All About Gotham

Christopher Nolan’s take on the Batman mythology was always far removed from Burton’s grotesquerie and Schumacher’s camp rendition of DC heroes and villains. Nolan’s imagining of the character and the universe he inhabits is, in this third and final instalment especially, dark and despairing. This was always a strength of the series: that it took itself seriously, and allowed the films to speak to social conditions familiar to its audiences. Judging by the box-office intake, audiences responded positively to an iteration of a familiar character that is as flawed as the heroes of ancient Greece. From the outset it was clear that Nolan’s Bruce Wayne would put duty above pleasure at any stage, sustaining the billionaire playboy persona only insofar as it covers the version of him that is most authentic, the Batman.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan and co-screenwriter Jonathan Nolan borrow from, amongst other sources, the critically acclaimed Knightfall storyline to shape their final entry. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a recluse since the death of Rachel Dawes in The Dark Knight. It’s been eight years since Batman faced The Joker, since Harvey Dent died, since Batman instructed Gordon (Gary Oldman) to tell and sustain the life-giving lie: Gotham City would be saved if they had a hero (Dent) to believe in, with an antagonist, Batman, to take the blame for his death. With Gotham’s crime at an all-time low, there is no need for a masked vigilante to assist the police in apprehending criminals.

Until Bane (Tom Hardy), a nearly supernaturally strong mercenary with shadowy links to key figures in Gotham, shows up. With the police unable to sufficiently respond to this unanticipated threat, Batman is forced to reconsider his self-exile. Also, Wayne is visited by Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar with greater plans than to simply steal some of Wayne’s possessions. New additions to the supporting cast include Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Blake, a beat cop supportive of Gordon even when the latter is being undermined; Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate, a prominent investor in Wayne Enterprises; and Matthew Modine as Foley, a policeman gunning for Gordon’s job. Michael Caine has a superb moment in his return as the butler Alfred.

The Dark Knight Rises provides what one expects from a Nolan Batman movie: big stunts, large set pieces, and some unexpected plot developments. But Rises is its own film, one that negotiates its way around much of what made Dark Knight such a fan favourite. Obviously The Joker is missing – he was always Nolan’s prime villain, and he left it at that. There is not attempt to link Bane to Joker or to make Bane into a Joker-like figure of anarchy. But there are other things, such as changes to the narrative focus, which I will address below. Please note: massive spoilers follow.

Arguably, Dark Knight was The Joker’s film, with Batman caught between the anarchist, the centurion and his great love. Joker, being what he is, wasn’t Batman’s enemy: Dent was. Dark Knight inserted Joker into Gotham and we watched the world burn as Batman struggled to keep his community from going up in flames, facing off with Dent in love and aspects of governance. Rises is all about Batman, however, even if he is not as physically present in the film as in the first sequel. This film follows Wayne’s trajectory towards reaffirming his position in the community even if it incurs great costs. His time in Bane’s pit is to a great extent an extension of his own self-exile in Wayne Mansion; individuation, as Jung would remind us, occurs naturally and artificially, and a natural process of psychological maturation is here intensified and focused by Wayne’s forced expulsion from Gotham.

The film’s focus on one’s commitment to the community is also located in Gordon’s increased activity in the film’s second half. As a constant supporter of Batman and a propagator of the lie that ended the second film but kept Gotham going, Gordon here becomes the type of figure that he used to pursue, someone who, once the lie is exposed as such and having always anticipated its end, gets his hands dirty. This is also indicative of the film proceeding with what we’ve come to know and understand of some supporting characters: Gordon gets angry based on having to sustain the lie for so long; Alfred refuses to watch as Wayne destroys himself.

In addition to the familiars, Rises introduces interesting new characters. Setting Blake up as Robin towards the film’s very end was highly problematic for some, but Blake, as a younger incarnation of Gordon’s principled engagement with law and order, perfectly fits this Batman universe. Based on the Gotham we’ve come to know, Blake is exactly the kind of person that city could help produce – that, of course, as well as hardened criminals. Yet again the villain comes from outside the community to destroy Gotham. Bane, as revealed towards the climax, had no community, and when Talia bonded with him, the relationship obtained a pathological and almost tragic dimension. Bane is not simply opposed to Batman, but to Blake specifically, as the characters demonstrate how engagement with the community (or lack thereof) can shape one’s life. They are thematic counterpoints. Being Batman’s right hand man is a natural development for Blake.

Another new character is Selina Kyle, not once referred to as Catwoman. In fact, there is no iconic moment for Kyle, no Pfeiffer-esque acknowledgement of the absurdity of the character. Rises’ Selina Kyle is a Trickster with an uncertain trajectory. She tarries with Batman until he convinces here that they’re on the same side. Some people have issues with her being the one to dispatch Bane. Since Bane literally breaks Batman earlier on, shouldn’t Gotham’s son be the one to avenge himself? Not necessarily; Bane, after all, is not the primary villain – Talia is. And Batman and Talia have a showdown of their own. If Bane is killed by what is essentially a bullet fired from a big gun, well, of course he dies. He is only human, and his vulnerability is emphasised by his emotional response to Talia’s monologue. He broke Batman, but he is himself not invincible.

