Clint Eastwood is sorry. Sorry about those extras he shot dead in the Spanish desert for an Italian director. Sorry that Dirty Harry Callahan embodied the idea that we should just Kill All the Bad People. Even sorry for all the people he punched in the face while his ape buddy Clyde stood on the sidelines, raising the roof.
Or so it seems. Eastwood’s latest film, “Million Dollar Baby,” is a decent bet to win him Oscars for best picture and best director this Sunday. But it’s hard to shake the sense that the film, with its somber, unsparing portrayal of injury and suffering, is another in a series of efforts by Eastwood to make amends for his early career, when he became famous as the vengeful loner, the angel of violent retribution, the Man with a Gun. It’s an interpretation that Eastwood himself dismisses — “I’m not that haunted by my past,” he recently told Entertainment Weekly — but one increasingly common both among his (predominantly liberal) admirers in film criticism and his growing number of conservative detractors.
Eastwood is the rare artist who has gone from being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the left to being condemned as a fascist propagandist by the right. The former charge was leveled in 1971, when the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael described “Dirty Harry” as “fascist medievalism”; the latter, earlier this month, when Ted Baehr, the head of the Christian Film and Television Commission, declared “Million Dollar Baby” to be a “neo-Nazi movie.” The particulars of the accusations have little in common: Kael was objecting to “Dirty Harry’s” enthusiasm for vigilante justice, Baehr to “Million Dollar Baby’s” perceived support of euthanasia. But the two critiques are illustrative of the journey Eastwood has taken over the last 34 years, from conservative icon disparaged by much of the critical establishment to Hollywood statesman (and Academy favorite) widely vilified on the right.
The broad contours of this evolution are widely known: Eastwood’s fluke debut as an international star when Italian director Sergio Leone plucked him from a $700-per-episode stint on TV’s “Rawhide” for the revisionist western “Fistful of Dollars” and its sequels; his emergence in the 1970s and 1980s as a full-blown film icon, thanks to the “Dirty Harry” movies and a variety of other films in which he alternated between the roles of law-unto-himself gunfighter and law-unto-himself cop; and his dramatic transformation, beginning with 1991′s “Unforgiven,” into a critically acclaimed director of haunting, jaded films about the cost of violence both to its victims and its perpetrators.
Perhaps the clearest summary of Eastwood’s shifting political appeal can be found in two essays by conservative film critic Richard Grenier in the magazine Commentary. The first, published in 1984 and titled “The World’s Favorite Movie Star,” praised Eastwood lavishly for lacking “the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice, even rudimentary justice. This attitude has earned him, among some movie reviewers, a reaction I think it is only fair to call hatred.”
But a decade later the tables had turned, leading Grenier to rebuke the star in a second essay, titled “Clint Eastwood Goes PC.” In it, he noted his former praise for Eastwood and for “the role he [had] played throughout his career: the enforcer of law and justice,” before continuing, “But now all has changed. Today Eastwood is the darling of the critics. [He] has been on a spiritual voyage and is now reaping the rewards.” This analysis was based largely on “Unforgiven,” which Grenier described as “a full-scale, systematic act of contrition, a repudiation and dismantling of the whole legendary, masculine character type of which, for this generation, Eastwood himself had become the leading icon.” Though Grenier’s analysis may be more explicitly political than that of most other critics, his view that Eastwood’s latter films have been an apology for his earlier ones has become a common one, particularly in the wake of Eastwood’s last two films, “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby.”
But while it’s true that Eastwood’s work, as an actor and especially as a director, has espoused a vague political philosophy — and one that has evolved over time — it has never been nearly as programmatic as either his admirers or his detractors imagine. The films he made early in his career were never as “conservative” as their reputation, and even his most prominent revisionist works — “Unforgiven,” “Mystic River” and “Million Dollar Baby” — are not as “liberal” as theirs. Both the fascist medievalist of the 1970s and the neo-Nazi eugenicist of today have been largely the projections of his accusers’ own political nightmares.
