Twentieth-Century Ghost

Metropolis

National Review Online, June 4, 2010 

To H. G. Wells, it was the “silliest film,” a “soupy whirlpool” and a “pretentious stew.” Yet on a Saturday night in Manhattan this May, 84 years after Metropolis was shot, the line to see Fritz Lang’s legendary sci-fi drama stretched halfway down the block. To be fair to Wells, the version of the movie he saw had been hacked down from an initial running time of 153 minutes to around an hour and a half in a counterproductive attempt to make its plot more comprehensible. He would probably not, however, have been much more impressed had he attended Metropolis’s January 1927 premiere. “The whole of Berlin” may have turned up to witness 153 minutes of a film intended to take German cinema to a whole new level, but by the end of those minutes much of Berlin was left thoroughly confused.

The managers of Germany’s UFA studios, the unfortunates who had spent nearly a year and a budget-busting 5 million reichsmarks (perhaps some $200 million today) on making Metropolis clearly knew that they had a problem on their hands even before their film was released and they marketed it as much as spectacle as cinema. A spread in the UFA magazine highlighted some of the movie’s vital (if not necessarily accurate) statistics: Seven hundred fifty children had, the publicists claimed, been used in the film’s making, along with “1,100 bald people, 100 Blacks, 25 Chinese, 3,500 pairs of shoes, 75 wigs” and, well, you get the picture. With 36,000 extras, how bad could Metropolis be? There was a tie-in novel by Lang’s wife, Thea von Harbou, that is, if anything, even more chaotic than the film, an overwrought mélange of pulp fiction, millennial raving, and begging-for-straitjacket hysteria that its author, at least, believed to have been art. Do not read it. I beg you.

UFA was not wrong. As story, Metropolis is a mess; as spectacle, it is superb, a glorious, oneiric depiction of a future urban dystopia (it’s set in 2026), part hive, part Manhattan, part megalopolis-of-the-future wow, and the inspiration for decades of cinematic cityscapes of not-yets to come, all the way from Just Imagine, a Depression-era musical comedy set in 1980, to Blade Runner, to the sadly underrated Dark City, to the sadly overrated Matrix trilogy. In a film where many characters fail to convince (the most striking exception to this is, tellingly, a robot), it is the city itself that is, like the Metropolis-influenced Gotham of the revived Batman franchise, the star.

But the future has a way of taking prophets by surprise. Within months of Metropolis’s opening, The Jazz Singer was released. This somewhat old-fashioned tale of a cantor’s son who performed in blackface heralded a technological change that was to drown out Lang’s suddenly dated depiction of modernity. Lang’s silent movie had been dumbed down overnight, its special effects eclipsed by the miracle of Vitaphone.

Metropolis faded from view. Its memory lingered, at least in cineaste lore, but the full breadth of Lang’s vision appeared to have vanished for good. All, it seemed, that remained was an abbreviation, a collection of truncated relics reasonably close to the bewildering 90 minutes of the international release. As for the rest, well, like the Weimar Berlin in which Metropolis had been filmed, it seemed to have been consigned to history.

Then something changed. As Europeans emerged from the devastation of 1939–45, the rebuilding of their ruined cities evolved into projects more ambitious than the hasty patchwork repair of the immediate post-war years. Historic town centers were painstakingly restored in an attempt to retrieve, reconnect, and sometimes reimagine the brutally shattered past. The same impulses can be detected in the reconstruction of Metropolis. It was an effort that gathered pace in the 1960s, and included a longer restoration put together by the East German state Film Archive (1968–72), disco guru Giorgio Moroder’s controversial 1984 appropriation  (shorter, but with color tinting and a classically 1980s soundtrack), and, after years of restoration work by Enno Patalas, the director of Munich’s film museum, the “Munich” Metropolis of 1987.

That’s not the end of the story. Using the Munich version as their core, and scrounging up every additional scrap of footage they could find, a team of restorers was able to assemble the “definitive” (124 minute) Metropolis issued in this country in 2002 on a fine DVD by Kino International. And that was meant to be that.

“Definitive” is a dangerous word. Six years after the Kino release, a 16mm copy of Lang’s epic was located in the archives of the film museum in, of all places, Buenos Aires. The footage was scratched, grubby, and the wrong size (16mm rather than 35mm), but it was as close to the original length as anyone could ever have hoped. Two years of restoration work followed as sections of the Argentine find were woven into the earlier definitive version filling in nearly all the missing links. Even after restoration, they are not perfect, but in their misty, messy way they are an evocative reminder of the time passed since the footage was shot and lost. The resulting patchwork—147 minutes long—comes as close to what was shown that long-ago night in Berlin as, probably, anything we are ever likely to see.

Fittingly enough, the new reunited Metropolis premiered earlier this year in the reunited Berlin that had too once seemed like an impossible dream. The movie arrived in the United States in April, debuting—where else—at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. By May, it had made its way to New York City (the night I saw it, the film was introduced by the endearingly modest director of the Buenos Aires museum) and will, doubtless, once again become a regular on the art-house circuit. A DVD is not far behind.

Gaps have been filled, and subplots added. With the additions, the film makes a bit more sense than before. A bit. Metropolis remains a city where the economics fail (as Wells pointed out) to hang together, and its supposedly sophisticated machines are oddly clumsy, closer to treadmills than agents of production. Meanwhile, the Bildungsroman that lies at the movie’s heart, the awakening of the son of the city’s presiding genius to the injustice and oppression that are the essence of Metropolis, is muddied by apocalyptic mysticism, suggestions of magic, and a psychologically fraught love story involving the son, his father, his dead mother, a mad scientist, the holy Madonna-like Maria, and Futura, her disturbing “machine woman” robot doppelganger. The conclusion is as sappy as it is unconvincing, a sentimental submission to some sort of organic unity between all classes that helps explain why Goebbels was a fan (interestingly, Thea von Harbou later became a Nazi), but didn’t do much for me.

But not to worry—dazzlingly shot, frantically kinetic, and brilliantly edited, this is a film that can be enjoyed for its imagery alone, from the remarkable shots of Metropolis, to the portrayal of the flood that all but sweeps the city away, to the most famous sequence of all, the coming to life of the robot, a gorgeous deco goddess encircled by electric halos as she gradually assumes the form of the virginal Maria to become the whore—complete at one moment with Babylonian headgear—who will seduce the city into erotic and then self-destructive frenzy. Oh yes, a monk is also involved, and statues of the seven deadly sins come to life.

No wonder Wells, whose science-fiction vision was shortly to shift to an enlightened “air dictatorship” (Things to Come) run by clean-limbed flyboys in jackboots, disapproved, but then, for all its status as one of the first great sci-fi films, Metropolis was in reality something very different. It was not so much an anticipation of the future as a reflection of its own epoch. The greatest science-fiction movies, 2001, Blade Runner, the Soviet Solaris, are in many respects beyond their time — beyond any time. Any dates they include are there just for decoration. Not so with Metropolis. By setting the film in 2026, exactly a century after it was shot, Lang was guiding the audience back to their own time, an impression only reinforced by the costumes worn by the cast — and even the cars. “1926 models or earlier,” sniffed Wells. The notorious scenes shot in and around the Yoshiwara nightclub district conjure up images not of some 21st-century pleasure dome, but of the wicked delights of Weimar at its exuberant, brittle peak.

