Miracle on 34th Street

 

Miracle on 34^th Street (1947)

Dir. and written by George Seaton, Story by Valentine Davies

Starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Natalie Wood

 

Is it possible to be both a universally acknowledge classic and still misunderstood and underrated? I submit to you that MIRACLE ON 34^TH ST (the 1947 version, obviously) is exactly that. You’ve probably seen it. Along with the 1951 Alastair Sim SCROOGE and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, (and maybe throw in the actually-not-very-Christmas-heavy WHITE CHRISTMAS) it’s one of the few movies from the first half of the Twentieth Century which is still required Holiday viewing for many people, myself certainly included. And of course, it’s easy to see why: it’s a delight through and through, charming, whimsical, and, it must be said, exceptionally funny. Not just in the polite, slightly patronizing way we often talk about classic old comedies, where you acknowledge that I’m sure it was very funny back then; no, to this very day, even after watching it dozens of times over the years, I still frequently laugh out loud.

But even so, I suspect that it seems so effortlessly charming that most folks just take it for granted that it’s simple. When I mentioned to a hip cinema pal that this was my favorite Christmas movie, he kind of rolled his eyes at me. When I protested, he was dismissive: ‘Oh, they think Santa Claus is crazy, it’s like they’re putting Christmas on trial!’ he jibed, insisting the movie is a thin parable about the importance of belief, with all the religious implications for the nominally Christian holiday that accompany such a reading. That is, in fact, exactly where the horrendously ill-conceived 1994 John-Hughes-produced remake goes with the material, ending (SPOILERS for the 1994 version) with a Judge, apparently in a fit of religious ecstasy, suddenly declaring that because a dollar bill has the words "in God we trust" on the back, Jesus is real, and therefore the old man in his courtroom over an assault charge is legally Santa Claus, case dismissed.

As a confirmed non-believer, this isn’t the kind of moral message I’m likely to find especially appealing, and my friend found it very amusing that I’d swallowed this old-fashioned conservative hokum. But I maintain that he is quite wrong, at least in the case of the 1947 version (hereafter, “the good version”). While the topic of belief is definitely in the air, I would suggest that the end result is anything but a simple argument for blind faith. It has, in fact, a remarkably secular outlook, especially for 1947 – but even more so, it has a surprisingly unsentimental, sharp-eyed view of the world. Its genius is to somehow entwine a sardonic perspective on human smallness with a subtly bemused appreciation for our fallible, perhaps even hubristic inclination to imagine that we’re capable of better – and to take both perspectives seriously.

The thing that really makes MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET special is that it is, in a lot of ways, a legitimately cynical movie. It sets itself up as fiercely modern (by 1947 standards), plunging us immediately into the world of a hard-driving executive who is also a single mom (Maureen O'Hara, RIO GRANDE, known for her many on-screen pairings with John Wayne, which makes it odd that her co-star here is named John Payne. Ain’t life too funny sometimes?). In 1947, this was certainly an unusual, perhaps borderline scandalous, situation, especially for a Christmas movie. But the movie does not judge her for it; in fact, it is openly impressed by her tenacity. Sure, by the film’s end she will wind up safely in a heterosexual romantic relationship, with a restored nuclear family. But, crucially, she ends up there on her own terms. Not once does the movie suggest that her life or femininity is stunted by being a tough businesswoman and single mother. Her story has been one of triumph over adversity, and O’Hara is the absolute embodiment of a flinty force of nature, unwavering, indominable, always in control, always thoughtful about how she wants to arrange her life.* And not in a cheesy Hallmark Christmas Movie kind of way, although the standard plot about how the uptight businesswoman finding love with an easy-going small-town artisan would almost certainly not exist without her; no, she is happy, is fulfilled. She enjoys her job, she loves her daughter, she doesn’t need anything else, although right from the start she’s certainly open to the idea of romance, if one comes along that fits into her world. But she can be comfortable in looking for love because she’s confident that she can deal with anything that life could throw at her. The only challenge she has yet to overcome is the idea that life could be anything other than adversity to be beaten.

Which is, of course, the dramatic core of the movie. Friendly, eccentric Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn, THEM!, giving one of the most irresistibly charming screen performances of all time) waltzes into the lives of savvy, driven professionals –tough businesspeople, clever lawyers, canny politicians—and simply stands there, refusing to play their game, refusing to acknowledge that the world is a hard place where only the strong survive. Cheerfully --but resolutely-- refusing to admit that sanity is defined by your ability to beat the other guy. By his very existence, he challenges the defensive posture O’Hara and the rest of the modern world accept as basic common sense.

