For Republicans out to smear Barack Obama, no tactic is too low or slimey, as Floyd Brown‘s new Willie Horton ad attests. Brown created the original Horton ad that was credited with being one of the two big things that sank Michael Dukakis‘s candidacy in 1988. (The other was the video of Dukakis riding in that army tank wearing a Rocky-the-squirrel helmet.)
It’s a tired subject ’round these parts, but N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich, having recently seen Errol Morris‘s Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25 NY, 5.2 LA), is apparently confronting it for the first time: “Iraq is to moviegoers what garlic is to vampires.”
Standard Operating Procedure, he believes, “will reach the director’s avid core audience, but it is likely to be avoided by most everyone else no matter what praise or controversy it whips up.
“It would take another column to list all the movies and TV shows about Iraq that have gone belly up at the box office or in Nielsen ratings in the nearly four years since the war’s only breakout commercial success, Fahrenheit 9/11. They die regardless of their quality or stand on the war, whether they star Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Elah) or Meryl Streep (Lions for Lambs) or are produced by Steven Bochco (the FX series Over There) or are marketed like Abercrombie & Fitch apparel to the MTV young (Stop-Loss).
“As the New York Times recently reported, box-office dread has driven one Hollywood distributor to repeatedly postpone the release of The Lucky Ones, a highly regarded and sympathetic feature about the war’s veterans, the first made with full Army assistance, even though the word Iraq is never spoken and the sole battle sequence runs 40 seconds.
“If Iraq had been mentioned in Knocked Up or Superbad, Judd Apatow‘s hilarious hit comedies about young American guys who (like most of their peers) never consider the volunteer Army as an option, they might have flopped too.
“This is not merely a showbiz phenomenon but a leading indicator of where our entire culture is right now. It’s not just torture we want to avoid. Most Americans don’t want to hear, see or feel anything about Iraq, whether they support the war or oppose it. They want to look away, period, and have been doing so for some time.”
The formidable Tommy Lee Jones lets go with three choice comments during an interview with 02138‘s Richard Bradley — about Iraq and the draft, righties pushing for the building a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico, and the meaning of the ending of No Country for Old Men.
(1) Draft/Iraq: “About eight months ago, [New York Democratic congressman] Charlie Rangel came out advocating the reinstitution of the draft, and people were shocked. ‘Congressman Rangel,’ they said, ‘why would you argue for the reinstitution of the draft?’ He said, ‘It’s very simple. We have a volunteer army. We’re sending ’em back tour after tour after tour. We’re running our military into the ground, and if we would just reinstitute the draft so that it had some impact on American people — those who don’t do a lot of thinking — this war would be over in six months.’
“[And] think that’s right. We had the draft in ’68, we had a bullshit war, and it ultimately ended. And there were terrific repercussions throughout the government. The Bush administration has escaped those repercussions because the American people have a way to turn their head and say, “It doesn’t really affect my family. My daughter is in no threat of having her legs blown off. My son is in no threat of coming back with no face, no ears, no nose — because he didn’t volunteer.”
“If somebody were making them incur those risks, the votership might change radically.”
(2) Border Fence: “The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bullshit.
“[You hear the talk] and the talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.
“First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.
“And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. ‘Okay, let’s just build a fence.’ That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.”
(2) About No Country: “So there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about morality, is what we were saying last, and the conventional way is not always the right way. Morality might be bigger than you are. And I think the human being needs — I don’t know if he deserves, but needs — frequent reminders that the world ain’t flat and he’s not living in the center of the universe. I think that’s an important part about the last few moments in the movie.
“You’re asking me now about the last scene, which is essentially a speech by Ed Tom Bell recounting dreams about his father. And you have the feeling that Ed Tom is thinking about hope, about the future, and that no matter what evil might have transpired, or no matter what opportunities were lost for communication between father and son, or between brother and brother, sister and brother, that somewhere off ahead through the darkness and cold there’s a father who carried fire to create a warm place to welcome you. And that keeps you going, because you know he’ll be there.
