Beyond the Multiplex

"Sleuth": Oh, that vicious and bitchy (and fa-a-abulous) Harold Pinter! Easily his best work since "La Cage"!
There's no way to explain the bizarre blend of high style and high camp that is the brand-new remake of Anthony Shaffer's hoary two-man stage puzzler "Sleuth," which has been reworked by screenwriter Harold Pinter, of all people, and director Kenneth Branagh (ditto). If you're the right age, this clever, funny and profoundly phony play was inflicted on you at some point, either in its numerous stage incarnations or in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's quasi-legendary 1972 film version with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. If you're not, well, I suppose this new version has got to stand on its own, and good luck with that. (The Mankiewicz film is not currently available on DVD, although you can find it used, at high prices.)

While it would be totally misguided to say there wasn't a homoerotic subtext to the original "Sleuth," Pinter and Branagh have apparently decided to turn the whole exercise -- in which a famous writer engages his wife's much younger lover in a series of dangerous schemes and games -- into a sadomasochistic intergenerational encounter. The wife that handsome Milo Tindle (Jude Law) is apparently boffing, and whom grizzled crime novelist Andrew Wyke (Caine) claims he wants to be rid of, never appears at all. And you could describe the running contest between Andrew and Milo as a series of rape-like violations, designed to determine which of them is the real man, and which of them the bitch. (Andrew's first exclamation is, "Well, I'll be buggered!" Milo responds, "Exactly.")

Caine, who himself played Milo in 1972, is of course wonderful as the faux-convivial, profoundly embittered Andrew, hiding his secret vulnerabilities behind the chilly gray-blue interior of the vast, technophiliac mansion where he receives Milo. And one could argue that Milo is the ultimate Jude Law character, stretching his lanky, androgynous fame from one extreme to the next. At some moments, he's a girlish and flirtatious boy-toy; at others, he's a thuggish London lad bent on satisfying his most primitive desires.

There are ideas galore in "Sleuth," far more of them than the movie can comfortably hold. Andrew's house is full of sinister security cameras and surveillance equipment, which the writer and director want us to see as, you know, metaphors for something. Almost every time either character opens his mouth, double entendres pour out. Long, long before we reach the point when Milo weepingly protests that he'd rather screw dogs or goats or boys than Andrew's wife, or when Andrew dons the missus' robe and jewelry, the film's homo-cryptic agenda -- which seems simultaneously pornographic and homophobic -- has become obvious.

"Sleuth" is well acted, and directed by Branagh with chilly, distant ingenuity. It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to. That goes some distance toward concealing that "Sleuth" is a horrible mismatch of writer and material, and that the story (if we must dignify this fevered paranoid fantasy with that term) is absolute nonsense. For five minutes I thought this movie was likely to be a coldhearted masterpiece, and then I reluctantly grasped that it possesses no level of psychological reality at all, unless you want to argue that these two cretinous closet-cases deserve to be trapped in the same universe forever, so self-conscious before the camera that they never quite get around to taking their clothes off.

"Sleuth" opens Oct. 12 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider national release to follow.

Fast forward: A haunting fable from the Mongolian steppes (and skyscrapers); how "King Corn" is killing us
Belgian director Peter Brosens and his American partner Jessica Woodworth have been making documentaries in Mongolia, on and off, since the mid-'90s, but nothing on their résumé prepares you for "Khadak," an audacious new narrative film that is surely one of the year's signature accomplishments in world cinema. For excellent reasons, we've grown used to the idea that people in the developing world should tell their own stories, but there is no hint of condescension or exoticism about "Khadak," which combines the strangeness of its Mongolian setting and story with a Western art-film vocabulary that suggests Andrei Tarkovsky, or even the great Soviet-era magical-realist Sergei Paradjanov.

Partly downbeat realism, partly social satire and partly pure dreamtime, "Khadak" tells the story of Bagi (Khayankhyarvaa Batzul), the young son of a nomadic family forced off the land by the Mongolian government after a plague allegedly spreads through their animals. Bagi is either an epileptic or an heir to his clan's traditional shamanic talents or both, but once trapped in a high-rise apartment building in a mining town, he becomes torn between a charismatic group of rock 'n' roll rebels and his increasingly apocalyptic visions. With its stunningly beautiful images of the stark, post-communist surroundings of modern Mongolia, "Khadak" dares to be nonlinear, poetic and mysterious, but without ever lapsing into cliché or obscurantism. A marvelously acted, brave and absorbing film. Catch it whenever and wherever you can. (Opens Oct. 12 at Cinema Village in New York, Oct. 19 at Facets Cinematheque in Chicago and Nov. 2 at Grand Illusion Cinema in Seattle, with more cities to follow.)

A deceptively intelligent new entry in the regular-Joe documentary genre, "King Corn" follows two recent Yale graduates as they "return" to the rural county in Iowa where (by coincidence) both of them have ancestral roots. Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis meet some distant relatives, but also decide to grow a single acre of corn, the Hawkeye State's signature crop, and then follow it as far into the food chain as they can. Cheney and Ellis are a virtually indistinguishable pair of post-fraternity fellows in backward Red Sox caps, but the movie they made with director (and Ellis' cousin) Aaron Woolf is a chilling one.

Propped up by irrational subsidies and massive doses of fertilizer and herbicide, Midwestern corn production reaches new highs almost every year. Most of the golden grain is not going to wholesome summertime dinners but rather into the production of cattle feed and high-fructose corn syrup for soft drinks and other sweetened products. Corn is ubiquitous in the American diet even if you think you're not eating it, and the deranged overproduction of corn instituted in the Nixon era has directly contributed to epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes. Thankfully, this information arrives via a graceful and frequently humorous film that captures the idiosyncrasies of its characters and never hectors. (Opens Oct. 12 at Cinema Village in New York, Oct. 19 in Boston and Washington, Oct. 26 in Los Angeles and Nov. 2 in San Francisco, with more cities to follow.)

Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)

Search terms:

Salon the Web

Salon Directory (browse by topic)