The Game, Panic Room
A Fincher double feature!
David Fincher brings weight, substance and excitement to outlandish concepts and genre exercises through superb photography and astonishing production values. Both of these films are so well shot and appointed they take the breath away.
I wish David Fincher would make more movies. I wish David Fincher would shoot something I wrote. Hint hint.
Fincher has done so well with his smooth, polished, glossy entertainments, I can’t wait to see what he does with a “real drama” someday.
When I was a young man, I hated Michael Douglas. I didn’t like his hair, I didn’t like his chin, I didn’t like his young, self-righteous, more-liberal-than-thou attitude. Then, in 1987, he delivered back-to-back amazing performances as conflicted, guilty, deplorable jerks in Fatal Attraction and Wall Street, and suddenly I was a huge fan. I’ve seen everything he’s done since. I enjoyed some, like A Perfect Murder, and didn’t enjoy others, like Disclosure, but he’s never been less than interesting and enjoyable ever since. Come to think of it, I can’t think of another actor that does what Michael Douglas does these days, playing multifaceted, sometimes unpleasant middle-aged men, and somehow finding decent scripts that feature lead roles for him.
The Game is so absurdly far-fetched in concept and outlandish in its execution that it’s flatly ridiculous, and yet I’ve seen the movie three times and will probably watch it again before my time here on earth is up, partly to watch the performances, partly to study Fincher’s seamless direction, partly to luxuriate in the sumptuous production design.
Panic Room is as contained as The Game is expansive, both in concept and in physicality. Almost a filmed play, it would make a kickass double feature with Woody Allen’s September, but it shares more in common with an old chestnut like Wait Until Dark. And for once, one can mention an Audrey Hepburn movie without apology, for in Panic Room we have an actress more than able to stand up in comparison.
Check out the special effects in Panic Room. It’s not just the flashy shots of the camera floating through the floorboards and zooming through the keyholes. All through the picture, in shot after shot, special effects are used to emphasize and delineate, to clarify and set in relief. A door opens, a phone slides under a bed, a flashlight turns on, the most common of shots, shots that might even be shot by a second unit on most pictures, are here given full CGI treatment, weaving the effects into so many shots that you don’t see them after a while. It’s a whole new approach to effects, using them to heighten and deepen what might otherwise be a claustrophobic chamber-piece.
Jodie Foster, I know, I’ve applauded before. But she’s completely convincing in this part and quite staggeringly well-photographed. Whoever did her hair and makeup in this picture should have been nominated for an Oscar. Seeing her with her teenage daughter, it made me wish that she had done the remake of Freaky Friday instead of Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s not too late!
Most of the acting in the movie is done on a completely believable, naturalistic plane, but then there are a handful of performances that are broader and seem somehow stagebound, as if this really was a filmed play. Both Ann Magnuson and Ian Buchannan as a pair of realtors come off as arch and stylized, and Jared Leto’s performance occasionally makes it seem like he’s doing a very good impression of John C. McGinley. There are plenty of scenes where Forest Whitaker stands there with his great, sad face and stares at Leto as he shouts and waves his arms, and I found myself thinking “I know, I know, I’m with you.”
The direction is done with much grace, elegance and poise, but the script sets a very high bar for itself and occasionally misses the jump.
The bar the script sets is: let’s make a movie, a suspense thriller, a “woman in jeopardy” picture (or “womjep”) about a woman trapped in a tiny room, and see if we can pull that off.
The problem is, you get the woman and her daughter into the room on page 20, and then what happens? The woman and the daughter are in the room and the bad men want very badly to get into the room. The bad men try something and the woman foils them. Then the woman tries something and the bad men foil her. Then the woman goes out of the room to fetch her phone. Then one of the men gets killed by another one of the men. And after each of these events, the central conceit returns to the status quo; the woman is in the room and the bad men want to get in. The situation doesn’t allow for an escalation of tension.
The individual sections of the movie are well written and executed and the film had no trouble sustaining my interest on a second viewing, but the writer (David Koepp) has literally written himself into a box. He has to pull out the old “diabetic kid” routine to get the movie out of its second act and into its third, where the situation is reversed and the bad men are in the room and the woman wants very badly to get in.
Anyway, small complaint for a movie as inventive and elegant as this.
David Koepp, I should probably mention, is something of a touchstone in my household. I use his name all the time, usually in the sentence “I wonder if David Koepp has to do this?” when a studio wants me to pay my own hotel bill, or submit multiple free treatments, or perform multiple pitches over a period of months before telling me that they don’t actually own the rights to a project.
