Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

Lonely Hearts

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Lonely Hearts written and directed by Todd Robinson.

The story involves a notorious murder case in New York in 1949. A con man (Jared Leto) who preys on widows and spinsters hooks up with a femme fatale (Salma Hayek) to prey on widows and spinsters and murder them.

The film structure has a flash-forward, flashback structure, but mostly proceeds in parallel between the pathological relationship between the killers, and the investigation, focusing on the lead detective (John Travolta) who is troubled in his own way.

Credits run over a montage of shots of the period, ending with a scene of a woman who shoots herself in the head over a bathtub. Then we jump forward 3 years, as two detectives Robinson (John Travolta) and his partner (James Gandolfini) arrive at Sing Sing prison to witness an electrocution. Gandolfini’s voiceover narration then brings us back in time and carries us through the rest of the story.

The suicide, he tells us, was Robinson’s wife. After that Robinson, a tough, hard-boiled detective, confines himself to desk duty and won’t go out on cases. Until by accident he is called in on a suicide scene of a woman who slit her wrists in a bathtub. Robinson finds it troubling, and he covers the case. He knows it’s a ‘Lonely Hearts’ case and suspects murder.

Meanwhile Gandolfini’s narration also introduces us to Ray Martin Fernandez (Jared Leto), a con man and swindler who writes letters to lonely widows and spinsters. He gives them his line, takes their money, and leaves. But one time he meets in this way a real beauty Martha Beck (Hayek) who is a real psycho. She falls in love with him but is never fooled by him, and together they embark on their crime spree.

The detectives try to get a line on Raymond and his next victim. And we also see how the couple do it: Raymond sweet-talks the women, Martha pretends to be his sister, but she is driven to jealous fury when she seen him romancing another woman, and ends up murdering the girl. Raymond participates in the killing and disposal of the corpse, and they go on to their next woman.

Robinson, the detective, is troubled. He has a new girlfriend (Laura Dern) but tries to hide it. He can’t move on, he can’t face his son with a new love. His son Eddie is 15 and maybe troubled himself; neither one has fully grieved or come to terms with the wife and mother’s suicide. Because of that memory, Robinson drives himself all the harder to solve the Lonely Hearts murder cases.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan Ray and Martha find a new victim, a young widow with small girl living on a farm. It begins to look like Ray wants to ditch Martha and start over; he’s getting along so well with the widow, and when she gets pregnant he tells her to keep it a secret from Martha. But the widow confides in Martha, who promptly poisons her. The poison is still slowly working when Ray gets back with the groceries. Ray isn’t sure who to shoot, Martha or the widow; Martha challenges him to shoot her or the widow. ‘If I don’t have you I don’t want to live,’ Martha tells him. ‘So shoot, Ray, but do it out of love.’ He puts the gun to Martha’s head, but kills the widow instead.

Then he rushes to bring back quicklime to dispose of the body and is pulled over. He murders the cop who pulls him over, but the cop has radioed in Raymond’s name already. The couple go on to kill a farmer for his dog in a mixed-up effort to appease the little girl. But the girl won’t cotton to Martha, and she ends up dead and slaughtered as well.

Robinson and his partner arrive in Grand Rapids and they help the local cops track the couple to the farm. There they take them alive, and get Martha to confess. She almost brags about it. And so, in the end, Robinson and partner witness the electrocution of both the Lonely Hearts killers – and then he resigns from the force.

The voiceover tells us that Robinson takes his son and the boat he had built for his wife, and moved upstate, married his girlfriend, and took up a normal life again.

The first of the end titles tells us that the writer/director is the grandson of the detective, and dedicates the movie to the detective’s son, the writer’s father.

The movie is well made, a good recreation of the period. It moves rather slowly, and seems lugubrious. Travolta’s performance is quite melancholy, repressing his rage and grief. The only time the movie really comes alive is when Hayek and Leto are playing their games. There’s no joy there either, but Hayek really gives oomph to her insane jealousy, and when she does her sex thing, it’s funny in a sick, sick way. The movie really should have just told the killers’ story, and the domestic difficulties of the detective are a bit beside the point, though Robinson makes a game effort of connecting the two causally. He wanted to pay tribute to a famous story his family was connected with, but the real story here is not the investigation so much as the weird, sick love triangles between con man, victim, and lover.