There are any number of examples of liberal undercurrents embedded in Eastwood’s early work: the futility-of-war subtheme of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”; Josey Wales’ decision to forgo his (eminently justified) vengeance against the man who betrayed him to the Union in “The Outlaw Josey Wales”; the gender education imparted to Eastwood chauvinists by strong women in “The Enforcer,” “The Gauntlet,” “Tightrope,” etc. But no early film was as explicit a subversion of Eastwood’s vigilante image as “Dirty Harry’s” 1973 sequel, “Magnum Force.”
The film opens with the acquittal, on grounds of inadmissible evidence, of a San Francisco labor boss suspected of murdering a union reformer and his family. (The family is important, as a consistent Eastwood theme is the particular evil of those who harm women or children.) On his way home from the courthouse, the labor boss is killed. This is followed by the executions of several other top crime figures, including a pimp whom we’ve watched kill one of his girls by pouring drain cleaner down her throat. The killings, it turns out, are being committed by a squad of renegade cops on the force, cool, good-looking hotshots (among them a pre-”Hutch” David Soul, pre-”Otter” Tim Matheson and pre-Dan Tanna Robert Urich) not unlike younger versions of Eastwood himself. Unsurprisingly, they invite Harry to join them in their campaign to rid the streets of scum. Somewhat more surprisingly, he declines. (“Apparently you’ve misjudged me,” Eastwood tells Soul, in a line perhaps intended equally for his liberal critics.) In the end, he is forced to kill his young imitators, along with the superior (played by Hal Holbrook) who had been working with them.
Why is “Magnum Force,” with its explicit rebuke of vigilantism, so rarely cited as a film in which Eastwood began the deconstruction of his vigilante icon? One reason is that in subsequent films (including the remaining “Dirty Harry” sequels) Eastwood reverted to his vengeful, outside-the-law persona with little obvious alteration. But another likely factor is the feel of “Magnum Force.” In art as in politics — and certainly where the two intersect — our responses are often more attitudinal than philosophical. We respond to the tone and then interpret the underlying facts in a way that will be consistent with that initial reaction. And while the moral of “Magnum Force” may have been in clear and deliberate opposition to that of “Dirty Harry,” the atmospherics weren’t all that different. Once again, Clint is alone in the department. (No matter that this time it’s because his boss and fellow officers are fanatical vigilantes rather than criminal-coddling bureaucrats.) Once again, it ultimately comes down to him, the Good Man against the Bad Men, with no time for mercy or cowardice or playing by the rules.
Further evidence that Eastwood’s reputation as “the enforcer of law and justice” was as much a product of his movies’ attitude as of their politics can be found in the 1978 ape-buddy flick “Every Which Way but Loose.” Though hardly a “serious” film, it was Eastwood’s most successful movie till then, raking in an astounding $85 million. Eastwood plays Philo Beddoe, a bare-knuckles brawler who wears a cowboy hat, drives an old pickup, and listens to country music. Although most of the movie is devoted to his disputes with two cops and a biker gang, his real cultural foil is a snooty USC student who’s onscreen for less than two minutes early in the film — just long enough for her to describe the country-western mentality as “somewhere between moron and dull normal” and then be cut down to size by Beddoe. In one of the most successful examples of pre-”Passion of the Christ” politico-cultural marketing, the film’s distribution specifically targeted rural and small-town theaters in the South and West.
Once you get past the conservative cultural trappings, however, “Every Which Way but Loose” has nothing at all to do with meting out justice, upholding the law, or any of the other political tropes that were thrown Eastwood’s way at the time. Beddoe may be charming (and, like Eastwood himself, fond of animals), but he is essentially a miscreant — an unproductive member of society who picks fights constantly and very nearly at random, and almost always throws the first punch. Indeed, the reason for his ongoing difficulties with the two policemen is that he assaulted them in a bar without provocation. Had Beddoe been played by Jack Nicholson or Dennis Hopper, he would doubtless have been seen as exactly the kind of anarchistic free spirit that liberal audiences applauded and conservative ones reviled.