For Lang was making his movie during the brief interlude when it seemed as if Germany’s fragile democracy might survive, a fact that might have influenced the film’s message of reconciliation between the lower city’s (the proletariat lives a subterranean existence) crushed and regimented workers and those who — in all senses — lived above them. At the same time, to watch the sequences when the mob careens behind Maria/Futura, a pied piper bewitching them into a riot that can only lead to their doom, is to witness the anxieties of an era (less than ten years after the Bolshevik Revolution) all too conscious of where the failure to narrow too wide a gap between labor and capital might lead and, for that matter, of just how dangerously malleable the masses could be.

Within a few years, of course, Germany had found its pied piper, and the consequences of the lethal dance in which he led his people cannot help but shape how we view this film today. The horrors anticipated by Lang’s images of shaven-headed workers marching into the fiery maw of the machine-god Moloch are too obvious to need explanation, but the plight of the children trapped by the floodwaters rising in Metropolis’s underground city also seems like an uncanny foreshadowing of another tragedy, the fate of the thousands drowned when Hitler ordered the flooding of the Berlin subway system in April 1945. Even looking at the cast, one cannot help but wonder how many of those 36,000 extras, or the 750 children — in their twenties by the time of the war — were to perish in the course of Hitler’s rule, whether as victims, perpetrators, or, sometimes, both. As for Lang, Roman Catholic of partly Jewish descent, he rejected what he claimed was Goebbels’s invitation of a senior position within the Reich’s movie industry and decamped for France and thence to the United States and a second, Hollywood, career, leaving Metropolis behind him. It was lost, he later said.

But sometimes Atlantis can rise again.

The Borgomeister

Nosferatu the Vampyre

National Review Online, October 30, 2009

There’s a long, unrespectable tradition of vampires’ being unable to decide whether we humans are lunch, lovers, or a bite of both. My irritation at coming across a pile of Twilights and their no-less-sensitive kin heaped under the heading “undying love” in a neighborhood Barnes & Noble was thus curmudgeonly and somewhat unfair. For those who can understand my reaction (well, you are reading NRO, so you just might), and are themselves getting a little sick of the simpering-emo-tofu undead, here’s a recommendation: This weekend, celebrate both Halloween and the 30th anniversary of the release of the finest — and grandest — vampire movie of them all by watching Nosferatu the Vampyre. It’s a 1979 film by the German director Werner Herzog that transforms genre into art and an old story into something new. It never goes near a high school and rarely goes bump in the night.

Blood is sucked, not shed, there’s no gore, and there’s none of the ripping and tearing so characteristic of another type of modern vampire, those ill-bred ones oafs who choose to adopt the revolting table manners of their loutish zombie counterparts. (If you saw 30 Days of Night, you know what I mean.) The sentiments that run through Herzog’s film owe nothing to either psychotic rage or prom-night angst, but a great deal to German Romanticism, ancient profound weariness, exhausted fatalism, and hysteria — complete with a grotesquely parodied danse macabre--in the face of onrushing death. Naturally there’s also a moment of supremely noble, erotically charged self-sacrifice. Inevitably it is pointless. Yes, Nosferatu is a German film, a very German film.

Shot in Holland, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, and, in its eerie opening sequence, Mexico, Herzog’s film, which was made on a budget — under $1 million — almost as incredible as its subject matter, is a slow, stately, hallucinatory, unexpectedly lavish, unexpectedly lovely “free version” of the first filmed Nosferatu (1922’s Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Friedrich Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece).

Owing to his studio’s failure to secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s then-still-within-copyright classic, Murnau’s movie was itself something of a reinterpretation. The count lost all his hair and all his wives but gained long, claw-like fingernails, the B-movie-alien name of Orlok, and a face that was part bat, part rat, and all ugly. Unlike Dracula, Orlok’s bite lacked even the gift of twisted immortality: It was permanently fatal to others and, in what was to become a familiar addition to vampire lore, sunlight was fatal to him. Additionally, some of Stoker’s characters were edited out or jumbled around, and the narrative was shifted in time (to the 1830s from the 1890s) and place (from England to the fictional Wisborg, a blend of Wismar and Lübeck, in north Germany).

These changes were not enough. The widow Stoker successfully sued the studio (which promptly went bankrupt), and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed. By then, however, copies had already circulated across the world. The film lived on, legendary, indestructible, and illicit, ready to reappear in the form of Herzog’s allusive, elusive, and dreamlike reworking.

In Herzog’s view, Murnau’s Nosferatu is the greatest German movie ever shot. Remaking it was his attempt to reconnect with an earlier generation of German filmmakers, the “grandfathers” untainted by the Third Reich (Murnau died two years before Hitler rose to power), and, through them, to an older, better national cultural heritage. Herzog may have borrowed much of Murnau’s storyline, but the earlier Nosferatu was merely a starting point for what the later director was trying to achieve. To be sure, some of Herzog’s shots are almost exact recreations of Murnau’s, and there are instances when the modern cast adopts the mannered acting style of Weimar expressionism, but the later film has a grandeur almost entirely missing from the slightly crabbed original.

Herzog’s Dracula (“Orlok” could now be safely dispensed with) may resemble Murnau’s in his loathsome appearance, but (as played by a mesmerizing Klaus Kinski) he is a predator — not vermin, never remotely a hero, but an oddly tragic figure nonetheless: “Time is an abyss a thousand nights deep. Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. . . . Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing the same futility each day?”

Herzog’s Nosferatu is, in its very specifically German way, a highly romantic film. Defined by an extraordinarily beautiful cinematography, much of it of mountain, mist, forest, and waterfall (Herzog hails from Alpine Bavaria), it is frequently reminiscent of nothing so much as the vast, visionary landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, the leading artist in Germany’s 19th-century Romantic movement, even as its eerie, not-quite-right grays pay tribute to Stoker’s own swirling imagery:

Everything is grey — except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a “brool” over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom.

Yet Herzog is too smart to believe that history’s dark ghosts can be kept at bay for long. When Jonathan Harker (nicely played by Bruno Ganz, a gifted actor best known in the United States, ironically under the circumstances, as Adolf Hitler in Downfall) makes his way through the thin space of the Borgo Pass into the nightmare that lies beyond, he does so to the cascading, tumbling prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold. It’s a choice that appears designed to extricate the composer from the clammy adoration of his most notorious fan, but it cannot help reminding us that Wagner’s work was the musical accompaniment to a people’s descent into a pagan intoxication — an intoxication that was in many respects an extreme, perverse expression of the German Romantic tradition that Herzog so loves.

