Airfield Films

Bare minimum, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker finally moves contemporary war films beyond Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) – which for years, to my mind, appeared to have accomplished the most experiential perspective on modern warfare that Hollywood has the patience to display.  But war feels distinctly immune to rhapsodizing; whenever characters are required to spill their emotional guts in polished monologues about how ‘it’s about the man beside you’, or ‘I just can’t take it anymore, man’, something ineffable slips away.  I no longer feel the dirt and fear that must, must reside alongside armed combat.  I just feel screenwriting.  Black Hawk Down suffers from far too much of this, and Scott is a lazy director (he can’t shoot to edit, and he’s prone to excessive music) but he does sustain two solid hours of wearying, soul-eroding strain.

That’s the easiest level on which Bigelow’s film works well.  Building scenes with extraordinary tension seems second nature to her here, and she does it mostly with carefully modulated performances, as well as playing off our expectations.  Shots that seem to suggest impending onslaught lead nowhere; innocuous chitchat on the periphery of battle doesn’t necessarily foreshadow imminent attack.  People chatter under pressure, and distant phones do ring, and helicopters will fly overhead without effect.  A civilian watching from a balcony, filming with a videocamera, might be as curious about the outcome as the soldiers who have just spotted him through their weapons’ sights.  It seems silly to commend a director for not slathering music all over her film, but Bigelow is judicious with her score – it offers occasional mood, little more.  Moreover, she recognizes the effect of technical flukes, and moves beyond the standard shaky camerawork and jumpy editing to letting us hear mic rustle and the muffled canned quality of an unmastered lavalier, buried in clothing somewhere around an actor’s throat.  I felt I was inside a film in the sweaty, claustrophobic process of creating itself.

Having twice in my life been far too close to gunshots fired in anger at live human beings, by people who would consider themselves combatants, I can say with certainty that the experience offers no insight beyond its own foolish inadequacy as human behavior.  Men don’t charge courageously into the maw of live fire; they run or hide from it, because it’s fucking awful.  I can only imagine warfare carries a crushing moral load, and incites greater indignation, as a sustained conflict between men committed to killing each other, and Bigelow seems to agree.  Her team of three bomb disarmament specialists works in constant, multidirectional alertness, often disarming a car bomb and keeping track of the men watching them from the rooftops nearby, any of whom could be carrying an automatic weapon or merely a cell phone with which to remotely detonate.  But when offered the decision to kill – as opposed to a reaction to return fire – all of these men hesitate, looking for an alternative, hoping for a mistaken intention or an optical illusion in the blazing desert heat.  It’s possible Bigelow milks these moments for more than they’re worth, straining behavior for drama, but at least two of these scenes present enormous moral choice, rooted in oppressive physical environment and/or disorienting cultural miscommunication, between people who would rather not partake of death but aren’t sure how to proceed.  Threats seem to get the ball rolling.

I could be losing my patience with feature-length films in general, but I would almost have been happy if The Hurt Locker was only as long as its opening sequence, masterfully built of continuous subjective discovery and some profoundly impressive acting by Guy Pearce in particular.  Yes, it paves the way for the story (which revolves around Pearce’s replacement, played by Jeremy Renner, in what is easily the film’s most conventional element), and also for another aspect of The Hurt Locker that struck me as sort of wonderful.  Several known character actors play bit parts – almost throwaway roles, destined in other films for supporting-role performers only, but they don’t feel like gimmicks so much as counterweights to the film’s otherwise appropriately even-keeled casting.  Nothing detracts from performance quite so much as an actor’s persona, and in filling the film with recognizable but persona-less actors, she directs our attention toward what they do, not whether they survive.  And then she gives us faces we can name, who are no more impervious to war.  Bigelow is a fine director of actors rather than stars.

What she’s not is a master sculptor, ultimately.  The film has long, fluid sequences – the extended, static shootout in the desert, for example – that play well because of their duration, but I suspect Bigelow thinks too highly of Mark Boal’s script and her actors’ fine work to cut too harshly into their playtime.  Certain other sequences – the hypermasculine drunken bareknuckle fistfight in the barracks loses momentum quickly, and acquires no residual dimension – carry on for no particular reason, and I’m of two minds about this.  On one hand, my guess is that this is probably closer to the way warfare works: in fits and starts, and long, long periods of interrupted unease that gradually dissolve a person’s mental defenses.  But on the other, I’m not sure such dissolution is Bigelow’s point.  I think she just loves this material, and badly wants it to stretch beyond the limitations of less ambitious storytelling, of less chunky content.  I’m inclined to side with her, if only to resist the destructive tendencies of producers who fear extended running times…but then again, that opening scene might have been enough for me.