Of course, he is crazy. Harmless, certainly; likeable, certainly; but nevertheless utterly delusional. The movie loves Kris, but never seriously flirts with the idea that he might literally be a mystical figure. But his delusion allows him to do the one thing that no one else in the movie is immediately able to do: see the best in people. Not that it’s an easy thing to see! Indeed, the movie expects people to be myopic, self-interested hustlers most of the time. Likes them for it, even; respects the funny, sharp-eyed canniness of the conman. But it also believes firmly that deep down, just about everyone would like to do the right thing, would like to be warm and caring and generous. They've just resigned themselves to the fact that they don't live in a world where that's possible. And most still get on pretty well! People live practical lives, learn to enjoy the madcap rat race, and don't spend a lot of time moping about how the world is. The "Miracle" of the title is the way the jolly machinations of one kindly, delusional old man upend that world and get people to actually behave humanely to each other, in the most unexpected way possible: by playing on that very cynicism.

From the money-grubbing department stores that are stunned to discover that putting people before profit actually boosts their business, to the lazy postal workers who end up saving the day by pawning their inconvenient mail off on someone else, virtually every good deed done in the movie is done out of cynical self-interest. In fact, a great deal of the movie's considerable joy is about watching feisty lawyers and salesmen try to get one over on each other, so much so that the movie's abrupt pivot to a cat-and-mouse courtroom drama for the final act feels much more inevitable and smooth than it probably has any right to.

And yet, there's something deeper, too; the "miracle" is that, when these people are suddenly, unexpectedly offered a chance to do the right thing for purely selfish reasons, something else happens. Sure, they do it because it’s the smart move for them, the same thing they do every day. But this time, it also happens to be the right thing, and that surprises them, wakes something inside them, something that they'd mostly ignored or forgotten about. They're glad to do the right thing. It makes them feel good, gives them something they didn't know they were missing.

It's a small thing, really; there's no suggestion that it's going to change their lives forever and they're going to give away all their possessions and become enlightened. But there's something very near magical about the way the cast uniformly seems startled and giddy about finding good inside themselves they didn't expect. When business tycoon R. H. Macy (Hollywood bit player Harry Antrim) is forced to take the stand to improbably testify in support of the sanity of a man who believes himself to be Santa Claus, his first thought is for his own business: he suddenly imagines tomorrow's newspaper headlines trumpeting his abandonment of the old man. This obviously cannot be allowed to happen, and he stammers something noncommittal. But then, pushed by the cross-examining attorney, he's asked to directly answer if he believes "Mr. Kringle" is actually Santa Claus. This time, he doesn't think about himself, but thinks about the kids, and how happy his Santa made them. If this old man is crazy, he doesn’t want to be sane. Suddenly the imperative for self-preservation actually overlaps with doing something genuinely good. And then he answers with confidence: "I do." And he’s not just relieved, he’s elated. He remembers something about himself, a feeling he’d probably just written off long ago as unrealistic sentimentality. But there is it, overwhelming him, real as the nose on his face. It's a moment of serenity in a world which offers so few chances for such moments.

The movie is full of little moment like that, tiny, impossible victories for the human spirit. And for once, they cost nothing – they require no sacrifice, no hard choices. For once, good is just sitting there, waiting for you to take it. You don’t have to worry that the world is going punish you for showing your humanity, you can just give in and see how you like it. Most movie fantasies play on our desires for selfish things –what if I suddenly had power, or good looks, or wealth?—but this one offers a more unusual fantasy: what if I could just do the right thing? Wouldn’t that feel great? It’s not realistic; the movie knows –puts it right out there in the text, even—that you’re going to be faced with a million chances to be kind and compassionate, and you’re mostly going to have to just ignore those options and be practical and do the sensible thing and get on with your life. You can’t give away all your possessions, can’t just drop everything and help someone in need, can’t devote every moment of your life to saving the world. But maybe it’s valuable just to know it’s in you to want to. Life gives you so few chances to just indulge in that fantasy that you can forget, can think that you really are tough and hard and cynical deep down, rather than just pretending to be so you can get by. And of course, you do have to get by, and that’s OK. But MIRACLE ON 34th STREET is a gentle reminder that there’s something better in you, too, even if the world doesn’t give it a chance to fully emerge very often. You never really doubted it. It’s just your silly common sense.

It helps that the cast is without exception terrific, it helps that the script is unshakably lively and funny.** But if the movie is a miracle, it comes out of its unique blend of snarky cynicism and warm humanism, and its certainty in the value of giving people a chance to do the right thing, even if it's only for a moment. I don't know any other Christmas movie which manages to strike such a perfect balance between unsentimental satire and genuine good-heartedness, and maybe no other movie of any kind. No wonder it’s remained so beloved for three-quarters of a century, during which time a lot has changed and much culture has become difficult to relate to. People may not completely understand it, but they can certainly feel it. If it’s a testament to the power of belief, it’s a testament to a very particular belief, and one which I sincerely hope will never be completely extinguished, no matter how much countervailing evidence life piles on the scales: that the world may push us to be callus, but somewhere deep inside, we’d rather be kind. If the spirit is willing, even if the flesh is predictably weak, there is always hope.  

