Inside the dominant institution of our age: Building a better “Corporation”
Why is every important independent film of 2004 (so far) a social or political documentary? This year seems to mark some kind of golden age for what a friend of mine used to call “spinach movies.” Of course there’s a ripple effect from the prodigious success of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which, despite the caviling of skeptics, looks like it may be that rare work of pop culture that actually influences politics. But leave Moore out of the equation and you’ve still got Jehane Noujaim’s “Control Room,” Morgan Spurlock’s “Super Size Me,” Ramona S. Diaz’s “Imelda” (reviewed below), Chris Smith and company’s prankish “The Yes Men” and a forthcoming biopic of historian and lefty cult hero Howard Zinn. So something big — yes, bigger even than Michael Moore’s outsized if huggable ego — is going on here.
Jennifer Abbott, co-director of “The Corporation,” an ambitious new Canadian film that seeks to demystify the dominant institution of our age, sees a mini-rebellion in progress among information consumers.
“People are craving substance,” she says. “A lot of people feel alienated from mainstream media and fiction films, Hollywood films. They’re craving something deeper, something that gives them answers to some of the questions they’re asking. At least, I hope that’s why it’s happening.”
Mark Achbar, her co-director (and previously the co-director of campus cult hit “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media”), chimes in: “The longer you try to hold down this kind of critical perspective, or push it out of the mainstream — it’s like trying to squeeze Jell-O; it’s going to ooze out between your fingers no matter what. The theatrical releases of these films prove that people are willing to pay money to see their values reflected in a legitimizing package.”
Abbott and Achbar, along with Joel Bakan, a professor of law at the University of British Columbia (who wrote both the film script and the accompanying book just published by the Free Press), stopped by Salon’s New York office this week to chat about “The Corporation.” Their film is long and dense, and may lack the balls-out entertainment value of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but it’s an ingenious and startling work that explores a subject few of us understand well. In an election year when the balance between corporate power and democracy seems near a tipping point, it’s every bit as crucial as Moore’s movie. (Now playing in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Calif., Sacramento, Calif., and several other West Coast cities, “The Corporation” will reach much of the heartland by September.)
In a sometimes vertiginous collage of file footage, voice-over narration and interviews with critics (such as Chomsky and Moore) and corporate insiders alike, “The Corporation” tries to untangle the ideology behind a social institution that is often believed to possess no ideology at all. There’s no question this is a radical and didactic work, and its premise at first may seem outlandish: The modern corporation, which has been legally endowed with many of the rights and conditions of personhood, is in fact a psychopathic personality, constitutionally incapable of doing good or caring about others. But the longer you sit and watch the movie, the more irresistible the conclusion becomes.
As “The Corporation” demonstrates, although the concept of legal personhood for corporate entities stretches back to the dawn of the Industrial Age (and in fact, says Bakan, to the Roman Empire), the dominant social role assumed by the 20th century corporation came about largely by accident. When the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was passed after the Civil War, it was intended to guarantee the civil rights of newly freed slaves. But sharp-eyed lawyers began to wonder whether it also guaranteed rights (such as freedom of speech and due process) to the artificial person known as the corporation.
The courts ultimately agreed, setting the stage for a day when corporations would become so powerful that they virtually dominate the society around them, controlling public philosophy and discourse to a significant degree. That day, Bakan and company argue, is today.
By far the most convincing aspect of “The Corporation” is that much of its critique comes from current and former corporate insiders, not merely from sideline commentators or anti-corporate activists. Former Goodyear Tire CEO Sam Gibara explains how frustrating it was to run a major corporation and discover that his urge to change the way Goodyear did business was at odds with his mandate to serve shareholder interests above all else. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the avuncular head of Royal Dutch Shell, meets a party of Earth First! protesters at his English country house with tea and lunch. Even Milton Friedman, the Reagan-era guru of free-market economics, agrees that corporations cannot be relied upon to be socially responsible without government regulation.
“It was very important to portray corporate insiders in their complexity and diversity,” says Abbott. “That was the strategy we used so that corporate insiders wouldn’t say, ‘No, I’m not engaging with these issues, I’m not seeing this film.’ So many corporate insiders have seen the film and really loved the film. Not all, but those that have this thing inside them where they know something is wrong.”
Most striking is Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial carpeting. A buttoned-down Southerner with a velvet-toned Jimmy Carter accent and the manner of a small-town Presbyterian minister, Anderson has become one of the corporate world’s leading apostates. He dares to suggest that if people like him cannot make their businesses environmentally sustainable, they ought not to be in business. He becomes the movie’s implausible, almost Christ-like hero, addressing a convention of North Carolina business leaders as “my fellow plunderers” and gently suggesting that at some point in the future executives who have created as much pollution as he has will be sent to prison.
