Heat
Pacino understands that this is an opera, about Men who Do What They Gotta Do and the Women who Love Them.
The script has a lot of plot, even for a three-hour movie, so there isn’t a lot of time for irony. Tough guys announce who they are, what they stand for and what they’re feeling at any given moment. Seems a little counterintuitive for tough guys, but the director is looking to humanize them, to make them accessible to an audience, especially women.
De Niro plays against the poetry of the script, holding back, holding back, holding back. Even when he’s announcing who he is and what he stands for, he makes it seem like he’s not telling you anything. He gets that Dispeptic De Niro look on his face, as if revealing himself makes him literally sick to his stomach. Pacino, on the other hand, goes in the other direction, blowing some lines up to absurd, laugh-inducing proportions. He carries the same sickness inside him, but he directs it outward, even when he’s announcing how he keeps everything inside (because it “Keeps me sharp. (snap) On the edge. (snap) Where I gotta be.”).
The story is preposterous, so the direction is crisp and efficient without drawing attention to itself. That makes the action scenes seem matter-of-fact and human somehow, exciting in a way a “slicker” directing style would not be. Another director might have employed a hundred different devices to “jazz up” the action sequences, but Mann keeps it simple and lets the mayhem of the moment speak for itself.
In a cast full of present and future stars (Dennis Haysbert! Natalie Portman! Wes Studi! Tone Loc! Hank Azaria! Jeremy Piven! Xander Berkeley! Mykelti Williamson! William Fichtner! Jon Voight! Henry Rollins! Danny Trejo [playing the role of “Trejo,” no less]!), Diane Venora has the job of being Pacino’s long-suffering wife. She is given some of the densest, most purple lines in the script (“I have to demean myself with Ralph just to get closure with you,” a moment of sober clarity unheard of in any of my messy breakup scenes) and somehow holds her own.
The Aviator
Martin Scorsese often complains about the limitations of genre, but as I look over his filmography, I’m struck at the number of his movies that could be classified as one genre or another. He has a number of gangster movies, all very different, two religious epics, two sports pictures (my local video store inexplicably puts The Color of Money in “Action”), a couple of costume dramas (I count Gangs of New York as a gangster costume drama, although it’s closer to a historical epic in structure), a thriller, a comedy, and now a Hollywood Biopic.
I mentioned watching The Aviator to a female friend of mine today and she said “Is that the one about the guy who, you know, follows his dream?” And it occurred to me that, well, all Hollywood Biopics are about a Guy who Follows His Dream. I mean, honestly, who would spend $100 million on a 3-hour movie about a guy who doesn’t follow his dreams? Usually, now that I think of it, the guy Follows His Dream but it brings him nothing but grief, and he often dies before his time.
Howard Hughes, of course, didn’t die before his time, but he did the next best thing in biopic terms, which was to have a Bizarre Medical Condition.
TE Lawrence was obsessed with the desert, Gandhi wanted to free India from imperialism, Schindler wanted to save them Jews, and Howard Hughes, according to The Aviator, was obsessed with building airplanes.
Scorsese’s Howard Hughes is obsessed with his airplanes, so we also become obsessed with his airplanes. He cares about the rivets, so we care about the rivets. He gets excited climbing into the cockpit to test a new plane, so we do too. And when he starts falling apart, we feel bad for him, we feel that something has been tragically lost. Scorsese has made the story of one of the 20th century’s most peculiar men into something oddly universal. How did he do that?
I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that only Martin Scorsese could make a movie about a billionaire industrialist playboy and have him come off as a shy, awkward, hard-working, underappreciated outsider.
How did he do that? I would say that he did that by strongly identifying with his protagonist. But how does one identify with Howard Hughes?
Well, I have a little meaningless pocket guide that served as my way through the movie.
Howard Hughes loves planes. Martin Scorsese loves film. (This link is underscored in the first half-hour of the film, where Hughes is shown actually making a movie about planes, in fact actually making a movie in a plane.)
