Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Sex, Drugs and Quivering Holes: Cronenberg Puts Burroughs in a Straitjacket
BLOGGER'S NOTE: Naked Lunch was released 20 years ago today. Spoilers start in this essay’s first 25 words, so beware.
By Jeff Ignatius
When a rubbery former typewriter humps two lovers in David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, and when a grinning Roy Scheider emerges from his woman suit and shouts, “Benway!” near the film’s end, it’s so excessive that the movie seems to jump the rails. Of course, that must be impossible, because the tracks don’t exist, and if there aren’t at least a few Dada moments, something has gone awry. I haven’t read William Burroughs’ 1959 classic, but I imagine one of the great appeals of attempting any adaptation is that it offers a really long leash — just make sure it isn’t conventional, comfortable, boring, straightforward, or coherent.
Cronenberg seems incapable of making conventional or comfortable films, and Naked Lunch is in no way boring or straightforward. It is, however, coherent. The rails do exist — often to the movie’s benefit but finally to its detriment.
The writer/director genetically combined elements of the seminal book with people and events from its author’s life — Burroughslunch instead of Brundlefly — and the result is an uneasy fusion; the chaos of id has been organized and annotated, and the central character has been reduced to a pawn of his addictions and his unconscious mind. The movie is, on reflection, significantly more ambiguous and textured than that, but it’s hard to escape its central contradiction: One of the 20th century’s most important and innovative writers has bizarrely been stripped of ownership.
Burroughs is presented in Cronenberg’s movie as William/Bill Lee (Peter Weller), whose drug use leads to the accidental shooting death of his wife Joan (Judy Davis) and then escalates, sending him fleeing into the fantasy world of Interzone — a place of exotic hallucinogens and fluid sexuality and ever-shifting corporate intrigue and living typewriters and…. Bill’s “reports” as an agent become the novel Naked Lunch, and as he shifts from the roach powder stolen from his exterminator job to “black meat” to alien semen, he drifts further from recognizable reality. “I feel so — oh — severed,” he says at his most wretched. At heart, Cronenberg’s adaptation riffs on the idea of the artist as vessel — a mere conduit for the work. Lee’s art here bursts from a potent potion of drugs, grief, drugs, paranoia, drugs, buried desires, drugs and guilt — although any regret he feels has to be inferred from the convoluted conspiracy built to explain his wife’s death. This conceptual choice — more about the book and author than a presentation of the novel itself — gives the film its structure and narrative resonance. William Lee sheds tears twice, recognizing what he’s done to become and later prove he’s a writer, and it’s a solid story. Yet it’s far too neat and easy, especially for this movie.
Lest it sound as if I don’t like or admire Naked Lunch, let me be clear on a few points.
First, the movie is as repulsively, giddily transgressive as one could hope for from these idiosyncratic artists. Somewhat shockingly, the most obvious barrier to bringing the script to the screen was apparently not much of a problem. Despite unmistakable erections and orifices, blowjobs and cum shots, the damned thing got financed, made, and released — with an R rating, no less. (In the MPAA’s eyes, penises and anuses aren’t penises and anuses if they belong to bugs, typewriters or Mugwumps.)
Second (and largely given), the production design — by longtime Cronenberg collaborator Carol Spier — is sharp and lovingly realized, from the mid-20th century detail to the tactile creature effects to the slightly fake/unreal look of Interzone.
Third, the movie’s eccentricity is balanced by masterful restraint of tone; the strangeness mostly just exists. Howard Shore’s score feels too ripe — the aggressive, digressive jazz sax highlights the oddness — but Naked Lunch’s otherwise-matter-of-fact presentation of outré material reflects William’s accepting mind.
So does Weller’s focused deadpan. The actor creates an aloofness that situates him as both pliant participant and hungry observer — detached but never blank, alternating between downcast eyes and keen attention. Some might see it as a one-note lead performance, but watch each of Weller’s smiles and you’ll begin to see the shadings. And notice the moment he fully surrenders to his hallucinations, when he sells his homosexual “cover” after saying the word “queer” aloud several times — trying it on — before launching into a bravura bit of storytelling. He has become an agent.