That Kyle kills Bane is additionally meaningful not because she’s a woman (let us not fall into some misguided woman-kills-male-maniac reductionist reading!) but because she is one of the people that Bane actually addresses when he calls upon “the people” to take back “their city”. Earlier in the film, Kyle tells Wayne that he and the rich, the 1%, must “batten down the hatches” because the time has come for the 99% to get their due. And where Bane positions himself as a false prophet for the disenfranchised (mostly, prisoners), Kyle really is one of the 99%. Her takedown of Bane is appropriate, if brief. The homegrown Gotham criminal vanquishes the ideological pretender.

The film has some iconic scenes. There is a shot of Kyle speeding along on the Batcycle (I think) reminiscent of the Joker putting his head of a car window, enjoying the wind in his hair. But Nolan, always a fast cutter, does not allow us to savour the flow of this scene, this moment of joy, and undercuts it much like he did with the latter scene in Dark Knight. And the images of people swinging by their necks from construction cranes, as seen on TV no less, are surprisingly unsettling.

Rises has some problems. I’ve never been a fan of the digital read-out except in Speed, but I understand its purpose for the audience. Also, for a film so focused on being ‘realistic’, much of the violence is notably bloodless and, as a result, too clean. A more pressing issue is Nolan’s occasional disregard for narrative time. There are dizzying time gaps ranging from how, in a single quick scene, Kyle and a hostage start at the top of a building and are, within seconds on the tarmac far below, to Wayne’s inexplicable return to Gotham from India. Finally, the film really should have ended four seconds earlier. Too often Nolan over explains things and in so doing waters down the dramatic effect of a given moment. Consider Gordon's flashback followed by the unnecessary exclamation: "Bruce Wayne..." When the wise lawman finally realises who Batman really is, as the flashback demonstrates, he certainly does not need to spell it out.

Even with certain plot and editing issues, The Dark Knight Rises presents a weighty conclusion. Some will miss the unpredictability of a Joker-like figure, as well as the humour that accompanies such a character. Nonetheless, Rises is easily the equal of Dark Knight; the former is slightly less spectacular than the latter, and it finally gives the Batman character his due.

A final observation: how perfect that where one lie is revealed, another one takes its place "for the greater good" (and personal gain) at the film's end. As Dark Knight ended, citizens of Gotham needed a hero, even a dead one. Rises gives them that hero, but Gotham still doesn't trust its people with the truth.  

Not a miracle, not on 34th.

I am always excited by a new Brad Anderson film. With the exception of his debut The Machinist, Anderson tends to locate all his narrative action in confined spaces, such as the abandoned asbestos-lined asylum in his best film yet, Session 9, or the train in Transsiberian, and now the bar in Vanishing on 7th Street. It is in this bar, against the backdrop of something apocalyptic, that four characters meet up by chance. There is hot shot Luke (Hayden Christensen); the bereaved mother Rosemary (Thandie Newton); a film projectionist, Paul (John Leguizamo); and a young boy, James (Jacob Latimore), whose mother owns the bar.

Along with countless others, James’s mother disappeared from Detroit on the day the darkness came. As Luke remarks early in the film, each day the sun comes up later and sets a little earlier. The darkness brings death, represented by creeping shadows that crowd along lines of light provided by flashlights, torches and glow-sticks. There is no explanation or even speculation regarding the fates of the disappeared, and just a little bit of talking (that is quickly deviated from) about why these four characters remained. (It is not certain that they are the only remaining people, but they might as well be.) Luke suggests that they need to get out of the city, but why being in the city is more dangerous than outside of it, given that the darkness is everywhere, is unclear.

Indeed, somewhere inside Vanishing on 7th Street is a good triller trying to come out. In this film, Anderson is unable to sustain our interests in what’s happening to the characters in the middle act. After the suspenseful and innovative opening, the film settles into a bit of the rut once all the characters convene in the bar. Once inside the bar, there is much concern, as the characters often indicate, about how long the bar’s power generator is going to last. Then there’s the usual camaraderie among survivors as individual uncertainties and regrets are wrestled with. There is a clever development regarding the fate of a specific character (actually, two characters) but it’s the only highlight in about 40 minutes of material.