Scorsese presents Hughes as an outsider because that’s what he makes movies about. His movies about societies are always about the outsider who can’t quite make it inside that society, who’s always on the edge, looking in the window, not quite able to understand the way things are done. Even his gangster movies have outsider protagonists; Henry Hill in Goodfellas is Irish, Ace in Casino is Jewish. My dimestore-psychology theory is that Scorsese makes movies about outsiders because even though he was an Italian/American living in Little Italy, he was too small and too sickly to ever fit into that world; the outsider’s POV is the only way he understands things.
So Howard Hughes is presented not as a wealthy captain of industry, but as a misfit loner who bucks the system. He’s an outsider in Hollywood (even though his movies are hits and he’s dating every actress in town), an outsider in aviation (even though he owns a major airline and has expensive military contracts), and an outsider in the human condition (because of his mental problems).
Like Scorsese and his movies, Hughes sweats the details with his airplanes. He knows everything about the engineering of his planes and he knows everyone’s job better than they do. He wants the rivets flush because it will make a difference in the way the plane flies. He’s presented with ten different steering wheels and none of them are quite right.
Hughes Aircraft was a stunning success, but Scorsese only shows the failures. There are two scenes of Hughes actually crashing in his own planes. One is harmless and he walks away from it, the other is horrific and he is crippled for life. In real life, these crashes were mere hiccups in the production of those planes, but in the movie we never see either plane again, as if they never went into production.
I get the feeling that Scorsese is equating Hughes’s crashes with his own crashes. The H-1, for instance, is the plane that beat the air-speed record, but crashed in a beet field. That could be a metaphor for Raging Bull, a movie repeatedly voted as one of the 10 best of all time, yet unwatched in its first release. The XF-11, the crash that crippled Hughes, could be King of Comedy, the movie that put Scorsese in the directoral doghouse for a decade. The Spruce Goose, years in the making, the plane that Hughes finally flew to save his reputation (the flight serves as the climax of the movie) could be The Last Temptation of Christ, the movie Scorsese fought to make for years but finally got off the ground.
The OCD stuff, well, I was going to say that it’s analogous to Scorsese’s asthma, but that’s glib. I was also going to say that instead of OCD, Scorsese has his Catholic Guilt, but I don’t see Scorsese as being crippled by anything these days. Maybe it’s his work ethic, the way that his work kept him from having close relationships in the early part of his life (says the guy who just read a book of interviews with him).
Leonardo DiCaprio, who doesn’t seem to look much like Hughes, does a great job of getting across Hughes’s strengths, so when we see him be weak we feel it. Cate Blanchett utterly vanishes in her portrayal of Katherine Hepburn. Man, what a performance. You look at her and look at her, and you know it’s not Katherine Hepburn, in fact it doesn’t even look that much like Katherine Hepburn, but the fact is that, even in the most intimate scenes, you don’t see Cate Blanchette either. There is some kind of actress up there, playing the role of Katherine Hepburn.
I dare not think too much about what this means, but Scorsese’s Jesus shows up half-way through the movie as an oily, fish-faced scandal-monger.
3121
The new Prince album.
On first listen, it sounds like it doesn’t suck.
Sigh of relief. I suppose it’s too much to ask Prince to change my life again, but it’s been too long.
More to the point, it’s an indicator of my current mood that I thought one of the songs was titled “Te Amo Cortizone.”
UPDATE: False alarm. It does suck.
Prince is really gonna give it to you this time. You want it? ‘Cause he’s gonna give it to you. What is he going to give you? Salvation. Jehovah-style salvation.
Let’s just say, Slow Train Coming it’s not.
Beckett update
Articles mentioning Samuel Beckett on the occasion of his 100th birthday.
New York Times: 91
Los Angeles Times: 0
Flightplan
Number two in the “Jodie Foster And Daughter Trapped With Bad Guys In An Enclosed Space” trilogy.
What will be the third? She inexplicably did not do Phone Booth (maybe because there was no part for a daughter).
Panic Train?
Steamer Trunk?
Packing Crate?
Envelope?
Kit update
My 3-year-old daughter Kit put on a tiny pink tutu the other day. She then proceeded to jump around doing martial arts poses.
MOM: What are you doing, Kit?