 

Merry Christmas.

 

 

* In particular, O’Hara’s ability to furiously turn away from someone who's angered her is powerful enough to melt steel, and I doubt any human could survive having it used on them. These are just special effects, kids, or poor John Payne would be splattered all over that wall.

 

** Even if pivoting to a courtroom drama and abandoning almost the entire cast in the last act is such an insane thing for any script to do that even one this savvy can't entirely avoid some turbulence, but whatever, it makes it work.

The Naked City

The Naked City (1948)

Dir. Jules Dassin

Written: Albert Maltz, Malvin Wald

Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart, Don Taylor

What we got here is an interesting little crime story from 1948 which isn’t particularly well-remembered today, but stands out as something a bit unique. It’s primarily a film noir from just around the time that genre was starting to crystallize the elements which would eventually become iconic of it. But it’s also sort of influenced by that whole Italian Neo-Realist deal, so along with the gothic cinematography, hardboiled lawmen and femme fatales, you’ve got the self-conscious use of real locations, non-actor extras, and documentary-style narration. Mixing the high stylization of film noir with realism isn’t a perfect fit, but it’s worth a look because this kind of genre hybrid is rare, and particularly since the two genres it hybridizes were both in their infancy at the time. It’s fun to see director Jules Dassin playing around with the rules of genre while those rules are still being formed.

Even though it's all or mostly shot on location, Dassin doesn't miss the opportunity to turn the geography into an expressionistic abstraction. This image has almost a Gustav Klimt quality to it.

The specific plot here isn’t that important. There’s a murder, so a wildly stereotypical Irish detective (Barry Fitzgerald, a green bowler short of a leprechaun*) and his young colleague (Don Taylor, later director of ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES) rope in some suspects (Ted de Corsia, Howard Duff, others) and begin to unravel a fairly mundane web of foul play which eventually leads to lies, clues, exciting chases, and so on. Pretty standard stuff. The fun of it, though, is watching Dassin labor to fit the noir conventions into a world which feels very real and alive. It opens with a typically hollywood bullshit production-code era murder of a young woman, her murderers lurking in the shadows or obscured by giallo hand-cam angles. It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect in any film noir, except that it’s cut together with scenes --real and staged-- of other stories transpiring at the same time throughout the city. We see a couple with a young kid, a morning DJ spinning records, even our yet-to-be-introduced protagonist Det. Muldoon eating breakfast. These juxtapositions serve to remind you that these stories extend beyond the narrow confines of our central murder mystery, out into the vast sea of humanity roaring all around it.

The long, slow plod through the false leads, lies, femme fatales, and colorful New York locales that the movie has to inevitably take to draw our trusty lawmen to their quarry has plenty of the usual landmarks of such narrative terrain, but also feels peppered with details intended to flesh it out, make it more real. Eschewing most of the dramatic denouements common to the genre, Dassin and writers Maltz and Wald instead seem to particularly delight in showing their hard-nosed detectives grinding their way through mundane details. Minute clues require hundreds of hours on-foot to follow up on -- at one point, they show dozens of officers painstakingly canvassing every gym in New York City to ask if anyone there remembers a wrestler who liked to play harmonica. Lt. Muldoon’s command of the crime scene clues almost evoke a CSI:1948 fixation on the not-yet-common-practice field of forensic science.

Top o' the morning to ya.

Dassin may have hoped that infusing his Hollywood film noir with little pieces of reality would make it more believable, but actually it has the opposite effect, starkly pointing out how arch and stagey acting and writing were at this point. Occasionally the two world do meet happily --as in the memorable and strikingly shot final chase sequence through the rafters of the Brooklyn bridge-- but mostly the movie’s serviceable fiction can’t stand up to the bursting-at-the-seams liveliness of the reality it’s juxtaposed against. But that’s OK, because it still has the more interesting effect of evoking the story’s tiny place in the vast tapestry of New York City life. Even if this particular story stands out as being a bunch of Hollywood nonsense, it feels vastly richer for taking place in a city where every outdoor frame finds a million tiny signs of multitudinous humanity. If it doesn’t exactly make the details feel more legit, it does blur the lines in a way which was certainly unusual for the time and still feels rewarding today. There really do seem to be, as the closing narration tells us, “eight million stories in the naked city. This [is] one of them.”**

*Fitzgerald, interestingly, is the only actor in history to be nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor for the same role (in 1944’s GOING MY WAY). Shame he couldn’t get nominated for Best Actress too, but I guess two outta three ain’t bad.

** I'd wondered why one of my favorite movies of all time, Spike Lee's SUMMER OF SAM, ends with Spike standing in front of the camera saying this line. Now I know, and I approve wholeheartedly. SUMMER is a very different film, but it has the same broad interest in the city of New York as a living, breathing entity all of it's own.

