Tag: 2010s

Loin du Vietnam: Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”

This blog entry contains spoilers.

Rick Dalton, the central character in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), is an erstwhile leading man who keeps his career afloat between pilot seasons by doing guest spots on a variety of weekly TV shows, typically playing the heavy. In the clips we see of Dalton’s cancelled western series, Bounty Law, he embodies the clean-cut masculine ideal of the 1950s and early 1960s, but when he arrives on the set of a different cowboy show a few years later, he finds that times have changed. The director tells him he wants to go in a different direction with Dalton’s appearance, giving him straggly hair, a thick Zapata moustache, and a hippyish suede jacket that would not look out of place on stage at Woodstock. Without being anachronistic, the director explains, he wants to find the point where 1869 overlaps with 1969.

There is an important point being made here about how movies and TV shows portray the past: No matter how historically accurate they purport to be, all costume dramas reflect the priorities of the time in which they were made (and Tarantino’s film is no exception). By the end of the 1960s, it was already anachronistic to make a Western like Rio Bravo (1959)—although this did not stop Howard Hawks from trying, with diminishing returns, in El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970)—because the world, and the audience, had already moved on. This is not to say, however, that Tarantino is a postmodern skeptic, for whom the past is unknowable; rather than foregrounding how our knowledge of history is always mediated through cultural texts, Once Upon a Time… suggests that, for Tarantino, forgotten TV shows and commercial movies, posters, pop records, comic books, and sensational news stories like the Tate-LaBianca murders are the past, or at least the only part of it worth knowing. As Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote of Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino’s overall project here is “to evict real life and real people from the art film and replace them with generic teases and assorted hommages [sic].” In other words, Tarantino’s films displace knowledge of the world (discovery) with a knowingness about pop culture (recognition).

Less disciplined as storytelling than Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds (2009), though not as empty as Death Proof (2007)—which presumed an interest in long, devout conversations about obscure 1960s pop albums, trashy car chase movies, and French Vogue that I personally do not share—Once Upon a Time… has an agreeably rambling plot that, for most of the film’s 160 minutes, tracks the separate and largely undramatic daily activities of three characters over two days in February, 1969 and a third day that August in a manner reminiscent of two Los Angeles-set art films of the period, Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). While Dalton (Leonardo DiCapprio), a high-functioning alcoholic, struggles to remember his lines on set and frequently breaks down in tears to the point where I wanted to shout at the screen, “Come on, son, grow a pair,” his former stunt man and BFF, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), picks up a member of the Manson Family who goes by the nickname Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) and gives her a ride back to Spahn’s Movie Ranch. At the same time, in another part of town, Dalton’s new neighbour, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), goes to a movie theatre to watch herself in a mediocre comedy starring a frail-looking Dean Martin. As in Model Shop and Zabriskie Point, it is almost as if the sprawling layout of the city dictated a dispersal of the narrative, although the aleatory, quasi-documentary approaches of Demy and Antonioni evince a curiosity about the reality of 1960s Los Angeles and the counterculture that is nowhere in evidence in Tarantino’s film.

Despite the film’s meandering narrative and leisurely pacing (which, for me, are part of its charm), the characterization of Tate is disappointingly thin. It is not so much that Tarantino gives her so little dialogue, or that the film tells us no more about her life than we could read on Wikipedia (we find out a great deal more about Dalton’s fictional career, and even his reading tastes, than Tate’s), but that Tarantino has not made the effort to imagine her as a character. Tellingly, when Tate and her husband, Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha), attend a party at the Playboy Mansion, the film privileges Steve McQueen’s (Damian Lewis) perceptions of their marriage over Tate and Polanski’s. Indeed, Tarantino seems even more uncertain about how to deal with Polanski as a character in the #MeToo era than he does about Tate: How can spectators sympathize with Tate while despising the man she is happily married to for a crime he committed several years after the story takes place? Tarantino merely ducks the issue by keeping Polanski offscreen as much as possible and giving him virtually no dialogue.