KIT: I’m gonna be a BALLERINA. ‘Cause they get to PUNCH! And KICK!
MOM: I think you’re thinking of karate, Kit.
KIT: No, I’m going to be a BALLERINA!
(punch, kick)
pestilence update
1. Haven’t seen silverfish in the screening room recently, but it’s usually pretty dark in there.
2. Hung up a bird feeder in my garden a couple of weeks ago, but no birds have shown up. Instead, there is a squirrel so huge it looks like a capybara wearing a fake tail that paws through the birdseed every afternoon around noon. He’s so regular it’s like he’s on a time clock. I can see him hanging out, chatting with his squirrel friends, and then suddenly saying “Oh shit, it’s noon, I’m due over at the Alcott joint.”
3. Hung up a tiny hummingbird feeder, and immediately three hummingbirds started fighting over it. The thing empties out in about three days.
Roy Scheider in Beaks: “We’re gonna need a bigger feeder.”
4. Usual assortment of spiders. Magic Schoolbus says that you’re never more than three feet away from a spider.
UPDATE: Two sparrows attacking the birdseed this afternoon. Birds eating birdseed! And, hummingbird feeder now emptying in less than a day. Hummingbirds too fast to see.
Cape Fear
Back when this movie came out in 1991, I was rehearsing a play with an actor who was a fellow cineaste. I came to rehearsal one afternoon and mentioned that I had just gone to see Cape Fear, and my cineaste friend gave me a look like I had just spent the day at a Three Stooges festival. He felt like Scorsese had not just betrayed his gift, but had made a movie that was boring, silly and unimportant.
Since then, I’ve seen Cape Fear at least ten times and never fail to get more out of it.
Last night I went to see the new remake of Slither. I liked it okay, but then I came home and put on Cape Fear. It’s silly and counterproductive to compare the work of a master operating at the height of his powers with the biggest budget of his career to the first film by a guy who wants nothing more than to gross us out, but Scorsese’s direction in Cape Fear, like Kubrick’s in The Shining, serves as a reminder of how gripping and transcendent genre filmmaking can be. There is barely an ordinary shot in the entire movie. Scorsese charges common shots with jolting electricity. A door closes, a car drives away, a man walks into a room, Scorsese finds ways to make all of these rote pieces of expository action crackle with intensity.
Both Cape Fear and The Shining feature, shall we say, larger-than-life lead performances. Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining is so peculiar and over-the-top, I went back and forth on it for years before accepting it as an integral part of the film. But De Niro in Cape Fear got to me immediately. His Max Cady is a palpable entity, monstrous yet still human. On the surface, with his loud, ugly clothes and ridiculous cigar, he’s nothing but an inbred yahoo. But when you get to know him, he’s got all kinds of hidden resources and powers.
That’s important, because one of the themes of Cape Fear is: who is “better,” the successful family man with the suburban mansion, or the lowlife scumbag rapist/murderer? That sounds like a stupid question, and yet Cape Fear brings it vividly to life. As De Niro slowly but surely gets the better of Nick Nolte and his family, we begin to feel our self-righteousness slip away until we don’t know what’s right or wrong any more, we just know that we don’t want to be raped and murdered.
After De Niro attempts to seduce Juliette Lewis, she defends him to Nolte by saying that he was just “trying to make a connection with me.” That sends Nolte into a rage, shouting “There will never be any connection between you and Max Cady!” Nolte (and the rest of affluent society) has spent his whole life building up walls of protection between himself and people whom he considers “lesser” than him.
Max Cady has spent a lot of time improving himself in prison. He’s lost weight, built up his muscles, learned to read and has ultimately gotten a law degree. So we could say that Sam Bowden “saved” him, gave him the motive to improve his condition. But Max wouldn’t have been in prison in the first place if Bowden hadn’t “done the right thing” by putting him there. And what is he doing, now that his condition is improved? He’s using all his new-found powers to destroy Sam Bowden.
It’s not about how Max brings Sam “down to his level,” it’s about how Sam was always on Max’s level, but had convinced himself otherwise. That’s why the film begins with hair-splitting legal niceties, but ends with two guys hitting each other with rocks on a muddy shore.
