Susan Sontag infamously remarked that the white race was a cancer on humanity. To Lars von Trier, humanity is the cancer. Von Trier’s “Dogville” caused a great stir at last year’s Cannes Film Festival with charges that the Depression-era fable, set in a rural town in the Colorado Rockies, was anti-American. It is. But anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human.
“Dogville” is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out. Von Trier, for all his studied technical incompetence, is just as deliberate a filmmaker as Kubrick, but his misanthropy feels both more virulent and more conscious than Kubrick’s chilly demonstrations of technical proficiency.
At three hours, and as the first film in a projected trilogy, “Dogville” strains for the epic. This is von Trier’s Big Statement (or at least grandiose throat clearing). But in every respect other than sheer length — in scope, imagination, execution, depth and spirit — “Dogville” is a piddling movie.
That hasn’t stopped it from being widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. Are the critics who are rhapsodizing over “Dogville” actually swallowing its puny, rancid view of humanity or are they afraid that slamming it means they’d be showing themselves not tough enough to take its hard truths? Reading the raves for “Dogville,” I’ve thought of the girl in Michael Ritchie’s “Semi-Tough” who announces at an encounter group, “I peed in my pants and it felt good.” Except that to get any pleasure out of “Dogville” you’d have to say, “I was peed on and it felt good.”
Bullies can be just as persuasive in the arts as they are on the playground and von Trier is nothing if not a consummate bully. An American critic who slams “Dogville” opens him- or herself up to the usual charges of Americans being unwilling to face the ugly truths about their country (no matter how facile or smug or uninformed those “truths” are). But any critic who rejects the film is open to being told they can’t accept dark, pessimistic art, that they’d prefer nice movies. That’s a very macho vision of the arts, in which the “hissing naysayers” (as one critic called those of us who reject the film — and let me own up: When I saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall, I hissed) should just go back to our nice humanist movies and leave the heavy lifting to the tough-minded.
But put “Dogville” next to the juice flowing through any great, vital misanthropic art, from Swift to Thackeray to Celine (to W.C. Fields, for that matter), and the thesis dryness of von Trier’s work becomes clear. Artists can be just as withering as they like about any milieu, any period, as long as they allow the characters to be fully formed and not just stick figures set up to make their points. “Dogville” is getting talked of as being a raw and demanding experience, but the educated, liberal moviegoers who will constitute its audience won’t hear anything they aren’t already primed to hear. Von Trier is preaching to the converted here as much as Mel Gibson is in “The Passion of the Christ,” and those of us who aren’t ready to hear the message are, to von Trier’s acolytes, just as much heretics.
As was “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville” is about the degradation and torture of a beautiful young woman. (The critic Greg Tate nailed it in the Village Voice when he referred to the director as “Lars ‘The Bitch Killer’ von Trier.”) In this case, as in “Breaking the Waves,” it’s specifically sexual torture.
Nicole Kidman plays Grace (cue the distant drums of approaching irony), a fugitive (from what we don’t know) who turns up on the outskirts of Dogville. The town’s resident young intellectual, Tom Edison (I swear I’m not making that up; he’s played by Paul Bettany), has been exhorting the mostly bored townfolk to improve themselves, and in Grace he sees his chance to help both them and her. Tom convinces the residents of Dogville to allow Grace to help them with their chores, in exchange for which she’ll be given room and board. Grace’s hard work and sweet smile soon make her a welcome addition — until strangers come to town bearing wanted posters with Grace’s face and offering a substantial reward.
From there “Dogville” becomes the longest exercise yet in the Lars von Trier Theatre of Cruelty. When Grace tries to get away, a cement wheel that she has to drag everywhere is attached to a manacle around her neck. Grace is raped repeatedly, and used by the men as the town whore. And the women find ways to inflict their own humiliations. (Three hours allows for a lot of humiliation.)
But where the whipping posts played by Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves” and Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” are sacrificial victims, Grace is von Trier’s avenging angel. She gets her revenge in the end, and it’s so much worse than what’s been inflicted on her that whatever sympathy we might have had for her (or, to put it more specifically, for Nicole Kidman’s heroic attempt to give a performance in this swill) is rubbed in our face.
It’s clear that’s what von Trier intends. He wants, I think, to fool us into identifying with Grace, though by the end we’re meant to be in the same position as Tom. Our sympathy for Grace mirrors his good intentions. That she turns so villainous is meant to make both good intentions and sympathy seem the province of fools.
