Once Upon a Time in Missouri

Splendor and Paranoia in the Prairies, 1882

See the boy. The slowed flutter of eyelids, the curious turn of mouth. Up on a chair, see famed Jesse James dusting a photograph. In the reflection, he sees Robert Ford; he sees the boy.

This is the infamous shot as imagined in Andrew Dominik’s pensive and prismatic epic, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Until this promised point two hours in, Dominik’s poetic film shades in the mythic sketches of the two fabled figures, giving it an underlying psychological—and psychotic—breadth as binding to the film’s panoramic, novelistic form—hello prologue and epilogue. The film is very much about the smoke and mirrors behind celebrity—alike James enshrouded and disappearing in smoke during the train robbery. More lastingly, it is about the Imagination, or at least the imaginations of two individuals whose realities never seemed to be real in the first place.

We all know this story of Jesse James and Robert Ford, fed to us in the U.S. like feed, but the movie is about the details of a death foretold. From Patricia Norris’ meticulously designed frontier towns and costumes to Dominik’s idiomatic dialogue and lyrical narration lifted from Ron Hansen’s same-titled novel, these elegant elements completely eliminate the disappointment of knowing what happens as history has dictated. A collective of critics have compared this world to Terence Malick’s morning glories of the 70s and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller, amongst others. They could not be more correct: there have been few films since as visually stunning and as evocative of an America of yarned yore.

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ elegiac and elemental score—saloon pianos, sullen violins and all—moves and moods the film—a slow saunter through the mythic fields of the James prologue. It plays perfectly with Roger Deakins’ chiaroscuro cinematography of slow-drifting dollies and shadowy Searchers doorway shots. Part PBS, part National Geographic, and as a whole, expressionist travelogue, Deakins lushly captures the Romantic grandeur of nature and the free frontier with time-lapse cumulus clouds and florid spates of fauna-free space (here, man seems the only animal worth document). His painterly eye pictures these seeping, fleet visions as phantasms passing once again through the sieve of time, like the characters.

The film plays like a penny picture show in color—a nostalgic, passing peep into a ghostly world of wounded machismo and the last days of wild individuality on the frontier. The American frontier circa 1881 was fertile ground for its self-made tall tales, none taller than Jesse James—a towering precedent that informs and inhibits the human presence as swaggeringly played by Brad Pitt. “Big as a tree” bemoans Bob Ford (Casey Affleck), who obssessively collects clippings in a secret shoebox and ravenously reads dime novels depicting James’ escapades.

Ford meets his god in a Missouri woodland just before the James Gang’s last robbery. Frank James (Sam Shepard) intuitively—Ford gives him the willies—sidelines his initial request to become a gang sidekick; Jesse, increasing paranoid, is not anymore receptive to the idea. But after the Blue Cut robbery and a symbolic, but obvious, scene—James playing with and killing snakes—Ford is able to partially plant his sycophantic self in James’ graces at a moment when the ever-suspicious outlaw sets off to determine the lean loyalty of his fellow gang members (and friends) with the rich reward on his head. And before you know it, James’ seething paranoia and psychosis are manifesting in volatile acts of violence against his former cohorts.

A few other James Gang ragtags stay at Dorothy Evans’ (Zooey Deschanel) hideaway somewhere yonder on the scenic plains. Dick Liddil (Paul Schneider), a womanizer despite his name, and Wood Hite (Jeremy Renner), Jesse’s cousin, await word from James and pass the time by belittling Bob and his fixation with the famed bandit. However, as the film inches towards the titular scene, the question that James confronts Ford with hangs over: do you want to be like me or do you want to be me? With each appearance onscreen, it becomes increasingly evident that Ford is more in love with the fame and myth that is “Jesse James,” than Jesse James himself.

Fatefully, Bob and his brother Charlie (a stellar, somber Sam Rockwell) become Jesse’s only companions in his last days, Bob having already agreed with Missouri governor (former Clinton crony James Carville) to deliver James, DOA. The portents of his death are of James’ own import—prominently the six-shooter he gifts Ford— and seem to signify his acceptance of his legendary fate, or dying in order to live on in infamy. When the actual assassination occurs, its aura is entirely one of resigned ritual for two figures consigned to roles beyond themselves, an arch annal as assassin and assassinated alike Lincoln and Booth, Kennedy and Oswald.

