The Way: watch it alone so no one will see you cry. [Movie Review]

Charlie Sheen has been kicking up a lot of dust lately.  He’s done some really excellent work in the past and I enjoyed him on Two and a Half Men, but the ratio of attention-paid to his public breakdown over the attention-that-should-be-paid seems way out of whack, so beyond that I’ll leave the personal judgments to addiction specialists and tabloid parasites.

It would be nice if Sheen could divert at least a small fraction of that attention towards The Way (2010), an extremely small-budget film project written and directed by Emilio Estevez and starring their father Martin.

The Way is about an ophthalmologist (Martin Sheen) with an only son (played in flashbacks and hallucinations by Emilio Estevez himself) who, after quitting a doctoral program at Berkeley to travel and find himself, dies suddenly while hiking in the Pyrenees.

The father, Tom, learns that his son was just beginning El Camino de Santiago, a walking pilgrimage through northern Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, where Catholics maintain the relics of the apostle St. James are interred. 

Expecting only to retrieve Daniel’s corpse and return home, Tom decides on impulse to complete the pilgrimage instead.  A lapsed Catholic about whom his friends joke on the golf course that he lacks a soul, Tom is broken by the news of his son’s death.  Daniel’s cremated remains symbolize the weight of his guilt and failure as a father. 

As he walks the nearly 800km westward journey, Tom periodically lightens his load, both figuratively and literally, sprinkling ashes by the small handful at notable sites.

Not only those ashes keep him company.  Three other pilgrims join him one after another, each broken in their separate ways, strangely mirroring Dorothy’s companions from The Wizard of Oz.  First he meets the Dutchman, who cuts a comic figure, though of all the characters, the precise history of his sadness remains to us obscure (ostensibly he walks the Camino to lose weight, though we also learn that he is married and that he may love her more than she loves him).  The next to join is a morose Canadian, whose heart has been hardened by an abusive ex-husband and an abortion.  The last is the cowardly Irishman, a travel book writer haunted by the real book he could never write, hiding from his publishers on the Camino.

 The Way is a small film in many ways, filmed with a skeleton crew of less than 50 according to IMDB.  Like Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the filming of the pilgrimage required that the crew become pilgrims themselves, but The Way is no Aguirre.  Though people have died as the character Daniel died in the mountains, the film captures little in the way of peril.  Estevez’s camera captures odd moments, strangeness perhaps, but never the sublime.  Quiet pain and reconciliation dominate the mood.

The most similar comparison to my mind is that weird little movie David Lynch produced with Disney Studios, The Straight Story, about an old man who rides a lawnmower through the American Midwest to see his brother once more before he dies.  Both films will have you in tears if you’re not made of stone.

The Elephant-men of Avatar 2

Here were trunks, spines, tusks, fangs, claws, tails, paws.  Here was fur, and here was smooth hide.  Here was flesh flowing at will and seeking new shapes.  Here were dark chambers, lit only by flickering fungoid-glow, in which no firm distinction of species existed (Downward to the Earth 165).

Word on the street is that James Cameron won’t make a sequel to the award-winning 3D spectacular, Avatar, unless “he feels strongly that the script is excellent enough.”  Sufficient excellence is a funny sort of concept, and I’m not exactly sure what it means, but he could do a lot worse than to adapt Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth (1969). 

I had pretty serious reservations about Avatar before watching it.  I'd read that it was racist, that it staged the conquest of fantasy over sci-fi, that it worshipped a death-god (Douthat, you're awful, but sometimes hilariously so), and that like Titanic it will be unwatchable in 10 years. 

The consensus among friends of mine whose opinions I respected was that it was visually awesome.  Not worth thinking about, but worth watching.  Initially I resolved not to watch it at all.  Movies can be good and have awesome computer effects, I said to myself, so I’ll wait for them… 

But then I was kidnapped! by this team of insane scientists who were researching methods of coercion and torture.  Seriously!  It was frightening.  They took me to a secret underground laboratory and told me that they would electrocute one kitten for every hour that I resisted watching Avatar.  Innocent, defenseless kittens!  Now, I am a man of strong principles and iron will, but I am not a monster.  So reluctantly I agreed to watch it.  Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same.   This really happened.  I wouldn’t have watched it otherwise.  My time is far too valuable.  Honest.

