Peter Jackson’s final movie in his Hobbit trilogy has the wiry elegance of elves, the robust craftsmanship of dwarves, the whimsical bonhomie of hobbits, and the spellbinding poetry of wizards. It’s elating to see these characters in action—and tough to bid them farewell. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug didn’t entrance critics: in Jackson’s Middle Earth sextet, these films were viewed as the awkward younger brothers to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. But The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is so beautifully wrought and unpredictably cathartic that it should compel even skeptics to reconsider Jackson’s previous films about the reluctant Hobbit hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and the quest he shares with dwarves to reclaim their Lonely Mountain and its ancestral treasures from the fearsome dragon Smaug. I’m a fan of all these movies. Whenever I have a spare six hours, I aim to take a second look at the first two just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. That’s how seductively Jackson has woven multiple themes and motifs into this penetrating wrap-up of Bilbo Baggins’s saga.

Because Jackson has spun an entire trilogy from J.R.R. Tolkien’s single novel The Hobbit (and a smattering of material from appendices to the Lord of the Rings trilogy), all three Hobbit movies have been easy for critics to scorn as examples of greedy franchise-moviemaking or creative elephantiasis. For 90 years critics have lamented the loss of Erich Von Stroheim’s eight-hour cut of Greed, his adaptation of Frank Norris’ 375-page novel McTeague. Why is it obligatory to condemn as a piece of over-reach Jackson’s eight-hour-plus version of Tolkien’s 275-page book—which is about many things besides greed, including war and peace? Is it simply that so many bad movie fantasies have made critics grow impatient with a great one? These movies are the opposite of exploitation. Their scale derives from Jackson’s affection for Tolkien’s characters and his drive to shape the action to their personalities. Sequences like Bilbo’s rescue of dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) from rampaging Orcs in An Unexpected Journey, or his engineering of the dwarves’ escape from prison in wine barrels in The Desolation of Smaug achieve an exhilarating impact. They’re rooted in Jackson’s masterly nurturing of Bilbo’s bifurcated character—part homebody, part adventurer—and in the Hobbit’s attempts to prove himself to himself (as well as to the crusty dwarves with whom he’s questing).

Early on in the trilogy, Bilbo stumbles onto the Ring of Power, but he resists its corrupting aura. This trilogy is essentialy about fellowship and what it means to be of good heart. In The Battle of the Five Armies, Bilbo uses the courage and wisdom he acquires far away from home to help unify dueling species—dwarves and elves—against swarming Orc and goblin armies that threaten their survival. It’s hard to imagine anyone else except Freeman in the role; the young Alec Guinness could have done it, but could he have done it better? Freeman’s confidence and subtlety enable him to make Bilbo’s innocence amusing and touching. The actor’s understated audacity makes Bilbo’s growing sureness as a man among alpha-males exciting.

The performances of Freeman, Armitage as Thorin, and Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey secure Jackson’s sprawling spectacle to visceral bedrock. Their ferocious commitment to moments of enmity and amity alike brings emotional release to the audience. Armitage is galvanizing when he snaps into mission mode to annihilate the albino Orc known as Azog the Defiler, but he’s heartbreaking when Thorin tells Bilbo that if more creatures valued domestic virtues the way Bilbo does, “it would be a merrier world.” The affection the warrior-dwarf expresses for the stalwart Hobbit is palpable—and inspiring. Similarly, when Gandalf tells Bilbo “I am very fond of you, but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all,” these actors convey the wizard’s worry-tinged warmth and Bilbo’s rue-streaked relief at being called “little” once again.

In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Jackson reaches new peaks of accomplishment: 144 minutes whoosh by, like the war-bats Azog trains to darken the sky for his Orc legions. As the dragon Smaug swoops down Lake-town—a water-world with an atmosphere that Jackson has compared to “a smuggling operation in eighteenth-century Cornwall”—the director and longtime co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens swiftly reacquaint us with crucial characters, including Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans), who’s been jailed by Lake-town’s monstrously avaricious mayor (Stephen Fry). Lake-town’s population empties out of homes and into waterways to escape Smaug’s smashing tail and fiery breath. Bard’s children clamber for their dad’s release, while a trio of dwarves and the sylvan elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), busy caring for her beloved, wounded dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), try to shepherd them to safety.

In the midst of all this churning desperation, Jackson and company set up a Buster Keaton-esque stunt involving Bard, a makeshift noose, and the Mayor, who, with his lickspittle servant Alfrid (Ryan Gage), overloads an escape barge with the town treasury. Enjoyable simply as virtuosic seriocomic staging, it also establishes Bard as a resourceful swashbuckler—the people’s champion destined to bring down the dragon. And what a dragon! Benedict Cumberbatch gives Smaug its smug, sadistic, roaring phrasing and, via performance-capture technology, contributes to its horribly gleeful visage and sinewy yet slithery movements. In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Jackson draws not only on Tolkien, but also on Western European legendry from Beowulf to William Tell. Bard’s son Bain provides his father with the spear-like black arrow designed to bring Smaug down, then serves as a body part for his dad’s makeshift “wind-lance,” which resembles a mammoth crossbow.

This section propels the movie beyond bravura to operatic expressiveness. Jackson’s plunging camera moves are genuinely dizzying because their effects are at once gutsy and psychological. When Bard hangs onto a rooftop by his fingers, the downward curves of the camera trace the sum of his fears. Later, when Bard rallies his Lake-town survivors, Jackson cuts, as he frequently does in crowd scenes, to an off-center long shot. It’s as if the director is suggesting that even a strapping figure like Bard is a bit like Bilbo, “a little fellow in a wide world after all.”

Smaug’s presence never leaves the picture, especially because Thorin, now the dwarves’ “King Under the Mountain,” develops terrible “dragon sickness” (a hoarder’s kind of greed). He won’t spread the Lonely Mountain’s wealth, not even to fulfill his debt to that good man Bard. As Thorin, Armitage is equally wonderful at exuding cupidity tinged with inertia and atavistic rage. He thinks he’ll never forgive the elves because they forsook his people when the dwarves first lost their mountain to the dragon. He grows suspicious that one of his own men has stolen the “heart of the mountain,” a gem called the “Arkenstone.”

Far more organically than Into the Woods, The Battle of the Five Armies extends its fantasy long past the point when creatures should live happily ever after. Except for Bard, Bilbo and Tauriel, most of the characters revert to tribal allegiances, including the elf army led by the imperious King Thranduil (Lee Pace). The idea that Smaug no longer guards the mountain treasure brings out the worst in almost everybody—and summons the forces of darkness to the Lonely Mountain.

In Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy the evil Sauron has already prepared to achieve hegemony over Middle Earth. Cate Blanchett’s regal elf Galadriel makes a dazzling return to rescue Gandalf the Grey wizard from Sauron’s clutches; Blanchett and Jackson conjure a demonic display out of a curse she hurls in guttural “Dark Speech.” And the elf Lord Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and Saruman the White wizard (Christopher Lee) face off against those foul ghosts the Ringwraiths. It’s particularly stirring to see the 92-year-old Lee play Saruman in his prime, not as a quisling spell-caster but as a righteous martial artist. Still, they can’t stop Sauron’s legions, led by Azog the Defiler and his equally loathsome son Bolg, from converging at the Lonely Mountain.

Akira Kurosawa once told me that when he designed the color-coded armies in Ran, he used ideas he’d developed for an aborted adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” The Battle of the Five Armies goes further in blending Gothic sensibility with medieval tradition. Glittering cadres of silver-and-gold elves line up against darker metal-clad dwarf soldiers while mud-skinned Orcs and goblins in rough-hewn helmets march in lockstep against both of them. Elves and dwarves ultimately band together with a bang: the dwarves use their sturdy backs to form a bridge for rampant elves who rain a splattering death down on their enemies. Although Jackson doesn’t explore the full range of Tolkien’s natural imagery, it’s a thrill to see the elf king Thranduil (Lee Pace) enter the field on an enormous elk, or Thorin and his best warriors gallop up a mountain on battle rams, or Thorin’s boisterous cousin Dain (Billy Connolly) charge into the fray on an armored boar.

What makes Jackson’s lucid battle scenes extraordinary is how fraught with tension they are from every angle, whether in a God’s-eye-view of Thorin leading his dwarves in a Spartan phalanx that drives through the other armies like an arrowhead, or in close shots of battle that reveal the black-comic failings of Azog’s and Bolg’s slave armies. The Orcs’ strength lies only in their numbers. The most towering goblins among them are like moronic special-teams players, capable of just a single task. Whether functioning as walking catapults or a battering ram, they do their deeds, then collapse.

The scenes of single-warrior combat are even more jolting and haunting. The ultimate grudge match between Azog and Thorin is like Eisenstein’s ice battle from Alexander Nevsky done in miniature, with a spooky lyricism all its own. In a movie replete with images of noble and ignoble deaths and after-lives, there are few sights spookier than one nemesis watching another float in water under ice, as if suspended between life and hell. Jackson puts the interspecies love between dwarf Kili and elf Tauriel to the ultimate test as they clash with Azog’s son, Bolg. This sequence exposes the core gallantry of elf prince Legolas (Orlando Bloom), who also loves Tauriel, and is nobler and more poignant here than he is in any part of The Lord of the Rings.

As in the book, Bilbo gets knocked unconscious midway through the final combat. After the battle, Jackson’s eloquent, original additions to Bilbo’s multiple good-byes restore his decency and resilience to the center of the saga. Jackson fleshes out Tolkien’s final irony with comic brio: the hobbit returns to his cherished Shire only to find that his relatives, believing him dead, are auctioning off his house and goods. Bilbo quickly brushes it off. Unlike the rest of the hobbits, he has seen what lies beyond the far horizon.

As he enters his own door, you imagine him remembering what he told the dwarves: “If you ever pass through Bag End, tea is at four. You are welcome any time. Don't bother knocking!” At the end he tells his neighbors, so quietly he could be talking to himself, that proud, willful Thorin—the dwarf who sorely tested him and doubted him—was his friend. 

The Notebook

On a sunny autumn day in Savannah, Georgia, in the year of our lord 2014, a resplendent theater built in 1921 projected a disreputable film made in 2004, and the audience wept. Not many film festivals could get away with a 10th anniversary screening of Nick Cassavetes’s notorious weepie, The Notebook, at least not without efforts at critical reclamation. (As far as this softie is concerned, all reclamations are welcome.) But no claims, assertions, or apologies were required at the Savannah Film Festival, where the 35mm print looked splendid projected within the Lucas Theater’s majestic proscenium, where 84-year-old legend Gena Rowlands was as disarming as ever during a post-screening Q&A, and where the “2014 MTV Movie Awards Best Kiss” winner sat snugly beside big-ticket mainstream fare like HBO’s The Normal Heart and Disney’s Big Hero 6.

It was refreshing to encounter a venerable festival seemingly disinterested in playing the gatekeeper, one that unfurls without any hint of self-consciousness about what’s cool, relevant, or avant-garde. Yet this absence of an edge or angle also made it difficult to know just what to make of the Savannah Film Festival. Yes, it’s a regional festival, and as such performs the dual function of bringing Hollywood glamour to the Peach State whilst exposing outsiders to local hospitality and culture. As was made clear throughout the week, part of what’s being exposed is the attractiveness and readiness of Savannah (and the surrounding region) as a playpen for film production—both in terms of shooting locations and postproduction facilities.

Speaking of facilities, what distinguishes Savannah from most regional festivals is its singular provenance as a baby of local art school SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design. Members of SCAD’s faculty and staff double as festival directors, programmers and coordinators, and screening venues such as the Lucas and the renovated, state-of-the-art, 1,200-seat Trustees Theater are official SCAD properties. The Trustees Theater (né the Weis Theater, built in 1946) is one of dozens of buildings that SCAD has repurposed for academic use, reviving the city’s historic old town into a thriving boho district. The festival functions as a world-class clarion call for SCAD, and for the changing face of Savannah, which, considering its casually but thoroughly historic atmosphere and dreamily stroll-worthy streets, need only be changed within reason. I’m just not sure if or how well it yet functions as a venue for vital cinema.  

Creep

Over the course of the eight-day festival, daytime was roughly reserved for competition, short and student films, documentaries and panels, while nighttime was split between higher profile prestige releases (Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game, The Humbling), enjoyed by an older, patron-flavored crowd, and genre offerings from the After Dark Series (The Babadook, Horns, Creep), consumed by decidedly student-aged corps. In terms of anticipation and excitement, nothing in the festival could match these After Dark screenings, at which the impeccably maintained Lucas seemed to turn spookily decrepit and grimly shadowed after nightfall, and at which a form of communion was achieved between the haunted offerings inside the theater and the quasi-historical “ghost tour” culture peddled around the old town. The sidebar culminated with a screening of Nosferatu on Halloween night, with live accompaniment by the Silent Orchestra, and a population of students dressed in sincerely and ironically costumed finery.

Meanwhile around the corner at the Trustees, the thousand-strong crowd was treated to a series of Awards season hopefuls. Conspicuously absent from these post-dinner, old-fashioned, put-on-your-nice-shoes-and-go-to-the-movie-palace screenings, was any context for why these particular films were being shown. Pre-screening introductions were advertisements for the festival itself, as well as for the eminently worthy SCAD. On the five nights that I was present, I never heard an extolment of the virtues of whatever the audience was about to see, I never heard context given for whoever made the film or how (which, based on grumblings overhead at breakfast the next morning, would have benefited Dardennes-ignorant viewers of Two Days, One Night). It was effectively, “now here’s a movie.” Maybe that didn’t seem off to anyone but me, but as an outsider trying to get a read on what the festival was about, and what sort of films/filmmakers/movements the festival might be looking to showcase, I found such presentations frustratingly, if not tellingly, vacant. Similarly, nightly tributes to the likes of Rowlands and “Rising Star” winners Analeigh Tipton and Asa Butterfield felt curiously rote, with very little offered as an argument for why these people, why now, and why they were the opening acts for films to which they had no relation. 

Likely this would be less troublesome if the programming itself didn’t have a milquetoasty feel. In the competition portion of the lineup, narratives were epitomized by quirky light-touch indies like Alex Beh’s self-made Garden State gloss Warren, and Amira & Sam, which took home the top prize for its meet-awkward/meet-cute dramedic pairing of an Iraqi war veteran (Martin Starr) with a beautiful Iraqi refugee (Dina Shihabi). In the latter, an insider-trading subplot relies on too-broad characterizations, but thankfully the contradictions and imperfections of its Romeo and Juliet leads are absorbed rather than detangled, and their rapport plays as genuine. 

Warren

On the doc side of the street, most of the competition films were formally familiar, topic dominant, TV-ready affairs like Poverty, Inc. and Limited Partnership. And in the case of top winner Ice Warriors: USA Sled Hockey (yes, that’s actually the Dewey Decimal System–friendly title of this cozy underdog tale)—a film with zero prior festival presence—a PBS premiere was only a few weeks away. My favorite in the program was a title that’s been knocking around the circuit for a while but benefited from such cookie-cutter company: Alex Fegan’s The Irish Pub. The premise is almost embarrassingly simple—we visit old school pubs throughout Ireland and meet the colorful people who run and patronize them—but Fegan’s elegant execution (the camera sits on a tripod and people just talk) elevates the film beyond easy sentimentality or quirkiness, giving us a strong sense of who and what keeps these places alive.

The festival raised its game a bit with a documentary sidebar (inertly titled “Docs to Watch”) that brought together nine top titles from this year’s festival circuit, including eventual Oscar short-list features like Keep On Keepin’ On, Finding Vivian Maier, and Life Itself. None of the selections were exactly envelope-pushers—though Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado pull off some nifty overlays that give 2D photographs three-dimensionality in The Salt of the Earth—but the program succeeded in nudging the festival into larger conversations about the craft and state of contemporary nonfiction, epitomized by a panel of eight visiting filmmakers that was moderated by Scott Feinberg of the Hollywood Reporter.  

Perhaps befitting a festival attached to an academic institution, there were treasures to be found among the student competition films (dominated by but not restricted to SCAD enrollees), from Pixar-worthy animated allegory Snow Boat to Joo Hyun Lee’s quietly assured, exactingly realized Sweet Corn. And among the pro shorts, Tim Guinee’s One Armed Man (adapted from a Horton Foote story) packs a ton of tension and class anger into 27 taut minutes, while there’s no way not to succumb to Eric Kissack’s The Gunfighter, which, thanks to an assist by Nick Offerman, is one of the best (and bawdiest) jokes about voiceover narration ever told.    

One-Armed Man

Walking out of the Trustees Theater on a late October night, overhearing packs of students debating the merits of Whiplash’s relentlessness, of older locals processing their feelings about Keira Knightley’s turn in The Imitation Game on their way to restaurants along the Savannah River, passing under the endless draperies of kudzu, it’s easy to see how Savannah could be among the most appealing stops on the festival calendar. Visiting filmmakers seemed utterly charmed and spoiled by the place, and by the chance to lecture and kibitz with a rapt student population. And the movies were well attended throughout, even if the vast interiors of the Trustees and Lucas theaters sometimes made it seem otherwise. All that remains is for the festival to engage more fully in the state of the art—especially on the level of creative and purposeful programming. As programmers from Missouri to Arkansas to Florida have shown, local interests don’t have to limit the vision or importance of regional film festivals. Nothing would be lost, and much would be gained, from being even more ambitious and creative in bringing home what’s vital in contemporary film, while showing off the potential of Savannah to a film community ever hungry for attention, affirmation, and inspiration.

The Blue Dahlia

Noir Central through Christmas Eve is New York’s Film Forum, transformed into a cornucopia of delicious nastiness and psychological and sociological disturbance by movies based on the novels and stories of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, and James Cain. The authors celebrated in the series are the immovable cornerstones of American pulp fiction, though Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, and the scabrous Jim Thompson run them close. The social fallout of the years between the Wall Street Crash and the Red Scare—spanning Prohibition, the Depression, World War II, the postwar malaise, and the emptying of America’s urban centers—provided the lowering, savage backdrop of their generally bitter tales of homicide, avarice, perfidy, and lethal seduction, transmogrified into film noir primarily by the Expressionist influence of Hollywood’s German émigrés.

In addition to director Billy Wilder, these included the cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl and the production designer Hans Dreier, who were probably more responsible for the look of Street of Chance (1942, Dec. 18), from a Woolrich amnesia story, than director Jack Hively. Sparkuhl and Dreier were also teamed, as were stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, on Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key (1942, Dec. 19), from Hammett’s novel about the the mob and political corruption; Dreier had previously worked uncredited on the 1935 Glass Key (Dec. 22), directed by Frank Tuttle. One of the eight noirs directed by the German Robert Siodmak was Phantom Lady (1944), adapted from a novel Woolrich wrote as William Irish. A startling example of claustrophobic studio artifice, it was photographed by Elwood (Woody) Bredell, whom Siodmak schooled in the menacing chiaroscuro effects of Eugen Schüfftan, Fritz Lang’s cameraman on Die Nibelungen and Metropolis and Abel Gance’s on Napoléon.

Film Forum’s lineup includes one film originated by Hammett and two films written for the screen by Chandler. Rouben Mamoulian brought his theatrical stylization and staccato imagery to City Streets (1931, Dec. 18), a crime drama, too early to be a noir, from a screenplay based on a four-page Hammett outline. It features a gauche Gary Cooper as a sharpshooting carnie who hires on with the mob to transport bootlegged beer and a charged Sylvia Sidney as his fretting girlfriend, who’s imprisoned after being implicated in a murder by her racketeering stepfather. For Ladd, Lake, and director George Marshall, Chandler scripted The Blue Dahlia (1946) during a legendary binge; a story of three demobbed Navy flyers trying to readjust in L.A, it inscribed Chandler’s drunken blackouts in the amnesiac episodes of William Bendix’s brain-damaged vet. Philip Marlowe’s creator had arrived at that movie, which he adapted from a novel he hadn’t finished, after having an “agonizing” learning experience turning Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944) into a masterpiece with Wilder, who described Chandler as a “dilettante.” He endured another unhappy collaboration adapting Patricia Highsmith’s murder-swap thriller Strangers on a Train (1951, Dec. 20) for Alfred Hitchcock.

Murder, My Sweet

The idealized detectives dreamed up by Hammett (including Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles) and Chandler (Philip Marlowe) generally kept their heads above the moral squalor they exposed. They are well (if not comprehensively) represented in Film Forum’s season: Spade (a womanizer supposedly redeemed by turning in the murderess he loves) in Roy Del Ruth’s 1931 The Maltese Falcon (Dec. 22) and John Huston’s 1941 classic (Dec. 19); Marlowe in Howard Hawks’s screwball-tinged The Big Sleep (1946), Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944, Dec. 21), and Robert Altman’s revisionist The Long Goodbye (1973, Dec. 23); Nick and Nora in W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man (1934, Dec. 24) and After the Thin Man (1936, Dec. 24), which took only their bantering, tippling marrieds and the clue-sniffing Asta from Hammett. 

Bogart’s harshness made him the best Spade and his insolence, in The Big Sleep, the most iconic Marlowe, though Lauren Bacall as Vivienne, the oldest and haughtiest of the idle-rich Sternwood sisters, and his accomplice in double-entendre wisecracking, was wiped off the screen by Martha Vickers as the thumb-chewing nympho Carmen (no matter that her lethalness was downplayed). However, Elliott Gould’s Marlowe for Altman is the most persuasive. He retains vestiges of the chivalry so important to Chandler’s conception of the private detective “who is neither tarnished nor afraid” and is all the more honorable as a man maintaining his principles because he’s a shabby, mumbling existential loser out of time. Even his new screen analogue, Inherent Vice’s Doc Sportello, has more of a future—and a girl.

More steeped in sordor, Cain’s and Woolrich’s narratives—respectively matter-of-fact and delirious—are primarily driven by middle-class and working-class losers made desperate by the Depression or the dread of its recurrence during and after the war. Economic independence drives Cain’s pie-making waitress turned restaurateur (Oscar-winner Joan Crawford) in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Piece (1945, Dec. 21), a movie underpinned by anti-patriarchal sentiments, as well as his murderous rutting adulterers in Double Indemnity and the two adaptations of The Postman Always Rings Twice already shown at Film Forum—Tay Garnett’s lurid 1946 version and Luchino Visconti’s formative 1943 neo-realist allegory Ossessione. These are films as thick in kitchen grease as they are in the musk of sweat and semen. Lensed by Domenico Scala and Aldo Tonti, Ossessione contrasts its rural sunlit exteriors with interiors of unsurpassed inkiness redolent of the depths of depravity its lovers have plumbed in seeking liberation.

The Bride Wore Black

Leaving aside The Big Sleep, the Thin Man pair, and The Bride Wore Black (1968, Dec. 23), François Truffaut’s then-modish Hitchcockian updating of a Woolrich (as William Irish) novel about a female Bluebeard (Jeanne Moreau), too many of these movies indulged in quick succession can be dangerous: we risk seeing ourselves in them. In his 1990 book City of Quartz, the urban theorist Mike Davis suggests that defining noir as an amalgam of hardboiled fiction and German Expressionism is simplistic since it doesn’t factor in the influence of psychoanalysis (or of Orson Welles). Yet Woolrich adaptations like Phantom Lady, Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946) and Harold Clurman’s Deadline at Dawn (1946)—each a race-against-time thriller—harrowingly refract the damaged psyches of emasculated men and their women persecutors.

