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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Friday, December 23rd, 2011

2001 (USA)
Director: David Fincher
Viewed: December 19, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Project (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

An argument can be made that David Fincher’s adaptation of Steig Larsson’s phenomenally popular pulp whodunit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is an exercise in style over substance. Certainly, the film’s opening credit sequence lends credence to this position: Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O growls out a cover of Led Zepellin’s “Immigrant Song” as oily black liquid oozes over human figures that are embraced and penetrated by writhing computer cables. It’s jarringly reminiscent of a James Bond opening, and perhaps a sly inter-textual joke at that, given that leading man Daniel Craig is serving as the current 007. The rest of the film is only moderately less brash.

However, such aggressive styling proves to be a tick-mark in the film’s favor, at least when one considers it alongside both the source material and Niel’s Arden Oplev’s comparatively flat, mirthless 2009 Swedish film adaptation. Under Oplev’s hand, Larsson’s grim tale of buried family secrets and socialist democracy gone freakishly awry was many things—workmanlike, satisfactory, disposable—but stylish it was not. The most valuable card up the sleeve of the 2009 film was Noomi Rapace, who embodied waifish, wounded hacker-sleuth Lisbeth Salander with eerie precision and a curious kind of dark magnetism.

Fincher’s take doesn’t add any appreciable depth to Larsson’s tale, and in this respect it is remarkably similar to the Swedish film. Screenwriter Steve Zallian wisely excises the Scandinavian politics and finance that dominated hefty stretches of the novel. Such components are arguable crucial for understanding the wider context of Larrson’s story, but what is digestible on the page is probably unworkable in a film. Zallian also trims and tweaks the narrative in other ways, mostly to make the story a little smoother and more symmetrical. From a thematic perspective, however, the new film is unsophisticated, offering little beyond the visceral appeal of an unsolved mystery, seat-squirming tension, and a streak of white-hot pseudo-feminist rage.

Insofar as this is the extent of what any version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could offer, David Fincher’s film is an unquestionably handsome and persuasive realization of the tale. It’s visually striking, crisply conveyed, and blessed with a lucid, seductive aesthetic and mood, which is more than one can say of most murder mysteries. Rooney Mara—slinky and wide-eyed beneath ghostly eyebrows—conveys her own variation of Lisbeth, more shrinking, awkward, and defensive than Rapace’s portrayal, but also more fearsome and razor-edged when provoked. Beyond Mara and Craig the film features a cast of familiar faces—Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright among them—as well as Swedish stars and long-lost character actors (Julian Sands!), all of whom acquit themselves well enough. (Perhaps the film’s only formal blunder is the vaguely accented English dialog, which is distracting given the explicit decision to retain the Swedish setting.)

The real stars here, however, are the craftsmen behind the film, a team of returning Fincher collaborators who manage to render a stomach-churning tale of rape, murder, and revenge as something deliriously attractive. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth bestows a familiar yellowish “greasy-gothic” look to most of the interior spaces, but elsewhere a chilly gray dominates, and appropriately so. The adroit editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall—who have now cut the director’s past four films—keeps things humming along with enviable vigor and clarity, a necessary asset in a story so laden with exposition. Just as essential is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which effectively evokes an atmosphere of pure wrongness by layering plucked-out, discordant melodies over ambient droning and buzzing. These various visual and aural elements coalesce (perhaps “curdle” is a better term) into an atmosphere that is oppressive, gnawing, and eminently fitting for the tale. And therein lies the primary appeal of The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo: As a lurid, shallow thriller steeped in hideous beauty.

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The Adventures of Tintin

Tuesday, December 20th, 2011

2011 (USA / New Zealand)
Director: Steven Spielberg
Viewed: December 17, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres 14)

Adapting the beloved Tintin stories to film has been a passion project for Steven Spielberg for nearly three decades. The director first sought to option the work of Belgian comic artist Hergé in 1983, after the runaway success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial had solidified Spielberg’s reputation as a Hollywood powerhouse. Twenty-eight years is a staggeringly long time for a film to languish in Development Hell, but the feature that has finally emerged, The Adventures of Tintin, is no worse the wear for its long gestation. In fact, Tintin is that rarest of things in this era when aggressive, directionless ugliness dominates the cinema of big-budget spectacle: a work in which cutting-edge technology allows a genuine film artist to express themselves without the usual analog limitations. It’s telling that the seeds of Tintin were planted by the Steven Spielberg of 1983, a man who had so recently given the world Raiders, one of the most perfect action-adventure films of all time. The Adventures of Tintin—which is, astonishingly, the first animated feature of the director’s career—gives splendid, ebullient expression to the same rousing spirit of derring-do that suffused the first chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. Moreover, Tintin finds the veteran director newly empowered by the potential of the digital film-making space, where his camera can be anywhere and move in any way he might imagine.

Adored in his native Belgium and among comics aficionados the world over, the eponymous Tintin is a young reporter of uncertain age and boundless pluck, who has an affinity for stumbling into globe-trotting adventures with his loyal wire fox terrier, Snowy. Adapted by a trio of British screenwriters—Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright—The Adventures of Tintin incorporates three of Hergé’s Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Apart from amalgamating the various plot elements from these books, the only significant change that the script makes to the source material is to switch Tintin’s nationality from Belgian to British, an alteration that is no doubt heretical among more impassioned devotees of the ginger-haired journalist. However, this change allows the characters to speak in English without the need for distracting logical leaps, while also preserving the decaying colonial tone of Tintin’s mid-twentieth-century escapades.

