The tightrope that Lynch walks is the irony. Ebert, in his review of this movie, totally missed that, and saw the irony as sarcasm--an inexcusable backdrop for the bare emotional honesty that Rossellini inhabited in this role. I think he missed the point. The irony is not just for laughs and sarcasm--it is the irony of the modern hipster, years before it's time. To the hipster, so quoth The Hipster Handbook, irony caries more weight than reason. To the critic, it's offensive because it belittles seriousness. To a more modern eye, it's not a counter or undercut of the violence, it's a comment on the form of the movie itself. It is a layer in the movie. It's a framework for absurdity (everything in the movie is absurd, but Dennis Hopper is frightening and absurd, while McLaughlin and Dern are ernest and absurd. Rossellini is tragic and absurd).
Much like Mulhulland Drive later (which, Ebert loves), Blue Velvet describes the haunting of a mind. Through the visual language of film noir and white-picket 50s technicolor, Lynch shows us (literally) the vermin under the manicured lawn. His irony is not mocking life, but mocking idealized filmic life. He's not making a statement with film about how life is (and maybe shouldn't be) a certain way (re: Crash, the 2005 version), he's making a statement about the artifice of representing life. The map, after all, is not the territory--nor will it ever be.
So, if film is not life (suck that Goddard, truth at 24 frames a second my ass), then the purpose of film can't be to represent life. The purpose of film is to tell a story and make an emotional connection with the audience, which can certainly evoke strong feelings of empathy. While Ebert felt that Lynch kept the audience away from the stark emotional realities of Rossellini's experience with irony, I say that Lynch keeps the entire medium at bay with irony, eroticism, and violence. The three are intertwined and inseparable.
This is, I think, what Spike Lee was attempting with the flawed He Got Game, a movie that started seeped in this irony, but dissolved into mistaken earnestness. Also brought to mind is Todd Hayne's brilliant Far From Heaven where the irony is not as cynical, and is one step further removed from the action, but the sexual tensions and violence that comes from repression are represented.
Mostly, Lynch shows us that of the people who watch films, some will take everything at face value and become offended if the filmmaker doesn't approach certain taboos in the acceptable way. Some others--and this is the current mask of Hollywood, as evidenced in this years Academy awards--want film to change the world through social conscience. To these types Lynch holds up something reprehensible and beautiful and challenges both views. Accept the film for what it is, and the irony feels right at home with the sexuality and the violence. They are three pillars capped at equal heights.
Jodie Foster, mommy. How do you make a mommy freak out? Steal her child. Or endanger it. That sympathetic human heart-tugging at the plight of a child or woman or, better yet, both--this is the emotional landscape of this movie. It offers a few twists throughout that I hear they call plot, but really it's a character study in how realistically Foster can lose it while still keeping it together. Or, said differently, Foster playing that fine line where we question her character as to her sanity, not knowing if she's really insane or if she's simply a mommy who lost her little girl.
But, personally, I'm a little sick of getting my marionette heart tugged in this way, my string has grown to flexible and callous. Kill the fucking kid, already, just give me something besides Foster's (admittedly well-acted) panicked face to go on.
So, let's talk about the marvel of engineering that is this plane they are flying on. First, it's quite extraordinary that the airline apparently has enough money to buy a plane and not use all of its space. Put in sumptuous staircases, and open lounges (that terminate in the cockpit door, thus putting the drunkest passengers nearest the flightcrew). Why, it even has a cot for the pilot to rest in during those long flights. I wonder if he lives on board?
And then there's the avionics area, which appears to have an exploded Cray-2 super-computer in it (is this plane handling requests from thousands of users at one time? Is it crunching weather prediction data? Is it modeling the airflow over the wing in real time? Measuring the alcohol-to-soda ratio in every cocktail? I can see some novel uses for huge computers on board, but no practical ones), and a good football field of unused space in the nose cone. Hey, 45 passengers could fit in there if you knock out the super computer and fill it with seats. At an average international ticket price of around $1000, that would be $45,000 the airline could make through efficiency each flight.
And what's with all the Jefferies tubes everywhere? Do they call down to the engine room when they need more power? Does the crew crawl around in spaces large enough to fit luggage, people or duty-free goods that they can sell for a profit? Okay, I know that some liberties had to be taken because--let's face it--flying is boring. But, I prefer the other scary flight film I saw recently.
This film, though, it has a big problem, which I suspect is not seen as a big problem in Hollywood, where people care about the roller coaster but not about the rails it rides on. When all is said and done, the reasoning of what happened is so impractical. Okay, some SPOILERS here (and, I think it should be said that part of the success of this movie when it's working is not knowing what's happening or who to believe).