I realize, as I approach the end of this review, that I really ought to have savaged this film more, on principal.  It’s vulgar cinema, stymied by directionless writing and conventionally chaotic editing, and tries far too hard, in the end, to pinpoint its obvious message.  In spite of many of the reviews, it is not an artistic masterpiece.  But there is a scene in a bomb-making warehouse, involving the body of a young boy and the stitches holding his stomach closed, that illustrates just how committed Bigelow is to this film, as an experience for us and an apparent obsession of hers.  Her command of this film is as assured and relentless as Renner’s bomb specialist, as committed as Ralph Fiennes in his tiny cameo, as professionally illuminating as her cinematographer Barry Ackroyd’s range (he shot The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) on steady long lenses, in perfect control of lush color).  All of which, eventually, is what The Hurt Locker is about.

The best parts of Goodbye Solo transpire in the opening scenes, while the film is still a mystery, and the stylistic brilliance of its director, Ramin Bahrani, is still washing over us.  Bahrani’s sense of visual rhythm is initially as graceful as his jaunty way with dialogue and behavior, and although both eventually show a repetitiveness that feels formulaic, his is an unquestionably focused talent, committed to his characters and thinking through them with a concise clarity that’s unusual in American cinema.  Maybe in cinema as a whole.

To be fair, I feel a twinge of jealousy over this film, and it has nothing to do with the end result.  Three years ago I received a call to head down to Winston-Salem to boom op this film with a sound mixer I’ve worked with on several features (and saw this film with two days ago).  He went, I didn’t.  My hope was to get better-paying mixing work here in New York, to eventually afford my own gear and get out of booming (for reasons that still baffle me; on the smoothest of productions, booming is a soothing mixture of craftmanship and meditation).  Now, on the verge of directing my first film with substantive characters, I wish I had been witness to Bahrani directing his two leads.  They are masterfully performed, and they keep the film afloat even when Bahrani’s dexterity as a filmmaker starts to blunt.

I can only imagine Bahrani began with the faces.  Souleymane Sy Savane as the taxi driver Solo and Red West as William, his two-week long fare, have faces of plastic granite: boldly, fiercely expressive, on emotional front after emotional front, to an extent that would strain the keenest of trained Method actors.  The ancient pitted scar on Savane’s left cheek expresses as much about the past that molded him as his almond-shaped eyes, the ones that glow on his black face when he laughs, and narrow to half-consciousness in the white line fever of the late-night cabbie.  Red West’s eyes are half-submerged, and if at all possible seem even less conscious than his withered, craggy face, the one that says everything we could hope to know about whatever it is that’s eating him alive.

It helps too that both actors are wonderfully adept with movement and dialogue; nothing feels scripted, or worse, like Bahrani’s voice instead of their own.  It’s the cardinal sin of the low-budget indie film, and the most common problem: that the script never gets to quality actors, or to the right actor for the part – or that it does, and the film has no money for them, or the director can’t lure them in.  Bahrani evades the problem entirely, casting one anonymous actor with no screen persona (West, a former bodyguard to Elvis and a sometime day player in his films), and a complete non-actor (Savane, a former flight attendant), extraordinarily right for the role of an immigrant taxi driver aching to become a flight attendant instead.  It’s as close to flawless casting as I can recall, and a sign of legitimate vision that Bahrani could see their potential.

He mines them fully.  William’s offer of $100 in the opening scene for Solo to take him to the top of a mountain on a prescribed morning two weeks hence provides a launchpad for these men that succinctly articulates their individual needs (isolation for William, a fuller, deeper achievement of service for Solo) without sloughing into the trenches of banality.  Because Bahrani takes a whole film to do it, and because he understands that a whole film is necessary.  The depths of human need are not spelled out in a scene, or in an arc per se, but in the wear and tear of duration – a concept foreign to directors who feel that filmmaking functions on plot turns that impel change (another, paradoxical, form of constancy that articulates little more than impatience).  By the closing scenes, these bodies feel like the shells of living creatures, identifiable by the viscera inside.