“And after describing that beautiful picture, Ed Tom says, ‘And then I woke up.’ So, as always with Cormac, the question becomes more important than the answer. Was that dream an illusion or not?”
In a 4.7.08 review, New Yorker critic David Denby is playing my Stop-Loss song, or vice versa or something in between. But Kimberly Peirce‘s film opened two days ago and didn’t exactly rewrite box-office history, so Denby’s support has come late in the game. Perhaps too late.
Stop-Loss “is not a great movie,” Denby says, “but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war — a time when the patriotism of military families is in danger of being exploited beyond endurance.
“This movie may become the central coming-home-from-the-war story of this period, just as The Best Years of Our Lives, made in 1946, became central to the period after the Second World War. Like that extraordinary work, Stop-Loss is devoted to the men’s hidden wounds — the wired-up tensions and nightmares that lead to drunkenness, fights, smashed love affairs and marriages.
“Throughout the Second World War, Hollywood made dozens of patriotic combat films, as well as occasional home-front movies (like Tender Comrade with Ginger Rogers) about gallant wives. The Korean War, except for B-movies by Samuel Fuller and Joseph H. Lewis, went undramatized until it was over, and this was largely true of the Vietnam War, too. During all these wars, none of the discomforts of the returning soldier, or the dismay of his friends and family, were shown on the screen.
Most of the recent feature films about Iraq (Rendition, Lions for Lambs, Redacted) have not been very good, and the public has stayed away from them. But audiences ignored Paul Haggis‘s sternly beautiful and moving In the Valley of Elah, too. Something more than the usual resistance to ‘tough’ subjects may be hurting these movies. The Bush Administration told us that we were waging a war for our survival, but it also suggested that most of us needn’t make sacrifices or even learn much about the conflict. Then again, some people may be so angered by the war that they don’t want to be confronted by it as entertainment.
“But Kimberly Peirce, whose younger brother has served in Iraq, has conceived her picture in popular terms that won’t be easy to ignore. Except for a few enraged sentiments that Brandon unloads on his commanding officer, Stop-Loss is not overtly critical of the war, but the way it uses the soldiers’ experience is inherently political. Peirce plays the antiwar game fairly. Indeed, she plays it as if she were a soldier herself.
“It’s hard to find the right tone for these movies, because even in victory there is loss. And the second Iraq war hasn’t yielded victory, nor is it likely to. For all the shoving and cursing and jangled videos, Stop-Loss has its own kind of tentativeness. Ryan Phillipe‘s Brandon King, who is both violent and highly moral (a classic American combination), struggles to understand what’s right, yet the movie doesn’t hold much hope that things are going to work out for him.
“At this moment, and maybe in the future, too, the resolution of an American warrior’s doubts is impossible to imagine. The soldiers are held together by their love for one another, and that element of Army life may make Stop-Loss popular with both liberals and conservatives, but no one, I think, will be happy about what the movie suggests is happening to some of the best young people in the country.”
Another story about the challenge that Paramount is facing in the selling of Stop-Loss, this version from the Hollywood Reporter‘s Steven Zeitchik.
Ever since last summer’s tanking of summer of A Mighty Heart and In The Valley Of Elah, the mantra is that American guys and gals don’t want to know from movies about the Iraq War and its combatants, and yet Kimberly Peirce‘s drama, opening 3.28, is “the first movie told entirely from [Iraq veterans’] point of view…a movie emblematic of how soldiers really feel,” she says.
And so the Stop-Loss trailers and ads are basically saying , “What, me Iraq?”
The story, directed and written by Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), is about a soldier (Ryan Phillipe ) who finishes his tour in Iraq and returns home to Texas, only to be ordered right back to Baghdad under the Army’s stop-loss provision. Except he’d rather not. Should he say or should he go? Abbie Cornish costars.
“To me, Roy Scheider‘s passing has far greater reverberations than the untimely demise of Heath Ledger,” New York Press critic Eric Kohn wrote this morning. “It signals the loss of a major artist whose fully developed body of work remains wholly distinct from the formulaic trajectory of so many leading men.
