Ryan's Daughter
Directed by David Lean
Manderlay
Directed by Lars von Trier
Smartness/Smugness—the crisis of millennium film culture—probably first began with the 1970 persecution of David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (now issued for the first time in a gloriously vivid dvd transfer on Warner Home Video). After a decade of contending with Euro-Art films and trying to keep pace with High Modernist experimentation, the critical smart-money in 1970 bet against Lean's storytelling as old fashioned. In the era of swinging and wife-swapping Ryan's Daughter (a melodrama about adultery) was deemed irredeemably hokey. When new cinematic territory was being charted by M*A*S*H, Five Easy Pieces and, oh yeah, El Topo, Lean's classical style was easy to overlook.
But time has rewarded faithful Lean watchers. This almost impossibly gorgeous intimate epic has earned its own special place in film history. The Robert Bolt script deals with the eternal verities while linking a Madame Bovary plot about a romantic Irish girl Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles) cheating on her husband (Robert Mitchum) with a British Lieutenant (Christopher Jones) to both the Irish “troubles” and the turmoil of WWI. Lean saw the political in the personal before that phrase gained currency.
The historical backdrop common to Lean's previous mammoth hits The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago serves to emphasize his interest in characters who discover or reveal themselves while the rest of the world looks askance. Few critics have been willing to recognize Lean's increasing fascination with the psychological and spiritual transformation of his protagonists. He defines them within epics that capture the phenomena of time and space. These are not wide-screen travelogues but narratives that admit to wide-eyed awe. In Ryan's Daughter, Lean and his cinematographer Fred A. Young present sky, sea and beachscapes so astonishingly huge, micro-telescopically [cq] clear and amazingly colorful that one feels the need to become reacquainted with the planet earth. Everyday sights seem otherworldly.
Besides its visual splendor, Ryan's Daughter's excellence is also apparent in its soundtrack—not just Maurice Jarre's deliberately Felliniesque score but the recording and editing of sound effects. This is the most exactingly detailed movie sound track outside of Bresson. A steady, suspenseful thrum can be heard—felt—during the moment Rosy's infidelity is sensed by her husband. The scene is quiet but the drama is devastating.
It was Lean's absolute mastery of film technique that fooled critics into thinking he wasn't progressing along the same rate as the French New Wave or the American counterculture filmmakers. Lean achieved discreet dramatic effects like Bresson, Dreyer, Rossellini and Antonioni. His “conventional” storytelling was actually advanced, featuring superlative visual, aural and sensual acuity. The nude love scene in the forest (with its pulsating orgasmic sunrays and Rosy's red nipple) heralded the new era of film frankness. You don't see the walls of Jericho falling but movie sexuality was never the same. (In 1970 this was on a par with Ken Russell's frontal nude male wrestling scene in Women in Love.)
Ryan's Daughter's great, personal theme is sex—as nature, habit and the preoccupation of young and old. Rosy overwhelms the middle-aged widower she marries and yet the younger man she takes up with is, like herself, an outsider whose internal distress is misunderstood by a cruelly mocking (because terrified and ignorant) public. (“The English intend the Irish to corrupt in idleness,” Rosy's father complains.) Here's where Lean shows his Dickens' expertise; the small town's crudeness stems from social oppression and, in ignorance, they feed upon their own. Rosy and the Lieutenant are like the village idiot (John Mills, superb) who cannot express the stormy passion and explosive dissatisfaction within. All this is seen from the outside, magnificently. But when you lean toward Ryan's Daughter's audio-visual canvas, look and listen closely, the only proper response is to gasp.
In Lars von Trier movies, what some mistake for brilliant is just dumb. But von Trier is the perfect mountebank for a smart/smug culture that prefers pessimistic scenarios. von Trier's Manderlay supplies the anti-Americanism that Bush-bashers prefer. It rewrites American race history (The Dearth of a Nation) using a perverse imitation of live-theater techniques that seemed especially idiotic after Lean's ravishing nature studies. Malick's distorted American history also contrasts Terrence Malick's beneficent The New World, perverting Malick's artsiness and grace.
In Manderlay, Grace is a person, the white female protagonist originally portrayed by Nicole Kidman in Dogville and here enacted by Bryce Dallas Howard who not only supplies a genuine American gawkiness but a trace of the pixie that Julia Roberts portrayed in Hook. As the daughter of a gangster-God figure, Grace shines her indulgence upon a town of freed blacks who don't know that slavery is over—even though the story is set during the Great Depression. Manderlay cites a key moment in American history but unlike Malick in The New World, von Trier looks for cultural degradation. Grace contests the blacks' ignorance and the white townspeople's cruelty but harbors her own vengeful and racist tendencies.
von Trier teases the audience's racist impulses through John Hurt's narration, a faux-naïve literary voice-over that rings florid variations on the word “nigger” as if screenwriter von Trier had never heard any hip-hop. (Hurt catalogs an archaic litany of social types: “Letting niggers, pleasing niggers, proudy niggers”) The narration points out black victimization while stagey pantomime demonstrates black fecklessness—sloth and ignorance in the face of white indifference. Essentially, it's all about the rottenness of American character. Malick romanticized Pochahontas' cross-cultural attraction, but von Trier is stuck on the heinous notion of miscegenation. When Grace finally gives in to her yen for a black buck (Isaach de Bankole), von Trier not only exposes her flaming bush (irony surely intended) but orchestrates her orgasmic cries to resemble bloody murder. That's having your racism and cumming [cq], too.
This moral confusion—which caused nihilistic critics to misread Malick's film as condescending—is the result of von Trier's trendy cynicism. It's apparent when Grace contests the laws that inhibit black conduct, shouting “They're not free!” to which the Negro patriarch Danny Glover counters, “I'd call that a philosophical matter.” After Glover created memorable archetypes of modern consciousness in Places in the Heart, The Color Purple and Beloved, his participation in von Trier's folly amounts to a setback. Our culture has surely regressed if von Trier is taken more seriously than Robert Benton, Spielberg and Demme.
Manderlay is so ignorant of authentic American behavior that the calculated outrageousness of its premise is dull rather than scandalous. Its story would have to be convincing to be insulting (like the unholy jumble of history and flippancy in the recently released mockumentary CSA which posits what America would be like had the South won the Civil War—a lunacy worthy of von Trier). Instead, Manderlay's concept is alternately absurd, banal, anachronistic—full of inconsistencies and nonsense. When Hurt describes a “magnificent, clear, twinkling, star-lit sky” the camera randomly pans an unfocused slab of wood. This genius pretense is not preferable to Malick's exalted vision or Lean's supernal spectacle. It's merely, laughably, ridiculous.