The dramatic reevaluation of Eastwood’s work over the last decade has similarly been driven at least as much by tone as by content. Take “Unforgiven,” the film in which Eastwood is generally considered to have fundamentally altered his approach to violence. If “Magnum Force” represented a radically different story told in a style similar to that of his previous ones, “Unforgiven” was just the opposite: a familiar storyline about a relentless avenger told in a different key, more tragic than heroic. Eastwood’s character, Will Munny, is a formerly heartless killer domesticated by the love of a good woman who has since passed away. In an effort to raise money for his two young children, he accepts a lucrative commission to kill two cowboys who had cut up the face of a prostitute. After he and his two partners (an old friend played by Morgan Freeman and a boastful youngster played by Jaimz Woolvett) arrive in the town where the job is to take place, Eastwood endures life-threatening illness, a savage beating by the town sheriff (Gene Hackman), and his partners’ discovery that they lack the stomach for killing. After his commission is completed, Eastwood learns that Freeman was caught on his way home and beaten to death by Hackman, and he wreaks a bloody vengeance on the town, killing the sheriff and several other men before mounting his horse and riding off.
As David Edelstein noted in a smart 2003 article in the New York Times, the concluding bloodbath makes “Unforgiven” at best an ambivalently anti-vigilantism film. (Indeed, the film’s last spoken line is Eastwood threatening the townsfolk, “You better bury [Freeman] right. You better not cut up nor otherwise harm no whores. Or I’ll come back and kill every one of you sons of bitches.”) Yes, it’s clear Eastwood knows that on some level what he has done is wrong, and that it will haunt him the way his earlier killings haunted him throughout the film. But his life goes on, and apparently not too unhappily — a postscript informs us that he’s rumored to have taken his children to San Francisco and prospered there. Moreover, Eastwood’s retribution isn’t presented as unambiguously evil. Freeman was a decent, gentle man and Hackman a sadistic monster. Finally, the lethal, commanding avenger that Eastwood has become by the film’s end is a vastly more imposing figure than the clumsy, tentative farmer he is at the beginning. In killing, he has rediscovered his true self. Was “Unforgiven” a deliberate subversion of Eastwood’s vigilante persona? Of course. But a “full-scale, systematic act of contrition, a repudiation and dismantling of the whole legendary, masculine character type,” as Grenier said? Hardly.
Eastwood went further with 2003′s “Mystic River,” tackling the question of certainty: Even if a crime has been committed that merits death, what happens if you kill the wrong person? (His mediocre 1999 capital-punishment film “True Crime” could be seen as a dry run for this subject.) “Mystic River” concerns three friends, played by Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon. As a boy, Robbins was abducted by pedophiles, who kept him for several days before he managed to escape; as an adult, he is “damaged goods,” shambling through life like a zombie. Penn, meanwhile, is a tough ex-con who owns a grocery store; Bacon, a cop.
One night, Penn’s beautiful teenage daughter is brutally murdered; that same night, Robbins comes home covered with blood, which he explains away with a series of shifting stories. Believing that Robbins killed his daughter, Penn ultimately executes him. But Robbins was not the daughter’s killer, and Penn must come to terms with the fact that he has killed not only a friend but also an innocent man. As with Will Munny in “Unforgiven,” it’s clear that this fatal error will weigh on Penn’s conscience in the years to come, though again it’s not entirely clear how heavily. Like Munny, Penn seems to have recovered a source of personal strength in his willingness to avenge — even wrongly — those he loves. (Penn’s wife, played by Laura Linney, certainly feels this way, telling him, “You’re a king. And a king knows what to do and does it, even when it’s hard.”)