The film’s events begin with Tintin’s purchase of an antique model ship, and from there proceed to all manner of chases, escapes, fisticuffs, and shoot-outs, at locales ranging from the streets of London to an ocean freighter to a Moroccan palace. To say more about the story would rob the viewer of one of the primary pleasures of The Adventures of Tintin: A thrilling awareness that the next clue could take Tintin and Snowy anywhere in the world and reveal almost any wonder. Aside from Tintin himself (Jamie Bell), the film features many iconic Hergé characters, including the perpetually soused Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the imperious Ivanonvich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), bumbling police inspectors Thompson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), pickpocket Silk (Toby Jones), and opera diva Bianca Castafiore (Kim Stengel). Created with motion-capture animation from Weta Digital, the film boasts a unique look that is at once realistic and cartoonish. Rather than attempt an animated realization of Hergé’s style, Tintin uses the character designs of the cartoonist’s original stories as a reference point and then extrapolates from there. The result is something that is more soft and natural than the exaggerated plasticity of most computer-animated characters, but also obviously drawn from the traditions of European comic art. As such, it seldom risks the Uncanny Valley of Robert Zemeckis’ digital monsters.

Beyond the characters, the world of The Adventures of Tintin is almost ludicrously detailed and gorgeous, an ever-so-slightly stylized vision of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the setting of the Indiana Jones films, Tintin’s world is mostly free of supernatural threats, and as such the obstacles that the reporter and his dog confront seem downright prosaic from a twenty-first century vantage. There are encrypted riddles, secret compartments, locked doors, trackless oceans, searing deserts, and lots of goons with guns. Contemporary viewers might ask, “Shouldn’t there be some mummies or aliens in there?” Perish the thought. One of the film’s singular achievements is how marvelously thrilling Tintin’s materially-grounded adventures seem, in part because the work is saturated with such giddy affection for its source material, without being embarrassingly slavish or self-referential. However, it’s also due to Speilberg’s enviable skill at rendering elemental action sequences—e.g. Snowy chasing a truck through the London streets—with breathtaking vigor and wit.

That skill achieves its unrestrained potential in Tintin, as the unfettered director luxuriates in the liberation of his virtual camera. For some film-makers, such freedom can become an excuse for indulgent flourishes and headache-inducing excess. Not so with Spielberg, for while Tintin is often breathless and frenetic, it is also one of the most visually seamless and handsome things that the director has ever created. In short, Spielberg takes to the realms of computer animation like a sailor takes to drink, and the result is by turns jaw-dropping and just plain heavenly. A bravura escape sequence through a desert port on a hill—presented as a single, unbroken shot that swoops through windows and roars down narrow alleys—is probably the most thrilling thing to bear Spielberg’s name since Dr. Jones dangled from the grill of a cargo truck. Tintin’s scene is lessened only by the knowledge that it did not require the blood, sweat, and tears of analog stuntwork.

However, what’s truly novel about Tintin is not the meticulous choreography of its action set pieces—although I am hard-pressed to recall a feature film that is this flat-out gorgeous while also moving very, very fast—but the marriage of its distinctly modern animation approach to a very simple, determinedly old-fashioned story. There’s something almost wistful about the way that Tintin goes to the library to do research (!), and then reads vital exposition aloud for Snowy’s (i.e. the viewer’s) benefit. Quite apart from such quaint details, however, the film impresses with the sheer minimalism of its scenario. Through all the rushing to and fro from one destination to the next—whether by car, boat, or plane—the goal remains clear: Reach the Prize before the Bad Guys. Tintin is presented with a keen awareness that it is not narrative convolutions that draw the viewer into a treasure hunt, but the propulsive progression from A to B to C to X.

Perhaps, in this respect, Tintin risks some flimsiness, for it appears to have no point beyond simply existing as a rollicking action-adventure picture with a Boy Scout’s soul. However, given that such pictures are so rare, and almost never this luscious and smartly-crafted, it seems woefully hardhearted to grouse that Tintin lacks depth. Of course it lacks depth: It’s a Boy’s Own tale brought to glorious life. Other problems do weigh on Tintin here and there. The film possesses all the rhythmic hiccups that one might expect from the first of two feature-length films adapted from multiple books. (Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson will purportedly be co-directing the second Tintin film.) Moreover, Tintin never scans as a particularly rich character, given that his primary qualities are his utter fearlessness, quick-thinking, and almost super-heroic knack for wriggling out of trouble. Such characteristics make him an excellent hero for the purposes of a breezy adventure tale, but don’t lend him much personality. Of course, Tintin must be an Everylad who can appeal to any viewer who daydreams of sunken galleons and palm-studded oases. In this sense, Tintin’s earnestness and dauntless courage make him exactly the right hero for the film that bears his name. For who wouldn’t like to be so brave in the face of danger; to alternately clobber and maneuver and reason their way out of harrowing situations; and to race across the world in search of fortune and glory, all with a loyal pooch by their side?

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Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Thursday, December 15th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Guy Ritchie
Viewed: December 12, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14)

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 re-imagining of the Great Detective and his adventures in Victorian London proved to be a luscious guilty pleasure. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes is overstuffed with garishly rendered action sequences and rushed-over plot twists, but the past two years have been unexpectedly kind to the film. Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal of Holmes is fittingly charming, while also conveying a man who is supercilious, unpredictable, and deeply unhappy. It’s a performance that never fails to elicit a smile, while revealing the actor’s ability to convey nuanced characterization beneath his trademark rapid-fire witticisms. Moreover, repeat viewings have strengthened the triumph of Sherlock Holmes’ other pleasures: the staggeringly rich production design, the cunning nods to the Holmes Canon, and the sneaky strength of the performances from Jude Law as John Watson and—yes—Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler.

Unfortunately, the new sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, doesn’t possess the same spark as its predecessor, for reasons that are somewhat slippery. The banter between Holmes and Watson is a little slacker, the humor is a little more cartoonish, and returning director Ritchie doubles down on the over-long action sequences that groan under his heedless employment of showy techniques. These include stuttering shifts in speed, smudged and distorted images, CGI zooms on slamming firing pins, and the like. Such flourishes aren’t irksome in isolation, but A Game of Shadows employs them with wearisome consistency. The whole film feels somewhat undernourished and ungainly, especially the script, which is surprising given that Sherlock Holmes’ gaggle of writers (usually an ill omen) has been replaced by a mere duo for A Game of Shadows (Michele and Kieran Mulroney). None of these flaws is glaring, but together they make for a film that doesn’t live up to its potential.

