Cynical Cinema

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.

Describing I’m Not There is a tall task. This movie is weird. It’s beyond weird. It’s bizarre and artistic and insane and bonkers and very, very, good. It is, in some way, the story of Bob Dylan. But it’s Bob Dylan as imagined by Todd Haynes, the director of some of the strangest, yet most powerful and subversive movies in cinema today. And this is another in his long string of great and successful yet incredibly strange and complex films Mr. Haynes has unleashed upon North America. Haynes has managed, with I’m Not There, to craft a movie the way Dylan himself writes a song. Enigmatic, purposefully cryptic, brilliant and defying explanation. I can’t begin to describe the bizarre scenes and the strange moments in this film. Just be warned, this is very much an art film, and you, the viewer, are not meant to understand it all. What I’m going to do here in this review is provide, as best I can, as a Dylan fanatic myself, a sort of guide to the film so that you might enjoy it simply by virtue of understanding it a little more. I hope it helps, because this movie really is terrific.

“Bob Dylan” is played by six extremely different actors, each of whom have a different name for the Dylan character. Christian Bale (American Psycho) plays Dylan as Jack Rollins, a singer-songwriter from the 30s whose most famous work was the song “Frosty The Snowman”. He also wrote Peter Cottontail and Smokey The Bear. A strange choice for one of Dylan’s personas, “Jack Rollins” is Dylan at the moment when his status as the leader of the folk movement begins to chafe on him and get under his skin. Richard Gere (Pretty Woman) plays Dylan as Billy The Kid in a movie. In the film Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Dylan famously wrote the soundtrack, which featured the song “All Along The Watchtower”. This is Dylan’s period after his motorcycle accident where he disappeared completely for a few years. Ben Whishaw plays Dylan as Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet of what was called the “decadent movement” in the late 1800s. He was a brilliant young man, considered on a par with Shakespeare, when he gave up writing poetry altogether at the age of 21. He never wrote again until he died at age 37. Whishaw is barely used in the movie, playing Dylan at his most standoffish and cryptic.

More involved in the movie is Marcus Carl Franklin, a young African-American boy who plays Dylan as “Woody Guthrie”. Guthrie, for those who don’t know, was Dylan’s hero and greatest inspiration, and Franklin is terrific as the young Dylan who passed himself off as the second coming of Guthrie. This is Dylan the “fake”, and (I think) the fact that he is so young is a reference to Dylan’s young years, and the “fakery” of passing himself off as the next Guthrie. And I think the fact that he is black is a reference to the backlash against Dylan for involving himself with race relations and the civil rights movement when he was a white guy, the “fakery” of writing songs from a black perspective when he was not himself black. Heath Ledger, also with a big part in the movie, plays Dylan the Rock Star, as “Robbie Clark”, and I have no idea who Robbie Clark actually was. It may in fact not be a real name. Which is odd, since everyone else playing “Dylan” had the name of a real person, except for Ledger and Cate Blanchett.

And then…Cate Blanchett. This is a woman who has won an Oscar for playing Katherine Hepburn. A woman who has been nominated for at least one (and sometimes two) Oscars each year since playing Queen Elizabeth in 1998. And this, Bob Dylan, may well be remembered as the performance of her life. This is Blanchett at her very best, and possibly at the very best any actress can ever achieve. Becoming completely believable as a very famous man. Watching her doing the famous press conference after Dylan went electric in 1965, you actually forget that you are not watching Bob Dylan at that press conference. This is a magnificent performance, and must be seen to be believed. She plays Dylan as “Judy Quinn”, another name that seems to be pulled out of thin air. Perhaps this refers simply to the Dylan song Quinn The Eskimo, his most nonsensical, whimsical and completely devoid of message song ever. Because she plays him at his most whimsical and nonsensical. The scene where she appears, she is taking the stage at Newport, and plugging in the electric guitar in what would prove to be one of the most significant events in the history of music. From then on, she is the Dylan of the Don’t Look Back era, the one who had some sort of thing with Edie Sedgwick and who turned the Beatles on to the joys of marijuana.

Other characters pop up in the movie, some playing actual people, others playing actual people with different names. Here’s a short guide. David Cross appears as Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg was a real person, a poet in the 60s and one of the major figures of the “beat generation”. Charlotte Gainsbourg is terrific as “Claire”, who is basically Dylan’s long-time wife Sara. Although for some reason she has a French accent. Don’t worry about that. Julianne Moore plays “Alice Fabian”, who is Joan Baez under a different name. Michelle Williams has never looked better than she does here as “Coco Rivington”, which is the name Haynes has given to Edie Sedgwick. Ritchie Havens shows up for a moment, but he doesn’t play anyone famous. I just thought it was cool he was in there. Also cool - Kris Kristofferson as the narrator. There is an enormous amount of cool in this film. But boy, is it tough to follow.