It’s equally worth noting that before she turned to Nazi propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl, the most infamous exemplar of the film-making generation Herzog wished to bypass, was best known for starring in Bergfilme (mountain films), a typically German genre in which the mountainous landscape was as much a star as the actors and that finds some strong echoes in Nosferatu. Riefenstahl’s debut as a director was a mountain film named The Blue Light. The next movie she directed was Triumph of the Will. It is, it seems, almost impossible to return to the roots of Germany’s cultural heritage without acknowledging the evil shapes into which they were to grow.

So it’s perhaps fitting that the consequences of that evil resonate in the very locations where Herzog’s movie was shot. The sequences filmed in then-Communist Czechoslovakia were a reminder of an Eastern Europe torn apart and cut off by the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1979, this region seemed irrevocably lost as, in a different way, so much of the Lübeck and Wismar of Murnau’s Nosferatu were; many of those cities’ centuries-old buildings had been devastated by Allied bombing and, in Wismar’s case, the malice of the East German state. Despite one notable sequence featuring the same row of Lübeck buildings that Murnau had, Herzog’s Wismar (he dropped the idea of “Wisborg”) was largely represented by the Dutch city of Delft — gorgeous, intact, and, by its very architectural survival, a pointed comment on all that Germany had lost.

But destruction isn’t only physical. When Dracula brings an army of rats (Herzog imported 11,000 of them from Hungary, painting each of them gray) and, with them, plague, into Wismar, its buildings endure as the city empties out. Among the most striking characteristics of Herzog’s Nosferatu is the way the director uses images of great beauty to tell a story of great horror. This is never more so than in the film’s depiction of Wismar’s losing its elegance as its people lose their lives; the shreds of their civilization are shown unraveling in astounding, merciless sequences of ravishing desolation.

Up until and including its finale — a glimpse of apocalypse complete with a pale rider disappearing into an immense horizon of sand and cloud — Nosferatu is saturated with a sense of impending, relentless doom. The atmospheric and impeccably chosen soundtrack features a repeating motif redolent of a death knell, while the film’s heroine, Lucy (a marvelous Isabelle Adjani in a role closer to that of Stoker’s Mina) has a pallor that hints at the grave. Her languor is echoed by almost all the rest of the cast in a series of subdued, sotto performances that underpin the sense of helpless, hopeless melancholy that persists throughout the movie.

Even Dracula himself is soft-spoken, his words slow, deliberate, and almost hesitant, his voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing, and always weary. He comes across as an exhausted figure, still powerful, yes, but tired of his own power. He is at the crossroads of human, demon, animal, and even insect, but he is still painfully conscious of the traces of humanity within him; he is alienated, isolated, lonely, envious, and resentful. Check out the scene in a night-struck Wismar where Dracula (illuminated an almost electric blue) peers through a window that reveals a cozy, candle-lit domestic scene: Satan gazing at a Vermeer interior, and mourning, and wanting and craving. To watch Kinski’s evocative face for just those few moments is to understand how the loneliness that envelops Dracula will lead this iron-willed predator into vulnerability and danger, and to watch Kinski in this role is also to be rewarded with the sight of one legend playing, and transforming, another. If Lugosi is operetta, Kinski is opera.

And best enjoyed, I think, with a little . . . wine.

The Prince

Il Divo

National Review Online, April 24, 2009

To listen to what is not said is often as informative as hearing what is. Absence can reveal as much as presence, the opaque more than the clear. It is this idea, brilliantly conveyed, that runs through the performance that dominates Il Divo, transforming this bravura, epic, and wildly imaginative new film by the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (released last year in Italy, it opens at selected U.S. venues this weekend) from the merely great into something very close to a masterpiece.

An acerbic, allusive depiction of Giulio Andreotti (born 1919), the acerbic, elusive statesman who served seven times as Italy’s prime minister between 1972 and 1992, and who was for decades its most powerful politician, Il Divo is not a movie with obvious appeal to a wide American audience. It monkeys with time, reality, and genre, jumping to and fro between decades, between fact and fiction, between comedy, tragedy, satire, and philippic. The events it purports to describe are little known over here. The political figures that prowl through its lethal funhouse narrative will be unfamiliar and, in their urbane cynicism and sardonic Realpolitik, almost indistinguishable from one another. Was that Franco Evangelisti we just saw, or Salvo Lima? Does it matter?

If it’s any consolation, Italians also struggle to understand their country’s post-war political history. It’s a half-century-long saga of cabals, conspiracy, and faction, of collusion with organized crime, of governments that fell but never changed, of guilty verdicts that were not, of murky Masonic lodges and devious Vatican bankers, and, always, the fear that the country’s deep ideological divisions would ultimately lead to violent conflict. Finally, hideously and, except to the dead, ambiguously, they did. The “years of lead” between the late 1960s and the early 1980s were the years of the Red Brigades, of fascist bombings, of a Mafia that appeared ready to take on the state, but also of a growing suspicion that much of this was the result of a deliberately engineered “strategy of tension” designed to whip up support for a more openly authoritarian regime. It’s no surprise that Italians have a word, dietrologia (“the science of what’s behind”), to describe the quest to discover who is really responsible for what goes on in that country of theirs. Up until recently, the answer, more often than not, or so it is repeatedly claimed, was Andreotti.

Paranoia? To a degree, but amongst the members of the faction that Andreotti led within Italy’s Christian Democratic party, and who feature in Il Divo, Salvo Lima used his connections to la Cosa Nostra to deliver large numbers of crucial Sicilian votes (he was eventually murdered by the Mafia in a response to government moves against it), Franco Evangelisti was a self-confessed recipient of large amounts of illicit campaign-finance “contributions,” Paolo Pomicino was convicted for his role in a major bribery scandal (naturally he still sits in parliament, where he has served as a member of the commission responsible for investigating organized crime), and Giuseppe Ciarrapico was found guilty of involvement in the same Banco Ambrosiano affair that saw the bank’s chairman “suicided” from London’s Blackfriars Bridge. Ciarrapico became a senator in 2008. Under these circumstances, does it matter who exactly is who?

As for another Christian Democrat leader, Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, who haunts this film and, it implies, what’s left of Andreotti’s conscience, he ended up broken, “tried” and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978 after a kidnapping in which efforts to rescue him may have been hampered by the same establishment of which he once believed himself to be an indispensable part.

Then there’s Mino Pecorelli, a prominent muckraking journalist with a sideline in blackmail. He’s gunned down at the beginning of the movie. Back in what passes for real life, he was reported to have had damaging information about Andreotti, information that may have proved fatal — though not to Andreotti. In 1999 Andreotti was tried for his alleged involvement in Pecorelli’s murder and acquitted, only to be found guilty by a court of appeal in 2002, a verdict that was itself overturned the following year. Andreotti continues to be a senator-for-life. Pecorelli continues to be dead.

Pecorelli’s is just one of many violent deaths to punctuate this movie. The most striking is that of Salvo Lima. Filmed in a cleverly cross-cut sequence strikingly reminiscent of the murderous finale to TheGodfather, Part II, it is just one of several nods to Coppola’s trilogy (which featured, incidentally, a character thought to be partly based on Andreotti). In another scene we watch Andreotti handing out small gifts to some of his humbler constituents. It’s impossible not to remember Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone dispensing a favor here and a favor there, and, if you’re me, to be struck by the similarities between the patronage state and a successful criminal enterprise.

