explained. So it's astonishing that a considerably intellectual filmmaker like Stanley Kubrick could distill this principle in such a visceral way.

Make no mistake, Paths of Glory is a film of high concept and blinding idealism, but composed simply and without plot complication. It's World War I: Upon the orders of his superior officers, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) leads his entrenched regiment of the French Army into a battle to take "The Anthill", an impenetrable German stronghold. It's a suicide mission, and everyone knows it. Of course Dax protests that the attack would only weaken the French Army, but General Mireau (George Macready) does not care. Indeed, though Mireau has already formed the same conclusion, the promise of a juicy promotion by the equally unscrupulous General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) combined with his own Machiavellian ambition have already persuaded Mireau to command others to certain and purposeless death.

Unlike the amoral executives who command him, Dax does not lounge in extravagant mansions and eat gourmet meals with fine silver; he lives in the trenches with his men, a lawyer compelled by war to root in a festering wound of dirt and death dug by politicians who have never gazed upon a battlefield. As he dutifully proceeds to prepare the attack, fear abounds among the soldiers he leads, with deadly results.

It is here that the film begins to challenge how we define courage. We see Dax advance while hundreds of others die horrifically around him. Some do not leave their trenches, so intense is the firefight on the battlefield. A safe distance away, Mireau orders his artillery to fire upon their own army to force them out of the trenches. Meanwhile, without support, Dax falls back into the trenches in a shower of dead bodies without making it to the Anthill, unable to convince anyone else to climb back out with him into oblivion.

So galvanized is Mireau's rage at the prospect of losing his promotion that he demands one hundred men from the regiment be executed for cowardice. General Broulard convinces him to merely court martial three men chosen at random, and even allows Colonel Dax to defend them against the death penalty. The trial is a farce to say the least, and although the outcomes are sadly predictable, that doesn't mean the final journey we take with this movie is less than we can anticipate.

Paths of Glory is a technically perfect film. As the camera seamlessly glides through the twists and turns of grimy trenches, horror and fear visually unfold like flowing tapestries along a magnificent human hallway. That nature and realism dominate the production design does not make the lens any less subjective or the images of war in all its boundless evil less beautiful. The booming cacophony of the battle scene has an aural texture that damns us to imagine the true nightmare actual combat must be. The acting is superb as well, every actor delivering his best work, Kirk Douglas in particular; despite his historic inclination for ham and bravado, Douglas' characterization of Dax is intense yet authentic and anything but a caricature. Colonel Dax's ability to maintain composure while evincing contempt and moral outrage is a script requirement, but the horror sculpted upon Douglas' face when confronted with the evil of men and the spiritual burden revealed in his posture and gait are the work of an artist.

As I said, this would seem at the outset like a philosophical film crafted by a director who demands his audience intellectually grapple with the moral implications of what is provocative material to say the least. Perhaps it does accomplish that; certainly, if you watch this movie and fail to consider the message the film delivers, you are not only brain dead but morally bankrupt as well. But please watch the final scene, a brief coda after the main plot of the film has concluded: An achingly beautiful German girl held as an enemy captive is made to sing before the rowdy French troops. As the war begets monsters, sometimes men of real courage are able to rediscover their own humanity. Any movie can make you think. But in that last moment, if you can see more than a singing peasant and weary soldiers, if you are able to hear more in the simple folk song than just lyrics, then you, like Dax, can discover that the only true path to glory is not in war or ambition, but in hope and innocence that sometimes may only be found in the most unlikely of places.

Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a playwright and family man lost in the sea of his life. In a sense his life is spiraling out of control: he begins to suffer numerous obscure physical ailments; he is tempted by the flirtations of a girl who works at his theater (Samantha Morton); his dissonant marriage to a talented artist (Catherine Keener) turns into a separation that eventually becomes a continental exile; his young daughter is tattooed over a large portion of her body, becomes the muse of a pedophile (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and is deceived (quite graphically) to think that her father abandoned her to pursue homosexual liaisons; and from there the story of Synecdoche, New York becomes exponentially more tragic, complicated and absurd. In the end, Caden is literally caught up in a cataclysmic global apocalypse. But believe it or not, none of this is especially significant to the story. The plot itself exists as a parable, and like all films written by Charlie Kaufman it is awash with symbolism, lunacy, and sorrow.

In the midst of all these devastating events, Caden is bestowed a MacArthur Fellowship, which is a large monetary grant dispensed over a period of years for people in any field who show enormous ability and potential. With that funding he assembles a cast and crew in a huge Manhattan warehouse and creates a theatre program that imitates every detail of his life. Stacked compartmentalized sets are built for the play as analogues for his apartment, the street, the city, the real world, and then other sets are made to imitate those sets within sets within sets, etc. He casts an actor as himself, then another as himself directing himself, and others as himself directing himself directing himself and so on. You get the point. He also casts multiple actors for the roles other people have in his life. There is no way to distinguish between the relationships in his real life and the play, because everything is real life, and everything is the play, and he has no idea how to complete either. He hires a cleaning lady as his replacement director and takes on her former job himself, thus not only being merely a character within his play, but actually becoming an actor portraying the life of a role within the play within his life. As the aforementioned apocalypse ensues, bodies are strewn across the bleak desolate landscape of (the world? the play?) and Caden, now infirm, becomes more and more isolated and withdrawn from the process of (life? art?) until he is taking direction on his deathbed from a voice in his ear. Simultaneously, this film is life as an art form and art as a form of life, each carried out ad infinitum.