And then, there is Bruce Greenwood. Greenwood is likely best known as the bad guy in Double Jeopardy, or as Mitch Yost on that John From Cincinnatti TV show. In I’m Not There, he plays two characters. One is a fairly self-important yet intelligent BBC journalist who attempts to interview Dylan, when he is being played by Cate Blanchett. The other is Pat Garrett in the scene with Richard Gere as Billy The Kid as Dylan. Following so far? OK. This is now my opinion, and this may well not be what Todd Haynes intended in the movie, but I’m going to throw it out there. In the Pat Garrett scene, the idea is that Garrett is the only man who was able to understand, and therefore capture, Billy The Kid. And the fact that he is being played by the same actor as the British reporter indicates to me that the idea there is that this British reporter is the only one who really understands what Dylan is about underneath all the enigma and bluster. Or, at least, he is the one who comes closest, who hits closest to home, and thereby is the only one who traps Dylan, the way Pat Garrett trapped Billy The Kid. This is just my opinion, and in watching this film you may well come up with some other explanation. But I certainly do hope you watch this film.

Six terrific performances, especially that of Blanchett, and brilliant song after brilliant song would make any movie good. What makes this movie great is that it so wonderfully mirrors the work of the man it canonizes. No one, including Todd Haynes, truly understands Bob Dylan. Many would go so far as to say that list of people who don’t understand Bob Dylan includes Mr. Zimmerman himself. So attempting to explain him is an exercise in futility. The only alternative, if one wants to pay tribute to this man, is to craft a movie the way Dylan crafts a song. Haphazardly, with a big picture only you can see, and if people get it, great, if they don’t, that’s great too. The idea here isn’t to get I’m Not There. The idea is to watch it, let it happen to you, and let it pique your interest, and then watch it again. And again, and again, and again. This movie is absolutely terrific.

That’s eight out of ten on my randomly-decided-upon measuring stick for movies. The box for the Russell Crowe - Christian Bale remake of 3:10 to Yuma says “The Best Western Since Unforgiven!” This is not true. It is, however, the SECOND best western since Unforgiven. The best one was a little-seen film called The Proposition, starring Guy Pearce, and it was a phenomenal film. What 3:10 to Yuma understands very, very well is the western hero. The greatest westerns all had heroes cut from one of two cloths. Either they were generally decent people who didn’t want to use guns but were forced into it, like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, or Gary Cooper in High Noon, or Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Or, they were tough, rugged frontier men who did not fear death, who were perfectly happy using a pistol, but they had a dark side and were not all good. Like Clint Eastwood in The Good The Bad and the Ugly, William Holden in the Wild Bunch, John Wayne in The Searchers, or Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. True western heroes are never the type that are happy, upstanding citizens who also are great gunfighters who don’t fear death and are dangerous to bad guys but perfectly safe to good guys. That hero is the mark of a less interesting western movie. One that can still be good, but never great.

Another thing 3:10 to Yuma gets right is the villain. Yes. I hate it in movies when the bad guy whoots his own man just to prove what a bad guy he really is. And yes, Russell Crowe shoots his own man in the very first scene he’s in. But this time, it is with a purpose. It is not an attempt to make him into the personification of evil, he actually has a reason. Both Crowe and Christian Bale are absolutely fantastic in the movie, both playing the western “heroes” with shades of grey. Peter Fonda is fantastic as well, as a grizzled old Pinkerton detective, a standard character in the old westerns - the lawman charged with upholding the law who may actually be more evil than the man he is bringing to justice.

And that is what makes 3:10 to Yuma fantastic. This film really is a throwback to the western tradition of the 1950s when the original was made. That is one reason this is not a classic western. Really, there is nothing new here. This is just a revitalization and a masterful rendition of an old genre. There are two other things (two characters, in fact) that hold the movie back from being truly great - but it isn’t really the movie’s fault. You see, at the time in the 1950s, these two characters were in many of the westerns. But since then, these characters have become standard in countless movies, and so they seem like cliches. The one character is Crowe’s right-hand man, played by Ben Foster. He is the psychotic killer we see all too often in movies, the man who will kill anyone without compunction, but who looks upon his mentor with a kind of respect that borders on worship. The other character is Bale’s young son, who is almost cartoonish at the beginning of the film with his bitterness at his father and his lack of respect for his toughness. Of course we know he will respect his father by the end of the film, so it seems like overkill with so much of it at the beginning.

But the best part of 3:10 to Yuma is Russell Crowe. He is magnificent as the outlaw with ambiguous motives, he’s absolutely captivating whenever he is on the screen. He is able to walk a fine line between charm and menace, and it’s such a magnetic performance that we never lose sight of who he is. A killer and a bandit with some kind of conscience. He makes every scene he’s in come to life, and that’s almost the entire movie. The gunfights are great - realistic and gritty, if a little stylized. The final gun battle is also the second best since Unforgiven (number two is that final gun fight in Open Range.)

This is definitely the best well-publicized western since Unforgiven, but there have been quite a few good ones in the last few years, for all you western fans - Seraphim Falls was terrific, Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson turned in some great performances. The Proposition was criminally overlooked. Dead Man also, although that may well be because it is just so weird. But definitely worth seeing. And Open Range was a pretty good representation of the genre. It’s a genre that has been called dead many times, but with films like 3:10 to Yuma, one can only hope that the next resurrection of the western is coming soon.