The Order (2003) (ORDER VS. ORDER DOUBLE FEATURE PART 2!)

The Order vs The Order

Part II: The Ordering
(See Van Damme's attempt in the first exciting intallment!)

The Order (2003) aka The Sin Eater

Dir and written by Brian Helgeland

Starring Heath Ledger, Mark Addy, Benno Fürmann, Shannyn Sossamon, Peter Weller

So Van Damme’s THE ORDER is more or less what you’d expect, plus split-kicking while dressed like a Rabbi. You’d think Heath Ledger’s THE ORDER would be pretty much like you’d expect it to be, too. I mean, early millennial studio B-movie with a rising star and an often-frustrated writer-director working in a mostly disreputable sub-genre. Should add up to something akin to UNDERWORLD, maybe like an EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, right? Sort of dull, drab, uninspired, safe, crappy and predictable. You’d think. But you’d be wrong. This THE ORDER is a really fuckin’ weird movie, it almost doesn’t do anything you’d expect of it. I mean, it is crappy, I guess that part is pretty expected. But not in the usual, predictable way these things go. This is crappy in a weird, alien way, like it was made by someone whose only previous contact with humanity had been through Cinemax Softcore films and Catholic fan fiction.

Here’s the story, I think: Heath Ledger is Detective John Order, a Catholic priest who belongs to an obscure THE ORDER which is frowned upon by the church hierarchy for their delving into arcane knowledge re: demon fighting, etc. Mainstream Catholicism is really embarrassed by their old fashion exorcism-having ways,* which is a little perplexing because it seems like there’s a demon lurking around pretty much every corner here and also let’s face it, by the time you accept the idea of a God coming to Earth to sacrifice himself to himself so he can legally forgive an entire species for a sin committed by the first woman ever, I don’t know why demons are such a stretch. Might as well go whole hog at that point.

Nah I’m just playing, I kid Catholicism, we’re friends. But seriously, with a mainstream religion as wacky as that, you can hardly blame the movie for this shit not making any sense.

What's he buuuuilllllldding in there?

Anyway, point is that Heath discovers that his mentor/adopted father has died under mysterious demonic circumstances in Rome, and the extremely shady Peter-Weller-esque Cardinal Driscoll (Peter Weller) wants him to hoof it over there and check it out. For some reason he also takes along Mara (Shannyn Sossamon, 2002 Teen Choice Award for Choice Film Chemistry) a mentally ill young lady who has just escaped from a mental institution she was placed in after trying to kill our boy during a (botched?) exorcism, and who also wants to bone him but she can’t cuz he’s a priest. And because three’s a crowd, they also meet up with the other guy, Father Thomas (Mark Addy, JACK FROST**) who is allegedly some sort of charming Irishman, in the role of fat best friend. So off to the races they go!

Basically for awhile it’s just your standard detective story, our boys making the rounds, shaking down the local demonic forces for info, meeting unsympathetic figures of authority, visiting crime scenes and collecting forensic evidence, visiting the crime lab (in this case, arcane supernatural bookstore) and talking to the nerds about what it all means. So far so good, but here’s the thing: after some routine evil demon child fighting and shaking down the local nameless malevolent force, our primary suspect emerges, and things turn decidedly strange.

See, the prime suspect here is this guy with the stripper name of William Eden (Benno Fürmann, “Inspector Detector” from SPEED RACER), whose job is that he is a “Sin Eater,” i.e. the movie’s original, less generic title. Here’s what a Sin Eater does: he finds people who normally would be eternally damned by the Church (heretics, excommunicated former members, people who wear linen and wool together, anyone caught in white after labor day etc) and removes their sins, bringing them onto himself. The person is now free to go to Heaven, Sin Eater gets paid, and also it makes him more or less immortal, so he doesn’t have to worry about Hell either. Pretty sweet deal for the guy, pretty awkward situation for the Church, which really, really likes to have a monopoly on who does and who does not get into Heaven.