Dreams Of A Life

Dreams of a Life (2011)

Dir. Carol Morley

Written by Carol Morley

Starring Zawe Ashton, Nelson Mandela

DREAMS OF A LIFE begins with an extremely intriguing and depressing premise. Around Christmas in 2003, an English woman named Joyce Carol Vincent died alone in her apartment. Somehow, her death managed to go apparently unnoticed for three long years. When her landlord finally got a locksmith to unlock her door for failure to pay rent, police found remains too decomposed to visually identify or determine cause of death -- a skeleton and a stain, essentially. The TV was still on. Police searched for clues; witnesses, co-workers, family, friends, all without success. It seemed as if Joyce Vincent was a ghost, whose only interaction with the world came in signing the lease to an apartment. How does a thing like this happen? How, in this interconnected world, can a person fall through the cracks like that? How does someone’s death go completely unremarked on, unreported, and apparently unnoticed? For three long years?

It seems like the perfect setup to talk about the festering specter of modern alienation. The people who disappear into the system, the lonely, the elderly, the adrift, quietly sitting alone in a million apartments across the world, separated from their neighbors by nothing but a thin wall and a universe of cold, technological indifference. It’s easy to picture Joyce, a lonely, elderly white lady, no children, husband dead, alone in the world and unable to draw so much as a glance from a fellow human, even in death.

This story made Rupert Murdoch ever so slightly richer.

That would be an interesting movie, but it turns out that DREAMS OF A LIFE is even more interesting than that, and in fact borders on the shocking. Because Joyce Carol Vincent was not at all the person you might assume she was, nor is her story as clear-cut as it would appear. We know this because director Carol Morley decided to go on her own campaign to track down people who might have known Joyce Vincent, complete with billboards, side-of-van ads, the whole works. And, amazingly, she succeeded where the police and authorities had failed: she found people who knew Vincent; a lot of people. And from there things simply get more and more unexpected.

Turns out Vincent is about as far away from the frail old English spinster as you could imagine. She was a young woman, only in her early 30s at the time of her death. The daughter of a Jamaican immigrant, she is remembered by a slew of ex-boyfriends, co-workers, and acquaintances from all walks of life as being outgoing, charming, beautiful. She dated musicians, recorded music, had long phone calls with Isaac Hayes and dinner with Stevie Wonder. She met Nelson Mandela! A former boyfriend admits that he had read the initial news story about her death but hadn’t come forward simply because he didn’t believe it could possibly be the same Joyce Carol Vincent that he had last seen only a few years earlier. And yet, it was. Somehow, the garrulous, captivating, and attractive young lady in the photos managed to die friendless and alone. How?

In some ways, as much as Morely’s film answers questions about who Joyce Vincent was it also makes her even more mysterious. Morely uncovers a woman who seemed to be known to many, but maybe really understood by no one. Someone who moved easily between different groups of people, but also made sure those groups never met each other. Someone who seemed like different things to different people. Was she being deliberately deceptive with someone, or was she just a an enigma onto which people projected whatever they wanted to imagine? Hard to believe you could fit into so many world and remain yourself in all of them. Was it easier, in the end, to be part of none of them?

This is boyfriend #1. Morley doesn't identify anyone she interviews in the film, so you can only pick up on who they are and what their relationship is through context clues. It works fine for the major players, but you're virtually certain to forget other faces which are less frequently seen. I know we all hate those documentaries which insist on putting a person's name and title into every frame they appear in (Dave Grohl -- not exactly a anonymous face-- identifies himself by putting a label under his face within the last 15 minutes of SOUND CITY, a film in which he not only appears dozens of times but he also directed and narrates and introduces himself directly to the audience through narration. OK Dave, I know you're a modest dude but we get it, we know who you are now.) but surely there's a middle ground we can find here, huh?

The net result is that although the film resolves the initial riddles about the Joyce Vincent case which baffled the authorities, it raises more than it solves. Vincent was a mystery even to those who seemed to know her best. Not one of her boyfriends -- both of whom she stayed with, on and off, for several years -- had ever met her family, or is really able to offer almost anything of substance about them. Her father was a bit of a player, her mother (an Indian immigrant) died young. But what exactly this all meant to her, or how it shaped her... on this topic they have no answers. Vincent was in life, it seems, the same as she was in death: an enigma about which we can speculate endlessly, but never know.

Indeed, even as people who seem to have known her extremely well offer interesting and tantalizing tidbits, you get a sense that there are large parts of this story missing. Vincent would disappear from people’s lives for long stretches, sometimes abruptly and always, seemingly, without explanation (which explains how no one worried about her in those three years she lay decomposing on her couch). There’s a consensus that she seemed to have had a string of abusive boyfriends (she checked herself into a shelter for victims of domestic violence near the end of her life) but no one seems to have any idea who they might  have been, or what might have happened. Morely’s chart of Vincent’s life --assembled like a police file in a procedural thriller -- has entries like “finance breaks off engagements” which appear, uncommented on, in the background, sometimes even appearing to contradict the story being told by the people interviewed. Wait, fiance? Who? What happened? Nobody seems to know. There’s a tacit suggestion that her father may have been abusive, and that her life ended up spiraling back into that cycle of abuse. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of any of this except general impressions left upon her friends, many of whom had not seen her in years. Would these gaps help explain the mystery of how Vincent ended up quitting her high-paid office job and working as a maid from a run-down, government-subsidized apartment? Or would they just offer more puzzles? Did anyone truly know this person?