If von Trier were simply making the point that the victimized often become victimizers, trite as that is, it would be hard to argue with him. But Grace is fulfilled by becoming the bloodthirsty vengeance demon she turns into in the film’s climax — just as Emily Watson’s and Bjork’s characters were fulfilled by being murdered and executed. Essentially, von Trier’s worldview is no different than that of the most macho pulp writer: In his world, it’s kill or be killed. And it doesn’t much matter who does the killing and who does the dying because, for von Trier, we are all rotten at the core.
He may find all human beings equally despicable, but that doesn’t mean that they suffer equally in his films. Women are von Trier’s select victims. That alone doesn’t make him a misogynist. What does make him a misogynist is the sadistic relish he takes in the drawn-out destruction of his female characters, which we see as if watching flies having their wings pulled off under a microscope.
Because of the style in which “Dogville” has been shot — entirely on an indoor soundstage, with chalk outlines on the floor standing in for buildings, and sound effects for things like closing doors — the actors mime many of their actions. But damned if Nicole Kidman doesn’t actually have that concrete weight manacled to her neck. In a von Trier movie, how could it be otherwise?
The director’s supporters have tried to explain away the treatment of women in his movies by invoking spiritual or political themes — “Breaking the Waves” was about the quest for salvation and the sacrifices we make for love; “Dancer in the Dark” was a protest against capital punishment and so forth. But Bjork’s execution in “Dancer in the Dark” went on for an obscene amount of time. And long after we’ve gotten the point in “Dogville,” Kidman is still being raped and abused. No matter what point he is allegedly making, we are still watching the protracted depiction of women being raped and killed and otherwise abused.
Speaking about the control he requires of actors in a recent interview, von Trier said, “This is why I work so often with females. To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it’s easier for me to convince females to do this, for some reason.” He doesn’t convince them for long, however. Has anyone noticed that actresses tend to get the hell away from von Trier after working with him? Following “Dancer in the Dark” Bjork announced that it was such a miserable experience she would never act again. And Nicole Kidman (citing scheduling conflicts) has pulled out of the next two films in the projected trilogy.
Given that style, “Dogville” is essentially a filmed stage show — a bad piece of ’30s avant-garde theater, to be specific. But the “open” stage plan serves a metaphoric meaning. That the worst takes place in plain view of everyone else (imaginary walls or no) is meant to implicate all the characters equally in every horrible act. Everyone is guilty (which, of course, means no one is).
Von Trier has borrowed both from Friedrich Durrenmatt’s play “The Visit” and from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” John Hurt narrates the film in a voice as dry as a corn husk, though with just enough vinegar to make it clear that the homiletics his lines consist of are intended as a parody of the narrator in Wilder’s play. It’s easy to see that von Trier would have contempt for as sweet and loving and achingly poignant a vision of American small-town life as “Our Town.” He wants to expose Wilder’s vision as a lie.
But von Trier, in whom the dunderheaded and the heavy-handed meet, also misses what’s great about his darker source. In “The Visit,” a fabulously wealthy woman returns to the impoverished town she left in disgrace years before and offers the townspeople a million dollars to kill the man who wronged her. Durrenmatt’s writing is sharp and uncompromised and also very funny. The fabular elements have a pointed playfulness to them. Durrenmatt presents the most appalling things with a fleet absurdity. “The Visit” moves swiftly and surprisingly to its climax. Von Trier grinds away at each instance of cruelty and hypocrisy like someone screwing a cigarette butt into an ashtray long after it’s gone dead.
And he means to be just that numbingly insistent. Von Trier is fully in command of his effects and his meanings. The imaginary sets of “Dogville” may be the opposite of what the Dogme 95 manifesto, which von Trier co-signed, mandated (shooting with a hand-held camera on location in direct sound, no special effects or lighting, and so forth). But the effect is of the same malnourished purity as the Dogme films. This is moviemaking as penance for the filmmaker and punishment for the audience.
Shot by Anthony Dod Mantle in watery, grainy color, the endless close-ups waver drunkenly on the screen. The movie is just as washed-out and ugly looking as “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark” were. (To talk about the aesthetic qualities of a von Trier movie is a joke.) The enforced drabness is summed up by what may be the most shocking sight in all of “Dogville”: that of Lauren Bacall hoeing potatoes — worse, miming hoeing potatoes. I keep thinking of moviegoers who saw “To Have and Have Not” when it opened in 1945 and were bowled over by that stunning, sexy, sarcastic girl: Did they ever imagine that one day they’d have to see her in a peasant role?