I haven’t seen Bahrani’s other films, so I can’t speak to any consistency or his development as a filmmaker.  I wish I could.  Goodbye Solo shows he’s got an eye for shooting behavior that keeps the film’s visual flow alive and progressive, and he’s got a dramatic flair self-consciously inspired by the likes of fellow Iranian Abbas Kiarostami: rooted in archetype, where repeated action elicits deeper reflection, and where a natural, clean soundscape provides the tonal undercurrent generally engendered by music.  Bahrani even borrows Kiarostami’s color scheme, his thick browns and profoundly unlit sensibility, captured in controlled, visually rhythmic frames that flow together smoothly.  That it was shot with prime lenses on the Varicam is a monument to that camera, and a better tribute to the expressive quality of well-used HD than Slumdog Millionaire, where flash and lightness stand in for any delicacy of mood.

Slumdog is a fitting point of comparison on another front.  In a sense, they take polar approaches to defining culture and character: whereas Slumdog is a film about indigenous people made by outsiders, Goodbye Solo is a cultural testament made by a second-generation immigrant, and that distinction – at least in this case – seems to make all the difference.  Unfettered by cultural identification, Danny Boyle uses stereotypes as an artificial means of uniting escapist fantasies.  He undermines our identification with his characters on their terms by appealing directly to what we think we know, what pop culture tells us we ought to know.  A child of immigrants who lived for a time in Iran, his parents’ birthplace, Bahrani instead paints a portrait of willfully uprooted culture – and, with the character of William, willfully uprooted identity – understood through his characters alone.  No quantity of pop awareness prepares us for identifying with these men.  There is no magnificent, universal commonality among us beyond our need to self-identify by bouncing off each other, often with no perceptible change.  It’s a much tougher thing to say, full of the illogical contradictions found in wayward human behavior, and a far more mature artistic endeavor on Bahrani’s part.

If he falters, and I think he does, Bahrani fails by attrition, eventually allowing his film to settle into narrative predictability (for a while).  The demands of satisfying certain raised questions – why does William keep going to the movie theater? – drains Goodbye Solo of a bit of its mysterious elegance.  And I was happy to find out why, but the answer is not unique, nor does it complicate William; I would rather not know.  It could be too that Bahrani lingers too long in the film’s final moments, and I’m torn between feeling that he must, for rhythm’s sake, and wishing that he’d found another beautiful beat to justify it.  But these are small quibbles in his writing, and Bahrani is a composer of whole films.  His greatest strength is his intuitiveness, his perception of subsurface tides among people as well as in the flow of a film.  He may rely too much on a shooting style of following his characters around a room on a tight long lens, but I would argue that Bahrani’s a searcher, and the act of looking is more expressive than telling us what he’s looking for.

It’s time to clarify that the review of Milk I posted several weeks ago was a joke from start to finish, a sarcastic response (full of suggestions to that effect, I hope) to my belief that Van Sant might have made a nearly flawless film – and that Penn has never, ever, been more effortlessly natural.  I say this now because the sarcasm was lost on many, and because I want to make it abundantly clear that there is no sarcasm involved when I say that Slumdog Millionaire is a vigorously obnoxious movie, a grab bag of cliches and sparkly popness mechanically designed to wring all manner of thick, buoyant emotions from our unwitting selves.  There’s no resisting a film like this; there’s nothing, in fact, that actually touches us.  Instead, we’re bombarded with stimuli to the point where our conscious brains quit, resigned to the knowledge that they are irrelevant compared with the blunt force trauma of pop spectacle.

I admit I put off seeing this movie, for two reasons.  One, I was advised not to by a friend who grew up in Bombay, and who found Slumdog‘s flavor a touch unsavory; and two, because it became as popular as it did.  In the summer of 2000, I spent five weeks at work on an archaeological site in Greece with a curmudgeonly Midwestern archaeologist who insisted, when pressed, that if a film was popular, it wasn’t worth seeing.  His attitude seemed elitist at the time.  But over the years, his logic has begun to make at least theoretical sense.  If a film works for a broad audience of such divergent interests and backgrounds, ethnicities and cultures, languages and ideologies, what on earth does it know that so many other films don’t?  Have these films struck universal chords consistent among people as a species?  Is that even possible?