But compared with Andreotti, Brando’s Godfather is a mumbling, incoherent lout. As depicted by Sorrentino’s biting, perversely witty, slyly winking script and Toni Servillo’s extraordinary (and in the view of many, remarkably accurate) performance, the reserved, melancholy Italian prime minister is a black hole, enigmatic, all-consuming and irresistible, his nature illuminated only by tiny inflections of his hunched, tightly held-in body and flashes of bleak, knowing humor. He’s devoutly religious (famously so), but we soon come to realize that he has embraced the idea of a fallen humanity so fully that it has become for him both inspiration and alibi.

Servillo’s soft-spoken, deadpan Andreotti makes the screen his own. Even if you have no interest in this film’s subject matter, go for Servillo, a maestro depicting a master with a subtlety and intensity that defy description. At times he seems almost inhuman, his narrow frame and bat-ears hinting at Max Schreck’s Nosferatu, particularly in a sequence in which he practically glides down the corridors of power, corridors that, Italy being Italy, are as architecturally glorious as they are politically treacherous. Its story of murder, corruption, and betrayal may be ugly, but Il Divo is frequently gorgeous to look at. It’s a contrast that reinforces the message that Sorrentino is trying to deliver. This is underscored by scene after scene shot in that perfect chiaroscuro where light and darkness play off each other with neither quite prevailing. Even the times when Andreotti walks slowly and stiffly down a quiet Roman street, completely, hauntingly alone yet accompanied by a heavily armed police escort, are filmed with a somber noir beauty all their own.

To be sure, in some respects Il Divo’s Andreotti is a caricature (the real Andreotti, no surprise, is no fan). Sorrentino is not looking for balance. He is making the case for the prosecution: Look out for the sequence in which Andreotti is interviewed by a journalist who recites a long list of distinctly awkward “coincidences” for which Andreotti has no easy exculpatory explanation. On another occasion Andreotti is filmed confessing, if only to himself, to terrible wrongdoing.

Sorrentino does at least allow his Andreotti to refer briefly to the Communist threat that had threatened to overwhelm the young, fragile Italian republic. Fair enough. To head that off required tactics unlikely to pass muster in safer, more complacent times. “Trees,” observes Servillo/Andreotti on another occasion, “need manure in order to grow.” Andreotti takes a similar tack in the course of his “confession,” referring to “the deeds that power must commit to ensure the well-being and development of the country,” and the “monstrous . . . contradiction [of] perpetuating evil to guarantee good.” Maybe, but these “deeds” became an end, not the means. The excesses that ensued, and the scandals they brought in their wake, brought both the First Republic and Andreotti tumbling down, even if, the film’s coda suggests, neither fell quite as far, or as hard, as they deserved.

One notable commentator on Italian politics has written that a leader “must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state . . . Some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.”

Somehow I don’t think that Machiavelli would have liked Il Divo. See it nonetheless.

The Sum of All Fears

Knowing

National Review Online, March 20, 2009

Knowing

Things are bad out there, you know, really bad: The economy is in a shambles, Iran’s mullahs are monkeying around with nukes, Michael Jackson is planning a comeback, and the S&P recently bottomed out (for now) at the number of the beast. Nevertheless, as Knowing director Alex Proyas’s endearingly apocalyptic, thoroughly entertaining, and ultimately goofy new movie reminds us, matters could be a lot, lot worse.

As the successful director of I, Robot, The Crow, and Dark City (the thinking man’s The Matrix), Mr. Proyas knows how to make the most out of doom — and he doesn’t disappoint on this occasion. I enjoyed Knowing’s every portentous, preposterous moment — even an absurd passage toward the end of the film involving children, bunny rabbits, and a richly kitschy Kincadian landscape located somewhere between Gladiator’s ridiculously Elysian wheat fields and the trippier sequences in The Fountain.

Mind you, I may be biased. As far as I am concerned, Knowing is a movie that has almost everything going for it: a beautiful heroine; hints of the end times; sinister and silent watchful presences; an eerie abandoned dwelling with scraps of ominous paper stuck on its walls; a wildly careering and occasionally senseless storyline; some sort of vast conspiracy; moments of excruciating sentimentality; moments of cruel death; Beethoven; scientific gobbledygook; a bloody-fingered, spooky, whey-faced child; prophetic visions of a world in flames; disembodied, not-quite-audible whisperings of warning and menace and some of the most dramatic special effects that you have ever seen. After knowing Knowing you may well hesitate before taking the subway again. You won’t feel too good about flying, either. (Does Mr. Proyas have something against public transportation?)

To reveal more would be to spoil a film structured to move from surprise to surprise. For Knowing is a movie driven more by plot than performance, something almost inevitable in any film starring the reliably not-up-to-it Nicolas Cage. Presumably under the impression that he is still stuck in that disastrous remake of The Wicker Man, the tiresomely hyper-kinetic and relentlessly histrionic Mr. Cage stumbles nervy, wild-eyed, insistent, and more irritating than I can say throughout a movie in which the audience will end up thinking that Armageddon might be a small price to pay for never having to set eyes on his character again.

As for the character unfortunate enough to be played by Mr. Cage, he’s Prof. John Koestler, an MIT astrophysicist and tragically widowed single father. Koestler is a brilliant scientist and, no less importantly, a devoted dad to his young son Caleb (nicely played by Chandler Canterbury, most recently seen by moviegoers as a senescent, eight-year-old Benjamin Button), an impression reinforced by Hollywood’s notion of what good child-rearing in an upscale academic household is meant to look like. Words are stuck to the refrigerator for spelling-class purposes. Television is limited to an hour a day, and most of that — poor, poor Caleb — appears to be the Discovery channel. We can be sure that this is a family that recycles.

Caleb attends William Dawes elementary school, the locus for the film’s opening scenes. These are centered on the celebrations that marked the school’s founding back in 1958, the highpoint of which was the burial of a time capsule containing artwork created by the new school’s pupils. Most kids draw rocket ships and other images of the future in which my generation (I too was founded in 1958) used to believe — but one outsiderish child, an unsettling Wednesday Addams look-alike by the name of Lucinda Embry (Lara Robinson) obsessively covers a sheet of paper with a long (uncompleted) sequence of numbers. What they mean will take the rest of this film to decode.

Flash forward 50 years and the time capsule is opened. Lucinda’s numbers end up with Caleb and then with Caleb’s conveniently mathematical dad, astrophysicist John. John comes to recognize that many of the numbers are dates, all subsequent to 1958 and each linked to a tragedy. Unsurprisingly for a movie aimed at American audiences and made in our own jittery era, the first date Koestler notices is 9/11/2001. In fact, it’s easy to see how — as in, say, Cloverfield — memories of that terrible day have influenced some of this film’s most unnerving imagery, including its depiction of even worse destruction to come, making this movie the latest to bear witness to the way in which the destruction of those towers still haunts the popular imagination — and is likely to do so for a very long time.