"Oh Heath, if only you hadn't chosen to forsake the ways of the flesh and devote yourself to God, I would surely make love to you." "Be quite, Shannyn, I'm way into this sunflower right now" 

Here’s what makes the movie so weird: I think this dude is supposed to be the villain here; he does all the usual villainous things, like make speeches about how we’re not so different you and I, murders someone important, associates with known demonic forces, etc. But the movie is surprisingly ambivalent about him. In fact, after seeing him work, Ledger actually seems more or less in agreement with his motives and methods. And of course, it makes sense, because any person with even the faintest hint of a human soul has to applaud anyone that would do whatever it took to prevent someone else from going to hell, especially if they’re doomed to that fate because some asshole church bureaucrat excommunicated them over a political dispute. To wit: Ledger’s own mentor and adoptive father had recently been excommunicated over his quest for knowledge; officially, without some last minute sin-eating, this poor old man was doomed to burn in hell for eternity. I mean, who could possibly support something so horrific? And let’s remember, this is a God of forgiveness; murder as many people as you want, and the Church will still absolve you from your death bed if you offer sincere contrition. The only thing they won’t forgive is you getting kicked out of their club. Fuck that. Suffering for eternity because you opened the wrong book? This Sin Eating business sounds like a real victory for simple human decency. Did you fuckers learn nothing from my takedown of DANTE’S PEAK INFERNO?

That’s all pretty interesting philosophically, but it makes for a weirdly unstructured genre movie. I mean, what exactly is the conflict here? There’s a big conspiracy, but if the conspiracy is all in service of something you more or less agree with, or at least have very mixed feelings about, there’s not a whole lot of tension about punishing the people responsible, right? I guess the Eden part was originally going to be played by Vincent Cassel, he might have been more able to seem sneaky and villainous even while doing arguably the right thing. But Benno Fürmann has a real earnest Jeremy Renner nice guy quality to him, it’s hard not to buy that he’s essentially right. There IS one unambiguously evil guy, but I’m not actually sure what his stake in any of this was, or how exactly he’s involved. It kinda seems like he was involved in this conspiracy part time as a hobby or something, he does have an evil plan but it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Heath Ledger or Sin Eating, at least as far as I can tell; he’s kinda got his own thing going and then they randomly happen to learn about it, unrelated to their investigation. They (SPOILER) him in the end, though, so… yay?

Good name for a bakery renowned for their rich chocolate desserts, possibly not such a good name for a movie. 

 

Aside from its weird wandering ambiguous plot, the movie has the unusual distinction of having a script which appears to be composed of 100% clichéd philosophy quotes taken out of context. How else could you explain an incident where a minor character solemnly intones: “Knowledge is the Enemy of Faith. And sometimes when you look into the abyss... the abyss looks back into you.” That’s not a line of dialogue, that’s a fortune cookie put together by a google search algorithm. Apart from being dodgy paraphrases of famous quotes, I can’t help but notice that those sentences have nothing to do with each other. Is knowledge supposed to be the abyss? I don’t get it. Heath Ledger nods gravely, though. Guess it’s one of those little in-jokes between seekers of arcane knowledge.

Also: “Every life is a riddle. The answer to mine is knowledge, born of darkness.”

The movie is full of that kind of thing, just total howlers. Writer Helgeland (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV: DREAM MASTER) would be nominated for an Academy award for his MYSTIC RIVER screenplay this same year; I’m not a huge fan of that one, either, but at least no one is throwing around Nietzsche quotes willy-nilly. I guess he was trying to match his characters’ diction to the big, gothic Catholic drama he’s trying to conjure here, but wow, does it not work. Even poor Heath Ledger gives a pretty embarrassing performance here. I think he’s going for naturalism, but given that dialogue you can imagine about how well it comes off. Mostly, he just seems kind of jet lagged and out of it, or maybe like he's trying to play off the fact that he doesn’t speak the language and can't understand a single thing anyone is saying to him. It’s weird, the whole main cast is more or less directly imported from Helgeland’s previous film, A KNIGHT’S TALE, where they’re all so charming and lively. Here, only Mark Addy comes off with any kind of dignity at all, and it’s really only because he’s the only cast member who occasionally smiles.