Beats being a civil war reenactor. More skin-tight vinyl dresses, less beards.

This is gripping stuff, but unfortunately Morely’s direction sometimes needlessly oversells it, pushing too hard for an emotional hook which is already there in the bare bones of the story. The film is already rife with powerful and deeply sad moments, why push the point with long musical montages and meandering reenactments? It’s a jaw-dropping moment when we first hear Vincent sing. Holy shit, that’s her voice! We’re hanging on every word about this woman, and suddenly she takes a huge step out of the ether towards us, becoming viscerally real and nearly tangible. Hearing the vitality in her voice and feeling this unexpected and somewhat disorienting connection to someone we only met after her death is a truly profound experience. But does it need to go on for the song’s entire runtime, while a reenactor playing the part dances around her ratty apartment?

Aside from THE THIN BLUE LINE (which uses reenactors to visually depict the alternate scenarios it explores) I’m generally of the opinion that reenactments in documentaries are not a good idea. You gotta either tell a story using what’s available well enough for us to imagine it, or you gotta just make a fictionalized version if you insist upon recreating the scenario. You can’t have both; it just makes the whole enterprise feel fraudulent and manipulative. Still, this one has --at least on paper-- an interesting idea for the reenactments: it depicts a silent Vincent (portrayed by actress Zawe Ashton) on her last day of life, reconstructing what might have been going through her mind by examining the minutiae of her death scene. We see her pick out the blue floral dress she was found wearing. See her wrap the Christmas presents that were sitting around her (who were they for? They never say!) See her put on the last record she would ever play. Kind of neat, but probably unnecessary in light of the real images available of her, and certainly unnecessary to fill up what seems like a full fourth of the film’s runtime. There’s a germ of a good idea there, and had it been used better it might have helped give the film structure and focus, as well as offering a visual reference. But as it is, it just adds bloat to what would otherwise be a lean and elegant exploration. Even more damning, Morely’s yin for drama also pushes her to ad a subtle intimation early on that foul play might have been involved, a pretty indefensible and baseless hook in a movie which certainly doesn’t need any other hooks. Had Morely simply trusted the story itself to move you -- rather than add a bunch of extraneous manipulators just to be sure you’re feeling things -- she might have had a true classic on her hands, instead of a just a fascinating film.

Still, it’s hard to trust. That, I think, is the main point here, and the thing that makes it not just a fascinating story but a unique and important one. We fret sometimes about the loss of a cohesive family unit, the social community, how no one talks anymore, how instant communication has alienated us rather than brought us together. But in the case of Joyce Vincent, we’re reminded that genuine human connection is more complicated than merely exchanging words with a real person every once in awhile. Connection is about trust, about allowing yourself to be vulnerable to someone else, about offering some kind of truth about yourself. That, it seems, was what eluded poor Joyce Vincent. She didn’t move through life without human contact, as the original reports might lead one to believe -- but perhaps she managed to do it without much genuine connection. A busy life, but maybe a lonely one anyway. The movie might be better if it were more able to help us understand why she ended up this way, but as a portrait --or dream-- of a life we seldom get such a clear look at, it emerges a riveting and deeply moving (if sometimes frustrating) document.  

The International

The International (2009)
Dir. Tom Tykwer
Starring Clive Owen, Naomi Watts, Armin Mueller-Stahl

I had sort of wanted to go see THE INTERNATIONAL when it was in theaters, but the poor word-of-mouth kind of bummed me out and I never did get out to do it. Then, when it came out on video I tried to download it, but --unbelievably-- couldn't find a torrent. I mean, there are almost a dozen torrents for PUMPKINHEAD 4: BLOOD FEUD, for fuck's sake. How disappointing does a film have to be before no one is even gonna go through the effort of stealing it?

I had another reason to be trepidacious about this one: It's directed by Tom Tykwer. You remember, Tom Tykwer, the guy who made the visionary, kinetic modern masterpiece RUN LOLA RUN, and apparently expended all his energy on that one because he then made a whole series of pretentious arty snoozefests like WINTER SLEEPERS (apparently he actually made this before LOLA, it just came out in America afterwords and I assumed it was a follow-up) PRINCESS AND THE WARRIOR, and HEAVEN. I was excited going into every one of those films and they ended up just boring the piss out of me, even when I could acknowledge the thought and artistry which obviously went into them. I'd forgotten that he recently directed the odd but excellent PERFUME, so the thought of him doing a 70's style paranoid thriller just seemed so awesome that I was certain he would bungle it into some kind of boring metaphor art project.