Since a “good” pro-active woman devoted to her weaker or dumber man sets out to rescue him from the gallows or a murder rap, however, these three films conflict with the phallocentrism of the Marlowe and Spade movies. In the 1988 CineAction! essay “Phantom Lady, Cornell Woolrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic” (republished in Film Noir Reader), Tony Williams extends Gaylyn Studlar’s research to Siodmak’s film and challenges the dominance of Laura Mulvey “sadistic male gaze” theory. An identification figure for Woolrich, who was a mother-fixated gay man, the secretary-turned-sleuth of Phantom Lady, Carol Richmond (Ella Raines), epitomizes the powerful pre-Oedipal or oral mother, Williams contends. She’s also a figure of identification for the male or female spectator seeking temporary escape from restrictive and oppressive gender roles, which the masochistic aesthetic (traditionally a female province) permits, according to the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in a 1988 Journal of Sex Research paper.

Attempting to free her passive boss, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), who has been wrongly convicted for murdering his vicious wife, Carol waylays two other weak men who can verify his alibi that he was with another woman at the time of the killing. She first stares at a barman to get him to talk, but her gaze is so Medusa-like it has disastrous consequences. She then adopts the guise of a prostitute to seduce a trap drummer, Cliff (Elisha Cook Jr.), into proving Henderson was at a theater at the time of the murder. Carol becomes a lewd phantom herself, head wantonly thrown back, as she drives Cliff into a masturbatory frenzy on his drum kit in a jazz cellar scene shot with maximal Expressionistic fervor.

Phantom Lady

Woolrich’s other dynamic amateur female sleuths—Susan Hayward’s Hawksian taxi dancer in Deadline at Dawn, June Vincent’s more feminine chanteuse in Black Widow—undermine the feminist theory that femme fatales are the fount of women’s agency in film noir, but Carol’s brief gig as a spider-woman clinches it. It echoes, in vulgarized form, the mocking stage routines Marlene Dietrich performed in her Josef von Sternberg films, of which Studlar wrote “the femme fatale does not steal her ‘controlling gaze’ from the male, but exercises the authority of the pre-Oedipal mother whose gaze forms the child’s first experience of love and power.” The conservative final act of Phantom Lady forces Carol into a victim role—first physically, then socially—but the ambiguous ending hints that she may yet reclaim the night. Her boss’s wife, Marcella (unseen except in a full-length portrait that dwarfs Henderson when the police visit him), and the doomed blackmailing tramps played by Lola Lane in Deadline at Dawn and Constance Dowling in Black Widow (and to a lesser extent the doomed unfaithful wife played by Constance’s sister Doris in The Blue Dahlia) are all closer to the spirits of the castrating Oedipal father than to the pre-Oedipal mother.

A new 35mm print was struck for the Film Forum screening of Ted Tetzlaff’s The Window (1949), adapted from the Woolrich novelette The Boy Cried Murder and one of few noirs with a child protagonist. Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) is a fibber who tells a tale that nearly causes his stressed mum (Barbara Hale) and dad (Arthur Kennedy) to lose their cramped apartment at the time of the postwar housing shortage. When he claims to have seen the couple upstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Kellerton  (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman), stabbing a man to death—from his nocturnal vantage point outside their window when sleeping on the fire escape during a heat wave—his parents don’t believe him, nor do the cops, and he is forced to go on the run from the killers.

Although William Steiner’s stunning location photography of Lower East Side tenements creates a neorealist atmosphere, Tommy’s experience has the feverish quality of a prepubescent boy’s nightmare embodying the return of the Oedipally repressed. Having angered his stern mother and his kindly but exasperated father, Tommy effectively recasts them in his unconscious as the dangerous neighbors—significantly sexualizing his mother as Mrs. Kellerton, a busty prostitute who brings johns home so she and her husband can rob them, and Mr. Kellerton as the Oedipal father who will kill (castrate) him. Only by outwitting them in the psychic terrain of a precarious abandoned house can he expunge his paranoid dream and restore his parents to their rightful place as his protectors.

The Window

The Window anticipated Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954, Dec. 20), a more famous adaptation of a Woolrich story about a New York murder witness. Whereas Tommy fears castration, consciously or unconsciously, James Stewart’s photographer L.B. Jeffries is half-emasculated at the start of Rear Window since he is prevented by his leg cast from dealing appropriately with two tormenting women, his teasing socialite girlfriend Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) and his bossy, maternal nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter). A tragic suspense comedy, the film recalls Phantom Lady in that it eventually sends its plucky heroine into the killer’s lair while the man she loves is immobilized. Though Jeffries uses his exaggeratedly phallic camera to extricate himself from one trap, at the film’s end he has fallen into another—a matriarchal maw (this was the reactionary 1950s) that will in the long term curb his virility and swallow his identity.

This puts one in mind of the Marlowe newly married to an Los Angeles tycoon’s daughter and fighting for his independence in the four chapters Chandler wrote shortly before his 1959 death for The Poodle Springs Story, which was completed by Robert M. Parker and adapted by Tom Stoppard for Bob Rafelson’s solid 1998 HBO movie starring James Caan as an older, wearier gumshoe. This year’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, written by Benjamin Black (a pseudonym for John Banville), is a Marlowe novel closer in tone to Chandler’s than either Poodle Springs or Parker’s Perchance to Dream, but it may never be filmed because Black’s conclusion was pre-empted by Altman’s 40 years ago. Though an updated TV Marlowe was mooted in 2013, the most iconic of Hollywood’s knights in dark armor is seemingly sleeping the big sleep.

The subtlety, complexity, even difficulty of some Stephen Sondheim musicals means that the composer’s shows have rarely had “surefire hit” written all over them (what, you mean you can’t hum any tunes from his Road Show, aka Bounce?). But Sondheim was right in guessing that there would be mileage in his and book writer James Lapine’s 1987 venture into fairy tales; he recalls in his second lyrics anthology Look, I Made a Hat: “I brashly predicted that if the piece worked, it would spawn innumerable productions for many years to come, since it dealt with world myths and fables and would never therefore feel dated . . . I predicted that Into the Woods could be a modest annuity for us.”

That annuity now brings Sondheim and Lapine a lucrative dividend in the form of a Disney screen adaptation, directed by Rob Marshall. According to Marshall, not only is Into the Woods not dated, but it’s more in tune with the times than ever. He claims he was inspired to make the film by hearing President Obama, 10 years after 9/11, telling the victims’ families, “You are not alone”—a key phrase in Sondheim’s lyrics. For Marshall, Into the Woods is “a fairy tale for the 21st-century, post–9/11 generation… The comforting knowledge that we are not alone in this unstable world gives us all that glimmer of hope.”

Some Sondheim devotees were shocked by the very prospect of an adaptation for Disney, especially when the maestro announced in a New Yorker piece that the plot had been changed, and some of its darker elements toned down. Sondheim subsequently modified his remarks. In the end, Marshall’s Into the Woods is not altogether the soft Disneyfication that you might fear. After all, when we see the perennial fairyland palace in the company’s opening ident, it’s being invaded by gnarly briars creeping in from the edges. If Disney lets its very logo be invaded, how compromised can this film possibly be?

Yet there’s cause for concern in Marshall’s talk about comforting knowledge and glimmers of hope. Yes, Into the Woods ends on a positive note—sort of. Lessons are learned, characters have reconciled themselves to their fates, accepted the reality principle that they, and we, have gleaned from the show’s several intertwined fairytales. The show ends with the assembled chorus singing “Out of the woods / And happy ever after!” only to be followed by the plaintive solo voice of Cinderella repeating the line that started the show: “I wish…” Sondheim and Lapine’s point is that in life, there can be no “happy after ever,” no end to wishing, no (to use that most hollowly reassuring Hollywoodian story term) “closure.”

The joy of any Sondheim musical is that, while there is abundant pleasure and sometimes even a sort of affirmative payoff, anything as soft and infantilizing as “comfort” isn’t in the picture. Nor is his work unproblematic entertainment—his musicals constantly draw attention to themselves as musicals, while refusing the traditional pleasures of the form, such as songs that clearly start and finish, that don’t dissolve in mid-phrase or leak tantalizingly into each other. The essence of Into the Woods derives from the absurd premise of adult players performing material derived from the tales of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm—and latterly associated with the nursery entertainment of Disney animation and British pantomime—but infusing it with adult themes and anxieties, and inviting an adult audience to read it in a serious, adult manner. Such discrepancies make Into the Woods, all in all, a very Brechtian musical.

There’s nothing very Brechtian about Marshall’s film. Yes, there’s the ostensibly bizarre spectacle of assorted prestigious Hollywood names (Emily Blunt, Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep) playing familiar pantomime figures, but that in itself is no more subversively defamiliarizing than, say, Angelina Jolie’s wearing wings and horns in Maleficent. We’ve become all too accustomed to fairy tales as mainstream Hollywood material—partly as a result of the old stories being re-ironized and re-booted by Shrek, which itself arguably took several lessons from Sondheim’s show. So a generally by-the-book movie of Into the Woods—especially with the workmanlike Marshall at the helm—comes across as a so-so proposition, and in some ways exactly what Sondheim said the show would never be, dated.

Not that Marshall does enough creatively to mess up Sondheim and Lapine’s achievement. In the musical, the woods are, as Sondheim has explained, “the all-purpose symbol of the unconscious, the womb, the past, the dark place where we face our trials and emerge wiser or destroyed.” They also represent the adult world of contingency, complexity, sexuality, and the place where stories—traditionally kept apart from real life and given neat closure—are interlocked and denied safe, sealed-in endings. (Contemporary Hollywood doesn’t actually like closure: why end a story decisively when you can have a dangling ending—a stray beanstalk shoot, in this film’s terms—snaking off towards the possibility of sequels?)

The various denizens of these woods include Cinderella (Anna Kendrick) and her vile sisters and stepmother (a nicely snippy Christine Baranski); a manipulative, shape-shifting Witch (Meryl Streep), a more sympathetic and troubled maternal figure than her Disney/Grimm/Perrault forebears; and two more figures who belong equally to the fairy-tale world and to modern working humanity, a Baker (James Corden) and his Wife (Emily Blunt). Characters venture out on various missions, some of them quests given by the Witch, and many achieve their hearts’ desires at a certain point—which is where the original musical has its intermission, and where many school productions reach their end. It’s in Act 2, however, that the tales unravel disturbingly. In the movie, the lack of a break, and Marshall’s hurriedness in bustling ahead past the pivotal twist, defuses much of the bitter irony as Rapunzel flees in a fit of madness, the Baker’s Wife has an affair with a Prince (Chris Pine), and the slain Giant’s widow (the great British actress Frances de la Tour, here looming ghoulishly through treetops) descends to earth seeking revenge.

Marshall and a classy team (including DP Dion Beebe, production designer Dennis Gassner, costume designer Colleen Atwood) have done a creditable job making Sondheim’s fairyland real: shot on location in England and at Shepperton Studios, the film evokes a part-medieval, part-Victorian tainted Arcadia. But the setting feels too real and the performances too theatrical for a natural fit—the result is not quite rich enough in its illusion to make us feel that we’re watching a real movie, as opposed to a movie-fication of a show that worked brilliantly in its own terms (exactly the trouble with Marshall’s flat Chicago).

Some tricks try and re-create in cinematic terms the show’s overtly theatrical jiggery-pokery—notably the Witch’s sudden arrivals and departures, which still have a dash of the old trapdoors-and-smoke-bombs brio about them. Less effective is the normalizing use of CGI—Jack clambering up the Beanstalk, the Giant on his heels. What’s missing is an attempt to really engage with the ambiguity of illusion and storytelling, to highlight the un-naturalness of the fairy-tale universe: in other words, something that engages with the seriously ludic essence of Sondheim, as Tim Burton did in his swashbuckling, rapturously morbid Sweeney Todd.

Marshall’s hectic pacing wore me out before the halfway mark, and actually made me lose interest in the score for a while: you need that intermission, or something like it, to take a breather, re-distance yourself, adjust your expectations for a darker second part. But the songs, and Jonathan Tunick’s orchestrations, are still sublime, and there are some enjoyable performances. As the strident, Cockney-sounding Jack, young Daniel Huttlestone has a touch of Oliver!’s Jack Wild, and Lilla Crawford’s Red Riding Hood, with her Brooklyn foghorn delivery, is a hoot, weirdly reminiscent of Aida Mohammadkhani, the insistently questing tyke heroine of Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon. Streep does quality Streep, of course—playing the Witch’s beauteous self as a preening take on Billie Burke in The Wizard of Oz, while shooting twitchy sidelong looks of hurt and resentment in her ugly form. She’s funny and poignant, and sings more than adequately, with wit and nuance.

Kendrick is agreeably spiky, Corden is at worst affable—but the show-stealer is Emily Blunt, who captures the doubt, yearning, and sexual restlessness of the Baker’s Wife, and sings with a full-blooded, rather raunchier echo of Julie Andrews’s ever-so-proper exuberance. But Chris Pine’s Prince is just too comically swaggering, and a good example of what makes the film look behind the times: the characterization seems to be modeled directly on the blowhard Gaston in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, a character that, again, probably owed much to Sondheim’s Prince in the first place. And “Agony,” sung by the Princes (Pine and the considerably more modulated Billy Magnussen) is played for bumptious laughs, where in the original, the whole point is that the song is self-parodic—yet can shred your heart, for that very reason.

The really awkward thing, though, is the Wolf, played by Johnny Depp—and an oddly muted Depp at that. Apparently it was his idea to model the character visually on the lecherous lupine of Tex Avery’s cartoons, a touch that Atwood has extrapolated brilliantly in the form of a fur-patterned zoot suit. Depp does a sleazier, more overtly rakish variation on his Sweeney/Jack Sparrow Anglo-roué voice, but it’s a low-key performance—almost as if Depp were nervous of what he was singing. As well he might be: “Look at that flesh / Pink and plump / Hello, little girl . . . Think of that scrumptious carnality…”—after which Riding Hood, escaping alive, sings, “He showed me things / Many beautiful things / That I hadn’t thought to explore / And me made me excited / Well, excited and scared…” The musical’s point is that fairy tales are childhood’s rehearsals for both the terror and ecstasy of sex—and on stage, the perversity of these songs can be drawn out to pithy effect, even if theater companies today may balk more than they did in 1987 at the thought of depicting the Wolf as a predatory pedophile.

That’s where the film comes untangled, and most awkwardly Disneyfied—it’s hard not to think of Depp as a fundamentally sexual presence, even when he’s playing roles for goofy laughs. Doing the Wolf as a cad wanting his territorial droit du seigneur gives his scene an unwittingly creepy flavor, especially given that he’s singing to a girl who, unlike the older actresses who have played Riding Hood on stage, is manifestly a child. By desexualizing her, the film ends up unintentionally being much more creepy than the original: what becomes obscene in the play between Depp and Lilla Crawford is that they are feigning not to be singing about sex (between a young girl and a much older man) when we know that that’s exactly what they’re singing about. The Sondheim mischief becomes queasy here, because the film asks us to believe that this rather serious and Freudian mischief is merely cheeky panto-style knowingness.

Marshall delivers Into the Woods to the screen dutifully, but what’s lost is the real point of the show as an exploration of storytelling—and the playfulness too, in both senses, for stage Sondheim is both ludic and fully mindful of its own status as play. Marshall’s is a pleasant, stolidly executed fantasia that could in effect be a less dazzling but more lyrically astute screen version of Shrek: The Musical. This Into the Woods is Sondheim, and Sondheim-approved—but it’s just not Sondheim.

Into the Woods opens December 25.

With Margin Call (11) and All Is Lost (13), writer-director J.C. Chandor established himself as a master of confined spaces and constrained budgets. A crime thriller set in 1981 in and around New York City’s shipyards, suburbs, bridges, and freeways, A Most Violent Year is his biggest and broadest effort to date, but it solidifies the director’s style of lean storytelling and slow-burn suspense. Despite the many knee-jerk comparisons to Sidney Lumet among critics, Chandor, it seems, is his own greatest influence.

Oscar Isaac stars as Abel Morales, the immigrant owner of a Brooklyn-based oil business whose entrepreneurial drive is clear from the opening scene when he signs the deed for a plot of land to expand his enterprise. A Most Violent Year plays out like a cost-benefit analysis of capitalism and the American Dream: Abel is willing to make bold financial risks, but he also prides himself on clean business dealings with delayed rewards. His upright moral posture becomes difficult to maintain as corruption and violence eat away at the foundations of his industry, while his wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain), proves all too willing to do the dirty work.

Following Margin Call and staring at one B-level script after another, Chandor found himself suddenly faced with the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and its aftereffects—namely, armed guards policing the entrance to his daughters’ school. Captivated by the notion of violence and the channels through which it echoes and escalates, he searched for the most violent year on record in New York—1981—and he knew he had a setting for his latest story.

Chandor’s films strive for a “man versus the world” thematic purity, but in conversation, the director carries himself with a great deal of levity and contagious enthusiasm. FILM COMMENT talked with the writer-director about his writing process, casting the film, and why he needs Elon Musk to reassure him that it’s all going to be OK.

A Most Violent Year

You’ve said in past interviews that the impetus behind this film was that you wanted to make a “good-old fashioned gangster movie.”

It’s certainly structured that way, but I think the film is hopefully taking that structure and doing something very different with it.

Were you trying to channel the style of any genre heroes in particular?

Most of my moviegoing was in my late teens through my twenties, and I was just trying to watch every movie in the world. For a kid from the Jersey suburbs for whom E.T. was an art film, I caught up. I lived in the East Village and was always at Kim’s Video and was scared of the guys behind the counter because they knew more than me. But then I had a kid and started getting jobs so now I’m just keeping up with what’s current. I know a lot of filmmakers would go and watch every movie in the genre they’re about to make, but all three of my movies started as writing projects—they started just as an idea. Once that idea was formed I never wanted to research other movies. I have a couple of friends I give my scripts to once they’re finished and I’m always like: “Is there anything in here that’s a total knockoff?” [Laughs]

The fact that people are even mentioning Sidney Lumet movies in the same breath as this film is an honor for me as a filmmaker, but I haven’t seen a Sidney Lumet film in probably 10 years, which is embarrassing for me as a filmmaker [laughs]. I can’t watch a lot of stuff while I’m writing, which is what I’m doing now. It’s a bummer because I haven’t gotten to see a lot of the films from this year.

Margin Call

With Margin Call, you managed to churn out the script in four days. Did this one come together as easily?

I’m still learning about the writing process and easy is certainly not the word I’d use. I formulate and work on the ideas for years in my head, I just don’t write anything down. This film began as a character piece, which is what it still is at its core: a husband and a wife growing a business together. I wanted to analyze something: there’s a main street in a town somewhere and there’s two bakeries on it. What makes one store stay a mom-and-pop shop that makes the best loaf for miles and the other become a supermarket chain 25 years later? What compromises do you have to make in either scenario? What is in ambition and drive and the quest for happiness—and what is our definition of happiness?  

I had been working on ideas about violence in movies ever since I had written Margin Call. I needed a job, so I’d taken one or two writing jobs and then later was getting offered directing jobs once my career took off a little bit. I’d say 90 percent of those projects were very violent and 50 percent of those were almost grotesquely violent and absurdist in their structure. At that exact time there was a horrible act of violence that took place about two towns over from where I raise my family: the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. I started to dissect this idea of escalation, which is essentially what A Most Violent Year is about. What are the people’s responses and how do those reactions change the world or a city or a family?

How was the writing process different with this film as compared to something like Margin Call, knowing you had the budget to support what you wanted to do?

It obviously opens up this whole world—with 18 million bucks, or whatever it was, you can almost do anything: visual effects, etc. It’s easy to give into a certain style and that’s a daunting thing [laughs]. In the end, of course, there have to be limitations. I want my movies to be about regular people that are caught up in extraordinary moments in their lives, usually by their own doing. It’s not like a meteor movie where something’s coming from space that the people had nothing to do with. The characters have to either go right or left—there’s no option for them to stay where they are.

In terms of production design, did you find yourself having to scale back on things like vintage cars and elaborately costumed crowd scenes to maintain the focus the story needed?

I wanted the film to feel as universal as possible and these characters live a fairly limited life—perhaps not limited, but protected. It’s a very dangerous time obviously and they’re running away from the violence. That’s the whole premise of the movie. [Laughs] But that’s a bummer from a production design standpoint: they’re hiding away in this weird castle, and driving around in their German cars, but they go right into their office. It’s only as the film progresses that the city kind of seeps into their lives—they can’t get away from it.

My production designer and I played with a color palette of the late Sixties and early Seventies, because that’s when we realized Abel and Anna would have renovated. We’d incorporate Oscar and Jessica, asking them when they thought their characters would have renovated their home and office. They’re strivers as characters so they were always trying to keep it a bit tasteful, even though they were probably a little over the top. But hey, don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to have done a Studio 54 nightclub scene [laughs]. But Abel is a Catholic that’s just obsessed with work—that’s his sin, basically.

A Most Violent Year

Javier Bardem was originally supposed to play Abel. Can you talk about casting Isaacs and how he meshed with your conception for the lead?

Hopefully Javier and I will work together one day. What happened was I made the mistake of talking to an actor at great length while I was still writing the movie. Even though it was in my head and I knew what I was going to do when I sat down to write it, it was not a script at that point. When he actually did read the script, it was not what he’d build up in his mind. So we very quickly came to a point where we realized that the movie he wanted to make was very different from the movie I was going to make, and we moved on, which happens all the time.

This character is “American” in the truest kind of form. And as for Oscar… Jessica was attached at the time and started to talk to me about this kid that she went to school with: his mom was Guatemalan and his dad was Cuban and he grew up in Miami and got himself into Juilliard and now he’s this famous actor. He’s about as American a story as you can come up with. He’s the same age as Jessica and they had this wonderful history together. Looking back on it, I think Javier just had a very different experience. He’s an actor who grew up in the bosom of a socialist arts program that shepherds their students, his mom was an actor… so he didn’t really get a certain American-ness of this guy. The exact opposite happened when I sat down with Oscar. Even though he’s an artist and not a businessman, the ambition and compromise and all the things about the immigrant experience, Oscar knew from his parents and from elements of his own life.

Jessica Chastain’s character, Anna, is a kind of lady Macbeth: she’s the one willing to get blood on her hands, which is the opposite of the classic gangster’s wife that’s at least feigning ignorance of her husband’s corruption. What was behind the conception for her character and the husband/wife dynamic?

By the end of the movie you realize she’s the CFO of the company and she’s probably had as much if not more to do with the success of the company than Abel does. She only comes across as kind of a Lady Macbeth because we’re seeing them at their worst moments—not that she’s not a tough damn cookie. But these are just small-business people in the end, and most of their days are mundane, like my days. You wake up, do your thing, and go back to bed. But she has these moments and you get to watch her take over and that’s exciting. My hope is that she’s not a caricature: she’s a tough woman who is taking advantage of all the opportunities that a woman in the late Seventies would have been given in that immigrant business world, trying to make her family’s life a success.

A Most Violent Year

All three of your films are ultimately about survival. You’ve said before that you like to work in this space in which the real world and capitalism meet—that this is where people are at their most raw.

Narratively, what I find most interesting is the way we all like to compartmentalize our lives just the way Abel does: “I am this and I’m making this choice now and I’m fine with that.” But all of our lives are much more complex than that, certainly people that are involved in huge organizations that have 200 people working under them the way these people do. A lot of the people I talked to researching for this movie, when I asked them what the most stressful thing was that happened between themselves and their employees, most would say things like: “Well, I had this one employee who was in a key position and their daughter was going through cancer, or was a drug addict, or his wife killed herself.” All these really personal things that when you’re running a small business, comprise the reality of your day: How are you a leader? How are you involved in your employees’ lives? Do you root for them? Do you just use them? There’s no black and white: the world is a complicated place. There’s very rarely pure evil—it’s often people that are being wooed into an evil act. 

