It all started with the battle of Cunaxa near Babylon in 401 B.C. If Prince Cyrus hadn’t challenged his brother, Artaxerxes II, for the Persian throne and hired 10,000 Greek mercenaries, the most intriguing new special edition DVD and the most hyped video game of 2005 and one of the most eagerly anticipated remakes of 2006 would never have happened.
“The Warriors,” Walter Hill’s 1979 fantasy about street gangs, has just been released on DVD with special commentary from Hill and the cast and crew. At the same time, Rockstar Games has issued “The Warriors” video game in PlayStation 2 and Xbox formats. And Grove Press is now shipping its reissue of Sol Yurick’s 1965 novel, “The Warriors,” which, as the cover says, is “The Basis of the Cult Classic Film.”
Yurick’s novel is the basis, but not the Ana-basis. Here’s the short form: Cyrus got himself killed, and his Greek mercenaries — the “Ten Thousand” of much classical lore — fought through 1,000 miles of Persian soldiers and barbarian tribes, each with its own mode of dress and special weapons, to the sea and safety. One of their generals, Xenophon, went back to Athens and wrote a book about it, “The Anabasis,” and from there it was pretty much a straight shot to pop culture immortality. Movies have often alluded to Xenophon, notably Sam Peckinpah’s 1976 “Cross of Iron,” with James Coburn, about a group of German soldiers trapped behind enemy lines on the Russian front.
“The Anabasis,” usually translated as “The March Upcountry” but also titled by some as “The Persian Expedition,” became an instant bestseller. In the early 1960s, a one-time employee of the New York Department of Welfare turned struggling novelist named Sol Yurick — trust me, this is all going to come together — submitted a manuscript to his publisher inspired by his firsthand experiences with what were then called juvenile delinquents. The book was about a single night in the life of a gang from Coney Island called the Dominators and its hair-raising adventure trying to return home on the subways after a gang meeting in the Bronx.
During breaks in the ordeal, one of Yurick’s characters, a kid with a literary bent, reads from a Classics Illustrated comic (the original graphic novels) about Greek warriors fighting their way through enemy territory to safety and sees a heroic reflection of his own sordid life. The book depicted in the comic is never named, but it is, of course, “The Anabasis” — a book that was never included in the Classics Illustrated series but which, as Yurick comments in the introduction for the current edition of his novel, “would have made a great comic book.”
Yurick is right — it would have made a great comic book, and finally it did. The comic book was Hill’s movie, shot in about 60 days on various New York locations with virtually unknown actors and on a shoestring budget. (Only one scene, a spectacular fight in a subway station men’s room, was shot on set.) The film follows the outline of the book, but quickly establishes its own identity. Andrew Laszlo’s cinematography transforms New York into a nightmarish world of neon night-glo colors, reflected off shiny wet pavement in what looks like a demented neoimpressionist vision. Barry DeVorzon’s synthesizer theme seems to throb to the beat the gang members move with — literally, in the opening sequence, when we see the garishly clad gangs marching through the subways on the way to the meeting.
Like the ancient Persian tribes, the gangs — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and some, like the Warriors, racially mixed — have their own signature outfits and weapons. The Boppers’ nighttime outfits (some gangs dress up to go out for the evening) wear tan slacks, black shirts and metallic magenta vests with 1940s-style fedoras. The Savage Huns dress like Chinese prols; the Electric Illuminators wear bright yellow-gold silk jackets with their emblem emblazoned on the back. The Warriors (their name changed from the Dominators for the movie) are basic and stylish in their brown leather vests, colors on the back, no shirts. The Gramercy Riffs, a black gang, wear orange karate shirts. In one of the film’s bizarre little jokes, their weapon of choice is the hockey stick, surely the first and only time that so many black men have been seen carrying that piece of sporting equipment.