No matter how much von Trier disdains the slickness epitomized by Hollywood filmmaking, he’s the unconscious heir of the hokey movie tradition of casting stars in roles unsuited to them. In one of their comedy routines Nichols and May once joked about Sal Mineo being cast as Ernest Hemingway. Is seeing Catherine Deneuve playing a factory worker in “Dancer in the Dark” any less ridiculous? Von Trier clearly thinks he’s taking stars down a peg by casting them in these unglamorous roles. But he’s also depending on their glamour to get people into the theater. And the only thing that sustains you through “Dogville” are the moments of movie-star glamour that Nicole Kidman projects.
Von Trier has established an amazing cast for “Dogville.” In addition to Kidman and Bettany and Bacall, there’s Ben Gazzara, Philip Baker Hall, Patricia Clarkson, Chloë Sevigny, Harriet Andersson, Jeremy Davies, Zeljko Ivanek, Blair Brown and James Caan. And not one of them is any good. If one or two of these actors were bad, you might conclude they were having an off day. When a group this talented, who work in so many different styles, is bad in toto, it’s pretty clear that the director has no talent for directing actors.
And no interest either. It was a shock to see Harriet Andersson’s name in the end credits. This is one of the great actresses who made her mark in Ingmar Bergman films like “Monika” and “Smiles of a Summer Night” — and in “Dogville” she’s simply tossed away in the undistinguished part of an old lady who runs the town store. The part could have been played by anyone, but von Trier’s disdain is, I think, indicative of how little feel he has for films and for people. He’s willing to turn anyone, no matter how great, into one of his pawns.
Von Trier is a conscious provocateur. He wants to pick at scabs, and I’m betting that he hopes people detest his movies as much as love them. For a director like von Trier, the former response is much more valuable, proof that he has touched a nerve. But he’s the most humorless provocateur imaginable. With “Dogville,” it’s obvious that he wants to needle people into a response, and also obvious that if you are needled, you’ve taken his bait.
More than anything, that makes von Trier seem a director perfectly suited to this moment in the movies when ironic detachment is paramount. At nearly every stage of von Trier’s career, from Dogme to “Dogville,” there have been supporters ready to talk about him as a joker whose provocations are just provocations. Again and again in the reviews of “Dogville,” you can read that the movie is not meant to be taken literally, that it’s hard to take seriously, that what happens shouldn’t really affect us because the movie operates as a fable or a fairy tale. Essentially what that view says is that the people in “Dogville” are as representational as the buildings we are left to imagine, that they are just stand-ins, and that what happens to them doesn’t really matter as long as we get the point.
That way, I think, lies the end of any useful concept of art, the acceptance of any brutality as long as it’s in the service of an idea, the encouragement of the belief that, since nothing that happens in a movie is real, it need not be taken seriously, that the people on the screen are actors and we shouldn’t get worked up over how they or their characters are treated.
But the people we see in the closing credits of “Dogville” aren’t actors. They are the subjects of photographs from the likes of Dorothea Lange and the Danish photographer Jacob Holdt’s “American Pictures,” a montage of the poorest and most damaged and wretched of Americans from the Depression to the present. Over this montage we hear David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” Are we meant to take these people as mere representations as well? Are we meant to have any human or aesthetic reaction to the misery these pictures show or just take them as proof of the three hours of playacting that has preceded them?
If there’s any irony to “Dogville” it’s one that von Trier hasn’t intended. The movie is being acclaimed as a great indictment of the incipient fascism in American life, or a powerful statement about human venality. And yet it’s been made by a director who sees his job as that of a puppet master (“To give up control you have to trust somebody, and it’s easier for me to convince females to do this, for some reason”), who is willing to sacrifice the talent on-screen and the characters they portray to the greater glory of his “vision.” If von Trier’s supporters are really concerned with the themes of power and freedom and enslavement he pretends to address, should they really be kissing the backside of the fascist behind the camera?
“Oslo, August 31st” is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who’s facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It’s a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.
