Track 29

Track 29 (1988)

Dir. Nicolas Roeg

Written by Dennis Potter

Starring Theresa Russell, Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd

Well, huh. Longtime readers will remember our longstanding love affair with director Nicolas Roeg from THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, EUREKA, PERFORMANCE, and the many, many references I have made over the years to DON’T LOOK NOW. Obviously, this is not an artists for all tastes, or even most tastes. Recall that in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH there is a scene where two unknown men in business suits show up at a nondescript apartment door, put on sparkly gold helmets, and then throw a bodybuilding gay man out of a 50th story window. Obviously, not everyone is gonna find that kind of arty nuttyness as delightful as I do, so I forgive the world for pretty much forgetting that Roeg existed post-1975, and simultaneously applaud Roeg for continuing to make movies consistently for the next three decades in obvious total defiance of the fact that there was absolutely no chance of anyone being around to appreciate them. Good hustle all around. But I’m sorry to say that 1988 may be my limit. That’s right, ladies and gents, with TRACK 29 Roeg has finally made a film which is too bizarre and obtuse even for me.

Now, as we’ve discussed before, Netflix is the father of all lies, so I knew I should be skeptical of the superficial simplicity of the plot as described by those notoriously imaginative netflix blurb writers. “In this psychological drama, a bored wife's curiosity about the son she long ago gave up for adoption coincides with the man's sudden appearance. Their meeting triggers more bizarre events as well as enmity between the woman's husband and offspring.” Sound suspiciously simple, but actually it’s not entirely bullshit, only the last sentence is explicitly and demonstrably false. Not too bad by Netflix’s standards. But what that description doesn’t quite get at is just how fucking bizarre this strange dark (comedy?) is, through and through. Yes, that stuff happens, but it’s much, much weirder than you imagine.

Nothin' phallic about that.

See, it’s not just that Gary Oldman’s “Martin” character claims to be Theresa Russell’s long-lost son. He’s also possibly a ghost, or a figment of her imagination, or something. We first see him appear quite literally out of thin air, and although he sometimes interacts with other characters it’s clear he’s not quite as tangible as the description makes him seem. Fair enough, that’s part and parcel for a Roeg film, I don’t expect to be able to figure out what’s really going on. What I wasn’t prepared for is just how fucking crazy a performance everyone in the film gives. Martin doesn’t just want to reconnect with his long-lost birth mother, he wants to re-live his childhood with her, and he does that by reverting to his five-year old self, whining, pouting, shouting, and throwing foot-stamping tantrums in between slyly manipulative guilt-tripping and weird, uncomfortable sexual intimations.

Gotta give Oldman credit for going for it, this is an absolutely unhinged, fearless performance. But, uh, I’m not sure exactly what the “it” he was going for was. He’s waaaaay too creepy to be endearing or humorous, but too laughable to be exactly threatening, and too nebulous to be relatable. It seems like the strange exaggerated childlike behavior both he and Russell’s “Linda” character exhibit must have been intended as comic, but I don’t know? There definitely aren’t any real jokes in there, and there’s a disturbing undercurrent of rape and psychological trauma which pretty much guarantees we’re not gonna feel OK laughing at these characters. But if we’re not supposed to laugh, how the hell are we supposed to feel?

Who knew Sid Vicious had so many Mommy issues?

Roeg has never been much interested in character development, and I think that hurts him here a little more than any of his other films I’ve seen. I get the feeling the script (adapted by Dennis Potter from his own awesomely named play Schmeodipus) was probably (maybe?) originally kind of a psychological drama about this lady Linda dealing with the painful repercussions of being raped, and then kind of emotionally raped again by having the resulting child taken away against her will. But Russell’s performance is all over the place, its too hard to get a fix on what she’s even like normally for us to really understand what’s motivating the behavior we’re watching. At first she seems like the mature one, a stifled housewife running out of patience with her arrested-development husband (Christopher Lloyd, BACK TO THE FUTURE III) and his fixation with model trains. But then out of the blue she starts flipping out and having this childish meltdown that ends with “I’ll just die if I don’t have a baby!” and he starts to look like the sane one (she was married to Roeg at the time, not sure if that had anything to do with the movie's perspective). Also she has braces and is attempting some kind of Southern lisp, so, uh.** Hubby’s obviously an asshole, but it’s not hard to see why he’s a little tired of her if she’s pulling this shit on a regular basis. (Plus he’s right, those model trains are pretty fuckin' fly. I bet some production designer had the happiest job of their career.) Neither one of them is especially endearing or relatable, and both have glaring social and mental problems which seem completely inexplicable. It feels like we’re not supposed to be particularly sympathetic to either of these people, but the movie is too vague about their problems for us to really find much satisfaction in condemning them, either. So I just don’t know what we’re supposed to take from all this, much less what it all means. And truth be told, I don’t think Roeg really cares exactly what’s really happening here, he’s more interested in just going along for the ride as the nutcases bring out the crazy in each other.