“He was refreshingly believable as the hardened police chief vainly attempting to guard an unsuspecting town from the monstrous creature lurking off shore in Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 classic. And yet Hollywood formula didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t sit that well with him: You could find him as a pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s withdrawn sidekick in The French Connection, but never a one-man army or incredulous hustler.
“The Jaws sequel was his sole miscalculation, but he followed it up with All That Jazz, Bob Fosse√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s surrealist musical that remains potent to this day. The vibrant movie concludes with the show-stopping ‘Bye Bye Life,’ where Scheider√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Fosse-like character bodes farewell to a troubled existence with a mixture of excitement and melancholia. It could be played at the actor√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s funeral.”
The Jaws sequel wasn’t Scheiders’ “sole miscalculation” but screw it…let it go.
A 30th anniversary, 3-disc, triple-dip Close Encounters of the Third Kind DVD came out on 11.13. It’s a Blade Runner package in that it has the original ’77 version, that awful extra-footage, inside-the-mother-ship version that came out in ’80, and the director’s cut that came out in ’98 or thereabouts. Reading about it reminded me to never, ever see this film again.
I’ll always love the opening seconds of Steven Spielberg‘s once-legendary film, which I saw on opening day at Manhattan’s Zeigfeld theatre on 11.16.77. (I wasn’t a journalist or even a New Yorker at that stage — I took the train in from Connecticut that morning.) I still get chills thinking about that black-screen silence as the main credits fade in and out — plainly but ominously. And then John Williams‘ organish space-music sounding faintly, and then a bit more…slowly building, louder and louder. And then that huge orchestral CRASH! at the exact split second that the screen turns the color of warm desert sand, and we’re in the Sonoran desert looking for those pristine WW II planes without the pilots.
That was probably Spielberg’s finest creative wow-stroke. He never delivered a more thrilling moment after that, and sometimes I think it may have been all downhill from then on, even during the unfolding of Close Encounters itself.
I saw it three times during the initial run, but when I saw it again on laser disc in the early ’90s I began to realize how consistently irritating and assaultive it is from beginning to end. There are so many moments that are either stylistically affected or irritating or impossible to swallow, I’m starting to conclude that there isn’t a single scene in that film that doesn’t offend in some way. I could write 100 pages on all the things that irk me about Close Encounters. I can’t watch it now without gritting my teeth. Everything about that film that seemed delightful or stunning or even breathtaking in ’77 (excepting those first few seconds and the mothership arrival at the end) now makes me want to jump out the window.
That stupid mechanical monkey with the cymbals. The way those little screws on the floor heating vent unscrew themselves. The way those Indian guys all point heavenward at the the exact same moment when they’re asked where the sounds came from. “Bahahahhahhree!” That idiotic invisible poison gas scare around Devil’s Tower. That awful actor playing that senior Army officer who denies it’s a charade. The way the electricity comes back on in Muncie, Indiana, at the same moment that those three small UFOs drones disappear in the heavens. The mule-like resistance of Teri Garr‘s character to believe even a little bit in Richard Dreyfuss‘s sightings. It’s one unlikely, implausible, baldly manipulative crap move after another.
If only Spielberg had the talent to blend his fertile imaginings with a semblance of half-believable realism…but he doesn’t. Or didn’t back then.
The worst element of all is the way Spielberg has those guys who are supposed to board the mother ship wearing the same red jumpsuits and sunglasses and acting like total robots. Why? No reason. Spielberg just liked the idea of them looking and acting that way. This is a prime example of why his considerable gifts don’t overcome the fact that he’s a hack. He knows how to get you but there’s never anything under the “get.”
The ending of No Country for Old Men is obviously irritating to some, but the thematic echoes and undercurrents from the last scene stay with you like some kind of sad back-porch symphony. Spielberg’s films have almost never accomplished anything close to this. I’m not sure they have even once. Has anyone tried watching the “little girl in red” scene in Schindler’s List lately? I love most of that 1993 film, but this scene gets a little bit worse every time.