There have been a plethora of Jesse James portrayals; Pitt plays James as charismatic, mindful of his environment, and with a mind full of chimeras. Wrapped in his black fur coat, James is a delusional and doomed man cornered by his own celebrity. Pitt enthralls with his eyes—as if, as the narrator explains, Jesse James found creation slightly more than he could accept (a la Eastwood or Fonda in Leone’s spaghettis). As icy inlets into his psyche, one senses in Pitt’s stares the infinite beauty and bounty of the earth as backdrop against the increasingly finite nature of an individual life.

But if Pitt, like James, gets the publicity, it is Affleck who casts lightning bolts in your chest. It’s an astonishingly artful and beautifully mannered performance, full of repulsion and pathos, and it elevates the film to higher heights. Affleck portrays Ford as an actor in his own grandiose script, as uncannily appearing both cocksure and unsure, and as a callow child whose wandering eyes, huffs and fits act as impetus to putting up his fists, and later gun.

It is the “coward” Ford’s coda of celebrity and consequence that shapes this into a fine film, acting as moral and human compass amidst the effacing qualities of lasting legend and factual history. It concerns itself with the aftermath of the cultural assassination and its contingent carnival of press with the Ford brothers’ theatrical reenactment of the event to an ominously anonymous crowd. In a film where each death occurs in the back save a suicide, even cowardice is contested as relative. Thus the regret that Ford expresses with his all-too-familiar entrapment in his nefarious name give the film a tragic dimension; he quietly accepts his demonized place in history, his peers’ ears deadened to any sympathy for a devil. These final moments remind of the epilogue to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in that they anchor each young director’s respective assault on the media’s, and thus man’s, manipulation of truth and celebrity and its trivializing effect on the violence inherent in these interpretations—to profound real effects in the real world.

Knickknacks and Kinetics

A Passing Homage to India in Wes Anderson’s Latest

Three famous American noses with a famous American last name are on a spiritual sojourn across India. These are the Whitman boys.

The brothers share, like genes, the emotional and physical baggage (eleven impeccably designed pieces by Marc Jacobs) that their father suddenly bequeathed with his untimely death. A year after his funeral and the abandonment of their now-nun mother (Anjelica Huston), eldest Francis (Owen Wilson) invites soon-to-be-father Peter (Adrien Brody) and forlorn youngest Jack (Jason Schwartzman) onto a baroque turquoise train, The Darjeeling Limited, to sort through this heavy conceit while reconnecting broken bonds and recollecting how they broke in the first place.

Arriving in their first-class cabin, the three immediately share their opiate-rich medicines and painkillers while chain-smoking as depressed, communal activities. These Whitmans are united by their unnamed gloom, ever untrusting of each other, recalling the “neverhappy hearts” of Walt Whitman’s poem “Passage to India” (a piece whose spiritual self-discovery is effusive, in contrast to the film). Jack, whose mop of hair and mannered mope remind of a lesser Jean-Pierre Léaud, has not fully recovered from his recent relationship’s end (its remnants seen in the accompanying short Hotel Chevalier); Peter worries about his tenuous marriage further complicated with an expected baby; and Francis, bandaged and battered physically (and one assumes emotionally), hides his insecurities with a bossy banter reminiscent of his Dignan in Bottle Rocket, albeit now equipped with the class privilege he lacked before.

Unbeknownst to his brothers, Francis’ labeled and laminated program for their familial passage to self-discovery—and the rediscovery of each other—takes the three, towards their mother, who has decided to retire to religion in the Himalayas, Black Narcissus-style. But writer-director Wes Anderson, like Francis, knows the journey is justification in itself. And so along the way, the three’s worldly view is colored by both India’s patterned terrain of deep blues and subtle pastels and proffered experiences: scenic stops at holy sites for praying with guru-purchased peacock feathers, flea markets for purchasing poisonous snakes, mace, and hand-sewn slippers, and sweet Indian delicacies—drink and woman—in the train’s claustrophobic compartments. Of course, the best-laid plan, like the titular train itself, suffers the distractions and detours that qualify the journey as stirring if also superficially spiritual.