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, whatcha gonna do?

There’s not a whole lot of dignity to go around for anyone; the entire enterprise has an off-putting amateurishness to it, full of awkward edits, listless framing, the whole nine yards. In fact, for much of the runtime it looks like it must have been made for almost nothing, you might even think it was a no-budget indie effort from a few years earlier if you didn’t know better. Occasionally, you do see some money on-screen (sins represented by CGI transparent soul squids, for example. I don’t think I remember that part of the bible) but mostly even if it looks like it must have been expensive they don’t get their money’s worth here, it comes off looking cheap anyway. They do have two pretty nice sets, though. One is a big evil throne room kind of deal (see pic above), lots of good detail there and even a little atmosphere generated solely by the set itself. The other is a set which is supposed to be the inside of St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s pretty convincing, as are a couple other fancy Vatican sets you see from time to time. They couldn’t have actually got permission to shoot inside a real Vatican church, right? These have got to be sets, but they’re good ones, real impressive looking and details-rich. So good job, set designer of THE ORDER, even though they kinda squander it by shooting things to look as cramped and unimpressive is they can.

I dunno, man, it’s kinda hard to even criticize this one since I can’t even confidently say what they were even going for to begin with. Is this supposed to be some kind of twisty gothic mystery? Some sort of morose philosophical meditation? A doomed love story, perhaps? A horror movie? I honestly have no idea. For a movie about an Order, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of guiding intent here. Maybe should have stuck with that Sin Eating title, guys.

These are some nice ass stairs. Good job, organized religion.

* Guess the new Pope watched this movie and saw the error in their ways, because…

** The Michael Keaton one where the dead dad comes back as a snowman, not the 1997 one where the dead serial killer comes back as a snowman and rapes a chick with his carrot nose, although now that you mention it they sort of have the same plot except for the whole carrot rape thing. And I gotta admit it’s been awhile since I watched the Keaton version, maybe that’s in there too.

ORDER VS ORDER FINAL SCORECARD:

WINNER: Van Damme, by virtue of at least being cheerful about all this.

LOSER: Anyone who had to watch both films.

WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED? The early 2000’s were a rough time for movies.
WHO WORE IT BETTER? As much as I will always treasure my time with Rabbi Van Damme, you can't deny how fuckin' fly Heath be lookin' with those vestments. Insert applicable alter boy joke here.

VAN DAMME

LEDGER: WINNER

The Car

The Car (1977)

Dir. Elliot Silverstein

Written by Michael Butler & Dennis Shryack and Lane Slate

Starring James Brolin, Kathleen Lloyd, Ronny Cox

One day, for no particular reason, an evil car decides to start running over the citizens of a tiny Southwestern town. Since cars are silent and can come from anywhere, this is a huge problem. Oh right, I just remembered that cars are noisy and can only drive on roads, so really it’s just a menace to anyone walking or biking along a road which they can’t exit to the left or right, which, it turns out, is pretty much the whole town. I’m not sure if these people have houses or what, but it seems like they spend most of their time standing in the middle of the street, staring in confusion at cars baring down on them.

Since it’s pretty much impossible for an adult human being to be scared of an evil car, this is sort of more in the JAWS mold than your typical horror movie, where we follow the cops trying to deal with a menace to the citizens of a small town (and only two years later, what a weird coincidence). James Brolin has an easier time than Roy Scheider, though; no one complains when he closes down the roads. And I gotta admit, as bald-facedly laughable as this concept is, well, you can’t really be mad at a shark for eating people. But a car that runs down attractive schoolteachers in the comfort of their own home, well, that’s just being an asshole. This car is a total prick, and you end up rooting against it.