Fourth, the movie is surprisingly funny, loaded with perfect touches: the sound of a carriage-return bell when Bill’s scurrying typewriter runs into a door; the casual way a cigarette-smoking Mugwump in a bar is plainly visible but goes unnoticed by William (and likely the audience); the cheeky foreshadowing of Scheider’s reveal — “And he’s obviously got sensational cover,” “She and Benway are…intimates.”
Other humor is dark and pathetic. Bill is fully aware of and barely trying to conceal his true self, for instance offering a lame but clever excuse to an exterminator colleague whose bug powder he tried to steal: “The centipedes are getting downright arrogant.” After Scheider’s Benway suggests that Lee came to him to score dope instead of treatment, Weller fills his response to the doctor with arch insincerity: “I came here for help.” And William downplays his months-long binge and ragged mental state to friends (“Naturally, I’ve had a few odd moments”) and another Joan, also played by Judy Davis (“I suffer from, um, sporadic hallucinations”).
Then there are the careful phrases lightly reinforcing the grip of drugs. Benway describes the side effects of a roach-powder-habit treatment as “nothing that will surprise the addict”; what goes unsaid is that nothing can surprise a roach-powder junkie. A sleazy operator offers “rare services to the arts,” adding: “I have found that writers are a particularly needy group.”
Another strain of humor subtly reflects characters’ acquiescence to the ridiculousness of what’s happening — full submission to the drugs. Early in the movie, a giant bug says, “Say, Bill, do you think you could rub some of this powder on my lips?” Bill replies: “Uh, yeah. Sure.” (You can luxuriate in Peter Boretski’s bug/typewriter/Mugwump line readings. In the example above, just listen to the word “pow-der.”) When Lee’s typewriter attacks a borrowed one, he only considers the awkward social situation this puts him in: “Holy shit! That machine doesn’t belong to me.” Cronenberg’s characters assign great personality to those machines, with language more appropriate to sexual partners. “I wouldn’t use a Clark Nova myself,” says Interzone acquaintance Tom Frost (Ian Holm), the husband of the second Joan. “Too demanding.” He then suggests that William borrow his Martinelli: “Her inventiveness will surprise you.” And it would be impossible not to smile at both the writing and delivery when Bill offers an exchange of writing machines. “I’ve brought you a new typewriter which conveniently dispenses two types of intoxicating fluids when it likes what you’ve written,” he says brightly and casually.
Despite these abundant strengths, Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch feels too processed and too sane.
Least damaging is the tidy, linear progression of Bill’s visions, with each successive drug creating stronger hallucinations. Similarly, periods of lucidity are explicitly marked by the absence or scarcity of narcotics, and trips are immediately preceded by drug use. As weird as the movie is, it clings too tightly to logic, refusing to ever give itself over chaos, depravity, or even narrative messiness. This is obvious in the way the conspiracy finally comes together — in Lee’s dope-dictated universe, it makes sense — and in a pair of related over-expository bits. What William thinks is his ticket to Interzone is shown to be drugs (a touch that just barely works), and a bag that Bill thinks holds the remains of a ruined typewriter is shown to be full of spent drug paraphernalia (too much). These two disclosures serve a secondary purpose through the character of Martin (which I’ll address later in this section), but they’re primarily blunt and unnecessary reminders that drugs are transporting and expressive tools.
Where Cronenberg’s typically thoughtful and rigorous approach really fails him, though, is in his conceit. In fairness, he made a choice between two inherently problematic formulations. He could have been more faithful to the by-all-accounts fragmentary source (“with apparently no cinematic structure,” Burroughs wrote), and he would have likely ended up with something bordering on unwatchable. (I imagine this is the tack a filmmaker such as Terry Gilliam would have taken.) He instead chose to contextualize the book with Burroughs’ life, and in so doing he forces a facile reading of both the man and his novel.
It works on a basic story level, and it can be interpreted several ways — as buying into the Burroughs mythology or as undermining it (the latter requiring a little excavation). Still, it is undoubtedly an imposition, one that makes it nearly impossible to either feel the movie or empathize with Lee/Burroughs. The audience is always outside, and always mindful of Cronenberg’s presence.
