1984 (USA)
Director: Brian De Palma
Viewed: February 15, 2011
Format: Theatrical Print (Webster University Moore Auditorium)
[Body Double was screened on February 15, 2011 as a part of "How (Not) to Mind Your Own Business," the Webster University Film Series' three-feature retrospective on the films of Brian De Palma.]
Permit me the most facile observation about Brian De Palma’s perversely mesmerizing thriller, Body Double: In every shot, and every frame, it is a self-consciously Bad Movie, one that teeters on that narrow ledge where all intentionally ridiculous kitsch artifacts attempt to position themselves. It’s hard to know what to make of a work of cinema so garish and goofy, and yet capable, in its best moments, of evoking both aching loneliness and white-knuckle tension. Certainly, a film as contradictory and bizarre as Body Double isn’t unexpected when the director in question is De Palma, but the film does strike me as his most deliberately trashy work, a precursor to the legion of disposable “erotic thrillers” that would crowd video store shelves and late-night television in the 1980s and 90s, at least in terms of its superficial content. Body Double is, of course, far more visually enthralling than such lesser kin. Its most cinematically conspicuous component is an extended, mostly wordless sequence in which out-of-work actor and amicable everyman Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) shadows his object of desire, Gloria (Deborah Shelton) first through a mall and then at a seaside motel. It’s a stock murder mystery setpiece masterfully rendered by De Palma and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum. How, then, are we to react when it concludes with a ludicrous, lustful embrace, complete with the characteristic De Palma 360-degree panning shot and hideously saccharin score? Is this the director simply attempting, as he does much more explicitly elsewhere in the film, to rub our noses in the artificial and manipulative nature of the medium? Body Double touches on many of the same thematic elements as Blow Out, but the lingering 1970s cynicism of the latter film is here replaced with a Reagan-era middle finger, complete with power-tool-wielding maniacs, vampire “punks” clad in black leather and chrome, and porn stars who specify their “wills” and “won’ts” in terms of orifice, substance, and species. I’m still not sure how I feel about a work perched so restlessly on the border between schlock and art, but Body Double is so obviously striving for the former that its silliest moments don’t disrupt as they do in other De Palma ventures. Carlito’s Way lulls you into nodding along with its personalized and almost spiritual approach to the gangster film… until Joe Cocker wailing out “You Are So Beautiful” makes you sit up and go, “Whaaaa…?” Body Double, by contrast, is chock-a-block with “Whaaaa…?” moments, and therefore nothing ever really seem out-of-place. Not even, say, a bizarre but admittedly lively music video sequence set to Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax,” with lip-syncing from a Joel Grey type by way of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Post-Script: Am I the only one who thinks the music used in the U-North advertisements in Tony Gilroy’s stupendous white-collar thriller Michael Clayton bears an uncanny resemblance to Pino Donaggio’s score for this film, and specifically to Gloria’s “striptease theme”?
C+ - Guy Ritchie purges the Victorian starch (and elegance) from Doyle’s sleuth, while preserving Holmes’ spooky powers of deduction and highlighting forgotten character details, such as the Great Detective’s talent for bare-knuckle boxing and his penchant for narcotics. Purists will doubtlessly blanch at the director’s approach, which paints Holmes as a superhero for a steampunk-tinged nineteenth century London. However, Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal possesses sufficient odd-duck touches to render this Sherlock a credible (if multiplex-friendly) variation on the iconic character. Witty and rollicking, the film focuses on a Holmesian mainstay—banal evil dressed up in mystical garb—and generally succeeds, despite a story stuffed with baffling plot holes. The gaggle of writers (surprise!) are too eager to sacrifice consistency for the sake of action, and leave far too much unexplained, despite a coda where Holmes sweeps away a plethora of seemingly supernatural events with his vaunted reason. Still, there’s plenty of glint to admire on this bauble, whether in Ritchie’s flamboyant style, Hans Zimmer’s lively score (his most flat-out stimulating in years), or the consistently rich art direction, which relies heavily on conspicuous computer effects, but still manages to delight. Sherlock Holmes suggests that anachronistic Victorian adventure can be guilty good fun, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen be damned.
B- - The film adaptation of the late Stieg Larsson’s phenomenally popular novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is a nearly flawless Swedish replica of a lurid Hollywood thriller. Whether that statement represents high praise or a backhand compliment depends on one’s regard for lurid Hollywood thrillers, but director Niels Arden Oplev has created, at minimum, a fierce little whodunit that is unwavering in its crackling regard for its heroine. That would be Lisbeth Salander, a misfit hacker with anemic social skills and an eidetic memory, embodied with spooky precision by Noomi Rapace. Oddly alluring and as tightly wound as a feral cat, Rapace is far more compelling than Michael Nyqvist’s doughy journalist or the film’s convoluted story of a vanished teen. Oplev, to his credit, preserves the novel’s righteous anger at misogynistic violence, and also its flair for lending thrilling significance to the tiniest of clues. However, the film’s gloomy aesthetic and faux-provocative shocks don’t conceal its fundamentally disposable nature. Salander may add some texture to the ranks of fictional female sleuths, but Girl is still just crime, peril, and conspiracy recast as entertainment, a movie-of-the-week seen through a Scandinavian, post-Thomas Harris lens.