Despite this catalog of gripes, A Game of Shadows works gratifyingly well as an honest-to-goodness sequel. It advances its predecessor’s story in appealing ways, changing the stakes while mostly preserving the inimitable snap-and-crackle tone. (In this, the film recalls, of all things, this year’s Kung Fu Panda 2.) Like the first Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows takes a peculiar approach to its source material. It cheerfully disregards the Canon while also weaving in a dizzying number of references and allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. In particular, the film borrows some of its narrative turns and window dressing from the Holmes tale “The Final Problem”. (If you’re a Holmes purist, it’s probably appalling. If you’re a fan of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it will seem familiar.) The new film likewise recreates the style and ground rules of its predecessor. Although it is set in an anachronism-laden and steampunk-tinged England in 1891, A Game of Shadows is nonetheless firmly rooted in the twisted, secular world of cold-blooded criminality. Ghosts and goblins need not apply.

Indeed, the first Sherlock Holmes succeeded in part due to its nimble treatment of the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). That film plays Blackwood’s B-movie menace for maximum effect, while also allowing the Great Detective to scoff at the man’s occult-draped theatrics and promise a rational explanation for everything (dutifully delivered by the end). In contrast, A Game of Shadows dispenses with the supernatural trappings altogether, presenting a grim tale of diplomacy, terrorism, and global conflict. It’s almost prosaic stuff compared to black magic and diabolic scions, but fortunately A Game of Shadows features the Canon’s most notorious villain, the esteemed mathematics professor and secret criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, an inspired choice). Moriarty makes a brief appearance in the first film, but for this outing the man Holmes calls the “Napoleon of Crime” is front-and-center.

A Game of Shadows presents Moriarty as a dark reflection of Holmes, an intellectual equal who possesses the respected public persona and daunting political clout that the Great Detective lacks. Moriarty’s reach is seemingly limitless. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, the fiendish professor clears a crowded restaurant simply by clinking his glass. (How does that work? Is every Londoner but Holmes and his allies on the underworld payroll?) A Game of Shadows opens with Holmes and Moriarty already locked in conflict, despite the fact that they have not met face-to-face. Taking place several months after the events of the first film, the sequel finds Holmes more unbalanced than ever, obsessed with the web of crime that he sees radiating out from the professor. Moriarty’s master plan alights on simmering Franco-German antagonism, Continental anarchist plots, and a caravan of French gypsies—including Noomi Rapace as a fortune-teller in search of her missing brother—but the details matter less than the archvillain’s persona.

Harris portrays the professor as unassuming and unflappable on the outside, but vain and sadistic within. It’s no mistake that Moriarty emerges just as Holmes’ loneliness begins to prick him, nor that the professor seems to take pleasure in his crimes on a visceral level, much as Holmes views each case as a personal challenge. Both men seem self-aware that their rivalry is one for the ages, which allows the film to set up some delicious scenes between Downey and Harris. Most memorably, the crescendo of Moriarty’s plot takes place off-screen as he and the Great Detective play chess, with each man narrating the events in the adjacent room. (This also permits Watson, bless his mustache, to play the part of both sleuth and man of action as he unravels Moriarty’s scheme without Holmes’ lead.) It’s a gripping scene, crisply edited and directed by Ritchie with more restraint than elsewhere. And it ends bleakly, in a manner that echoes Yimou Zhang’s martial arts epic Hero. Even as Holmes’ ability to peer into the future with his vaunted logic sidesteps the need for a brawl, it ultimately leads him to one final, inescapable conclusion. It’s a good thing that Ritchie’s playfulness wins out before the credits roll, lest the film be saddled with a discordantly glum ending.

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Martha Marcy May Marlene

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Sean Durkin
Viewed: December 6, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Sean Durkin’s unsettling, skillfully crafted debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, offers abundant moments of skin-crawling tension. However, it’s not quite accurate to describe the film as a thriller. That generic tag suggests the primacy of a propulsive narrative and stunning reversals, features which the film pointedly lacks. What it in fact presents is a character study of an abused and harrowed psyche, a study that places the viewer deep inside the titular Martha’s dazed, fearful headspace with disquieting ease. The terrors that the film presents are the terrors of the past, which seep up through the ground and distort the present into a narcotic haze. Fully half of the film takes place in flashback, as Martha recalls her horrific experiences in a Manson-like pseudo-spiritual criminal cult. The achievement of the film lies in the befuddled immediacy of Martha’s remembrances, which scramble past and present and leave her (and the viewer) in a state of perpetual raw-nerved paranoia. It is, in essence, an immersive portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder, deftly realized in cinematic form.

The film opens with Martha’s (Elizabeth Olsen) hasty, surreptitious flight on foot from a rural commune, where what little we see—women toiling in mute subservience to the men—suggests something Not Quite Right. Cult member Watts (Brady Corbet) quickly catches up with Martha in town and lays some vague menace on her, but she nonetheless manages to place a tearful call to her estranged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who shows up a few hours later and whisks Martha away. This sets up the rest of the film’s framing narrative, in which a shell-shocked Martha takes up hesitant residence at the massive, dreadfully tasteful lakeside summer home of Lucy and husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). There she attempts—with little success—to re-acclimate to the outside world and shake the unnerving sensation that she is being watched. These scenes at the lake house are intercut with flashbacks which gradually reveal the hellish extent of the traumas Martha suffered while in the fold of the cult.

Underneath a flimsy veneer of wooly New Age positivity and utopianism, the cult is exposed as a witch’s brew of misogyny and cynical criminality, all roiling around the father figure of Patrick (John Hawkes), a charming tyrant who viciously rapes each female recruit under the guise of “cleansing” them. The tactics that the cult utilizes to control its members are as old as the hills—a toxic mingling of love, reward, and fear designed to remake each captive into their own jailer—but the film wisely devotes ample time to observing exactly how such emotional terrorism unfolded in Martha’s specific case. This is essential, as it allows the viewer to appreciate Martha’s actions as reasonable given her situation, neatly heading off the incredulous objections that inevitably sprout in any abuse scenario (”Why didn’t she just leave?”). Moreover, the flitting between past and present highlights Martha’s discomfort with the wider world, not to mention her still-fresh dread after escaping a nightmarish situation. Several moments will often pass before it is clear whether a new scene is a flashback or not, a confusion abetted by the film’s often purposely ambiguous framing, lighting, and design. For Martha, the past isn’t even past.