I guess a fella’s answer to that question would say a lot about his attitude as a whole, and I’m not deaf to the pessimistic overtones I’ll incur by saying that I don’t think it’s wholly possible, no.  I think what such entertainments latch onto are common escapist fantasies, where real violence never kills, cute kids embody innocence, song and dance is the greatest imaginable expression of joy, and social disorder affects no one in the face of a united cause.  Affirming these fantasies is no crime, but it hardly makes a film insightful, or even honest for that matter, especially when a film like Slumdog – like so many Western entertainments, and now, frequently, indigenous ones too – sashays so casually over content that should be treated with at least respectful complexity.

Opening Slumdog with the onscreen text that asks whether the following story is a function of luck, cheating, smarts, or fate is a fairly sinister way of coaxing us to think of dramatic license as moral dilemma – sinister because it prefers that we shut down our intellect first.  No amount of narrative preparation should preclude us from seeing that this movie consciously mixes a coming-of-age story with a rags-to-riches story and a crime thriller for no better reason than that they’re all recognizable genres with inevitable conclusions (one way or the other), and will thus keep us mindlessly on the edge of our seats until each preordained question is answered: will the guy get the girl?  will he win the money?  will the bad guys lose?  Furthermore, no amount of sexy canted Dannypants photography or rhythm-busting editing should distract us from the fact that, whichever way each of those posed questions goes, there is nothing to be gleaned from them except the resolution of posed questions.

So why do I care?  Maybe because I suspect Danny Boyle doesn’t really care, that he’s only in it for the fun of the whole thing.  There are directors who build movies on the peaks and call it drama; there are also those who, in defiance, build them on nothing but troughs and call it art.  But there’s a realm between both, the whole damn wave, where unique emotions happen and peculiar experiences incite mysteries, ones not to be solved.  It’s a broad place, and it demands patience and breathing room, two things Slumdog scornfully represses in favor of hopscotching from one dramatic high point to the next, in a high-wire act impressive for its consistency alone.  I suppose there’s something to be said for uniformity.  But it’s the kind that makes “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire” popular, where there’s no space for anything but tension.  And it’s also the kind that draws such enormous audiences to “American Idol” or “Top Model”, where the tension lies in seeing who will fail and who will rise to meteoric success as a flagbearer of pop nonsense.

Boyle’s made an appreciable career out of nonsense, from the amusing darkness of Shallow Grave (1995) and Trainspotting (1996) to the silly visual pleasures of The Beach (2000) and the terrifying first half of 28 Days Later…(2002).  What he’s never shown was much interest in or aptitude for artistry or intellect, content to settle for slapdash kineticism over narrative logic or depth.  Slumdog is no different, cut together from incongruous shots of little particular rhythm, with an atrociously aggressive sound mix (I spent whole scenes with my hands over my ears to dull the physical pain) laden with a World Beat score cynically crafted to undermine any real taste of modern India in favor of a more familiar taste of Western influence on modern India.  Yes, one could argue that that is modern India.  Having never visited, I couldn’t say.  But in my travels I’ve found that the divergences from my own culture have been more interesting to me than the McDonald’s or the Coca-Cola.  And language confusion aside, I’ve never had trouble understanding the people as human beings – a problem Boyle conveniently sidesteps by casting the cutest postcard Indian children alive, lest a Western audience be turned off by unattractive Mumbai slum kids in a film about them.

It’s not even that any one of these problems on its own would kill the movie.  It’s that collectively, they reveal just how calculated and contrived Slumdog really is, a movie as formulaic as Titanic and as manipulative as The Cider House Rules.  It’s also willfully disdainful of the full capacities of cinema: to accomplish worthy insight into life through sound and image alone, by capturing behavior and, yes, even spectacle, that reveals complicated truth.  If Slumdog weren’t so peacockishly proud of its simplicity I might not care so much, but I suspect I’m doubly annoyed by its popularity as an apparent cultural icon of some sort.  The Oscars have never been a reliable barometer of cinematic artistry (Kramer vs Kramer over Apocalypse Now?  Gladiator over Traffic?), and we all know this, but at some level they are an indicator of our year-to-year attitude toward the part movies play in our social mood.  It may be that the Academy burned away its quota of taste last year with No Country for Old Men, though we were clearly more willing, for some reason, to grapple with darkness last year.  No Country might not be much deeper a film than Slumdog, but it wasn’t afraid of disturbing our illusions of pervasive goodness by suggesting that sometimes good is just irrelevant compared with the blunt force trauma of evil.  I wish that wasn’t the case, but I also wish we weren’t so uncomfortable with that fact.