The film is also limited as a portrayal of the Manson Family. Indeed, it is surprising just how little we see of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), who appears only once in an early scene where he turns up unexpectedly at the Tate-Polanski house, which he thinks is still owned by record producer Terry Melcher. Given what a loathsome and boring person Manson was, his minimal presence here might seem at first glance to be in the movie’s favour, but as a result, the film fails to give us any sense of the Manson Family as a cult. Thus, the bulk of our antipathy falls on Manson’s followers—who were, after all, his victims as well. Tarantino even rewrites history to give the female cult members more agency than they likely had in real life: Just as four of Manson’s followers are about to go into Tate’s house on August 8, 1969, Susan “Sadie” Atkins (Mikey Madison) proposes that it would be more poetically apt for them to murder Dalton instead, and as they are walking up the driveway, Linda Kassabian (Maya Hawke) runs back to the car and drives off, implying that Manson’s control over his followers was less than absolute. The film also elides the fact that the real Manson ordered Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (an unrecognizable Dakota Fanning), as well as several other girls, to have sex with George Spahn (Bruce Dern) so that, in the film, they appear to have a consensual, monogamous relationship—and, oddly enough, the fictional Fromme and Spahn make a more convincing onscreen couple than Polanski and Tate. By fudging the historical record in this way, Tarantino makes it possible for spectators to enjoy the film’s climatic bloodbath—in which Atkins, Charles “Tex” Watson (Austin Butler), and Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty) get bludgeoned, chewed up, and burned alive—as a wish-fulfillment fantasy. (Did it make me feel good when Booth destroyed Atkins’ face with a can of dog food? You bet it did.)

Without minimizing the horror of the Tate-LaBianca murders, Reginald Harkema’s little-seen indie film Leslie, My Name Is Evil (2009) suggests that the media hysteria surrounding the trial of Manson and his followers represented a form of mass psychic displacement, wherein the crimes of the Manson Family served as a scapegoat for the even more spectacular violence then being perpetrated by US foreign policy in Southeast Asia. Notwithstanding Pussycat’s passing remark that people are being murdered everyday in Vietnam (she does not specify whether she is referring to US servicemen, Vietcong guerrillas, North Vietnamese soldiers, or civilians, implying that all of these deaths are morally equivalent), Tarantino’s priorities are the inverse of Harkema’s: Ultimately, the film wants us to despise Manson’s followers and cheer for the gruesome deaths of three of them rather than, say, the perpetrators of the massacre at My Lai—whom, unlike Manson’s followers, went largely unpunished. Rosenbaum has argued that Dalton’s use of a flamethrower to deliver the coup de grâce can be read as an unconscious allusion to the American military’s use of napalm against the people of Vietnam, which can only be represented in a displaced form, and given Madison’s Asiatic features, this interpretation seems inescapable. Released at a time when US influence in the world is in decline, due in part to the rise of China, Once Upon a Time… nostalgically harkens back to an era when American men proved their masculinity by incinerating yellow children.

Formulaic Thoughtfulness: Paul Schrader’s “‘First Reformed'”

Given that the central nugget of Paul Schrader’s biographical legend—the one fact endlessly cited in reviews of his films as if it explained everything about the man and his work, for better or for worse—is that he had a strict Calvinist upbringing and did not see his first film until he was seventeen, it is all the more dispiriting that, as a writer-director, he seems incapable of functioning independently of his influences. Indeed, to judge by “First Reformed” (2017)—which recycles massive, undigested chunks of Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de compagne (1951) (a solitary priest keeps a diary while dying of stomach cancer and drinking copiously), Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963) (with global warming substituted for nuclear war and Victoria Hill for Ingrid Thulin), and Schrader’s own script for Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), itself largely derived from The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) and Dostoevsky by way of Bresson—one might guess that he learned everything he knows about spiritual angst from watching European art movies. As in the Bergman film, Schrader’s protagonist, Rev. Toller (Ethan Hawke), is the minister of a small church where one of the few remaining parishioners is a young man with a pregnant wife who is driven to despair by the spectre of an impending apocalypse and takes his own life; the twist is that here the young man is an environmental activist, and his death pushes Rev. Toller to become more outspoken about the moral outrage of man-made climate change and eventually to plot a terrorist act. This at least is an innovation on Winter Light, where the possibility of any type of political action is simply not on the table. But while the theme of environmental collapse and a clumsily executed levitation fantasy both suggest the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, Schrader has not updated the Russian master’s reactionary sexual politics: The only roles for women he seems capable of imagining are as opportunities for carnal sin (Hill) or as madonnas promising renewal for the hero (Amanda Seyfried as the dead man’s widow). Also mildly innovative, if not particularly purposeful, is the film’s locked down camera style which largely eschews reframings, yielding compositions that are conspicuously decentred when they are not emphatically symmetrical. And despite its familiarity, the plot does manage to generate a certain degree of suspense, though ultimately Schrader winds up blowing it with an unsatisfying final scene—cribbed from Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), which Schrader wrote—that, in true Hollywood fashion, posits heterosexual romance as a solution to all the world’s problems.