I think we've all been here.

Unfortunately, the ride the nutcases take him on is only sporadically one which really avails itself to his talents. I think it’s hugely problematic that this one was adapted from a stage play, because the result is that the main action gets trapped in a mundane 80’s living room talking a bunch of nonsense for way too long, and Roeg doesn’t get a lot of opportunity to indulge his superpower of expressionistic montage. He’s the best there is at conveying intense emotions when he can get symbolic and crank up the visuals, but there’s not much to be done with these two people weirdly baby-talking each other on some suburban couch. He has better luck with Lloyd’s side story, which ends up involving a gathering of miniature train fanatics who perform “Chatanooga Choo-Choo” with a fervor which borders on a frenzied evangelical revival. But what the fuck that has to do with anything in the main plot I surely do not know. Obviously I guess it must mean something, since it’s the origin of the movie’s aggressively generic title (what, was this a sequel to MOVIE 43?). I’m assuming it’s a symbol or something, but I guess maybe they just couldn’t get the rights to “SCHMOEDIPUS” and stuck TRACK 29 in there as a filler and only at the last minute after the posters had already been struck realized they’d forgotten to go back and think up a real title and then just ran with it. But I don’t know, that could have been it, too. I’m not a mindreader for fuck’s sake.

Fundamentally, the problem here is that the film never seems to coalesce around a consistent tone or style, instead it swings wildly from one idea to another, sometimes negating previous choices and never quite building to anything. It’s a psychedelic headtrip that only really turns trippy a handful of times, and is also a psychological drama with characters who are incomprehensible cyphers, and also a comedy with no punchlines. Makes it a little frustrating, obviously. Still, there’s something there, amid the alternating outlandishness and tedium. Not exactly a good movie, but something. An odd unease permeates the whole thing, a subtle intimation of dread which anchors the absurdity and gives it a kind of diffuse focus. We may not be 100% sure what’s happening, but we know it’s not gonna end well. That sharpens the film’s otherwise lackadaisical meanderings and forces you to engage with it more earnestly, try to parse out some meaning and identify what the threat is and where it’s coming from. Even when the film starts meandering, it's too visceral and erratic to entirely lose your attention, and on the occasions when its firing on all cylinders -for example, the surreal but harrowing rape flashback at a carnival- its potency is undeniable. It’s not a particularly pleasant experience, but I gotta admit it’s a unique one, and moreover a unique one with fitful bursts of real power. Not Roeg’s strongest work, but it’s still a reminder that even in the later years of his career he was an enormously gifted filmmaker, with plenty of ability yet to frustrate, baffle, and mesmerize.

By the way, that handsome gentleman on the poster in the background produced the movie and scored it. Not his most memorable work, but you gotta respect that he went out of his way to help these weird movies.

I’ll close with the words Roger Ebert used to close his own review of the film in 1988, as nothing that I could possibly write could come close to this sort of perfection:

“Look at it this way: Most of the time we go to the movies hoping to be amused, and often we are disappointed. “Track 29” does not offer amusement, but it promises confusion, frustration, weirdness and the bizarre. You probably won’t like it. But it won’t disappoint you.”

*If that even happened; there is definitely dialogue that suggests that perhaps it didn’t and Linda is just a fucking nutcase who has made up an elaborate fantasy for herself. But if that’s the case, who the fuck even knows what’s going on here.

** Speaking of Russell’s ill-advised accent, part of the problem here may be that this whole thing is somewhat lost in translation; it was written as an English story by an Englishman, and its essential British-ness makes an uneasy bedfellow with the Wilmington, North Carolina setting. Particularly since I have a feeling that neither English Roeg and Potter nor Californian Russell has an overwhelmingly strong understanding of Southern Culture. The movie seems to delight in goofy Southern stereotypes, but they’re all of the blandest, most generic variety. I don’t think anyone who actually lived in the South would ever mock it in this particular way, so it feels both clumsy and tone-deaf. Lloyd doesn’t even both with an accent and Oldman says he grew up in England, so I don’t know what the point of transplanting the story to the US was.