Curiously, almost bizarrely, Darjeeling Limited director Wes Anderson has given his critics all the ammo they need and then some by freely discussing his whimsical, mercurial, Wes-world lifestyle (thus spurring thoughts about how this may have affected the style and content of his films) in a New York interview by David Amsden called “The Life Obsessive.”
Anderson, says Amsden, is “someone who has constructed a life almost preposterously conducive to the pursuit of fantastical whims. [And yet] one gets the impression that even Anderson, these days, can find living in Wes’s world a bit claustrophobic.
At one point Amsden mentions a recent Atlantic Monthly essay by Michael Hirschorn which “argued that, as a culture, we are ‘drowning in quirk,’ an aesthetic he defines as the ’embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream.’ Citing Anderson’s movies as a prime example, Hirschorn claims that the problem with quirk is that it ‘can quickly go from an effective narrative tool to an end in itself.’
“You need only watch a few frames of one of his movies to spot it as an Anderson production,” Amsden goes on to say. “Though he is originally from Texas, there is something distinctively European in his obsession with aesthetics: a belief that the way something looks is what dictates how it will make you feel. His impeccably composed wide-angle shots have the feeling of a childhood fantasy: wistful, more than a bit ridiculous, with a darkness creeping in at the edges.
“Pepper in some resurrected classic-rock songs; deadpan dialogue; themes of failure, nostalgia, and fractured families; and the result, at its best, is a world unto itself.”
I’m not heartened by Amsden’s observations at all. Anderson is obviously one of the most distinctive signature filmmakers working today, and he used to be one of our finest. He can solve his problem by simply crawling out of his own rarifed ass and exposing himself to some form of raw, unruly, Hemingway-esque experience — a life without stuffed African animals or spur-of-the-moment train trips to Rome or specially tailored seersucker suits.
Career-saving suggestions for Anderson to consider: (a) do a T.E. Lawrence and join the Army or Marines as a raw recruit with a fake name, and serve in Iraq for a year; (b) get a job in Iraq as an ambulance driver, and have an affair with a nurse if he gets sent to the hospital if and when he gets maimed by an I.E. D.; (c) do a T.E. Lawrence and take a low-level job in some blue-collar industry in Missouri or Mississippi for a year, again under a fake name; (d) do a John Pierson and run a repertory movie theatre in some far-off territory for a year — soak up the exotic atmosphere, get to know the locals, etc.
Last Friday Rogert Ebert delivered, for my money, the most perceptive and best-written review of In The Valley of Elah that I’ve seen anywhere.
“I don’t think there’s a scene in the movie that could be criticized as ‘acting,’with quotation marks,” Ebert observes. “When Susan Sarandon, who has already lost one son to the Army, now finds she has lost both, what she says to [her husband] Tommy Lee Jones over the telephone is filled with bitter emotion but not given a hint of emotional spin. She says it the way a woman would, if she had held the same conversation with this man for a lifetime.
“The movie is about determination, doggedness, duty and the ways a war changes a man. There is no release or climax at the end, just closure. Even the final dramatic gesture only says exactly what Deerfield explained earlier that it says, and nothing else.
“That tone follows through to the movie’s consideration of the war itself. Those who call In the Valley of Elahanti-Iraq war will not have been paying attention. It doesn’t give a damn where the war is being fought. Hank Deerfield isn’t politically opposed to the war. He just wants to find out how his son came all the way home from Iraq and ended up in charred pieces in a field. Because his experience in Vietnam apparently had a lot to do with crime investigation, he’s able to use intelligence as well as instinct.
“And observe how Charlize Theron, as the detective, observes him, takes what she can use and adds what she draws from her own experience.”