Unfortunately, Lucy and Ted, while initially charitable and patient, are a tad too self-absorbed and suffused with bourgeois sanctimony to provide Martha with the empathy she desperately needs. (They are, after all status-obsessed yuppies, which under the conventions of American indie film marks them as, at best, clueless obstacles to the main character’s liberation.) The film is vague about Martha’s life prior to the cult, suggesting only that it was lonely and troubled. By lecturing her about her lack of ambition and strange behavior, Lucy and Ted provide Martha with daily reminders of why Patrick’s superficially loving and accepting ideology proved so enticing. In her defense, Big Sis is operating under limited information. Martha offers Lucy virtually no explanations for where she has been, even as signs surface that the cult has followed and is now watching her. Panicked second-guessing prevails: Are the nocturnal taps on the roof dropping pinecones, or are they pebbles tossed by cultists, mimicking a common diversion they employed during their bloody home invasions? Martha’s comfort with life in her sister’s house wanes just as her paranoia waxes, leading to an outright meltdown when she mistakes a bartender at a party for a cult spy.

Events eventually spiral towards a conclusion that crackles with tension, although the film refuses to decisively resolve the story. Martha isn’t exactly an unreliable narrator; rather, the ominous signs that crowd the final minutes of the film can reasonably be interpreted as either meaningless occurrences or the telltale rustles of something Very Bad that is about to go down. Like this year’s definitive American film, Meek’s Cutoff, the non-ending of Martha will likely frustrate some viewers accustomed to more concrete resolutions. While Martha never discovers the former film’s philosophical, historical, and mythic depth, the thrust of its final moments is similarly devastating. To a mind battered by trauma—war, torture, abuse—there is no discernible difference between a stranger sitting on the beach and a murderous fanatic bent on dragging you back to Hell.

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Into the Abyss

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

2011 (Germany / Canada)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: November 29, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Into the Abyss might be the closest Werner Herzog will ever come to creating a work of outright agitprop, and yet it’s still light-years from the cinematic polemics of film-makers like Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney. Herzog’s ambitions are far too multi-faceted and high-minded to indulge in political swipes or straightforward argumentation, even in a film that tackles a topic as contentious as the death penalty in America. At every turn, Into the Abyss proves intriguingly divergent from what one expects from a documentary on a Very Serious Issue, although it is in most respects exactly what one expects from a Werner Herzog documentary.

The entry point for the writer-director’s somber new feature is a shocking and senseless 2001 triple homicide in the Houston suburban-rural fringe community of Conroe, Texas. In separate trials, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry were convicted of committing the murders in the course of a scheme to steal a Camaro, with Burkett being sentenced to life in prison, and Perry to death by lethal injection. In the film, Herzog largely refrains from indulging in his customary lyrical musings, appearing only as the interrogating voice in interviews with Burkett, Perry, and others: family members of victims Sandra Stotler, Adam Stotler, and Jeremy Richardson; law enforcement officials who worked the case; locals who recall encounters with the convicted men; a chaplain and former guard captain from Texas’ Death Row; and Burkett’s advocate-turned-wife, whom he married through the glass in the prison visiting room.

Unlike Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost documentaries about the (now exonerated) West Memphis Three—films that simmered with journalistic agitation and white-hot indignation—Into the Abyss isn’t especially concerned with whether Burkett and Perry actually committed the murders for which they were convicted. Both men maintain that they are not to blame for the brutal triple murder, but both are also weirdly elliptical about what exactly happened, and Herzog doesn’t press them on the matter. The film regards the bloody details of the Conroe slayings not as an end, but a means to a sweeping-yet-intimate rumination on American murder, of both the criminal and state-sanctioned varieties. The tone of Into the Abyss is set in its first interview, wherein the Death Row chaplain—after outlining his solemn duties—describes his encounter with a squirrel on a golf course. The anecdote is sort of absurd, and yet it moves the chaplain to tears as he relates it. In that inimitable Herzog way, the film regards the man’s ache with both vague amusement and deep reverence.

Into the Abyss does not spend its time building a case against the death penalty, despite the director’s declaration early in the film that he finds capital punishment abominable. The film is much more interested in reflecting on death and murder as phenomena, on the way that they reach out with scarlet fingers and touch strange places. This philosophical but human-centered approach allows the film to discover some of the rawest moments in any Herzog film since Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Some of these moments are undeniably potent, as when the former Death Row captain describes his own nervous breakdown following the execution of Carla Faye Tucker in 1998. Other scenes contain a more subjective emotional element: Parents will probably be most sensitive to the confessions of Burkett’s dad, also imprisoned for life, as he tearfully describes his memories of holding his infant son and his realization of his absolute failure as a father.

Such heart-tugging is a far cry from the more cerebral, transcendent cogitations of Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As a result, Into the Abyss can’t help but feel a bit facile in comparison. It’s arguably easy to achieve poignancy by pointing a camera at a murder victim’s daughter and asking her to talk about her grief, but, as usual, Herzog’s interview methods—the pregnant pauses, the peculiar questions, the intermittent schoolboy coyness—almost always manage to elicit something unexpected. The film regards moments of searing pain and startling eccentricity with the same awed curiosity.

Into the Abyss seems ordained to invite comparisons to In Cold Blood, but unlike Truman Capote’s celebrated non-fiction novel, it has little to say on the relationship between the two perpetrators. Housed in separate prisons and facing different fates, Burkett and Perry barely acknowledge one another, save for the purposes of shifting blame. In the decade since the murders, Perry has maintained a gawky, adolescent countenance and become a born-again Christian. Personable and polite, he betrays no fear of death, but neither does he exhibit any remorse for his deeds. Nor does Burkett, whom prison life has made thicker and tougher, and who maintains that he will one day be exonerated.