The Last Temptation of Christ
By total coincidence, my Palm Sunday choice of entertainment is Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film of The Last Temptation of Christ.
I was in the audience opening night at the Ziegfeld in New York. To get into the theater, you had to walk past Christian fundamentalist protestors, waving signs and shouting epithets.
The movie, back then, seemed heartfelt but a little weird. It was weird to be a Downtown New York hipster and see Willem Dafoe playing Jesus. It was weird to hear Judas talk with a tough-guy Brooklyn accent behind his big putty nose, see fellow Downtown hipster John Lurie play an apostle, see Harry Dean Stanton play Paul. It was weird to see Mary Magdelene naked, having sex, it was weird to hear stories you’ve memorized in Jacobean English be translated into contemporary American English. It seemed a little arch, a little self-conscious, a little too 80s. It seemed a little long, a little confusing, occasionally obvious, occasionally very very strange.
Repeated viewings takes all the weirdness away, turns them into mere stylistic choices. Bold choices, but secondary to the script and the story, as it should be, as it must be. Now the movie seems like a very important, deeply moving human drama about the divine in all of us. In fact, I’ll go further than that; if this movie had been around when I was a kid, I might actually believe in the story of Jesus now. Scorsese’s Jesus is approachable, human, confused, upset, doubtful and given to temptation. Hey, that’s me! But, “Owl Creek Bridge”-like, he wakes up from his dream and presses on, knows that the divine is possible when you realize that life isn’t the most important thing in the world.
I am also struck by the similarities between Jesus and another Willem Dafoe character, Norman Osborne.
Both characters hear voices. Jesus hears God, Norman hears the Green Goblin.
Both come with signiture identifying props. Jesus has a cross and nails, Norman has a glider and hand grenades.
Jesus is a simple carpenter who becomes a powerful savior, Norman is a simple arms manufacturer who becomes a powerful villain.
Jesus is betrayed by Judas and killed by the Romans, Norman is betrayed by the board of Oscorp and is killed by Spider-Man.
Both Jesus and Norman are scorned and mocked as crazy people.
Both Jesus and Norman are buff and ripped.
Both of their stories were written by great Jewish writers.
Norman is tempted by a mask, Jesus is tempted by Satan, who wears many masks.
Jesus has a scene with David Bowie, Norman has a scene with Macy Gray.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
Celebrity
One of Woody Allen’s most frustrating films. A convincing and detailed love story, derailed by a handful of bizarre missteps and a hopelessly outdated view of popular culture.
1. Kenneth Branagh’s performance, on first viewing, is nothing but an unapologetic impression of Woody, and is hugely distracting for that reason. Only in later viewings can one appreciate it for what it is, a VERY GOOD impression of Woody. He’s got it all down, the stammerings, the body language, the gestures. That he manages to get any human feeling across in the midst of this highly detailed stunt is an accomplishment all by itself.
There is another performance that comes to mind in this regard, Clint Eastwood does a feature-length impression of John Huston in White Hunter, Black Heart. Again, it fascinates partly because Eastwood is not known for his facility with impressions, and partly because he manages to pull it off. Eastwood, a movie star of the highest magnitude, only occasionally attempts to play an actual role, but he’s impressive in this and in another picture of the era, Heartbreak Ridge.
2. The film is lovingly shot and even more lovingly produced. Not many people will recall that, as the ’90s drew to a close, Woody Allen shocked New Yorkers by declaring that his budgets were going to be drastically reduced and that even things like free coffee for the crew would be eliminated. Celebrity was the first film in his new austerity program, but instead looks like one of the most lavishly produced films of his career, packed with name actors in bit parts, dozens of locations, sophisticated camerawork involving complicated lighting schemes.
INSIDER GOSSIP: the great Sven Nykvist, who shot 3 Allen movies prior to this one, once complained to me that he disliked working with Woody Allen because his camera setups were dull and unimaginative. He must have been happier with Celebrity, where the camera rarely stops moving and there is a lot of emphasis on foreground and background, faces moving in and out of frame and many complicated crowd scenes.
3. Among the actors who flit in and out of the movie are JK Simmons, Dylan Baker, Allison Janney, Adam Grenier, Sam Rockwell, Jeffrey Wright, Mark Addy and no fewer than 3 future Sopranos.
The cast is mostly wonderful and occasionally brilliant. Leonardo DiCaprio shows up halfway through the movie and practically burns a hole in the screen.
4. Well-observed, witty and erudite scenes of show-business lives occasionally butt straight up against broad, farcical physical comedy. The strangest of these scenes involves Bebe Neuwirth choking on a piece of banana.