In that final chase sequence in the movie, Oscar is literally being lured down into that tunnel, into the gates of hell, basically, for revenge. It’s calling to him. That whole sequence is about that struggle that I face in my life and I’m sure you do in your yours at times where you’re thinking: “Is this the right path or is it just the most expedient? Am I being unethical? Am I mistreating someone to make sure this other thing happens for me?” Those are the struggles that I think are at the core of the American experience because we like to think we’re part of this pure capitalist endeavor, but there is no pure form of capitalism. We’re just in the middle of this insane grind—two grindstones mashing up against each other and for me, that’s where you really learn who you are. Those key moments of how you respond to that grayness and when you are willing to make a stand, one way or the other: at this moment I am about me, or at this moment I am about my society, or my community, or my country or whatever it is.

Can you speak about your next project, Deepwater Horizon?

It’s a tragic poem to where we are with oil right now. I didn’t know just how hard it is to get oil out of the ground: the extent of the enterprise and all the people involved. I’ve been reading and researching for the last six months. It’s a story of how that all blows up and what happens in the day around that. In that way the film shares a structure with Margin Call, but couldn’t be more different in terms of what’s actually going on.

I’ve never had a movie like this where I know people will have the chance to see it widely, so it feels like a big responsibility. The opportunity to make a film that’s about something happening now in the world on a grand scale doesn’t happen very often. The movie doesn’t need to be political—it’s a warning sign. I need to do a comedy after this. I think I’m going to go hang out with Elon Musk, and he’s going to make me feel a whole lot better by telling me it’s all going to be OK.

Anyone who’s followed American film over the last quarter century has probably marveled at some point at the cinematography of Roger Deakins. Best known for his collaborations with the Coen Brothers (11 so far, including Fargo, 96; O Brother Where Art Thou?, 00; The Man Who Wasn’t There, 01; and No Country for Old Men, 07), Deakins has also shot works as wide-ranging as The Shawshank Redemption (94), Kundun (97), Skyfall (12), and that pure reverie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (07). For each of these—and three others—Deakins was nominated for an Academy Award.

Born in Torquay, England, Deakins’s love of painting led him to the Bath School of Art and Design, where he discovered photography. After a year of recording his native county of Devon with his camera, he relocated to the National Film and Television School at Buckinghamshire. Upon graduating, he spent seven years as a cameraman on documentaries, including Around the World With Ridgeway (79), a chronicle of a nine-month yacht race, and Zimbabwe (77), an account of the genocide that ravaged that nation after its 15-year civil war. Music videos led to early film credits like 1984 (84) and Sid and Nancy (85), and some rocky years before the Coen Brothers enlisted him in 1991.

Renowned for both sprawling landscapes and precise interiors, he recently lent his expertise to sophomore director Angelina Jolie’s historical drama Unbroken, about the wartime travails of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini. Working in the mode he terms “the classical style,” Deakins depicts with utmost clarity the horrors of Zamperini’s plane crash in the Pacific, subsequent weeks adrift in shark-infested waters, and years imprisoned in Japanese camps where the guards are as merciless as the climate.

Deakins took time out from shooting his latest Coen Brothers movie, Hail, Caesar!, to speak with FILM COMMENT about formative experiences, career-defining partnerships, and how the simplest shots can be the trickiest to achieve.

Unbroken

You have a background in still photography, and it’s still a hobby of yours. Did you initially want to be a still photographer?

Yeah, I did. I started off wanting to be a painter. I went to art college, and most of the things I painted were fairly realistic or naturalistic. So I started taking photographs and that became my passion. I wanted to do stills, photojournalism really.

Before you went to film school, you spent about a year documenting the farms and villages of North Devon. How did that inform or inspire your style as a cinematographer?

I think any work you do in the visual area informs your style. Your whole life informs your eye. And it was great to have a full year just wandering around with a camera, just finding out how I saw things. I’d like to say I was training my eye, but it wasn’t that, I was just looking and taking pictures, seeing what I liked and seeing what meant something to me in terms of content and composition. It was a good year. I had applied to the National Film and Television School the year before I did that, and been rejected, but I was told if I applied a year later I had a good shot of getting in. I suppose they wanted people who had a bit more professional experience, people who didn’t go right to film school after college. So I did that for a year, and then reapplied to the Film School and went there.

So would you say that lived experience is more valuable than technical training, because it helps you develop an eye?

Yeah, very much so. Technical training is important. In a way it’s becoming less so, but I still think it’s important. But I think life experience far outweighs any technical training.

Are there films you saw in your formative years as an artist that made you want to be a director of photography?

Yeah, there were many. When I was at school in Torquay I joined a local film society, and I’d see lots of European films before they were released in the country. Peter Watkins’s film The War Game, for instance, which was actually made by the BBC and then banned for 25 years. We saw that in a film society screening. And we saw his other film, Culloden. And all kinds of others. I remember seeing Last Year in Marienbad there. I think that was probably my first taste of movies, really, my first taste of film being more than what you regularly saw at the cinema.

Do you choose projects on the basis of the script, fundamentally, or on the collaborators, or on the opportunity to do things you haven’t done before?

Well, all of them really, but it’s the script that’s paramount to me. There are certain people I’ve worked with, like the Coen Brothers, but generally I judge the project by the script.

Barton Fink

Let’s talk about your work with the Coen Brothers. You’ve said before that your first film for them, Barton Fink, revived your interest in cinematography.

I’d done a particularly unsatisfying, large-budget movie just before that. I was living in London at the time, and I’d basically decided to go back to my roots in Devon. I was moving back there when the Coens approached me to do Barton Fink. So I came over to America, and it was just a different experience. I realized that I couldn’t give it up.

Fortunately! I’ve heard that with the Coens, everything is planned out ahead of time. Do you prefer working that way?

I don’t mind either way, really. The Coens plan ahead very carefully, especially for the more complicated stage sets. I’m working with them on a film at the moment.

I quite like working off the cuff as well, though. My background is in documentary filmmaking, the verité style, where there’s no preplanning. You’re just thrown into the situation, you find the best ways to cover it, and there are no second chances. I quite like that, too—it’s stimulating and fun.

I understand that the legendary shot in The Shawshank Redemption, with Tim Robbins in the rain with his arms outstretched, was actually a paring down of a more complex sequence that you didn’t have time to shoot?

It was quite a long sequence, yeah. But it got pared down to one sequence where he crawls out of the sewer pipe in the rain and the lightning.

How much of cinematography is finding creative solutions to logistical snags like that one?

Quite often, that’s what it is. Conrad Hall used to say cinematography is just happy accidents. What he meant is that they’re not really accidents at all—you’re just there in a situation and something happens that triggers an idea in your head. And it may change your idea of how to do a scene or a shot. That’s what he meant, and that’s certainly what I feel a happy accident is.

Do you think extensive planning and storyboarding makes you less open to happy accidents?

No, I don’t. I suppose it could lead to really formulaic filmmaking, if you’re not careful. I don’t like that style of stiff, methodical planning. That could lead to something that’s stale. But that’s not how storyboards are used, in my experience. I’ve used them mostly with Joel and Ethan [Coen], but also with Sam Mendes. Their use is as a template for what you’re doing, or a guide for the essence of a sequence. They’re not necessarily what you’re going to achieve in the end.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

I recently read an interview with another DP where he talks about the difficulty of a director asking for absolute darkness in a shot—struggling to come close to that while making sure the shot’s contents are still visible. You’ve had some extremely dark shots in films like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Is that something you’ve struggled with, too, directors asking for pitch black?

You know, a director might ask for pitch black, but do they really mean pitch black? I’ve had that conversation with a director. The director’s said, “I want it really dark,” and I’ve had to say, “Look, I hope it’s okay, but we’re doing this scene in total silhouette,” and then the director says, “But I can’t see their faces!” You have to figure out what the director means by “total blackness,” or what they mean by “silhouette.” It’s different for different people. But it’s fine when you have a relationship with a director like I have with Joel and Ethan, or with Denis Villeneuve. I know that if they say “silhouette,” they know what I mean by a silhouette, and it’s fine, it won’t be a surprise when they suddenly see a total silhouette.

Something that I noticed in Unbroken was how the viewer is kept oriented at all times, even in shots where other DPs might accentuate chaos. For example, the scene in which the three survivors are adrift, and they have to dive into the water to avoid the bombers, and then they climb into the raft to avoid the sharks. I always felt keenly aware of my bearings.

We certainly wanted that, yeah. Maybe it was more of a “classic” way of storytelling. We didn’t see Unbroken as an action film, even though there are action sequences. We wanted the audience to be with the characters, to sense what they were feeling, so if it felt chaotic to the characters, it was chaotic, but only in an emotional sense. It was important to know where the characters were and what was happening.

WALL-E

You’re often credited as a visual consultant on animated features, like Rango and How to Train Your Dragon. What does “visual consultant” actually entail?

It’s being one of the crew, really. I’m just giving my ideas for the film. I spent a lot of time on Rango and How to Train Your Dragon, the first and the second ones, before they did any animation for the films, talking about the look and the style and the feel of the films. And I worked with Andrew [Stanton] on WALL-E, because they wanted more of a live-action style, not just in the sense of the lighting and the visual style, but in the way that a live-action camera moves, versus the way a computer creates a camera move. On How to Train Your Dragon 2, there was quite a long prep period where we created a whole color palette reference for the look of the film. We discussed the style of the camera movement and all that. The animation itself takes something like two years to make, so obviously I’m not there for all of that, but I’d have a link to DreamWorks, so I’d always be watching the animation as they were creating it. Any time I was in Los Angeles, I’d come up and spend time with the lighters, the animators, and the layout artists. Basically I was a consultant all the way through production.

Do you find that being exposed to the possibilities of animation has bled into your work as a DP at all?

Not really, but I think of live action and animation getting closer and closer to each other. In the last few years, there’s been a lot more animation in live-action films, but the audience wouldn’t know it. But it’s a fantastic storytelling tool. The avenues are open to create films like Gravity, where you put the audience in new situations.

Do you have films that you use as visual touchstones when you’re preparing the look of a film? For Unbroken, did you look at other World War II films, or prisoner of war films?

Well, I have a lot in mind when I start a film. For the Coen Brothers’ new film, Hail, Caesar!, it’s set in Hollywood in the Fifties, so I’ve been looking at quite a few old films as references. But when we started Unbroken, Angie was very keen on a film called The Hill, directed by Sidney Lumet. That, in a way, was our template. Not that we copied it or anything—the feel of the film was our template for the movie, the prison camp scenes in particular. Just the simplicity of those parts, what I called the classical style a minute ago. Sidney Lumet’s work in that film is so much about simple compositions and subtle camera movements. Shooting Unbroken was so much about the compositions and allowing things to happen in the frame.

Are there any trends in cinematography today that you find troubling?

Well, yeah, quite a few. I’m not going to talk so much about the trends I find troubling...

You don’t have to name names!

I suppose in a general sense, there’s the overall sloppiness with which films are made nowadays. I’m not an admirer of the current brand of filmmaking, really. I mean, look at a film like The War Game. It has that “I am there” documentary style, and it was done all the way back in the Sixties. I think it was done better, frankly.

No Country for Old Men

Can you tell me about the most challenging shot or lighting configuration you’ve ever had to achieve?

I think that’s really hard, because sometimes it’s the simplest shot that’ll throw you a curveball, and you’ll agonize about it for hours. Just the other day I was doing some simple little scene in an office, and I agonized for hours, days, actually, over how I was going to light it. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t visualize what I wanted.

The night scenes in True Grit, or in No Country for Old Men, were hugely challenging. I had just enough light to expose the action. But it’s not the technical challenges that are really difficult. It’s the conceptual challenges, what you want a scene to look like. It’s easy to put up a light, it’s figuring out where you put it that’s the real problem. When we did the night work in True Grit and No Country, we looked at a lot of locations. It was so much about, “Okay, we could choose this place, but how do we light it to get the effect we want?”

Have you ever done a shot that you were uncertain about, and then saw on the big screen and loved?

One of my favorite films for the Coens was The Man Who Wasn’t There. I watched it again a while ago and thought: “This looks better than I remembered, actually.” I’ve always been fond of that movie. So sometimes you revisit a film after years, and it becomes fresh, almost new.

Is there anything you’ve always wanted to photograph and haven’t had the chance to shoot yet?

I’ve always wanted to do a science-fiction film. The closest I’ve come was doing 1984 years ago. But I’d like to do a futuristic science-fiction film. I’d love to do Stranger in a Strange Land or Mockingbird. A true classic science-fiction story.

In this spot this time last year, I found myself concluding with some relief that, despite doom-laden mutterings to the contrary, the art of film was generally in a state of robust health. Perhaps I didn’t feel quite as excited by cinema in 2014 as I did in 2013—there were few out-and-out revelations, more cases of filmmakers consolidating, building on their past achievements with confidence and style. But the signs are, once again, that cinema as an art still matters.

2014: The Punchline

The Interview

In fact, the year ended with an urgent reminder that film didn’t exist harmlessly in its own sealed-off sphere, but still had the power to cause repercussions in the real world—a power worth safeguarding. The irony was that it took what few might otherwise have considered an important film to remind us of that. Whether or not it was really the Pyongyang government that took exception to and measures against The Interview—a work by all accounts more farce than sustained political satire—Sony’s decision to pull the film only days before its release confirmed that commentary on the real political world can be a dangerous thing in cinema, and one that must be allowed to speak unhindered (even if it does speak with the voice of Seth Rogen). The Interview notwithstanding, 2014 proved a very politically engaged year in film, with Cannes alone featuring a number of works, both fiction (Leviathan, Timbuktu) and documentary (Maidan, Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait), that proposed extremely of-the-moment commentaries on current situations of oppression and revolt. Imagine if any implicated regime, or indeed corporation, sought to suppress one of these films, or Joshua Oppenheimer’s Indonesian documentaries, or for that matter, documentaries by Michael Moore, Errol Morris, or Alex Gibney. Sony’s capitulation may well have made it all the easier for them to do so in future.

Specialist topic – France

The Blue Room

Very occasionally, a given year in French cinema provides the proverbial vintage crop, but most often we’re just reminded that France consistently produces a wide range of strong, individual work. Several of the following came close to making my Top 10: they’re all by directors who repeatedly contrive to find new vivid angles on familiar material, whether their own or from other sources. This year gave us three striking and very different reworkings of literary texts: Mathieu Amalric’s Georges Simenon adaptation The Blue Room, taut, sexually charged and fragmented à la Resnais; Christophe Honoré’s poetic, playfully erotic update of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, refitted for multicultural modern France; and My Friend Victoria, in which the perennially underrated Jean-Paul Civeyrac produced a contemplative Parisian reading of a Doris Lessing story, offering a distinctive and poignant new angle on the black French experience. There was also a crisp new cogitation on the Baroque by Eugène Green, La Sapienza; Benoît Jacquot’s ludic and teasing quasi-romance 3 Hearts; and Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve’s sprawling reminiscence of the French house music scene, at once rapturous and poetic. Watch out for these next year. 

The mainstream

The LEGO Movie

Again, Hollywood failed to bring us much that was fresh, but there was one magnificent anomaly in the form of The LEGO Movie. This was not only the smartest, most wittily self-referencing merchandising tie-in to date, but an authentically hallucinatory use of CGI animation, which treated pixels like little plastic bricks, little plastic bricks like pixels, and the whole world as it were made out of both. For similar reasons, I got a kick from the underrated Edge of Tomorrow, at once a robust example of the “Tom Cruise showcase” as a genre in itself, and a sly parody of that genre. It eventually settles for being a textbook example of that very genre, but for at least its first half, Doug Liman’s film was a canny renewal of futuristic action tropes, based on the idea of repetitive genre recycling as a valid conceptual strategy in itself. 

Duds

A Million Ways to Die in the West

It’s rarely worth naming and shaming the year’s worst if it’s purely on the grounds of ineptitude; some incompetent films simply deserve to slump unnoticed into merciful oblivion (although I can’t go without noting that the bleakest two hours I spent in a cinema this year were provided by A Million Ways to Die in the West).

But really, the films you want to single out are those that operate with an inflated sense of their own importance, whether their makers piously believe they’re making grand statements (Claudia Llosa’s ponderous “We are the world” statement Aloft), or just constructing sheened, hollow red-carpet prestige machines. In the latter category, there’s the obvious case of Grace of Monaco, a wretched example of the biopic as gilded souvenir postcard, justifiably resented by anyone who would rather have started Cannes by getting a decent meal under their belt—or watching an actual film. Then there was Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children, a hectoring piece of polemic that hit new heights of furrowed-brow obviousness. As for the much-admired Interstellar, it’s not without imagination, ambition, or visual grace, but it’s at once studiously earnest and crushingly mundane: it made visiting other galaxies through wormholes seem as momentous as a trip on the Eurostar and back.  

Proving that 2014 was really a pretty good year were titles such as (alphabetically) The Babadook, Boyhood, Force Majeure, Ida, Maidan, A Most Violent Year, Night Will Fall, Timbuktu, What We Do in the Shadows, and one I’d nearly forgotten that was largely overlooked in Berlin: Yannis Economides’ Stratos, a talky (à la Mamet, that is, rather than Tarantino), hyper-jaundiced Greek crime movie that’s also a striking panorama of moral compromise in times of economic adversity.  

So here’s a Top 10, for what it’s worth, although these things are always provisional and a little arbitrary. Writing from the U.K. for a U.S. publication, I sometimes forget which film has been released in which country and when, which led me to inadvertently including one film in my FILM COMMENT Top 10 two years running (never mind which one). So here’s an amended lineup, with comments and links for some, including a film (at #7) which jumped in at the last minute, despite my reservations.  

1. The Tribe (Miroslav Slaboshpytskiy, Ukraine)

The year’s true UFO and out-and-out revelation: a film about young deaf people made using only sign language, with no spoken dialogue and no subtitles. Poised, brutal, and entirely sui generis, this was one of those rare films in which a director follows a subject to its logical limits, making us re-assess our watching and listening habits in the process. Expect major praise when it emerges in 2015, and—I suspect—a substantial backlash, but this film was like nothing else.

2. Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, U.K.)

3. Leviathan (Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia)

Reviewed in next week’s column.

4. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, U.S.)

5. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, France)

6. Li’l Quinquin (Bruno Dumont, France)

The surprise of the year: a mischievous, rambling comedy thriller from a director you never imagined having that much of a sense of humor (although now I’m beginning to wonder about his Humanity). If you only see one French cattle-mutilation comedy whodunit in 2015…

7. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, U.S.)

A mesmerizing, economical, keenly original drama about psychological warfare and the rigors of jazz mastery—and finally, after hearing about it for months, I saw it in time to refresh my Top 10. J.K. Simmons’s big-band instructor is one of the great monsters of recent cinema. It’s an astonishing performance, and a very physical one: not least in that terrifying signature gesture with his clenched fist. I have misgivings about the barnstorming climax, though. I couldn’t help thinking: personal triumph for the hero, perhaps, but I bet the sax section was really pissed. And how might the film’s insights apply to drummers who aspire to playing not like Buddy Rich, but like Paul Motian? Still a dazzling piece, though.   

8. Calvary (John Michael McDonagh, U.S.)

One of the year’s most underrated and most singular: Diary of a Country Priest crossed with High Noon, resulting in a scabrous comedy—theologically resonant comedy, at that. Cinema gave us three leviathans this year: the Russian film of that name, Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner, and Brendan Gleeson’s soft-spoken but emotionally thunderous lead here.

9. Journey to the West (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)

If you must, the last word in “slow cinema”: one man pacing like a barely animated statue through Marseilles, with another eventually following him at the same pace. Seen on an IMAX screen in Berlin, it was an incomparably strange site-specific experience.  

10. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq (Guillaume Nicloux, France)

In all honesty, there may have been better French films that didn’t make my final list, but this was one of the most enjoyable and most interesting in its showcasing of a great contemporary antihero, novelist-provocateur Houellebecq. Here he got to riff magnificently on his image as a creepy, yet oddly sympathetic malcontent—a sort of literary Larry David. Nicloux’s comedy presented him to good advantage, whereas Houellebecq’s other appearance this year, in Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern’s minimalist NDE (Near Death Experience), lived up to its title as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, God forbid that we should have too many cinematic near death experiences in 2015. Happy New Year and bonnes projections…

The Judge

What do (500) Days of Summer, The Men Who Stare at Goats, In Bruges, Safe House, Snow White and the Huntsman, Draft Day, The Judge, Bad Teacher, and 47 Ronin all have in common? If you answered, “They are all poor-to-awful movies,” you would be correct. If you answered, “They all appeared on the Hollywood Black List,” ditto.

Amid the crowded field of meaningless distinctions that we call “awards season,” The Black List is a fair contender for the most meaningless of all, for it confers honors onto movies which don’t yet exist, like a Most Beautiful Baby contest honoring promising zygotes.

Since 2005, The Black List has been released on the second Friday of December—just as the governing bodies of the entertainment industry’s various self-affirmation committees are announcing their “noms” and Las Vegas is placing odds on forerunners. Its architect is Franklin Leonard, who was a 26-year-old development executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions when he conducted a survey of favorite scripts via email in 2004, ultimately compiling a list of what an opening disclaimer is always careful to state is “not a ‘best of’ list,” but, “at best, a ‘most liked’ list.” Per a 2010 history of The Black List in The Los Angeles Times, Leonard invited a group of “film executives and high-level assistants” to submit “an unranked list of up to 10 of their favorite scripts of the year.” That first year, The Black List was culled from the picks of 90 contributors; the most recent credits 250 contributors, down from a high of around 300 in 2009-12. (This, anyway, is what the preambles to the various Black Lists say—elsewhere the website reads “Every December, we survey over 600 production company and film financier executives about their most liked screenplays and aggregate the responses for the industry and the public.”) The given criterion for inclusion states that the script must be “uniquely associated with” the year in question, but “will not be released in theaters during [it].” (In 2011, the wording was changed to read “will not have completed principal photography during this calendar year.”)

Juno

The inaugural 2005 list is topped by titles that would eventually make their way into production and be cut and polished into glittering indie gems, including Things We Lost in the Fire (25 mentions), Juno (24), Lars and the Real Girl (15), and Charlie Wilson’s War (13). This first list was a rather slim, quick-to-the-point affair, providing nothing more than the title of the script and the name of the author, agent, and agency attached. For the first and last time, any film that received even a single mention appeared on the list. This changed as The Black List became a larger and larger production: the cutoff was two mentions in 2006, four mentions in 2008, five mentions in 2009, and six mentions in 2011, which is where the number stands today.

Fortuitously for Leonard, who seems to have assayed his pet project into a fully functioning sideline business, The Black List appeared at the cusp of the list-obsessed Web 2.0 era, and was an almost instant success. Its production values took a significant leap forward by 2007, the first year in which brief synopses of the scripts were included. That list was topped by Danny Strong’s Recount (44 mentions), a retelling of the 2000 election runoff made for HBO the following year, and Beau Willimon’s Farragut North (43), a political skullduggery yarn, possibly indicative of second-term Bush II political malaise and blah blah blah, that later became George Clooney's The Ides of March. In addition to the plot blurbs, there was another new feature to the 2007 Black List: films were designated as either AVAILABLE or UNAVAILABLE, depending on if they had been spoken for. Out of the 128 films on the 2007 list, 35 were listed as AVAILABLE—one of them being a script by Paul Webb titled Selma, which received 29 mentions—while three were already AVAILABLE FOR DISTRIBUTION. Adventureland, a period-piece coming-of-age story that takes place during a young man’s one crazy summer working a theme park job, was UNAVAILABLE, while The Way, Way Back, a coming-of-age story that takes place during a young man’s one crazy summer working a swimming pool job, was still AVAILABLE for the taking. This is another way of saying that a little under a third of the scripts on The Black List were at all likely to have their fates significantly altered by inclusion therein. In the main, then, the list was serving no purpose other than to reconfirm the popularity of projects already well-liked enough to be optioned by “production company and film financier executives.” It is Hollywood reiterating, before the eyes of the world, a consensus that it had already reached, allowing us to feel that we have some privileged vantage on the process.