With his first three features, Mr. Anderson engaged in a sort of cinematic alchemy. He merged a style full of handsome particularities and esoteric extracts with melancholic substance, producing warm, intelligent tragicomedies. Everything he touched became golden, until the critics ruled The Life Aquatic an overly designed tribute to the struggles of the artist that never knew exactly which foot into the water first. In this latest imaginative incarnation, Mr. Anderson has captured his color-coded characters’ travails and travels to varying degrees of success; in honesty, it never reaches the golden standard set by his past films.

The Darjeeling Limited is a film that talks when it should be quiet, loudly announcing then subtly doing. The film becomes bogged down in the easy arching idea of the brothers’ dismissal of materiality—their couture clothing contrasted with the local’s plain clothes—as the first step in reaching an immaterial enlightenment, which culminates in a centerpiece sequence with three young Indian brothers. Rather, what gives the film an attractive core is the chaotic but fraternal chemistry between the brothers. Acutely aware of the quarrels and unspoken qualms that richly stuff sibling histories, they come across as real brothers if not always as relatable people. Jack even ponders “I wonder if the three of us would’ve been friends in real life. Not as brothers, but as people.”

The answer is a yes and no. After all, these brothers enjoy excessive purchasing power ($6000 belts, $3000 loafers) and move about in self-absorbed orbits operating in an exceedingly gorgeous but entirely crafted universe. Still, the brothers’ collective emotional edification is heightened in this foreign expanse, where each is physically faraway from their troubles but for all purposes far and away carried off by them. And this highlights Anderson’s humanizing talent: we feel for these melancholy monied men, despite all the reasons not to. Of these three brothers, Mr. Brody shines with a pensive performance, his Academy-Award winning eyes employed to moving measure as the only sibling who seems to have something on his mind besides himself.

Anderson’s deft knack with the inanimate—his tasteful adornment of each frame—has always been admiring, if a bit indulgent, here it borders on being contrived or quirk for quirks sake. The J.L.W. monogrammed baggage seems to be public enemy number one, but through Anderson’s ability and his sheer tenacity these belongings convey each character’s near palpable longing for something unseen. Another saving grace is Anderson’s selected visions of India, including the moody music of Satyajit Ray and Merchant Ivory productions and the horizontal camera-eye tracks shots of verdant vistas and colorful crawling cabooses. A spatial journey as well as one with spiritual intent, the film’s dreamy-as-can-be landscape is by no means India, yet it’s an idea of India—which offers it’s own problems of exploitation— that suits the staid yearn and said yeses of the Whitman journey. Longstanding cinematographer Robert Yeoman’s craning camera pivots and swivels—yet still framed with pinpoint precision—seem especially illustrative of the brothers’ continual search for clarification in the confused world, while burnishing Anderson’s reputation for A-Z technical virtuosos.

For all its obvious qualities and self-evident shortcomings, The Darjeeling Limited finds Anderson with a permutated version of his golden formula—less funny, more somber—as he is literally on strange soil heading in new directions, even if he glances back fondly once in awhile. It represents a step towards something beyond whimsy and something expected of, but unexpected for Anderson: maturity. From the awkwardness of a fairly explicit sex scene to the subtle stylistic flourishes, the film feels like his first endeavor since Bottle Rocket that hasn’t been entirely storyboarded ad infinitum. It contains a certain cushion of spontaneity free from the dispatches of Control Tower Anderson. Thus it works best when he lets the interactions speak for themselves; that is to say its silences speak most convincingly of the strangeness of a place and the strangeness of another human being, even one’s own brother.

In his trademark one-shot, Anderson tracks through compartments of a moving train, each housing busied characters of his storybook universe. It’s a scene in the Whitmanesque spirit of celebration of specie and space, but it also glimpses the lonely limits on this grand train of life. It’s a superb sequence—optimally placed—that speaks of Anderson’s preoccupation with form and it’s construction of bittersweet emotion and evocative settings. With such scenes, The Darjeeling Limited is a rough but rich journey to wherever—a passing frame full of those Wes Anderson autumnal skies and sartorial saps, a neighbor humming telltale pop songs of yesteryear.

That Obscure Coherence: Abbas Kiarostami & A Simple Event

Up in the matte hills off of the Four-O-Five funnel, the J. Paul Getty Museum has an exquisite ongoing exhibit; it is titled Recent History: Photographs by Luc Delahaye. Since September 11th, Delahaye, armed with his photojournalistic preludes, has shot larger-than-thou tableaus of recent world events—Rwandan mass burials, the Israel-Palestinian cycle, the terrorism war. The detailed enormity and formal elegance of his phenomenal photographic documents—like the more famous, but differently scoped, Jeff Wall’s—withdraw the viewer into a distant world, one seemingly staged but resonantly real, one near in time and actuality, but afar in our own respective realities.