Anderson proves to be an irresistible centerpiece for the film, but Bakan remains privately skeptical about the long-term viability of his vision. “Ray Anderson has made money by being sustainable,” Bakan says. “He’s a very smart man, a very driven man, a very committed man. He’s using recycling now. Rather than selling carpet and saying, ‘That’s it,’ he effectively leases the product and then recycles it. He saves a lot of money on raw materials — he doesn’t have to buy them anymore — and on waste disposal. He’s actually become more profitable by becoming more sustainable. Now the question of how far he can go with that, or how far that can be a model in general, is a real question.”
When Bakan asked Goodyear’s Gibara if he could imagine a similar model in the tire business — taking responsibility for a potentially toxic product from manufacture to disposal — the former exec just laughed at him.
“I take my hat off to the Ray Andersons of the world,” Bakan goes on, “people who are embedded within the corporate structure and trying to push the envelope. But it’s important to remember that there’s always an envelope. Mark Moody-Stuart [of Shell] can’t get up at an annual meeting and say, ‘You know, I’m an environmentalist. So we’re going to stop drilling in Nigeria even though we’re reaping huge profits. And I’m going to take money out of the shareholders’ pockets in order to serve my environmental vision.’ It would be illegal. He’d get his ass sued. That’s what the best-interests principle of the corporation is all about. He does not have authority to act in a way that does not benefit the shareholders. Personally, he could be a member of Earth First!, you know? It doesn’t matter.”
As preposterous as Bakan’s psychopath diagnosis may sound, the central point of “The Corporation” is difficult to argue with. Corporations have been designed to be avaricious and self-serving; why should we be surprised if, when we leave them in charge of the world, they loot the place? “The fundamental diagnostic idea of a psychopath,” Bakan says, “is a person who’s incapable of being concerned about others. In the corporation, we have created an institution that is deliberately programmed, legally, to be incapable of being concerned about others. That’s a fact. Any corporate attorney will tell you that: Yes, of course, corporations have to serve their own self-interest even if it means exploiting or harming others. I challenge anybody to tell me why the metaphor is inaccurate.”
From the Philippines with love: “Imelda”
Former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos has been pursuing filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz through the courts, trying to halt screenings of Diaz’s hilarious and tragic documentary “Imelda” (which has been playing to packed houses at New York’s Film Forum and should reach you soon). Imelda — she of the 6,000 or 200 pairs of shoes, depending on whom you believe — shouldn’t bother. Many Filipinos may never forgive her for her role in the corrupt and rapacious regime of her late husband, Ferdinand, nor should they. But filmgoers may well see Imelda, in her self-appointed quest to bring love and beauty to the world, as a self-deluded heroine in the mode of Blanche DuBois. Alternately pathetic, charismatic, strikingly intelligent, hard as tempered steel and (seemingly) diagnosably insane, she’s certainly a figure you can’t take your eyes off.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine what Marcos objects to — she granted Diaz extraordinary access to herself, her family and what remains of her once-grand retinue. The film is remarkably evenhanded in its treatment of Imelda’s notorious excesses, and grants her ample time to expound on her increasingly dotty theories of cosmology, cosmetology and modern romance. (I cannot possibly summarize Imelda’s grand spiritual theory; suffice it to say that the tree in the primordial Garden is related to the zeroes and ones of digital code, and the serpent’s apple is — yes! — an Apple.)
In Imelda’s mind, at least, her marriage as a teen beauty queen to an up-and-coming politician was a love match, not a merger of two influential families that created a dynasty in the newly independent postwar Philippines. Furthermore, it was her beauty and charm, her basic humility and goodness, that made her the confidante and dance partner of Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Qaddafi and Henry Kissinger, or drew Hollywood celebs by the planeload to her yacht parties. (Watch this movie and you will see George Hamilton, in a navy blazer and white slacks, crooning, “I can’t give you anything but love/ Imelda”!) It wasn’t, say, her behind-the-throne position of power in a nation uniquely poised between West and East, between Asia and America.
The thing is, as with so many people completely convinced of their own specialness, Imelda may be partly right. Don’t misunderstand me here. Consciously or not, Imelda Marcos played a key role in a dictatorship that committed unpardonable crimes, and she appears to lie to herself about that fact to this day. Sure, some of the Filipino public still worships her, but then, Hitler and Stalin (and, more to the point, Eva Perón) still have followers who weep over their graves too. But the great service Diaz has done for posterity is to create a portrait of Imelda that captures her undeniable appeal — her confidence, her clarity of purpose, her relentless conviction that tomorrow will be a sunny day — as well as her repugnant qualities. No study of despotism, anybody’s despotism, is complete without both.