The 2008 list at least retained some ability to surprise, topped as it was by The Beaver, and including space for such beguiling items as Untitled Channing Tatum Project and a project called Keiko, described as follows: “A white teenage girl, who was adopted and raised in Japan by Japanese parents, travels to America to find her long lost father, comedian Dana Carvey.” (The script is credited to one Elizabeth Wright Shapiro, which is presumably a pseudonym for “Dana Carvey.”) By 2009, however, The Black List had well and truly arrived in its new post as an early-warning awards predictor, featuring a little-script-that-could called The Social Network by an unheard-of barista moonlighting as a screenwriter named Aaron Sorkin in the number two slot. In 2010, Margin Call, by the director of plodding, blown-up miniseries melodrama J.C. Chandor, hauled in 31 votes, just above Eric Warren Singer’s American Bullshit (retitled, inevitably, as American Hustle) and Argo. Today The Black List website boasts of its clairvoyance in recognizing “3 of last 6” Best Picture Academy Award winners, its anointed films being responsible for 37 Oscar wins (and 196 nom nom noms) and $23.22 billion in global box office. It also offers paid memberships for aspiring screenwriters to be evaluated by Black List professionals (Leonard recommends purchasing multiple evaluations per script), presumably so that they may learn the black arts whereby Black List–ready scripts are created.    

The King's Speech

It isn’t too difficult to guess what kind of work a Black List tutelage encourages. A palpable shift occurs in the tenor of Black List material in the immediate aftermath of The Social Network and The King’s Speech (which received a measly seven mentions) cleaning up at the 83rd Academy Awards. The “Based on a True Story” biopic, always a popular prestige form, begins to runs rampant. Browsing various Black Lists, I find scripts about Jim Henson (The Muppet Man), Jackie Kennedy Onassis (Jackie), Jimi Hendrix (Jimi), Atari founder Nolan Bushnell (A Fistful of Quarters), Bobby Fischer (Pawn Sacrifice), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and the Damned), John Lennon (Nowhere Boy), John McEnroe (Superbrat), Carl Sagan (The Golden Record), Lewis Carroll (Queen of Hearts), and Bill Watterson (The Boy and His Tiger). In 2012 alone we have screenplays about Theodore Geisel before his Cat in the Hat fame (Seuss), the future Hillary Clinton during Watergate (Rodham), Sam Peckinpah in Colombia (If They Move… Kill ’Em!), Marlon Brando auditioning for his Streetcar role (Hey, Stella!), Senator Joe McCarthy’s rise to infamy (McCarthy), and Hearst and Pulitzer’s circulation wars (Titans of Park Row). The following year, there were two ranking movies that feature Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood host Fred Rogers as a character (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and I’m Proud of You), and another two that concern the making of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (The Mayor of Shark City and The Shark Is Not Working).

These sorts of movies are popular for the same reason that fat tomes of historical fiction by the likes of James Clavell, James A. Michener, and Leon Uris used to be the only fiction that you’d find in houses otherwise devoid of books: there is a significant segment of the American public that thinks this business of making characters and stories up out of thin air is a little suspicious and possibly effeminate. Backers gravitate towards True Story film properties because, like superhero movies, franchise reboots, and genre work, they utilize recognizable icons and known quantities—though, unlike all of those examples, true-life stories of famous people triumphing over honest-to-God hardships are widely and erroneously considered to belong to a higher category of morally improving works. It’s a known fact that people feel favorably inclined towards Fred Rogers and Bill Watterson and their creations, therefore, presumably, people will respond favorably to seeing these men (they are, almost invariably, men) as characters in a movie; of course they will be flawed and prickly and all-too-human, as current fashion would reject, say, The Glenn Miller Story (1954) as “sentimental.” The films that will come of these screenplays also tend to perform well with awards tribunals, particularly in those hard-to-quantify acting categories. We all know what Fred Rogers (or Carl Sagan, or Hillary Clinton) look and sound like, ergo a performer who can manage to approximate the vocal cadence and mannerism of any of the above can be said beyond a shadow of a doubt to have given a good performance. By this logic, mimicry is the highest attainment of acting, and Frank Caliendo is our modern Olivier.

And so the beat goes on, and yesterday’s Black List grads become today’s awards contenders. In 2011, The Imitation Game, on the life and times of World War II cryptographer Alan Turing, cleaned up with a whopping 133 votes. (This makes it, by one measure, the greatest script in Black List history.) In weeks and months to come The Imitation Game will duke it out for honors with Selma, Whiplash (Class of 2012), Foxcatcher (Class of 2008, when it was already tagged “Media Rights Capital. Grandview Pictures, Bennett Miller producing”), and Clint Eastwood’s disconcertingly excellent American Sniper (Class of 2013), from Jason Hall’s adaptation of the autobiography of the late Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle. (Presumably not the same “Chris Kyle” whose script, Serena, landed on the 2010 Black List.)

Invictus

It’s still a little early for the 2013 batch to have ripened, though as it does we may expect more of the same. In that year’s dossier, which begins with a quotation from Nelson Mandela (subject of 2007 Black List honoree The Human Factor, later filmed by Eastwood as Invictus), I find two instances of the phrase “terminally ill” among the synopses of the top four scripts, along with seven instances of “true story,” “true events,” “true-life,” or some variation thereof, and at least three times as many instances where it might have been used or is essentially implied.

Other than having been released on Monday morning, the 2014 list doesn’t upend well-established precedent. It is topped by a script about Catherine the Great and a historical drama about the O.J. Simpson trial, and there were origin stories and rise-to-power biopics for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Lyndon Baines Johnson, 60 Minutes co-host Mike Wallace, and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. Beloved-from-childhood figures Shel Silverstein and “Oz” creator L. Frank Baum also get the treatment, while the historical fictions include a whodunit in which a little-person P.I. investigates sinister goings-on around the filming of The Wizard of Oz, and a re-creation of the torrid affair between Ingrid Bergman and war photographer Robert Capa.

Elsewhere, the popularity of the CIA does not seem to have been greatly affected by recent U.S. torture revelations, as they figure in not less than four screenplays. Women are also “in,” so long as they are placed in a futuristic/postapocalyptic context. A script called Erin’s Voice seems to be a feature-length version of the Twin Peaks plotline in which David Lynch’s Agent Gordon Cole is only able to hear the voice of Mädchen Amick’s waitress Shelly Johnson. Other trends emerge: alas, the days of overreaching wordplay titles like Toy’s House (“When 14-year-old Joe Toy and his buddies tire of their parents overbearing ways…”) and Winter’s Discontent (“When Herb Winter’s wife of 40 years dies…”) are behind us, and the once-mighty gerund is limited to a single screenplay (Seducing Ingrid Bergman). Now, in addition to the proper-name title, it would appear that we have entered the heyday of the “The” title: The Munchkin, The Babysitter, The Wall, The Cascade, The Defection, The Founder, The Search, The Shower, The Bringing, The Takeaway—which makes it look as if movies are now being packaged like generic products at the supermarket in Repo Man. Plot synopses have been pared down to meet the log-line gold-standard of being easily graspable by the brain-damaged: “The investigation of a murder on a moon colony”…“A girl tracks down the man responsible for her father’s death and avenges him.” Two of the more elaborate titles on the 2014 list are among the only scripts that I can imagine myself seeing were they to eventually be filmed. One, called Manchester-by-the-Sea, was written by Kenneth Lonergan. Another, called I Am Ryan Reynolds, purports to be “An inside look at the marriage, career, and mental state of 2010’s Sexiest Man Alive.” 

Repo Man

We are told that the name “The Black List” is, per Los Angeles Times writer Nicole Sperling, a reference to Leonard’s African American heritage, though it also just happens to invoke the political purge that permanently sundered friendships and irrevocably changed lives in the movie colony, almost invariably for the worse in the case of those on the side that was politically out-of-favor. (The McCarthy/HUAC connection is strengthened by the fact that The Black List singles out the achievements of screenwriters, for screenwriting was the one “faceless” occupation which Hollywood artisans tarred with the Commie brush could still practice.) The presentation of the list—the 2009 cover is designed as a communiqué stamped “CONFIDENTIAL” with the text “redacted”—is designed to reinforce the impression of forbidden knowledge, to suggest we the public are being allowed a privileged glimpse at some sort of samizdat that was smuggled out of Brentwood, at risk of life and liberty, in a renegade agent’s colon.

This is, to be clear, pure and utter hogwash. Whatever claim The Black List may have had to being a platform to draw attention to the work of outsiders for maybe 16 seconds in 2005, today it’s about as inside as you can get. Admittedly, it’s poor sport to disparage “movies” before they are movies per se—that is, before they have had the opportunity to actually cohere on-set or play for an audience. Von Sternberg made a film about Catherine the Great, and it’s not half bad, so hope must spring eternal for the 2016 movie The Empress to be directed by Tom Hooper or whomever. The Black List, however, encourages just such premature evaluation, pushing the process of self-fulfilling prophecy through which distinction in filmmaking is determined back to the very moment of conception. Far from shining light on overlooked and undiscovered properties, The Black List establishes a space in which projects meeting certain unspoken requirements can begin to be competitively bred and acquire a pedigree before they have, in most cases, taken their first toddling steps before the camera. In doing so, it has set itself up as a kind of boarding school for prestige projects, one more item on the resume that can offer a leg up during awards season. Posed as a renegade antidote to The System, it has no purpose other than to perpetuate it and its cynicism, and to reward maximum calculation.

It is with this in mind that I announce that my script for The Cartoonist, about Charles Schulz’s coming-of-age in Minnesota, and his unrequited love for the real-life Little Red-Haired Girl, is now up on the auction block. Direct all inquiries to my agent.

Picture a boss barking comically profane orders from behind a desk and it’s likely that J.K. Simmons springs to mind. An actor whose presence looms large even when his screen time runs short, Simmons has played his fair share of entertaining hard-asses over the years, from the blunt tobacco lobbyist in Thank You for Smoking (2005), to the cigar-chomping newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies (2002, 2004, 2007). Fueling a surge in attention for the screen (and theater) veteran, his performance as the maniacal band teacher in Whiplash puts a volcanic talent center-stage.

With a gleaming bald head, deepening lines in his face, and a naturally authoritative voice, Simmons tends to be cast in roles that are either fearsome or fatherly. He’s played a neo-Nazi in the TV series Oz (1997-2003), a no-bullshit psychiatrist on Law & Order (1994-2010), a blind divorcee on the recent NBC series Growing Up Fisher (14), and, of course, the deadpan professor in the Farmer’s Insurance commercials. On the “nice guy” end of the spectrum Simmons is perhaps best known as the patient patriarch in Juno (2007)—in fact, he’s acted in every single one of Jason Reitman’s films, and it was Reitman who recommended him for the role of Terence Fletcher in Whiplash.

As he hazes wannabe drum-phenom Andrew Neyman (Miles Teller), Simmons’s Fletcher is well aware of the power he holds over his students, and his pedagogical methods are perverse at best. “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job,’” he explains to Andrew. Yet even if we despise Fletcher as a human being, we believe that he believes in what he’s saying, and the film operates almost entirely in this gray zone Simmons creates between mentor and monster.

FILM COMMENT recently spoke by phone with Simmons, who was open, funny, and notably road-rage-free whilst driving in Los Angeles (where he lives).

Oz

You tend to play characters on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. When people meet you, are they bracing themselves for Schillinger from Oz or are they expecting the nice guy from the Farmer’s Insurance commercials?

I tend to get both of those. People come ready to defend themselves if they just saw Whiplash, or they’ve been watching Oz. And some people just want to give me a hug if they’ve just seen Juno with their 13-year-old.

How do you feel about the term “character actor” that’s so often applied to you? It’s kind of a superfluous qualifier when you think about it.

To me that kind of just means, he’s not as good-looking as George Clooney. He’s not number one on the call sheet, and he’s not the leading man. It is, as you said, superfluous in a way.

Is it a compliment that characters are now probably described in scripts as “a J.K. Simmons type”?

Sure, I guess I’m at that point now. I actually went to a voiceover audition for a commercial in New York—this was 15 years ago—and they were looking for a guy who sounded exactly like the guy from the Budget Rent A Car commercial. Of course, I was the guy on the Budget Rent A Car commercial, and I auditioned for a part to sound exactly like myself… and did not get the job. So, you never know.

Whiplash

You’ve said in past interviews that you don’t need to like the character you’re playing but do need to understand him. Does Fletcher actually see talent in Andrew? Or does he recognize a vulnerability that he wants to manipulate?

He sees talent, and I think he also sees vulnerability. But he definitely sees at least the potential for that kind of drive and focus that he’s looking for that he saw in Sean Casey, and that something he would define as the factor that could make a Charlie Parker some day. So it’s all of the above, really. Because he’s so single minded in his pursuit, if the vulnerability is what ends up being the most prevalent characteristic in Andrew, and this destroys Andrew, then tough luck.

We see moments of Fletcher’s life outside of teaching: he gets a phone call that obviously upsets him in some way, and we see him interacting with his friend’s daughter in a very gentle manner. Did you work with Damien Chazelle on a backstory for the character or did you just go with what was on the page?

Damien and I never talked about a backstory. I generally have some version of a back-story for anything I do just for myself, and we actually did shoot some hints at a backstory: we saw a lot of Fletcher at home alone, and traveling through the city on the subway and there were other moments where we saw different sides of him. But at the end of the day Damien decided it served the story better for Fletcher to be more enigmatic and for us to see him only from Andrew’s perspective. We lost a few poignant moments but I think it serves the film better.

Whiplash (the short)

Some of Fletcher’s best lines are as hilarious as they are painful. Were there any insults that were particularly fun to deliver, or conversely, awful to say out loud?

They were mostly both fun and awful at the same time. There’s one line in the finished cut where I say “I will eff you like a pig” which actually was supposed to be in the script: “I will gut you like an effing pig.” When we were shooting the short, I just said it wrong, and Damien found it so hilarious that he kept in the short and wrote it that way when we were shooting the feature. I said: “Dude, I’m not going to do it like. This is stupid. Why would I say that?” [Laughs] So he said, fine, fine, say it how you want. I said it the way he [originally] wrote it—and then as he was editing, he went back to the short and stole it and put it in the damn movie anyway when we were cutting away to Andrew’s face. It’s just another little lesson that the actor really is not in control of what happens in the movie. [Laughs]

If Dr. Skoda, the psychologist you played on Law & Order, were to observe Fletcher, would he have him committed or would he understand where he was coming from?

Well, I think Skoda’s seen a lot. Fletcher is not homicidal or suicidal—he may be borderline psychopathic and certainly abusive, but I think Skoda would find him…

A lovely coffee companion?

Well, an interesting guy to be in a room with. [Laughs]

Burn After Reading

One of my favorite roles of yours is in Burn After Reading (08). What was it like working for the Coen Brothers? They’re known to be quite precise in terms of dialogue and blocking.

I actually just saw both of them at a holiday gathering and it was delightful as always. What’s wonderful about the Coen Brothers is that they’re the most low-key filmmakers and human beings that I’ve worked with. Very dry and very funny, but absolutely no drama, no BS: they’re just there to have a nice time and to do the work. They’re immaculately prepared with what they have in mind—if it were other directors, it might feel really constraining to have to stick to the script exactly as it’s written the way Joel and Ethan want you to. They do have everything storyboarded, but they don’t put you in a straitjacket as far as the blocking goes. They just have such a clear idea of what they want from the time the first word goes on paper to the time the final cut is made in the edit. So it’s a different experience working with them than it is working with a director that wants you to bring more of your own ideas to it, but it’s a completely joyful experience. 

Whiplash was shot in something crazy like 19 days—and you can see from the finished product how precise the shooting must have been. Was there room for improvisation on set at all?

It was both really. Damien did have the whole thing storyboarded and he knew ahead of time, in this two measures, I’m going to be on the trumpet section. He had a very clear idea of what he wanted. So there was that kind of precision, and that was cool because then we weren’t wasting time doing obligatory coverage just for the sake of doing the coverage. If he knew he wasn’t going to be on my face for three seconds and the camera was just going to live on Miles and his reaction, we didn’t waste time turning the camera around to cover me just because that’s what you’re supposed to do. But at the same time, because he had such a clear vision of what he wanted he also was very open to Miles and I and all the actors—Paul [Reiser, who plays Neyman’s dad] and Melissa [Benoist, as Neyman’s love interest]—everybody was free to moderately paraphrase or even improvise. I mean, hey, it’s a jazz movie, you’ve gotta let people improvise.

I saw this film at Sundance last January and just re-watched it, and the final scene, the stage performance, was even more spellbinding the second time around. What was it like shooting that?

It was the better part of two days and, of necessity, the shooting itself was very chopped up. We didn’t get a lot of long runs at playing that scene—you see the final product and how precise and rhythmic it is. I have no idea how many cuts there are in that scene but it’s a lot. So we really didn’t have as good a sense of how that final sequence was going to ultimately be like, whereas all the other stuff—the scenes in the studio band room, or in the jazz club—I felt like I really knew what it was going to be. When I saw the final sequence with the drum solo come together, I was blown away by the level of exhilaration and tension and emotion.

Do you prepare differently for a TV role versus a film role? Is your preparation medium-dependent or character-dependent?

A little of both. With episodic TV all of your character preparation is leading up to shoot the pilot and then once you’re up and running, frankly, it can be somewhat tedious because you’re doing a lot of the same kind of thing over and over again. Certainly film work really depends, too—the closer the character is to yourself in terms of backstory and everything else, the less prep there is. Most of the prep I end up doing for film roles, including for Whiplash is really as much about the psychology of the character as it is the minutiae of the character’s daily life. If the guy is a sheriff, then I want to go do a ride-along with the sheriff in the county where the guy exists. If the guy is a musician, then I go back to my music-school roots and I study the scores—I listen to big-band jazz and I try to create a character so that somebody who does that for a living is going to believe what I’m doing. I talked to jazz musicians, and I believe that Damien and Miles and I accomplished that goal. That to me is a prerequisite of making a really good film. That’s just the jumping-off point: you need to get everything technically right first, and then you have the chance to make something special.

You acted in the theater for 20 years before you came to film and TV. Is there any role that might tempt you back on stage?

There were two things that led to the conscious transition to film and TV. One of them was just that I wanted to get paid and the other one was just I was doing Broadway shows and it was great, but I was doing the same thing that week over and over and it was testing my attention span. Now that I’ve been exclusively doing camera acting for as long as I have, there are a few elements at play. Going back to the stage, honestly, is a little bit intimidating because those muscles haven’t been exercised in a while. And I have a kid in high school and a kid in middle school. Maybe when they’re both in college, I’ll find myself on stage again.

Selma begins with the camera squarely framing Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo), as if for a formal portrait. The immediate effect is ironic. He’s rehearsing a solemn line for an award speech, and he’s unhappy about something, which turns out to be his tie—or, rather, his “ascot,” as his wife, Coretta Scott King (Carmen Ejogo), calls it. She adjusts the neckwear. King complains about feeling ill at ease in such a swanky getup. When he spins out his blue-sky ideal about taking a calm job as a minister in a college town, Coretta looks pleased and then wistful, as if her husband has pulled this nostalgic number on her once too often. The director, Ava DuVernay, cuts to the dais at a grand occasion, and King accepts the 1964 Nobel Prize for Peace.

With this opening vignette, DuVernay (Middle of Nowhere) and the credited screenwriter, Paul Webb, mean to signal audiences that we’re in for an intimate, maybe irreverent look at the world-changing figure whose nonviolent campaigns against institutional racism propelled America’s boldest civil-rights advances of the 20th century. But even if you know nothing about King, both the cute business with the ascot and the dreamy escapism about a quieter life are too wispy to introduce this complex character. They’re like anecdotes about the human side of Great Men that educators employ to make biographies “relatable.” If you do know something about King, this Nobel Prize moment is inadequate.

At that time, the real King was depressed for many troubling reasons: rifts between King’s longtime partner in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), and other members of the SCLC; scandalous behavior among members of King’s entourage in Oslo; bogus FBI-spread rumors about his mismanagement of funds and links to Communism as well as the agency’s hyperbolic gossip about his extramarital affairs; frustration that 19 white Mississippians accused of murdering civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been released from prison (briefly, it turned out); and apprehension over the violence he rightly thought would erupt in Selma as soon as he started marching there for voting rights.

It’s understandable that DuVernay would make a priority of avoiding excessive detail. But too much of the movie is like that opening: deliberate, broad, uninspired. Selma is nothing if not ambitious. DuVernay aims to evoke the urgency behind King’s goal to enfranchise Southern blacks—that’s why she interrupts her chronology to depict the church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls in 1963. (She envisions them chattering, pre-explosion, about Coretta Scott King’s hairstyle.) And she seeks to emphasize the grounded political wisdom behind the high-flying rhetoric of King’s nonviolent protest. When King arrives in Selma and confronts the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), his youthful competition, he states three principles of protest—“Negotiate, demonstrate, resist.” He explains that raising white America’s consciousness is as crucial as organizing black communities. King’s marches provoke racists to behave badly so national media will take notice. DuVernay lays that much out clearly. But when his legions proceed to the courthouse, the awful spectacle of Southern white lawmen brutalizing righteous citizens overpowers the film’s attempt to engage viewers more deeply. DuVernay’s scenes of street atrocities achieve a dogged power, but her rendering of King’s character fails to provide a counter-weight to all the carnage. With police batons thudding against flesh and bone, and almost surreal images like a mounted posse-man in a cowboy hat lashing men and women of all ages, the movie captures horrific challenges to civil disobedience. But it doesn’t clarify King’s own complicated responses to events.

What is King thinking when he sees Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), outraged by the sheriff’s manhandling of an elderly gentleman, wallop him with her handbag, inciting a violent takedown? No matter how intensely Oyelowo grimaces, you can’t read what’s going on in King’s mind. While the moves and counter-moves on the street spiral into a destructive dance, King strives to control his own political dance with grassroots political groups on his left (SNCC) and reactionary public figures on his right, like Sheriff Jim Clark (Tim Houston) and Governor George Wallace (Tim Roth). How did King maintain his balance, ethically and tactically? (Even The New York Times once declared, “Non-violence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction.”) You can appreciate the sincerity of DuVernay’s work and still regret her lack of nimbleness and her psychological opacity. She awkwardly focuses on the same abused marchers in each busted-up demonstration. Watching this movie is like reading a large-type edition of a long and workmanlike biography.

The key politician in King’s sights is President Lyndon B. Johnson (Tom Wilkinson). One of the film’s major disappointments is its failure to imbue LBJ with a scale or fascination equal to his towering domestic accomplishments and imposing wheeler-dealer personality. The script depicts him simply as a beleaguered Chief Executive who stubbornly sticks to his own timetable. Having signed the milestone Civil Rights Act of 1964, the president tells King that his first priority is waging the War on Poverty to benefit impoverished blacks and whites alike, no matter what the facts are on the ground in Selma. He agrees that the federal government should guarantee the right of blacks and other minorities to vote, forcing the ban of prohibitive poll taxes and bogus literacy tests. But he thinks that pushing this issue soon after the civil rights bill would jeopardize his anti-poverty crusade. In the movie, he resents King so much for hectoring him that he gives his consent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s extortionist tactics, which include recording King’s infidelities and mailing a damning sex audiotape to his home. DuVernay’s clever use of printed legends from FBI logs help her set the time and place of crucial scenes and maintain a modicum of suspense. (Dylan Baker plays Hoover as an albino snake.) The film barely acknowledges the genuine anguish Johnson was suffering over U.S. policy in Southeast Asia—a serious omission, since the first U.S. combat division reached Vietnam on the very same day as the first aborted march from Selma to Montgomery. In this movie, the president finally gives King exactly what he wants because he doesn’t want to be seen as a small-minded cracker like Roth’s George Wallace. A more generous view of events would suggest that Johnson welcomed the pressure King put on him to do what he knew was right all along. Selma gives King and only King the moral high ground.