Lawless

Lawless (2012)
Dir. John Hillcoat
Written: Nick Motherfucking Cave
Starring Shia LeBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Jason Clarke, Guy Pearce, and Gary Oldman.

I don’t usually write about movies which are still in the theaters, since I feel like the hundreds of thousands of trained monkeys who already write about them around that internet I keep hearing about have that subject pretty well covered. But every once in awhile a film comes along that changes you in a profound way. That teaches you to look at the world differently, to experience more deeply, to love more richly. OK this isn’t that film, but it’s a damn fine one which is about 10 times better than it’s rap and what the hell, they haven’t made a new PUMPKINHEAD sequel in awhile so I figured I’d use my valuable time to tell you that you’ve really got to see this one. It’s awesome.

And of course, you have every reason to think it would be. John Hillcoat already has made two films which are available to you, those being THE PROPOSITION (2005) and THE ROAD (2010) and those both being one of the best films of their respective years. And screenwriter and composer Nick Cave has done many things cinematic and otherwise, all of those being the best ever regardless of year. This is the guy who wrote that famous rejected script for GLADIATOR 2 where Maximus is reincarnated by Roman gods to defend people throughout history. This is a guy who has played with Shane MacGowan, fucked PJ Harvey, covered Leonard Cohen, inspired praise by Wim Wenders, starred alongside Brad Pitt, written two novels, and authored an introduction to the fucking bible. How could anything he touches not turn to badass gold? Plus you got Tom Hardy, who has been doing amazingly ballsy work on everything from BRONSON to his shirtless Sean-Connery-plays-Darth-Vader turn in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. Plus Guy Pearce, who would have top-tier badass credentials from THE PROPOSITION alone, even if you didn’t know about MEMENTO and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL and so on. And Gary Oldman, who has notably played Sid Vicious, Dracula, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pontius Pilate and Jean Baptiste Emanuel Zorg.  That all totals up to a pretty good badass pedigree, from a purely scientific standpoint.

So I’m thinking maybe it’s that pedigree that causes it problems. Because that’s the only possible explanation I can think of for reviews like, “The center of narrative gravity is hard to locate; for whom are we rooting, and does anything really ripple outward from this nasty local fight?*” or “An inescapable sense of "so what?" sets in early with "Lawless,"** or most patronizingly, “Mr. Hardy mostly grunts, growls and ribbits, occasionally interrupting his angry bullfrog impersonation to deliver down-home bromides that make him sound like Toby Keith choking on a Cheeto.”***

It’s hard to fathom how otherwise generally sane critics could react to a film this good with that level of vitriol. In fact, only that nutball Richard Roeper seems to have gotten what the movie was going for. His review: “Bad-ass from start to finish.”

Seriously, this is one fucking badass movie. And really, that’s all there is to it. It’s a bad-ass movie made by a bunch of badasses at or near the top of their game, committing most of their formidable badass resources to making something really God Damn kick-you-in-the-gut-burn-down-your-village-defile-your-women badass. 

Still doesn't forgive TRANSFORMERS.

But for some reason, everyone wanted something different from this movie, so many critics turned to my least favorite trend in film criticism, which is criticizing a movie that doesn’t exist. They all list different specific deficiencies, but this movie that exists isn’t the one they wanted. What exactly is should have been no one can agree on, but definitely it should have been something different. They want more drama, or more scenes in the city, or more from the women, more real history, or most infuriating, more point to all the bloodshed. Everyone seems to be of the impression that because it’s an extremely violent film, it must have some noble objective to enlighten us and teach us a valuable lesson about humanity. No you jackasses, it’s just damn entertaining. Does DOG DAY AFTERNOON really have a big philosophical point to it? Does THE WILD BUNCH reach some big epiphany about our place in the world? Shit, does THE GODFATHER really have so much to teach us about the nature of evil in man? No god damn it, they’re just phenomenally made badass stories which are told by great storytellers. Now, this isn’t quite that caliber of filmmaking, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s an enormously gripping, meticulously constructed period gangster film, and that’s all it ever needed to be. It’s like when X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE came out and everyone said it was horrible because there were no aliens in it. How bout actually giving the film that does exist a chance, rather than whining that it’s not the film you personally imagined?