5. As I say, there’s a decent love story somewhere in here. Removing all the references to our wicked culture of celebrity, we have Kenneth Branagh, who is turning middle aged and feels like he hasn’t lived yet. So he breaks up with his dowdy, repressed wife (Judy Davis, teetering on the edge of self-parody) and pursues a number of women. He has meaningless sex with a movie star, pursues and fails to catch a fashion model, lands a beautiful, smart, talented book editor, then throws that relationship away in order to get involved with a shallow, insipid young actress. Meanwhile, Judy Davis has a nervous breakdown, meets a TV producer, goes to work on his show, ends up becoming an on-air personality, gives up worrying about meaningful things, and becomes happy and fulfilled.
Right there is an interesting, heartfelt, well-written contemporary love story (well, perhaps not “contemporary;” Branagh, who’s almost exactly my age, has the attitudes of a man almost twice his age, and does not own a computer, allowing for a lame “only copy of my manuscript” plot point). Almost a remake of Manhattan in this regard, the luminous black-and-white photography making the connection even clearer.
6. The problem is, the love story is freighted with an “important,” “scathing” critique of our current culture of celebrity which, news flash, Woody Allen finds wanting.
This is the man who, in Annie Hall, equated Bob Dylan with Alice Cooper and the Maharishi, all in one scene. This is a man who, although born the same year as Elvis Presley, seems to listen only to music made before he was born, who rolled his eyes at punk rock (in 1986, on time for him) in Hannah and Her Sisters (SILLY PERSON: Don’t you just love songs about extraterrestrials? WOODY: Not when they’re sung by extraterrestrials!). His attitude seems closer to that of someone like Steve Allen, who always maintained that Elvis Presley was a no-talent hack dancing at the pleasure of his money-raking puppet-masters.
There is no accounting for taste. I don’t care for rap music, but I wouldn’t write a movie about it where I complained about it being a clattering racket made by foul-mouthed idiots. And the parts of Celebrity that deal with the general culture and steer clear of individual cases are brilliantly brought to life and work just fine. But when he tsks and sneers at Joey Buttafuoco and suggests that skinheads and the obese are not worth celebration, it makes the whole movie seem stale and remote, when in fact it is one of his most vibrant and lived-in pictures.
I wonder, who does he think will be going to see this movie? Does he think there is an audience out there who will say “Wow, I guess he’s right, now that I think of it, our culture DOES tear down the worthy and celebrate the worthless!” If such a person existed, why would they be going to see a black-and-white Woody Allen movie? No, in these moments he’s patting himself on the back and inviting us to sneer along with him.
Sure, there’s a lot of garbage in our culture. But the finer arts have always appealed to a more limited audience. And a lot of it will be forgotten and the good products of this exact same culture will live on, just like always, which will make those moments of Celebrity all the more baffling to future audiences.
Kids say the darndest things
A conversation I had today with my four-year-old son:
SAM: Dad? How did God make everything, and make people, and make them talk?
DAD: Um, well, that’s a good question. And you know, a lot of people spend their whole lives thinking about that and some of them never come up with a good answer.
SAM: But how did he do it?
DAD: Well, the story goes, a long time ago, there wasn’t anything, and God decided there should be things, and he just made them out of nothing.
SAM: But how did he do that?
DAD: I guess you could say he’s magic.
SAM: Huh. And where does he live?
DAD: Where does he live?
SAM: Yeah, like in a house, or where?
DAD: Well, no one knows where God lives. Some people say he’s everywhere. In the rocks, in the trees, in the air.
SAM: Can he fly?
DAD: They say that God can do anything, sweetie.
SAM: What does he look like?
DAD: That’s another very good question.
SAM: You know what I think he looks like?
DAD: I would love to know what you think God looks like.
SAM: Well, you know that guy from Star Wars? [Sam has never seen Star Wars; he has only seen the action figures]
DAD: Which one?
SAM: He’s got a round head? And like a robe? And, like, light-brown skin?
DAD: What?
SAM: Yeah, like a round head, and a robe, and like, dark, light-brown skin.
DAD: Is he a guy or a robot?
SAM: He’s a guy.
DAD: Um [does a quick catalogue in his head of Star Wars action figures] — you mean Mace Windu?
SAM: That’s the guy.
So, there you are. From the mouths of babes. Or at least pre-schoolers. God looks like Samuel L. Jackson.
Faites Sauter La Banque!, Rrrrrrr!
Two French comedies with exclamation points in their titles.
Faites Sauter La Banque!, or Let’s Break the Bank!, is a Louis de Funes vehicle from 1963. I had been promised (warned?) that de Funes was “The French Jerry Lewis” (whatever THAT means), so I was expecting something quite broad, if not unwatchably garish and shrill.