The film reserves it most cockeyed fascination for Burkett’s wife, Melyssa, a glassy-eyed murder groupie who has somehow conceived a child with her husband without ever having been alone in the same room with him. (Herzog, clearly amused, asks about a contraband sperm sample, but gets only a non-denial-denial.) The film regards Melyssa with leery skepticism, but is also beguiled with the idea of life emerging so improbably and even farcically from death. It’s a sentiment embodied even more succinctly in a quintessentially “Herzogian” revelation: When the police attempted to move the impounded Camaro years later, they found that a sapling had grown through the floor and into the car.

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Troll Hunter

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

2010 (Norway)
Director: André Øvredal
Viewed: November 19, 2011
Format: Netflix Instant Queue via Playstation 3

In most respects, the Norwegian horror-fantasy Troll Hunter is a fairly representative “found footage” thriller. It possesses the jittery camerawork, generally unpleasant characters, and old-school matinee-monster teases that are now bedrock elements of that sub-genre. What most distinguishes director André Øvredal’s film is the engaging mythological framework that it constructs for its story, a framework that the film regards with affection and sincerity while also acknowledging its innate absurdity. Absent an intense and detailed viral marketing campaign—as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—most found footage features do a dreadful job of conveying the broader fantastical universe that rustles outside the audience’s field of view. Too often, every aspect of these films is pitched slavishly to the camera’s eye, with little regard for textured world-building, as though a first-person camera automatically bestows all the necessary verisimilitude. Not so with Troll Hunter, which utilizes expository dialog, creative set design, and four or five thrilling special effects set-pieces to intimate a rich and dryly amusing pagan-fantasy mythos. (In this respect, Troll Hunter plays as a wily, lo-fi cousin to the Nordic-influenced How to Train Your Dragon.)

The conceit: All the footage that the film presents was ostensibly shot by a group of student documentarians—director/interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound woman Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen)—who are shadowing a suspected bear poacher in western Norway. Despite being curtly warned off by their subject, Hans (Otto Jespersen), the trio doggedly follows his movements through campgrounds and rugged wilderness areas, going so far as to tail him during a nocturnal expedition into the forest. Eventually, the students stumble upon the outlandish truth: Hans is no poacher, but a government-employed field agent (the only field agent, actually) for the Troll Security Service (TSS). Disillusioned by decades of thankless work under an agency that values secrecy above all else, Hans agrees to allow the students to film his lonely, day-to-day routine, as well as his matter-of-fact explanations of troll biology and behavior. This proves to be the set-up for the real meat of Troll Hunter, which is a succession of fearsome, often funny encounters with different varieties of troll.

The unsuccessful aspects of Troll Hunter are distressingly familiar within the annals of found footage cinema. The only truly compelling character in the film is Hans, a reserved and hard-nosed old salt who doesn’t have a shred of romanticism left about his life’s work, but betrays a streak of wary fondness for trolls. Every other character is either featureless or actively unlikable, which necessarily restrains the tension of the various action-horror sequences. The film drags a bit in spots, and is liberally padded with lingering shots of the admittedly gorgeous winter landscapes of rural Norway, to the point where it seems to have ambitions as a promotional film for Scandinavian tourism. However, fifteen or so minutes of bloat notwithstanding, the story is neatly structured around Hans’ investigation of a recent, unprecedented rise in troll rampages, with each scene revealing new details and flowing smoothly into the next. The whole thing is a bit schematic and predictable at times–when a 500-foot-tall troll species is mentioned in passing, its eventual appearance is virtually guaranteed–but still gratifyingly executed.

Troll Hunter never quite figures out whether it wants to treat its titular monsters as wholly scientific subjects or émigrés from a lost magical era. The film offers some biological gobbledygook to explain why trolls turn to stone when exposed sunlight, but elsewhere ridicules other alleged attributes as fairy-tale nonsense. On the one hand, Hans states flatly and without elaboration that trolls are definitely mammals. On the other, the film doesn’t even attempt to present a pseudo-scientific explanation for trolls’ ability to smell Christian blood, a characteristic that proves to be a crucial plot point. Such contradictions might have been more vexing if Troll Hunter weren’t having so much vintage monster-movie fun with its signature creatures. The sheer spectacle of seeing mythological brutes marauding through a contemporary landscape is half the appeal of the film, which does a marvelous job of conveying the threatening nature of the trolls while also portraying them as faintly ludicrous. Blessedly, the viewer is spared the sight of “darker, edgier” trolls. Instead, the creature designs draw from the works of whimsical contemporary fantasy artists, such as Brian Froud’s witty creations and Rien Poortvliet’s seminal illustrations for Wil Huygen’s gnome books.

Troll Hunter takes sardonic aim at a wide variety of targets: romanticism and revisionism regarding Europe’s pagan past; the glib flimsiness of hero myths; government bureaucracy and its aversion to transparency; and the tension between development and environmentalism. It’s not what one could call a vicious work of satire—it is Norwegian, after all—but in the end, the modesty of the film’s cultural commentary proves a wise decision. Troll Hunter functions first and foremost as an old-fashioned creature feature, one that boasts an absurdly deep mythology and abundant moments of giddy, comic terror.

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Take Shelter

Monday, October 31st, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Jeff Nichols
Viewed: October 28, 2011
Format: Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Jeff Nichols’s riveting new film, Take Shelter, is perhaps the most frightening work of cinema I’ve seen this year, and unquestionably the best new horror film to land in theaters since Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. Nichols’ film boasts vivid nightmare sequences and a bit of computer-generated creepiness, but its boogeymen are predominantly creatures of the mind, and therefore all the more plausible and terrifying. Fundamentally, Take Shelter is a film about the deforming qualities of dread itself, and about how it can devour a mind and all the lives that surround it. The fact that the mind in question is perfectly, horribly aware that this all-consuming dread is absurd… well, that just makes the disintegration all the more disturbing.