“Father and Son”: I dream of Russia
Even amid the onslaught of documentaries, we still need impenetrable art movies to remind us of the pain of existence, yes? Yes, absolutely. But do they have to be this impenetrable?
I thoroughly enjoyed “Father and Son,” the new film from “Russian Ark” director Alexander Sokurov. I have no idea, however, whether I liked it for the right reasons, or whether anyone else is likely to agree. It’s a stunningly beautiful set of semi-mythic tableaux, set partly on a rooftop soundstage that looks like a schoolboy’s fantasy landscape, partly in the real city of Lisbon, Portugal, and partly in a set of never-explained dream sequences. These elements appear to add up to a meditation on the quality of a father’s love for his son and vice versa, but I’m really only guessing. One thing is for sure: This is the most homoerotic film I’ve ever seen that didn’t have any overt homosexuality in it (although Sokurov, apparently, has angrily rejected this interpretation).
A sequel of sorts to Sokurov’s 1997 “Mother and Son” (which I haven’t seen), this film begins with a fuzzy, golden-lit close-up of two entangled male bodies, with the perspective of the shot so tight we can’t tell who’s who or what is going on. It sure looks like sex, but in fact the stonily handsome Father (Andrei Shchetinin) is comforting his teenage Son (Alexei Nejmyshev) after what appears to be a bad dream. These two drift through the rest of the film like a couple of hunky cologne models, exchanging intimacies whose significance we can’t grasp, bemoaning the absent women in their lives, harassing the friends who show up and inevitably begin the process of pulling them apart.
This entire movie — blessedly, it’s pretty short — is like the languorous coda to a longer film by somebody like Tarkovsky or Bergman, or for that matter like the last scene of one of Chekhov’s plays. The great drama has occurred, love has arisen and been dashed, the dreams of youth have been partly and incompletely replaced by the wisdom of age. Now comes the period when we can’t quite sleep, when we stay up late drinking, when we exchange confidences that would make no sense in any other context. That isn’t much of a story, and by normal standards it ain’t much of a movie either. But it sure makes for a mood, and some devastatingly pretty pictures. Sometimes, maybe, that’s all we need.
Truth, lies and “Control Room”
Last weekend, when it opened at New York’s Film Forum, Jehane Noujaim’s documentary “Control Room” sold out every seat at every screening, breaking the legendary Manhattan cinema venue’s single-screen box-office record. This might not directly reflect the film’s merits, although “Control Room” is a surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work. Rather, these packed houses for a documentary about an Arab TV channel speak to the intense public hunger (at least in some quarters of our society) for alternate sources of information about what the hell happened in Iraq over the last year and a half, and for ways of thinking about it that don’t spring from prejudice or pure propaganda. (Cough-cough-New York Times-cough-cough-cough.)
Improbable as it seems, “Control Room” looks like the season’s smash documentary, at least until Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein get their act together and figure out who’s going to distribute Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Noujaim, an Arab-American woman who grew up shuttling between Egypt and the United States, spent the months surrounding the “major combat operations” in Doha, Qatar, traveling the 20 miles back and forth from the studios of Al-Jazeera, the semi-notorious Arabic-language news channel, to CentCom, the complex where the U.S. military dispensed approved information to the world press. What makes the movie so good is the fact that what she sees is never precisely what you expect. Sure, Noujaim is clearly more sympathetic to Al-Jazeera than, say, Donald Rumsfeld is (the defense secretary’s live-from-Mars press conferences serve here as a kind of dark comic relief), but you never get the feeling she’s pursuing some simplistic Arabs-good, Americans-bad story line.
In fact, if anything characterizes the protagonists who gradually emerge from the stew of names and faces in “Control Room,” it’s how complicated and conflicted they all are. Hassan Ibrahim, the cuddly-bear ex-BBC reporter who is Al-Jazeera’s main man at CentCom, speaks contemptuously of the cowardice and conspiratorial thinking of the Arab world, and says he believes the U.S. Constitution and the American people will ultimately restrain the Bush administration’s imperialist urges. Senior producer Samir Khader, a sad-sack middle-aged chain smoker with a bad Rudy Giuliani combover, seems like more of a pro-Arab ideologue — until he announces that if Fox News were to offer him a job, he’d take it. (Anything to get his kids into American universities and trade “the Arab nightmare for the American dream.”)