Oh, he tries to have it both ways. The movie’s first epigraph promises: “Nothing is true; everything is permitted.” Early in the movie, Bill utters the movie’s tagline: “Exterminate all rational thought.”
And yet…Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch offers a clear narrative “truth,” and — despite all its drug-induced imagery — it is unabashedly rational. This is a partly a result of the essential conflict between an art that can be and often is spontaneous (writing, in this case) and an art that cannot be except in minute details (commercial filmmaking). But it’s also a function of the essential conflict between the brains and methods of Burroughs and Cronenberg, despite their clear artistic kinship.
The writer/director tackles this issue directly in an early exchange between Hank (based on Jack Kerouac) and Martin (based on Allen Ginsberg). “To rewrite is to deceive and lie and you betray your own thoughts,” Hank (Nicholas Campbell) asserts, by extension damning movies. Martin (Michael Zelniker) counters by arguing for refinement, saying that revision allows for “writing the best that I can…considering everything from every possible angle. Balancing everything.” Hank says that level of conscious analysis amounts to “censoring your best thoughts. Your most honest, primitive, real thoughts.” This exchange sounds like the movie’s built-in defense mechanism. It’s as if Cronenberg is saying that he understands the objections to his structural and thematic choices — that they’re “censoring” and confining Burroughs — but that his heart and brain are more in line with Martin’s philosophy.
Martin stands as the movie’s ineffectual moral center; he’s the only person who questions, however gently and tentatively, Bill’s increasing disconnection. When Lee claims that somebody else must be writing Naked Lunch under his name, Martin jokingly replies, “For God’s sake, Bill, play ball with this conspiracy!” But other times he speaks seriously and sincerely, and it’s only when he’s present that Bill’s hallucinations are peeled away to allow glimpses of concrete reality. “I think it’s time to discuss your, uh, philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavor,” Martin says, quickly rebuffed. And as he and Hank are preparing to leave Interzone for the real world, he implores Bill: “Stay until you finish the book. But then come back to us.” Most tellingly, when Bill is adamant that he’s never before heard the words being read to him from his in-progress novel, Martin’s face falls; he’s clearly heartbroken.
Martin’s presence and singularity — he’s the only clear-eyed person in the picture — and how he seems to stand in for Cronenberg make me skeptical that the movie accepts that Bill is only the nominal author of Naked Lunch. It appears to be saying that he’s not responsible, deserving neither credit (for his novel) nor blame (for killing his wife).
The talking, bossy, drug-taking, orgasmic, violent typewriters are this artist’s excuse made literal. Writing tools are, of course, important, but William’s Clark Nova gives him orders and composes all by itself. An Interzone companion hopefully tells Bill, “If we fix the typing machine, we also fix the life”; he turns out to be right. And after both of his typewriters are destroyed, Tom Frost warns Lee: “A lot of people have tried to silence me. All have failed.” It’s a funny line, and almost a joke: How could one possibly write without a typewriter?
The opening credits reinforce the central concept: The artists (the names in the credits) are defined by circumstances (moving color blocks) and don’t otherwise exist.
Yet I think it’s a mistake to take all of this at face value. One could reasonably say, for example, that the movie is aping Bill’s denials without lending them credence. And digging deeper reveals tantalizing nuance.
The movie opens with a shot of a red door, then darkened by William’s shadow. “Exterminator,” he says. The character’s entrance is not as a human being — what we see initially is the result of him blocking light — and his introduction is as a killer, somebody who takes life rather than a creator. And the movie underscores that a killer he remains, with the shooting of his wife ending the first act and of her replacement closing the movie. There’s subtle judgment here, a refusal to let William off the hook. Perhaps, then, the film is not denying Bill as the author so much as a person. Lee wrote the novel but he lacks a certain moral validity. His tears — over what he has lost or sacrificed for art — represent the cost, and that price negates (or maybe offsets) the work. What the movie bleakly posits — literally and hyperbolically, yes, but I think truthfully — is that the writing life feeds off death; art requires suicide and murder.