I don’t know why this theme fascinates me, but it does. The idea of the “good man” locked in combat with the “bad man” until we don’t know which is which any more. Or the “bad man” wearing the “good man” down until the “good man” isn’t “good” any more. Mamet’s Oleanna has a similar effect: a student calls her teacher a monster, seemingly out of nowhere, and he gets angrier and angrier until he finally becomes the thing he keeps insisting he is not.
Max Cady says at one point that he’s going to force Sam Bowden to make a commitment, just as Sam forced Max to make a commitment by putting him in prison. This line stuck out at me today, because Max isn’t saying that he’s going to kill Sam. He’s saying that Sam is going to kill him. Max is telling Sam that this isn’t going to end until Sam has lost his family and is put in prison. Why will Sam be put in prison? For killing Max Cady. Sam will kill Max because Max will rape and murder Sam’s wife and daughter. In his way, Max is offering himself up as a sacrifice. He’s made it his life’s work to put Sam Bowden in prison, and he’s got every single step in the plan worked out from the very beginning.
One of the reasons the theme of this movie appeals to me is that a friend of mine is currently involved in a lawsuit with a man who, for reasons best understood by himself, has decided to make my friend’s life a living hell. He’s got money and resources and a very large axe to grind, and he’s not going to stop until my friend’s life is ruined. In normal life, I’m sure this man goes about his life, charms his friends and takes care of whatever family he may have, and would never merit more than a passing glance from a passer-by. It’s only when one examines him closely, or is the victim of one of his electronic missives, that one realizes what a dangerous, unstable psychopath the man is. Just as Max Cady is an ordinary, even faintly ridiculous figure on the outside but seethes and roils with hatred, jealousy and rage on the inside, this man uses his intelligence and resources to do nothing but destroy and spread hatred in the world. Like Max Cady, he knows how the law works and how to use it to his advantage. He has an incredible talent for getting under people’s skin and drawing out parts of themselves they would prefer never see.
I guess one could say that lawsuits, like the phone company and the internet, are there to bring people together.
The Color of Money
Long ago, in the mists of time, Some Guy came up with a thing called the “Auteur Theory” of film. The “author” of a film, he said, is the director, that the director cannot help but put a personal stamp on every film he or she makes, regardless of his or her personal connection to the material. This theory insists that, regardless of film being an incredibly collaborrative medium, the director is the sole author of the finished artifact.
This was a radical theory for its time, at least in America. According to Hollywood, the author of a film is whoever found the money to finance the production. That’s why the Oscar for Best Picture usually goes to someone you’ve never heard of.
The Oscar goes to the producer because Hollywood was not built by Auteur Theorists, or even Auteurs. It was built by Show People out to make a buck. The Studio made a movie, not Some Director. The Studio created a brand, beat filmable scripts out of ink-stained wretches, assigned stars to be in them and directors to shoot them. The director is the “author” of a film? That would have certainly been news to Irving Thalberg, to Louis B. Mayer, to freaking David O. Selznik.
Now then:
The Auteur Theory is very useful if your job is film analysis. But the marketplace has its own demands.
Why do people, let’s say Americans, go to see a movie? This is a question that is becoming more and more pertinent in today’s market, where tickets cost $11, popcorn and soda cost $10, gas costs $3, parking costs another $3, and who knows what else your date will ask for. What will induce Americans to leave their homes and go to a movie theater, when excellent entertainment awaits them in every corner of their homes on their computer screens, sattellite TVs, DVD players and X-Boxes?
One answer to that is Spectacle. Give an audience something in the movie theater that they cannot see at home. Give them More. Big pictures, broad themes, lots of Stuff, sophisticated special effects, grandiose and complex action sequences, famous faces, big drama, emotional punch.
By this reasoning, Peter Jackson’s King Kong should have been the biggest hit in the history of time. But it wasn’t. Why not?