Anyone who has seen anything written by Charlie Kaufman will be familiar with such themes, however I don't think I have ever observed within any other work of fiction such intense sadness as Caden's forty year journey across the last half of his life. The rose petals on his daughter's tattoo wither and fall from her body as she dies cursing him. The woman he has loved for over thirty years dies of smoke inhalation the same night they finally consummate their relationship because she lived for the same amount of time in a perpetually burning house. These mythic elements probably seem bizarre or baroque to most people, but they succeed within the film because Kaufman as writer/director/producer has created an incomparably beautiful and grotesque work of art that above all makes you feel.

Most people often use deficient words like "brilliant" or "masterpiece" to describe great films, and I believe that is because we are too dim to articulate anything substantive about what a film means to us on a deeply personal level. All we dullards are aware of is that we have been moved, and that the mechanism of that movement is totally beyond our stupid, grasping comprehension.

Synecdoche, New York is definitely a great film. It contains the best work of all people involved in its making. And although it is great for many reasons, none of the ones I am able to write intelligently about are what actually makes this film what it is. All I can say is that it is great simply because it is, and it means something to me. On the other hand, what the film means is hard to say...I guess it depends on how you feel, or if you can feel at all.

Everyone at some point feels like Joel Barish.

Joel has decided to erase his girlfriend Clementine from his memory. Literally. That's only fair though, because she has already had Joel erased from hers.

Apparently, there is a medical treatment that can do that...as the doctor who pioneered the technology explains, "Technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage." If only it was that simple.

Joel and Clementine are extremely complicated thirtysomethings who because of their many flaws and quirks actually make a perfect match. Most importantly, they love each other. We learn this along with many other bizarre and fascinating details as the film traces every memory Joel has of their problematic relationship. The labyrinthine journey through his mind takes the fuzzy fantastical form of dreams: some of his memories of Clementine are nightmares, but quite a few are startlingly beautiful treasures. It is these that Joel desperately tries to salvage, but by the time he realizes how he feels it may already be too late.

Over the course of the film we also meet the entire staff of Lacuna, Inc., the four-person medical firm who is systematically destroying Joel's memory of Clementine. These are very weird people. Collectively they resemble the sort of slapstick professionalism you might witness late night at a video store. Still, as the plot (and Joel's memory) unravels, we discover that memories may be fleeting, but the past is absolute. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The careless employees of Lacuna Inc. experience this truth as their lives intersect, parallel, and collide with Joel and Clementine and one another. Their struggle through the night against Joel's memory of his love will change each of their lives forever.

What I like about movies written by Charlie Kaufman is that in an underhanded, diabolical way the film itself is always asking the audience questions. So even if you could somehow willfully change what you remember, could you ever really change how you feel? And does Fate even care about what you remember?

Paradoxically, Joel and Clementine seem perpetually destined to be together, and equally doomed to break up. To me, that is the one unanswered question that lingers long after the credits roll: "Does love overcome fate, or does fate overcome love?" In the real world there may not be an answer, but in the present reality of Joel and Clementine, I think the answer is both.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd. -- Alexander Pope, "Eloisa to Abelard"

Five Easy Pieces is much like its protagonist, Robert Eroica Dupea: buried underneath layers of superficiality lies brilliance, passion, and pain. Not only is Jack Nicholson as Bobby Dupea at his personal best ever, his performance in this film is largely unparalleled in post-modern cinema.

It doesn't take long for us to learn that Bobby works as a laborer in a hot, dusty oil field because he is so exceptional that he can do anything he wants, he can truly be anyone-except his true self. On the other hand, the people with whom he surrounds himself pretty much do the best they can with what they have. Despite these limitations, there is something authentic and admirable in their simple lives that Bobby surely knows he cannot find in himself. His condescending relationships with his trailer trash bowling pals (Billy Green Bush) and Rayette (Karen Black), the gum-smacking waitress who loves him, certainly do not provide him with any level of personal satisfaction. Frustrated, he erupts in fits of torment and rage that obliterate his mask of sanity. He cannot escape the life he left behind.

It is his past, his eccentric but gifted family that comes to bear when he returns to his childhood home on a small, eternally foggy island in Puget Sound. There, we see the real him emerge: the tortured musical genius, the sensitive loving son. We are moved, they are moved, but he is not. He will always see himself as a failure because he hates himself-the only person he ever loved-and nothing else matters.

There is a scene halfway through the film that has been the subject of much homage and parody: Bobby, Rayette, and two traveling companions they picked up are seated at a roadside diner. Predictably, Bobby doesn't see the wheat toast he desires to eat on the menu, so he antagonizes the server by ordering a sandwich and customizing it until he gets nothing but his toast. The scene is quite funny, and the clever wordplay and clash of personalities is entertaining to us as the audience, but at its climax Bobby is overcome with boredom and anger and sweeps his arms across the table smashing water glasses and sending all manner of eating utensils flying. This parable illustrates Bobby's larger predicament: Some people are given much; others very little. No matter what life Bobby could choose to live, he perpetually chooses the empty table rather than a warm meal, even if he has to clear the table himself.

Perhaps that is the message of Five Easy Pieces, to choose between finding or losing, accepting or rejecting, living or dying. By observing the tragedy of Robert Eroica Dupea, we can choose to do what he could not, no matter what life we have been dealt.