At least one gang, the Highhats, in black pants, long-sleeved red striped pullover shirts, suspenders, corpse-white makeup, and black top hats, reveals the influence of a source for the film version of “The Warriors” that has gone curiously unmentioned, Herbert Asbury’s highly fictionalized book about 19th century New York street thugs, “The Gangs of New York.” Much of the time the film seems less inspired by Yurick’s novel than by Asbury’s book. At times, “The Warriors,” the movie, is “Gangs of New York” on amphetamines.
Following Yurick’s plot, the Warriors go to the Bronx to the meeting called by the enigmatic leader of the biggest gang in the city. In one of the many classical allusions ingeniously inserted by Hill in the script, the gang leader’s name is Cyrus. His plan is simple: The gangs, if they maintain a truce, could unite and outnumber the city’s police by five to one. In short, led by a man of vision, they could rule the city. Cyrus (played by an unknown actor named Roger Hill, who died a few years after the movie was shot) enthralls the delegates (many fans of “The Warriors” can recite his entire speech by heart). But Cyrus is murdered for kicks by Luther, the leader of the Rogues, a gang that rides around in a graffiti-strewn hearse. Luther is played by veteran Walter Hill character actor David Patrick Kelly, who looks like the illegitimate son of Cagney’s Cody Jarrett in “White Heat.”
Kelly’s exuberance at the chaos he causes is infectious. “What are you so happy about?” snarls one of the Rogues. “I’m havin’ a good time!” Kelly shrieks in reply. Late in the movie, when asked why he did it, Kelly responds with my all-time favorite explanation for psychotic behavior: “No reason. I just like doin’ things like that.” The Warriors are blamed for the murder, and after dodging police nightsticks in the ensuing riot, must fight their way back to Coney Island, facing annihilation from different gangs at every subway stop. And — horror of horrors — all the trains in this movie are locals. Scorned and reviled by the mainstream media upon its release, “The Warriors” picked up such unlikely fans as Pauline Kael (whose rave review in the New Yorker stunned the magazine’s more genteel-minded readers) and, a few months after its release, President Ronald Reagan (who phoned the film’s lead actor, Michael Beck, to tell him that he had screened the movie at Camp David and enjoyed it immensely).
In the 26 years since its release, the film has evolved into a cult phenomenon, the subject of international Web sites, including the U.K.-based Warriors Movie Site (which, according to its Webmaster, Gareth Jones, gets nearly 50,000 hits a month) and an Italian site dedicated to “I Guerrieri della Notte.” DeVorzon’s soundtrack has been reissued, and, in addition to the video game, there is a set of action figures. You can even purchase a replica of the Warriors’ vest. One of the film’s gangs, the Baseball Furies, itself inspired partly by the band Kiss, has spawned a punk band of the same name. In the Diplomats’ recent video “Crunk Musik,” the group members appear in Furies’ face paint.
With the possible exception of “Scarface,” no film has been quoted so many times by hip-hop artists, from Ol’ Dirty Bastard on “Enter the 36 Chambers” to Craig Mack’s “Flava in Your Ear (Remix),” in which Puff Daddy, at the beginning of the clip, reprises the film’s best known lines: To the beat of clinking bottles, he imitates the wail of the movie’s psychotic Luther: “War-ri-ors, come out to pla-ay. War-ri-ors, come out to plaa-ay!” There are reports that the line has now worked its way into the patter of NBA players; Commissioner David Stern, who recently launched a campaign to clean up the league’s image, would probably not be amused to know the source of the chant.
Let’s hope Stern doesn’t remember some of the editorials from 1979 written by conservative spokesmen, particularly the late Max Rafferty, a nationally syndicated columnist who wrote that “The Warriors” was “violence purely for the sake of violence,” citing several reports — some real, some exaggerated — inspired by the gang violence in the film.
Conservatives — though, surprisingly, not Ronald Reagan — weren’t the only ones up in arms. “The Warriors” was greeted by the critical establishment as if a cold, wet corpse had been dumped on its doorstep. The New York Times and the Village Voice, which supposedly represent both the establishment and alternative ends of the critical spectrum, were, on this occasion, in agreement: They hated it. A review from Desmond Ryan of the Philadelphia Inquirer was typical of responses from daily papers: “‘The Warriors,’ a sickening film that glorifies gang warfare and brutal violence … has left a bloody trail of real-life mayhem and death in its wake … In hundreds of cities across the U.S., the depraved violence shown in this movie has been blamed for inciting young people to fight, rampage and kill, in obvious imitation of the hoodlum gang members in ‘The Warriors.’”