But the chief problem is lack of any joy (or much vitality) and much suspense. The picture only comes alive when following the twisted lovers in their horrible crimes and ghastly-funny declarations of romantic love. Martha is particularly loopy in this regard. As for suspense, the flashback structure lets us know the bad guys were caught, and the only suspense we really are left with is whether the cops can prevent the killers from killing the little girl on the Grand Rapids farm.

(26 April 2009)

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955)

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Invasion of the Body Snatchers a Walter Wanger/Allied Artists sci-fi thriller directed by Don Siegel.

The story has a doctor being called in to the hospital to interview a strange mental case: a respected man from the nearby town of Santa Mira, CA, a doctor himself, who is raving paranoically about ‘them’ and how his whole town was taken over. As the man (Kevin McCarthy) settles down and tells his story, the screen goes blurry and the flashback begins.

It started ‘last Thursday’ when the Dr was called back early from a medical conference he’d been at for a couple of weeks. People were frantically trying to get appointments and would only see him. But when he gets into his office, none of the appointments show up. And there’s the little kid who runs screaming into the road ahead of the Dr’s car, claiming his mother isn’t really his mother. And there’s the middle aged woman who claims her father isn’t her father, even though he looks just like him, sounds just like him, and remembers everything her father knew. She can’t even explain what it is, there’s just ‘something missing.’

The Dr meets another person come back to the town, his old flame Becky (Dana Wynter). She’s just off being divorces, and he’s also divorced, so they feel the old magic and go on a date. But the restaurant is empty. Nobody comes there anymore, the owner tells them.

The Dr gets another frantic call, from a friend and writer. He goes to the writer’s house and finds on the man’s pool table a dead man – what seems to be a dead man. But the face is oddly indistinct, and the hands have no fingerprints. The dead man does, however, happen to exactly match the general physical shape of the writer. And later that night, the dead man begins to wake up – and now he has a cut on his hand just where the writer cut his hand an hour ago.

Soon the cause of all this becomes clear, when the Dr finds in his greenhouse four large seed pods, that burst open, and out of them emerge the slimy, rapidly changing, forms … forms that match with increasing exactitude the Dr, his girlfriend, and the writer and his wife.

It happens when you sleep. When the pod-thing reaches maturity, which it can do inside a day, it can read all your memories while you sleep. When ‘you’ wake up, you are a pod-person too.

The discovery of the threat takes up the first half of the picture. The second half details the frantic efforts of Dr and girlfriend to get out of town to warn the other communities. But the pod people are growing thousands of the pods in greenhouses (it’s a central California farming town) and trucking them out to those other communities.

In a confrontation with some of the pod people, the Dr gets a chance to learn just how it was it happened. The seeds came first from space, and landed in the fields. The pods can take on the exact semblance of whatever life form they choose. They are just like humans, except they have no emotions, no fear, no love, no greed, no ambition, no faith. They all think just alike.

The Dr and Becky manage to run into the hills, chased by the pod people, and they find temporary shelter in an abandoned mine. But Becky sleeps, and when the Dr kisses her, he rises off her body in horror – she’s one of them now. He runs out, chased again, and ends up in the middle of the freeway, desperately trying to get someone to pick him up, to believe him, to take the threat seriously…

Back in the present, he fails to persuade the examining physician, until a report comes in of an accident where giant, weird seed pods fell off a truck. At this the alarmed physician calls the FBI to send out the alert and seal off all roads to Santa Mira.

The film is one of several of the ‘Who Goes There? or, My Neighbors are Aliens!’ films that came out in the 1950s, and is one of the best of them. Supposedly the creators were aiming at the rise of suburbia and the lifelessness of it, or the general rise of more plastic people following the tumultuous years of Depression and war. It also plays into the general fears of Communists and Communist sympathizers that plagued the popular imagination, fanned by zealots of the far Right.