Turns out no, this one actually delivers. It's not the stylistic follow-up to LOLA that everyone would like to see, but it is an extremely classy and deftly made old-fashioned thriller about a topic which is both old-fashioned and torn from today's headlines: evil bankers (not so fast Mel Gibson, they're British and German).

Clive Owen plays an Ex-Scotland Yard INTERPOL guy who is has been trying for years to prove maleficent behavior on the part of the IBBC, a conglomerated European bank which barely bothers to hide their evil intent. They go about murdering one person after another, knowing they're entirely safe behind a thick wall of intragovernmental bureaucracy and callous extralegal skullduggery. And here's the cool part: they're absolutely right. They hold every ounce of power in this relationship. They're almost completely unconcerned that Owen's Louis Salinger is on their trail, because there's not a single god damn thing he can do about it. Every bit of evidence he collects will be undermined, every potential ally will be scared off, every good intention will be recontextualized as fanatical paranoia. Who is the world going to believe, scruffy, wild-eyed Clive Owen with his wild theories about bank assassins, or smooth-talking bank lawyer Michael White (Patrick Baladi) who represent the soothing forces of accepted reality.?

I never cease to be amazed how hostile middle America is to the idea that there are powerful forces in the world working in secret on things which will make them rich and make the world a worse place. I mean, I'm not a crazy person. I don't see much evidence to suggest that there's a secret society working to perpetuate Jesus' bloodline into a New World Order. On the other hand, both Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr, killed within a five year span, all by mentally unstable lone nuts for basically no reason? That doesn't sound suspicious to anyone? I mean, I feel crazy just saying it, but folks, if that shit doesn't set your alarm bells ringing, what in fuck's name is wrong with the world? Which is not to start claiming that I have secret proof that there was a third shooter at the grassy knoll, or that Dick Cheney shot a missile at the pentagon or whatever. I don't know. But I'll be damned if there aren't some things out there that seem mighty suspicious. With a conspiracy which is properly successful, you can't prove it. And even if you could, people don't want to believe it. Give them any possible way out, and they'll choose a comforting fiction. Some things just challenge people's perception of their world too much for them to allow.

It's not that all conspiracies are true (oh god, no.) It's that Americans are hostile to the very notion of conspiracies. Despite plenty of indisputable historical evidence of some fucking crazy ass shit, Americans reject the very notion of such activities as suspect. And that's after the Gunpowder Plot, CIA's MK-ULTRA experiments, the Tuskegee experiments, COINTELPRO, The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy, Iran-Contra, Operation Ajax, and of course the true events which obviously are referenced in the film, the murder of Italian banker Roberto Calvi in 1982 and the assassination of dissident writer Georgi Markov in 1978 just to name a very few in which it's basically impossible to argue against a conspiracy. Most of these conspiracies were exposed only when the perpetrator were either caught red-handed or achieved their desired aims and felt no need to continue in secret.

It's not faith in the system that keeps people from believing, I think, but rather fear of what it might mean if we really started wondering about what forces are conspiring against us. And so Americans violently resist such notions and marginalize even the vaguest suggestion of such things. The American public does half the work of conspirators for them! We create a spiral of silence which ensures that it's the people who ask hard questions that will suffer, not the people they're asking those questions about. Hell, the argument has always been that keeping secrets between a group of people is too hard for conspiracies to be plausible. But if everyone's implicated and you keep it simple enough, exposing conspiracies is such a difficult task it's hard to believe there aren't more of them. Or maybe there are. I guess the point is that if they're done well you can have all the suspicions you want, and in the end it's just you that will seem crazy.

The genius of this film is that it successfully presents the enormity of the odds stacked against poor Clive Owen. The deeper he goes and the more outlandish the conspiracy gets, the more obvious it becomes that no one is ever going to believe it. The Sisyphean nature of his task becomes more and more obvious as his enemies get bolder and bolder. They shoot up the goddam Guggenheim and get away with it! There are bodies and machine gun rounds blanketing one of America's most famous and celebrated institutions, but one look from Owen and you realize that if he claims this is the work of a conspiracy of international banking assassins, he'll be the one locked up.

This is a powerful feeling to evoke in this crazy modern time. The system has gotten so out of control that it's gone beyond the bounds of what most people allow themselves to believe is possible. People violently defend the status quo because believing the alternative is just too horrific. The forces stacked against us are so overwhelming and so utterly devoted to furthering their own ends that stopping them is basically an absurd idea. Often, stopping them would essentially entail destroying most of the basic institutions of our government and economy. They have us at gunpoint -- if we fuck with them, they can completely destroy us and make it look like it was our fault all along. Tykwer emphasizes this point with his fixation on juxtaposing tiny humans with monolithic monuments to modernist architecture. Everything in the film is bordered by clean, neat lines and grids, and menaced by towering modernist citadels. They lurk above the horizon like predacious giants; like tombstones to ideals that don't yet know they're already dead. The Guggenheim itself, with its spiraling minimalism and austere spaciousness, is the perfect metaphor for the escalating violence against humanity wrought by the faceless powers represented by this disaffected monument to grandiosity.