Curtis (the ever-enthralling Michael Shannon) is a geological driller in rural Ohio, blessed with a lovely, forthright wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and a sweet young daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), whose deafness has only nurtured her parents’ devotion. Their life is simple but gratifying, the kind of existence that Curtis’ partner and friend, Dewart (Shea Whigham), will readily admit to envying once he has a few Friday night beers in him. Curtis, however, has begun to have distressing nightmares about an approaching thunderstorm, a storm that is somehow Different and Wrong. In addition to spawning fierce tornados, this storm unleashes a dark, thick rain resembling motor oil, and drives humans and animals alike to homicidal madness. Confronted with such harrowing visions, Curtis becomes distracted during his waking hours, and increasingly mystified by the omens that he sees in flocks of birds and arcs of lightning. Quietly, he begins to prepare for the apocalyptic storm that haunts his dreams. Frightened and embarrassed in equal measure, he conceals these preparations from his family and friends for as long as possible, while taking steps to evaluate his sanity.

Take Shelter functions chiefly as a character study of a splintering mind, a study presented from its protagonist’s unreliable perspective. It isn’t the first film to utilize this approach, of course. Just last year, Black Swan offered a similar first-person view of a mind losing its grip on reality, a mind trapped in a pitiless vice of rivalry and perfectionism. In contrast, Curtis gives every appearance of being an easy-going family man with no unusual mental strains beyond those common to just about every working-class American household. Therein lies the strength of Nichols’ script, which trenchantly mines the ashen pits of our collective anxieties, be they economic, cultural, religious, medical, or environmental. Eventually, the film reveals that Curtis’ mother suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. Although this provides a rationale for his sudden outbreak of apocalyptic visions, it doesn’t diminish the horror of his situation. Indeed, it only serves to heighten Curtis’ most pragmatic fear: That he is hurtling towards a genetic destiny that will transform him from a provider into a shameful burden on his family.

What makes Take Shelter distinctive from previous films about the terror of mental illness is the resounding self-awareness of its protagonist. Curtis understands that his predicament is psychiatric in nature, and yet he is unable to stop planning for the unnatural threat he perceives on the horizon. He calmly (and secretly) takes out a loan to pay for the construction of an elaborate tornado shelter, even as his rational mind screams, “This. Is. CRAZY.” Shannon conveys this contradiction marvelously, providing an anguished and largely shuttered portrait. (When Curtis does finally explode with terror and fury, Shannon plays it utterly unhinged.) Curtis is a man caught between two distinct kinds of dread. On the one hand is the fear of the loss of identity, the terror that one’s own mind has a frantic life of its own that cannot be denied. Then there is the fear of an overwhelming threat that will tear apart the world, a fear that Nichols presents with startling acuity, while never forgetting that it is essentially chimerical.

The filmmaker’s effortless evocation of the rural Heartland setting is crucial, just as it was in his debut feature, Shotgun Stories, a rattling tale of Biblical retribution in the archetypal Shitty Little Town. In Take Shelter, the setting provides a credible, willfully prosaic substrate for Curtis’ dissolution. The film presents a rare reverse-shot examination of the proverbial Ordinary Guy who just snaps. Nichols’ film proffers that no one “just snaps.” True, Curtis is caught in a whirlwind that begins with his unlucky birthright. However, that worldwind is fueled by his dumb Midwestern pride and a series of increasingly faulty decisions, each hastily made in the shadow of his waxing terror.

The film’s treatment of fearful conviction and looming Armageddon recalls several exceptional forebears, including Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, Todd Haynes’ Safe, and Bill Paxton’s Frailty. It shares with those films the phenomenon of “paradigm isolation,” wherein the protagonist is the lonely steward of a fearful, disruptive worldview. Of course, the psychological character of Take Shelter’s central conflict does not lessen the creepshow potency of the film’s nightmare sequences. Those are pants-shitting scary in their own right. The vividness of Take Shelter’s spine-tingling apocalyptic horror is one of the reasons its more down-to-earth chills of eroding sanity are so effective. There is little doubt that Curtis’ nightmares are the progeny of a malfunctioning mind, but those visions are so unsettling that they render his situation all the more pitiable.

Indeed, the film that Take Shelter brings to mind most readily is Night of the Living Dead, as it shares with that film a fear of a destructive reordering of the world into something unrecognizable and savage. Supernatural and science-fiction horror films such as Living Dead embody common human fears within literal monsters, but Nichols’ film seals its monsters within the mind of the hapless Curtis. This is cold comfort to the viewer, who sees what Curtis sees and feels his fear just as acutely as he does. In one of the most memorable shots in any film in recent memory, Nichols summons icy, stomach-flopping terror from little but a character’s slow, dead-eyed half-turn towards a kitchen knife. Cinematic moments don’t come much more elemental than that.

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Rosemary’s Baby

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

1968 (USA)
Director: Roman Polanski
Viewed: October 2, 2011
Format: DVD - Paramount (2000)

[Spoilers] Roman Polanski’s most thematically absorbing and persuasive works are what I term his Dupe Films: Stories in which sinister forces manipulate and mislead the protagonist, who plays a central but unwitting role in their Machiavellian plots. In the films that comprise this narrative current—Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, The Ninth Gate, and The Ghost Writer—the hero eventually becomes aware of such exploitation and subsequently challenges their exploiters. However, in each of these films, whatever fleeting successes the protagonist claims are outweighed by the triumph of the puppet-masters in the end. Needless to say, Polanski’s Dupe Films are exceptionally bleak works, especially in aggregate, as they posit a world where the hapless victim of a conspiracy has no realistic hope of outflanking the coldblooded conspirators. The Tenant and The Ghost Writer (and to a lesser extent Rosemary’s Baby) are also secondarily “Dupe” Films in the sense that the hero follows the footsteps of an unfortunate predecessor, down to sleeping in their bed and tracing their route turn-by-turn.

Rosemary’s Baby offers the most uncluttered and successful expression of this narrative framework. It was Polanski’s fourth English-language film in as many years, and yet the script exhibits the kind of straightforward elegance that few native British or American filmmakers ever muster, particularly when it comes to the treacherous realms of supernatural horror. I hesitate to label it the best of the Dupe Films. Chinatown is undoubtedly a more daring and exceptional film overall, and The Tenant’s cracked-mirror reality has a visceral appeal for me, but it’s hard to deny that Rosemary’s Baby is an exemplar of clean-and-simple storytelling when laid alongside the other Dupe Films. No feature with a 136-minute running time can be brisk, but every minute of Rosemary’s Baby feels necessary and proper, like the individual stones in a garden labyrinth spiraling into an ever-tightening circle. Polanski relies on thriller and horror narrative conventions that were familiar even in 1968 (and are now downright mildewy), but somehow the film never seems schematic, even when the viewer can see exactly where it is going.