Often a first-class actor, Wilkinson fails to summon an iota of LBJ’s sloppy energy. Instead, he acts like a man in a perpetual snit, until the president gives his stirring plea to Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Even then, the way DuVernay sets up the action and the way Wilkinson plays it, when LBJ says “We shall overcome,” he sends a message of reconciliation specifically to King. It’s a reductive interpretation. Johnson was talking to King, but he was also, in a rare feat of eloquence, addressing the better angels of each American’s nature. He had used every hustle in his arsenal to advance a progressive domestic agenda. For Johnson and for the country, that occasion was cathartic.

In the greatest speech of a dreary public speaker, was Johnson trying to rise to the level of Martin Luther King Jr.? The civil rights leader, of course, was a magnificent orator. The film’s chief pleasure is hearing Oyelowo deliver roof-rattling variations on the preacher/activist’s call-and-response style. King had the podium artistry to inject adrenaline into gravitas. When seized by the moment, he entered a zone that was at once spiritual and sensual. Oyelowo emphasizes the visionary roll of King’s distinctive cadence, then adds his own startling staccato punctuation. His achievement is all the more impressive since the words he speaks are not King’s. DuVernay wrote the speeches herself, to bypass copyrighted material. Her pastiches lack the sinewy religious texture of King’s own writing, but their sleekness allows Oyelowo to connect with youthful, secular audiences who’ve never read the King James Bible. It’s when King descends from the lectern that Oyelowo gets into trouble. He’s praised his director for letting him take an extra second or two in playing out a scene, but his conversations often unfold in the same tempo as his sermons and stem-winders, especially when King is with Coretta. Did he actually speak this sagely and ceremoniously at home?

The script for Selma suffers from naming emotions rather than conjuring them and from invoking ideas rather than dramatizing them. In what should be the movie’s boldest domestic scene, Coretta and King listen to an audiotape that’s allegedly of him making love to another woman. But all Coretta wants to know is whether King honestly loves her—and whether he loves any of “the others.” Should these be the sole questions? Despite Oyelowo’s array of facial contortions and Ejogo’s haunting, tremulous elegance as Coretta, the movie leaves you with only the most general notion imaginable of King’s marital guilt. Selma acknowledges King’s infidelity without suggesting how it fit into his temperament or affected his marriage.

The movie is even more evasive about the most intriguing and under-chronicled episode in the Selma voting-rights campaign: King’s decision to curtail the second try at a march to Montgomery. He retreated from state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the town’s “Bloody Sunday” two days earlier, after lawmen broke up their battle line and cleared a way for the marchers. King kneels in prayer before turning back. Is he looking for direction from God? According to King biographer and civil rights historian Taylor Branch (in At Canaan’s Edge), King had been reluctant to flout a federal court order prohibiting a Selma to Montgomery march. Now “King stood stunned at the divide, with but an instant to decide whether this was a trap or a miraculous parting of the Red Sea. If he stepped ahead, the thrill of heroic redemption for Bloody Sunday could give way to any number of reversals—arrests, attacks, laughingstock exhaustion in hostile country—all with marchers compromised as flagrant transgressors of the federal order. If he stepped back, he could lose or divide the movement under a cloud of timidity. If he hesitated or failed, at least some of the marchers would surge through the corridor of blue uniforms toward their goal. ‘We will go back to the church now!’ shouted King, turning around.” Another biographer, David J. Garrow, says that King had cut a deal with one of LBJ’s emissaries to stop until the march was cleared in federal court. The movie, by contrast, shies away from practical explanations and leaves King’s oddest move in a haze. King turns around and walks slowly back, amid his puzzled, angry flock.

The supporting actors bring oomph to their small roles and are dead ringers for their historical counterparts. They include Andre Holland as Andrew Young, Wendell Pierce as Hosea Williams, Common as James Bevel, Ruben Santiago-Hudson as Bayard Rustin, and Stephan James as young John Lewis. Along with Oyelowo, and Domingo as Abernathy, they imbue the whole ensemble with comradely warmth and solidity. It’s hard to resist this cast’s portrayal of idealism in action, or to feel any distance from the characters’ pain as truncheons scar their flesh. They act with the vitality of performers caught up in what Branch calls “Selma’s unique collaboration between a citizen’s movement and elected government.” This particular triumph was to win blacks their voting rights while setting an example of focused, disciplined protest. Its tragedy is that this inspiring episode can still be called “unique.”

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s 2013 smash This Is the End, which also starred Rogen and James Franco and gave them the clout to do The Interview, put several kinds of “joint” in the idea of “joint identity.” When the stars and their friends weren’t smoking weed, they were spanking the monkey. Depicting a fictionalized version of the “Judd Apatow gang” as a team of wankers, Rogen and Goldberg turned their scathing yet adoring eyes on the frat-boy type of male bonding that’s tantamount to self-love. Not surprisingly, the film’s low-comic high point was a proud confession of masturbatory feats. This Is the End was funny in a gleefully disreputable way, but it also announced a creative climax. The movie revitalized “bromance” by actually burning it to a crisp in a fiery Hollywood apocalypse, featuring a Satan who inspired penis envy among guys obsessed with their own members.

When Rogen, Goldberg, and Dan Sterling came up with the script for The Interview, they saw it as another way to goose the bromantic comedy back to life and even into relevance, this time using real-world catastrophe. Scrape away the external controversies and what’s remarkable about it is how snugly it fits into a buddy-movie formula. Starring Franco as a dufus celebrity interviewer, Dave Skylark, and Rogen as his smart, self-loathing producer, Aaron Rapoport, the movie tries to satirize and celebrate bro-therly love while rocketing it into the realm of nuclear geopolitics. As everybody knows by now, this team scores an interview with Kim Jong-un (Randall Park), a Skylark fan, only to be seduced by CIA Agent Lacey (Lizzy Caplan) into trying to assassinate North Korea’s supreme leader. What you don’t know until you see the film is that its MAD magazine parodies of crass American journalism and North Korean mind control surround more protestations of comradely love than you’d find in the team-ups of Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, and Newman and Redford—combined. The novelty is that the rival who tests the pals’ Krazy Glue–like bond is Kim. The premise of the farce is that Skylark’s ultra-impressionable nature makes it easy for the dictator to draw him into a man crush.

If Franco were a competent comic actor, The Interview might have stood on its own two feet, albeit in floppy clown shoes. But Franco isn’t skillful enough at embodying or parodying Skylark’s idiotic glibness. This actor’s method for impersonating a shallow tabloid-TV interviewer is to squint with concentration or to contort into expressions of oversize enthusiasm. Perhaps worse, Franco mugs his way through over-the-top demonstrations of Skylark’s love for Rapoport, his instant lust for Agent Lacey, and his summer-camp camaraderie with Kim. To be fair to Franco, his character even as written is, to quote Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s Love and Death, “incredibly jejune.” He treats The Lord of the Rings as his Bible. He repeatedly refers to Rapoport as the Gandalf or Samwise Gamgee to his Frodo. Skylark’s pre-Kim coup as an interviewer comes when Eminem casually admits that he’s gay. The rapper, it turns out, has been dropping “a breadcrumb trail” in his lyrics, pointing listeners toward his homosexuality. He’s been “playing peekaboo” about his sexual preference with his audience, all along. Skylark himself waxes enthusiastic about the “money shots” in gay porn. The movie continually flirts with outing him as gay or bisexual, much as This Is the End did the character “James Franco.” The onslaught of nudge-nudge, wink-wink gags click only as a “meta” treatment of high- and low-media fascination with Franco’s off-screen sexuality. (An essay in the current Cineaste, “What’s So Queer About James Franco?,” says that Franco “is playing this cat-and-mouse game with our perceptions, expectations, projections and always shifting conclusions about him, his celebrity, and his work.” Nathan Lee in his FILM COMMENT review of Interior. Leather Bar. puts it more directly: “What does it mean that James Franco is playing with the fact that we know that he knows that we want to know whether or not…?”)

Rogen and Goldberg fit promising social and political burlesques around their buddy story. Rapaport is a Columbia-educated newsman who seeks to push Skylark into honest-to-God reporting. Even when the interview with Kim is conditioned on asking scripted questions, Skylark cajoles Rapaport into going through with the event because it will catapult them into the broadcasting big leagues. I envisioned Rapoport as the baggy-pants equivalent of disillusioned spies in wised-up espionage fiction. After all, Rapoport recognizes the moral quandaries in assassination. He could have been the farcical equivalent of Rupert Friend’s Quinn in Showtime’s Homeland, who goes through a “plague on all your houses” phase, then comes to his senses when he sees the depths of enemy depravity. No such luck. Rapaport’s peak accomplishment is hiding a forearm-sized canister containing poison up his butt. Naturally, as Rapaport does the dirty but necessary deed, Skylark and Agent Lacey set off a fusillade of comic analogies to anal sex. Rogen told Rolling Stone’s Josh Eells: “The movie itself is kind of our attempt to do what Aaron is doing in the movie. And it was born out of a very similar thought: Are we gonna just make movies about guys trying to get laid over and over again? Or, now that we have people’s attention, maybe we can focus it on something slightly more relevant—while still doing shit we think is funny. Which, for better or for worse, is sticking missiles up people’s asses.” In The Interview, it’s definitely for worse.

Rogen and Goldberg display their genuine talent for comic hyperbole in the opening tableau: a small Korean girl sings an anti-Yankee anthem to a vast military audience. (It turns out she’s the opening number for a missile blast.) She’s irresistible when she warbles that it fills her tiny little heart with joy to think of Americans suffering fates worse than death. The rest of the film relies more on highly variable gross-out humor. Like politicians playing to their base, Rogen and Goldberg don’t stint on gore and vomit. In the movie, North Koreans believe their supreme leader neither urinates nor defecates. The Interview is so chock-full of scatology that debunking that myth might have been its raison d’être.

Diana Bang conjures a terse, crash-and-burn panache for her role of a North Korean propaganda chief named Sook, who ignites Rapaport’s id. Sook has the brains to ask when Americans will stop making the mistake of killing enemy leaders instead of exposing their perfidy to their captive populations. Too bad the movie’s script moots the question. Sook gets more to do than Caplan’s crisp, droll Agent Lacey. But Rogen isn’t deft enough as a physical comic to wring laughs from the film’s most clever setup: Rapaport trying to make love to Sook one-handed. The actor who gives the most rounded performance in every way is Park, who is equally convincing as an ebullient, overgrown fanboy and a world-conqueror wannabe. Rogen is far better at directing other performers—or at least performers who are not close friends—than he is at directing himself. He’s right on the mark when he says in RS that he, Goldberg, and Sterling wrote Kim “as more robotic and strict—what you would expect—but Randall played him as a lot more sheepish and shy, which was much funnier.” Park’s instincts underline the wittiest aspect of the script: its depiction of Kim Jong-un as an Oedipal wreck who never recovered from knowing Kim Jong-il considered him less than a man for liking a drink as “gay” as margaritas. Kim’s inferiority complex not only connects to Skylark’s but also makes Kim hilariously volatile in the role of divine paternal figure. The Interview’s depiction of a pressure-cooker cult of personality really is daring, in ways that go beyond the guest-dictator appearance of Saddam Hussein in The Big Lebowski or even the uproarious treachery of Kim Jong-il in Team America: World Police. Whether or not the real Kim tried to sabotage the movie, Park’s fictional Kim steals it.

You don’t call a film Leviathan if you want it to be perceived as a gentle, intimate little art-house offering. You choose that name either to decorate an opulent SFX blockbuster—which Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film most certainly is not—or if you want to signal that you’re making a heavyweight statement, with lofty metaphysical connotations and with a heavyweight target in sight. That about fits the Russian director’s remarkable fourth feature. Leviathan certainly carries metaphysical resonance, sometimes explicitly invoked, sometimes alluded to in cinematography that conveys a stark impression of human isolation and vulnerability in the midst of indifferent nature; that won’t come as any surprise to admirers of Zvyagintsev’s 2003 debut The Return.

As for the film’s polemical dimension, its object is contemporary Russia—depicted as a realm of corruption, petty tyranny, and misery for the struggling powerless. A portrait of Vladimir Putin hangs conspicuously on the wall above the desk of a small-town despot; there’s a sly but cutting gag at Putin’s expense in the film’s most openly comic sequence, and a hard-to-miss glimpse of Pussy Riot graffiti in an extract of TV news footage. Even so, Leviathan received funding from Russia’s Ministry of Culture, and the film is the country’s official submission for the foreign-language Oscar.

This might suggest that filmmakers like Zvyagintsev have an easy ride, despite what we generally understand to be the situation of oppositional Russian artists. The reality is somewhat different. Zvyagintsev has necessarily been cautious in interviews (pointing out, for example, that the Russian president’s portrait is displayed as a matter of course in local government offices such as the one he shows). It is also known that Russia’s Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky disapproves of Leviathan—supposedly for the time-honored reason that Russian films should be upbeat and inspiring rather than pessimistic, which Leviathan undoubtedly is.

We should welcome Leviathan’s pessimism: it’s cause for celebration that Zvyagintsev has managed to make a feature this politically provocative and this artistically eloquent. One of the outstanding films of 2014, Leviathan lives up to its title: it’s a behemoth of intelligent contemporary cinema.

The setting is a rundown fishing community in northwest Russia, on the Barents Sea. Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is an ex-soldier turned car repairman who lives in a large, ramshackle, but cozy house on a windswept coast with his teenage son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) and his young second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova, who played the cynical daughter in Zvyagintsev’s last film Elena). The town’s corrupt, self-serving mayor Shelevyat (Roman Madyanov) quite openly intends to appropriate Kolya’s house, prime real estate for speculation or perhaps for building a personal palace. To contest Shelevyat’s court order, Kolya has asked old army buddy Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovitchenkov), now a hotshot Moscow lawyer, to come up and help him. It’s clear that the legal decks are stacked against Kolya. In an extraordinary courtroom scene, a female judge—soon revealed to be one of Shelevyat’s stooges—recites the facts of the case in a long, uninflected machine-gun delivery, making it clear that this law only speaks, but doesn’t listen.

Shelevyat—played mesmerizingly by Madyanov as a spoiled, overgrown, drunken baby—has the law and its enforcers in his pocket. A shot of the town square contains, in utterly matter-of-fact manner, a big black car parked with attendant goons, a little ominous detail that quietly tells how power is exercised here. Luckily, Dmitri is around to defend his friend; he simply has to mention to a spluttering Shelevyat his important connections in Moscow, prior to pointing out that he can easily discredit the mayor in the media, and it’s clear that this smooth-suited white knight has all the right weapons at his disposal. But Shelevyat is prepared to carry out his measures in the old brutal baronial way, and besides, Dmitri proves not to be entirely an ideal person for Kolya to have visiting.

In one magnificent, uproarious scene, the life of Kolya and his blue-collar circle proves to offer more space for joy and rebellion than we might think. It shows a birthday outing for a friend, who comes generously equipped with vodka and weaponry—and it’s a mark of Zvyagintsev’s and co-writer Oleg Negin’s light touch that the potent combination of Stolichnaya and Kalashnikovs yields satirical comedy rather than tragedy or horror (as they would surely have done in the hands of Russia’s late master of macabre bleakness, Aleksei Balabanov). Instead, after all the available bottles have been shot to pieces, the friend gets another bunch of targets out of his car: official portraits of Russian leaders including Lenin, Brezhnev, and Gorbachev. “Haven’t you got anyone more recent?” asks Kolya—to which his friend slyly answers, “Not enough historical perspective. Ripen them up on the wall for a bit.”

The film’s key theme appears to be political corruption, the consistent root of Kolya’s grief. He goes to the courtroom to lodge his appeal only to find the premises mysteriously deserted, so that there’s no way for him to officially submit it. When he attempts to voice his rage, with no one to listen, he’s clapped behind bars. It’s a situation we might conventionally think of as Kafka-esque, but here it harks back to blackly farcical depictions of Russian bureaucracy by Gogol and other 19th-century writers.

But there are two other strands to Kolya’s woes. One is personal: his apparent failings as a husband to the manifestly frustrated Lilya, and possibly also as a father to Roma, who’s none too ready to accept her as a mother. Weatherbeaten and terse (Serebryakov rather resembles Richard Harris at his early-Sixties craggiest), Kolya drinks too much and, it emerges, has a brutal side that contributes to his downfall.

The other strand is metaphysical. Like Zvyagintsev’s second feature, The Banishment (07), Leviathan wears its religious themes on its sleeve—but in a more direct, down-to-earth manner than that rather portentous, overtly Tarkovskian exercise. In Leviathan, the Russian Orthodox Church plays a prominent part, and a most worldly one; Shelevyat is hand in glove with the powerful local priest, who plies him with pious sayings and urges him to use his might to sort out his problems. This same priest is seen in a coda, preaching in a luxuriantly gilded church to congregants in fine coats and furs, who leave in a cortege of limos.

In contrast, there’s the somewhat Dostoevskian figure of poor priest Father Vassily. Challenged by an angry Kolya—“Where’s your merciful God Almighty?”—Vassily recites the famous Biblical passage of Job 41: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook, or tie down its tongue with a rope?” The implication is that Kolya should submit with endurance and humility to his lot, like Job before the authority of God. But the film leaves some doubt about the precise identity of its Leviathan. For “Leviathan” also signifies the State in Hobbes’s work of the same name, the worldly body to which citizens must submit so as not to live in anarchy (“the war of all against all”). Yet the film makes it clear that the state that governs Kolya and his kind is a tarnished deity that seeks to grind down resistance. And it’s apparent too that Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan is not just Russia, but humanity itself—potentially glorious, but shown here as debased and out of touch with true values, as it was in the director’s fine but tendentious Antonioni-esque Elena (11), in which TV, gyms, expensive cars and modernist architecture alike bespoke the death of the soul. 

Meanwhile, the metaphysical resonance of the Leviathan image emerges in two remarkable shots. One is the appearance of a whale skeleton encountered by Roma on the beach. If this is an image of God, then it’s of a martyred deity, brought brutally down to earth and a condition of mortal decay; we’re inevitably reminded that whales are perilously close to extinction, and the implication is that so too are God, and any kind of spiritual and human values, in the world depicted here.

The other Leviathan image is an understated shot of a whale surfacing in the sea, at some small distance offshore. I don’t know whether this is real, or a subtle CGI effect, but either way it’s a very striking shot, and it occurs just before a crucial turn in the narrative. The whale’s ominous appearance here marks all that follows with a deep, unresolvable scar of uncertainty—and everyone I know seems to have a different interpretation of what happens at this point. The image also emphasises the isolation of Lilya, the story’s most emotionally approachable character: she’s seen alone on two walks by the water, and working at a fish processing plant, where Leviathan, or his smaller relatives, really are drawn out with hooks, and then beheaded. Lilya, as much as her husband, emerges as the film’s protagonist, an exemplary sufferer herself. That’s partly testament to Lyadova’s strong, enigmatic, and at points powerfully sexual presence; exuding an earthy weariness, she looks rather like Mira Sorvino after a very heavy working day.

Leviathan is Zvyagintsev’s most successful film since The Return: impressive, and teasingly elusive as Elena was, it too obviously had an axe to grind about modern life and values. His follow-up hits a perfect balance between polemic and mystery, partly because of Mikhail Krichman’s extraordinary panoramic landscape photography. It’s part of the great enigma of cinematography that landscapes shot in the right way can bring a genuine metaphysical or spiritual dimension to dramas that might otherwise feel entirely earthbound, and the bleak beauty of Krichman’s widescreen perspectives bring Leviathan a genuinely numinous weight. The closing shots of sea, sky, and land powerfully but gnomically suggest impending apocalypse: you could hardly imagine a more foreboding ending, yet overall the film’s quiet authority makes for a strange euphoria.

Norwegian director Morten Tyldum might seem like an odd choice to tell the story of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who led a team of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, England, tasked with breaking the German Enigma code. Turing was also an eccentric and profoundly secretive man, persecuted for his homosexuality, until he was found dead of cyanide poisoning in 1954.

Tyldum, educated at New York’s School of the Visual Arts, spent a decade working in Scandinavian television, making a name for himself through shorts and music videos. He made his feature debut with Buddy (03), a low-budget romantic comedy that connected with critics and audiences alike, earning the Amanda Award (presented at the Norwegian International Film Festival) for best Norwegian film of the year. He followed up with two thrillers adapted from best-selling novels, Fallen Angels (08) and Headhunters (11), expert genre films with refreshing emphases on characterization. The latter became the most commercially successful Norwegian film in history, leading to many lucrative offers from Hollywood.

He chose instead The Imitation Game for his English-language debut, which FILM COMMENT’s Laura Kern identified as continued proof of his talents: “Tyldum’s handling demonstrates the same smooth assurance and skill with actors—the performances are first-rate across the board.” Tyldum recently spoke with FILM COMMENT about his collaborative methods, his affinity for outsiders, and cracking the code of Alan Turing.

The Imitation Game

This is your first English-language feature, and you’ve chosen to make a film about an outsider. What perspective did being one of the few non-Britons involved in the production give you on Alan Turing?

Being Scandinavian, I watched British movies and grew up side by side with British culture. In many ways, our nations are practically neighbors. But at the same time, I do think it’s important that this is a story of an outsider, and being an outsider means that you have that perspective on it. I think also that’s a little bit why I became so obsessed with Alan Turing. There was something very relatable about him, even though I’m very different from him. It’s impossible not to be outraged by the injustice that was done him. This is a man who we all owe so much to, who did all these phenomenal things, and was treated so badly. You can get upset thinking about it, but at the same time, there’s something very touching and human about him.

At the core of the character is this little boy who’s so lost, and to me it’s a story about unconsummated love—how strong that is. It’s amazing to think that young gay love sort of inspired computer science. He was obsessed with creating consciousness, creating an intellect, re-creating something that he had lost. Starting down that path and having those ideas is so unique. Much of this happens in the Thirties, when—at the age of 23—he theorized the computer. It’s incredible.

You said that you grew up with British history, but when did you first become aware of Alan Turing? He’s been kind of a marginalized figure until now.

I had heard a little bit about Turing machines, that they had something to do with computers. I was blown away by how little I knew—his whole team at Bletchley Park, how important it was in the war, how many millions of lives he saved—and I think that happened to so many people who wanted to do this project. Winston Churchill said Alan Turing was the single most important contributor [to the victory over the Nazis]. Just because he was convicted of gross indecency, he was pushed into the shadows of history. There’s a famous quote, which he wrote in a letter to a friend: “Turing thinks machines can think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines cannot think.” His ideas were becoming ridiculed simply because he was gay, and why he wasn’t so widely known—that whole secrecy act, that dealt with everything that was happening at Bletchley. Everything was burned, everything was razed, and everybody kept quiet. It means that everything that happened wasn’t recognized until 25 years after his death.

So it’s shocking and but also very moving, and everyone got very emotionally involved in the making of this movie. All these incredible, talented people—both in front of and behind the camera—wanted to come aboard on this small, independent movie. And they did it for a fraction of their [usual] salary.