All that works beautifully, and Tykwer drives the narrative along at a tense, kinetic clip, pausing for impeccably executed setpieces (of which the Guggenheim shootout is the most spectacular). That sequence in particular is so immaculately constructed in terms of acting, story, cinematography, editing, and score that it will probably be considered a classic film sequence somewhere down the line. The acting is excellent, even if both Owen and a needless Naomi Watts both fall a little short of being fully realized characters. So why didn't people like this thing?

The problem, it turns out, is that the film's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. Tykwer masterfully convinces you of the hopelessness of the situation he's created, but then finds himself painted into a corner. He's so expertly crafted an impossible situation that there doesn't seem to be any good way out. In order to explain the unsatisfying result, I'm going to have to describe the conclusion, so the next bit is gonna be in my ever-popular Ulta-3-D- SPOIL-O-VISION!

So, after this long multinational chase to get evidence to bring down the bank, our heroes are left with exactly fuck all. An accusation as extraordinary as they're attempting to make is going to require extraordinary evidence to move on, and the people working against them are simply too good at obfuscating and confusing the picture to leave extraordinary evidence. Oh sure, they've got plenty of suspicious connections, plenty of innuendo, coincidences, odd happenings, evidence which contradicts the official explanations, and even a guy who's willing to go on record. But it's not ever going to be enough. The bank will be able to control their message, change the facts, and turn the whole thing into an incomprehensible jumble of international court hearings which will ultimately lead to some minor fine and no admission of guilt. Owen and Watts will die in some suspicious way which can't quite be proved to be the result of anything except happenstance, nothing will get any better, and anyone who thinks their deaths look like foul play will face instant ridicule and derision as a conspiracy nut.

With this setup, the director has two choices. Option A: Go the cynical route, follow the obvious logic of the film and aptly demonstrate that they're right, there's not a single damn thing you can do to make anything any better. Or, option B: Say fuck it and go for the Hollywood ending where somehow against all odds they succeed in bringing the bastards down, likely in a hail of gunfire in a secret volcano lair.

What Tykwer unwisely chooses to do is go with option C: Have Owen admit the system is untenable and take matters into his own hands, but then only do an OK job of it. Basically, Owen goes rogue and pits the mafia against the bank, so they send a dumpy middle aged guy to sort of easily shoot two of the bank's managers who for some reason don't have body guards or cell phones, and then that's it. So it kind of undermines the whole paranoia thing most of the film does so well, but also isn't a big enough win to give you the kind of payoff you'd want from an ending this unlikely. It's well put together just like everything in the film, but ends the film on kind of a shrug instead of a climax.

You can remove your SPOIL-O-VISION glasses now!

Still, the film is pretty good and bordering on great. It's a powerful, unique and exciting film which is a perfect vehicle to describe the major issues of our times, and indisputably the work of a supremely gifted and thoughtful filmmaker. It may well be the first great international thriller, that has at the very heart of its story a keen understanding of an increasingly post-national power structure juxtaposed against a stubbornly nationalist legal structure. That alone makes it a worthwhile use of your time, and a few great setpieces seal the deal. Tom Tykwer, it turns out you were already off my shit list because of PERFUME, but I'd forgotten that* so this time for sure, I'm officially excited for whatever it is you're doing next. Which, um, seems to be some kind of crazy religious epic with Tom Hanks and the Wachowski brothers? Sounds like exactly the kind of thing a cadre of evil international bankers might force on you. Call me crazy.

*Apparently this is why Santa always checks twice.

Parents

Parents (1989)
Dir. Bob Balaban
Starring Randy Quaid, Mary Beth Hurt, Sandy Dennis

Parents just don't understand. You know it, I know it, Will Smith knows it. It's the classic victimization of both childhood and politics; being under the unquestionable power of forces which don't understand what you wants and don't get why you do what you do. But a lesser-explored angle to that timeless axiom is its inverse: You don't understand parents. That may well be the key to understanding PARENTS. I wouldn't claim that I entirely understand PARENTS, but it's a damn fascinating film.

PARENTS, directed by perennial Christopher Guest supporting player Bob Balaban (who also, it turns out, directed the enjoyably dorky zombie rom-com MY BOYFRIENDS'S BACK) is a decidedly odd film. It concerns young Michael Laemie, a disturbed, withdrawn little kid who just moved to a new town with his all-American 1950's parents (played to the hilt for both menace and parody by Randy Quaid and Mary Beth Hurt). They're chipper and successful, but something seems a little off about them. Maybe it's their weird insistence on telling Michael vaguely menacing stories, maybe it's the surprisingly abundance of "choice cuts" on the grill, maybe it's their shifty evasions when Michael wonders what exactly all these "leftovers" were, originally. But they're doing fine; it's Michael who is not doing so well. He's plagued by bloody nightmares and hallucinations, and his pent-up horror is finding its way into disturbing violent drawing and assertions that his parents are dangerous.