The film is an outlier in other ways: It is the only feature among the aforementioned five with a screenplay credited solely to Polanski, and also the only to boast a female protagonist. Needless to say, Rosemary Woodhouse’s (Mia Farrow) femininity (and fecundity) are essential to the film’s story and its thematic preoccupations. Perhaps it’s a little hackneyed that the emotional terrain of Polanski’s most prominent female lead is so thoroughly dominated by the twin motives of fear and protectiveness. Consider that Chinatown’s Jake Gittes, The Ninth Gate’s Dean Corso, and The Ghost Writer’s nameless hero react with bristling resentment at being played for fools, and pursue their manipulators more out of offended pride than anything. (The Tenant’s cringing protagonist, Trelkowski, is the exception that proves the rule, as his malevolent neighbors aim to transform him into his female predecessor.) Still, Rosemary’s personality has a willowy realism that matches Farrow’s physical presence. She’s lamentably naive, but also a little unruly, and posseses enough aptitude to ferret out the Satanic conspiracy that has designs for her unborn child. (Although, admittedly, she requires a male character’s posthumous help to point her to a crucial clue.)

Indeed, Rosemary’s Baby may not be a feminist film, but it portrays the social obstacles that women confront with devastating clarity. One quickly loses count of how many times characters patronizingly soothe Rosemary’s fears, or utilize gender-tinted guilt tactics to manipulate her. Ironically, Rosemary isn’t especially threatening to the male-dominated social order (secular or Satanic) that surrounds her. Her rather traditionalist yearning to settle down and have two or three children appears to be genuine, and she exhibits an eager-to-please submission to the demands of her actor husband’s (John Cassavetes) vanity. However, even her tiniest defiances are sins in the eyes of her devil-worshipping tormentors, who ruthlessly quash the influence of the outside world while nudging her in their preferred direction. Polanski tips his hand by having all the male characters react with revulsion to Rosemary’s ultra-short haircut: Stray outside the role assigned to you and you will face scorn.

Such cultural criticisms are consistent with the broader conflict of traditionalism vs. modernism that the film establishes. Following the path of many horror films, Rosemary’s Baby exploits the dichotomy of the old and the new for its thematic ends. However, unlike, say, Night of the Living Dead, the film’s anxieties are directed backwards to the fossilized past rather than forward to an alien future. Fear of aging and the elderly pervades the film, but its terrors are more complex than mere illness and mortality. Rosemary, for all her professions of maternal longing, seems to sense that she will lose something ephemeral (Her freedom? Her hipness?) after she becomes a mother and locks her life into a particular, conformist narrative. The Satanists profess a forward-thinking ideology that rejects Christian moral norms and declares a glorious Year One, but their designs for Rosemary are dreadfully retrograde, a point underlined by the fact that the film’s diabolists are all old enough to be cashing Social Security checks.

Disturbed by all the time her husband is spending with the dotty neighbors forty years his senior, Rosemary at one point proposes a party with their “old” (read: young) friends. It’s telling that once Rosemary’s female peers have a moment to sit down and listen to her miseries, they acknowledge and bolster her fears rather than dismissing them. Neither is it a mistake that Rosemary’s Satanic obstetrician warns her away from the advice of such young women, while urging her to take herbal concoctions rather than modern vitamin pills. The demonic is explicitly connected to the old-fashioned and traditional, down to the the “Anti-Virgin Mary” role that the more pragmatic Satanists have in mind for Rosemary. There’s something gratifyingly audacious about a film in which the gravest threat to a Luciferian cabal is not the Church (which is complicit with Rosemary’s demonic rape in her drug-addled dreams), but a few liberated and levelheaded women.

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Moneyball

Monday, September 26th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Bennett Miller
Viewed: September 24, 2011
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

Moneyball offers a spreadsheet warrior’s variation on a musty cinematic archetype: the Sports Underdog Film. Instead of focusing on a player or team, however, it trains its gaze on the offices of a big-league general manager. Specifically, the film presents the story of Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who upends the world of professional baseball in 2002 with the aid of economics wunderkind Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Faced with the most paltry salary pool in the majors, Beane and Brand privilege on-base metrics to the exclusion of every other factor, jettisoning generations of recruiting wisdom that put great stock in personalities and gut feelings. As Moneyball attests, this approach allowed Beane to detect drastically undervalued players and assemble them into a misfit team that set the American League record for the longest winning streak of all time.

The appeal of Beane’s story is self-evident: It is a tale of iconoclasm, of institutional hypocrisy and inequity exposed on a multi-million dollar, national stage. Baseball has long thrived on its reputation as a game of statistics, but when Beane and Brand attempt to distill management down to an aseptic science, nearly everyone involved revolts: players, scouts, media, and fans. One needn’t be familiar with Oakland’s 2002 streak, or with the Michael Lewis book on which the film is based, to discern that Beane’s methodology will eventually be vindicated. It is a sports movie, after all. The film’s structure and rhythms are exceedingly familiar, but Moneyball still proves to be an engaging and knotty slice of drama, chiefly due to the lynchpin performances from Pitt and Hill. Pitt’s turn isn’t the revelation it was in, say, The Assassination of Jesse James or Burn After Reading, but it typifies the trait that makes him such a watchable screen presence, especially in middle age: His perfect balance of celebrity magnetism and frank humanity. Hill, meanwhile, shines in what amounts to his first dramatic role. He plays Brand as a ball of studious timidity, except when he is expounding on his hallowed statistical methodology, whereupon his steel-plated conviction shines through.