So, having gotten that out of the way, how about the actual film, bud? Is it any good?

Sure it’s good. Let me count the ways.

What we got here is a pretty simple period gangster story based on real history and then augmented in ways which make it more enjoyable. Hardy, LeBeouf and Clarke play three brothers in prohibition-era Appalachian Franklin County, Virginia. They, like seemingly everyone else in the county (dubbed “the wettest county in the world,” also the title of the book it was based on) are ignoring prohibition completely and making a tidy profit through their expertise in moonshining. As the money piles up, a corrupt D.A. and his sadistic enforcer Deputy Rakes (Guy Pearce) move in to try and take the business for themselves, only to find that the three brothers in question don’t take kindly to being pushed around. Most of the movie consists of the ever-escalating battle between these two groups, and the ways in which the illegal alcohol trade pushes the brothers to grow (in particular youngest brother Jack, played by LeBeouf).

What are we supposed to learn from all this? Well, there might be some feasible parallels to the war on drugs, as we watch organized crime wrack bitter years of violence on this once-peaceful community. There might also be a hint of the Afghan war, with the US represented by smug, condescending outsider Rakes thinking that he can use force to change the culture of this isolated and proud region in his favor. There may even be something to take from it about the seductive nature of violence, and the way our own mythologizing about it can lead us places we can’t back away from. 

moonshine has many uses around the home.

But really, it’s just a tense, terrifically acted story of attack and reprisal, with a little period color thrown in for texture (which may well be one of those mixed metaphors you always hear about). And as such, it’s a pretty wild success. All three brothers are spectacularly good, but special praise should be reserved for Hardy as the monsyllablistic, supposedly indestructible eldest brother Forrest. He can express so much with a mere grunt that we may seriously have to take Billy Bob Thornton’s SLING BLADE crown and award it to Hardy for best non-language performance in American history (although Chewbacca still probably remains king of this category). Hardy draws Forrest as a truly unique creation -- more man of action than thinker, but perhaps not as simple as he might first appear. He’s the leader of the brothers, with an aura of quiet authority and an understated sense of both purpose and unassailable power. But he’s also a long way from infallible, as a series of miscalculations and surprises makes clear. It’s an understated performance of an oversized character, and it makes for one of the most memorable screen badasses in recent years.

But that’s Tom Hardy, you expect him to be great. But were you expecting a great performance from Shia LeBeouf as well? Well happy Rosh Hashanah kid, you got one. LeBeouf’s Jack is the heart of the movie, and his transformation from sensitive kid to merciless killer is the chief narrative thread that links the concatenation of bloodshed. It’s a really great performance because of how subtle the character shift is -- there’s not a single moment of transition, but rather a gradual slide which is never explicitly address but always mutedly apparent. Less subtle but equally successful is Guy Pearce, fearlessly taking his loathsome antagonist to heights of hateability rarely explored by less adventurous actors.

There’s a long and storied cinematic history to hateable villains intended to stoke our bloodlust, but you gotta respect someone playing a classic song with this level of perfection. Creating a truly detestable villain and transferring audience hatred into genuine cinematic catharsis is not as easy a thing to do as it might seem -- it takes careful, well-executed filmmaking of a story which is all broad strokes. Hillcoat pulls it off with such verve that it seems almost hilariously simple -- just like any well-orchestrated magic trick. In fact, I think part of the reason this film was so easy to write off is that it’s such a well-oiled machine that it never seems to be working very hard. It’s easy to miss the stunning dexterity Hillcoat shows in navigating between humor, moments of awkward humanity, hauntingly poetic visuals, and shocking bloody violence because it all feels so natural. In a lot of ways, I think LAWLESS got punished for not showing off enough. It has fantastic performances but no high-drama Oscar Clip scenes. Visual poetry to spare but only in service of the story. Sharp, well-staged action sequences but no over-the-top showstopper setpieces. A top-notch soundtrack but few scenes that overtly call attention to it. It’s interested in working as a whole, rather than showcasing how good its parts are -- which makes for a really great movie but not one which seems ostentatiously impressive.