Ebert got one tiny thing wrong, though. He quotes an early back-and-forth in which Jones tells Sarandon he’s going to drive to the New Mexico military base where his son was stationed and do some poking around. “It’s a two-day drive,” she says. Jones’ reply, according to Ebert, is “Not the way I’ll drive it.” Nope — he actually says, “For some people.”
Presumably someone out there has a recent draft of Mikko Alanne‘s script of Pinkville, which director Oliver Stone will make into a film sometime early next year for United Artists. It seems like an astute move for Stone to not only revisit his own Vietnam combat experience as well as the turf of Platoon, his greatest screen triumph, but to also reflect on the Iraq War experience by looking back at another time when U.S. troops were frequently seen as the bad guys when it came to dealings with civilians.
I realize that Pinkville will not be focusing on William Calley, the Army Lieutenant who became a poster boy for G.I. atrocity-committers during the Vietnam War after news of the My Lai massacre — the slaughter by U.S. troops of 500 villagers, many of them women, children and elderly in March of 1968 — broke through. But I wonder to what degree, if any, it will include him in the scenario.
Calley, 64, is apparently retired and now lives in Atlanta, after a lifetime of working at a jewlery store in Columbus, Georgia. He will of course have to go through the whole magilla all over again once the film comes out.
Michael Fleming‘s Variety story says the focus will mainly be on a good-guy whistle-blower — General William Peers (Bruce Willis), who spearheaded the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Peers took heat from trying to get at the truth when most of the military establishment wanted it to just go away fast, especially after President Richard Nixon, looking to kowtow to the blue-collar, construction-worker, pro-Vietnam War voters, announced that he would personally review the Calley court-martial situation before any sentence was passed.
There’s a scene in Platoon, of course, in which some of the angrier and more belligerent troops (two fo them played by Tom Berenger and Kevin Dillon), furious over the death of comrades, terrorize and come close to killing several villagers before everything is stopped by Willem Dafoe‘s Sgt. Elias.
Channing Tatum “will play Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who, upon realizing what was happening below, put a stop to the killing by placing his craft between gunmen and the few villagers who were left, and telling his two shipmates to fire on the soldiers if they shot any more people,” Fleming reports. “They airlifted the survivors and reported the carnage to superiors.”
Presumably Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the My Lai story in late 1969, will be a character also.
At his court-martial, Calley “testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone, of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.”
The little kid to the left of Calley on the Esquire cover, the one with the expression that sort of says “the idea behind this photograph is kinda sick”? I wonder where he is today. I’d like to know if he deliberately conveyed that expression for the Esquire photographer, or whether it just happened.
Shaky-cam Bourne vomiting has been brought up by Roger Ebert by way of a letter forwarded by David Bordwell (“the most respected film academic,” Ebert says) that was posted on movies.com a while back by “sfjockdawg,” to wit:
“We went to see The Bourne Ultimatum on the IMAX in San Francisco. Near the end, when Webb is having the flashback to when he [was] forced to show his commitment to the project, the lady next to me spontaneously unleashes a huge amount of vomit all over my leg and all over the floor in front of her! I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life! All the action sequences, the nauseating use of moving cameras and the relentless score were enough to make anyone dizzy, but to throw up?”
Like Jason Bourne himself, this item triggered a repressed memory in the brain of yours truly — a vomit-splatter that happened during an early-ish screening of The Bourne Supremacy on 7.12.04.
Sometime during the third act of a showing at the Writers Guild theatre, an older woman sitting on the left side spewed on the floor. It was kind of alphabet soup-y mixed with pumpkin puree and chopped Spanish peanuts. A few people got up and moved away. A guy who was sitting nearby told me later it smelled pretty awful in that section of the room.
The next day I mentioned the episode to a Universal publicist in an e-mail, not as something that was necessarily caused by Paul Greengrass shaky-cam but as something funny that had merely “happened.” I was chuckling the way a fifth- grader would chuckle with his friends if the really smart girl with the freckles and the pigtails had vomited in arithmetic class, but the publicist wasn’t in fifth grade — she was coming from the office of Roy Cohn during the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Her voice shrill and agitated, she read the riot act in order to dissuade me from mentioning the incident in the column. I felt so overwhelmed with bludgeonings and bad vibes that I caved (wimp that I am deep down) and said, “Okay, all right…good God.”