He was granted a royal pardon about a month after you finished shooting. Do you think that was because of the film, or just a coincidence?

I don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate. I know that there have been a lot of people working for his pardon. I think the bigger question to ask is why the pardon matters when there’s nothing to pardon. He did nothing wrong, and he shouldn’t be singled out for injustice. There was a beautiful Twitter message that I got, which said: “I’m a 92-year-old gay man who was wrongfully convicted for gross indecency, and I saw your movie in tears.” I mean, he should be pardoned. It’s so many—it’s 50,000, and some are still alive who were convicted for this. This pardon should go out to everybody who ever bore the injustice of this law, not just Alan Turing.

Headhunters

You were coming off the most successful film in Norwegian history—you must have had your choice of projects. You must have been offered a lot of Hollywood thrillers, I imagine.

Which I love! I hope that every movie I do will be different, so I read a lot of action thrillers, superhero movies, all that, and some really good ones. But I don’t think you pick your project; you fall in love with it. It’s something that just happens. I never would have chosen to do a character-driven, dialogue-heavy British period movie, because it would’ve scared me. I couldn’t have started with anything more complicated. There are no explosions to hide behind. I moved myself outside my comfort zone, which in many ways was exhilarating. Headhunters was a darker, sexier action thriller, but in many ways character-driven and with a sort of complex narrative, same as this one. There are similarities, but also huge differences. I like that, to challenge myself.

How much pressure did you feel to be historically accurate?

A lot. You can get every factual part correct and completely fail to recapture the emotionally accuracy—the spirit of the time, what the pressure was like. It’s always easy to nitpick on details, because you have to compress things when you have two hours to tell a movie. You have to take different things that are all correct in their way, and you have to combine them all into one moment. For instance, that Joan Clarke wasn’t recruited by a crossword puzzle. Alan Turing did design crossword puzzles, and he did put them in the Times, and he did recruit people to MI6 with them. Joan Clarke was recruited in a different way, but she was that smart, so how do you have a scene that shows her intelligence, the very real connection she had with Alan Turing, and what an original, outside-of-the-box thinker Alan Turing was? You have that crossword puzzle.

We were really nervous about getting that aspect right, especially when we showed it to his family. Some of them were around 18 when he died, so they’ve been living with his legacy and their memories of him. They’ve been incredibly supportive, and one of them said that watching the film was like watching him. Bletchley Park, and other institutes featured in the film, have all been totally supportive. A lot of them have said that we actually captured Alan Turing and his life.

You shot on a lot of actual locations, including in Bletchley Park. Werner Herzog has talked about “the voodoo of location,” which I think refers to the ways filming on the spot where the story occurred carries a sort of psychic charge. Did you experience that?

Yeah. We shot at the Sherborne School, and saw the mural plate of [Turing’s first love] Christopher Morcom. It was emotional for everybody. I shot as many interiors as I could at Bletchley Park, so if we’d dusted for fingerprints, we probably would’ve found Alan Turing’s fingerprints. I think it does something to the performances—it does something to the actors to be part of that.

We also used real relics—many of the props are from the war. The first time we brought a real enigma machine into the rehearsal room, the actors were touching it and saying, “This is the one we’re beating.” It reminded them that this is a real story. It’s a thriller, it’s a war story, it’s a love story—it has everything, but this actually is real. This really happened, and that’s inescapable when you’re touching these machines. We tried to use as many of the real things as we could have or duplicate. All the people based their work on things that we copied, that is saved from what little they had left from Bletchley Park. The [codebreaking] machine called Christopher is based on the original machine they built, with the dials and everything. We added some red cabling, because to him it was more than a machine, it symbolized the loss he had. So we had all these red cablings sort of like to have blood veins for Christopher, and we made it sound more complex because it was just like a character itself. So it means more to me actually than it means to the audience in many ways.

The Imitation Game

The title of the film—The Imitation Game—would seem to have a double meaning, referring not only to the ways that computers are programmed to imitate human thought patterns, but also to the struggle of Alan Turing to imitate social cues, to understand humor and collaboration.

You’re right: it’s a beautiful double meaning. It’s not a coincidence that a closeted gay man imitating a straight man—you know, hiding—comes up with the idea of machines imitating human behavior. He’s ultimately as important a philosopher as he is a mathematician. We are only what we can convince others that we are, only what others can concede that we are. So if a machine can convince him that it’s human… that’s the idea behind the imitation game, what makes us human, what makes us think? Because, like Keira Knightley’s character says in the movie, just because somebody thinks differently than you do, doesn’t mean they’re not thinking. And if he accepts that idea, that thinking doesn’t have to be the way I’m thinking, then why can’t machines think? That’s the imitation game.

Wouldn’t you say, though, that being a gay man wasn’t the only thing that made him an outsider? He was also a deeply introverted man and a very literal thinker.

Being gay was just one part of it. The biggest thing that made him an outsider was how he was thinking differently. Peter Hilton, the young man in the codebreaking team, said later in his life that there were so many bright, smart people at Hut 8 [Turing’s section], and there were a lot of good ideas being thrown out, but most of the time when someone came up with one, he thought, “That’s a great idea but I could’ve thought of that.” But every time Alan Turing came up with an idea, he always thought, “I would have never come up with that.” His ideas always came from a completely different place, from a completely different angle. He was complex: he could be very funny, but he could also be very hard to communicate with. If you stopped being interesting to him, he’d leave you in the middle of a sentence and just walk away. He was an odd duck, as his mother called him.

I wanted to show that his gayness didn’t define who he was. I think it’s a disservice to gay characters in movies that every time they’re in a movie, they have to be gay first, and whatever else they’re doing is secondary. So to me, Alan Turing is first of all a genius that was one of the most important thinkers of our century, and then he was a gay man who was being convicted and very wrongfully prosecuted for just being a gay man. And yes, it did influence the way he saw life. Because imitating and hiding came very naturally to him. But it’s not the defining feature of him, at the end of the day. Or it shouldn’t be.

So even more than being a thriller or biography, it seems to me that the movie is an argument for the necessity of oddballs and eccentrics.

Completely. An outsider doesn’t fit into the norm, and has to create his own position, and that is something that I’ve always been fascinated with. The fear of someone who’s different has always been one of our biggest problems. Fearing a different sexuality, religion, political view, nationality, or race has caused so much strife. It sounds cliché, but it’s very true.

Did you approach the film as kind of a process of decrypting Turing’s life? Because I felt like the jumping back and forth in time presented him as an intricate puzzle to be solved.

Yes, it’s a mystery. He was a mystery to me, and in many ways he is a mystery to a lot of people. There’s so much about him that we don’t really know. We wanted to present the movie as a mystery, as a puzzle, as something you have to unravel to understand more and more—and hopefully the answer will be Alan Turing. The answer will be slightly different to everyone who sees the movie. That’s what we tried to do.

He was obsessed with puzzles. He didn’t call it “the imitation test.” He called it “the imitation game.” Because he loved games. He loved puzzles. He loved figuring out things. He invented his own board games; he invented his own chess games. He had a very playful nature.

The Imitation Game

What’s next for you? I know you’ve talked about developing an adaptation of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Is that something you’re still working on?

Yes. Again, it’s an outsider character. I love William Gibson’s novels. I’m also developing a project with Warner, and I have a third project, so right now I have material which I really love, and I want to get it right and make it ready before I go into production. But I feel very lucky and privileged that I’m being sent good material that I can really respond to.

What appeals to you about William Gibson in particular?

Again, this girl [Pattern Recognition heroine Cayce Pollard] that has this incredible gift that actually makes her an outsider. Makes her somebody who doesn’t fit in. I realize it’s a recurring theme [laughs]. It’s her struggle to find meaning in her life. It’s what we all struggle for—to find what feels right for us, and what feels superficial. I also love that William Gibson embraces technology. So often when you’re dealing with technology, it’s portrayed as something that alienates us or makes us separate off into something bad, but he actually embraces it. It can be as good as it is bad, which is actually the truth. It’s uniting people as much as it’s alienating people.

You call outsider-ness a recurring theme. Is that something that resonates especially with you, or is it just a universal facet of the human experience?

I think it’s both. It’s something about finding meaning: you as an outsider trying to understand where you are, and your role in it, and who you are, and not trying to fit into something which is a shape or form that’s already been made for you. An outsider doesn’t fit into the norm, and has to create his own position, and that is something which I’ve always been fascinated with.

What We Do in the Shadows 

The January/February 2015 issue of FILM COMMENT leads off with our cover story: Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s hilarious documentary-style What We Do in the Shadows, an essential vampire film with a difference (and vive la différence—Jonathan Romney explains). Amy Taubin pinpoints the crushing import of Ava DuVernay’s Selma for our times. Michelle Orange dissects Force Majeure and other squirm-inducing films by Ruben Östlund, and Russian critic Anton Dolin is our guide to Aleksei German’s final, medieval-sci-fi film, Hard to Be a God, taking us the point of no return. Plus: Molly Haskell on Still Alice, Chuck Stephens on Jill Banner, and reviews of Mommy, American Sniper, A Most Violent Year, Timbuktu, Wild Tales, and ’71. And don’t miss Jeff Berg’s look at the state of America’s (headline-grabbing) art-house theaters, complete with a state-by-state directory.

It’s also time for our essential year-end package, featuring the Top 20 released and unreleased films of 2014, Scott Eyman on how hunting down films has changed, Tony Rayns’s Terra Incognita list of contemporary Asian films, Personal Best lists of the year from our contributors, David Filipi’s animation highlights, and, for our final trick, Howard Hampton ties together The Homesman and Only Lovers Left Alive.

View the full Table of Contents for January/February 2015, with links to articles. To subscribe to FILM COMMENT, click here.

To begin with the end: your correspondent’s maiden voyage to the Venice film festival concluded with a stroll through the 14th International Architecture Exhibition, also organized by the Biennale. The exhibition’s Rem Koolhaas–curated “Elements of Architecture” showcase turned its Central Pavilion into a life-sized encyclopedia of human dwellings and all their components. All of which felt a little like a getting lost in a giant film-studio storeroom, surrounded by stories waiting to be assembled.

Pasolini

By then, I’d already seen a healthy chunk of the film program at this year’s edition, dutifully shuttling among the temple-like monumental theaters at the festival’s heart. And a clear standout, though not universally acclaimed, was Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini, a biographical sketch that saw the self-exiled New York filmmaker continuing to lay his hands on white-hot material in European politics and culture. Making its world premiere a few months after Ferrara’s Welcome to New York in Cannes, this exquisitely tuned portrait looks at the pioneering gay Marxist filmmaker-poet-theorist through his last days on Earth in November 1975, all interspersed with fanciful/macabre scenes from his unmade film Porno-Teo-Kolossal. Willem Dafoe embodies the 53-year-old Pasolini with a sensual cool and watchful intelligence, and the script by Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah) luxuriates in the loving environment of his family and friends and in the outspoken intellectual’s choice quotations (starting with a gauntlet-throwing television interview). Pasolini’s insights at this point in his career have an apocalyptic ring, and that suits Ferrara well, in elegiac mode here, aided by supple, melancholically beautiful cinematography by Stefano Falivene, especially in the portrayal of the artist’s final, violent night. The act of Pasolini’s murder is rendered in full, twinned indelibly with acts of desire, and as for Ferrara’s opinion of who the guilty parties might be, the prominent placement of EUR, Rome’s Fascist architectural showcase, in montages is hard to ignore.

Heaven Knows What

A menace of a different sort shadows the aimless heroin addicts of Heaven Knows What (which, unlike Pasolini, quickly acquired U.S. distribution, by Weinstein’s RADiUS shingle). Panic in Needle Park—the 1971 Al Pacino addiction romance set in New York’s Upper West Side—was the touchstone for early takes on the film, which centers on Harley (Arielle Holmes), trapped in cruel love with the vicious Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). But this is something else again, the spirited product of wonderfully dissonant collaboration: the pointlessly cutesy title may show the hand of directors Josh and Benny Safdie (cf. Go Get Some Rosemary aka Daddy Longlegs), but they’ve chosen some vocal partners who keep the film fired up. Holmes is the most apparent, author of her own memoir of addiction and homelessness, Mad Love in New York City, and a wild-haired natural performer and risk-taker who holds her own under a potentially exploitative premise. But just as crucial is co-screenwriter-editor Ronald Bronstein, himself the director of the under-sung Frownland (07), and here confirming himself as a vital creative force in the Safdies’ varying career; the star of Daddy Longlegs infuses Heaven Knows What with jagged rhythms that play against the usual cinematic beats of a self-destructive life on the streets. DP Sean Price Williams mans the eagle-eyed camera that gives the Safdies’ rambles their stolen look, while the whole movie’s howl is unified by gloriously excessive, unpredictably deployed blasts of analog electronic arrangements by Isao Tomita. Its appeal came as a surprise to me, no fan of their loaded documentary outing about a fallen basketball star, Lenny Cooke.

In the Basement

I did know fairly well what to expect with In the Basement, Ulrich Seidl’s documentary about Austrians and their subterranean pursuits, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s almost a surprise that Seidl hadn’t forayed downstairs already, having portrayed other depths of experience from prostitution (Models) to religious martyrdom (Paradise: Faith) to near-zoophilia (Animal Love) to sheer shut-in nuttiness (Loss Is to Be Expected). His selection of regular folk—presented less as oddities to gawk at than as the invisible norm, perhaps—include an opera enthusiast with an underground gun range, a bunch of drinking buddies who might politely be called Hitler nostalgists, and a female-dom S/M couple whose scrotally challenging practices reliably elicited nervous chuckles. As often with Seidl, there’s something satisfying about the plainspoken mystery of human desires, but another result of the film is its underlining of the tension between the varying fidelity to the personalities and psychologies of his subjects, and the stirrings of the director’s own creative urges—which, for example, lead him to partly fabricate episodes about a woman who looks after lifelike baby dolls kept in boxes in a storage room. The grounds for pause isn’t deception but rather whether his aesthetic decisions tend to flatten out or obscure those of his subjects.

Goodnight Mommy

The freaky goings-on in Goodnight Mommy might well deserve their own episode in Seidl’s film, but they’re decidedly not limited to the basement. It’s a piece of stringently nasty Gothic home horror from Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, the latter a critic co-directing her first feature but a already a veteran collaborator with Seidl, her husband. In a modernist house in the country, two blond  pre-teen boys begin to suspect that their mother—her face obscured with bandages after an accident, and her mood distinctly soured—may not be who she appears to be. The German title, Ich Seh Ich Seh, suggests the kid’s game “I Spy,” and part of the fun is watching the growing boldness on both sides as parent-child relations cruelly degenerate and the mystery of the situation ripens and rots. The confinement drama, though perhaps predictable to attentive horror veterans, pays off with some prime living-room Grand Guignol, and the deceptively lucid imagery is, as the credits proudly proclaim, “filmed in glorious 35mm.”

The Look of Silence

The real-life horrors of Indonesian genocide received another look by Joshua Oppenheimer in his follow-up to The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence acts in many ways as a concerted complement to its mind-bending predecessor but with its own meaningful shock treatment: our guide this time is an Indonesian, Adi, whose older brother was murdered during the Sixties genocide; and the documentary structure is somewhat more serial and more static in its interviews, as Adi confronts killers in often dangerous visits. It’s a stomach-churning watch, but Oppenheimer, ever vigilant against the possibility of numbing his audience, complicates the experience with sometimes uncomfortable scenes of Adi’s elderly and infirm parents at home. The film was shot after The Act of Killing was edited but before it was released, and Oppenheimer’s canny stewardship (and brinksmanship) is not irrelevant to their achievement; like Lanzmann, Ophuls, and Panh before him, in purely formal terms he’s set a high bar for chroniclers of violence when it comes to galvanizing an audience.

The Cut

The force of Oppenheimer’s storytelling was hard to forget during The Cut, Fatih Akin’s prestige-picture look at Turkey’s Armenian genocide as told through one man’s lost-and-found saga, which reaches all the way to Cuba and the United States. As much as I was rooting for a stirring, definitive account of these events, relentless clichés and broad-brush strokes bog the film down, though the remarkable facts of its existence and its reach do endow it with historical significance. It joined a handful of other curiosities I was glad to catch at all: Peter Bogdanovich’s labored sex farce She’s Funny That Way, Saverio Costanzo’s jaw-dropping vegan-momma horror story Hungry Hearts, David Gordon Green’s messy Manglehorn and its confirmation of Al Pacino’s embrace of grumpy old manhood, and (prior to its HBO airing) the two-part serving of Olive Kitteridge, a darkly comic, stingingly apt anatomy of depression across decades of marriage, as portrayed by Frances McDormand (Olive) and Richard Jenkins (long-suffering dear Henry). Fun for the whole family (unless you’re living it).

We’re often told that filmmaking is a visceral pursuit; When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism gives us a case of a filmmaker literally putting his guts on screen. Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2013 feature contains an extract from the endoscopy video of a director named Paul—winding pink tunnels, foamy discharge, and all. Intriguingly, in this narrative about the process of shooting a film, it’s the only piece of footage we see. And significantly, in a work that muses on authenticity and the demands of screen realism, the footage is at once real (indeed, it’s hard to imagine anything much more real than a traveling close-up of a person’s innards) and at the same time fake—since the video is not an up-to-date representation of Paul’s gut at the time he submits it for insurance purposes. When Evening Falls may be a unique case of a film in which a director misuses medical evidence to cover his tracks while dallying with an actress. Oh, those movie people!

All the above might suggest that When Evening Falls is an outré comedy, or generally confrontational in nature. If it is a comedy, however, it’s so dry and detached that the humor is virtually subliminal, and the film is certainly anything but aggressive. This is the most contemplative of the Romanian director’s fiction features so far, considerably more muted than the testy comedy of his 2006 reputation-making debut 12:08 East of Bucharest, and even lower on action than 2009’s anti-thriller Police, Adjective, which was as claustrophobically procedural as procedurals can possibly get. (I’ve yet to see his documentary of last year, The Second Game, in which Porumboiu reviews a 1988 football match with his referee father.)

When Evening Falls is a new addition to the canon of discursive films-about-film, and it’s certainly one of the most intensely thoughtful, though hardly the most riveting. It comprises a series of primarily locked shots of various lengths (I counted 15, plus the gut footage), one or two of them very short but for the most part extended, the longest I timed being nine minutes. In fact, the opening sequence—Paul (Bogdan Dumitrache) and actress Alina (Diana Avramut) talk in his car, the two of them filmed from behind—contains a discussion of shot length. Paul points out that working on celluloid—as he’s doing in his movie, and as Porumboiu is doing too, on 35mm—means that you can only film for a maximum of 11 minutes at a time, a technical limitation which for decades defined the nature of cinema. Video changed everything, he says, and longer takes now allow you to depict the world more faithfully (his endoscopy presumably being an example of in-deep DV realism). It’s a rather academic discussion to anyone who’s not specifically interested in questions of film form and ontology—and we eventually gather that Alina isn’t. Still, if Paul’s hoping to impress her, it seems to work, and the couple kiss at the end of this seven-minute shot.

Paul has got it into his head that he needs Alina to appear naked, a proposal that he insists is absolutely justified by his movie (stop me if you’ve heard this one before…). Shortly after, we see him talking her through a long sequence that involves her dressing after a shower, which leads to a discussion of exactly where her character would keep her tights in her apartment, and why. Alina is skeptical (“You wrote this just so I could appear naked?”), and possibly with good reason; she’s playing a minor character, and yet, because Paul has become fixated on her, or on her shower scene, she seems to moved to the center of his film. The couple get down to some intensive rehearsing that is either perfectionist truth-seeking, or a pedantic, time-wasting business that holds up production; but it ends up more than once with the couple in bed.

When they’re not rehearsing, screwing, or driving around, the couple find time to eat. Their first meal is in a Chinese restaurant where Alina talks about her time living in France, and Paul muses on the question of utensils and cuisine, about the question of whether Chinese cooking developed differently from European because of chopsticks. Alina doesn’t seem keen to sit through yet another form-and-function lecture, but it becomes clear that whatever Paul is talking about, he’s really still thinking about cinema (which, like food, also tends to present itself to the consumer as being more or less raw or cooked). “Taste has to be educated,” Paul pontificates. “Whatever you say,” Alina replies, and keeps eating.

The other restaurant scene is marked by a dry, uncomfortable comedy, as the couple are joined by another filmmaker, one Laurentiu (Alexander Papadopol). He promptly tells Alina that she looks like Monica Vitti—she doesn’t, not remotely—and suggests that she audition for his new film. Paul, who clearly knows all the time-honored techniques by which directors hit on actresses, isn’t impressed, and visibly balks when Alina says she likes Laurentiu’s films; who knows, perhaps Porumboiu is giving us some sly insight here into rivalries among the Romanian New Wave. Alina rejects Paul’s accusation that she’s flirting with the other director, then puts his back up by saying that she’s never heard of Monica Vitti—nor Antonioni, for that matter. Paul bristles (“It’s like talking about theater without knowing Chekhov”), and thereby pretty much seals our impression of him as a pompous, solipsistic, self-deluding dork—nicely embodied by actor Dumitrache, who mostly looms and hunches morosely, resembling a sullen, underfed Emir Kusturica.

Porumboiu’s film neatly captures an enduring paradox of filmmaking—that while an auteur agonizes about truth, and shoots, reshoots, or tries not to shoot, all in the name of elusive perfection, meanwhile the dollars, or euros, or in this case lei, are ticking away on the meter. Bringing things down to earth is understandably cantankerous producer Magda (Mihaela Sirbu), who has already had trouble with an actor trashing his room, is running over budget because of lost shooting days, and now needs Paul to produce an endoscopy video for insurance purposes. You could hardly bring the lofty business of cinema more decisively down to earth, or make the brain/belly divide more literal.

The explicit debate on matters of film form and true or deceptive realism promises to be fascinating, but doesn’t in the end engage all that deeply, partly because of Porumboiu’s oppressively stylized execution—claustrophobically flat compositions, a studied visual drabness (deadened greys and blues in Tudor Mircea’s photography), and a detachment compounded by a curiously dead sound design, stripped of background noise even in the restaurants or a hotel lobby and bar, as if the action were happening in an anechoic chamber, or under a bell jar. For much of the time, it all feels like a theorem being worked out under lab conditions.

Where the film comes to life is in those rehearsal scenes, in the first of which Alina rises to the challenge and we get a sense of the ways in which an actor can really direct a scene far more than a director does—which the sharply alert Avramut seems to be doing here. But the absurdities of the process really emerge in the next session: Paul wants Alina to dry her hair for a full 10 minutes, although most of that won’t be on camera, and presses her on the subject of whether or not her character can hear the other actors’ dialogue. She can choose the action, he tells her, “but whatever it is has to be assumed by every inch of your being.”

What a line—and just how much of a performer’s being is required to step out of a shower on screen? Well, sometimes a great deal, and sometimes arguably none. But by this point, things are beginning to feel a little obsessively pedantic, like Paul himself—and I can’t help feeling that a certain over-insistent pedantry has been in Porumboiu’s makeup ever since 12:08, in which he spun out a studio-bound trial-by-television sequence somewhat farther than its satire could profitably take it.

When Evening Falls is intriguing as the latest intervention in cinema’s long debate on itself, but non-specialists will find it a little arid. And I suspect that even many critics would enjoy engaging with Porumboiu’s film less than they’d be interested in hearing how it went down with other directors noted for their own uncompromising approaches to realism, authenticity, or pushing actors to “assume . . . with every inch of their being.” When Evening Falls is so-so as a stand-alone piece, but I’d love to see it as a curtain-raiser for a roundtable between, say, Abdellatif Kechiche, Mike Leigh, and Catherine Breillat.

