October 27: Gimme Danger (2016 - Jim Jarmusch)

★★★

Gimme Danger has a few nice cinematic gestures, but it doesn’t go far beyond telling the chronological story of Iggy Pop and The Stooges.  There’s ample space that the film could have investigated, but instead, Jarmusch simply says what happened when, though he dresses it up well enough to keep us engaged.

One of its more effective elements is the film's starting in media res, with The Stooges at the point of breaking up.  Jarmusch then takes us back to Iggy’s upbringing, the coming together of the band, and the early successes that led to the time that started the film.  From there, we follow The Stooges into their future of glam rock, punk and beyond.  It’s a clever way to organize the plot in what’s basically a chronologically-told story.

Although the spine of the film is Iggy giving us his account of the group from a chair, Jarmusch dribbles in interesting extras to keep us interested in the content.  He intercuts short comments by other band members, and he finds relevant clips from TV and movies that visually comment on Iggy’s words.  He also uses home videos and still images to break up the Iggy narration, and script across the screen fills in some history.  One of the more fun devices is when Jarmusch uses animation to illustrate one of Iggy’s points, even cutting to an animated figure that is mouthing Iggy’s words.  All these elements help to keep us involved in what’s happening.

What emerges is the story of the development of one stream of rock music as experienced by a band near its center, but there is material here for even more interesting stories.  For example, Jarmusch could have followed more of the connections between the music of The Stooges and other types of music and art.  At one point, Iggy mentions the Ann Arbor music scene experimentation that fed into their work, and it would have been a unique contribution if Gimme Danger had been able to look at how an avant-garde, interdisciplinary scene that went from the musical experimentation of John Cage to theater contributed to the emerging aesthetic of The Stooges.  And on into the music developments that followed.

There is also an interesting story about art, the artist and creativity in Iggy himself.  From his narration, we understand that Iggy used his body to express himself.  From his earliest days, he played drums, the most bodily-engaged of rock's instruments.  And at one point later, he talks about wanting to express an opinion but, being unable to do that verbally, he just did somersaults around the room.  We also see that in The Stooges’ performances Iggy’s body is his instrument.  He connects to the crowd with his gyrations, even to the point of jumping into it.  He also describes jamming with his guitarist by his movements, the guitar riffing on Iggy’s motion while Iggy is doing the same to the guitar.  It’s a fascinating way to see the art of The Stooges and one we might wish we'd heard more about.

What Jarmusch gives us of The Stooges here is a basic narration.  If he doesn’t go far beyond that, Gimme Danger is still an engaging chronological story that gives us insight into one type of music in it’s time.  But the film has interesting little jewels embedded throughout that would certainly warrant more attention.

October 26: American Honey (2016 - Andrea Arnold)

★★★★★

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October 24: Deepwater Horizon (2016 - Peter Berg)

★★★

Deepwater Horizon is a fun couple of hours at the movies.  Peter Berg uses the same elements that Hollywood figured out back in the 20s—heroic everyman, action, bad guy and melodrama—but he amps most of these up into 21^st century expression.  Mike Williams is a decent guy who rises to meet the challenges posed by the devastation on the oil rig, and the action has contemporary intensity with fires roaring up corridors and bits of metal zinging by people after mud explosions.  The bad guy here is BP, a soulless corporation represented by Donald Vidrine, emphatically places profit above people.  And melodrama informs the film, from the sweetness of Mike’s leave-taking of his family to his wife’s tears as she learns of the accident and on to their reunion as a family.  Along the way, one brave crew member is killed as he saves the rest of the crew, the honorable Mr. Jimmy insists on returning to the bridge despite his wounds, and Mike rescues several of the injured while gallantly trying to restart the rig’s engines.  Much of Deepwater Horizon is a silent era adventure with up-to-date elements.

Exposition here can be obvious, as when Mike’s daughter explains subterranean oil pressure by using a shaken can of Coke, but the exposition is some of the most interesting and compelling content.  We learn what fantastically complex mechanisms these floating oil rigs are, and we come to understand the risks and precautions on the them.  In fact, Berg devotes the entire first half of the movie to exposition as our dread builds since we know what the outcome is going to be.  It’s one of the finer pleasures of the film.

Deepwater Horizon has a few missteps.  Berg gives John Malkovich too much latitude as Vidrine, so we get a Simon Legree-style bad guy who is far more caricature than Kurt Russell’s Jimmy Harrell or Wahlberg’s Mike.  And the film's women lack agency.  Andrea needs Mike to give her the courage to save herself, and Felicia stays home with the kid and is left to cry and fret.  But Deepwater Horizon doesn't aim to challenge or instruct; it's a fun action film that also manages to give us an engaging sense of what goes on aboard such a huge vessel and of the colossal forces it sits astride.