Scars and stripes forever

Thinking about that also kind of explains everything about the lukewarm reception this thing got. Like poor EUREKA, it’s a movie they started to make as kind of a weird arty historical hybrid film, but then someone got the idea that the cast and the premise might actually make them some money. So suddenly, the name gets changed from the admittedly terrible “The Wettest County” to the completely generic “Lawless.” Horrible posters get struck up to emphasize the stars and play down everything unique and interesting about it. They do a series of character posters as if we’re going to fall in love with each character separately and demand a lucrative LAWLESS franchise with its related marketing tie-ins, product monetization, and cheapie spinoffs. They demand a running time of under two hours, add some narration to make sure no one gets lost, make sure everything has a nicely wrapped-up happy ending. None of this ruins the movie, but it’s all designed to try and lure an audience of normal people who will just find it off-putting and weird. Meanwhile, the highbrow film snobs look at the chintzy poster, the needless narration, the slightly shallower shorter cut, write withering reviews, and prevent a more adventurous audience from checking it out in the first place. And hence a perfectly excellent film with a great cast manages to alienate it’s entire audience and disappear from theaters without anyone who would actually like it ever having taken a look at it.*****

That having been said, there are a few problems here. For one, this cut does have a whiff of being trimmed down beyond what was good for it. A number of elements it introduces seem oddly truncated, most notably story threads relating to the strict German Baptist community that lives alongside our more sinful heroes and most story threads having to do with the city mobsters lead by Gary Oldman (who end up with a total of maybe four minor scenes). Neither feels exactly extraneous, but they both scream of themes which were intended to be further developed and subsequently feel noticeably unfished. Both female characters are simultaneously well-acted and underdeveloped, but you’re used to that. More troublingly, there’s a very occasional narration by LeBeouf which painfully over-explains things that are already obvious from watching. Both Hillcoat and Cave are smart enough to show us rather than tell us -- they know that this kind of storytelling shortcut is both alienating and unnecessary, and so I’m assuming it was a concession to the studio and a way to shave minutes off the runtime. But they should have put their foot down against it, because it’s about as necessary and seamless as Harrison Ford’s narration in the theatrical cut of BLADE RUNNER. I suspect there’s a longer cut out there somewhere which manages to achieve the classic status that this cut is slightly too flawed to reach, which makes it a bit frustrating.

Who thought this would make people want to go see it? It looks like a Seagal DTV flick with a festival win.

Beyond that, there’s that [LIGHT SPOILER] troublesome and unnecessary happy ending which probably sums things up a little too neatly. The happy ending, amazingly, is true to history - maybe they felt like they had to include it, but it’s the only part of the film which comes across as labored and awkward. It feels like the end of AMERICAN GRAFFITI or HARRY POTTER PART 7 PART 2 where they unnecessarily lay out a bunch of stuff that happened to the characters after the story reaches its logical conclusion, undermining the finality of that closure and presenting nothing of particular relevance anyway. What, we need to know that everyone got married? If so, all we need is a final establishing shot of the clan all together to gather all the information we need. Having LeBeouf explain who married who, what jobs they got, what tax bracket they ended up with, where they’re insured, where they buy their gingham and so on belabors what should have been a simple, quiet grace note of an ending. [END LIGHT SPOILER]

Still, none of these things is enough to really hurt the LAWLESS experience. Even if its flaws keep it from the greatness that could have been, its still pretty damn great on its own terms. There’s a rootsy cover of the Velvet Underground’ “White Light/White Heat.” A series of tooth-shattering brass-knuckle beatdowns. Guy Pearce with hair so greasy it looks like it was painted onto his head. Why get bogged down in what might have been when what we got here is a genuinely fine little gangster movie, completely unique and filled with great touches? If it’s not quite CASINO, it’s at least THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY. You can complain about it if you want, or you follow the example that Tom Hardy sets here: man up, drink some moonshine, and know when to shut up and have a good time. 

*Anthony Lane, New Yorker

**Ann Hornaday, the Washington Post

***A.O. Scott, New York Times****

**** What, you thought I didn’t know how to use actual footnotes? 

*****By the way, what kind of world do we live in where Roger Ebert gives LAWLESS and THE MASTER two-and-a-half-stars while POSSESSION and END OF WATCH get 3-and-a-half?

The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Dir. Christopher Nolan
Written: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Joseph “Commissioner” Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Modine, Aidan Gillen, and pretty much everyone else.

    One thing everyone seems to be able to agree on. This is a big movie. Everything about it is big. Big cast. Big ambitions. Big scope. Big spectacle. Big budget. Big explosions. Big expectations. Being a sequel to BIG. Being an acronym for “Batman is Great.” Big balls. Big baldy. Big business.