I saw “Oslo, August 31st” last year at Cannes and found it powerfully affecting, but I never would have guessed that this small movie from a small country would have touched an international nerve the way it apparently has. In the wake of a breathless profile of doctor-turned-actor Lie and his supermodel wife, Iselin Steiro, in the New York Times’ style magazine — which made the film sound rather like a fashion accessory, or a handbook to Oslo architecture — I almost feel the need to dial back expectations a little. Yes, there are drugs and dance clubs and traveling shots but, honest to Pete, we’re not talking stylish, scenic, lovable hipster romp here, people. While “Oslo, August 31st” definitely has the dynamism and street-level energy of, say, an early Godard picture, and may indeed leave you eager to visit Norway, it’s first and foremost an intimate tragedy about a likable young man who has wandered off the path of life into some very dark woods, and isn’t necessarily finding his way back.
As in Trier’s equally wonderful first film, the 2006 “Reprise” — I’m pretty much the president of the cult on that one — the director is interested in exploring the existential dark side of Scandinavian social democracy, with its largely homogeneous character and devotion to equal opportunity. When I talked to Trier about that film, which featured Lie and Espen Klouman-Hoiner as a pair of arrogant, doomed aspiring novelists, he observed that in Norway “there are a lot of people with a lot of choices. It sounds wonderful but there’s a darker side to that. Lots of people are not dealing with those choices very well.” Anders in “Oslo, August 31st” is something like the worst-case outcome for Lie’s character in “Reprise”; he’s a guy from a loving, middle-class family who’s got looks, health, intelligence and education, but for unknowable reasons finds himself on the edge of middle age as a penniless, unemployable, supposedly recovering junkie.
Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt adapted their central premise from “Le Feu Follet,” a 1930s novella about alcoholism by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but “Oslo, August 31st” could really be set anywhere at any time. It’s about the painful necessity of adapting to change, every single day that we’re alive, and if we identify with Anders even as we rage against his despair, it’s because every living human has at some point considered the possibility that it’s just too much and the struggle isn’t worth it. Anders is doing well in drug rehab, and has cautiously been granted a one-day leave to visit Oslo friends and apply for a job. But we can tell from the first moments of the film that his agenda is more complicated than that; Anders is in the position of a certain Danish prince, evaluating the reasons for being against the reasons for ceasing to be. (Trier, by the way, is cousin to another famous Dane, “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier, and one could argue their visions of the world are related as well.)
“Oslo, August 31st” runs a lean, mean 95 minutes, and not one second seems unimportant. Anders moves through the streets of Oslo looking for reasons to live and reasons to die, and even though we don’t know those streets as he does, we can tell that they’re haunted with memories and private agonies. The city is dotted with construction cranes and demolition sites, remorselessly regenerating itself while he appears to stand still. Indeed, Anders’ family home will soon be sold, and one of his personal missions is to pay a final visit. (The fluid, poetic cinematography is by Jakob Ihre.) He insults a prospective employer, refuses to make peace with his alienated sister, falls off the wagon — at first tentatively, and then enthusiastically — and leaves increasingly pathetic messages for his lost love, a woman who’s now in New York. (It’s the voice of Steiro, Lie’s real-life spouse.) On the other hand, he flirts with a younger girl who seems affectionate and charming, and who seems to open for him the promise of a new beginning. Their scene together at an Oslo swimming pool that has just closed for the season, so suggestive of both death and rebirth (and, literally, of baptism) is so gorgeous I wanted to cry. OK, I did cry, and that wasn’t the only time.
But none of that, not even the scenes where we feel that Anders is in imminent danger of taking his own life, are quite as painful as his visit with Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), an old friend and veteran of long literary discussions and booze-and-drug sessions. Thomas has a wife and a kid now, and his vices involve an occasional bottle of beer. In the manner of one-time bohemians who’ve more or less grown up, he’s kind of an ostentatious jerk about it — but then admits to Anders, when they’re alone, that he’s desperately unhappy. Perhaps that’s the “ordinary unhappiness” Freud wrote about, the unhappiness we all have to accept to get from the last day of August into the first day of September, in Oslo or anywhere else. But is that enough? Is that ever enough, for anybody? And can we forgive those who decide that it isn’t?