That basic idea is echoed by Burroughs himself, who of course accidentally shot and killed his common-law wife Joan in 1951. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death,” he wrote in 1985, mimicking the movie’s surface argument but with a welcome sense of repulsion. That death “brought me into contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I had no choice except to write my way out.”
The movie is open to other possibilities that probably feel more natural. Maybe Naked Lunch is a portrait more of an addict than an artist, saying that Bill’s substance abuse rules his writing and his life, and that he therefore has little control over either of them.
The film also makes sense in the context of Cronenberg’s other work, particularly the consumption of identity that recurs in nearly all of his movies, most obviously the physical transformation in The Fly. Bill’s mesmerizing talking-asshole routine articulates the idea that an artist might birth and nurture something that eventually becomes fully independent: “After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.” The asshole finally became parasitic, and then stronger than its host; the art can eventually devour the artist.
Or Cronenberg might be purposefully taking the construct of the absent artist to an extreme. Most of us understand that there are unconscious and subconscious aspects to art — that things beyond intent seep in — and Beats such as Burroughs not only embraced these but sought to give voice to them above all else. Cronenberg carries that to its logical conclusion.
While there’s no doubt that, on a superficial textual level, the movie casts its central character as a mere tool, it’s crucial that Bill rejects that easy defense, or perhaps just the relevance of the concept of accountability. The Clark Nova explains to Lee that he wasn’t responsible for his wife’s death: “It was not an act of free will on your part.” William brushes him off: “Who the fuck asked you?” Then he adds, to the typewriter (and Cronenberg and me), “Save the psychoanalysis for your grasshopper friends.”
Lee would certainly agree that parsing the film and the character like this is beside the point. But it also proves the point, that Cronenberg’s dense, multifaceted treatment ultimately is constricting and reductive. However you choose to read it, it’s for good and ill a cerebral text with a narrow scope, irreconcilable with Naked Lunch’s raw material.
Jeff Ignatius is a writer and editor who runs CultureSnob.net, which he has steadfastly neglected for 15 months.
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Labels: 90s, Books, Cronenberg, Fiction, Ian Holm, Judy Davis, Movie Tributes, Roy Scheider, Terry Gilliam
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Sunday, October 09, 2011
Still Picking Feet in Poughkeepsie After 40 Years
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post appeared in a slightly different form on Feb. 27, 2009 at Cinema Viewfinder. Tony Dayoub let us borrow it to mark the 40th anniversary of The French Connection.
By Tony Dayoub
One of the great, iconic films of the 1970s, The French Connection, marks its anniversary today. A gritty, realistic look at all angles of a huge heroin deal by its then young film director William Friedkin, it also made a star out of its lead actor, Gene Hackman. It also went a long way toward romanticizing the seamy underbelly of New York City.
New York crime films became a staple of '70s cinema due in no small part to films such as Gordon Parks' Shaft (1971) and The French Connection. Movies such as Across 110th Street (1972), The Seven-Ups (1973), The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three (1974) and Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973) and his Dog Day Afternoon (1975) were all subsequently inspired to employ the washed out color and grainy look of fast film stock that was utilized so often by documentarians for its flexibility in shooting in low-light situations. The jittery hand-held camera in such films signalled a "spontaneous" stolen shot and an immediacy that was rare before Friedkin's film. And the littered streets of New York's back alleys were often spotlighted, rather than glossed over, in an effort to heighten the raw intensity of the docu-inspired dramas.
New York cops Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso had participated in just such a takedown of a heroin smuggling ring a decade earlier, with much the same outcome; the alleged kingpin got away with the crime. But it was still the largest drug arrest of its time. And Egan and Grosso were exciting personalities to base a film on. Egan was a bigoted hothead with a cagey way of throwing his perps off by interrogating them about an incident unrelated to their arrest, "Ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?" Grosso was a methodical cynic who helped rein his partner in. Egan harbored the ambition that actor Rod Taylor would play him in the cinematic adaptation of their story. So, as Grosso recounts in a documentary on the Blu-ray, he was very surprised when he was introduced to the mild-mannered man who would ultimately win the role of Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (based on Egan), Gene Hackman.