Siegel kept the pace moving along smartly. This is vital for a story which is, at base, preposterous. We have to keep getting new scenes to be distracted from thinking about what we’re watching. The pods themselves are a bit ridiculous, except for the genuinely (to this day) creepy shots of the pods bursting and the bubbling, oozing proto-human shapes sliding wetly out.

The script and first cut of the picture had no frame story, and ended with the shots of Kevin McCarthy as the Dr in close-up looking straight into the camera shouting, ‘You’re next!’ – but when Wanger and the other brass at Allied Artists saw this, they thought it was too bleak and frightening, so they gave Siegel money to shoot the frame, which ends on a more hopeful note. (I wonder if there is any DVD version that gives us that version – it would be a pretty simple matter of skipping the bookend scenes and suppressing the voiceover narration.)

One thing the flashback structure does give us though is a sense of fear and foreboding from the opening. There is a necessary Act 1 of exposition in which everything seems normal on the surface, before the Dr begins to suspect that something is really wrong (with the examination of the unfinished corpse on the writer’s pool table). Without the flashback structure, these scenes would play very tame, even boring; but with the prologue that sense of fear hangs over all this, and we have been assured that something is really wrong; this lets us interpret everything even slightly odd in ways the Dr doesn’t as yet; it also makes us suspect everybody around him, and lets us develop our paranoia over a longer portion of the picture’s running time.

Of course, the closing scene shows us the Dr now relieved, feeling he’s no longer alone. But there is no certainty that the pods can be defeated. There are only the grounds for hope, and no real hope at all.

(Two interesting side notes: Sam Peckinpah was Siegel’s assistant for a few pictures, including this one. Sam claimed to have done a complete rewrite of the script himself, a claim which is widely disputed. In the 1980s Phil Kaufman remade the picture as a comment on the Reagan years and what looked like a return to 1950s life.)

One problem: there really isn’t any difference between the pod people and the regular people. In the 1980s remake (with better actors and more time shooting) Kaufman tried to bring out in performances the lack of emotions when people ‘went pod’ but Siegel really doesn’t get that, and the script doesn’t highlight the difference. Instead, and this is interesting, the difference shows up in the reactions of those not yet converted. They know, and we get the idea just because THEY react that way. In the same vein, what’s so bad about being a pod? The movie doesn’t give a good intellectual answer, but it gives us a good movie answer – because our heroes react in horror to the conversion of those they know, and because the conversion is forced – nobody has a choice.

In this light, it would be an idea to make a My Name is Legion adaptation (the Richard Mathieson novel adapted 3 times as Last Man on Earth and Omega Man in which all the world is vampires, except one man) along the pod people idea: show the doctor faking that he’s a pod person, and so far as he knows everybody else has changed over – but he doesn’t know for sure, so he has to hide himself, who he really is, and yet he’s always tempted – is this woman ‘real’ or that man, that kid?

Here the metaphor would cover things like being gay and trying to pretend you’re straight in a homophobic society, or being an immigrant in a different culture, or being ‘different’ in any way and trying to fit in.

Since this question of ‘fitting in’ is so strong among adolescents, it could be done in a teen-high school setting. The teachers are the main proponents of the pods, they grow them and convert kids; the hero is the last one, so far as he knows, who’s still a ‘real’ kid.

In a weird way, this is the same issue as Kurosawa’s Ikiru.

(27 April 2009)

Mysteries

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Mysteries a 1978 Dutch film adapting Knut Hamsun’s novel. It stars Rutger Hauer, Sylvia Kristel, Rita Tushingham and David Rappaport. It was shot by the great Robbie Müller but unhappily the DVD is based on a poor quality print, the colors of which are all wrong, and is cropped. I also suspect it was heavily cut down since there are several very awkward edits. (On the other hand imdb.com lists the longest cut at 97 minutes, and the US cut at 93, which is roughly what I saw; I didn’t miss much.)