Ryan’s near-hysteria wasn’t entirely based on urban legend. There were numerous reports of violence around the country where the film was showing, though the most publicized incident was the murder of a 16-year-old boy in Dorchester, Mass.; the accused killer, a gang member, was later proved to have been drunk and asleep while the movie was showing. Paramount, perhaps in reaction to the negative publicity, quickly yanked the original posters, which featured a hoard of gang members from the movie with the legend, “These are the armies of the night” — take that, Norman Mailer. “They are 100,000 strong. They outnumber the cops five to one. They could run New York City.” Some theater owners refused to display the poster; the fantasy hit too close to home.
Kael’s review in the March 5, 1979, New Yorker surprised serious moviegoers by turning the principal argument against the film on its head. Essentially she admitted that the primary criticism of the film was true: “The Warriors” does glorify violence, and aren’t we lucky that it does? And isn’t the glorification of ugly reality what movies are all about?
“The Warriors,” she wrote, “is a real moviemaker’s movie: it has in visual terms [emphasis Kael's] the kind of impact that ‘Rock Around the Clock’ did behind the titles of ‘Blackboard Jungle.’ ‘The Warriors’ is like visual rock … The physical action is so stylized that it has a wild cartoon kick to it, like ‘Yojimbo’ and the best Kung-Fu movies. The fighting is so exhilaratingly visceral, and so contrapuntal in the Oriental-martial-art-dancing manner that you have no thought of pain or gore.”
Sparked by Kael’s review, a fascinating small body of criticism has collected around “The Warriors.” In his book “The Blood Poets: A Cinema of Savagery, 1958-1989,” film critic Jake Horsley praised the film for being “one of the first American movies to come up with a genuine comic book nihilism, to sell us the sheer joy of destruction.” Horsley gets to the heart of the film’s appeal: “These Warriors aren’t rebels, exactly, and if they’re wild, it’s not for any particular reason (they were simply born that way); they’re not kicking against anything, they’re just kicking.”
For newcomers, the special edition DVD explains the near-fanaticism that “The Warriors” has inspired. Laszlo’s color photography, drab in recent TV broadcasts (like the current TBS showings) is once again vivid and lurid, and the sound is so sharp you can hear a baseball bat slither through the palm of a Fury. Hill (who once told an interviewer he had aspirations of being a comic book illustrator) returns to the Classics Illustrated conceit, framing the opening scene in animated panels. He also freezes the final frame of some scenes and segues into the next, underlining the point that what follows is not to be mistaken for realism.
Despite the plethora of articles to the contrary, “The Warriors” doesn’t have much to do with real street gangs, then or now. For that matter, despite its legendary status as the ultimate New York street gang movie, it really doesn’t have that much to do with New York. Hill, a Californian, knew little about the city and thus was able to re-create it with a sense of fantasy where a New York filmmaker, say, the Martin Scorsese of “Mean Streets,” would have gone for realism. Hill didn’t see New York as New York but as a giant movie set. The Warriors go to a gang meeting supposedly in the North Bronx (actually shot in Riverside Park); the cops arrive, a riot ensues, and the Warriors flee to a nearby Bronx cemetery (actually Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn); the nerve center station at Union Square was really the cavernous Hoyt and Schermerhorn Street station in downtown Brooklyn. “The Warriors” is a feast of visual guessing games for long-time New Yorkers.
For all its effective use of location shots, though, “The Warriors” seems to take place not in a real city but in some weird alternative universe populated almost entirely by street gangs and cops. There probably are no more than two dozen average citizens in the entire film, all of them glimpsed from a ghostly distance. The streets of this New York are not merely devoid of traffic, but of parked cars (except as needed to toss a Molotov cocktail at). In Yurick’s novel a man yells at the gang, “You punks think you own the street!” In Hill’s movie, the gangs own all the streets — or at least they do at night.