Vanishing on 7th Street compromises much of its suspense by incessantly showing the creeping shadows, to the point where it becomes rather ridiculous. If the darkness is dangerous, surely there is much suspense in visual restraint? (Earlier, I reviewed Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, which does the same thing.) The film also has the obligatory one-light-flickering-and-going-off-after-another-in-a-long-corridor scene. Again, Anderson handled a similar scene in Session 9 already, and more effectively so, maybe because the set-up for that ominous film’s story was much more plausible than what we’re shown here. At just under 90 minutes, Vanishing on 7th Street provides a brief diversion for genre aficionados, but it’s Anderson’s weakest film to date.

Have you ever seen the rain?

Michael Shannon, Oscar nominated for his turn in Revolutionary Road and playing the villain in the forthcoming Man of Steel, has taken to leading man status. Though by no means an A-list celebrity (and thank goodness for that), Shannon has worked his way towards the position of one of the most interesting character actors around. His performance as an unhinged war veteran opposite Ashley Judd in Bug was one of 2006’s highlights, while he breathed life into Boardwalk Empire’s Van Alden, thereby giving a badly written character given more presence than it deserves. It’s a good thing Shannon is such a magnetic performer, or Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter wouldn’t be as memorable.

Shannon stars as the increasingly troubled Curtis, a blue-collar worker feeling the brunt of the economy as there is never enough money to go around. His wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and hearing impaired daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) are the center of Curtis’s existence, and he becomes increasingly aware of his role as provider as his actions start to compromise the stability of domestic life. Troubled by intense nightmares of a massive, destructive storm, Curtis starts to pour all his time and money into constructing the ideal storm shelter for him and his family. At the same time, Curtis is fully aware of the possibility that the dreams point not toward prophecy but mental illness, especially since schizophrenia runs in his family.

Take Shelter is character driven drama that takes a page from that masterpiece of terror, Rosemary’s Baby, in keeping the viewer uncertain as to whether Curtis is losing his mind. I was also reminded of Field of Dreams, where people become suspicious of one man’s vision until he is singularly alone in doing what he feels compelled to do. That film’s tagline, “If you build it, he will come”, suggests an interesting parallel with Take Shelter: is Curtis not possibly pre-empting and inadvertently inviting a massive storm by building a storm shelter? That Curtis is not preparing for the 'ínevitable', but desiring destruction so as to validate his 'visions'?

There are scenes depicting Curtis’s vivid nightmares and scenes showing the townsfolk’s growing distrust in what he’s doing. Even his brother shows up to find out if “everything is OK”. There is also the compulsory Pacino-scene, where even the best actors are reduced to turning over tables and screaming in large crowds because people think the character is “crazy”. We wait for something riveting to happen as the film slowly makes its way to its final act. It must be said that this is the best directed part of the film, with enough tension to almost make up for some of the film’s occasional plodding. As for the ending itself, let’s just say that in its final minutes, the film shoots itself in the foot by straddling creative options instead of committing to a single way of showing what it shows. Either the film should’ve ended a minute earlier, or it should’ve taken another four to five minutes for purposes of elaboration. 

(And for all the deserved praise that Shannon received for Take Shelter, surely this was simply another shade of what he did in the superior Bug?)

Once Every Ten Years

To a great extent I agree with the many who claim that film lists are meaningless. Forced to work in hierarchy, how does one rank Kubrick’s tale of droogs and state oppression higher or lower than Kiarostami’s intimate, playful take on the nature of film in the 1990s? Of course it comes down to personal preference, and those who shout that “these lists are subjective!”, as if it’s a somehow twisted practice, should not be congratulated for stating the obvious.

The Sights and Sound critics and director poll, which happens once a decade, enjoys a particularly exalted status among cinephiles. Critics and filmmakers from around the globe are invited to submit their top ten lists of the best films ever made (some worked their lists out on napkins in restaurants, while others used software that auto-picked ten titles out of a hundred possibilities). The Sight and Sound list, I would say, is not meaningless, even though I see sense in David Poland’s statement that, to paraphrase, the list is a series of navel gazings between others' and one's own.

The Sight and Sound critics list is meaningful because it shows interesting developments in cinephilia over the past years, such as the rise in prominence of silent movies. Someone suggested that the success of The Artist reminded critics that there are silent movies and that’s why silent cinema has reclaimed such strong positions on the list. Not to be bullish, but any critic worth her/his salt doesn’t need a contemporary French film to be reminded of the wealth of silent cinema.

Of additional interest is the lack of recent films on the list. The most recent film in the top ten is 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. Broadly, the suggestion is that in the past 45 years, no films deserving of a top ten position had been produced. It could of course more plausibly be that the exclusion of certain great names and films reflects the general age of the critics who voted, specifically their own familiarity with films from their formative years (I see the formative years of cinema as mostly located between adolescence and the late twenties).