Well, turns out it sucked.  It totally sucked.  I wasn’t offended by the politics or anything.  The nature-worship was sort of cheesy, but the idea of a sentient biosphere was cool, and I’m positive that Cameron meant well.  But it was still 10 lbs of CGI in a 5 lbs bag.

However, Cameron could totally redeem himself in my eyes if he took a serious, long look at Downward to the Earth as possible source material for the sequel. 

Why, you ask? 

Downward to the Earth, as it happens, is a novel about redemption.  In the far future, Earth has established a far-reaching colonial empire spanning inhabited alien worlds.  Holman’s World (or Belzagor, as the natives call it) is one such planet.  But liberal activists on Earth stir up enough anti-colonial sentiment to successfully lobby for the relinquishment of all colonized planets hosting sentient life back into the possession of their indigenous populations.  The plot of the novel follows Edmund Gundersen, a former sector administrator of Belzagor, who returns once more to his outpost eight years after Relinquishment to atone for his past sins.

Strangely, there are not one but two sentient races on Belzagor, the Nildoror and the Sulidoror.  The Nildoror are massive, elephantlike beings, herbivorous and passive, whom the earthlings exploited as beasts of burden.  The omnivorous Sulidoror, on the other hand, are large, furry bipeds, about one and a half times the size of a man.  Throughout the many years of colonial occupation, the Sulidoror mainly kept to themselves in the mysterious forests of the northern mist country, but Gunderson is surprised, on his return, to find the Sulidoror living alongside of the Nildoror, even in the tropics where he had been stationed.

The Nildoror have this thing, like a religious rite, called Rebirth, that Gunderson has heard only whispers about.  They pilgrimage to the mountain of Rebirth, deep inside the mist country, to undergo it, and Gunderson, racked with guilt, has become obsessed with the idea of participating himself.  But on the way to the mountain, Gunderson comes in contact with one of his former colonist friends, a “dark and chilling saint” named Kurtz (an explicit reference to Heart of Darkness) who has already attempted Rebirth and came out of it writhing in pain, his body a deformed mess of alien biology equipped only for suffering.  “River…death…lost…horror…river…cave…warm…lost…warm…smash…black…go…god...horror…born…lost…born…” he feverishly repeats (116). 

Will Gunderson continue on his pilgrimage or turn in horror from this fleshy manifestation of the deep, twisted darkness he fears he and his kind have imposed upon the planet?  You’ll get no more spoilers from me, but at its core, Downward to the Earth is about the cruelty of Western civilization, the arrogance of the human race, the possibility of redemption and the virtue of estrangement (and maybe also the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs).  These themes match well the message of Avatar, but with an important difference: the natives of Belzagor have no use for human saviors. 

Cameron really wouldn’t have to change much.  Swap out the Sulidoror for the Na’vi and maybe instead of elephant-like aliens, he could have some Pandoran equivalent of the blue whale play the role of the planet’s secondary sentient race.  

The Virtue of Indifference: a review of "Stalker" (1979)

Stalker (1979), like many of Tarkovsky's films, proceeds slowly and thoughtfully through familiar landscapes made strange.  The plot is allegorical: two men, one a scientist and the other a writer, engage a "stalker" to guide them to the heart of the "Zone."  The Zone looks for the most part like normal countryside, except that there are burned out tanks and a few ruined, Soviet-style bunkers laying about.  It was cordoned off by the military of the small, imaginary country in which the film is set, after a few units of soldiers had mysteriously disappeared.  But rumors have it that in the heart of the Zone, there is a room that grants the deepest desire of those who step through its door.  

The Zone represents the Unconscious, and the film is an investigation of the logic of desire.  Its argument is that desire invents its own objects (success, revenge, meaning, escape) but can never be satisfied.  A desiring existence is unbearable--endlessly deferring and disappointing.  

Not until the conclusion of the film does Tarkovsky seem to suggest two alternatives to the manacles of desire.  These are presented by the wife and daughter of the Stalker.  The wife, speaking directly towards the camera, attempts to make suffering into a universal principle, something to be accepted even.  But whom is she trying to convince?  Her eyes, her nervous way of smiling, clearly belie her desperate rationalizations.  The stalker's daughter, on the other hand, never says a word.  In the final scene, her father places her at a table (she was born crippled...or perhaps without the desire to walk); when he leaves, she lays down her head and with a disinterested, bored look on her face seems to push three glasses across the surface with her mind...or at least appears to.  She, it seems, is wired differently, with a mind that does not desire nor accept but rather rejects and destroys indifferently.