Freeze, car!

Most of the movie is way too slow and pointless to really be watched seriously by human eyes (after all, how many scenes can we watch of a car angrily driving around in the dust in pursuit of a human who by any reasonable measure should be able to avoid it simply by stepping to the left or right?) but it is at least is amiable enough to try a few humorously absurd antics. That scene, referenced in both South Park and Futurama, where a nervous person returns to their house only to find that the car is already INSIDE THEIR HOME!!! is from this movie, for example. There are some mid-level impressive stunts of cars and motorcycles doing obviously dangerous things for real, a couple funny kills, and a nicely restrained non-explanation for what the fuck is the deal with this asshole car, anyway*. If it wasn’t obviously one of the main influences for the Futurama episode where Bender turns into a were-care (the design of his were-car form is a direct lift of THE CAR) it might not be worth watching, but it is, so it is. It’s genial, and sporadically humorous enough to be potentially enjoyable when viewed with friends and a lot of alcohol. Just don’t get behind the wheel afterwards.

*Anton LaVey gets a “technical advisor” credit on the film, and gets a pre-credit quote from the Satanic Bible, which might lead one to jump to conclusions about who’s behind the wheel. But let’s not be hasty; it’s equally possible LaVey is just a classic car collector who helped furnish the (evil) custom Lincoln Continental Mark III, notable for not having any door handles or respect for human life.

• CHAINSAWNUKAH 2013 CHECKLIST!
• 
  
• LITERARY ADAPTATION: Ha, nope.
• SEQUEL: No
• REMAKE: No
• HAMMER STUDIOS: No
• SPAGHETTI NOCTURNE: No
• MORE (PETER) CUSHING FOR THE PUSHING? Nope
• SLUMMING A-LISTER: Anton LaVey
• BOOBIES: Seems like there should be, but I don't think so.
• DECAPITATIONS OR DE-LIMBING: No, doesn't get too bloody now that I think about it.
• ENTRAILS? No
• CULTISTS: No
• ZOMBIES: No
• VAMPIRES: No
• SLASHERS: No
• CURSES: No
• OBSCURITY LEVEL: I think high-mid. Played in theaters, but who ever actually watched it?
• ALEX MADE IT THROUGH AWAKE: N/A

Tree of Life

Tree of Life (2011)

Dir. Terrence Malick

Starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, plus a few shots of Sean Penn looking out the window or walking barefoot on a metaphysical beach.

For his fifth total feature-length film in a career marked by the glacial pace of just over one film per decade, Terrence Malick apparently decided to just go for it and make his FEMME FATALE. If we are really lucky, every director with a distinct style will get at least one chance in their career to go whole-hog wild and indulge every one of their fetishes, quirks, themes, and tricks and create something really crazy that most people won’t like but is endlessly fascinating to cinemaphiles. For De Palma, this was FEMME FATALE. For Gilliam, IMAGINARIUM OF DR. PARNASSUS. For Seagal, ON DEADLY GROUND. “Normal” people don’t generally like these films very much because they’re so weird and crazy and hilariously tone-deaf. But they’re such pure distillations of a particular vision that I can’t help but be fascinated by them, and I’m always up for another swing for the fences.

With TREE OF LIFE, Malick has completed his long, slow drift away from narrative (or at least the pretense thereof) into a distinctively Malickian hazy dream of suggestion, atmosphere, and symbolism. Its ambition is practically dripping off the screen, and its sense of importance barely leaves room for an audience in the theater. Malick is not just asking the big questions, he’s shouting them like a Tourettes patient at a Tea Party rally. What is man’s place with God, the universe, and everything? Can we accept the authority of a God who allows suffering and misery? How bout pain and memory and family, what’s up with that stuff? OK, so those aren’t exactly new questions, but Malick asks them rather more overtly than most (sometimes just having creepy whispered voiced just outright ask them) which is where I got hooked. I mean, this thing begins at the dawn of time, takes us through the various geologic epochs (including my personal favorite Devonian period) and has fucking dinosaurs in it for God’s sake. How many pretentious art house films have not one but three sequences with different dinosaurs? Not enough, that’s how many. Terrance Malick is trying to address that ratio, but he’s only one man. Eric Rohmer, check yourself.