Not all the dates on Lucinda’s sheet have passed, however, and Koestler now sets off to do what he can to either stop or survive the future horrors they may foreshadow. This brings him into contact with Lucinda’s daughter Diana (the lovely Rose Byrne, even more depressed than in the current series of Damages) and her daughter Abby (Lara Robinson, again). Together they all embark on a desperate race against time that they quite possibly have no chance of winning.

That their destiny may already be fixed reflects an unexpectedly interesting philosophical subtext that bubbles throughout this film. When we first encounter Koestler, he’s an atheist, albeit of a distinctly non-Dawkinsian hue: He is content to let Caleb believe that the boy will one day reunite with his much-missed mother in the hereafter. That said, Koestler takes his convictions sufficiently seriously to be estranged from his pastor father. Perhaps inevitably, however, his belief in a random, purposeless universe comes to be shaken by the implications of Lucinda’s ominous, forbidding, and implacable numerals. To be sure, Koestler knows full well that numerology is nothing more than a junk science designed, like so many human beliefs, to create meaning where none exists, but in their seemingly genuine ability to predict the future, Lucinda’s numbers may, it is hinted, be driving this man of science to concede that there is more order and purpose to the universe than he had once thought possible.

By the conclusion of the film Koestler has reconciled with his father, and, maybe (the ending is much more ambiguous in this respect), the faith of his childhood. Are these issues carefully worked through? No, not really. Knowing is, thank heavens, a movie, not a seminar — an entertainment, not a sermon. Nevertheless, it’s a mark of its director’s impressive sensibility that he allows concepts such as these to make an appearance in the course (and conceivably even in the title) of a would-be blockbuster.

Strangely enough, despite this film’s cleverly fashioned portrayals of gathering disaster, the most poignant images of destruction are only by implication. Mr. Proyas’ affectionate, if somewhat rose-tinted, depiction of that orderly, dedicated, and kindly late-1950s elementary school ushers his audience into a long-obliterated world, just another victim of the continuous humdrum apocalypse that is the passing of irrecoverable time into an infinitely variable future at which we can only guess. In real life, there’s no knowing.

'Space Chimps' on a Wild Ride Through Outer Space

Space Chimps

The New York Sun, July 18, 2008

When Alan Shepard returned safely to Earth late in the Gagarin spring of 1961, a relieved, ecstatic nation treated him to ticker tape, meet-the-president, and, subsequently, a trip to the moon. The previous astronaut sent by NASA into space hadn't fared quite so well. Emerging snarling and indignant from an edge-of-disaster suborbital shambles that was a comedy of human error and simian savoir faire, Ham had to make do with an apple, a pat on the head, and a speedy return to the desert laboratory that had, with the help of occasional electric shocks and (one hopes) more frequent banana pellets, trained him so effectively. Ham, I should say, was a chimpanzee, one of only two to escape the surly bonds of Earth — at least until Tim Burton's "Planet of the Apes."

Ham never returned to space. He was held for years in Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo before being allowed to enjoy a glorious polygamous twilight in North Carolina, a twilight that, if "Space Chimps," the latest CGI saga from Vanguard Animation ("Valiant," "Happily N'Ever After") is to be believed, left him with just one grandson, the ne'er-do-well Ham III. Voiced by "Saturday Night Live"'s Andy Samberg, he's a slacker circus chimp, clad in sub-Knievel kitsch and periodically shot from a cannon in a tawdry parody of his famous forebear's legendary feat.

Everything changes when Ham is conscripted by a flailing space agency to be the p.r. face of a mission to retrieve a probe lost on a planet at the wrong end of a wormhole. Shot into space with the "Star-Trek"-citing straight arrow Commander Titan (a Pan troglodytes Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Patrick Warburton, who played Puddy on "Seinfeld") and the coyly fetching Lieutenant Luna (Cheryl Hines), a chimpanzee hottie with more than a passing resemblance to the Zira who fell so hard for Charlton Heston's bright-eyed Taylor, Ham is forced to decide what he's going to make of himself.

In a movie not notable for its originality, it's no surprise that, in the didactic, rapscallion-with-a-heart-of-gold tradition of children's fiction, Ham ultimately discovers his better self. He helps his friends. He rescues the oppressed. He acknowledges his wise old mentor. By the end of the film, the tousled scapegrace has proved himself a worthy heir to his heroic grandfather, "a chimp," Titan says in one of the better of the entertainingly awful ape-themed puns scattered throughout this movie, "off the old block." And, yes, he ends up with considerably more than an apple.

With its chase scenes, laughable, not-too-scary villain, affable apes, lovable aliens, mild subversion of the adult world, hokey sentimentality, endemic cuteness, cheesy sound track, goofily lame jokes, gentle potty humor, and Crayola-colored extraterrestrial settings, there's probably enough in this movie to make it a good dumping ground for the kids on a rainy summer afternoon. The younger ones, at least, should have a reasonably fun time, particularly if stoned on Twizzlers and Coke. This, after all, is the demographic that enriched the Wiggles — sophistication is not the name of their game.

Despite a few, very few, amusing moments clearly designed to appeal to an older audience (on the whole I'd have preferred a few banana pellets), adults are likely to regard sitting through Ham's space odyssey as something of an ordeal. The film lacks the wit, inventiveness, and charm that made "Toy Story," say, or "Shrek" such strong intergenerational hits. That's not to deny that "Space Chimps" is, technically speaking, an accomplished achievement, certainly to anyone, such as me, brought up in the "Top Cat" era, and, I suspect, even for some of those whose early years were more Pixar than Hanna-Barbera.

But technological savvy isn't enough. This is a film that just lacks the spark necessary to keep it from what seems bound to be a lonely afterlife in the dustier corners of Blockbuster's children's section. For a film about outer space, the screenplay is miserably earthbound. Worse still, the talented cast (which also includes Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth, and Stanley Tucci) is rarely given an opportunity to do much more than simply recite lines that needed a lot more help than that.

Meanwhile, despite occasional moments of hallucinatory splendor, the almost immeasurably remote planet Malgor is routinely depicted as little more than a Pufnstuf New Mexico. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, by-the-numbers oddball creatures, with the possible exception of the creepily sweet Kilowatt (Ms. Chenoweth), a megalocephalic dollhouse Tinker Bell with, perhaps, a touch of the Murakami studio about her.

If there is one time when this movie manages to rise above itself, it's when the chimps' spacecraft first leaves Earth behind it. In a short, magical, beguiling sequence, the filmmakers manage to convey a sense of beauty, immensity, and wonder. It's a glimpse of the movie that might have been, and a hint, frustrating in its brevity, of the original Ham's strange, wild ride.