In Noujaim’s portrait, Al-Jazeera’s correspondents seem genuinely divided between their commitment to Arab nationalism (albeit an idealistic, democratically minded version of it) and the so-called objectivity demanded by news reporting. One young female Al-Jazeera producer finds herself close to tears at seeing American tanks in the streets of Baghdad. “Where is the Republican Guard? Where is the Iraqi army?” she exclaims in disbelief. “They must be somewhere.” Yet the CentCom correspondents from CNN, MSNBC and Fox are not much closer to the journalistic ideal of impartiality, Noujaim suggests. We watch as they stand around and cheer the semi-staged toppling of the Saddam statue, or obsequiously thank a military spokesman for providing details (subsequently discredited, of course) of the Jessica Lynch rescue.
If Noujaim does have an agenda, it may have to do with debunking the conventions of objectivity and absolute truth to which mainstream journalism still pays lip service. She comes from the cinéma-vérité tradition of D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus (she co-directed “Startup.com” with Hegedus). Although that documentary style is obsessively interested in depicting reality with as little directorial interference as possible, that’s quite different from offering some unitary version of the truth. The more you watch “Control Room” the less certain you feel that you know what really happened during the invasion of Iraq; the one thing you do feel sure of is that television viewers on different sides of the conflict saw different wars. When one Al-Jazeera producer — a woman who wears Western-style clothing and speaks English with a distinctly North American accent — tries to explain to an airhead U.S. TV reporter that journalistic objectivity is a kind of “mirage,” it’s a thoroughly confusing moment: Someone from the Arab world, so notorious for its despotism and intolerance, is lecturing an emissary of Thomas Jefferson’s homeland on the value of unfettered freedom of expression. (And is right to do so.)
Amid the chaos of “Control Room,” a story emerges that is at once tragic and hopeful. When an Al-Jazeera reporter is killed by U.S. forces in Baghdad, in an incident that has never been adequately explained, CentCom journalists from all parts of the world come together for a heartrending memorial service that makes you feel the profession may still have a mission. Unlikelier still is the friendship that gradually develops between the wisecracking, cynical Ibrahim and Lt. Josh Rushing, the boyish U.S. Army officer who ladles out official spin to the press corps. Gradually, the inherent mutual mistrust of their official capacities gives way to an unmistakable warmth, and the avuncular Arab begins to see the young lieutenant as a sweet, curious and gentle young man (who experiences a remarkable epiphany I won’t give away). By the end of the film, Ibrahim has invited Rushing to join him and his wife for dinner — in Jerusalem. Now that sounds like a movie.
Reeling around: “Twentynine Palms,” “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring,” “People Say I’m Crazy”
Beyond the Multiplex has been on hiatus for the last month or so (thanks to the two newborn art-film geeks currently slumbering on the couch at BTM world headquarters), so I never got a chance to weigh in on the two short-lived movie controversies of the season, Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” and Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms.” Oh, darn!
What’s striking is how quickly both of those movies disappeared, meaning that nobody cares what I think. For the record, “Twentynine Palms” represents a familiar pattern we’ll call the Zabriskie Point Complex, when some art-damaged Euro filmmaker comes to America, gets seduced by the grandeur of the Southwestern desert, and forgets that movies need something more than empty space. It does get credit for combining Wim Wenders’ “The State of Things” and Wes Craven’s “The Hills Have Eyes,” something that hadn’t been done before. I still haven’t seen “Dogville,” but trust me, I’m really excited about the DVD. (Guy Maddin fans, I promise to catch up with “The Saddest Music in the World” by next time, too.)
One of April’s movies that hasn’t disappeared, and for good reason, is Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring,” which sounds in the abstract like pure spinach-cinema, but turns out to be among the most wrenching, and most rewarding, films I’ve seen so far this year. It takes place entirely on and around a tiny Buddhist monastery on a raft floating in a remote rural lake, but the thing is, that makes it seem like it’s going to be slow and contemplative. It’s actually not. This story of a young monk’s journey into manhood encompasses grief, torment, lust (including some really hot sex), murder, death and spiritual redemption. It’s what “Crime and Punishment” would be like if Dostoevsky had been a Korean poet.
This is evidently Kim’s 10th feature and, no, I hadn’t heard of him either. What’s so startling about discovering this filmmaker is not that he constructs beautiful shots or has the patience and passion to capture the natural world on film. Let’s face it, those qualities kind of go with the turf in higher-end East Asian cinema. But out of the bare bones of this movie — basically a teacher, a student, their secluded realm and a girl who arrives from the outside world — Kim crafts a compelling narrative that feels both realistic and primal, like a folk tale that has partially migrated into the modern world. This one’s a real discovery — don’t miss it.
Lastly, amid all the exciting documentaries of the season, I’m afraid that John and Katie Cadigan’s memorable little film, “People Say I’m Crazy,” has gotten lost. That’s really too bad; I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and if it doesn’t make you cry two or three times, you need a heart transplant. John Cadigan, now in his early 30s (he looks much older), is an artist who has battled a severe psychotic illness since his undergraduate years. With the help of his sister Katie (an experienced filmmaker), he made this movie in an effort to capture mental illness from the inside.