The story is set in the 1890s on a small coastal village (shot on the Isle of Man, but probably the novel is set in Norway). One day a young man commits suicide in the fields. The very next day a stranger, also a young man, comes to visit. He stays in the hotel for an indeterminate period and claims he is an agronomist and that his name is Johann Friedrich Nagel (Rutger Hauer).

There is a dwarf (David Rappaport) and all the town picks on him, and one of Nagel’s first kindnesses is to the midget, whose name is Grogard. Grogard in fact is the picture’s narrator, and his voiceover is used to help make sense of everything and carry us through the tale economically. You know these 19th century novels are long and dense. Hamsun also specialized in the psychological realism that was held to be the novel’s chief purpose in those times.

Nagel falls in love with two women. First there is the ‘frivolous’ Dany Kielland (Sylvia Kristel) who is engaged to a lieutenant serving elsewhere. She seems alternately drawn to and repulsed by Nagel, and Nagel falls helplessly under her spell. Then there is the poor woman with a past, Martha Gude (Rita Tushingham) whose hair has turned all white because of a grief in her past which the midget tells us, ‘It’s not for me to tell.’ So, we never find out.

Once in his sojourn Nagel is visited by a woman the midget tells us was Nagel’s former love. She calls him Simonsen and takes money from him and goes.

Nagel’s behavior grows ever more erratic as Dany scorns his offers of love. He stalks her and hangs around her house and poisons her dog. He turns to Martha and she accepts his marriage proposal, but on the next day rejects him and disappears. Nagel is sure that Dany has filled Martha’s mind with lies about him. So he takes 90% prussic acid, which he carries always in a vial in his pocket. But the midget has replaced the poison with water. Nagel stays in his hotel room, driving himself into nightmares, torturing himself, harming himself. At last he runs down the pier and dives into the water and drowns.

The midget feels he has to do something in memory of his friend, so he throws acid on the lovely face of Dany, scarring her. He is sent to prison for 3 years, but feels ‘not one moment of remorse.’ And the two women, Martha and Dany, are thereafter often seen about the town walking arm in arm, speaking of their memories of the enigmatic man.

Hamsun is said to be famous for his lyrical descriptions of nature, and the Isle of Man is so undeveloped it offers Müller a great place to shoot gorgeous landscapes as Nagel and company take long walks. But the print is so bad I can’t tell how nice these might have been, and the effect of those shots is therefore lost. At the same time the version I saw has been dubbed into English; not a great problem when it concerns Tushingham and Rappaport, who are English speakers, nor such a problem with Kristel, who was never a great actress. But Hauer’s performance is hard to tell, since we see him and hear another man’s voice. All I can say is that Hauer looks very much of the period. Clothes and styles are nicely done.

There is an odd power of the picture that does grow. Some traces of the psychological portrait glimmer through. And I do like these glimpses back into the peak of European civilization; it fills me with sadness to contemplate how far we have fallen in 120 years.

(25 April 2009)

Along Came Jones

Hi Aki,

Today I watched Along Came Jones a Gary Cooper western.

The story shows us a hold-up of the stage of the Express Company at night. The robber is masked, but he kills one of the drivers and escapes with the money bag. The other driver shoots the robber, who loses his prize rifle engraved with his name, but he rides away. Wanted posters are put up all over the territory, for Monte Jarrad, dead or alive, who robbed the stage and is often seen with his half-witted ‘Uncle Roscoe.’

Melody Jones (Cooper) and cranky old sidekick George (William Demarest) happen to be riding through, by mistake (four or five hundred miles back, Melody took the wrong turn). Melody is a light-hearted ‘bronc stomper’ and they’ve just finished a cattle drive and are headed for jobs somewhere else. When they get into town, the locals in Payneville (‘What town is this here?’ asks George. ‘It’s Payneville,’ says the local. ‘Well, what’s painful about it?’) catch sight of the ‘MJ’ on Melody’s saddle and see that he’s tall and thin just like the posters say Jarrad is. So naturally the whole town thinks he’s the killer. And they treat him with great respect, even fear. Some though aim at him through windows to shoot him.