As Hackman tells it, even he wasn't sure he could sell the crude facets of Egan's personality. Doyle is a cop with no personal life, save for a predilection for women that might be too young for him. He's an alcoholic, frequently waking up from a bender; in one scene, cuffed to his own bed by a young woman he picked up off the street. In a warning to his partner, Buddy "Cloudy" Russo (Roy Scheider), his deep-seated racism is more than evident:
Doyle: You dumb guinea.
Russo: How the hell was I supposed to know he had a knife?
Doyle: Never trust a nigger.
Russo: He could have been white.
Doyle: Never trust anyone!
But he does have an instinct and drive that suits the case that falls in his lap, a drug deal involving a supplier from Marseilles, Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Together with his partner, he relentlessly tracks all angles of the case, even on his off-hours, to the point of obsession and exhaustion. This obsession ultimately endangers anyone — cops, innocents — that get between him and his quarry.
Hackman gives us a nuanced take on what, according to Grosso, was the emotionally one-note Egan. Rather than play the constant intensity of the type-A cop, the actor instead leavens it with a world-weariness that humanizes the driven supercop. The dynamism in his performance makes it even more chilling when Doyle is able to spring into action after an exhausting night, as a sniper tries assassinating him on his way home. This leads to a nerve-wracking chase in which Doyle drives a car recklessly in pursuit of an elevated train.
Credit Friedkin for that inspired set piece, which he hyperbolically insists that he shot from inside the car himself, an assertion disputed by the film's cinematographer, Owen Roizman, in a recent interview with Aaron Aradillas on Back by Midnight. He also admits to daring his stunt driver, Bill Hickman, to drive the car (with only a siren on top to warn oncoming traffic) as fast as possible even though no permits were secured to close off the street for the shoot. The driven Friedkin obviously saw a kindred spirit in Egan (and the character of Doyle). The manipulative director, by his own admission, was prone to yelling at Hackman in order to keep him in a constant state of stress. The results are on the screen, though. The French Connection wound up winning Oscars for best picture, best actor, best director, best film editing and best adapted screenplay.
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Labels: 70s, Hackman, Lumet, Movie Tributes, Oscars, Roy Scheider
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Sunday, April 06, 2008
What a long, strange trip it's been
By Edward Copeland
"It's puzzling. I've never seen anything quite like this before," HAL 9000 says at one point in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which opened 40 years ago today. I used that quote to open the first movie review I ever wrote: a writeup in my high school newspaper of the 2001 sequel 2010 . At the time, I suggested that in many ways, 2010 made for a superior film because, as far as I was concerned, 2001 was overrated and boring for a lot of its length. I haven't seen 2010 in a long time, so I doubt I'd stand by that assertion, but my opinions of 2001 have evolved over time. I still believe it's overrated, but there is a lot within it to admire. Just not enough to love.
Granted, my first exposure to 2001 came in the wake of Star Wars and my subsequent childhood obsession with it, so its more cerebral sci-fi take was off-putting to a youngster to say the least. This was a space odyssey! Why was I watching people in ape suits running around? As I aged of course, I grew to appreciate the meaning of the Dawn of Man sequence, though I still think Kubrick could have accomplished it in less time. It's 25 minutes before a single word is spoken in the film. Though my favorite Kubrick films are his works in black-and-white, I do have to say that watching 2001 again, his color compositions in his post-Dr. Strangelove films were quite stunning, even if the films themselves were too often chilly.
Proof of the low temperature reading of 2001 is that the most interesting character in the movie doesn't arrive for an hour and it's a computer. Voiced in monotone by actor Douglas Rain, HAL 9000 is very much the main attraction in 2001. When HAL sings "Daisy" and vanishes while Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) goes on the final 25-minute acid trip, the computer is sorely missed. When you get down to it, no attempt is made to develop any character in the film the way HAL is. What do we know about Dave, his fellow astronaut (Gary Lockwood) or Heywood Floyd (to be played by the late Roy Scheider in the sequel)? They have families on earth. That's about it. HAL is the first one to question the "extremely odd things" about their mission to Jupiter.