There are no glamorous “Beautiful Mind”-style effects in “People Say I’m Crazy,” just a journey through the looking glass into the world of the borderline-functional mentally ill. Cadigan and most of his friends are those slightly funny-looking people we tolerate in coffee shops but generally don’t look at — people who struggle every day to quell voices, combat paranoid delusions and deal with the effects of mind-numbing medications that can lead to catatonia and obesity. While the Cadigans’ film is relatively artless, you’ll never forget it. John Cadigan’s heartbreaking baby steps back toward “normalcy,” and his attempt to communicate with us, epitomize those virtues Hollywood films are supposed to demonstrate but never do: honesty, courage, family love, the miraculous resilience of the human spirit.
The Kevin Bacon of Iceland and a Creepy Russian Dad
So I have this theory, pretty much untested, that all arty, indie-type films made in the last 15 years or so in America and Western Europe fall into one of two categories: Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch. Wes Anderson is a Jarmusch filmmaker; P.T. Anderson is more Lynch. Quentin Tarantino? Lynch on really high-grade coke. Some movies can be a little of both, like Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation” or everything the Coen brothers have ever made, but even there it’s possible to categorize. “The Big Lebowski” is more David Lynch, in that its dominant strain is sweet-tempered wackiness; “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (aka “The Movie You Didn’t See”) is more Jarmusch, in that its dominant strain is impenetrable ennui.
Let’s move on, before you point out that a lot of earnest, semi-arty flicks veer more toward the John Cassavetes and/or John Sayles category (“In the Bedroom,” “You Can Count on Me”), or that the most important grandfather figure in all of Western art cinema might be the late Luis Buñuel, or that the Dogme movement is best described as a system for making imitation Ingmar Bergman films. It’s all true, but you’re distracting me.
My point is that at a lower level of production (and fame) than most of the examples I have mentioned so far, at the genuine grassroots of filmmaking where ambitious young artists try to find a foothold in the biz, the influence of Jarmusch and Lynch — with their quirky, disaffected responses to modernity, their individual versions of early-’80s bohemian angst — is tremendous. Unfortunately, in perhaps four out of five cases (again, my methods are ruthlessly unscientific), this influence pans out as nothing more than atmosphere and mood, as a film that’s vague and rootless (Jarmusch) or recklessly goofy (Lynch) to no clear purpose.
Consider two of this season’s best-regarded imports, Dagur Kári’s “Nói” and Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “The Return.” The former (which just opened in New York and will gradually make its way elsewhere) is a tale of an unhappy teenager in goofy clothes trapped in a remote Icelandic town nestled under a huge glacier. It features an overweight bookseller in one of those “NEW YORK FUCKING CITY” T-shirts, a cute girl who rarely speaks and a karaoke version of Elvis Presley’s embarrassing yet irresistible late hit “In the Ghetto.” It’s winsome. It’s dark. It’s Jarmusch all the way.
The title character is played by a French-Icelandic actor named Tómas Lemarquis, who happens to be an albino. He skulks around his ice-bound village in a sky-blue Members Only jacket and a knit cap, wearing a half-vulnerable sneer that makes him look like a starved, hairless version of the younger Kevin Bacon. Even through the cryptic fragments of Kári’s script, Lemarquis makes Nói seem like a likable, bright and hopelessly unmotivated kid. He knows how to jimmy the slot machine at the gas station for pocket money, he cuts school virtually every day, and he gets along with his hapless, drunken, cab-driving father about as well as could be expected.
“Nói” has a lot going for it. The empty, eerie scenery of this tiny village, with its permafrost streets and dowdy mobile homes, is distinctively rendered; you’ll leave the theater feeling snowblind. The acting is very good, in that noncommittal art-movie way. It’s pretty funny in a grim, Björk-ish Icelandic manner; the sequence in which Nói tries to rob the town bank and then escape in a stolen American car is a dry, slow-motion parody of crime-movie conventions. It has a drifty, spacey, cool soundtrack of exactly the kind you’d expect. (Like seemingly all other young Icelanders, Kári is a musician as well as a filmmaker. I’m sure he’s opening a gallery soon, or marrying an ex-lesbian pop singer or something.)
So this is exactly the kind of movie that winds up playing every film festival in the known world. (It won a major award at the Transylvanian Film Festival in Romania, and no, I couldn’t make that up.) It moseys through your consciousness in its depressed, can-kicking way, always verging on irony but mostly feeling sad instead, before exiting at the other end with a big allegorical flourish that leaves nothing resolved and few traces behind. I liked it OK, but it’s more like a painting or a piece of ambient music — or, pardon the expression, a “head space” — than a movie.