They are all ineffable, to put it simply: an unknown Taliban insurgent dead on a pebble strewn path as captured from above; a mass of stoic Belarusian denizens out in support of Alexander Milinkevich, their faces sculpted by the cold and untold circumstance; an Indonesian man standing after the tsunami, amidst a sea of yellow rubble strewn against the grayed, indifferent sky.

I liken them to artifacts—perhaps ones buried only a few days back—in that they elicit fascination and fear; it is a fascination with time and people as contained in an object and a fear of what humankind can be. And you sit there in its projected vacuum of space, unearthing old details in a new context, where the quiet breadth of human life is breathtaking even in its politics and bloodletting, caught in that split second of insight.

But if I have written in hyperbolic, hyphenated terms, I apologize. See, Delahaye’s artistic sensibilities—harbored in that ambivalent realm between fiction and reality—sang in my mind upon reading this:

Life and So Much More: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami
October 12- October 27

Los Angeles is a mecca of sorts for Iranian cinema and Abbas Kiarostami—director, screenwriter, photographer, poet, painter—is certainly the seminal and surprising figure of its considerable yield. For these two autumn weeks, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will grace the public with nineteen of his shorts and features, a stellar collection of his masterpieces and about half his entire filmic output.

Though unfortunately underexposed to the general public, Kiarostami is a luminary, a progressive auteur whose poetic, singular style—his film’s framework built entirely to slowly, but sincerely, explore the details and travails of everyday Iranians—allowed him to be banned in Iran while being voted the most important film director of the 1990s by two international critics’ polls.

Emerging with the Iranian New Wave of the early 1970s, and directors like Forough Farrkohzad and Sohrab Shahid Saless, Kiarostami’s films feature a near ascetic aesthetic while lyrically documenting his country’s elemental beauty from its desert terrain and its grid-like zigzag of dusty roads to the metropolitan gridlock of Tehran. In these pictures a chance conversation becomes ennobled in its plain insight as the characters, candidly captured in their workday rhythms, speak in the vernacular and in verse taken from contemporary Iranian poets or the venerated Omar Khayyam. But his films are deceptively simple, even from the viewpoint of his oft-used child protagonists; rather, he imagines the prosaic world as a poetic riddle.

A Kiarostami film is never once-upon-a-time, instead rooted in an existing realism and historical context, where his characters’ physical and metaphysical explorations abut those terrifying terms: Art, Life, Death, and Continuity. What allows these grand inquiries to transcend that conceited, trite tone is their relatable treatment on an individual level, his characters’ melancholies and ecstasies becoming inhabitant characteristics of an universal personality.

One of his trademarks is a stationary mounted camera inside of a car—the car, of course, significant for its freedom. In his socio-political study, Ten, he captures Tehran through the eyes of a woman driving her car over several days, including the ten conversations she has with strangers. His Palme d”Or-winning Taste of Cherry features car conversations as well, but the conversations become requests for burial by the suicidal protagonist Mr. Badii. Life and So Much More— the second film of the Koker trilogy that revolves around the 1990 earthquake that killed 50,000— follows a father and son who drive from Tehran to Koker searching for two missing boys, meeting wayside survivors who must face the tragedy and the regeneration to follow. These few films highlight Kiarostami’s humanistic and moral concern whether the compassion of strangers or the difficult search for that desperate sweetness of life.

Kiarostami himself has often declared that “we can never close to the truth except through lying” and throughout his existential oeuvre, he has shot his fictional narratives as reportage, blending the thin line between fact and fiction. His magnum opus, Close-Up, is the real story of Hossein Sabzian, who impersonated director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and led a well-to-do family to trust that they would be stars in his next film. It is a perfect example of Kiarostami’s formal complexity: the film features the actual participants recreating the actual events (like a fictional film) while binding it with footage from the actual trial (like a documentary). Kiarostami often uses only diegetic sound, but the penultimate scene in the film features Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary,” which coupled with the slow-motion swim through teeming Tehran, surprises and is amongst the most moving and sublime in recent cinema.