TIFF 2017: Beyond the Unpleasure Principle

My report on the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) for Offscreen. Thanks as always to the editor, Donato Totaro, for agreeing to run it. Since writing this article, I was able to catch up with Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, which — in spite of its stylistically awkward conclusion — rivals Western as the best and most moving narrative film in this year’s festival. On the other hand, I don’t consider Darren Aronofsky’s mother! a success as its allegorical story isn’t grounded in enough realistic detail (few real poets can support themselves on their work alone, much less afford a house like the one in the movie), and I didn’t really enjoy watching it, but it’s such an audacious and at times exciting failure that you should probably see it anyway, if you haven’t already.

La Guerre n’est pas finie: Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan”

Note: This blog entry contains spoilers.

Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015) is one seriously weird movie but not in a good way. It starts out as a realistic drama about Sri Lankan refugees adapting to life in a French housing estate and then gradually morphs into a multiculti retread of Death Wish (1974) with a Tamil Charles Bronson mowing down street trash. I found the latter more compelling than the former (which tends to drag), but Audiard seems reluctant to go all the way with it, keeping one foot in the art house and the other in the grindhouse. Ultimately, one gets the sense he couldn’t make up his mind which kind of film he wanted to make.

The opening scenes in Sri Lanka are promising. The movie begins with an extreme long shot of some men placing branches on a pile, and the relaxed tempo of the action and the sound of leaves blowing in the wind create a contemplative mood. So it’s all the more surprising when the film cuts in to a closer view, revealing that the men are building a funeral pyre with several bodies on it. As it’s never explained who the people were or who killed them, it’s unclear why their deaths inspire a member of the Tamil Tigers (Jesuthasan Antonythasan) to burn his uniform and defect.¹ Furthermore, the narration elides the details of his escape, instead cutting to a refugee camp where a young woman (Kalieaswari Srinivasan) walks around asking every child she sees if they have any parents. The subsequent revelation that she and the ex-Tiger are planning to go to Europe using the passports of a dead family cues the viewer to infer a sequence of events the narration has omitted.

Once the characters arrive in France, however, our interest turns from their pasts to future events—namely, how they’ll fare in their new lives. Accordingly, the narration becomes much more communicative, showing how the ex-Tiger (who assumes the name Dheepan) secures refugee status for himself and his new family with the help of a sympathetic translator (Nathan Anthonypilai), and their arrival in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, where Dheepan becomes caretaker of a neglected housing estate and the young woman, now called Yalini, finds work cooking and cleaning for a senile invalid (Faouzi Bensaïdi). Only the material involving the various drug gangs operating in the estate is handled obliquely so as to emphasize the impact of gang violence on Dheepan’s family. When representatives of the two factions start shooting it out in one of the buildings, it’s not explained why the situation turns sour, and the camera remains outside with Yalini and her new daughter, Illayaal (Claudine Vinasithamby).

As the characters goals are somewhat vague for much of the movie, the plot tends to proceed in fits and starts, lacking the sure-footedness of Audiard’s Un prophète (2009). At one point, Dheepan visits a deranged former colonel in the Tigers, who beats Dheepan viciously when he tries to tell him the war’s over and then disappears from the film entirely. And while Yalini is evidently attracted to the invalid’s grandson, Brahim (Vincent Rottiers)—a recently paroled gang member who likes her curry—they never get beyond making small talk. In one sequence, a low-level drug dealer explains to Dheepan the advantages of hiring people from outside the community to do his job, leading one to assume Dheepan will start selling drugs to buy a thaali for Yalini. Instead, he literally draws a line through the estate’s courtyard and forbids the gang members to cross it.

It’s at this point that the plot promises to become interesting but Audiard doesn’t follow through. Instead of developing the conflict between Dheepan and the gangsters as an escalating back and forth exchange, à la Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959), here Brahim threatens to kill him if he doesn’t back down and Dheepan responds by producing a machete and going on a rampage. (Earlier, he appeared to be forming a vigilante army with his caretaker buddies, but contra Hawks, when the time comes for action, he inexplicably decides to go it alone.) What’s more, Audiard perversely underplays what should be the film’s dramatic highpoint by shooting it in a sub-Bressonian fashion, keeping the camera on Dheepan’s feet as he slashes his way up the stairs of the apartment building where Brahim lives with his grandfather, and by having Brahim (who’s already been shot by a professional rival) bleed to death off camera before Dheepan arrives, thereby depriving us of a final showdown. The movie gives a whole new meaning to the idea of “vulgar auteurism.”

Note:
1. In a review for the Guardian, Andrew Pulver proposed an alternative explanation: The war is already over when the story opens and the men are burning the bodies of their dead comrades. Accordingly, Dheepan isn’t a deserter but a defeated soldier trying to pass for a civilian refugee. Regardless of which explanation is correct (and admittedly, I find this account more persuasive than my own), the very fact of different viewers making disparate inferences about the story is indicative of just how uncommunicative the narration is in this part of the movie.