    But the more I think about it, the thing that I like best about the movie is one of its smallest scenes. It takes place between Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne (out of costume, wearing a plain tee-shirt) and his butler and caretaker, Michael Caine’s Alfred. They talk for a few minutes in a sparsely decorated stairway about whether or not Wayne can go on being Batman without eventually being killed. Alfred begs Bruce to give it up, tells him he’s certain to be killed if he continues; that he can’t stand by and watch Bruce throw his life away. Bruce hangs back in the shadows, knowing Alfred is right, knowing that by continuing on this course he’s going to lose the few people he still has any human connection to at all. And knowing he’s going to do it anyway.

    In a movie which features a nuclear time bomb, a gigantic heavily-armed hovercraft, the wholesale destruction of a stadium, a gigantic Cecil B. DeMille-style hand-to-hand battle with a cast of hundreds, and a grown man in a rubber bat suit, that scene sticks with me. Caine and Bale don’t make any grand speeches. Bale barely says a word. The whole thing is virtually irrelevant to the plot. But there’s something real there. Something passes between these two excellent actors, in this small scene, which is deeply touching and deeply true. They’re talking about whether one of the two of them (I won’t spoil who) is going to put on a cape and drive a motorcycle to punch a supervillain who lives in the Gotham City sewers. But they’re not really talking about that; they’re talking about whether it’s worth living in the world anymore. Alfred is laying out his soul, begging the person he cares about to care about himself enough to at least give life an honest attempt. There’s something deeply heartbreaking about the way Alfred so nakedly begs, and the way you can see both that Bruce’s heart is breaking and yet that there’s so little of a person left there that he can’t respond in kind. It’s very small. But it’s real.

Looks like someone needs a hug

    I mention this, because most of this movie isn’t real. The BIG is mostly bluster, an attempt to overwhelm with sheer mass. An attempt to meet the ridiculous expectations by giving us too much to process, flummoxing our sense and making us confuse exhaustion with satisfaction. In fact, this is an extremely silly film which ultimately buckles from the ridiculous weight it insists upon carrying. It never quite generates enough mass to entirely disappear into its own black hole, but it’s inarguably top-heavy. It’s a movie full of big ideas which never really venture past the surface; a movie which is deeply grim but mostly over ridiculous things. The movie is basically a gothy teenager, thinking it’s the first one ever to discover that life is meaningless and people are jerks.

    But the weird thing is, it’s directed by Christopher Nolan. So the serious parts are actually done so well that they’re legitimately arresting. And that makes the underlying ridiculousness seem all the more inexplicable.

    We’re introduced to Mr. Wayne eight years after the events of THE DARK KNIGHT. Apparently, his unnecessary plan to publicly blame himself for an event which no one else witnessed and could have had almost any explanation worked better than I thought it would, because thanks to Harvey’s heroic death they passed a bunch of draconian laws which have prevented parole for convicts associated with organized crime and hence the city is safe and Batman is no longer needed. Fortunately everyone convicted under these laws was definitely guilty and had nothing more to contribute to society or culture, so it’s OK that they threw away the key and everyone is happy and in fact celebrates the awkwardly-named “Harvey Dent Day” every year at Wayne manor.

Wayne, though, is not at the party, having become an eccentric recluse with a cane and a big beard who sort of squats in one unfinished wing of the gigantic rebuilt mansion, presumably dividing his time between throwing away his family fortune on quixotic clean energy projects and carefully saving and categorizing jars of his own urine. He’s lured out of this idyllic existence, as so many of us are, by being robbed by Anne Hathaway. Having already seen her costumed as a maid, he correctly surmises that she must also own a skin-tight leather catsuit, and so our intrepid hero ventures out into the world to follow up on these important leads, in the process discovering that there’s a lot more going on outside the mansion than just cocktail parties for dead DAs and long expository monologues delivered by Gary Oldman. For instance, there’s also a shirtless Darth Vader living in the sewer, and at some point Morgan Freeman invented flying cars but for some reason never told anyone.

Best Fetlife meetup ever.

 This slowly leads us into an enjoyably convoluted plot which involves pretty much every single element and character from the previous two films, plus Matthew Modine because fuck it, he wandered onto the set. Things are blown up, ever more characters are introduced, missiles are fired, motorcycles are ridden, punches are thrown, laborious metaphors are constructed. It’s a pretty well constructed -- if hilariously overbuilt-- story. The mystery is engaging, the spectacle is impressive, the characters are colorful, numerous, and well-acted. It even remembers to have some fun every now and again (mostly thanks to Anne Hathaway’s quippy Selina Kyle).