Penn’s ambivalent response to the discovery that he has killed an innocent man is not the only way in which “Mystic River” deviates from a simple, anti-vigilantism message. The greater, though largely unexamined, issue is that Robbins is not completely “innocent.” While he may not have killed Penn’s daughter that night, he did commit murder: The blood on his shirt came from a pedophile whom he encountered in the street and beat to death. That murder is almost an afterthought in the film, however, a necessary plot device that is given remarkably little moral weight. It’s as if Eastwood is telling us that the killing of a pedophile doesn’t count. (And that’s if Robbins’ victim even is a pedophile: We get only a glimpse of the boy who is with him, but he is clearly well into his teens and could easily be of age.) “Mystic River” may be a melancholy meditation on the self-perpetuating cycle of violence. But, like “Unforgiven” before it, it’s far from an unequivocal condemnation of vigilante justice.
“Million Dollar Baby” seems to renounce retribution altogether, though it does so quietly. The film differs in subject matter from most of Eastwood’s work — there are no cops or criminals or cowboys — but in the end, it too is a film about the human cost of violence. (If you are still unaware of the film’s central plot twist, and you want to remain that way, stop reading now.)
Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) is a 33-year-old waitress who’s dreamed of becoming a boxer. She persuades a grizzled old trainer named Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) to take her on, and he turns her into a top fighter. When Swank gets her shot at a title fight, however, the triumphal sports movie takes an unexpected swerve: Hit by a dirty shot after the bell, Swank is permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Without hope of recovery, she attempts suicide before finally persuading Eastwood to help her die.
To some degree, “Million Dollar Baby” is still locked in Eastwood’s Manichaean world of good guys and bad guys: The boxer who cripples Swank is cartoonishly villainous, a former East German prostitute who is famously “the dirtiest boxer in the ring” and who deliberately hits Swank from behind long after the round has ended. But while Eastwood’s invocation of big-E “evil” is all too familiar, what’s new is that he shows no interest whatsoever in punishing that evil. No one jumps into the ring to attack the dirty fighter, or even takes the case up with the boxing commission. Having fulfilled her role, the villain vanishes from the movie. Back in the “Dirty Harry” days, Eastwood explained that his movies were about the rights of victims rather than the rights of criminals. But he rarely wasted much screen time on those victims; their stories of loss were little more than the rationale for his stories of vengeance. In his more recent films, such as “True Crime,” “Blood Work” and “Mystic River,” Eastwood has devoted more time to the suffering of the victims. With “Million Dollar Baby,” he focuses exclusively on it, essentially letting the perp walk. His character is a would-be healer, not a would-be avenger.
But Swank cannot be healed, and Eastwood eventually grants her plea to end her life. This has been read as a pro-euthanasia message in some quarters, but here again, the reality is somewhat more complicated. Eastwood’s boxing trainer, Frankie Dunn, is in many ways another iteration of Will Munny from “Unforgiven” (and, for that matter, of Sean Penn’s character in “Mystic River”). Like Munny, Dunn is filled with remorse for some past crime, though we never learn what it is, only that it has to do with a daughter who sends his letters back unopened. Like Munny, at the end of the film he contemplates an act that he knows will result in his being lost forever, with no hope of salvation. And like Munny, he moves away after committing the act, leaving behind his friends and disappearing into the realm of rumor (in this case, the rumor of a swampland diner rather than of the City by the Bay). The parallel is not exact, but it is striking. Yet the two films have been read in diametrically opposite ways: “Unforgiven” as a condemnation of Munny’s vengeance killing and “Million Dollar Baby” as an endorsement of Dunn’s mercy killing.
Both films, in other words, have been generally interpreted as having a “liberal” message, much as Eastwood’s films in the 1970s and 1980s were widely read as “conservative” even when they condemned war (“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”), denounced vigilantism (“Magnum Force”), disdained law and order (“Every Which Way but Loose”), or concluded on a note of forgiveness (“The Outlaw Josey Wales”). Do Eastwood’s recent films constitute an apology for his earlier ones? Perhaps. But he may not be the only one with apologies to make.
“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" 