Luckily, de Funes is nothing like that. Born in 1914, he made over 100 movies in France. In Banque! he comes off not so much like Jerry Lewis but Jackie Gleason. He doesn’t have Gleason’s weight or immense presence (he is, in fact, rather slight and unassuming in appearance, more Joe Pesci than Jackie Gleason), but he plays a similar character: the long suffering, easily frustrated, put-upon paterfamilias, who’s just trying to keep his head above water and will resort to crazy schemes to do so.
American audiences will recognize this character not just from Gleason but Fred Flintstone (I know, I know), Fred’s futuristic cousin George Jetson, Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons, and Dagwood Bumstead (all of which more or less overlap in time; what was going on in world culture that these put-upon dads all showed up at the same time?)
The crazy scheme this time around is: de Funes has been defrauded of his life savings by the unscrupulous banker whose bank is across the street from de Funes’s sporting-goods shop. de Funes hatches a harebrained scheme to tunnel under his store and into the bank vault, and enlists the aid of his foggy, scatterbrained family to complete the task.
Complications ensue, as they inevitably must.
It’s fleet, it’s funny, it’s only a little dated, it has no ending, and it zips by in an hour and twenty-three minutes.
de Funes’s comedy is only a wee bit broad, based in stage performance but not distractingly so, very quick and very detailed.
Woody Allen fans will note that Allen lifted the basic concept and an entire scene from Faites Sauter La Banque! for use in Small Time Crooks, where the bank robbers hit a water main, then rush upstairs to the store to get repairing supplies and find the last person who they want to know about the tunnel. Even a couple of lines of dialogue made it into Allen’s film.
Rrrrrrr! is a much later comedy (2004) written and directed by Alain Chabat, who has made a name for himself in France as a creator of solidly, unapologetically commercial comedies.
Rrrrrrr! is what I would call a “prehistoric procedural,” the story of the world’s first homicide investigation, in fact the story of the world’s first homicide. There is serial killer loose in caveman days, and a pair of slackers are assigned the task of finding the culprit.
The movie is very funny, succeeding most when it sends up conventions of policiers (“don’t worry, they can’t see you through this two-way rock” says one of the detectives to a wary witness). The humor is rather Pythonesque, and Americans can be assured that this is a genuine cultural artifact by the presence of Gerard Depardieu and Jean Rochefort in supporting roles.
Sight gags and linguistic jokes abound. Everyone in the tribe is named Pierre (or “Stan” in the English translation), due apparently to a lack of imagination on the part of the tribal chieftain. All animals in the movie have mammoth-like tusks, including ducks, chickens and frogs. A babysitter is paid “half a boarmoth” for watching the kids.
The murderer is revealed early on. The characters, and indeed the movie, are in no hurry. There is no mystery to speak of, and the stakes remain low throughout the movie, the better for the gags to flow.
I have no idea if either of these movies are available in any form in the US.
The Gambler
James Caan is a self-destructive degenerate gambler in Karel Reisz’s film of James Toback’s script.
This would make a good double feature with California Split, if only to demonstrate what Approach does to a piece of subject matter. As California Split is observational and behavioral, allowing us to watch the characters and draw our own conclusions, The Gambler boldly states its themes (Caan plays a college professor and the story periodically slams to a halt so that he can lecture his students on the film’s themes of Will and Risk and Fear and so forth).
As California Split seems very “slice of life,” with characters caught in everyday, perfectly ordinary scenes, The Gambler self-conciously packs in references to Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Mahler, Beckett (Caan, who is “in a hole” as a gambler, has a first edition of Beckett’s Happy Days on his desk, a play where the protagonist sinks into a literal hole)
A number of the cast members later showed up in Goodfellas, including Paul Sorvino, Frank Vincent and Frank Sivero. Now they play old gangsters, but once upon a time they played young gangsters. 70s Usual Suspects Burt Young, Vic Tayback and M. Emmett Walsh show up, as does a skinny young actor named James Woods, playing, what else, a yuppie bank clerk.
California Split
SPOILER ALERT
American cinema doesn’t get any more behavioral than Robert Altman. This is storytelling of a very high order. Even though the film is tightly plotted, it feels like it has no plot at all. There are very few scenes that even feel like they’re scripted; it feels more improvised. Not only is the dialogue loose, a good deal of it is completely meaningless. Especially Elliott Gould’s character, who, like Shakespeare’s Gratiano, talks and talks all the time and never says anything.