HAL also reveals more layers in terms of what motivations the machine has within him and where his loyalties lie, not to mention the chill when you realize that HAL can read lips. In many ways, HAL is the viewer's conduit into the film's murky depths. When Dave proceeds to disconnect him and HAL says he can feel his mind going, you can feel your mind going at the same time. When 2010 came out in 1984, a lot of 2001 fans were critical at the attempt to provide answers for what was going on in the earlier film. However, even in retrospect, the trippy ending to 2001 really doesn't add up at all to what the supposed "answer" is as given by 2010. Granted, when the late Arthur C. Clarke wrote the book of 2010 and Peter Hyams made the 1984 film, they really could have no idea that the Soviet Union would cease to exist in less than a decade and the Cold War aspect of their story would be obsolete in their 21st century setting.
Putting that aside though, how does Dave Bowman traveling through lights, seeing himself as an old man eating and then even older lying in bed staring at another monolith square with the idea that everything that happened (basically aliens killing humans getting too close and taking over computers) was to engineer the creation of a second sun in the universe which the planet Earth was to use in the name of peace? As I said at the outset, I've grown to have a lot of admiration for 2001, but not a lot of fondness. It's worth marking its 40th birthday, but I believe it's yet another case of a movie that drowns in fans singing praise not from actual love but for fear that if they admit they have problems with it, they might be exposed. Kubrick was a truly iconoclastic filmmaker and I think he'd hate that kind of worship. He'd rather you be true to yourself than to pat him on the back because you think that's what you are supposed to do.
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Labels: 60s, Books, Fiction, Kubrick, Movie Tributes, Roy Scheider, Sequels, Star Wars
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Monday, February 11, 2008
Roy Scheider (1932-2008)
"We're gonna need a bigger boat." Just reading those words doesn't indicate that it would be one of the most famous lines of dialogue from a classic movie, but when you hear Roy Scheider's voice as Chief Brody speaking it with a mixture of fear and resignation, you know why it's worth repeating. It wasn't a shark that got the great actor, it was a long struggle with multiple myeloma before a staph infection took his life Sunday in Little Rock, Ark.
Jaws may be Scheider's lasting legacy, but his career went far beyond that. He was nominated for an Oscar twice, in 1971 as Popeye Doyle's partner in The French Connection and in 1979 as Bob Fosse's alter ego Joe Gideon in All That Jazz.
There could be an air of the sinister in his roles such as in Klute or as Dustin Hoffman's brother in Marathon Man, where Scheider took part in one of the great life-and-death struggles ever put on film.
Scheider also brought gravity to films that didn't really deserve them such as Blue Thunder or Listen to Me. He even helped the misguided sequel Jaws 2 work better than it should (as long as the teens weren't alone on the screen anyway). He even dared to take the lead in 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Still, it's his first outing as Martin Brody, police chief of Amity Island, that's going to be the dearest in my heart and mind. An exiled N.Y. cop with a fear of water who moves to an island, which of course is only an island if you are looking at it from the ocean. No matter how you looked at Roy Scheider, he was an actor, and one of the most underrated.
RIP Mr. Scheider.
To read The New York Times obit, click here.
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Labels: Dustin Hoffman, Fosse, Obituary, Roy Scheider, Sequels
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Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Sound and fury signifying something
By Edward Copeland
In the post-Watergate era of the mid-1970s, paranoid thrillers seem to spring up with amazing regularity and recently I re-visited 1976's Marathon Man and was impressed that it plays much better than I recalled. The story is incredibly complicated and it takes you awhile to connect all the pieces, but John Schlesinger's thriller definitely proves worth the effort, even after 30+ years.
What really stood out for me this time, seeing it for the first time in a good DVD copy with the proper ratio and excellent sound was how much the sounds of the movie and especially the score by Michael Small, a composer whose name honestly rang no bell at all but who also worked on another '70s journey into paranoia, The Parallax View, the original Stepford Wives and Klute. The sound effects really work to increase the tension, from the very beginning with the NY car duel between an old German and an old Jew through the very end of the picture.