                                        Still better than JURASSIC PARK 3.

So I was excited about that. What I was less jazzed about is the family drama at the center of this thing. You know me, man, I’m always up to watch some trippy experimental jazz with stock footage of volcanoes and some gyrating light patterns, but you’re gonna have a tough time getting me in the theater with the promise of a tightly woven family drama about the complicated feelings between a boy and his father and zzzzzzzzzz. I was worried this was gonna be a bait and switch, where Malick lures me in with the promise of mid-grade CG dinosaurs but then spends most of the time droning on about people’s feelings.

Well, as the movie roles, I was relieved to see my initial fears were unfounded. There’s a little context-free nonlinear family stuff, and then it’s straight back to the beginning of time for you. You get to see God, (he’s actually a little unimpressive, looking like a meeker version of the screensaver drug trip from ENTER THE VOID) the creation of the universe, the formation of the planet, a plesiosaur (actually scientists now doubt that their necks would have been sufficiently muscled to hold their head up like this out of water, so that must be a metaphor or something) and I think some weird fish or something. No giant sloths, though, that apparently wasn’t important for the story.

So it’s all fun and trippy, and then we get to Sean Penn as an old version of Jack, the boy played as a youth by the awesomely named Hunter McCracken in the film’s primary narrative. Old Jack is a fancy pants architect, which gives Malick cause to luxuriate in the abstract grandeur or some big spacious modern buildings. Say what you will about Malick, (to yourself. In the meantime, listen to what I say about him) you can’t deny his ability to find amazing shots on everyday things, here turning the glass ceiling of a building into a stunning abstraction which probably symbolizes something like God or Death or Memory or something like that. Then we get Old Jack looking sadly out a window and flashing back on his childhood where his dad is Brad Pitt and his mom is Jessica Chastain.

This is the part I was worried about; I wasn’t sure how the mundanity of a childhood in Waco Texas in the 50s was really going to live up to all the big picture stuff. But a funny thing happens here. The longer you watch the family, the clearer it becomes that this is heart of the film, the classic work of genius. This is literally, with no hyperbole, the best depiction of youth I’ve ever seen put to film. McCracken is beyond fantastic as a normal kid entering the choppy waters of adolescence while his dad starts to gradually fall apart, taking the family with him. It’s a genuinely stunning document of a child’s focus, wisely depicting the child’s here-and-now reality where a caught frog has as much wondrous significance as a burning house but also noticing the budding sense of larger forces afoot as young Jack begins to question his dad and see the cracks in his larger-than-life authority.  

It’s not just a depiction of youth, though; it’s a depiction of memory. It’s entirely possible this is a highly subjective depiction of events, but it has a staggering emotional resonance and emotional truth to it. No film I’ve ever seen better captures the shards of intense memory which linger in our mind – a chance encounter with an old face, a stolen glimpse of a guy getting arrested, the image of a sunbeam playing over a mother’s hands. This isn’t metaphor or symbolism or a way to ask The Big Questions – it’s important because it informs our memory, our sense of self. Yes, we remember the big events, but the fragments of the everyday end up weighing just as heavily on our memory and our perception of who we are and where we’ve come from. Images, smells, words – tiny but potent icons which represent a past which is mostly elusive.

