Vacancy
Directed by Nimród Antal
The Long Goodbye
Directed by Robert Altman
The opening credits of Vacancy elegantly twirl around each other and compete for room, locking together like the pieces of a digital jigsaw puzzle. Before a single shot appears onscreen, the movie presents a blatant homage to Saul Bass, the legendary graphic designer whose lively title sequences serve as introduction to Alfred Hitchcock’s finest works. So it seems that we’re being given a thriller of the classic Hollywood variety. During its first 20 minutes, before it takes a lethal stumble, Vacancy delivers on that ambitious promise.
The early scenes find a squabbling couple (Kate Beckinsale and Luke Wilson) driving through an empty interstate in the dead of night. The barbs in their exchanges (scripted by Mark L. Smith) would sound excruciating in a romantic comedy, but the ubiquitous gloomy aura promises that the heated conversation fits into an evolving plot with a genuine direction. Then the plot reveals itself, and everything finally gets dumb.
Ultimately less a thriller than a mainstream slasher flick, Vacancy meekly bows down to genre conventions. Beckinsale and Wilson do their best to look petrified when their characters get stranded by way of car trouble. They wander to a vacant motel, where the strangely cheery night manager (Frank Whaley) offers them a spacious room for a discount rate. (Grinning widely in extreme close-ups like a Cheshire cat on Botox, Whaley becomes a Saturday morning cartoon version of Norman Bates.)
In short order, the couple discover that they’ve been unwittingly cast as leads in an elaborate snuff video, cowering in their room while masked killers of the Texas Chainsaw variety emerge from trap doors and pose for the hidden cameras. The psychotic manager (and apparent snuff curator) watches the fiasco unfold with sadistic glee. Audience members anxiously twiddle their thumbs and wait for him to receive his comeuppance.
Director Nimród Antal, whose Hungarian debut feature, Kontroll, won accolades two years ago on the festival circuit, demonstrates a skill for crafting decent action and violence, using the minimal sets to establish an eerie vibe. Somewhere along the way, however, the intelligence of earlier scenes dissolves into tired and formulaic jolts, screams and blaring cues from the soundtrack. The filmmakers show keen awareness of the material before it demolishes their intentions, and the conclusion arrives as an apathetic inevitability. When the flashy credits return at the very end, you can almost hear Hitchcock yawning from a better place.
The homage in Vacancy, like its deserted victims, loses track of the main road. Rather than defying audience expectations, the story plays into them, confirming a laundry list of trite clichés. There’s no crime in making genre pictures, but the best ones forcibly reevaluate the elements that create the mold, so that the movie sustains itself without those limitations.
Few directors figured out better pathways for transcending translucent subject matter than Robert Altman. In The Long Goodbye (playing this week at Film Forum), Altman extracted a familiar character from movie lore and gave him an unfamiliar face. An adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1954 novel of the same name, The Long Goodbye places investigator Phillip Marlowe into the stoned indifference of 1970s Los Angeles.
Since Marlowe was famously portrayed by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep, Altman’s decision to cast comparatively unsexy schlub Elliott Gould as the freelancing sleuth didn’t sit well with everyone. Taboo, in this case, is misleading: Gould’s mumbling, meandering portrayal never ceases to amuse, but hardly condescends to Chandler’s creation. It goes without saying that the movie has all the marvelous Altman flourishes that imbue ordinary scenes with unordinary significance—overlapping, improvised conversation and complexly choreographed camera movement make their expected appearances—and Marlowe is tailored to suit that unique environment.
The plot of a Chandler novel typically relies on incoherence until a revelation in the final act puts all the mysteries to rest, no questions asked. Altman famously hated plot, so the production makes a perfect match from the outset. Rather than allowing Marlowe to stumble through an exaggerated world while maintaining a cocksure, sober attitude (as Bogart did with great élan), Altman shows how the disjointed plotting can symbolize Marlowe’s subjectivity.
Whether he’s implicated in a murder, hired to track down a blond bombshell’s alcoholic husband or searching for his beloved cat, Marlowe maintains a special kind of apathy about his aimless existence. He’s a lost soul adrift in film noir oblivion—a lyrical place that misguided efforts like Vacancy could benefit from visiting.