“The Return” (which has been open in New York and California for a few weeks and should be reaching wider release) is also pretty head-spacey, but in a quite different and — to me, anyway — more effective way. This would be a Jarmusch film too, except that it’s Russian, and that changes the equation significantly. Russian movies are always symbolic in character until proven otherwise, and they can almost never be proven otherwise. Zvyagintsev’s first scene features a boy who goes swimming at a beach (on the ocean or a lake, we can’t tell) with a bunch of friends, but becomes too frightened to jump off the wooden diving platform and sits up there shivering in the evening wind until his mother comes to fetch him.
It’s a completely naturalistic scene, or nearly so, like the rest of the film. But it’s also like a dream, in that it’s virtually overrun with primal symbolism — and that’s like the rest of the film, too. The boy is Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), around 12, who lives with his older brother Andrei (Vladimir Garin), one of the boys who abandoned him on the platform, and their laconic blond mother (Natalya Vdovina) in a decrepit, half-abandoned housing project. We don’t know where in Russia we are, or what year it is. (Probably Siberia and probably now, but it doesn’t really matter.) Neither the mother nor the father (Konstantin Lavronenko) — who abruptly appears after a long absence — are named. Although other people are occasionally seen, the towns and countryside alike seem largely depopulated, as if by war or disaster.
Where has Dad been since Andrei and Ivan were small children? They ask but are not told. (We may be in a better position to guess.) He’s a father of a familiar flesh-and-blood type — the masculine, outdoorsy, quick-to-anger version. His behavior is recognizably Dad-like, given as he is to running unexplained errands involving unexplained packages and checking out the asses of overly made-up women in tight skirts. But when Andrei and Ivan first see him, asleep in Mom’s bed, with the sheet hugging his masculine endowment and his arms thrown out to the side, looking for all the world like a medieval Christ in agony, you may start to wonder things, things like: What the hell is really going on in this movie?
I’m not telling, except to say that the long and eventful fishing trip Dad drags the boys on is simultaneously a very real voyage through the Russian wilderness and also, like, a Jungian trip, man. What’s so miraculous about “The Return” is that the story completely works on both levels. The dampness, loneliness, fear and boredom of the journey are tangible, as is the volatile mixture of love and hate the boys feel for this stranger who abandoned them and now expects their respect and obedience. When Ivan once again finds himself atop a wooden tower, weeping and terrified, the event has all the devastating force of a dream that has ripped its way into the waking world. Where “Nói” drifts listlessly through your consciousness, too cool to say anything or actually make an impression, “The Return” will leave indelible marks.
A girl named Osama
You might say that Siddiq Barmak was flavor of the month in international film circles — if it hadn’t taken him seven years and an escape from the Taliban to get there. Barmak’s film “Osama” got a kind of affirmative-action boost from being the only movie from Afghanistan anybody in the West has ever seen (it’s just the 43rd Afghan feature ever), but it’s been playing in the United States for six weeks and keeps spreading to more cities. It’s now apparent this is one of those little foreign films that won’t quit, and if you’ve seen it you understand why. If you haven’t seen it because it sounded too much like spinach cinema, I’m here to tell you not to miss out.
Most American critics haven’t known what to make of “Osama,” largely because it doesn’t fit any predigested categories. Its story, about a little girl whose mother forces her to masquerade as a boy so she can work in the nightmare world of the Taliban regime, is strongly pro-feminist and harshly critical of Islamic fundamentalism. But it’s not pro-Western propaganda or an American-style tearjerker. I found it both devastating and beautiful, but it’s an elliptical, atmospheric work that spins out its tale of terror with mythological intensity. It’s no surprise that Barmak says his favorite directors are people most American filmgoers have never heard of, from Andrei Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami to Mohsen Makhmalbaf and the late Georgian genius Tengiz Abuladze.
In between television interviews during a brief New York stopover, the gracious, soft-spoken Barmak talked to me, in melodious, half-fractured English, about his film’s title, which might be its most controversial but also most misleading element. (What did he tell U.S. Customs upon arrival at Newark airport? “I’m from Afghanistan and I made an award-winning film called ‘Osama’”?) The little girl who serves as his central character (played by the amazing Marina Golbahari) is christened Osama only in desperation, and the name is mentioned only once. “The previous title was ‘Rainbow,’” Barmak says with a wince. “There was a special scene that I wrote — I never put it in the film because I found it very stupid. This little girl, and some other girls, escape by crossing through a very beautiful landscape and passing under a rainbow. It was a big lie.