"I don't recommend it": A review of Night Train (2009)

I watched two movies the other night. The first was From Hell, the Jack the Ripper story based on Alan Moore's graphic novel and starring Heather Graham and Johnny Depp. Those two couldn't make a bad movie if they tried. I'm one-thirds to half-joking. The other movie was Night Train (2009). I had just been wondering to myself about two days earlier, what's Leelee Sobieski been up to since Eyes Wide Shut? Turns out the answer is a crap load of things, including several movies I have, in fact, seen...in some cases, very unfortunately.

Anyway, about the movie. A few preliminary remarks are called for. I am like Hume's Man of Taste, but still I've seen The Postman about 3 or 4 times more than I've seen La Dolce Vita, which I've seen twice. This isn't to say that I watch anything ironically. I have a very low tolerance for what is often designated "camp," and I rarely come across movies that "are so bad that they're good." I also don't get off on bad special effects, though it's usually pretty easy for me to ignore them.

Oh, also. I have sort of a weakness for suspense thrillers. I'd call it substance abuse, but it's a pretty happy day when one of these movies turns out to possess substance.

And I'm not hung up on "movies that make you think." I don't need a movie to make me think. And if I do think it's because I wanted to, not because some bossy movie made me.

Ah, one last thing. If a movie takes place entirely on a train, there's about a 90 to 95 percent chance that I will like it, and if a murder is involved, that bumps the percentage even higher.

All of this is sort of a roundabout way of saying that for most people, this Night Train is going to be the worst thing on wikipedia's list of entries for things called "night train," and as one who has imbibed it in fortified wine form, that's saying a lot. Nevertheless, there aren't many reviews of this movie up yet, so I thought I'd post my 2 cents (you're overpaying).

The plot of Night Train is not new. I hope it's not too spoily to say that its basic form it shares with Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," one of my favorites, except that the small cast (consisting of Danny Glover, the conductor of the train, Steve Zahn, a traveling salesman, and Leelee Sobieski, a med-school student, and about five other less important characters) are not a gang of drunken revelers, and they also don't begin with the virtuous intention of killing Death.

That's not exactly to say that the motivations of these three characters are unvirtuous, but instead, like most Americans, they suffer, each alone, invisibly spilling bourgeois tears over the lives they could be living if only they had lots and lots of money. I know their pain. They are my sisters and brothers.

So Christmas eve (of all nights to be unwealthy!) finds Zahn and Sobieski sharing the rear car of the titular train when a mute stranger appears bearing an unusual present. In no time at all, he is dead, courtesy of the lethal interaction of some pills he was taking and one of Zahn's miniature bottles of vodka. For some reason, I think he wanted to die. Morbid curiousities are piqued, and all three (including Glover, who's come for the now-dead man's fare) take a peak inside the box. It contains...another box. But that box contains...the lives they could each be living...lives where they wouldn't have to be successful salesmen or doctors like their parents want...lives where they wouldn't have to be anything other than rich. One sees emeralds, one sees diamonds. Sobieski sees some other kind of gems, presumably. Little do they know, the box is magic or something, passing through history, leaving death and destruction in its wake by seeming to contain the heart's desire of whomever peers inside. "Gems, you saw? How ordinary," contemptfully remarks a later, nameless character who knows about the box. I wonder what he would see. I would see world peace.

Things proceed predictably from there on out. You're never really given the chance to care about the characters, just as they were never given a chance to care about the man who killed himself on Christmas eve. Then, ultimately, the twist is that there is no twist, and everyone dies, including a cross-dresser, an Chinese man and his father who spend most of the movie playing Go, and the little dog too.

If you're looking for a better modern take on the Pardoner's Tale, I'd recommend "A Simple Plan," especially if you're into believability and character development. The acting is much, much better (if you can resist thinking "Game over, man! Game over!" every time you see Bill Paxton), the setting's more desolate and evocative, and the characters start out as friends, so when they turn on each other, it means more. But if you're exactly like me, and you've already seen "A Simple Plan," and there's really nothing else on, and you already drank about half a bottle of wine watching a mostly decent movie and are just looking for something, anything to accompany the second half, then "Night Train" will certainly help you pass the time.

But you don't have to take my word for it.