“Oslo, August 31st” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and June 1 at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
All the details of Wes Anderson’s rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance “Moonrise Kingdom,” taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they’re perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of “Khaki Scouts” headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” (I’m not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)
Yet, as usual with an Anderson movie, this meticulous and convincing detail does not add up to realism but — depending on your perspective — to something either much less or much more than that. Something that could be described, and has been, in all kinds of ways: As fantasy or fairytale; as a whimsical miniature under glass; as a diorama created by a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive child. All reasonable descriptions, at least up to a point — and I’m on board for all of it. I’ve pretty much been on Anderson’s wavelength from Day One — or at least from “Rushmore,” which isn’t quite Day One. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think all his movies work equally well, or that he doesn’t occasionally lapse into laziness or self-indulgence. (I’ll have to give “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” another chance one of these days, but I feel pretty confident that was a misstep.)
I understand why Anderson’s films drive some viewers nuts, in fact, and I would simply respond that it should be clear by now that his vision of cinema and the world is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste and that there’s no point sitting around hoping he’ll become more normal. But here’s what I reject completely: The idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson’s worlds — which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here — is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion. Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.
“Moonrise Kingdom” takes place at the tail-end of summer — that season which is more charged with a rueful sense of passage than any other. Its preteen lovers, Sam and Suzy (played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, respectively), most certainly aspire to the grand passions of Tristan and Isolde or Abelard and Heloise, and it’s entirely possible they’ve heard of them. They first met backstage during a performance of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” at the island of New Penzance’s only church, when Sam was in his Khaki Scout uniform and coonskin cap, and Suzy was wearing a bird costume. (The use of Britten, of all possible composers, as this film’s musical muse is wonderfully unlikely, and totally Andersonian.) After a hot and heavy epistolary romance, they conspire to run away together — as it happens (so we are told by on-screen narrator Bob Balaban), just three days before a major hurricane will hit New Penzance.
As irresistible as our young lovers are — Sam with his corncob pipe and camp-tested scouting skills, Suzy in her saddle shoes and with her dangerous pre-Lolita sexuality — this isn’t a movie about kids, and they are Potemkin protagonists. Against the certainty and clarity of the childhood world, we see the real heroes of New Penzance: Norton’s upright Scout Master Ward, who confesses his secret fears to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the depths of the night; Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp, the island’s only cop, who’s in love with Kara’s artsy, bespectacled mother, Laura (McDormand); Murray as the gentle, lawyerly Walt (Laura’s husband and Kara’s dad), who knows he is being cuckolded but can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. All these lonely people are portrayed with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity, right in the middle of an artificial construction that contains plenty of shtick. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Norton and Willis, in particular, be better than they are here.
Sam and Suzy’s tempestuous love affair, along with that looming act of God that’s boiling up out there in the Atlantic, will not merely bring all these people together but will give them an excuse to escape their everyday routine and their ingrained fears. In that sense, and in others too, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a deeply romantic film, perhaps the sweetest and most compassionate Anderson has ever made. What has evidently confused some viewers is the fact that it’s also an obsessively curated re-creation of an era that never quite existed, a meticulous storybook version of 1965 that’s more perfect than the original. In real life, Boy Scout tents of that era were made of canvas but were never yellow, and government social workers never wore Salvation Army-style uniforms, as Tilda Swinton’s officious character (whose only name appears to be “Social Services”) does here. And so on.
I suspect that people conflate the artificiality of Anderson’s movies with inauthenticity or insincerity (different things, to be sure) because his artificiality is obvious and worn on the surface, whereas the highly mannered films of, say, Martin Scorsese masquerade as realism. I’m not picking that example at random, by the way; Scorsese has identified Anderson as his favorite among younger American directors, I suspect because he sees a kindred spirit. The two men have very different aesthetics, but both are visionaries who see the world through a personal lens, and both are technical virtuosi concerned with managing every detail of their created universes. You’re free to prefer one director’s work to the other’s, of course, but “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are every bit as obsessed with style and production design as any Anderson film. (The cinematography in “Moonrise Kingdom” is by Robert D. Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action films. The production designer is Adam Stockhausen, the art director is Gerald Sullivan and the spectacular costumes are by Kasia Walicka-Maimone.)