But it’s hard to deny that in the end,  it’s simply too big for it’s own good. It’s a whole miniseries crammed into a frantic 165 minutes where a whole fucking lot happens, but not much sinks in. It’s almost a cliffs notes of a movie. The abridged DARK KNIGHT RISES. It feels like a movie version of a novel too beloved by fans to allow anything to be excised. The result is a movie with almost no narrative slack, but no real narrative impact, either. A plot checklist with a whole fucking lot of checks. It’s crafty and gripping while you’re watching, but as soon as it’s over you find yourself thinking about the plot holes instead of the characters. Because stuffing three films’ worth of plots into a single film doesn’t really give you time to do anything satisfying with the characters. They’re always occupied frantically moving the plot forward, and never seem to have time to be affected by it. And consequently the audience can never be much affected by it.

By my count, there are no less than eight major characters --four of them totally new-- competing for time and relevance throughout the film’s 165 minutes with not only each other, but also what seems like dozens of minor characters, setpieces, expository flashbacks, and explosions. Nolan knows he has to find something for all of them to do, and with each new story that gets added, the gigantic ball of plot becomes more tangled and unwieldy. The result is that every character gets the bare outline of an arc, but no more. Every character gets a setup, one or two scenes of conflict, and then a resolution. But that’s simply not enough to really convey meaningful growth. Even Wayne himself barely has a character arc here. We learn, because the film outright tells us, that he has to learn to fear again in order to “rise” -- fair enough, it’s a good setup that addresses both the reason he became Batman to begin with and the reason he can’t care enough about his own life to exist without Batman. But how, exactly, does this change come about? At the start of the final act, he just announces that he now has something to fear, and that does the trick. Any kind of meaningful change has to happen off camera -- there’s no time for it. The movie just settles for telling us it’s happened. And that, my friends, makes for somewhat superficial and unsatisfying storytelling. 

Bane Kitty is really fucking hard to understand.

The film is no better with the philosophical issues that it raises. It starts off by tantalizing us with the dynamic between poor Selina Kyle and obscenely wealthy Bruce Wayne. What right does he have, she asks, to take so much while others have so little? Good question. Too bad it never comes up again. Likewise, Tom Hardy’s Bane character takes over the city with a long speech about oppression, and proposes that he’s going to free Gotham’s citizens to make their own choices regardless of their past or the leadership. But then he, um, doesn’t. Just like PROMETHEUS a few months ago --and for that matter, the two previous Nolan Batman films-- the film is bold enough to ask some ballsy questions, but then acts confused and changes the subject when you ask for an answer, or at least a discussion.

On that subject, friend of the site Dan P pointed me to this quote from Nolan, which appears in a Rolling Stone article unpromisingly subtitled, “Director Argues he has no Particular Message:”

"We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of interesting questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop for the story. What we're really trying to do is show the cracks of society, show the conflicts that somebody would try to wedge open. We're going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things."

This seems to me to read as Nolan acknowledging that his films deliberately raise issues they have no interest in meaningfully addressing, and basically arguing there is no reason to seriously consider these issues in the context of the film. If that’s true, it’s a real shame, because of course these very issues are the most interesting thing about this whole trilogy. To read that quote, you would think Nolan just wants us to watch his trilogy as a series of action movies about a guy in a batsuit fighting supervillains. But of course, that’s always been the weakest element in them.

Alas, it remains the case here as well. I foolishly (and apparently against the director’s wishes) got invested in the symbolism and themes, but I guess the important thing is the action, right? Problem is, there’s not a whole lot of action setpieces, and when they happen their quality is all over the place. There’s nothing to match the stunning truck chase from THE DARK KNIGHT, but the action is generally more comprehensible than it has been in the last two films. So you can tell what’s happening, but that just raises a new problem: it’s all surprisingly low on imagination. Bane has a couple nice setpieces, including a reasonably well-choreographed motorcycle chase and that Stadium explosion you’ve already seen in the trailers, but that’s honestly as memorable as the action gets. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that the basic conflict is essentially a remake of BEGINS: A plot by the League O’ Shadows (LOS, FYI) to blow up the city with a big bomb travelling around the city on a vehicle. The bulk of the rest of the action sequences involve Bane and Batman clumsily slugging at each other, or Batman flying an absurd, apparently invulnerable flying saucer and shooting missiles at people on the ground. This is a guy who was trained by ninjas? In retrospect, I almost liked it better when it was edited so I couldn’t tell what was going on. Wally Pfister still stubbornly refuses to shoot anything that has the least bit of atmosphere in it, so now that he has to hold the camera still in broad daylight, you can really tell what monotonous slugfests most Batman fights are. And how silly that suit looks on a grown man. They could spend 250 million on this movie but didn’t bother to train Bale so he looks like he can actually fight?* And then want to tell me that there’s no point in thinking about anything else in the film? What does that even leave?