Holding Up A Shattered Mirror

Funny Games

The New York Sun, March 14, 2008

When it comes to movie do-overs, the recklessly sexy Naomi Watts just cannot keep herself out of trouble. In remakes of "Ringu" ("The Ring") and "King Kong," she found herself stalked by, respectively, a monstrous spirit and a rampaging ape. If, as has been reported, she stars in an upcoming reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," she will soon be facing an enraged avian army. But none of these ordeals, past or future, are enough to deter the much menaced Ms. Watts from appearing in yet another remake — the sinister and distressing "Funny Games," a film in which she confronts the most dangerous creature of all: man.

Naomi, peril, remake — so far, so familiar. But what makes this remake so different is the way that it is the same. The new "Funny Games" is simply the Austrian director Michael Haneke's American version of his own 1997 German-language film. And it's no Mulligan. The original "Funny Games" was profoundly and brilliantly disturbing, an unsettling, upsetting examination of human savagery and the spectacle that we like to make of it. It told the tale of the torment — relentless, remorseless, and just for the fun of it — of a vacationing family at the hands of Peter (Frank Giering) and Paul (Arno Frisch), two preppies with more than a touch of Leopold and Loeb about them. Almost all the physical violence was off-screen, but the intensity of the cruelty on display, and the forensic psychological skill with which it was wielded, made "Funny Games" a tour de force that was almost, but not quite, unbearable to watch. And it's that "not quite" that's the rub.

Yes, Wim Wenders, the distinguished German director, walked out when the movie was shown at Cannes in 1997, but most people who have watched it have seen it through to its brutal conclusion. Some may even have enjoyed it. I didn't, but I was fascinated, intrigued, and gripped, which I think, I hope, is something else. Of course, Mr. Haneke was not the first to ask awkward questions about how we react to media depictions of violence, but the clever and highly manipulative manner in which he did so was not the least of his film's far-from-funny games. Throw in the extraordinary performances by the cast, and it is difficult to deny that the first "Funny Games" was some kind of masterpiece.

So why remake it, and why remake it as a shot-for-shot re-creation of the original? The actors are different, they speak their lines in English, and the action has been transferred from Austria to America. But in almost every other way, the two films are identical. The rationale for the remake lies not only in the obvious lure of a wider audience, but also, more interestingly, in its location. Mr. Haneke clearly relished the idea of using a Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) to inject his film into the American entertainment culture that, he claims, inspired it, but which it repudiates.

That said, positioning "Funny Games" as a critique of a specifically American cinema may win Mr. Haneke the usual plaudits from the usual suspects, but it risks diluting its impact. To see this as a film solely "about America" (and I don't think that Mr. Haneke truly does) is to divert it from the source of its appalling power as a commentary on humanity as a whole — a perspective that will, ironically, be enhanced for American viewers by virtue of the fact that the story is now presented in their own language. Watching "Funny Games" in subtitled German offered Americans the comforting possibility that it was merely an account of Teutonic beastliness, an all too familiar theme. To shoot it in English removes that alibi. Peter and Paul ensnare their victims. Mr. Haneke entraps his. There is nowhere to turn. This isn't a film about Austrians; it is a film about us, all of us, wherever or whoever we are.

In almost every other respect, there is little to choose between the two versions. If the first was a masterpiece, so is the second. When it comes to the principals, Tim Roth and Naomi Watts (as the tortured couple) do just fine, but never equal the depth of the late Ulrich Mühe (so compelling as the hero of "The Lives of Others") or, even more notably, Susanne Lothar: Her portrayal of the crushed and broken wife is one of the most harrowing performances in modern cinema. On the other hand, as Peter and Paul, Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt manage to eclipse their Germanic predecessors, which is no small achievement.

Floppy-haired, soft-spoken, and Locust Valley immaculate, these are the most well-mannered of sadists — Mengeles filtered through Choate, Berias groomed by Andover. Precisely, methodically, and, on the whole, most politely, they test, they probe, and then they tear apart a family just because, well, they can. Of the two, the diffident, pudgy, clumsy Peter (Mr. Corbet), his odd, off-kilter face punctuated with the lips of a Habsburg princeling, comes across as a stumblebum psychotic — as feeble, ultimately, as he is lethal. While some of his supposed weaknesses are themselves just another game, he is, in reality, little more than foil, stooge, and plaything for the more dominant Paul (Mr. Pitt). It is Paul, we come to discover, who is presiding over these games, both within the movie, and beyond. It is Paul who gives us a glimpse of the abyss.

Or is it, more horrifying still, a look into a mirror?

Fight for Your Right To Fight

Battle in Seattle

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

One doesn't have to agree politically with a movie to appreciate the skill with which it was made or, for that matter, to enjoy it. To combine a bad film, however, with worse politics is to add insult to injury, which brings us to the topic of "Battle in Seattle," a ham-fisted, sanctimonious blend of leftist agitprop, by-the-numbers melodrama, and excruciating self-righteousness that arrives in theaters Friday. If you are currently taking orders from Rage Against the Machine, Michael Moore, or Naomi Klein, go and see it; for anyone else, this is one "Battle" you're going to lose.

The movie begins with a brief but remarkably paranoid introductory history sequence, a sort of Protocols of the Elders of GATT, designed to expose the supposedly sinister evolution of the postwar international trade regime. Having set this bleak, menacing, and thoroughly conspiratorial scene, "Battle in Seattle" then gets down to business — or, more accurately, to stopping business. The film is a fictionalized account of the 1999 anti-globalization protests that trashed Seattle, wrecked the World Trade Organization negotiations, and left a legacy that has bedeviled the WTO ever since.

Its writer-director, Stuart Townsend, tells the tale through the stories of a handful of protagonists, primarily some noble protesters. But he reinforces it with a noble Médecins Sans Frontières-type physician (Rade Serbedzija), a noble representative of the Third World (Isaach de Bankolé), an eventually noble TV journalist who comes to see the error of her corporate media ways (Connie Nielsen, a long, long way from "Gladiator"), and a potentially noble, basically good-hearted cop (Woody Harrelson) who, prompted in part by what befalls his wife (the ever-decorative Charlize Theron), finishes the movie at least dimly aware that he is being duped by the Man.

The case for free trade is, of course, never made. The benefits it has brought the developing world don't rate a mention. All we hear about is exploitation. "Battle in Seattle" is a modern morality play, and like most morality plays, it's drawn with little nuance and less character development. As Mayor Tobin (presumably a rendering of real-life Seattle mayor Paul Schell), Ray Liotta turns in a cleverly convincing portrait of a soixante-huitard bewildered by a radicalism he once would have understood. But Mr. Liotta's sensitive, well-judged performance is the exception. His character is a believable, conflicted human being, a refreshing presence in a drama peopled, if that's the word, by cardboard cutouts.

The protesters at the center of "Battle in Seattle" never emerge from the didactic stereotypes within which they are confined. Beautiful Sam (Jennifer Carpenter) is the sensitive, smart one; Django (OutKast's Andre Benjamin) is the genial joker, and Lou (Michelle Rodriguez) is fiery, feisty, and, let's face it, a bit of a pain. Needless to say, they are all passionate, sincere, idealistic, and selfless, none more so than their leader, the charismatic Jay (Martin Henderson), who is determined, inspiring, and replete with tragic backstory and Jesus hair-and-beard. The only surprise is that when he is restored to his people after a time of tribulation, it is not on the third day.