Pitt is excellent as the complex father, a sensitive and sometimes warm man who is gradually being crushed by his inability to meet the standards he thinks society is setting for him and slowly turning into a bitter bully. He wonderfully conveys the father’s deepening frustration and isolation but lets us see the good person he could have been, too, which makes his escalating brutality all the more frightening and painful. His disintegration turns the family abode into a bunker under siege from within, a chaotic nightmare of uncertain tension which might erupt at any point. Chastain brings a sense of gentle serenity to the mother, but her character is oddly underdeveloped considering the richness of her husband’s characterization. Old Jack seems to remember her as a saintly Madonna, offering perpetual comfort and forgiveness even as she is powerless to meaningfully stand up to her husband. We never see her get mad, or snap at a kid, or find herself tempted to be unfaithful, or do anything other than be selfless and stable. This might be interpreted as merely a son’s idealized memory of his mother, but it’s so markedly shallower and less interesting than Jack’s memories of his father that it stands out as disappointing and maybe even a tad stereotypical.

Even so, Malick’s camerawork (mostly hand-held in this section) marvelously captures the atmosphere and the deep, mysterious magic of childhood experience. McCracken feels so real and so vital, and his relationship with his father is so fraught with an almost painfully believable tension, that the whole thing feels as deeply moving and honest as anything I’ve ever watched. Even when Malick starts to get arty again and puts in needless shots of mom wandering through misty woods with cornball whispered voiceovers like “Father! Mother!—forever you wrestle inside me,” the whole thing simply feels too grounded to really derail.

Unfortunately, Malick doesn’t know when to stop. He had me sitting transfixed, through one of the most moving and sensitive portrayals of childhood and family dynamics ever created, and with only the barest wisp of narrative. It’s so good my filmgoing companion actually found it very hard to watch – too painfully honest, too close to the real thing. Too close to a lot of the real heartbreaks and cruelties which lurk below the surface in, I suspect, most of our memories. Malick sold me a ticket based on dinosaurs and managed to seduce me into loving –loving-- a nonlinear, free-floating family drama. But that wasn’t enough for him; it didn’t seem big enough, important enough to address all those Big Questions about God the Universe and Whatnot. So rather than ending it on a note of profound honesty and quiet, unassuming power… he had to do his version of the 2001 A SPACE ODYESSEY ending.

So suddenly we’re back with Sean Penn, and he has to cross through this wooden doorway on the beach and go up in a big glass elevator into memory or heaven and confront his parents and brothers and they walk barefoot on the beach and we go back to the universal scale and see God again. And you know what, after watching something as rich and legitimate as the family drama which anchors the film, it all seems very trite and needless. Somehow those Big Questions about man’s place in the universe and God’s right to rule us seem kind of pompous and silly compared to a kid watching his family fall apart. Without meaning to, I think Malick reminds us that for all our high-minded philosophy, our deepest experiences come from life itself, not from shouting questions into the cosmos and waiting for an answer. True, those questions are not entirely distinct from our daily lives either, but they may actually be better answered through the surprising gentleness of a father’s hand on his son’s shoulder than through walking barefoot on a metaphysical beach.

 No no, it's a metaphor! He's not really walking in the desert! It means something else so that means its automatically deep. If you don't think so it's because you don't "get" it.

I don’t fault Malick’s ambition, nor do I begrudge him his more esoteric examinations of the universe. He opens with a quotation from the book of Job, as God asks Job, "Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation ... while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" In the movie’s context, that becomes a question about Man’s place in the universe, and God’s place in the life of man. But maybe Malick ought to look a little closer at the original context of that quote. It’s what God says to Job after wrecking his life in a completely arbitrary and cruel fashion. Finally, after never losing faith while everything he loved was taken from him, Job’s composure cracks and he asks God what the fuck his deal is, and God answers with that line. It’s not a metaphysical question; it’s a rather stinging rebuke to anyone who might question God’s intent. It’s advice to not ask questions which you couldn’t possibly understand the answers to. If that’s the case, what’s left to us?

Maybe to find our meaning a little closer to home. To find those little shards of portent memory, and to build a lifetime with them. To live deeply in this haunted, strange, painful but beautiful world. Malick may be more interested in questioning it, but his camera and his actors remind us just how potent it is to live it.