October 23: The Handmaiden/Ah-ga-ssi (2016 - Park Chan-wook)

★★★★

Park Chan-wook is simultaneously elegant, clever and passionate in The Handmaiden.  The visuals here have an Edwardian feel with dark interiors, heavy woodwork and period furnishings, but these elements merge seamlessly with an Asian sensibility that includes cherry trees in the landscapes and sliding paper doors.  Park blends the two influences to create a magnificent, English-inspired Japanese mansion set in the countryside of Korea.  The same Edwardian/Asian blend carries through in costumes, which range from simple, high-collared dresses for servants to shimmering gowns for the wealthy women and tight Edwardian suits for the men.  Even the hairstyles reflect this two-world approach with women’s tresses sometimes piled on top of the head, pulled back into a bun,  divided into hemispheres or left to fall in straight cascades.  And all the while, Chung Chung-hoon bathes the settings and figures with a soft glow that takes the edge off of low-key lighting and makes The Handmaiden feel like a film version of an old photo album.  His tight control sometimes brings a figure out of the background with a narrow depth of field, and his color saturation gives hues a special richness.  It’s sumptuous movie to watch.

It’s also a very smart film.  In the long first part, we see the straightforward story of Count Fujiwara’s scheme to use one woman, Sook-hee, to defraud another woman, Lady Hideko.  Perhaps the major surprise in this part is Sook-hee and Hideko falling in love with each other, but Park also draws us into the film by giving us a few visual teases that imply we’re not getting the whole story.  For example, why is the white rope, which was once in a box in Hideko’s closet, hanging in a tree when the two leave the estate?  In a film as controlled as The Handmaiden, such elements engage us and promise that there’s more to the story than we’ve seen.

Park’s narrative whiplash begins in Part II, when we revisit many of the scenes of Part I from a different perspective.  The big reveal is that the Count has been conspiring with Lady Hideko all along to use Sook-hee so Lady Hideko can claim her inheritance.  We learn that Lady Hideko isn’t being kind when she offers to let Sook-hee try on some earrings but rather that she’s following the Count’s suggestion to put Sook-hee at ease.  A similar reversal occurs in the picnic scene as we see it in this part.  In Part I, the couple is snuggling when Sook-hee returns from an errand, but in the same scene in Part II, we find the two pair quarreling until the handmaiden returns.  And Part II shows us that the white rope was hanging in the cherry tree in Part I because Lady Hideko had been in despair over her love for Sook-hee and tried to kill herself.  This section of the film is a smart bit of intertextuality that delights with a series of reversals, flashbacks and changes in perspective before returning to a stable, if different, narrative line in Part III..

Park also amps up the sex between the women in The Handmaiden, though he integrates it well into the film.  These scenes run long and steamy, perhaps overly so, but the genuine passion between the women comes through clearly in them.  Given that this passion ultimately undermines the Count’s initial plans, we have to believe in the intensity of the women’s love, so there’s some justification for Park’s dwelling on it.  And Park uses these scenes to reinforce the characters.  The commoner Sook-hee is more robust and aggressive in the love scenes while the Lady is appropriately tentative and discovering.  Park also uses these scenes to introduce a theme of voyeurism and to call his (male) audience to account.  In one of the longer erotic scenes, Sook-hee puts a thimble on her finger, gently holds Lady Hideko’s head and moves her finger slowly in and out of the lady’s mouth to smooth a rough spot on a tooth.  The scene is laden with erotic overtones, and Park brings the audience directly into it by putting the camera in Sook-hee’s perspective, looking into the eyes of Lady Hideko while her/our finger is in her mouth.  This daring voyeuristic gesture points to more explicit voyeuristic scenes later, when Lady Hideko reads pornography to the room of men and acts out some of the content while the men set enrapt. In this self-reflexive gesture, Park suggests that the male gaze in both settings is focused on sex, a gaze as we see later that ultimately blinds the Count to the reality of the situation he faces with the two women.  The Handmaiden gives us two women who escape exploitation by men even, ironically, with a male impersonation at its end.

With so much to recommend this film, it’s not without its drawbacks.   For all the beauty and deliberateness of Part I, this section of the film is overly long and feels like a movie in itself.  It consists of extended scenes and more than a little repetition.  The sex scenes in the film, too, are unnecessarily frequent, run overly long and risk falling into the very voyeurism they implicitly criticize.  The film doesn’t need so much passion to make its point, and while Park clearly highlights voyeurism, it’s not clear that this emphasis contributes to our experience of the movie or comes to some statement.  The Handmaiden also leaves us wishing that its characters had more depth.  The people we meet here certainly have feelings, but Park leaves us to accept their emotion with too little background or range of experiences among the principals.

The Handmaiden is a fine cinematic experience, bold and beautiful.  If the ideas don’t always hang together well and the characterizations don’t run deep, it still gives us a striking surface of visuals and story to enjoy.