Bennett Miller’s direction is unobtrusive, to the point of being unimaginative at times, but in a sense it gives all the other talents plenty of room to breathe. This includes Pitt and Hill, but also screenwriters Steve Zallian and Aaron Sorkin, who stud the film with the tobacco-flecked quips and quotable locker room wisdom that the genre practically necessitates. Equally essential are the cinematography from Wally Pfister and score by Mychael Danna, which provide a strong aesthetic basis for the film’s smooth shifts in mood from forlorn to uneasy to wistful.

Major-league baseball is the film’s setting, but Moneyball is less about athletics per se that it is about gaming. Complex, multi-parameter systems present an alluring challenge: Given a set of rules and starting conditions, what principles should one follow in order to maximize a desired result? Poker sharks and fantasy sports leagues have long indulged in the compulsion to perfect a System for fun and/or profit; Moneyball is fundamentally about the pursuit of a System for real-world professional sports on a macro level. It’s not a mistake that a movie about baseball features so little baseball. In fact, the film’s backgrounding of the physical game allows Miller to flex his otherwise anemic stylistic muscles. The Athletics’ on-field tribulations are presented in almost collage-like fashion, with snippets of archival television footage, luscious slow-motion recreations, and snatches of play-by-play overheard on crackling radios.

Not everything works. The script’s determination to frame the story around Beane’s personal demons isn’t particularly successful, and Miller deflates the drama by dragging things on for about fifteen minutes too long. Moreover, there is a nagging paradox at work in any tale about a radical institutional realignment that so thoroughly embraces conservative storytelling tropes. For all that, I find it difficult to dislike the film. Moneyball is a shallow work, in that no thematic complexities lie beneath its prominent emotional landmarks, but it’s a finely crafted and refreshing shallowness, blessedly free of the nonsensical moralizing and over-developed cultural earnestness that plague so many “adult dramas”.

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Drive

Monday, September 26th, 2011

2011 (USA)
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Viewed: September 22, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Cinema)

In another reality, where Ryan Gosling was not available to assume the role of the nameless Driver in Nicolas Winding Refn’s peculiar, vitalizing new film, another young male actor could theoretically have done so without difficulty. However, Gosling’s physical presence—lean and boyish, casually self-possessed, and just a little bit crazy at the acute margins—is so essential to the effect of Drive that one can scarcely picture what such an alternate iteration of the film would look like.

This is not to say that the Driver is a demanding role, or that Gosling’s performance is some kind of actorly feat for the ages. There’s just not enough texture to work with. In adapting James Sallis’ 2005 novel of the same name, director Refn and scripter Hossein Amini maintain a cool distance from their wheelman antihero, who carefully considers the world around him and speaks in short, clipped sentences. (The only exception being a terms-of-service speech he recites to his prospective clients, a monologue that self-evidently draws from a Hollywood bad-ass archetype that Drive itself embraces and critiques.) We never learn much about him or where he comes from, and the film’s rare glipses into his inner landscape have a stark simplicity that precludes a deeper interrogation of character. The Driver is a cipher, and Drive therefore cannot be properly regarded as a character study. It is, rather, a slick and invigorating noir piece.

For me, the film recalls Thief in its generic trappings and style, especially its smudgy vision of the nocturnal cityscape and the spectacular, synth-heavy score by Cliff Martinez. Moreover, Drive is preoccupied with masculine codes in a manner that unavoidably echoes any number of Michael Mann’s works. However, Refn embraces a dreamier, more unreal tone than Mann, and also a more brutal approach to violence that positions it pointedly alongside shimmering romanticism.

Refn opens the film with a nocturnal warehouse burglary and subsequent getaway, a dazzling sequence that reveals the Driver’s breathtaking talent behind the wheel and his unwavering dedication to a clear set of rules. (One of the little touches that hooked me into the film right away was the silence of the burglars, who simply ride along in mute terror, holding their breath at the approach of every squad car and helicopter. A different, less intriguing film would have placed a couple of wearisome mooks in the back seat to spout fearful exclamations with every cut.) Consistent with genre conventions, the Driver’s commitment to his rules is swiftly complicated by an emerging friendship with Irene (Carey Mulligan), the Pretty Thing down the hall who has a sweet little boy and a husband in prison. Meanwhile, the Driver’s restless mentor (Bryan Cranston) talks him into a stock car racing enterprise with a pair of backers (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman) who also happen to be loathsome, remorseless gangsters. Then Irene’s husband makes parole, goons start threatening the family, and the Driver finds himself wedged into a corner facing the proverbial One Last Job.

Drive’s narrative is hardly original stuff, but Refn’s copious visual and aural artistry and his somewhat removed, fable-like approach to that narrative make the film a wellspring of unexpected cinematic pleasures. It is, above all else, a familiar story presented in a very idiosyncratic mode. Viewers who settle in expecting a high-octane action odyssey are bound to be disappointed. Excepting the opening sequence and one other car chase at roughly the halfway point, the film features very little actual driving. It does, however, boast long, pregnant pauses; flat, self-consciously insipid romantic dialog; languid pop music interludes with on-the-nose lyrics; sequences that are little more than generous celebrations of Los Angeles’ ugly splendor; and an abundance of gruesome beatings, knifings, and shootings presented for maximum shock and revulsion.

Underneath these elements throbs a rather harsh appraisal of those aforementioned masculine codes. Gosling’s baby blues and soft-spoken affability charm the viewer, and the professional minimalism of his code suggests a fundamentally Good Man who does Bad Things because he has no other reliable talents. There is a critical moment in the film, however, when the mask drops, and the Driver is revealed to be capable of frightening cruelty. In that moment, the absence of access into the character’s mind becomes a blessing, and there is a modest relief at his inscrutability. No matter how noble his intentions or clinical his pursuit of vengeance, the Driver has been unavoidably tainted by a lifetime of criminality, and no code can protect him. In this light, the front-loading of the film’s most stunning car chase is a cunning stratagem. The life of the Driver is first drenched in nitro-fueled glamour, and then torn down in a flurry of appalling, blood-and-guts violence. It makes for a striking, tragic stripe of genre exercise, and one so aesthetically enthralling that it seems unkind to label it an exercise at all.

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