A pretty girl, Cherry de Longpre (Loretta Young) helps Melody get out of town, explains the whole matter to him, and sends him on his way. But the truth is, she’s helping the wounded Jarrad, and wants to send the posse after Melody so Jarrad can go the other direction and get away. Melody figures this out and returns to the de Longpre ranch, in part because he’s falling in love with the girl.

Comedic complications (and a few killings) follow before Melody, who’s a total klutz with a gun, faces off with Jarrad. But Cherry has to shoot Jarrad to save Melody’s hide, and all ends happily.

This is a charming picture. It follows in the vein of the 1939 Destry Rides Again although Destry does turn serious for its final act, and Tom Destry turns out to be good with his dad’s guns; Jones is light-hearted throughout.

Cooper produced in part of the new trend of stars and star directors making pictures independently with an eye towards profits after the income tax had risen so high that the old system of salaries looked less advantageous, and when the ‘Consent Decree’ gave independently-distributed pictures a better shot at bookings. For this Cooper put together a fine cast and brought in Nunnally Johnson to write the script, adapted from a story or novel. Johnson in fact was given his name above the title: Nunnally Johnson’s Along Came Jones which is extremely rare, especially back then. I’ve seen it happen that the best-selling brand-name author of the source material can get his name above the title: Graham Greene’s blah-blah or Noel Coward’s blah-blah but for the mere screenwriter?

The picture gives us a glimpse of what the golden age was all about, even apart from the studios. Everybody knows just what they were doing, everybody agreed on making an entertaining picture which nobody took very seriously, just a piece of rollickin’ good-natured fun. (About the only people who might have taken this seriously would have been the young boys watching on a Saturday matinee – but even they must have been disillusioned when Melody never does come up to the mark with a gun – he can throw a good punch, at least.) Cooper even sings to meet the ‘singing cowboy’ label, though this too is given us as tongue-in-cheek. Stuart Eisler is listed as director, a name I don’t know. Direction is solid, though, including most notably the way Melody hauls back and kisses Cherry in the two scenes that cement their love and close the picture.

(25 April 2009)

The Brave One

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched The Brave One a new take on Michael Winner’s Death Wish from so long ago – must be 30 years ago. This new one stars Jodie Foster as the vigilante, directed by Neil Jordan (though he doesn’t have any script or story credits) and was produced in part by Joel Silver.

The story: Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) has a radio show in which she does personal stories about New York city. She is happy and on top of the world. Her show is popular and they want to make a TV version. Her boss loves her. She has a fiancé who’s a doctor and they are so so so haaaaaaapy together that you know it will soon take a bad turn. Her friend even tells her, ‘you are too happy.’

Yep – they are attacked in the park, and brutally beaten. Fiancé ends up dead, Erica is in hospital 3 weeks recovering. She tries to get her life back together but is too upset. In constant fear – for her job entails walking all over the city – she tries to get a pistol, but the 30-day permit period seems too long for her so she buys an illegal gun.

Then one day in a convenience store she sees a murder. The killer knows she is in the store. To protect herself she kills him and runs away. Some days later, on the subway, she is threatened by some punks. She shoots both of them.

Now meanwhile we follow the parallel story of a police detective (Terence Howard) who ends up in charge of the investigation into the ‘vigilante killings’ as they come to be known. Erica kills again, but she also starts interviewing the detective. He used to listen to her show, so he talks to her when he won’t talk to the other media. They become friends.

She goes so far as to kill a wife-killer the detective tells her he wishes he could bring to justice. But this brings the detective to suspect her. He as much as tells her that he won’t let their friendship stand in the way of arresting her if he has enough evidence. But she is so distraught about the whole thing – she already tried to give herself up – that she doesn’t flinch.

Now just at the point when she swears she won’t do it any more (an artificial second curtain ‘bright moment’ insufficiently motivated to believe in) she gets a lead on the three guys who killed her fiancé and beat her up. She goes to kill them after they mail her video to her cell phone of the attack (one had a video camera while they were beating her). She forwards the video to the detective and goes to meet them. The detective is frantically trying to get there before anything can happen.