Well, I think the Auteur Theory has finally caught up with mainstream American audiences. I think that what people want, increasingly, from a film is a personal vision, an authorial voice, if you will. I think that as films become less and less about “going out to the movies” and more like Something You Own, like a book, people will gravitate more towards filmmakers of strong personal vision and will become less interested in Studio Programmers, movies that are made to fill a production pipeline, not because anybody actually feels passion about any of them. I go into people’s houses (I’m not a burglar, they invite me) and what I see are things like an entire shelf of films by Tim Burton or David Lynch or Stanley Kubrick.
There was a great story in The Onion a few years ago, the thrust of which was that a potential girlfriend turned into a one-night stand after she woke up in a guy’s house in the morning and saw his DVD collection. The joke was not that his collection consisted of animal torture videos or anything; the joke was that his collection consisted solely of movies like Joe Somebody and Hart’s War and The 6th Day, corporate place-fillers with no theme or personal point of view. The girl in question says “I mean, I can’t believe I actually went to bed with someone who one day walked into a video store and said “Hello, I’d like to purchase a copy of The Legend of Bagger Vance.”
Point is, the Movie Business is rapidly becoming the DVD Business. And if you Buy a movie the way an earlier generation Bought books, movies by voices you love, trust and admire, voices that intrigue, seduce and enthrall you will be the movies you buy.
Anyway, enough of that.
The Color of Money is one of Martin Scorsese’s least personal, least discussed and most underrated movies. At the time it came out, I didn’t even see it in the theater because it had the whiff of “a job” about it. When I first saw it on video, probably in 1991, it still didn’t do that much for me because it wasn’t very clearly “about” Scorsese, who very much interests me as an Auteur. It seemed very much a Star Vehicle for Paul Newman. You can tell when a movie is a Star Vehicle when a supporting role is played by the hottest movie star in the world, in this case the young Tom Cruise, who had just come off Top Gun.
One of the pleasures of the movie is watching Cruise, easily the most intensely focused, controlled actor alive, play someone who is out of control, unfocused and green. Usually in the Tom Cruise Movie, Tom plays the Cocky Young _____ Who Takes A Fall and Becomes a Better _____. In this movie, he’s a pool hustler, so he plays a Cocky Young Pool Hustler, but because he’s in a supporting role, we miss the scene where he Takes A Fall and move on to the part where he Becomes A Better Pool Hustler, but it turns out, in the end, that That Isn’t Good Enough. Because, well, because it’s Not His Movie.
The DVD of The Color of Money, I’d like to note, has a substantially better transfer than my old DVD of Goodfellas. I know Goodfellas has been remastered recently, but I cannot otherwise account for this discrepancy.
The Color of Money deals with Pool Sharks, which are a type of con man, which automatically puts this movie into Mamet-land, bars and pool halls and hotel rooms, where men “play” each other and everyone has a hidden agenda. And there are a number of reveals and reversals in the movie that are certainly worthy of Mamet. But the script, by Richard Price, has a depth and subtlety of character that Mamet’s screenplays don’t really seem interested in, along with a corresponding charity toward both his characters and his audience. Mamet often seems mainly interested in tricking the audience; he’s more witholding, colder, more cynical. (The comparison isn’t that unfair. Both Mamet and Price wrote excellent comeback vehicles for Paul Newman [Mamet was nominated for an Oscar for The Verdict.] For some reason, I believe Richard Price’s climactic scene of redemption and Mamet’s seems forced to me.)
The power struggle between Newman and Cruise (and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) is palpable and engaging without ever being underlined and overstated. The thrust of Newman’s character arc is that he goes from saying that excellence is good for taking people’s money from them to saying that excellence has a value in and of itself. In Mamet’s version, it would turn out that Newman, we learn, was playing Cruise all along, or vice versa, whichever would make us feel more cynical. Well, that’s life.
On a technical end, I don’t know if anyone has counted, but a good alternate title for the picture could be 101 Exciting Ways to Shoot a Billiard Ball.
A young man named Forrest Whittaker shows up as a rival hustler, and Bill Cobbs will meet up with Newman in a few years, playing the Magical Negro in The Hudsucker Proxy.
SPOILER ALERT: The Color of Money, we finally learn in a surprise twist, is “green.”