The story, briefly: George Segal is a gambler on a losing streak, and he meets up with Elliott Gould, who doesn’t seem to attach much importance to winning or losing. He doesn’t see an “end game” to gambling, he just likes to gamble. But George, the second act announces, is in debt to a guy named Sparky, and has to come up with some money. George is out of money, but Elliott always seems to have enough to get by, and the two of them go to Reno and, against all odds, win over eighty thousand dollars.
Gambling, it seems to me, is a form of prayer. You put your money down, and you hope that God favors you. If you win, then your faith is rewarded. If you lose, then God is angry with you for some reason.
When you study the statistics, when you study the Racing Form, when you “bet with your head,” you’re saying that you’re not going to place your faith in anything unless you’re sure it’s a sure thing, which is another way of saying that you have no faith at all.
I think maybe that’s why cheating is so reviled, because the cheater has no faith. The cheater believes that one can be redeemed without faith.
So there’s George, and he’s on his cold streak, and he’s down on his luck, and we sympathise. Why? He’s a degenerate and a loser, why do we like him? Because we feel like we’re losers too, we feel like we’ve been shut out of some better life.
And George sells his car and his typewriter and his radio and tape recorder and takes all his money and all of Elliott’s money (which he’s gotten by hustling basketball and mugging a guy in a bathroom) and they head to Reno. And once the stakes are raised, Elliott sees everything as an omen. The snow is an omen, the carpeting is an omen, the decor is an omen. This is faith of a paranoid kind, if the carpeting is a sign that you’re blessed.
And we want George to win, because we want to win too. We place our faith in George, he’s going to win for us. He’s going to be saved, and we’re going to be saved along with him.
Think of this: all through the movie, we watch George and Elliott bet on all manner of things: cards, horses, boxers, roulette, dice. You bet on a horse, the horse doesn’t even know what money is. Cards don’t care what’s printed on them, dice don’t care how they fall. But in the audience, we’re betting on George, for the exact same irrational reason that Elliott bets on anything; he has a feeling. And if George wins, then our faith is rewarded. If he loses, then there is no God. We become complicit in the theme and message of the movie.
And guess what happens: George wins, BUT.
But after he wins, there’s a scene at a bar, just George and Elliott. And George is miserable, and Elliott is very very happy, and they have this exchange:
Elliott: You always take a win this hard?
George: There was no special feeling. I only said there was.
Elliott: I know. It doesn’t matter. We made a lot of money.
So George placed his faith, and his faith was rewarded, but in his moment of vindication, he’s realized that the dice are not God, they’re only objects, their numbers have no meaning. It took this incredible winning streak for him to finally realize that there is no vindication in winning a gamble.
Not to drag Mamet into this, but there’s a scene in his TV movie Lansky where Meyer Lansky (played by Richard Dreyfuss) goes to his gangster friends to get some money to build a hotel in Las Vegas. Gambling has been going on in Vegas for some time, but only marginally, in gas stations and bus stations and such. And Lansky holds up a sign he took off the wall of a gas station, one that was hanging over a one-armed bandit: “Higher pay means longer play.” “Gentlemen,” he says (I’m paraphrasing) “This sign is telling you that we will take all your money. What it promises is that it will take us longer to do it than others.” Mamet’s point is that there is something pleasurable and exciting about gambling itself, even in the act of losing, that people can’t get enough of, that the point of gambling isn’t winning or losing, but rather the thrill of betting itself.
After the bit about the “special feeling,” Elliott says that they have enough money to visit every track in the world, he says they have enough money to live at the track for fifty years. Because for him, there is no end to the game. Life is the game. You don’t quit the game; what else is there?
So George looks like he doesn’t like the sound of that idea, and there’s the following:
Elliott: So what do you want to do now?
George: (pause) I’m going to go home.
Elliott: Oh yeah? Where do you live?
And what he’s saying is, this is where you live, in the casino, at the dice table, at the card table, at the track. And we’re worried that he might be right.
Mr. Urbaniak will note that California Split features a three-second appearance by his Fay Grim co-star Jeff Goldblum.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
A good overview of the Enron story, its main players and their basic dramas.
Only in passing does it place the Enron phenomenon in its historical context, but there’s only so much time. For an overview of why Enron happened in the first place, I recommend The Corporation.
The key to a thing like Enron is the Milgrim experiment, which the film discusses at length. For those unfamiliar, Milgrim had one guy pose as a scientist and another guy pose as a test subject, and then asked normal people to come in and participate in some “scientific research.” He said that he wanted to learn if electrical shocks would help improve memory.
This was all a Mametesque put-on. There was no experiment, at least not involving electrical shocks.