Delahaye offers, in an estimation of his own art, a beautiful way to read a Kiarostami film: “if you aim at a form of truth through fiction, then the reality will become enigmatic precisely because it is obvious. If any image is powerful enough, if it resists us, if, by its obscure coherence, part of it escapes our understanding, then it means that something has been won reality.”

And much of the awe of watching one of his films lies in that ambiguity, that “obscure coherence” in spite of missing information. Kiarostami, his faith in people, only directs or invites the audience to assess—at times identify with—his characters; his films are rewarding for those patient enough to ponder the possibilities of film, which for Kiarostami, is our life. One can go on forever praising this Iranian director, but the critic Phillip Lopate had it right: “We don’t know it yet, but we are living in the age of Kiarostami.”

Migrant Nights of Hunter and Hunted

On Cronenberg’s Latest, Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises is an apt appellation for David Cronenberg’s latest; the premonitory title immediately initiates the observer into a foreign and ominous London, a demimonde of the displaced where mysterious allegiances literally flow blood deep. And as with Macbeth this art will have blood, and yes, blood will have blood.

Of course, nothing is routine or roundabout with Cronenberg and even in this mainstreamed, linear tale, he tallies another violently fascinating, albeit flawed, feature. It is a chronology of violence here, where the first scene of a barbershop slashing signals that Shakespearean saying, also definitive of the crime genre. Crime here is prominently prostitution, and the central conflict occurs Christmastime when a fourteen-year old one dies after delivering a child. Yet she leaves a more telling document of her existence: a diary.

Her midwife, and second generation Russian, Anna (Naomi Watts) has the diary translated to discover details of the girl’s life to save the child, leading her unwittingly to Trans-Siberia, a popular Russian “restaurant” run by calculating and charming crime boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). Implicated in the entries—read by the girl in English voiceover (undoubtedly granting her the voice stripped from her while alive)—is Semyon’s wanton and weak son Kirill (Vincent Cassel), who latently loves his driver/ ”undertaker” Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen).

And with nary a native in the narrative, this is the xenophobes’ unrecognizable London—more micro than macro—where these Russian émigrés, transported but intransigently committed to their born blocs, can operate in their shadowy atmosphere—replete with rain—of black cars, black clothing, and ostensibly blackened inner cores. This darkness verges of pathetic fallacy, but seems necessary to convey that what lurks beneath each inanimate and animate surface—for what a piece of work is man—is, frighteningly, more frightening.

As the film forwards, Kirill’s rashness and insecurity insure Nikolai’s “ascent” within the family’s business and corresponding descent into the further hells of indecency while entering stage left are the revengeful relations of the murdered man. Concurrently, Anna dangerously frequents the Russian residence more and more, first asking then accusing, until the film reaches its pièce de résistance: a Turkish bath scene disclosing everything.

Without spoiling the story, or shot, suffice it to say that the murkier plot points are steamed out here. It comes as the succinct summit of the film; in its reveal-all, it answers much of the quote-unquotes or artifices surging through the film’s veins. But for a film that is very much about outer strength—whether the cool, collected Semyon or the tattooed bodies of the Vory V Zakone—it excels most when it extracts the buried emotion (which it now and then neglects) as premise to the physical, those seething promises to the unseen past and those unspoken oaths to gender, profession and nation.

The conceit of the buried comes appropriately from the young girl’s diary and whether the gruesome rashes of red, the increasing blatant homoeroticism between Kirill and Nikolai, or Anna’s past miscarriage, that which sees the light of film becomes liberated. For Anna and Nikolai, their everyday present offers redemption for all-too-near pasts. In a film that continually transgresses genre delineations, these redemptions, however, hinder on reconciliation; in the end, Nikolai is a modern, but enigmatic Machiavellian.

Scribed by Steven Knight, who wrote unforgettably about foreign bodies in London last in Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises garners strength from its social commentary and taut timing, but loses pointed purpose when it switches to a nearly sentimental story arch complete with an anticlimactic ending. But, ultimately the film belongs to the mesmerizing Mortensen, whose body is toned to near machinery and Russian accent honed to near fluidity. His outward perfection plays perfect counterpart to his inner impasse between good and evil, which very much like the film, is a cold exterior masking a certain complexity worth observing.