October 12: Birth of a Nation (2016 - Nate Parker)

★★★

Nate Parker’s first feature aims high and hits the mark in several ways.  It gives us a compelling portrait of antebellum slavery, de-glamorized from the nostalgia glaze of Gone with the Wind and its descendants.  The slavery we see here is one of utter brutality, from beatings to hangings to knocking slaves’ teeth out with a hammer.  And the slaveholders themselves are not a refined aristocracy.  Some are educated, but many are scrappy farmers who have to work their slaves hard in order to make ends meet.  They are sweaty, dirty, unshaven and pot-bellied.  Birth of a Nation gives us visceral portrait of slavery as a harsh institution sustained by viciousness.

The cinematography and art direction figure prominently in creating this effect.  Muted hues inform many shots, often blue/grey outdoors and brown indoors, which suppresses any brightness or gaiety of color.  The slave quarters are dark and spare, furnished with handmade items, while the slaveholders’ homes are larger though only slightly more decorated with more ornate appointments.  Sweat glistens on everyone, and everyone has an unkempt look, even when they seem to be trying not to look that way.  Elliot Davis’ camera, for example, often catches Mrs. Turner with strong back or side lighting, which highlights the fuzz growing on her face.  While the camera sometimes uses cliché’s like circling a dance to help us participate in the fun, it more often adds to the film’s material portrait of the era.

Likewise, the script has some clear strengths.  In an inversion of DW Griffith’s film, Parker tells this story from the perspective of the enslaved, so these slaves have names, families and human emotions.  We see Nat’s love for his wife, mother and grandmother, and we see their love for him.  When he visits other plantations to preach, we see the suffering of the other slaves through his eyes.  This perspective draws our sympathy to the slaves and puts us on their side.  And the script ranges beyond the slaves to portray the effect of slavery on the slave-holders, too.  Samuel Turner sees the immorality of slavery.  He’s taken aback at some of the abuse that owners inflict on their slaves, and we see him defend Nat against a white man at one point.  It is implied that he turns increasingly to gin to deal with his inner moral conflict over his participation in the institution of slavery, but he still exploits slaves, in particular using Nat to raise money to get his farm out of debt and restore his family’s name.  The script of Birth of a Nation isn’t one-dimensional in its portrayal of slavery.

There are also interesting historical elements in the film.  We see slaves subjected to every indignity imaginable with the intention of dehumanizing and therefore pacifying them, but Birth of a Nation shows how slaves maintained their humanity.  Their history speaks in religious practices and forbearers’ stories we encounter while ceremonial practices like weddings preserve their culture.  Africa is constantly in the air, whether in cowry shell accessories or in the rhythms of the film’s music, and this provides yet another unifying element among the enslaved.  The movie also shows us how the slaves preserve their own identities.  Cherry, for example, shows Nat a blouse that her mother has sewn her child’s name into lest the child forget it; Nat similarly gives Cherry a family token from Africa.  Such gestures show the persistence of humanity despite the slave owners’ harsh efforts to undermine it.  The film also dramatizes some of the unique ways slaves maintained their own culture right in front of the slave-owning whites.  At one point, we watch Nat use coded biblical references to condemn slavery while slave owners look on obliviously.

Despite the value of the historical portrayal here, the script of Birth of a Nation ultimately undermines the film.  Although the story of Nat Turner and what motivated his rebellion lies at the center of the movie, the script ultimately muddles its portrayal of the central character.  For much of the movie, we see Nat increasingly angered at the treatment of slaves, from the mistreatment at nearby farms to the abuse his own wife suffers.  But in the latter third of the film, Birth of  a Nation suddenly pushes Nat’s religious belief as his primary motive rather than his anger at injustice.  After we’ve watched Nat’s moral growth in secular terms for most of the film, it’s jarring when he’s suddenly willing to incur punishment because he wants to serve god by baptizing the white man.  We’ve seen Nat’s knowledge of god before that, but the film has given us little hint that this knowledge has affected his behavior before this extreme decision.  And shortly afterward this event, Nat is looking for signs from god to begin his insurrection and cloaking himself in the robes of martyrdom.  The script here gives us little indication of a religious motivation for Nat’s uprising and leaves us confused when the central character suddenly starts giving religion as a reason for his rebellion.

The script also has several other distracting elements.  For one, most of the women have little character depth and largely appear as accessory to the need to develop the character of Nat.  When Nat needs a love interest, the script brings in Cherry, and she helps to generate sympathy for Nat at a later point.  The mother and grandmother perform similar functions, developing Nat as a loved, grounded character.  In addition, the script builds Nat’s growing anger at slavery in a series of obvious steps -- visits to different farms, each with an increasingly brutal treatment of the slaves.   And while some of the story’s turns to magical realism work, they can be redundant or distracting.  The vision of Cherry as an angel or the bleeding ear of corn hardly add to the psychology or drama of the moment.

At times, Birth of a Nation can feel like the vanity project of someone with strong talent but who’s not yet in total directorial control. That said, this film gives us a strong insight into one of the worst parts of our national history, and for that alone, it’s a worthwhile contribution the movies.