The “scientist” was in the room with the normal person, and the “test subject” was in another room, unseen. The “scientist” would tell the normal person to increase the power of the electric shocks, the normal person would push a button and the “test subject” would scream in agony as the “shocks” got progressively worse and worse. The “experiment” would continue until the “test subject” was either dead or the normal person said that he wouldn’t push the button any more.
What Milgrim found was that over half of the normal people would gladly, even enthusiastically, kill the “test subject” just as long as the order to do so came from a legitimate enough authority figure.
A simple form of this can be found in, say, a restaurant, where you get bad service from a surly waiter. Why is the waiter angry? Probably because he’s treated badly by the manager, who is being squeezed by the owner to cut corners and maximize profits.
So the Enron story is about a handful of deeply unethical, conscience-free, amoral monsters who set the agenda for one of the largest corporations in history. They told their employees, by example and by direct order, that anything they did to make money for the corporation was not only good, but would be rewarded. And so the employees, and everyone working with the corporation, including banks and contractors and lawyers and accountants, enthusiastically participated.
Eventually, “anything” came to include a rainbow of fraud, theft, destruction and death.
Nazi Germany, same thing.
And the current administration.
And Hollywood.
Maverick
You know, I wonder why David Mamet hasn’t written a movie about poker yet, it being so popular with the young’uns these days.
Maverick starts at the protagonist’s Second-Act Low Point. He has a noose around his neck with the rope around a tree branch, atop his horse, with a burlap sack full of snakes at his feet.
The bad guys could have just shot him, but that’s the way it goes. They could have just taken out one of their guns and shot him and left him in the desert and stolen his horse. Hell, they could have just stolen his horse, that would have been enough. But no, they tie him to a tree branch, with his horse, and throw a bag of snakes at his feet. That means that the bag of snakes was part of their plan to begin with. Yes, they left town and rode out into the desert with a bag of snakes in order to put Maverick in this life-threatening position, and then they rode away.
BAD GUY 1: Okay guys, we got to stop Maverick from getting to the big card game. There’s a half a million dollars at stake, and that’s a lot of money, so it is absolutely essential that he not get to the big card game. Understand me? Okay. Here’s the plan: we capture him, hit him on the head, put a noose around his neck, put him back on his horse, find a tree in the middle of nowhere, wake him up, throw the bag of snakes on the ground, and ride away. It’s foolproof.
BAD GUY 2: Why don’t we just shoot him?
BAD GUY 1: Who asked you?
BAD GUY 3: Where do we get a bag of snakes?
BAD GUY 1: Snakes R Us, they’re having a three-for-the-price-of-two sale.
Anyway, Mel Gibson, as Maverick, is there tied to a tree, inches away from certain death. He looks up at heaven and prays to God, saying that if God will get him out of this situation, he will do anything — anything — to make it up to him.
SPOILER ALERT: Maverick makes it out of the dire situation and goes on to the big card game.
I can’t watch this scene without thinking that what is going through Mel Gibson’s head is: “Dear God, if you get me out of this grinning, happy-go-lucky movie star life of mine, I will never forget it and I will do anything — anything — to make it up to you.”
Religion, and its cousin Belief, weaves through Maverick. There are a handful of direct references to Jesus and God; Mel rides into town on an ass, and mid-way through the movie, there’s a fifteen-minute set piece where he goes out of his way to recover the money stolen from a group of women trying to set up a mission, even though they reveal themselves to be chisling, dishonest and hypocritical.
But is Maverick really about a man’s relationship to God? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, God comes through for Maverick when he needs him (and vice versa, I suppose), but on the other hand, one of the last lines of the movie is something like “There is no more deeply moving religious experience than cheating a cheater,” which, the last time I checked, does not come from the New Testament.
That line is followed by a conversation about a trick that Maverick pulls off at the climax of the movie. In this scene, Mel has 4/5 of a royal flush and is lacking only the Ace. He places his belief in the card, and lo, it is so; the Ace of spades turns up and the day, and Mel, is saved.
So, right after the joshing “religious experience” line, James Garner says to Mel something like “Hey, how did you pull off that Ace of Spades trick?” and Mel says, hardly believing it himself, “Magic.” Magic, of course, being the secular word for God.
There is a phrase that courses through Maverick (screeplay by the great William Goldman): “Just Teasing.” And in a way, the whole movie is Just Teasing. When Mel gets beaten up, it’s Just Teasing, and when he beats someone up, well, that’s Just Teasing too. When Mel acts the fool, that’s Just Teasing and when he steps up and defends someone’s life, that’s Just Teasing too. When someone says they’ll give you the money they owe you, they’re Just Teasing, and when they finally give it to you, that’s Just Teasing too. When a woman kisses you, she’s Just Teasing, and when you kiss her back, that’s Just Teasing too. Even an Indian attack is Just Teasing. Everything in the movie, it seems, is Just Teasing, except that magic Ace of Spades. That, the movie insists, is real.