“Carry the tiger, pull the horse” might be the “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” of modern Chinese cinema. Coming right in the middle of Tsui Hark’s Taking Tiger Mountain—a blockbuster war flick that has earned close to US$112 million at the Chinese box office in just two weeks—the line is a perfect example of the kind of high-level absurdity that Tsui dishes out by the plateful, right alongside tiger attacks, prisoners transformed into human dogs, a Lord of the Rings–scale mountain fort, bandits sporting black lipstick and facial tattoos, ski attacks, lots of grenades, a tank, a fight on top of a crashing biplane, and a New York City traffic jam.

It’s easy to take Tsui’s talent as a filmmaker for granted, but we really shouldn’t. A mid-movie scene of a snow-covered village being invaded by bandits on skis is executed with clarity, authority, and total confidence. Even the least generous Western critics have noted that the film is a superb showcase for Tsui’s spectacular setpieces, and these days his kind of craftsmanship is so rare that it gives the illusion of a movie that’s nonstop action, when in fact there are only four action scenes in its entire two-hour-and-22-minute running time.

Starved for good filmmaking, most people seem to be loving Taking Tiger Mountain, but one of the few things critics have consistently singled out as being lame is its modern-day framing device, and it’s true that any movie in which an African American cab driver bangs on his steering wheel and says, “Merry your mother Christmas,” should spend a little bit of time in the corner. But the framing sequence is what makes it more than just another action film about brave Chinese triumphing over the enemy. It’s what makes Taking Tiger Mountain a Tsui Hark film.

Tiger Mountain opens in 1946 with a bunch of People’s Liberation Army soldiers tracking down a bandit, Hawk (played by Hong Kong’s Tony Leung Kar-fai), who has set up shop with his 1000 murderous minions in a mountain fortress abandoned by the Japanese. Setting up camp in the mostly abandoned Leather Creek village at the base of Tiger Mountain, PLA captain Shao Jianbo captures an opium-smoking crook named Luan, who was in the middle of bringing the Advance Map to Hawk. This McGuffin shows the location of hidden troops, secret arsenals, and treasure depots stashed by the retreating Japanese. Shao’s 30-man PLA unit has recently welcomed Nurse Bai and a new scout, Yang Zirong, to their ranks and it’s decided that Yang will disguise himself as a bandit, take the map to Hawk, and infiltrate his gang as a trusted henchman, destroying it from within. 

The movie is based on a single incident in the 1957 novel, Tracks in the Snowy Forest, by Qu Bo, who really was a soldier tasked with rounding up bandits in northeastern China after World War II. At the time, combat novels describing the struggle of the revolution were popular, and Tracks was the biggest of them all, selling millions of copies. Books like Tracks, Raging Flames and Adamantine Warriors (1958), and Guerrilla Forces of the Railroad (1954) were presenting the heroics of lone scouts (Yang Zirong in Snowy Forest, Xiao Fei in Raging Flames) who were stand-ins for wu xia fiction’s wandering swordsmen, while being written in accessible, colloquial language. Despite having to be rewritten a few times to purify its ideology, Tracks was adapted into one of the first Chinese operas to tackle contemporary themes in 1958. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, supervised revisions of the opera, titled Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, and her version appeared in 1964 at a huge national Peking Opera convention where it won the approval of top officials and, after several more revisions, it was selected as one of the Eight Model Revolutionary Works in 1966. One of the few operas allowed to be performed during the Cultural Revolution, it swept the country and Yang Zirong became a national hero, especially after the film version was released in 1970. This is the version Tsui remembers seeing in New York’s Chinatown as a student—the incident which sparked his desire to make the new film.

Hark’s Taking Tiger Mountain opens with a re-creation of this formative viewing in Chinatown rather than the PLA soldiers on the hunt. A misty-eyed sap named Jimmy tromps through a snowy Chinatown to meet some buddies at karaoke. They’re all young, wealthy Chinese kids about to start working for tech start-ups, full of beer and braggadocio, completely uninformed about their roots, and when a glitch in the karaoke machine shows a scene from Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, everyone laughs except Jimmy, who stares at it in awe. On his way to catch a flight to Silicon Valley his cab gets stuck in a traffic jam and so, via a bit of egregious Youku product placement, he watches the movie on his phone. But the film he watches is partly a film he’s imagining and partly a film Tsui Hark is subverting.

Jimmy’s version of Tiger Mountain presents a well-scrubbed version of Chinese history in which bold PLA heroes are framed like they just stepped out of a propaganda film. Like most people his age, Jimmy’s history is 90 percent Party doctrine and 10 percent Hollywood spectacle, and it follows the formula for revolutionary fiction to “make the good better, the bad worse” resulting in heroic PLA soldiers and subhuman bandits. Because Jimmy’s version takes up most of the running time, it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that Tiger Mountain is straightforward, but it’s actually a young person’s reimagining of a 1970 movie, based on a Cultural Revolution-era opera, based on a novel, based on real events—while peeking out through the cracks is Tsui’s version, deconstructing Jimmy’s Central Committee–approved Hollywood take.

Tsui’s version is well aware of the story’s origins as a stage play. Characters are constantly dressing up in costumes and masks, pretending to be other people, staging fake attacks, staging fake conversations to mislead eavesdroppers, denouncing innocent men with fake charges, and indulging in life-and-death make believe. The bad guys seem to have found an arsenal of MAC cosmetics right next to their arsenal of weapons, and they wear eyeliner and lipstick, fake scars, eye patches, mismatched costumes and bad wigs, right out of a primary-school history pageant. 

In the book and the opera, Hawk’s men are a mix of bandits, Nationalist soldiers, and landlords—class enemies all—and it is solely concerned with class warfare, as the heroic PLA intervene to protect the oppressed proles of Leather Creek from Hawk’s predatory capitalists. The novel’s romance between PLA commander Shao and Nurse Bai was scrubbed from the opera as being “too individualistic,” as was a revenge subplot, and neither are present in Jimmy’s version of the story. In fact, Jimmy’s version goes one step further: in the book and opera, the Advance Map shows the location of a huge stash of opium left behind by the Japanese, not the weapons and gold it shows in the movie. 

But Tsui keeps tweaking the script. In an off-kilter note, everyone dislikes Yang at first sight, trembling when he’s introduced, and even instinctively trying to murder him for no reason. Instead of being a four-square hero, there’s something uncomfortable and oddly disruptive about his presence. Tsui’s villagers also don’t stand up to Hawk’s gang once the PLA arrives as they do in the opera. In fact, they beg to be left alone, preferring subjugation to being murdered when the PLA moves on and new bandits arrive in the area. Yang isn’t even a Communist in Tsui’s version, choosing to leave the army and the party to infiltrate the mountain fortress after being ordered not to do so by Shao. 

Tsui’s version looks further back than 1970, or even 1958, for many of his choices, reaching all the way back to the roots of Chinese opera. Hawk is a chou, one of Chinese opera’s comic types, a masked, hunched, subhuman clown, earthy and ridiculous. Yang is a jing character, a forceful male warrior, sporting a fake beard and slathered in eye shadow and make-up. The film itself is staged like an opera, with numerous scenes of one character standing in the foreground speaking while the rest of the cast cluster behind them like the chorus. And the scene when Yang first meets Lord Hawk—one of the most famous arias in Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy—is here rendered almost as if it’s on stage with the two actors declaiming lines from the opera across a vast hall at each other. 

The changes from one version to another are subtle and multilayered, and they matter. In Snowy Forest, the original book, Yang rides up the mountain singing pornographic songs to get himself into character as a bandit. In the model opera, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, he rides up singing patriotic songs. In Tsui’s Taking Tiger Mountain he doesn’t sing at all, instead we get right to his fight with a CGI tiger. The tiger fight is in all three versions, and it’s based on a famous sequence in the 16th century Chinese classic, The Water Margin, in which the hero, Wu Song, gets drunk and fights a tiger. Tsui wants to keep reminding us that the roots of this story are not Communist China, but Imperial China.

At the end of the movie, Yang leads an assault on the mountain fortress during Hawk’s Hundred Chicken Feast he’s holding for his birthday, and most of the bandits surrender. Hawk escapes and sets a trap, but Yang outwits him and shoots him in the back. Then Yang and Shao smile and clasp hands as the sun rises in the East and they talk about how they are needed for one more mission. In the wrap-around, Jimmy goes home and we learn that his grandmother and grandfather were both characters in the film. His grandmother has prepared a New Year’s dinner that’s attended by the ghosts of the dead soldiers, and then Jimmy imagines a different, more heroic, more 3-D friendly ending for the movie in which no one is shot in the back, and instead Yang and Hawk are shown battling each other on a crashing biplane. Presented as the credits roll, Jimmy’s version is far more traditionally heroic, and far more traditionally Hollywood, with Yang trying to save Hawk, who betrays him, then falls to his death. Flush with the egotism of China’s little emperors, Jimmy can’t help but imagine that Chinese history is all about him—nothing more than a comfortable fairy tale that reinforces his own prejudices and places him at the center of the universe.

But Tsui still gets the last word. There’s something chilling in the final shot of the 1946-set sequence between Yang and Shao because Communist ideology only functions in a world of “continuous revolution.” You can only have one party if there is always a new enemy to fight, if there is always one more battle to win, if there is always one more mission to accept. It’s when the missions are over that everyone settles down, and sends their children to American colleges so they can work for international companies and get rich, and that’s when the problems start. The Communist Party’s version of Chinese identity, Tsui seems to be saying, is only formed in opposition to an outside enemy, be they national enemies (the Japanese) or class enemies (Hawk’s bandits). Without an enemy to fight, who are these characters?

Like his characters, Tsui’s Taking Tiger Mountain is all playacting: the story of a director pretending to make a nationalist blockbuster which is based on the white-washed official history sold to the young people of China, but is actually a Trojan Horse critiquing their understanding of history. And in an ironic twist worthy of an opera, the very same young people who are being criticized are the ones who have bought the tickets that made this film a hit. 

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

... Welcome to 2015! Now let’s talk about death. Veteran voice actor, Lam Po-chuen, was the Chinese voice of animated Japanese character Doraemon for over 30 years before he passed away on January 1. He was a much-loved fixture on the Hong Kong film scene, having also dubbed Sammo Hung and Alexander Fu Sheng’s voices in the past. It’s a nice reminder that most of the voices you hear in Hong Kong movies don’t belong to the actors you’re seeing on screen. On December 17, veteran cinematographer Chan Kwok-hung drowned in a boat accident while shooting the Renny Harlin–Jackie Chan film Skiptrace. He was a longtime DP and shot movies like Fong Sai Yuk (93), The God of Cookery (96), the three Overheard films, and many more. Also, the last film directed by Thailand’s master action director, Panna Rittikrai, has finally been released. Vengeance of an Assassin was shelved by distributor, Sahamongkol, for about a year, but by all accounts it’s a perfectly lovely B-list action movie. You can watch the trailer and judge for yourself.

... Also dead in 2014 was Japan’s legendary cinematographer Fujio Morita, who shot everything from the Zatoichi series to the Lone Wolf and Cub films. Midnight Eye has a focus on his career which is a nice primer on the development of Japanese camerawork.

... PK, a Bollywood spectacular is stirring up all kinds of lucrative controversy. Superstar Aamir Khan plays an alien who comes to earth and gets caught up in a religious controversy. It’s been protested by fundamentalist Hindu groups, who have vandalized theaters showing the film. No matter: the movie has become the top-grossing Bollywood film of all time, even beating Khan’s previous hit, Dhoom 3. 

... Japanese right-wingers have their panties in a twist over Angelina Jolie’s war movie, Unbroken, claiming, predictably, that the World War II drama is “pure fabrication.” Also, that it’s racist.

The Light Only Shines There

... The Japan Times film critics get together and talk about the best Japanese films of 2014.

... Ode to My Father has become the first Korean movie of 2015 to reach the 10 million admission mark, coming in at number-one three weeks in a row so far, and showing no signs of slowing. The controversial movie, about the generation growing up after the Korean War and the sacrifices they made for their children, is an old school melodrama with big star power (Kim Yun-Jin of Lost fame and Hwang Jung-Min of The Unjust, both of whom appeared together in the 1999 blockbuster Shiri), but when the current conservative government praised it for its patriotism, and patronizingly lectured Koreans that they could learn a thing or two from the movie, it was labeled a conservative, backward-looking movie. 

... On January 9, Korean blockbuster The Con Artists will hit US and Chinese screens after opening strong in Korea earlier this year. Starring Kim Woo-Bin and Lee Hyun-Woo, both of them young good-looking TV drama stars, it’s about a heist that has to take place in 40 minutes.  The trailer promises more slick Korean blockbuster action of the kind that’s becoming more and more common these days.

... Anyone sick of hype surrounding The Interview and wanting a look at the far-more-fascinating real-life North Korean film industry should keep their eyes peeled for A Kim Jong-Il Production, Paul Fischer’s book about the North Korean film industry. It’s set to come out in February of this year, and it’s a densely researched look at one of the most fascinating film industries on earth.

... Indonesia’s film industry is getting stronger after local movies took a tumble between 2010 and 2013. In 2014, several local films raked in big grosses, including The Golden Cane Warrior, a retro throwback to classic kung fu flicks (with choreography by longtime Tsui Hark collaborator Xiong Xin-xin). There was also Supernova, a CGI-stuffed film adaptation of an “unfilmable” novel which is a meta-fictional science fiction romance. But the big movie of the year was the hit heist-gone-wrong comedy, Comic 8. The Jakarta Post has a good roundup of both the highest-grossing, and the undiscovered treasures, of Indonesia’s 2014 in film.

Brothers who team up as moviemakers are often organic virtuosos—think the Tavianis in The Night of the Shooting Stars and Kaos, the Coens in No Country for Old Men and Inside Llewyn Davis, or, in a pop, sci-fi/fantasy vein, the Wachowskis in The Matrix. It’s as if their bond empowers them to go out on an artistic limb without losing their emotional foundation. So it is with the German-born Australians Peter and Michael Spierig, identical twins who co-write and co-direct their films. In their breakthrough horror feature, Daybreakers (10), they devised a string of dynamite flourishes that lasted 45 minutes. Using a slick, contemporary visual idiom, they unveiled their vampire world as vividly as F.W. Murnau did Transylvania in Nosferatu, even if Daybreakers eventually ran out of originality and élan.

Their new film, Predestination, plays like one sustained, boldly extended storytelling flourish: it’s a rare head trip that’s both humane and haunting. By the end, even bad jokes and tired riddles come together in a giddy concatenation of thought and feeling. When a central character asks, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” he answers for himself: “The rooster.”  We learn that he’s not just being absurd, imbecilic or sarcastic. He’s presaging the movie’s existential triple whammies.

In this acute adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s mind-bending 1959 time-travel story “—All You Zombies—” the wayward hero, a “Temporal Agent” known as The Bartender (Ethan Hawke), hurtles across decades from 1945 to 1992 with a series of bumps and splashes, like a flat stone skimming time’s river. He’s on a dual quest to defuse a homegrown terrorist nicknamed The Fizzle Bomber and to recruit a true-confessions columnist who goes by the moniker The Unmarried Mother (despite being male). You could say this movie is about the world’s most outlandish bar bet. As The Bartender slings drinks at a saloon called “Pop’s Place,” The Unmarried Mother boasts to The Bartender that his own life story is more remarkable than anything he’s written for his column or any tall tale the barkeep might have heard from a drunk. The Bartender wagers a bottle on it and The Unmarried Mother commences by announcing he started life as a “girl.” (Trust me on the pronouns!) His story could be called “Dickensian”—if Dickens had written about a time when people were rapt with curiosity about Christine Jorgensen’s sex change or could envision an American space agency establishing an orbiting concubine service for sex-hungry astronauts.

Originally called Jane, The Unmarried Mother battles her way into adolescence as a two-fisted tomboy/nerd in a 1940s Cleveland orphanage. She tries out for the female wing of the SpaceCorps in the 1960s (it’s like a high-class escort service), only to be rejected for reasons not yet revealed to her (or to us). She becomes a “mother’s helper” for a suburban Ohio family while attending night school, but soon gets impregnated by the only fellow who’d been kind to her. The doctors who deliver her baby via C-section discover that she has an undeveloped set of male sex organs and a female set just developed enough to make her a mother. Out of concern for her health, they turn her into a man.

These moviemakers know just when to let The Unmarried Mother take a breath and check out The Bartender’s reactions. Flashbacks and flash-forwards tumble into a volatile “present” like the cascading pieces of a domino stunt, without the laborious setup. The film’s focused visual approach to period scenes matches The Bartender’s unassuming manner and modest-looking time travel device, which fits inside a violin case. Only the story is baroque. As the action flashes backward and forward, you’re compelled to wonder why The Bartender juggles his recruitment of The Unmarried Mother in the early 1970s with his attempt to stymie The Fizzle Bomber, who is due to plant a bomb that will kill 11,000 people in 1975 New York.  In its own perilously peculiar fashion, the movie captures the fluidity of “identity” and the challenges of maintaining it in our chaotic, terrorized world.

Hawke and Sarah Snook, who plays The Unmarried Mother, are nearly ideal casting for these characters. They’re engagingly enigmatic—a requirement for playing mystery men—yet they also react to each other body and soul. Even when playing a submerged character, Hawke lets his instincts take over. You can read the significance of an action in the shifting wattage of his eyes; his voice becomes more expressive the closer it gets to a Kris Kristofferson rumble. And Hawke proves to be a wonderful partner for Snook.

A youthful veteran of Australian TV and movies, Snook is heartbreaking and inspiring, whether as a man who struggles to feel comfortable in his own skin or a teenager named Jane who feels like an outsider. Abandoned as an infant, her character grows up yearning for parents, or for anyone who might appreciate her formidable mental and physical strength. Although Snook is not 100 percent convincing as a full-grown male—she looks like the young Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy’s Life (92)—her eloquence as a performer, and the Spierigs’ empathy and cleverness, make you eager to suspend disbelief. One of the film’s many touching and funny sequences depicts Jane learning, much as an actor would, how to sound like a male. It’s all the more wrenching because, as an individualistic female, she had to be taught how to look and flirt like a girl. Snook could play Emma Stone’s sister, but she has a remarkable elasticity and a quirky, square-cut beauty of her own. As Jane, her appeal is inseparable from her liveliness and intelligence. It’s typical of this film’s satiric use of pulp clichés that Jane hides her beauty behind glasses. When she doffs them at her interview for the women’s branch of the SpaceCorps, the whoa-baby reaction of some astronaut observers scores the movie’s biggest belly laugh.

The Spierigs are strikingly intelligent adapters here. Rather than update Heinlein’s post-Sputnik projections of the future, the filmmakers present them as pungent alternate realities that might have happened (or could still be happening!) in some parallel universe. Except for adding The Fizzle Bomber and a Temporal Bureau honcho named Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), who shepherds new agents and doles out assignments to old ones, the Spierig Brothers hew closely to Heinlein. (There may be no Fizzle Bomber in the story but there is mention of a Fizzle War.) Heinlein’s brief, brilliant fantasy came out three years before Chris Marker’s short, La Jetée. Like Marker’s time-travel masterpiece, it features a serpentine narrative that coils around and bites its characters. The title “–All You Zombies—” comes from The Bartender’s climactic rant (retained in the film’s voiceover): “I know where I come from, but where did all you zombies come from?”

The choices the brothers make as screenwriters shape the movie’s look, including their confident blend of discordant visual styles. They daringly mute the colors for 1945 Cleveland—the time and place of Jane’s unusual birth. Postwar America has never before looked quite so glum as in this movie. But the Spierigs also indulge in a snazzy Pop look for Jane’s experience of the SpaceCorps-crazed 1960s, then go for the grunge in a mid-1970s New York awash in dirty-blonde hues and grime-flecked silver light. Even the most playful, eye-catching strokes, like female SpaceCorps recruits donning designer stewardess uniforms, carry disquieting overtones: the best hope for these out-of-this-world courtesans is to become an astronaut’s actual wife.

In every era, the Spierigs’ uncanny compositional sense enables them to find the framing that makes an image harrowing, amusing, or both. Their visceral sense of space gives farcical oomph to the scene of grade-school Jane cracking a car’s headlight with her fist. The almost abstract sight of a jet soaring past a glass skyscraper pulls viewers into a space-age aesthetic, just as an off-kilter image of a drunk shaking a jukebox instantly evokes a New York City on the skids.

The song that’s playing on the juke, by the way, is “I’m My Own Grandpa”—a telling choice and a prime example of the Spierigs’ shrewd deployment of Heinlein’s details. They salvage his stealthily witty lines, like the description of an anonymous baby-snatcher as a man “with a face-shaped face.” They find wall-space for some of his jocular “By-Laws of Time”—like “Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow,” and “If At Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again”—and work the concept that “A Paradox May Be Paradoctored” into the dialogue. They also spin out timelines as easily as a spider does webs.

What makes Predestination their best step forward is its nimble emotionality and heft. The movie has a pungency all its own. As the picture unspools, it’s poignant to think that Temporal Agents like The Bartender and his key recruit, The Unmarried Mother, are doomed to loneliness, for reasons intimate and professional. So it’s heartening that their job gives them purpose. Because of the Spierigs’ deft embellishments, and their mastery of point of view, the perspectives of The Bartender and The Unmarried Mother converge with a bang—and Heinlein’s glancing insights gain new dramatic clout.

Heinlein writes: “It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself.” Predestination fleshes out that idea and seduces the audience.

A few months ago, in August of last year, I wrote a roundup of summer movie miscellany which doubled as a tour of the (mostly) independent movie theaters still struggling to make an ever-less-viable business model work in a New York City that is ever more determined to convert all square footage into shitty apartments with slate counters. I wrote then that “humble, independently operated neighborhood houses, are at this point at even greater risk of being priced out of New York than people” and, as if to prove this point, despite an eleventh-hour rally, one of the theaters discussed in my Queens roundup, the Sunnyside Center Cinemas, has ceased operations as of January 1.

Theatrical moviegoing is not, I trust, under any grave, immediate threat. When I hit the multiplex over the holidays, it was well and truly mobbed, in spite of the fact that the bill of fare was worse than any in recent Christmases past. Much evidence indicates, however, that the venues for theatrical moviegoing which remain are going to be fewer, larger, and more homogeneous in their offerings, so take advantage of what variety still exists, while variety still exists—in the immortal words of the Dog Brothers from MTV’s Sex in the 90s, “Who wants to have the same cereal for breakfast every day?” With that in mind, I explored some more of this nation’s endangered moviehouses, as well as their histories, personal and otherwise.

Theater: Tower Theater, Miami, Florida

I was in Miami at the end of December to cover the 9th Borscht Film Fest for Artforum. This was my first time in the city immortalized in song on the Big Willie Style LP, so I took the opportunity to get in some sightseeing, which included walking the length of the Venetian Causeway between Miami Beach and downtown Miami, eating stacks of every dead animal flesh imaginable between two pieces of bread (this is called a “Cuban sandwich”), and paying a visit to the historic Tower Theater in Little Havana.

On December 20, 1926, Miami-based moviehouse chain Wometco (Wolfson-Meyer Theater Company) opened a new first-run venue on 15th Ave and Tamiami Trail, with Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as their first attraction. Today, the theater on that spot, the Tower, is the oldest in South Florida still functioning, boasting a distinctive Art Deco façade which includes a corrugated metal marquee and, topping the building, a 40-foot steel spire. You might assume that this feature provided the theater with its name, but apparently that came from Nelson Tower, its first manager—the spire was added as an afterthought when the theater was remodeled by Robert Law Weed before reopening on October 3, 1931. (If comments on the invaluable website CinemaTreasures.org are to be believed, the theater has cycled through a few different towers since.)