A- - Yorkshire. Is there a more evocative landscape in all of England? The word conjures visions of Wuthering Heights and its doomed lovers, of green dales and simple, working-class folk. Such visions, nurtured on robust helpings of classist romanticism, are nowhere to be found in the Yorkshire of Red Riding. Turn off the M-1, peer out the rain-spotted windows. What do you see? Sad, ragged flats and shops; cruel buildings of steel, concrete, and linoleum, seemingly designed to engender malaise; the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant, pumping God-knows-what into the air, water, and bowels; vacant lots inflamed with rubble, weeds, and grubby children, who aren’t so much playing as they are biding their time. And out there, beyond the drone of Leeds, Sheffield, and Hull and the countless, wretched towns, are the moors. There are no trees, just the pitched and rolling Pennines (what passes for mountains in England), clad in heather and huddled under eternally gray skies. The sense of exposure and remoteness is suffocating. England’s sun-kissed Isle of Wight might as well be in Monaco, or Timbuktu. The Red Riding film trilogy spends nine years in this miserable dream of Yorkshire, from 1974 to 1983, as the Left’s dreams of a bright British future comes crashing down amid economic stagnation and ruin. The tale crosses paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in British history, but the film is not really about him. It’s about the sort of place that could give birth to such a creature.
B+ - Roman Polanski’s thrillers pulse with their own curious rhythms, conveying a sense that everything—conversations, knowledge, even physical space—is ever so slightly out of sync. Few directors possess his uncanny facility for pulling together all the elements of cinema, especially the selection of shots and music, to evoke a veiled, relentlessly sinister reality. Whether he succeeds (Chinatown) or fails (The Ninth Gate), the result is unfailingly sumptuous and moody. So it is with The Ghost Writer, a potboiler set in the rotten twin worlds of politics and publishing, executed with the auteur’s customary dramatic dexterity and passion for generic trappings. Polanski makes no effort to conceal his personal fingerprints on the film: its politics are acidly suspicious of American power and yet also vaguely sympathetic to (ahem) public figures hounded by public outrage and the courts. Yet the film remains relentlessly engaged with the noir-tinged plight of its nameless protagonist (Ewan McGregor), a man who, like Jake Gittes, considers himself a savvy mercenary, and whose pursuit of the truth is rooted not in airy ideals but in his resentment at being played for a fool.
A- - There is a mystery at the core of Michael Haneke’s Palm d’Or-clinching new film, The White Ribbon, but it is not a mystery that requires a solution. Unlike the director’s brilliant splatter of post-modern mindfuckery, Caché, his latest feature does not wander outside the frame in the pursuit of answers. The culprit who has committed The White Ribbon’s bizarre misdeeds is hiding in plain sight. Set in the rigidly Protestant German hamlet of Eichwald just before World War I, the film presents the events of a single year, a year in which a series of peculiar and disturbing misfortunes befall the community. Someone in the village is clearly responsible for these misfortunes, but sorting out whodunit is, at best, tangential to the film’s striking emotional and intellectual vigor. Maintaining a mannered, somber tone that swathes the viewer in Old Testament dread, Haneke uses his setting and plot as portals through which he accesses a breathtaking array of themes. Impeccably constructed and exquisitely shot in black-and-white, The White Ribbon will frustrate viewers seeking dramatic jolts. This film is all trembling and lip-licking, a work brimming with the sour-gut sensation that something is wrong, just out of sight.
B - Eternally the Catholic kid from the Garment District, Martin Scorsese has long used his narrative features to explore the relationship between violence and guilt. Granted, the stultifying, deforming influence of societies on the individual frequently figures prominently into his films, with the societies in question ranging from blinkered, hierarchical subcultures to the vast, alienating melting pot of over-stimulated contemporary America. Even Scorsese’s most unambitious feature in the past two decades, his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, took pains to develop the original film’s anemic foundations into a more substantive commentary on the absurdities of the criminal justice system and the allure of masculine mythology. However, settings only seem to hold the director’s attention inasmuch as they relate to searingly personal concerns; at the center of most Scorsese films is a battered man squeezed between others’ rules and his own sins. Given these tendencies, I suppose I should have expected that Shutter Island would prove to be something more elaborate and bruised than the “mere” creepshow thriller that is being presented in the film’s marketing. Not that there’s anything wrong with a creepshow thriller done exceptionally well (q.v., Drag Me to Hell), but Scorsese, despite his profile, isn’t the film-maker that leaps to mind when one hears the phrase “Master of Horror.” Shutter Island feels for all the world like a florid imitation of a Wes Craven delve, and it’s only in the final twenty minutes that the curtain is pulled back to reveal that Scorsese tell, the strand of private Christian torment that stretches all the way back to Mean Streets.