“We have to follow the reality — maybe a strong reality. I tried to find another title, and I found it from the film. When the little boys are following the little girl, they are calling out, ‘She’s a girl, she’s a girl!’ And the little boy who wants to protect her says, ‘He’s a boy and his name is Osama!’ He thought at the time that this name would create a scare and a fear. So I thought, this is the title. Because my film is about horror. Who was behind all this horror? Osama bin Laden. I’m not on the side of commercializing this name. But I’m thinking there are a lot of symbolic links between my story and this name.”
Barmak’s own connections to the Russian and Iranian intellectual elite (he was trained at the famous film school of Moscow University, during the latter days of the Soviet Union) might raise questions about his own political leanings, which he does not seem eager to discuss with an American journalist. His film is an unrelentingly bleak experience, but Barmak says he finds hope in Hamid Karzai’s struggling Afghan government and its fledgling constitution.
Despite his harrowing depiction of the Taliban and its medieval ideology, he thinks that persecuting its followers — the poorest and most desperate people in Afghanistan — is counterproductive. “In my belief, we have to make a compromise, and in some cases we have to forgive each other,” Barmak says. “At some point we have to say, all our fathers and grandfathers and their grandfathers were criminals, because they were involved in all these political mistakes. It’s not the time to say who is a criminal. It’s the time to say, ‘OK, let’s go and build our country.’ For myself, I did not create a tragedy for the sake of tragedy. I wanted to create a tragedy for a new beginning, and new hope.”
Flesh-Eating Zombies: Worse Than the Taliban, or About the Same?
Why do I get to write about the No. 1 film in the country in this column? Oh, you know why. Partly because nobody else who writes about movies for Salon wanted to touch Zack Snyder’s remake of “Dawn of the Dead” with a 10-foot zombie-killing stick, and partly because, well, we know exactly what you art-geek types like to watch when you’re taking a break from those bootleg all-region Tengiz Abuladze DVDs.
Well, anyway. The good news about the new “Dawn of the Dead” is that it’s not a devastating parable about nuclear war or terrorism or sexually transmitted disease or the decay of the suburban dream. Don’t get me wrong; we went through all that in the ’80s with Wes Craven and David Cronenberg and John Carpenter and Clive Barker and zombie-meister George A. Romero himself, and it was great. Every movie where somebody got their face eaten off or grew a new sex organ or wound up as a piece of pepperoni on Freddy Krueger’s hellish slice of pizza was an allegory for whatever it was we currently hated about Reagan’s America, man.
But with Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead” and last year’s equally enjoyable (and equally pointless) remake of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” horror movies seem to be experiencing a badly needed back-to-basics movement. Even Danny Boyle’s “28 Days Later” — although I didn’t think it was as great as the entire rest of the world did — exhibited a low-budget pretentiousness that belonged to the depresso British ’70s rather than the espresso American ’80s.
No, this is a movie without deeper meanings, and I want you to feel OK about that. (Profound significance will return to the horror genre; we just needed a break from all that.) This is an old-fashioned gross-out movie, in which Sarah Polley wakes up at dawn to discover that her beloved daughter has become a ravening, flesh-eating zombie. Her husband soon follows suit, and our heroine goes out the bathroom window without a single look back. She and a handful of other still-human survivors (hardass cop Ving Rhames, troubled playa Mekhi Phifer, lovable loser Jake Weber, sinister redneck Michael Kelley, etc.) end up in a shopping mall encircled by the undead, just as in Romero’s deathless (ha!) 1978 original. But back then that was a grand joke: zombies at the mall. Today, where the hell else would you go? The mall is pretty much all there is.
So there they are, growing ever more paranoid as they suck down the leftover mochaccino slush at Starbucks and watch each other for signs of impending zombiehood. How did this happen? Is the world at an end? Can they bust out successfully with a couple of “Road Warrior”-style souped-up mall shuttles? Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn know better than to take any of these questions seriously; in Romero’s grand tradition, nothing is ever explained. No, I take that back. It’s just that they understand what questions are really important and dare to broach medical-slash-metaphysical puzzles never considered before. What happens when a pregnant woman who has become a zombie gives birth? See this and, at last, you will know.
“Tadpole” is an ostensibly sweet little picture about a 15-year-old prep school kid, fluent in French and a fan of Voltaire, who’s so sensitive he prefers older women to younger ones. The big problem with it is that the setup is treated as just that, a scheme around which many things that are intended to be funny (but aren’t very) are packed like ice around a fish.
It certainly starts out with good intentions. Oscar (Aaron Stanford) is headed from school to his home on New York’s Upper East Side for Thanksgiving break. It’s a comfortable, well-appointed home, furnished with tasteful but not costly furniture, lots of books and a tweed-jacketed academic dad in the form of John Ritter. Oscar seems to like his dad OK, but he’s still determined to tell his stepmother, Eve (Sigourney Weaver), that he’s deeply in love with her.