When the Tower first opened, its clientele would’ve principally been the Georgia crackers and Jews who lived in the neighborhoods of Riverside and Shenandoah. The history of the Tower through this period is somewhat obscure, and it isn’t until the late Fifties and Sixties that it again begins to appear in recollections. This is when the Tamiami Trail, SW 8th St through Miami, became known as the “Calle Ocho,” the Tower Theater became “Teatro Tower,” and the surrounding neighborhood became Little Havana, the capital-in-exile for Cuban refugees. During this time the Tower, whose programming was a mixture of Latin American and Hollywood fare projected with Spanish subtitles, is remembered as a cut-rate ESL classroom for newly arrived Miamians.

With a double bill of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Uncommon Valor, the Wometco era at the Tower unceremoniously ended in 1984. The building was bought shortly thereafter by McDonald’s, who were considering turning it into a greasepit before settling on a location down the street. It was purchased to become part of a “Latin Quarter Specialty Center” in 1987, then sold to the City of Miami in 1991, which in 2002 handed over theater operations to Miami Dade College, who are still today managing the theater. Throughout, the Tower has been subject to repeated renovations, reopening to the public after the most recent round in spring of 2014. The programming today is more-than-usually-demanding art-house fare, with Spanish subtitles. There was a trailer for Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu before my feature, and Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is Now Playing, along with the Simon Bolivar biopic The Liberator. The Tower stands immediately across the street from Domino Park, a renowned gathering place for first-generation anti-Castro Cuban exiles, and as I was in Miami days after President Obama’s announcement of the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba, I was hoping to see something in the way of angry placards or brandished flags. It was pretty quiet, though, so I just saw Birdman instead.

Movie: Birdman

The Spanish subtitles were something to look at, at least. For example, did you know that the Spanish equivalent to the phrase “break a leg” is mucha mierda, or “lots of shit”? I didn’t—or at least not until I watched Birdman at the Tower Theater.

Otherwise, I took exactly nothing away from Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s A Middle-Aged Batman with Enormous Wings tale, the story of Hollywood action star Riggan Thomson’s attempt to revivify his career and establish his Serious Artist cred by staging a Raymond Carver story on Broadway, which may or may not be a film à clef about Iñárritu and star Michael Keaton’s own creative crises, and is a sort of perfect storm of things that I don’t care about. (Magic Realism, Edward Norton, needlessly ostentatious camerawork, cutesy alternative titles, the creative crises of Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Michael Keaton, or any alter ego.) Admittedly these are mostly temperamental aversions, and hardly grounds for outright critical dismissal, but I saw it on vacation and I don’t have to be rigorous, so I’ll leave it at saying that Riggan’s “Will he, won’t he?” death wish is mucha mierda. Like the bathroom graffiti in The Mother and the Whore says—or am I thinking of the Pointer Sisters?—“Jump, Narcissus!”

Theater: Showcase Cinema De Lux, Cincinnati, Ohio

The Showcase Cinema De Lux is an 18-screen multiplex in the northern reaches of the Greater Cincinnati area, just beyond the I-275 lasso, with all the architectural charm of your average Petco superstore. It was opened in 1998, and renovated to its current appearance in 2004. It is a building of no historical or aesthetic importance whatsoever. Nor, to be honest, was the demolished theater whose footprint it was built on, that of the dearly departed Showcase Cinemas Springdale.

Showcase Cinemas Springdale held some importance to me, however. It was the first movie theater that I ever worked at, starting in the summer of 1996, when I was 15 years old. I can fix this date with some certainty because, when I first started, I would without fail sit in on at-random chunks of the movie The Rock during my half-hour breaks. (After my first interview, I stuck around to watch Independence Day on the house.) I would work at various Cincinnati-area theaters in concession-usher capacity at various times up until the summer of 1999, though my memory of which theater I was at and when is a little hazy, and usually tied to the closing-credits music of assorted contemporary movies, music which one would hear several times during a shift while waiting to stream into the theater with broom and long-handled dustpan as soon as the house lights went up. My ’99 stint at Showcase Kenwood Mall, for example, is inexorably tied to “You’ll Be in My Heart” from the end of Disney’s Tarzan, and Elvis Costello’s nauseating “She” playing out Notting Hill.(This was also the summer of Runaway Bride, and I still recall with considerable horror the cardboard-stand image of Julia Roberts lacing up her huge, white running shoes.) The General’s Daughter was the one movie that everyone looked forward to sweeping up after, because the end credits really swung. The highlights of this stint included seeing Eyes Wide Shut two days before the rest of Cincinnati, and spitting tight game at the girls who worked at Sbarro while I was buying my daily pink lemonade. The identifiable lowlight came during our area-exclusive run of The Blair Witch Project, when some dude offered me $50 to let his date and him into a sold-out show, and I let them in for free, an acte gratuit which haunts me to this day.

But I digress. The original four-screen Showcase Springdale first opened on July 11, 1973. With this, National Amusements, a Dedham, Massachusetts–based theater chain chaired by Sumner Redstone*, were making their first venture into southwestern Ohio. Per the invaluable-as-ever CinemaTreasures.org: “Local advertising touted the following amenities upon the theatre’s opening: exclusive rocking chair loungers, acres of free lighted parking, climate controlled for year round viewing pleasure, the most modern sound and projection equipment, showcase art gallery featuring works by local artists, reduced rates for groups and organizations.” Springdale also had not less than two theaters equipped for 70mm projection, its primary competition for large-format screenings being the state-of-the-art Carousel Cinemas on Reading Road, whose exclusive engagement of Earthquake in Sensurround many still speak of fondly today.

All that the De Lux retains of its predecessor are the ENTER and EXIT signs and the “touted” parking-lot grid, which could admittedly use a fresh coat of paint. In addition to manifold theaters, the De Lux has added a concession island selling delicacies that would’ve been unfathomable during my time wearing a concessioner smock, as well as a Food Court where the moviegoer can “[i]ndulge in a slice of freshly baked Famous Famiglia Pizza®, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, a delicious Starbucks™ latte, Nathans Famous® hot dogs, burgers, and much more...” There’s also Chatters Bar & Grill, apparently so named because it’s a fun and cool environment in which to analyze the movie that you’ve just seen over signature cocktails, where my companion and I sat to discuss…

Movie: Big Eyes

When Showcase Cinemas flung open its doors in 1973, the moviegoer might have chosen between John Milius’s Dillinger, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, Robert Aldrich’s Emperor of the North, and Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar. On Christmas Day, when my ladyfriend and I set out to see a matinee, we would’ve settled for a National Treasure: Book of Secrets or a Jack Reacher—not to speak of The Wolf of Wall Street—but this yuletide season held no such bounty. After being turned away from a Sold Out screening of The Interview** at the Esquire (est. circa 1911), my companion and I headed due north for an afternoon show of Tim Burton’s Big Eyes, stopping only to pet the live donkey in a nativity crèche in the industrial suburb Lockland, which would remain the identifiable high mark for entertainment that afternoon.

The Tim Burton movies released during my adult life have seemed so uniformly disinterested and slapdash that I’ve often wondered if the entity that we call “Tim Burton” is actually a studio run by an army of pale and sullen interns hired out of Hot Topics from around the country, a teeming factory floor populated by willing minions, of the sort that he has always delighted in showing. (Big Eyes, for example, has Amy Adams’s Margaret Keane consigned to a furniture-painting warehouse.) His choice of “Burton-esque” subjects (Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows) is so by-the-numbers, his Gothic-clutter aesthetic so photostat-predictable—are we sure he isn’t just drag-and-dropping the same gnarled trees and Victorian bric-a-brac from one project to the next?—that his work scarcely announces a conscious authorial intervention at all. In fact, you don’t need the participation of Tim Burton to pull off a “Burton-esque” project. Wait, did he do Into the Woods? How about that insipid-looking Nevermore: The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe that I see subway adverts for?

I was nevertheless intrigued by Big Eyes, for not only was this Burton’s reunion with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the screenwriters of 1994’s Ed Wood, his last movie that I can rouse myself to defending full-throatedly, but because it’s an imposter’s movie about artistic imposture, telling the story of Margaret and Walter Keane—she who painted the mass-market masterpieces which sold like hotcakes in the Sixties, and he who took the credit. It is also, as it happens, an exceedingly clumsily made movie about artistic imposture, full of scenes that run into a wall rather than hit a mark, never threatening to develop a rhythm but, at best, as in Christoph Waltz’s pinball-antic courtroom scene, occasionally running rampant. The appeal of Burton is, as ever, in the art direction rather than the direction. Here he has the valuable contribution of Bruno Delbonnel, who also shot Burton’s Dark Shadows and, most recently, Inside Llewyn Davis, and who gets some memorable exteriors of the Keane’s arriviste home in Woodside, California, with the shrubbery lit in Pop Rocks colors. I also enjoyed Terence Stamp in the role of New York Times art critic John Canaday. Canaday was in fact an American, mostly raised and educated in the South, but after Mr. Turner’s depiction of John Ruskin as a Terry-Thomas-esque toff and Lindsay Duncan’s brittle, bitter, martini-pickled spinster in Birdman, it was nice to see a villain-critic with at least a dash of Mephistophelean panache.

Theater: DanBarry Dollar $aver Turfway 10, Florence, Kentucky

Again, I am drawing attention to a theater that has no strong claim for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. The DanBarry Dollar $aver Turfway is scarcely 20 years old, though it was built in a slapdash, EIFS Art Deco style calculated to lend it a patina of Golden Age glamour. This intention is somewhat betrayed by the fact that it lies adrift in a vast ocean of parking lot, in sight of the Turfway Park horse-racing track. Thus set off, it looks a little sad and a little seedy, and the movie-reel-and-ticket-stub-themed carpeting within shows wear-and-tear, but the tickets are three dollars, so who cares?

The second-run house is a phenomenon that I’ve missed above all others since becoming a New Yorker some five-score years ago. (Well, that and quality of life, and not having to endure a constant, suffocating anxiety during my every waking moment.) Most of my formative moviegoing was done on the cheap, at cut-rate houses in and around Cincinnati: the Norwood Central Parke II Cinemas and the Super Saver Cinemas 8 at the ill-starred Forest Fair Mall, whose glass-block-and-strobe-light façade was rumored to have caused many an apoplectic seizure. (The disco lights had been eliminated when I last visited the Super Saver, since rechristened “The Screens at Cincinnati Mills,” where I watched a battered 35mm print of the 2013 DreamWorks Animation film Turbo in a theater redolent with the perfume of loaded diapers.) Both of the abovementioned theaters have since closed, leaving the DanBarry Turfway among the last of an endangered species, the workingman’s moviehouse. Unsubstantiated rumor has it that packs of wild dogs now roam the corridors of Forest Fair Mall/Cincinnati Mills, a story that I elect to believe.

Movie: Beyond the Lights

For its first half-hour or so, Beyond the Lights seemed like it might actually be the smart, skillfully made, below-the-radar mainstream movie that I’d been told about—first by friends, then by Manohla Dargis, who included it in her list of the Best Movies of 2014. The film opens with a bedraggled working-class white mother (Minnie Driver) driving through black Brixton with her young, mixed-race daughter, Noni, desperate to find someone who can “do” black hair on the night before Noni is set to compete in a talent contest. When the girl, singing a rending version of Nina Simone’s “Blackbird,” places as a runner-up, her mother drags her offstage and commands her to toss the trophy—nothing but number-one will do. This is followed by an audacious leap-forward cut to a music-video clip: “Masterpiece,” Kid Culprit feat. Noni, now having achieved her number-one, all grown up, wearing S/M togs, delivering catatonic Autotune come-ons, and played by the magnetic Gugu Mbatha-Raw.

Noni is living in Los Angeles, having cut three successive ringtone-ready hits with Culprit, with whom she is in a stage-managed, red-carpet-ready romance. On the eve of an awards-show triumph, a tipsy Noni tries to throw herself off of a hotel balcony, and Kaz (Nate Parker), a police officer moonlighting as security, hauls her in, beginning a worlds-collide romance between the two. Where Beyond the Lights began to lose me was in Noni’s journey from peddling fantasy to discovering her real self, and the very binary attitudes that the movie has toward “authenticity” and “fantasy”—the former depicted as wholly good, the latter as wholly worthless, even as the movie traffics in its own off-the-rack fantasy of authenticity, with working-class Kaz always clad in pressed clothes, pristine sneakers, and driving an extended-cab pickup with nary a scratch on it. As the movie ends, Noni, having shed her hair extensions and traded in her onstage lingerie for laundry-day lounging clothes, performs for her hometown crowd, singing a self-penned song about which I can remember absolutely nothing, and indulgently smooching her new love in front of the crowd. Being true to thine own self, apparently, is a matter of completely foregoing showmanship. Any paying audience member would have a right to be pissed—though the audience we’re shown look like they’re at a Chumbawumba reunion. Not that this fact necessarily undermines the narrative of Noni’s spiritual progress, but “Masterpiece” is, objectively, 10 thousand times better than this uplifting twaddle.

All of the film’s original music is courtesy of songwriter/producer The Dream, who co-wrote Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” among other Billboard comers. In pairing Kid Culprit, played by the lanky, white Cleveland rapper Machine Gun Kelly, with Mbatha-Raw, director Gina Prince-Bythewood seemingly intends to evoke the platinum-plated duo of Ri-Ri and Eminem. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that MGK is playing an amalgam of Eminem and Chris Brown.) The film freely mixes and matches pop press narratives—beginning as the forlorn little-girl-lost Britney Spears of “Lucky” then emerging as the triumphant singing-her-own-words Britney of “Everytime,” she’s just Noni-from-the-block who can’t forget to beeeee reeeeeal. Like Birdman, Beyond the Lights deals with a celebrity who finds herself literally and figuratively perched on a ledge, trying to separate sincere artistic ambition from commercial calculation. And while Beyond the Lights is by far the more satisfying of the two pictures, I can’t find beacons of hope in films which, in their obsession with the mental health of the rich and famous, tacitly reinforce the Us Magazine/TMZ obsession with celebrity, scandal, and rebranding.

Theater: Concourse Plaza Multiplex Cinemas, 214 East 161st Street, Bronx, NY

More than any other borough, the Bronx has felt the pinch from the contraction of exhibition venues which began with the great digital-changeover purge. As noted in a New York Times piece last May (“Options Dwindle for Bronx Residents Trying to Escape to the Movies”), with the recent closure of the American Theater in Parkchester and the Whitestone Multiplex Cinemas, the birthplace of Bobby Bonilla now has only two movie theaters serving the 1.4 million souls who call it home. (This does not include the charming, Spanish Revival–style Pelham Picture House, a two-screener on the Bronx-Westchester County border that specializes in genteel art-house stuff.)

In fact, the Concourse Plaza Multiplex, opened in 1991, doesn’t really appear at first glance to be functioning. I drove by it twice, failing to perceive a movie theater where one was meant to be, before finally parking by the Bronx Supreme Criminal Court to investigate on foot. Finally I discovered, crouched in the southwest corner of a strip mall containing a Food Bazaar and sundry other amenities, a black-and-white vinyl sign reading “CINEMA OPEN DURING CONSTRUCTION” and an entrance below it. Descending through a gridwork of tube scaffolding serving an indeterminate purpose, one enters the surprisingly vast, entirely subterranean world of the Concourse Plaza, which is laid out on a split-level plan, taking one past the rather impressive ticketing kiosk before one descends still further into the building’s bowels.

By now the holidays had given way to the early months of January. This is a magical time for movie-lovers, for this is when the flotilla of filmed theater on award-qualifying runs begins to loosen its grip on the moviehouses and multiplexes, and when pure cinema re-emerges from its hibernation. By “pure cinema,” of course, I mean movies about deeply angry men killing, maiming, and—in this particular case—waterboarding their way through flocks of enemies. 

Movie: Taken 3

Director Olivier Megaton, who handled the latest adventure of ex-CIA-operative-and-very-particular-set-of-skills-possessor Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), as well as Taken 2, is to the stable of Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp directors what Robert Wise was to the Lewton posse. I guess that makes original Taken director Pierre Morel the Mark Robson? There’s definitely no Tourneur, at any rate. Actually, I wish I’d thought this comparison through a little better.

Taken 3 is a Papa John’s pizza. It is, make no mistake, utter garbage, but on one day out of the year it might hit the spot. There is a comfort-food quality to watching Neeson desperately loping across the screen yet again, though all the razzle-dazzle cutting in the world can’t imbue him with the appearance of gazelle-like speed. At any rate, a good hype-man can sell anything—remember how The Price Is Right announcer Rod Roddy could make a popcorn popper sound positively life-changing?—and there were a few in my small crowd who were volubly excited every time Mills pistol-whipped anyone, which was often, not to speak of the spontaneous applause that erupted when he finally got to haul out and put a stomping on Dougray Scott, to the point where what I was looking at seemed much more exciting than it actually was. Taken 3 concludes not with destruction, however, but with rebirth, as Mills discovers positively that he’s going to be a granddad. Can Taken 4 and a purloined incubator be far off? Thus does the circle of life continue, and the release schedule cycle begin anew…

* A striking piece of Wikiprose from Sumner’s entry: “Though he was warned that he might never be able to live a normal life, eight years later he was fit enough to insist on playing tennis nearly every day and to launch a hostile takeover of Viacom.”

** As it transpired, the showing was sold out at least in part because one Jason Best had purchased 50 passes from MovieTickets.com in hopes of reaping a windfall from resale. The entire sad affair is detailed in this Variety piece.

The big-tent (or big-marketplace) approach of the Toronto film festival can make comparing notes with fellow attendees a rewarding experience, especially as the days run on and people check the purported must-sees off their lists. That somehow felt less true of the 2014 edition, but my mixed experience might have been because I had attended Cannes in the spring, and wasn’t starting the festival off with, say, a Stranger by the Lake, but rather a Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (more on this later). And it’s easy to distrust the conventional wisdom when it steers you away from Christian Petzold’s latest film, Phoenix, not a hands-down masterpiece but by no means a film to dismiss.

Phoenix

Perhaps it was the Berlin Schooler’s embrace of melodramatic and noir conceits that turned some people off (many apparently before even seeing it), but Petzold’s borrowings from postwar genre films are key to his latest feature. Phoenix follows a scarred concentration camp survivor as she returns and finds herself inexorably drawn into looking for her husband who thinks her dead. Petzold fixture Nina Hoss plays Nelly, the fragile survivor, while her shifty spouse is called Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), and the two not-very-German-sounding names suggest an old bar ballad. But when Johnny does not recognize her and makes an unusual job offer, the scenario is closer to a mistaken-identity picture (No Man of Her Own?).

While some viewers grumbled about suspension of disbelief, I found the story an uncanny and pointed expression of postwar alienation for survivors, especially those pressed to cope with the past by forgetting it. Nelly faces a double re-assimilation in peacetime Berlin, as a Jew and as a wounded survivor, and around Johnny, she is quite literally asked to impersonate herself, which would make for a permanent state of fractured identity. Petzold’s ruined, mercenary city is a land of rubble and long, deep shadows, and at least one thriving cabaret club, which shares its name with the film; Nelly’s sister meanwhile tries to steer her away from self-destruction, to the point of suggesting a move to an apartment in Haifa, Israel. The deceptively gimmicky plot was written by Petzold and his close collaborator Harun Farocki, who died a little over a month before the film’s world premiere here.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

While you might not guess as much from the parodically long title, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence also has its mind on man’s inhumanity to man and the fact that there’s no escaping the past. Other than being shot on digital (and not for the better), Roy Andersson’s first new feature in seven years does not exactly stake out new ground: its long-take, wide-screen tableaus are populated with his usual dumpy, woebegone figures of fun, most of them made up to look as pale as corpses and walking as elegantly as zombies. The episodes are like elaborations on single-panel newspaper comics: a dying hospital patient clutches her handbag to the frustration of her adult children; a king and his entourage inexplicably appear at a modern-day bar, where his highness takes a shining to a young man.

Andersson’s deadpan humor has always cut both ways in his pictures of habit-ridden humans: bovine, potentially harmless, but capable of causing great suffering. Here he restages the devastating truck-gassing scene of his 1991 short World of Glory with a thoroughly off-putting scene of murder for show: British colonial soldiers lead Africans into a giant cask-like contraption that cooks them and channels their moans through trumpets. But in the day-to-day scenes, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine” becomes the film’s hopeless refrain, heard whenever someone takes a phone call (even when it’s scientist stepping away from a monkey awaiting open-skull experimentation). Andersson remains fascinated by the violence of history lurking beneath the present, whether explicitly or not, and by the politeness that’s spread like a whitewash over civilization. But his punch-line tendencies have a way of making these ideas feel sentimental; the accumulation of orchestrated scenes dilute his film’s impact this time round. As for his two interminably recurring characters here—a pair of sad-sack traveling salesmen who purvey goofy novelty masks that no one wants—I prefer Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald’s “Nobody likes us” duo from The Kids in the Hall. 

While We're Young

Shinya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain splashed fresh gore on the classic Kon Ichikawa adaptation of the Shohei Ooka novel, bringing ample frenetic camerawork and (quite literally) visceral portrayals of the Hell on Earth that was a Philippine island in the waning days of World War II, stalked by abandoned Japanese soldiers going mad. The Tetsuo veteran retains the original’s crowd-pleasing line, “You can eat me!” uttered by a dying soldier to a survivor, which succinctly expresses the gross-out level of the film’s climactic battle scene. But lest Toronto ’14 sound entirely grim and grisly, a little relief came with Noah Baumbach’s entertaining if not profound While We’re Young, which lacked the usual bite present in most of his films. Failed documentarian turned teacher Ben Stiller and his producer wife Naomi Watts are shaken up (and shown up) by an unexpected friendship with cool Williamsburg careerist Adam Driver and his companion Amanda Seyfried. The premise is broad and musty, somewhere between an extended arc on Girls and either a reheated Sixties counterculture comedy or an Eighties hand-wringer for boomers. But Baumbach’s riffs on ambition and creativity and his ambivalence about the younger generation (cf. Greenberg) are diverting.

Among the nonfiction work at Toronto, Episode of the Sea employs Dutch fishermen to tell the story of their industry’s survival, straight to the camera, arrayed on boats or in houses. Shot in bracing black-and-white and interspersed with lengthy text scrolls explaining the project, it’s almost like a riposte to the total immersion of Leviathan, taking some inspiration and its title from La Terra Trema (which was originally subtitled “Episode of the Sea” and planned as part of a trilogy). You might also call The Yes-Men Are Revolting self-narrated, as it’s driven by the notorious culture-jammers of the title, as they face divergent paths later in life. But this is an alarmingly weak installment in their continuing adventures, the kind of documentary that feels slapped together to follow a simplistic overarching narrative at the expense of clarity about its complicated subject matter—unwisely, since the Yes-Men’s actions attune us to the shortfalls and short-cuts of media representation.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper

My festival visit ended with a definitive high point—or low point—with Tales of the Grim Sleeper. These days Nick Broomfield seems to elicit knowing winces (which is certainly easier to produce than an actual reckoning with his techniques), yet there’s no denying the strength and the horror of his latest work, which delves into a jaw-dropping run of serial murders in South Central Los Angeles. Co-starring his extraordinary, outspoken guide, Pam Brooks, who spent years as a prostitute and addict, the film develops from tabloid investigation into an unexpectedly poignant portrait of life as lived in a routinely harsh yet neighborly stretch of black America and of the cataclysmic effects of racism and violence (from within and without a community). It’s apparently not destined for theaters, but its disturbing truths deserve to be part of the larger cultural conversation.