Marathon Man, named for the exercise regimen of lead character Thomas Levy (Dustin Hoffman) proves an apt metaphor because once Schlesinger's film begins to pick up a head of steam, it doesn't really let up until the race is over. Hoffman's character is supposed to be a doctoral student, though in the DVD extras Hoffman, producer Robert Evans and screenwriter William Goldman all acknowledge that he was too old for the part since he was pushing 40 at the time, but hell, he was 30 when he graduated from college in 1967's The Graduate.
As the villain of the piece, Nazi-in-hiding Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier, in a well-deserved Oscar-nominated turn), tells Thomas at one point, "I envy you your school days. Enjoy them fully. It's the last time in your life no one expects anything of you." In a way, Thomas Levy in many ways resembles Hoffman's David Sumner from Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, an essentially nonviolent man pushed to the edge by the circumstances in which he finds himself embroiled.
In case there are those out there who haven't seen Marathon Man, I'll spare too many details, but I do want to compliment the excellent cast from Hoffman and the superb Olivier to Roy Scheider and William Devane. Everyone fits the piece perfectly.
Schlesinger also shows real suspense chops here with this, which was his first try at making a thriller. In addition to keeping the story taut with unease and uncertainty, there also are some really nice throwaway moments. In the film's most infamous scene, when Szell begins to do some dental work on Thomas to extract information, longtime movie tough guy Marc Lawrence as one of his henchmen actually turns his back. Brutal beatings and killings are no problem for him, but dental work is too much.
While the film tries to encompass many political and historical issues such as Nazi war criminals on the run, the government being in bed with them and even passing glances at victims of the McCarthy era, they all end up being almost incidental to the thrills themselves. In a way, the entire film could be called a MacGuffin, but it's a damn good MacGuffin.
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Labels: 70s, Dustin Hoffman, Olivier, Peckinpah, Roy Scheider
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Friday, December 02, 2005
From the Vault: Naked Lunch
While director David Cronenberg takes a decent stab at filming William Burroughs' novel Naked Lunch, the movie still ends up much like the book itself — too bizarre to maintain interest for its entire length.
To Cronenberg's credit, he doesn't try to film the novel literally, seeing that the task would be too improbable and too expensive. Instead, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch focuses on the writing of the novel itself with a wonderfully deadpan Peter Weller playing Bill Lee, a very Burroughsian character — lowkey, gaunt and monotonous.
Don't be misled though: This is not your typical writer story. Naked Lunch summons a two-hour hallucination where large insects instruct humans as their "agents" and where people have consumed so much of a bug powder they actually can kill centipedes just by breathing on them.
The director takes a few of the realities of Burroughs' drug-filled and tragic early life and fuses them with the novel's wild leaps of consciousness to create a concrete visual environment that epitomizes the author's abstract imagination. For a while, the approach works to fascinating, humorous effect. The visual effects by Chris Walas, Stephen Dupuis and Jim Isaac are grotesque and funny early on, but eventually you've seen too many talking typewriters, too many encounters with mugwumps.
The dialogue propels the film, especially when delivered by Weller and Judy Davis. Davis plays Joan Lee, Bill's wife, as well as Joan Frost, another woman Bill meets in the fictional world of Interzone. Davis manages to create two wonderfully distinct characters, one of whom has a fascination with injecting bug powder into her breast. With this performance and her work in Barton Fink and lead in Improptu last year, her failure to earn an Oscar nomination goes down in Academy history as one of its worst outrages.
There also are nice turns by Ian Holm as Joan Frost's husband and Roy Scheider, in an all-too-brief appearance, as Dr. Benway.
With Naked Lunch, Cronenberg creates a film of dreamlike quality. Unfortunately, the audience wakes up too soon and spends the rest of the film trying to recall what they saw while they slept. The dream was certainly interesting, but it was too long, too disturbing and too disjointed to want to experience it twice.
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Labels: 90s, Cronenberg, Ian Holm, Judy Davis, Roy Scheider
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