He adores everything about Eve, who’s a medical researcher: her mind, her hands, her way of walking around the room. It’s an idealized love, though — he doesn’t seem to have any interest in whisking her off to bed. But before he can declare his ever-so-pure intentions, he somehow gets drunk and, confusedly, ends up sleeping with Eve’s best friend Diane (Bebe Neuwirth), a dazzling chiropractor.
Director Gary Winick (“The Tic Code,” “Sweet Nothing”) and writers Niels Mueller and Heather McGowan clearly intended “Tadpole” to be a gentle comedy of manners. But everything in the movie feels like a device. Oscar’s love of Voltaire and fluency in French are the tags that identify him as sensitive. We’re told he loves the hands of older women: “Experience, wit, intellect — they’re all revealed by the hands,” he tells his best friend. This is supposed to make him some sort of dream date for the over-40 set.
Later, we see him holding court in a cafe with a group of 40-plus women, discoursing enthusiastically but humorlessly on French philosophy as they lean forward over their half-eaten pastries, wide-eyed and appreciative of his youthful brilliance. One of them hands him her card with a glassy-eyed smile. None of them seems to be aware that he’s done nothing but condescend to them the whole time; they haven’t been engaged in a vivid conversation as much as been held hostage to one. It’s not clear if Winick thinks Oscar’s tedious windbaggery is supposed to be sexy, or so beyond the boundaries of sex — boring, old bourgeois sex — that it sets the hearts of these women aflame. Either way, the women’s rapt involvement in Oscar’s obvious self-absorption makes for a completely puzzling scene.
Worse yet is the way Oscar, and the movie itself, treats Neuwirth. She’s the liveliest, most glittering presence in the movie: With those naughty, sparkling eyes and that cupid’s-bow mouth straight out of a speak-easy, you understand perfectly how Oscar could fall for her.
But he doesn’t. Oscar is horrified after his one-night stand with Diane. He makes her promise not to reveal their secret to anyone, and he tells her (actually, it sounds more like a lecture) that they must never sleep together again. Diane, who is easygoing, openhearted, sexually free but always sensible, agrees to his terms with a mischievous twinkle. But she likes Oscar, and she’s had a nice time. So when she later suggests she might like to sleep with him again, he repeatedly rebuffs her with the air of a cranky, superior thundercloud, asserting that he loves only Eve.
His behavior is supposed to be charming: What a fine, decent young man this is! But really we only wonder how he can be such a schmuck. And we’re supposed to sigh with approval over the fact that he isn’t hormone-addled — but does he have any hormones at all? Oscar’s motivation is pure; so what if he treats the people around him, particularly Diane, like extras in his own droll little drawing-room comedy? Neuwirth, always a smart and capable actress, holds her own in the fray: But if you’re lucky enough to have an actress like her in a movie, why use her this way?
Weaver fares better, and the best moments in the movie belong to her. Oscar brings Eve some lunch at her workplace, and they share a quiet afternoon. (She doesn’t yet know how he feels about her.) She finds herself explaining the intricacy of the human heart as an organ, not a metaphor, and Oscar listens, spellbound. Weaver plays the scene beautifully, with carefully balanced levels of seriousness and enthusiasm that are perfect for her character.
The scene is also Stanford’s best, perhaps because he’s allowed to keep relatively quiet, for once. “Tadpole” is being sold as a fresh, breezy older-woman/younger-man romance, but it isn’t that at all. It’s really a portrait of a 15-year-old kid whose hormones aren’t what make him obnoxious — it’s his intellect. Or, more specifically, his constant need to remind the world how precocious he is. In the movie’s view, brains and sensitivity are what turn older women on. They’re long ago supposed to have forgotten about sex — and if they haven’t, their punishment is to be flogged with Voltaire quotes until they’ve completely forgotten what sexual desire is like.
And then there’s the way “Tadpole” looks. The picture was shot on digital video (D.V.), and it shows: It’s all grainy surfaces and murky, orangey lighting. (“Tadpole” was produced by InDigEnt, a collective co-founded by Winick that’s dedicated to exploring the craft of digital feature filmmaking.) Audiences’ tolerance for D.V. has yet to be determined. The general sense I get is that if the only way for a smart little movie to get made is to use D.V., then audiences will accept the medium’s substandard aesthetic.
But what about a casual little movie that revolves around one feeble concept, a movie that could only be made on the cheap because it wouldn’t really be worth the time and money it would take to put it on film? The jury is still out on that one. “Tadpole” may have cost less to make. But the audience still spends the same amount of time in the theater and pays the same price for a ticket.