If the magic Ace of Spades is the pole star for Maverick, money is the only thing that anyone cares about or respects in the young nation that Maverick journeys through. It solves problems, binds wounds, brings lovers together, builds missions, and turns the conquest of Indian lands into a farcical charade.
And I suppose that’s true of America, that all anyone cares about is money, and I suppose that money has turned the Indian’s suffering into a farcical charade.
Now, Maverick is a comedy, so let’s cut it some slack. For the Indian, the one with lines anyway, they got Graham Greene, a real live Indian, to lampoon the part he played in Dances With Wolves, and his performance is so fluid and reflexive that it reminded me of the Indians on F-Troop. So if the movie’s view of the Old West is okay with Graham Greene, I guess it’s okay with me too.
(How reflexive is Maverick? He actually refers to The Old West as “The Old West” as in: “News travels fast in The Old West,” as if people in The Old West actually referred to it as The Old West. So yes, the movie’s opinion of American History is Just Teasing.)
And while we’re at it, how about that Jodie Foster. She should do more comedy. She’s very funny in this, and she’s very funny in Inside Man too. She keeps pace great with Mel. In fact Mel, I would say, as far as big deal movie stars go, is quite generous and game to share the screen with his co-stars. And he’s hired a cast designed to remind astute audience members of great films from times gone by, and I give him (or whoever is responsible) credit for that.
But we were talking about that magic Ace of Spades. Maverick (the movie) kids about everything, everything but that. That Really Happened.
So, Maverick Believes in the Magic Ace of Spades, and even though he seems to be Just Teasing about God throughout the movie, there is, nonetheless, that miracle that allows him to win the day.
Now then, “winning the day” in Hollywood terms means that you walk off with a great deal of money. So now where are we?
I never saw The Passion of the Christ, but it seems to me that Mel pulled off his own version of Maverick here. He made a movie about Jesus, according to his lights, in Aramaic, which no one asked him to do, and he financed it with his own money. That is what folks in Hollywood would call a “fool’s gamble.” You only spend your own money on something if you’re an idiot. Right?
At the beginning of Maverick, Mel walks into a saloon and sits down at a poker table and proceeds to lose for an hour, before pulling out the stops and cleaning everyone’s clocks (whew! mixed metaphor!). I think he did something similar with Passion. He said that he would make it himself, spend his own money, and not care whether he made it back, that to make this movie was an exercise in devotion to his God. And everybody laughed and said “That Mel, he’s crazy,” forgetting that, in every movie Mel Gibson has ever made, THAT’S WHAT HE DOES. He does something ABSOLUTELY CRAZY and thus WINS.
When you think about it, it’s an incredible triumph. And, like Maverick, his act of devotion did what? Allowed him to ride off into the sunset with untold wealth.
Is this a great country or what?
Spartan
Purchased for $3.99 at Second Spin, Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica. This price made even the clerk do a double-take.
Mamet’s smoothest, most sophisticated piece of film direction, this one feels more like a “real movie” than any of his others.
Val Kilmer is swell in the lead, William H. Macy is fine as the guy smoking the cigarette, but Ed O’Neill is a revelation as the authority guy in the big suit.
When this movie came out, some snorted with derision at the political stance of the picture, which includes the observation that the president would rather kill innocent people and sell his own daughter into slavery than risk losing an election. At this point of our national nightmare, that kind of news item would be noted on page A17.
The photography is silky smooth and seductive, and the production design is the best of Mamet’s films. You get the idea that he’s really starting to get the hang of this art form.
SPOILER ALERT:
There are a number of plot contrivances that do not detract from the overall pleasure of the experience. They are:
1. The Girl has a logo, a little emoticon [ %-) ] (so, Mr. “I only write on a portable Smith-Corona in a cabin heated with a wood fire” Mamet is familiar with the computer, after all!). This emoticon (or “device”) becomes a key plot point, as it shows up in the windows of both places where the girl is held against her will.
Derek Luke (Val’s Little Pal #1) “sees the sign” in the window and thus we know that the girl is not dead. Okay then, good enough.
But wait! Derek also found her earring at the house, so why did we need the sign?
My question: why did the girl put her logo in the window of her captor’s house? The only thing I can think of is that she was hoping that the Delta Force guys would see it and thus know that she’s in the house, without her captors knowing.