That's not to say that "Battle in Seattle" doesn't have its moments: The scenes outside the prison where some protestors have been detained are powerful; with the help of a surging melody, they even stirred my own dark, reactionary soul. What's more, the film occasionally — very occasionally — has something useful to say. The two acts of brutality that come to define Mr. Townsend's portrayal of the police response to the protests may dissolve into a bloody sludge of karma and caricature, but the director's depiction of a police department unprepared for what hits the city rings true. So does the obvious implication that the resulting confusion inflamed a situation that may not (as is sometimes claimed) have been a "police riot," but was certainly chaotic and, at times, all too heavy-handed.

To be fair, Mr. Townsend doesn't dodge the fact that the protesters were themselves responsible for much of the violence that marked the Seattle protests, although he is careful to pin the blame on an anarchist minority. There's some truth to that latter claim, but only some, and it sidesteps the awkward question of whether large crowds swarming downtown Seattle with the intention of stopping people from going to a conference they wish to attend can, in any meaningful sense, be considered "nonviolent." At the very least, such "direct action" (to use the usual euphemism) is intimidation, if not mob rule — something that Mr. Townsend veers dangerously close to endorsing in a closing sequence that seems to celebrate the trouble that has surrounded subsequent WTO gatherings.

Judging by his movie's script, Mr. Townsend's justification for this appears to be that the WTO lacks democratic legitimacy, an argument with emotional, if not always logical, appeal in an era when globalization has left many feeling as though they've lost control of their economic destiny. It might have more force, however, if moviegoers could believe that Sam, Lou, Django, Jay, and their ilk would have protested just as vigorously against, say, the no less undemocratic Kyoto treaty. Fat chance. Their real beef, of course, is with nasty old capitalism (the ugliest expletive throughout "Battle in Seattle" is "corporate"), a dreary, shop-soiled grudge to which this film adds little beyond a city's smashed shop windows.

The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

The Duchess

The New York Sun, September 19, 2008

Barely more than a decade after that tragic dash through Paris and the unhinged, hysterical carnival of lamentation that followed, it is no great surprise that Princess Diana continues to cast a shadow over popular culture, particularly in the country where she once seemed destined to be queen. It is, nonetheless, disappointing to detect that elements of her tawdry, strip-mined melodrama have been slipped into Saul Dibb's new film "The Duchess," which arrives in theaters Friday. The British director gives what should have been a perfectly respectable biopic of Georgiana, an 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire, contemporary resonance it neither needs nor deserves.

Yes, Diana was the duchess's great-great-great-great-niece and, yes, both women weathered marriages that were indeed (to borrow a word) "crowded," but neither genealogy nor (very) superficially similar matrimonial difficulties are good reasons to blend their (very) different stories. The lure of the box office is, I suppose, to blame. Diana still sells.

Very loosely based on Amanda Foreman's clever, immaculately researched, and enthralling biography of Georgiana, Mr. Dibb's movie has taken the story of one of the most fascinating Englishwomen of her epoch — a celebrated socialite and political campaigner — and transformed it into a big-budget blend of Lifetime television, Masterpiece Theatre, and Diana Spencer tribute movie. Thus, the young duchess (Keira Knightley) speaks in the soft Sloane tones more typically associated with Lady Di in her early years than with the Georgian grandee she is meant to be playing. Meanwhile, Ralph Fiennes, in a subtle, show-stealing portrayal of the duchess's cold, buttoned-up, and older husband, manages to punctuate his performance with very specific hints of Prince Charles's lugubrious tics, mannerisms, and phraseology — hints that will make a British audience, at least, shudder or snigger, depending on mood.

For the most part, however, this film's sins are of omission. Georgiana may have been a famed fashion icon, but she was also a genuinely effective power broker, a fiercely intelligent woman known as much for her Whiggery as for her truly remarkable wigs, an angle the filmmakers have downplayed in favor of crowd-pleasing emotional drama and roller-coaster marital crises. It's typical that the movie ends on a note of gently accommodating family reconciliation, concluding its narrative at a point that may make some sort of soap-operatic sense, but is well before Georgiana's final period of political prominence. To be fair, at various times we do see the duchess electioneering, and at others she's shown hanging out with Charles James Fox (a potato-faced Simon McBurney, sufficiently wily, sufficiently charming, insufficiently louche) and the rest of his clique, but, taken as a whole, the film leaves the clear impression that the duchess's political role was primarily ornamental. In reality, it was substantially more than that, no small achievement more than a century before female suffrage.

Rather more flatteringly for the duchess, we are not told, except through the most oblique of references, the extent to which her love of gambling (one of the main aristocratic pastimes of that period) became an addiction, bringing in its wake losses that might have brought a blush to the Lehman Brothers's mortgage bond team and which, in part, explained why the poor duke might sometimes have looked a little pained. The reason for this particular omission is probably the filmmakers' wish to present cinemagoers with a suitably sympathetic romantic heroine (so far as they reasonably could, given the tricky historical record). To show her losing tens of thousands at the faro table wouldn't really have done the trick.

Similarly, the duchess's love life (something she pursued with a splendidly 18th-century gusto) is mainly reduced to misery at the hands of her unfeeling husband (that was true enough, alas), a series of harmless flirtations, a not-quite seduction by the woman who goes on to become the duke's live-in mistress, and then one great romance with a future prime minister, Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper, doing his unconvincing best to channel the BBC's Mr. Darcy). The truth was considerably busier, rather more complicated, and much more interesting.

If Georgiana's biography has been prettied up, so has the country in which she lived. Eighteenth-century England was a grubby, smelly, uncomfortable place. Even its grandest houses were just a pace or two from squalor and were, for the most part, none too clean themselves. The same could be said of their inhabitants, not to mention those unfortunate enough to live beyond ducal walls. The beautifully filmed England of "The Duchess" (courtesy of cinematographer Gyula Pados) is, by contrast, immaculate, a land of lush landscapes, Augustan charm, and gorgeous Palladian magnificence. It bears about as much resemblance to the real thing as Marie Antoinette (a friend of Georgiana's, not that you'd know it from this movie) did to the simple shepherdesses she occasionally pretended to be.

No matter. As a backdrop to what is, in essence, a well-crafted, well-acted, period romance, this prettily stage-set, sceptr'd isle will do just fine. We'll leave the slums, the stench, and, for that matter, the disease that was later to wreck the lovely Georgiana's looks to some other, more realistic film.

But if you allow yourself to overlook the historical inaccuracy, the faint feminist subtext, and the forced, tiresome parallels with the Windsors' domestic disasters, "The Duchess" can be fun. So why not take a break from Wall Street worries and wallow instead in an hour or two of spectacle, splendor, and sentimentality?