Strangely, there are almost no guns, which means, as it did in “The Road Warrior,” that the gangs must come up with more ingenious weapons with which to create mayhem. And the unstated reason there are no guns points to the biggest difference between the real New York of 1979 and the New York of “The Warriors”: In the latter there are no drugs. That seems like a comforting thought until you realize that this is a world capable of nurturing such characters without the use of artificial stimulants. In one of the many weird visual details that dot the film, a pinball machine stands in a subway station. In the real Brooklyn, that pinball machine would stand as much chance of surviving a night as “The Warriors” had of winning an Academy Award.
There’s something else about the film that’s quickly apparent to first-time viewers. Frightening as the Warriors’ world is, the violence isn’t a fraction as graphic as even routine teen-action movies of the present day. In fact, the entire movie doesn’t contain as much graphic violence as the first 15 minutes of Rockstar’s “Warriors” video game, which places the film’s characters in new scenarios.
The most puzzling aspect of “The Warriors” is why none of its actors ever attained stardom. James Remar (as ultra-macho Ajax) and David Patrick Kelly became familiar faces in character parts (both were featured in Hill’s Nick Nolte-Eddie Murphy vehicle, “48 Hours”). Lynne Thigpen, the underground deejay who tips off the various gangs to the Warriors’ progress, died two years ago after a successful career on stage and film, and as one of the stars of the TV show “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” Marcelino Sanchez, who played Rembrandt, died of cancer in 1986. And Tom McKitterick, who played Cowboy, has never been tracked down even by the film’s ardent fans. The only actor in “The Warriors” to reach something approaching fame is Mercedes Ruehl, who appeared in a short but effective bit as a plainclothes policewoman.
But the leads, Michael Beck as the War Chief, Swan, and Deborah Van Valkenburgh as Merci, a street girl who takes up with the Warriors, should have been stars. Van Valkenburgh, who bore a striking resemblance to Angelina Jolie, was a New York stage actress when she was cast in “The Warriors” and later costarred with Ted Knight on a TV sitcom, “Too Close for Comfort.” Beck, as chiseled and enigmatic as a young Viggo Mortensen, had the misfortune to be cast, in his next film, with Olivia Newton John in the musical “Xanadu” and afterward appeared mostly in television roles. The only explanation I can offer for the failure of Beck and Van Valkenburgh to land more starring parts is the stigma that was attached to the film for years after its release.
Next year, “The Warriors’” strange story will get another chapter with Tony Scott’s new film version set in Los Angeles (how Scott can pull it off without subways will be interesting to see). Will the new film be greeted with the same horror and derision as the original? Or will a legion of critics step forward and denounce the remake in the name of a film that had so few champions on its release? We’ll see. But, meanwhile, it’s reassuring to find that on watching it again after all these years “The Warriors” remains a bona fide guilty pleasure, still not everyone’s cup of tea.
There are those who will simply never get it. For instance, Sol Yurick, who, in the introduction to the reprint of his novel, writes that, “on the whole, the movie was trashy, although beautifully filmed.” Correct. But, “I looked for my novel on the screen. I found a skeleton of it intact. Its revolutionary content was missing.”
“What is astonishing to me,” he says, “is the durability of the movie … I have to admit that I didn’t and still don’t understand the phenomenon … ‘The Warriors’ is not the best of my books.” The appeal of the film, I think, is that it dumps the sociopolitical baggage of the lives of street gangs and the conditions that produce them. Yurick meant for the title of his book to be taken ironically; Hill’s movie takes the title literally. Hill really has no interest in the psychology of street gangs (and what psychologist could explain Kelly’s Luther?). The movie tells you what the kid reading the Classics Illustrated comic understood even if his creator didn’t, namely, that anyone’s life, no matter how squalid, can include an element of heroism.
“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.
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" 