Finally, and this is the big one judging by internet response to the list, there is the dethroning of Citizen Kane as the greatest film of all time by Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Kane is about an obsessive politician whose pursuit of power tragically shapes his eventually empty life, while Vertigo is about an obsessive detective who colours his empty life by clinging to an illusion of an-other. The triumph of Vertigo over Kane reflects the recent evaluation of Hitchcock as the greatest filmmaker ever, rather than the cultural decline of Kane. Personally I’d take Kane over Vertigo any day; for that matter, I’d take Rear Window over Vertigo just as easily. No self-respecting cinephile would doubt the merit of any of the below films; it is their ranking and inclusion at the inevitable cost of other worthy titles that arouses much animated discussion.

The Critics’ Top 10
1. Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958)
2. Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941)
3. Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
4. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
5. Sunrise: A Song for Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
7. The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)
8. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1927)
10. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963

(The directors’ list at least includes four films from the 1970s, but my focus here remains on the critics' list.) 

Now for some navel-gazing of my own. Below is a list of films I consider to be (possibly, impossibly) the ten (or at least "ten of the") best films ever made. Asked tomorrow, the list might very well look very different. So it goes.I had one guiding rule (that, too, is changeable): I can include only one film per director. In addition, the titles listed below had to be films that leapt to mind with considerable ease. I am confident that a more prolonged selection process would result in a different list. 

In alphabetical order:

The 400 Blows (Truffaut, 1959)

Blade Runner (Scott, 1982)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Come and See (Klimov, 1985)
Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982)
The Piano (Campion, 1993)  
Requiem for a Dream (Aronofsky, 2000)
Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1994)
Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007)
The Thin Red Line (Malick, 1998)

The above list consists of titles that leap to mind when I am asked, as first year students often do “what are, like, the best films ever?” And yes, I cheated; there are eleven films listed above. I have seen each of these films at least three times; Blade Runner viewings stand at nine. (The film I've seen most times is Terminator II: Judgment Day, standing at 15 viewings. 1994 was a slow year with long school holidays).

The critics list seems to reflect an unfamiliarity with films from certain eras as well as the work of certain major directors. I have not seen near enough of world cinema to make a list that draws on the riches of the filmmaking globe. At the same time, I have met many (but not all!) of the greats, such as Kurosawa, and then the challenge becomes: which Kurosawa to include? Rashomon? Ran? Throne of Blood? The eponymous Seven Samurai? The gentle passage that is Ikiru? Those whose TV habits are restricted to CSI have no idea how gratifying mental revisitations and explorations in great art can be.

Finally, I suppose, I'm grateful for a list like Sight and Sound's because, if only for a few days, film takes center stage in current affairs (unrelated to any festival), and, at least from what I can anecdotally tell, encourages discussion about what constitutes a great film in many of those who have never heard of Kurosawa before. They'll get there, of course, if they take film seriously enough. They'll get there.

There, Wolf

I am not a fan of Liam Neeson’s recent rebranding as action hero. In Schindler’s List, Michael Collins, Kinsey and other films, he demonstrated that he is an actor of superior ability. In Taken and Unknown, as well as in Joe Carnahan’s The A-Team, Neeson plays one-note characters capable of great physical feats but little else. To be sure, the physically imposing Neeson is very good at being physical (kicking, punching, torturing) but I miss the more dramatic Neeson. This is why his latest film, the existential adventure The Grey (also directed by Carnahan), is a return to form for the actor, where character is privileged over image. This is the action driven Neeson I can believe in.

Ottway (Neeson) is an Irishman working for an oil company in northern Alaska. His job is simple and brutish: to keep the wolves away from on-site company employees by shooting them. Ottway’s voice over narration, which disappears from the film after its opening, explains that he is a deeply troubled individual. Within the early minutes of the film, we see Ottway put a gun in his mouth (he doesn’t pull the trigger, of course). Soon, he is on an airplane for a brief respite from the cold, if not the detachment the job requires. But then the plane goes down in the white hell of Alaska, and the wolves smell blood. The Grey details the survivors’ attempts to outsmart the wolves and remain alive long enough to be rescued.

When I referred to the film as an existential adventure, I used the term in the broadest possible sense to indicate that the characters’ ordeal force them to reflect on life and to take account of their worth (or lack thereof). The film is somewhat clumsy in its early attempts to add some psychological weight to the characters, but as their numbers inevitably dwindle, the survivors become much more than the stereotypes and clichés they at first appear to be.

The Grey is a man vs nature film depicting nature at is uncaring worst (not that I needed to be convinced). In one of my favourite documentaries, the riveting Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog observes how any notion of harmony between humankind and nature is an illusion. Nature will destroy us. Indeed, the ice plains and ominous forests in The Grey serve as plateaus of death at nearly every turn, and it is here that Ottway and some others make their stand. 

The Grey is an unexpectedly sombre experience, so much so that none other than Roger Ebert himself could not watch another film shortly after having seen this one. To be deliberately vague, the film remains coldly and calculatingly committed to its thesis.