Aided by landscape, architecture, and costume, "The Duchess" looks terrific and the script does its best, too, helped along by a cast stronger than this film probably deserves. Mr. Fiennes may steal the show, but as Lady Spencer (Georgiana's mother), a matriarch who combines strong maternal affection with a steely sense of dynastic obligation, the perennially formidable Charlotte Rampling dominates every scene in which she appears. By comparison, Ms. Knightley was bound to struggle, but with her strangely old-fashioned beauty, she at least looks the part, and the pathos she successfully brings to her performance reinforces the aura of victimhood without which no romantic heroine is complete. In such a shamefully enjoyable film, what more could one ask?

Dragging Kennedy Into a New Fight

Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived

The New York Sun, September 16, 2008

At its best, counterfactual or "virtual" history (to use Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's term), the exploration of what might have happened if history had not taken a certain turn, can be a fascinating intellectual exercise, a "what if" that illuminates what did happen. Unfortunately, "Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived," which begins a two-week run at Film Forum tomorrow, is neither fascinating nor illuminating.

Helmed by first-time director Koji Masutani, and featuring Brown University professor James Blight (previously known for his work on "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara"), this new documentary is, at least superficially, devoted to the question of whether President Kennedy would have extricated America from the Vietnam conflict long before it could spiral into the quagmire that, under his successor, it became.

Despite the best efforts of Oliver Stone, that's an old debate that can never be resolved. This film adds little to it other than artfully selected news footage, some interesting audio recordings of discussions within the Kennedy administration, and an inordinate amount of wishful thinking. The filmmakers examine the foreign policy crises that defined Kennedy's term, and use the way he handled them to conclude that he was a president who did everything he could to avoid all-out war, whether of the nuclear variety (over the construction of the Berlin Wall or the installation of Russian missiles in Cuba) or something less apocalyptic (the decision to abandon the anti-Castro forces at the Bay of Pigs, and an early reluctance to commit significant ground forces in Indochina).

Add to this some comments contemplating withdrawal from Vietnam that Kennedy made not long before his assassination, and a case begins to come into focus. But begin is all it does. Most of the rest of the film is devoted to images of an embattled President Johnson and brief glimpses of the Vietnam war itself: nothing new, in other words. The movie's point, it's claimed, is the hardly novel idea that it really does matter who is president. President Kennedy might well have called a halt in Vietnam; President Johnson didn't.

But that's not really what "Virtual JFK" is about. The movie's real target finally emerges emerges in its closing moments when the following quotation appears on-screen: "Every time history repeats itself, the price of the lesson goes up." Ah, so that's it. This film is not about Vietnam — not really. It's about Iraq, and Kennedy's role in it is to act as El Cid, a "virtual JFK" in a very different sense, sent forth to do battle with those wicked Republicans one more time. Thus we see Kennedy in press conference after press conference, his deftness, charm, and eloquence a devastating rebuke both to the sourpuss, crudely belligerent, Grand Old Party he occasionally finds time to tease and also, by implication, to the current occupant of the White House — tongue-tied, bellicose and, as president, responsible for a war that need not have been.

If you think some of that sounds like caricature as much as history (actual or virtual), you're right.

Imitation Jules

The New York Sun, July 11, 2008

On March 9, 1886, poor, deranged Gaston Verne shot his uncle Jules, the French writer often credited with the invention of science fiction. The great man survived, but if he'd known what filmmakers would do with his books in the centuries to follow, he probably would have reached for that revolver himself.

The latest movie to spring from Verne's pages, "Journey to the Center of the Earth," may turn out far better than what has come before, but the precedents are not encouraging. Previous "Journeys" — no fewer than five television projects and four feature films have worn the name — have been more trudge than adventure, despite attempts to boost the novel's sometimes leaden pace with additional love interests, murderous rivalries, a martyred duck, a massive ape, humanoid dinosaurs, sexy primeval girls, noble Maori rebels, gunrunning, and, in a confusing 1989 version that doubled as a sequel to "Alien From L.A.," Kathy Ireland.

The idea that Verne's fanciful stories are, by themselves, no longer enough to draw a crowd can be detected in many of the films that have been made of his work. The two best-known versions of Verne's 1874 novel, "The Mysterious Island," added giant animals into the mix, and one of them also threw in a giant bomb just to make sure. Disney's simpering, sickly "In Search of the Castaways" (1962) hit the rocks when an aging Maurice Chevalier broke into saccharine song.

On the other hand, if we avert our eyes from the grotesque blend of martial arts, slapstick, and ham that was Hollywood's most recent take on "Around the World in 80 Days" (with Jackie Chan as Passepartout), Phileas Fogg's legendary circumnavigation has been treated relatively kindly, notably in its 1956 retelling starring David Niven. Notwithstanding a balloon transplanted from an earlier Verne novel, this effort stuck fairly closely to the original story line and offered its audience a spectacle that the old Frenchman, a man fully in touch with his inner Barnum, would have relished.

Verne would also have been intrigued by the way "Around the World" was enriched by the nostalgia with which it is saturated. Just 11 years after Hiroshima, it depicted the mid-Victorian world as a gentle, almost prelapsarian place, its disorders more antic than dangerous, its inventions amusingly retro contraptions. Similarly, and ironically, Fogg's hectic dash had been transformed by time and technology into a symbol of a leisured era, into something that now seems almost stately. Understanding the implications of these changes in perception helps explain those added dinosaurs, karate kicks, and Maoris: Many of the wonders chronicled by Verne are, nowadays, anything but. Making the filmmakers' task more difficult still, the characters created by this most Joe Friday of novelists are, more often than not, cutouts, sketches, and caricatures. The most worthwhile exception is, of course, Captain Nemo, that enigmatic specter of alienation, vengeance, and the utopian violence of the century to come. The captain has benefited from compelling performances by some of cinema's finest, including James Mason (the most convincing Nemo of all), Michael Caine, Herbert Lom, and, appropriately, another captain, the Starship Enterprise's Picard (Patrick Stewart).

But if Nemo has fared well at the movies, the same cannot be said of his lonely odyssey. Neither Mr. Lom nor Mr. Stewart managed to extricate his respective "Mysterious Island" film (the former in 1961, the latter in 2005) from the wreckage of its screenplay, while even the best "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" project (the Walt Disney version from 1954, with Mason) modified, sweetened, and dumbed down Verne's original in a way that sapped much of its power. That said, it is one of its rivals — the Michael Caine film, one of two made-for-TV versions of this story produced in 1997 — that may indicate the best way forward for renderings of Verne. The narrative, bloated by a bitter father-son rivalry, a romance with the girlfriend from "Ferris Bueller" (Nemo's daughter, remarkably), and, yes, the resettling of Atlantis, is the usual Verne movie shambles. But the film's evocative, almost steampunk aesthetic — an exhilarating blend of brass, iron, pumps, and valves, of William Morris, satanic mills, and a science that never quite emerged — is not.

Verne's future may, in one sense, be behind us, but as an alternative reality, or as an imagined universe of (to borrow William Golding's lovely phrase) "astronauts by gaslight," it still has the potential to enchant. There are glimpses of how this could be in Captain Nemo's appearance in Alan Moore's graphic novel "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," but Verne's stories themselves still await such treatment.