Doves flying = symbolism. John Woo proved it.

Turns out it leaves just one thing: a long, complicated, overwrought drama overrun by characters looking for a resolution. But as it happens, this is the film’s secret weapon. Consider this: You know how in action films there is always a whiny girlfriend, who wants our hero to stop being so awesome and give up his code and settle down for a life of placid domesticity? They always gotta do that, it’s just sort of part of the formula at this point. I guess they put it in there as an empty gesture towards not glorifying antisocial vigilante violence, but come on, you know what we want to see -- some god damned irresponsible sociopathic violence. A bad thing in real life, but a good thing in the movies. OK, here the girlfriend is played by Michael Caine, but come on, you’re not actually supposed to agree with him. It’s just an empty gesture. They gotta say it so they don’t get sued if some asshole gets the wrong idea and turns vigilante.** Right?

Which brings us back to that scene I was talking about at the start of this review. Somehow, it doesn’t feel like a throwaway gesture here. It feels like an earnest plea by someone who is probably right. And I found myself sort of halfway hoping that Bruce would reconsider. I found myself halfway hoping that Batman could really never show up. In a Batman movie. Right about that time, I realized that for all its bluster, superficiality, and silliness, there is something fundamental in this Batman trilogy that works. Nolan, graced with a stunning dream cast of most of the best actors alive and working right now, has crafted an epic drama under the guise of making superhero action movies. Now, it’s a consistently silly, sometimes hilariously ludicrous drama. But the actors sell the heck out of it, the scope is breathtaking, and the dialogue is snappy and ingratiating. By the end, you realize you care about what happens to these Gotham City ninnies. When the movie plays rough with them, you root for them to recover and worry that they won’t be able to. When they start succeeding, you cheer for them. Most simply, when they talk, you listen.

Now let's do the WHEN HARRY MET SALLY ending!

There are plenty of things to complain about here. Yes, Bane’s plan is the exact same stupid plan that already didn’t work for Ras Al-Ghul in BATMAN BEGINS, and yes, it’s foiled the exact same way. And yes, plenty of shit here doesn’t make a lot of sense, a little sense, or occasionally even a lick of sense. The action can be clumsy and uninvolving. The drama can be thinly sketched and lazy. The themes can be muddled and superficial. And depending on your level of experience with reality, you may find it impossible to reconcile a complex, ensemble psychological drama with a guy wearing rubber bat ears and a cape. All these things are valid complaints.

But even given those factors, there is something giddy and compelling about the level of seriousness the film takes with its characters and its world. For all its unearned pretensions of depth and portent, there’s an earnest care for the people at the heart of this silly drama. Few people get the opportunity to put $ 250 million into a dense, Dickensian drama about fear, hope, and redemption, so in the rare event that it comes along you gotta sort of appreciate it. Comic books, at their heart, are as much soap operas as they are action movies -- laboriously overbuilt collages of colorful characters and shamelessly overwrought drama wandering about their ever-more-complex, ever-shifting world with listless plots which struggle for new territory, get lost in the motley minutiae, wander back, and forget where they started. RISES, for all it’s overreaching, in some ways represents the best of this ridiculous but endearing variety of American storytelling. The surface may be all false flash, but its heart is as resolutely, stalwartly geeky as it deserves to be. For a movie this self-consciously devoted to being BIG, it’s nice to know that the little things still make the most difference. Plus, Batman flies a flying saucer. As they say in the funny pages,

                                         Fin.

Barely, and only because Selina Kyle talks briefly but slightly over 30 seconds to her female neighbor/sidekick.

*Turns out Bale studied a form of Mixed Martial Arts called the Keysi fighting method, as I probably should have assumed he would. But like most MMA fighting styles, it looks like real fighting instead of choreographed movie fighting, which is to say, it’s boring and clumsy to watch.

**Not interested in talking about that subject, please feel free to discuss on other sites, but not here.