But why would she know that the Delta Force guys are coming? And if she knows they’re coming, why would she need to put the sign in the window? What would it matter? And then she does it at the second place in Dubai too, even though she knows by now that no one is coming after her. Why?
2. The Shootout At the Airport. At the end of the movie, Val Kilmer finds that he’s been followed by Bill Macy and his team of commandos. Bill and his team are there to kill Val and the girl, to protect the president.
There’s a shootout in a hangar, and much posing with guns and ducking in shadows.
Why are there no people working in the airport? It seems like you can have a shootout any old place these days.
But wait, there’s more.
During the shootout, a plane happens along. Who is it? Why, it’s a SWEDISH NEWS TEAM, led by a tall, gorgeous blond of course. Aren’t they all? And they capture the whole shootout on tape and eventually get The Girl onto the plane and out of the country. They save the day.
Why was there no Swedish News Team around when someone backed out of their driveway and rammed my car? It came down to my word against his, and he didn’t have any insurance. I sure could’ve used a Swedish News Team that day.
Why is a Swedish News Team in Dubai that day anyway? What Swedish News Team is so well-funded that they’re sending private jets to Dubai with an anchor and a camera crew? You would think a stringer in a hotel would be enough for the Swedes, but no, apparently there is an unquenchable thirst in Sweden for news from the United Arab Emirates, and their hugely well-funded News Teams jet from country to country, scouring the streets for any tidbit of news they can find.
SWEDISH CAMERAMAN: Where are we going?
ANCHOR: Today we are in Dubai, tomorrow Oman.
SC: What’s happening there?
A: Doesn’t matter. We’ve GOTTA GET THAT NEWS.
SC: Is that the thing?
A: That is the thing.
SC: Well ain’t that a kick in the head.
A: It is indeed.
I guess, because they’re Swedish, they’re guaranteed to be neutral on the subject of the president’s daughter.
Speaking of which, because they’re Swedish, they also get their plane off the ground on time, even when there are ARMED COMMANDOS HAVING A SHOOTOUT IN THE HANGAR NEXT TO THEM. This goes back to the “why are there no people working at the airport?” question. The last time I was on a plane and a shootout broke out among a bunch of commandos on the runway next to my plane, we were delayed quite a long time, let me tell you. But I guess these things happen every day in airports in Dubai.
PILOT: Excuse me, tower, but there is a shootout going on in hangar one-niner.
TOWER: Understood, proceed with takeoff.
PILOT: Um — shouldn’t you, um, “do something” about it?
TOWER: This is Dubai, chief, we don’t bother with that stuff.
PILOT: Oh my God! The guy from “Fargo” just got his throat cut! Shouldn’t you call somebody or something?
TOWER: It’s probably some American inter-agency struggle going on. Rogue agent, kidnapped president’s daughter, not our concern. Let ’em sort it out.
PILOT: Roger.
3. There’s a Female Unit Member, who is Val’s Little Pal #2 (since Pal #1 gets his head blown off at the end of Act II). FUM has a drink with Val, and Val tells her what he’s going to do.
Then he goes to Dubai, seemingly by himself, and meets up with an English guy, who becomes his Little Pal #3. (Hint: Don’t become one of Val’s Little Pals. They all get shot dead, dead, dead. So much for Leave No Man Behind.)
Anyway, so there’s the airport, Val has The Girl, Bill Macy shows up, shootout, bang bang bang, Val’s hit, Faceless Commando is killed, and bang-zoom, here comes FUM, out of the shadows, to escort The Girl to the plane (before getting shot in the back by Macy).
How did FUM get there? It seems that she was there with Macy. But why would she be with him? She was with Val at the top of the act. Did Val give her the assignment of “Stick with Macy, just in case he tails me to Dubai and tries to cut us off at the airport and kill us both?” Why would he do that?
In Heist, Gene Hackman’s character (“Bob” or “Joe” or whichever man-man name he was given this time around) always has a back-up plan. It’s part of his credo. Is FUM being with Macy Val’s backup plan?
But no, she couldn’t be, because Val’s surprised when he finds the Tracking Device (capitals intentional) in his Special Knife That We Had a Whole Scene About. So Val DIDN’T think that Macy was going to follow him to Dubai. Why then would he have FUM be with him?
Or was her mission to merely be there in the airport hangar when Val showed up with The Girl? If so, where was she at the top of the act, when he flew in on the airplane and did the thing with the shipping container?
I understand that if you have not seen the movie, the above will make no sense to you. But hey, these nits ain’t gonna pick themselves.