She finds the punks and kills one. She kills the second. But the third one gets the drop on her and is killing her with an iron bar when the detective comes in. She points her gun at the punk, detective points his gun at her. Standoff. Then she hands over her gun.

Then the detective hands her his own gun. Tells her to go ahead and shoot. She kills the third punk. Detective has it all figured out: it was these three punks who had the gun all along, they were just on a killing spree, there was no ‘vigilante’ after all. He makes her shoot him in the forearm with her gun (the ‘vigilante’ gun) so that he can report that the punk got in a fight with his partners and killed them all, and when the detective came the punk shot him, and the detective had to fire back in self-defense.

Erica walks away. She even gets her dog back (the punks took it after they beat her up – now this is impossible, say some guys attacked you and beat you up in front of Jack, would Jack be their pet for the next couple of months? Doubt it!). But her voiceover tells us there is no going back, she isn’t the woman she was before, she is that stranger – the killer.

There are a few visual riffs on Death Wish. But here are a couple problems: Bronson who starred in Death Wish was already an action star, had been in a leone western. The gun he gets is a colt 6-shooter. So Death Wish becomes a wrinkle on Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry: the ghost of the old Western justice come to visit the modern metropolis. We don’t really believe Charles Bronson as an architect, but when he gets that gun, we do – it’s as if Bronson is now becoming himself.

Contrast this to Jodie Foster who does not have that persona. The closest her film roles come to this is Taxi Driver and the real-life ugly incidents that followed it. it’s odd that she would be in this movie. And it twists my head to think of those three images – her now here, her in Taxi Driver, and her as an image in the assassination attempt. Of course she gives us her usual well-thought out, researched, skillful performance.

But what we have are three contrasting points of view wrestling for mastery in the picture: jodie wants to do a riveting psychological portrayal. Joel Silver and the Warners brass want a female Death Wish series. And Neil Jordan wants, it seems, to show that he can deliver a visually interesting picture as director, that he’s not just a writer.

So Jordan gives us beautiful visuals, and does all these fancy tricks with the camera that are completely inappropriate to the subject matter. This is a story that you either shoot flat, very matter-of-factly, gritty, realistically, naturalistically – or else you make it into a surreal nightmare (which Warners and Silver are NOT going to accept).

And Foster cries and tries to act beyond what the material will allow. I say ‘beyond it’ because if this woman is really so distraught, I can’t see her succeeding in what she does. She might be repressing everything in order to survive, and her control might come out of that, but then you doubly don’t want to shoot it in this hyper-real way that Jordan and Philippe Rousselot, the DP, use. You want to desaturate colors and aim at near black and white, you want to keep the camera eye-level, at a medium shot most of the time, an invisible camera style, and you want to emphasize control as she does. The camera has to be as repressive as she is, or else where is all the emotion in the camera moves coming from? From the woman who she is not letting out?

The finale is pure Joel Silver wish-fantasy garbage. I just can’t believe the detective doing what he did. For one thing, this detective is smart. He would know that if he lets erica go, she will kill again and go on killing until she gets herself killed. To protect others, to protect her, the detective can do her no better favor than to arrest her and see she is locked away.

But then, you see, you don’t get sequels!

(24 April 2009)

Changeling

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched Changeling the Clint Eastwood movie.

The story is ‘a true story’ based on a famous case in Los Angeles from the 1920s. In 1928 single mom Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie), having promised her son they would go to the movies, instead has to work. When she gets home that night, her son is gone. She looks everywhere but he’s gone. The police try to find him, no good. But Collins is persistent, and her case attracts the attention of Reverend Gebleit (I probably spelled that wrong – John Malkovitch plays him) who is a crusader against the violent, corrupt LAPD. And he uses the case to ridicule the LAPD for incompetence along with violence and corruption.

Five months after she loses her son, Collins is told by the police that her boy Walter has been found in Iowa. They will meet him at the train station. There the Police Captain Jones and a gaggle of reporters are on hand to make the most of the publicity – the LAPD reuniting mother and missing child. But when she sees the kid, Collins says it’s not her son. The Captain, faced with the reporters, talks her into taking the kid home on a ‘trial basis’ for a couple weeks; the ordeal has changed him, he looks different, and if she doesn’t take care of him nobody will. Reluctantly Collins agrees, and the reporters all swarm around to take pictures of the happy family.