The problem is this: the plot to hijack the plane is so labyrinthian and detailed that the slightest thing could go wrong. Most criminal conspiracies are not built on tightwires, for a pretty good reason: it's too easy to fall. I would like to see a tricky plot in a movie like this that doesn't rely on an overly elaborate sequence of events that just happens to fall into place. The good con is the con where the characters are manipulated into doing what the conner wants without realizing it, and then having the realization wash over them as they understand they've been taken. The conner doesn't rely on human characteristics that are impossible to predict--such as Mommy falling asleep in a different seat than her daughter.
I think the film played it honestly, to be fair, and could have cheated more, but Hitchcock's movies always held up in retrospect. For this movie, which is being called Hitchcockian, I just want a little more in the end.
Better than the previews led me to believe, which is saying something, but not a whole lot of something. A waify potentially psychologically disturbed woman played Connelly? That's no sign of the apocalypse, that just the way things have always been.
The ending of this movie--and by ending you should be clued in about SPOILERS here--is so badly handled that it nearly negates everything before it. The psychological set up for the primary character was, in my view, totally negated by her action. It was a passive thing to do--essentially abandoning her daughter in a different, but just as real, way as her mother abandoned her.
If, though, her character had been truly crazy, and had a moment of clarity that she was hurting her child, then it would have made sense. But they set up JC as a passive woman and then her moment of action, supposedly redeeming herself and her pain at the hands of her mother, and so the last action had no bearing on her emotional well-being.
Tim Roth was great, and disappeared into the roll, as was the always great John C. Reilly and the particularly evil Pete Postletwaite. As for JC--well, she annoyed me, like her characters usually do, which means that she's playing them right on the button, I would say.
Characters are driven to inevitable futures, but it's always nice to see a movie that simplifies the drive. This title is as good as the much lauded Snakes on a Plane for pure descriptive purposes. You know what's going to happen from the minute you walk into the theater--there is no guesswork that Bill won't be killed--and anybody who thinks that this is a spoiler is missing the point. It's the process and the journey that amuse so much.
And show what a true crazed master that Tarantino is. The movies that he worships, and gives ode to here, are nowhere near as entertaining as his opus. Why? Because Tarantino does it all outside of genre--he's poking fun and paying homage at the same time.
Here too, he uses the standard saws of Spielberg--the mother and child--and twists it on its head, so that sentimentality leaks out and only a skeleton is left. No tear jerking here, just understanding why the heck the Bride would do what she does when she does it. And, of course, even egg her on despite the bloodiness of her rampage.
Some might argue that the plot is insignificant, but despite the fact that Tarantino is so copied by fools who just stack a bunch of improbable and shockable violence and abstract, witty, nostalgia driven dialogue in a film and call it a QT alike, the true test of a Tarantino film is plot and character. (but wait--dialogue like this is pure gold: "If on your journey you should meet God, god will be cut."). It's like the people copying the iPod who haven't had any success. The original still outshines the copies, and so it is in this case as well. Because they don't get it--they don't understand what the original success was about, and try to paint-by-numbers their way in.
The reason the heroin-overdose part of Pulp Fiction works so well is that you've been hanging out with these characters and you like them (or, in the case of Stoltz and especially Arquette don't like them so much) and you know what's at stake if she dies. Therein lies the comedy.
Just putting some thugs in suits and handing them throwaway Wildeisms doesn't make a QT. Here's hoping the man has a long life full of filmmaking.
A much different Cillian Murphy than we saw last time, and Mr. Craven in fine form. In a little featurette on the DVD he said something to the effect of:
"Horror movies are all about the vulnerability of the body, this movie is all about the vulnerability of the soul."
Which I'm reporting here not because I have anything to add to it, but more as a note that any time I write a horror scene to remember that it's about the vulnerability of the body.
A marvelous job was done for sticking these characters so close together in such a confined space for such a long period of time. You nearly could call it My Dinner with Rippner.
It is a movie that got in, got tense, and got out again without trying to dress it up or get overly melodramatic. I can appreciate a movie that knows its limits, and let's you enjoy it inside of them.
And it was clever without being tricky, character driven without drawing stereotypes, and enjoyable to boot.
A bit of classic melodrama with a decidedly anti-spin, successfully couched in the horrors of war instead of the sentimentality of fighting.
But, it is melodrama nevertheless. The boys we meet are young and sweet, they go to fight and fall. We learn a lesson that war is bad. We learn a lesson that being a man isn't all it's trumped up to be.
Of course, for 1930 it was a different message than today. We don't, for instances, have trenches in Iraq, and the army has better communications and supply chains, right?
But imagine being in the theater in the 1930s in Germany watching this, and Nazi's--not yet in power--would open the doors and release rats into the theater and yell.
But still, it's propaganda. Pro war, anti war, it's all about the message and not the complexity of the message.
So, class, we have learned that war is bad. Except when it isn't. Which is whenever it's needed to not be. Remember that, and then no movie can tell you what to think and feel. You'll need brave democratically elected leaders for that challenging role.