To the extent that “Moonrise Kingdom” can be described as nostalgia, it isn’t personal nostalgia, since Anderson himself was not born until 1969. Very likely it’s an attempt to create a fantasy version of the lost world of his own parents. I wonder whether Scout Master Ward, when the magical summer of ’65 fades into memory, will get married, move to Texas and have a son. The island cabin of Walt and Laura feels like a creation out of a classic children’s novel, but it is imbued with the sadness of a failing adult marriage. In the third act, it feels like Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola get a little lost in plot shenanigans, and they introduce several extra characters (Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Swinton all show up in small roles) to little effect. But all of “Moonrise Kingdom” — from Sam’s miniature stolen canoe to the Benjamin Britten excerpts to Captain Sharp’s heartbreaking bachelor trailer home — is a labor of love, as pure and sweet as the lovelorn letters of its young runaways. Wes Anderson can fool some people, maybe, but he’s not fooling me.
“Moonrise Kingdom” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
It’s a general rule of thumb that a grown man doesn’t get a lot of support for knocking out a 10-year-old child’s teeth. But Yong Hyun Kim has won himself a few fans lately for doing just that.
Back on April 11, the 21-year-old Washington state man settled in with his girlfriend to enjoy “Titanic” in 3D — right in front of a boy known only in police documents as KJJ. What ensued led to a night in jail and a charge of second-degree assault.
According to the Associated Press, the boy, who was at the theater with three friends and his mother, says “they were watching the movie and talking when Kim told them to be quiet.” KJJ maintains that they settled down, but when he later whispered something to a companion, Kim “jumped over the seat, threw an iced drink at them and punched KJJ in the face.” He says Kim told him something like, “You know what, I paid a lot of money to see this movie.”
Kim, however, insists that the boys “were hitting him and his girlfriend with popcorn, running back and forth in the aisle and bumping him with their arms.” He says that when he confronted the group, “they started laughing at him,” provoking him to take a swing at the boy. “I got so mad that it just happened,” he told police, adding that he didn’t realize his tormentors were children. He now faces the possibility of up to nine months in jail. When police arrived at 10:40 p.m., they found the boy in the lobby “bleeding from the nose and missing a tooth.”
What really transpired that night is still under investigation. I do know that, as a parent, I would never take a group of 10 year olds out late on a school night to see Kate Winslet’s boobies. Nor would I, under any circumstances, let them talk through a movie, as KJJ himself admits he and his friends were doing. I’ve suffered through too many other families and that precise brand of self-centered behavior. And that’s why Kim’s assertion that a bunch of kids wouldn’t stop wrecking his movie-going experience has struck a powerful chord of recognition among moviegoers.
Among the online commenters horrified that an adult would physically assault a child instead of just getting a manager, there have been plenty of folks who seem to know exactly where the guy was coming from. On USA Today, commenters have called Kim “a hero” and even offered “to pay for the man’s defense.” The more level-headed commenters suggest he should have hit the parents instead. And on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s site, comments have been flooded by those who admit they’ve “wanted to do that” themselves and “understand the guy’s feeling behind it.”
As ticket prices skyrocket, the movie-going experience continues to deteriorate. If you’ve gone to a film lately – or for that matter, any public entertainment — you’ve likely experienced the astonishingly rude behavior of individuals who seem unaware that they’re not in their own living rooms. Texting. Talking. Kicking seats. It’s exasperating and sometimes outright experience-ruining. And we rarely get the satisfying experience I once had when a row of rowdy teens were talking and texting during the film and a patron with roughly the dimensions of the screen barreled over, leaned down and whispered something to the group. I don’t know what he said, but the kids all got up and left. When they did, there was a palpable exhalation of admiring relief in the theater. And when an Austin, Texas, woman was kicked out the Alamo Drafthouse last year for texting, the theater’s cheeky pride in her outrage promptly went viral.
It’s inexcusable to assault someone for being annoying or disruptive or even for laughing at you. Furthermore, Kim’s assertion that he couldn’t see how young the kids were – when he saw well enough to land a face punch — seems a little shaky. Don’t knock out little boys’ teeth. In fact, don’t knock out anybody’s if you can help it. If you applaud hitting kids, you’re probably a bad person. But the lesson here – whether you’re a child or a grownup — is pretty simple. If you don’t know how to behave in public and you don’t like losing teeth or going to jail, for God’s sake, just stick to Netflix.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don’t know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Mansome,” the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer “chick jobs and guy jobs.”
I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.
It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)
Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)
In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.
Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)
Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.
“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.
Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton in "Moonrise Kingdom" 
(Credit: iStockphoto/IBushuev) 
A still from "The Intouchables" 
Jack Passion in "Mansome" 
