★★★★
In Destiny, Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou finally give up
convoluted storytelling and settle for a plot that starts at the beginning and
goes to the end. They remove confusing references whose explanations await a flashback and instead give us a clear,
direct story here. And rather than
engaging us with cleverness, Lang creates a deeply atmospheric film here that
touches its audience though mood rather than narrative showmanship.
Much of Destiny’s evocative atmosphere comes from the figure
of Death. Instead of a dark, pitiless,
inescapable Grim Reaper, Lang’s Death is a figure who regrets the suffering he
presides over but who nonetheless performs his duties. As created by Bernhard Goetzke, Death is sad about what he does, but as a part of the order of things, it's the only thing he can do. In this
portrayal, Death’s black robes and wide-brimmed hat are as much about his own
mourning as the grief he must inflict.
This Death, echoing a similar portrayal in Victor Sjöström’s Phantom
Carriage of the same year, gives Destiny an eerie tone, both repulsive and
attractive.
Art design contributes to the mood, too. The Apothecary’s crow, which we initially see
standing on a skeleton, is unnerving as it hops among the Apothecary’s
bottles while the man is looking for ingredients. And low-angle expressionist shots distort and
disturb, too. For example, the wall around
Death’s domain, which has no door, appears huge when Lang shoots it from below
with the Young Woman standing outside it. Similarly, the figural lamp in the bar takes on a macabre life as our attention
is directed up to it and its candles from below.
Grotesque close-ups also bring us too close to people who we don’t want that
proximity to, and Lang uses
Expressionist low lighting to project threatening shadows when figures pass, as
in the Carnival section of this film. Some
of the décor also evokes the darkly mystical.
Death, for example, follows the length of people’s lives in a vast room filled with
candles, each candle representing a human life.
It’s a beautiful, if chilling, scene.
Another important element of the atmosphere is Lang’s use of
special effects. One
tour de force
moment is when Death goes to a candle, opens his hands above it as the
candle flickers out, and a baby fades into his hands. Effective as that moment is, Lang shows
greater creativity when the scene dissolves into a mother grieving over the
death of her baby. With that one effects-laden
sequence, Lang shows us Death’s terrible job and the burden he carries in doing
it. Lang uses this same dissolve technique
effectively elsewhere in
Destiny. Death
fades in to meet the coach at a crossroads, establishing his other-worldliness
early on, and the Young Woman fades into Death’s lair when she poisons herself
and then fades into the Apothecary’s lodgings when Death sends her back among the
living. The otherworldly procession of
the dead into Death’s kingdom uses a similar in-camera effect, as does the
poignant reunion of the Young Woman and the Young Man as the latter rises to
meet her and the two are led off by Death.
Other effects – like the stop-motion moving letter, the flying carpet and the
crying statue – also maintain the unnatural tone in the film.
Destiny is the first film to show Lang’s ability to create
and maintain such a compelling mood, but even in doing so, he builds on
strengths from his preceding work. Most
conspicuously, Lang keeps the frame filled with opulence and décor, and he did
as early as Spiders. From Persia to Carnival
to China and the village where Death has taken up habitation, Lang stuffs
Destiny full of showy costumes and decoration. The Third Light, the Middle Kingdom in China,
is especially rich in these, climaxing with a pagoda turning into an elephant that has a pagoda on its back. There are fascinating details throughout the
film. Another carryover from Lang's movie-making include using the
same actors to play different roles in the film and Lang’s attraction to
showmanship. The conflagration at the
end of Destiny is compelling even today in its size and reality.
While
Destiny certainly succeeds, it still has some rough
edges. The frame of Death and the Young
Woman works well, but the three interposed stories don’t engage us. Their small run time barely lets Lang tell
the story, much less develop characters.
Five years earlier, DW Griffith had likewise tried to portray one idea
as manifest in different eras with
Intolerance, and he achieved some
success. But
Intolerance runs more than double
the time of
Destiny. Another odd Lang
choice in Destiny is to make the Chinese section a comedy, thereby misaligning
it with the other segments. After the
dark moodiness of the first 2/3 of the film, it’s jarring to have a fat, petulant,
immature Emperor as the Son of Heaven with fingernails longer than his
hands groping at the heroine. What problems there are in
Destiny arise in the interposed tales.
Destiny shows us a director who has made genuine progress
and produced a noteworthy film. He’s
learned to tell a story in a way that the audience can follow, and he can
control tone to engage us. And Destiny
points in the direction of Lang’s next project when Death looks at a group of
quarreling burghers and apparently uses mind control to calm and manipulate
them. Lang’s next works will demonstrate further consolidation of the silent film language he's most clearly developed here.
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