Collins grows more and more sure that this is not her son. She tries to tell this to Captain Jones, bringing evidence – the new kid is shorter, he is circumcised and her son wasn’t, the teacher knows he’s not the same, the dentist confirms it too. But the cops won’t listen, and even threaten her. At this point Collins lets the Reverend talk her into going to the press, but Captain Jones has her picked up and commits her in secret to a mental hospital.

There Collins is a prisoner, drugged, abused, and threatened. The doctor in charge is no more helpful or sympathetic than the cops, and uses double-talk to make her seem paranoid and unbalanced.

Meanwhile though, a detective finds up in a farm town outside LA (now called Mira Loma) evidence of a serial killer. Northcott, a Canadian, has forced his nephew to help him drive into LA, pick up boys, and bring them back to the farm, where Northcott cages them in the chicken coop before he chops them up with axes. Northcott has fled to Vancouver, but the nephew identifies Collins’s son Walter as one of the children he and Northcott abducted.

Collins is freed, and sues the city. Northcott is caught and brought back to trial. The two trials are held at the same time. As a result of the civil suit, Captain Jones is dismissed, the Chief made to resign, and the Mayor doesn’t run for re-election.

Two years later, just before he is hanged, Northcott telegrams Collins to tell her the truth about her son and how he killed him. Collins has refused to give up trying to find him, because maybe the nephew didn’t remember Walter right, and maybe Walter was one of the two or three kids who escaped. So she goes up to San Quentin penitentiary to meet Northcott. But he refuses to talk, and goes to the grave telling nothing.

Five years later (now it’s 1935) one of the missing boys turns up. He tells of the night he escaped. Two boys broke out, and he tried to follow, but got hung up on the chicken coop wire; one of the boys came back to help him – it was Walter Collins. The boy was separated from the other two, Walter and the other, as Northcott chased them. Since then the boy has been in hiding, afraid he might be accused of complicity.

Collins gains new hope from this news, and continues trying to find her son. She will spend the rest of her life in doing so, without success.

That’s the end of the movie. It’s a good period reconstruction, and Jolie is pretty good, taking at last a more mainstream, non-genre role. The guy playing Captain Jones, and the hospital doctor, are both great: Eastwood wants us to hate them and I sure did. The serial killer aspect of the story is downplayed, and emphasis centers on Christine Collins.

Here’s something interesting: this was a hot script that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard optioned for their Imagine company. Howard was supposed to direct, but he had two other pictures he wanted to do first, and so Grazer brought in Eastwood to do this; Eastwood says he likes to shoot pictures set in the Depression when he grew up. And his libertarian streak would lend himself to liking this story of how bad the cops and authorities can be. But Grazer and Howard had the screenwriter to a couple more drafts of the script, and Eastwood when he came on board went back to the first draft! He thought it had more heart and directness.

The problem I had with the script is – it covers too much ground. J. Michael Stracynzki (I probably spelled that wrong too – he’s most famous as the creator/producer of the TV show Babylon 5) just found too much in the real life stories that he liked, and was unable to let any of it go. In fact he did claim to let some of it go (for one thing, Northcott was aided in his crimes by his mother, but the mother is dropped) but once we leave Collins in the mental hospital and follow the investigation into the murders, the movie seems to be telling a different story. And then we have the two trials. And then we have the scenes of the hanging in San Quentin. And then we have the scenes from 5 years later. At some point it starts to feel as though this movie intends to tell the story of Los Angeles County for the next 80 years. It just doesn’t know when to stop.

Eastwood’s pace as usual is on the slow side. Well, old men make old men’s movies of course. But I wish they had concentrated just on the abuse of Collins and left it at that. Sam Fuller would have maybe left Collins in the psycho ward with the cops triumphant, and left it at that.

(22 April 2009)