Only now, three years and 40 days later, can the story be told.
I’m wondering if Roger Ebert would have gotten the same phone call and had to deal with the same agitation from this very willful publicist if he were based in Los Angeles and had been in the Writers Guild auditorium on Doheny that fateful night.
Paul Haggis‘s In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.21 or 9.28) is more than just a respectable true-life drama, and a helluva lot more than the sum of its parts. I think it’s close to an epic-level achievement because it’s four well-integrated things at once — a first-rate murder-mystery, a broken-heart movie about parents and children and mistakes, a delivery device for an Oscar-level performance by Tommy Lee Jones, and a tough political statement about how the Iraq War furies are swirling high and blowing west and seeping into our souls.
The best films are always the ones that don’t seem to be doing all that much, but then gradually sneak up on you, laying groundwork and planting seeds and lighting all kinds of fires and feelings. Elah is one of these. It’s a damn-near-perfect film of its kind. There’s one moment at the very end that could have been played down a bit more (i.e., a little less on-the-nose), but others I’ve spoken to don’t agree. I’m trying to think of other potholes but they’re not coming to mind.
Elah isn’t some concoction, some tricks-of-the-trade movie that’s mainly about pushing buttons and playing audiences like an organ. It’s primarily about respecting real-life experience and refining this into art. Haggis’s screenplay is based on a true story that happened in the summer of ’03, and was first reported a year later in a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boal, called “Death and Dishonor.” It came from Boal interviewing Lanny Davis, a former U.S. Army M.P., about the death of his son, who had been reported AWOL following a tour of duty in Baghdad. Haggis bought the rights and created a somewhat fictionalized version, although he stuck to the basic bones.
So let’s not hear any carping about this being another bleeding-heart, anti-Iraq War movie by a Hollywood leftie — it happened. In fact, to hear it from Davis (whom I called the day after I first saw Elah on 6.19), the real story is even darker and more damning.
Elah has been screening for critics over the last two or three weeks, and I know it’s definitely skewing positive, but this is one of those times when I don’t care if everyone understands how good it is or not. All right, I do care because it’s nice to be agreed with and I want to see this film break the Middle-Eastern conflict curse (i.e., the U.S. moviegoer mentality that apparently doesn’t want to know about anything Iraq or Afghanistan-y, an attitude that arguably killed or severely damaged A Mighty Heart at the box office) but I know what this thing is and that’s that.
Forget Crash, or rather forget whatever resentments you might have about Haggis’s film taking the Best Picture Oscar from Brokeback Mountain. And forget the beefs about Haggis writing scripts that are too explicit and surface-y with not enough subtext. Elah, trust me, is a much better, more plain-spoken film than Crash was. It’s about real people, real hurt, real tragedy. My first thought after seeing it was that Warner Independent should show it to all the Crash haters in order to put that dog to bed.
Elah is one of those very rare birds that starts out like a what-happened? procedural you may have seen before, and before you know it it’s doing something extra, and then something else and then another thing altogether. Before you know it Haggis has four or five balls in the air, and when it’s over you’re heading out to your car and going, “Hmmm…yeah…wow.”
I was thinking at first that Elah resembles David Greene‘s Friendly Fire, a 1979 TV movie based on a true story about the parents of a Vietnam veteran cutting through red tape to find out how their son actually died. But before the what- happened-and-whodunit? story even gets going you can feel the undercurrent of grief in Jones, whose character, Hank Deerfield, is based on Lanny Davis.
Jones’ weathered, old-guy face is full of the suppressed shock and grief and guilt that any parent feels when his or her son has gotten into trouble or otherwise done something inexplicable. And his performance, which is all about feelings being kept in check, like it always is with any old-school military guy, just keeps getting sadder and more affecting.
