There are viewers -- American and otherwise, right wing and otherwise -- who will really hate "A Mighty Heart" for its perceived politics. Without remotely excusing the heinous crime committed by Daniel Pearl's kidnappers, Winterbottom and Orloff place it in context, specifically the shadowy context of Pakistan in 2002. In this telling, American diplomats watched as Pakistani security forces used, um, "harsh tactics" on people swept up in the Pearl investigation, some of whom were involved and some weren't.
In fact, Pearl's kidnappers were demanding the release of Guantánamo Bay detainees, and we can only watch ruefully as Colin Powell assures TV cameras that the prisoners in Cuba are being treated humanely and respectfully. Of course the U.S. government was not going to accede to those demands, nor should it have. But in an odd sense "A Mighty Heart" is a companion piece to Winterbottom's "Road to Guantánamo." As Mariane Pearl herself told a CNN interviewer after her husband's death, 10 other people had been murdered by terrorists in Pakistan during the same month (and none of them were foreigners). Every personal tragedy that captures our attention is a subset of a larger, more communal or global tragedy.
In addition to "A Mighty Heart," I've seen three other movies at Cannes that feature unsolved crimes and/or fruitless investigations. I don't know if this collective loss of faith in authority results from the Bush administration's Iraqi WMD hunt or some existential angst that's more atmospheric in nature, but it's striking. Most prominent of these is "No Country for Old Men," the latest sojourn into comedy-inflected noir (or noir-inflected comedy) from Joel and Ethan Coen, aging enfants terribles of the Amerindie scene.
If there's a favorite for the Palme d'Or among the competition films shown so far, it's probably the Coens' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel (second place, by a nose, goes to "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," a wrenching film about abortion in Ceausescu-era Romania). It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut, as a Terminator-esque hit man with a cattle-killing air gun.
There are some superficial similarities between "No Country for Old Men" and both "Fargo" and "Blood Simple," and it has been widely assumed that this film is in some sense a return to the Coens' roots as genre-film enthusiasts. Yes and no, but mostly no. For the first hour or so, all the elements of a classic crime-chase picture are in place. A likable, trailer-dwellin' good ol' boy named Llewellyn (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a whole bunch of dead drug dealers and a suitcase of money in the desert. Once he takes the money, of course, a grand fatalistic plot is set in motion, with both the decent, aging sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) and the sinister Anton Chigurh (Bardem) on his trail.
Readers of McCarthy's novel will not be surprised, of course, that conventional thriller expectations are defeated at almost every turn. Key plot developments are unexplained, characters' destinies remain incomplete, and several key events occur off-screen. (This film won't open in the United States until November, so I'm trying not to be too specific.) With this outstanding cast -- Jones is at his best, and Brolin is a revelation -- and impressively bleak photography, "No Country for Old Men" has the potential to be a breakout hit. On the other hand, American audiences are not known for tolerating genre thrillers that decompose, '70s style, into existential anomie. My gut feeling is that this ambitious experiment doesn't entirely work.
Still, every Coen film is tricky, and this one more than most; I want to see it again before reaching a final conclusion. I'm afraid that Gus Van Sant's "Paranoid Park" -- yet another film revolving around an unsolved crime -- is precisely what it appears to be on the surface, a visually lovely, semi-experimental riff on Dostoevski's "Crime and Punishment" that has almost no point of contact with actual human existence. (It premieres here late on Monday night.)
Van Sant's recent films (like "Elephant" and "Last Days") have trended toward visual and auditory sculpture and that's again true here, even though "Paranoid Park" has actors and lines and all that. (The actors were recruited on MySpace -- really! -- and the dialogue is minimal and deliberately repetitious.) Adapting Blake Nelson's young-adult novel about Alex (Gabe Nevins), a teenager plagued with guilt over a security guard's death near a skateboard park, Van Sant turns the story into a concatenation of echoing and repeating elements, skipping unpredictably backward and forward as Alex gradually tries to make sense of what has happened.
This is another film with great cinematography (it's by Christopher Doyle, who shot many of Wong Kar-wai's early movies), and Van Sant has always captured the rainy, temperate, urban-but-rural surroundings of Portland, Ore., as moody visual poetry. But his highly aestheticized and stylized depictions of teenage life sometimes seem as if they were shot through the wrong end of a telescope. Van Sant wants his brief, deadpan, underpopulated scenes -- some of them shot on 8 mm video, others with overlaid music so we don't hear the dialogue -- to feel more like real teen existence than the clichés of mainstream cinema. It's a worthy goal, but I'm afraid the actual effect is the opposite. How did these sweet kids get trapped in a middle-aged art film, and how can we get them out?
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Andrew O'Hehir is a senior writer for Salon.
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