The movie seems to be a weird kind of mix of 50's parody and surreal horror. There's not a lot of overt comedy, but the film plays up the 50's stereotypes pretty aggressively and sports a determinedly cheery cornball soundtrack which seems defiantly unaware of the dark intimations creeping in around the edges of the pristine 50s dreamhouse. But then again, there's not a lot of overt horror, either. The world is dripping with unspoken menace and lurking malice behind its bright suburban facade, but we never actually see anything unambiguously frightening happen. We see Michael's horrific dreams, we listen as Dad spins pointed parables, we draw connections when we see a dense blanket of prime cuts laying thick on the grill. But the film stubbornly refused to provide a smoking gun. Several times, it seems that Michael has stumbled upon grisly proof, only to have the film back away from endorsing his experience as concrete evidence.

Which slowly begs the question -- is Michael the only one who can see behind the mask of wholesome 50s nostalgia? Or is he actually the one who is disturbed, finding hideous hidden meaning in the absurdly banal? Is it more likely Mom and Dad are closeted cannibal killers, or that Michael is a troubled pre-teen who doesn't understand the world and is imposing his own warped sense of reality on things? The movie leans heavily in one direction, and then just as it seems to tip its hand it swings back and subtlety rescinds a lot of the certainly it just provided. The film is so resolutely from Michael's terrified perspective that the lines between reality and imagination blur to the point that no event can really be completely taken at face value. it's a nifty trick, and the film is confident enough to refuse to resolve itself or directly address the subjective nature of its perspective.

What does it all mean? I'm not sure I really know. It's focus on bland 50s archetypes juxtaposed with elements of horror (both real and imagined) seems to suggest it wants us to draw some kind of parallel, but I'm not certain exactly what. The fact that Dad works at a cheery chemical plant designing defoliants and (apparently) testing them on human subjects seems to parallel the film's central narrative of savagery lurking behind the veneer of vapid consumption, but doesn't Michael's warped perspective on life somewhat undermine that suggestion? Or is it Dad's detached, modernist workaday horror part of what is causing poor Michael to come unhinged? Are to to believe Michael is the only one who lacks the cognitive dissonance to compartmentalize chemical warfare and domestic bliss and hence is falling apart? Or is this actually a story of fear of the unknown turning a blissful reality into a nightmare? I'm sort of hedging towards the former, which I think makes more sense and explains more of the film's unique creative choices, but I like that there's plenty of room to argue other possibilities. There's also a strange undercurrent of animalistic sexuality running beneath everything, which may be the key to understanding the whole thing or may just be another layer of mystery. What's up with the aggressively sexual encounter between the parents that Michael observes (and is it even real?) and what does it have to do with the hellsprite little girl next door, who runs a savage burn worthy of FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS on the Laemie house while (at the very least) aping the rhythms of adult sexuality?

I've seen this film compared to Lynch's early work (BLUE VELVET, in particular) which is a fitting connection to draw in the two film's shared mix of suburban normalcy and surreal horror. But the film I found myself thinking about while watching is Mark Peploe's 1991 film AFRAID OF THE DARK, a similarly vicious nightmare of childhood subjectivity (interesting that the two were made only two years apart -- what the fuck was going on in the late 80s that made people think kids were living in a separate world of depraved horror? Oh right, Kriss Kross.) PARENTS and AFRAID... traffic in the ambiguities of childhood perception, and offer a glimpse into the isolation and terror this can engender. Both films have other interesting things to say, but their most interesting trick is this unusually bleak insight into what exactly it can mean that parents just don't understand. It's an old horror trope that kids (and pets, I guess) exist closer to the spirit world and are open to seeing and believing things that adults cannot. But these two films are a troubling reminder that seeing is not the same as understanding, and without understanding the consequences can be severe.

Balaban went on to direct four other films, and none of them seems to be anything even remotely like this, so figuring out exactly what the fuck he was up to with this one seems like a hopeless cause. Even so, its an astoundingly well-constructed film bolstered with a surprising about of visual prowess (there's an interesting technique here which seems to transform the live-action into a illustration as Michael dreams about running through the halls of his house. It's surreal and effective and I don't know that I've ever seen it used anywhere else). Neither Balaban nor anyone else I'm aware of would ever return to this kind of material again, but that's OK -- PARENTS is a rare perfect original. It's exactly what it needs to be, and hasn't been diluted with sequels and knockoffs. Even if we may never completely understand, you don't have to emulate PARENTS to love them.