Haggis originally wanted Clint Eastwood to play Deerfield, but it’s a role that has Jones’ history and DNA all over it. He owns characters like Deerfield and that sheriff in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and the small-town sheriff he plays in Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men, which comes out in November. All of them plain-spoken, craggy-faced Texas dudes with turkey necks, paunchy guts and wells of sorrow in their eyes.
The fact that In The Valley of Elah is a gripping investigative procedural is almost the least of its attributes. I felt I was swimming in holy water five minutes into it. Haggis’s early dialogue feels tight and true, and Jones and Sarandon’s acting in the early scenes feels like the playing of two master violinists. (There’s a sad phone call scene between them that choked me up, and Sarandon has a flash- of-rage moment that pierces right through). Add this to Roger Deakins‘ cinema- tography and Jo Francis‘s editing, and any half-aware observer can tell from the get-go that this is very high quality stuff. You just know it. You can feel it happening a hundred different ways.
Red-staters and blue-staters alike are going to get where this film is coming from — they’re going to feel it in their hearts, and make all the connections on their own without going off into specific tirades or defenses.
It’s not so much Haggis-the-Hollywood-liberal as the story itself that’s making the point here, which is that the Iraq War is primarily responsible for the terrible thing that this film turns on. It’s heartening to hear (as Jones’ character says at one point) that David sometimes does win out over Goliath — the title refers to the valley in Israel where their ancient conflict took place — but the Iraq War is a thousand plunderers and a thousand knives. It is obviously laying waste left and right, and will continue to do so for a long time to come, and for what?
(Iraq is going to suffer a blood bath — maybe like Ireland, maybe like Rwanda — and eventually break apart like Yugoslavia and become two or three countries. People have to tend their own nests. There’s no other way. It would be nice if it were otherwise, but the hard rain has only begin to fall over there.)
In some quarters In The Valley of Elah is going to be seen in the same light as Grace is Gone (dad-in-denial John Cusack mourning the death of his wife who was killed in Iraq), although it is much more powerful and assured.
Some might be more muted in their admiration, and they wouldn’t be wrong or right in expressing this, but I think In The Valley of Elah is an unmistakable Best Picture contender. It’s an American tragedy that every last person in this country, from whatever region or persuasion, is going to “get” deep down. Except with aberrations like Chicago, this groundwater quality is usually what gives a Best Picture nominee traction with voters.
I believe that Haggis is now a prime contender for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ditto Deakins for Best Cinematography and Francis for Best Editing. I can see Theron being talked up in the Best Actress category also (her role as a single-mom investigator is much less showy and grandstanding than the blue-collar character she played in North Country), and Sarandon, depending on the competition, could wind up in the Best Supporting Actress category.
Every Elah supporting player delivers a straight-up, no-fuss performance. The best are Jason Patric, James Franco, Josh Brolin, Jonathan Tucker, Frances Fisher, Rick Gonzalez, Barry Corbin, Wayne Duvall, Brent Briscoe, Mehcad Brooks, Brad William Henke and Kathy Lamkin. (Watching it is like a No Country for Old Men old-home week for Jones, Brolin, Corbin and Lamkin.)
- All Hail Tom White, Taciturn Hero of “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Roughly two months ago a very early draft of Eric Roth‘s screenplay for Killers of the Flower Moon (dated 2.20.17,...
More » - Dead-End Insanity of “Nomadland”
Frances McDormand‘s Fern was strong but mule-stubborn and at the end of the day self-destructive, and this stunted psychology led...
More » - Mia Farrow’s Best Performances?
Can’t decide which performance is better, although I’ve always leaned toward Tina Vitale, her cynical New Jersey moll behind the...
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- Hedren’s 94th
Two days ago (1.19) a Facebook tribute congratulated Tippi Hedren for having reached her 94th year (blow out the candles!)...
More » - Criminal Protagonists
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films...
More » - “‘Moby-Dick’ on Horseback”
I’ve never been able to give myself over to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, a 1965 Civil War–era western, and I’ve...
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