Confetti Cinema
A PERFECT EXAMPLE of a movie made without conscience, and not much skill, is Man on Fire. Director Tony Scott was always a hack, which was sometimes preferable to his brother Ridley's pretentiousness; Tony didn't make you suffer the frustration of watching poorly served material. The trash content of The Hunger, Top Gun, True Romance and Crimson Tide was matched by a trashy visual style. Man on Fire may be the ultimate example of the Scott family's trademark tv-commercial technique; it's the excessively mannered slickness that some people mistake for cinema. Six-second edits, blurry superimpositions, subtitles in various fonts, pointless changes in color all have the effect of relentless channel-surfing. It's done to disguise the fact that Man on Fire isn't a story, just a gimmick. Scott's idea of drama is to throw confetti in the audience's face. Visual noise.
If you can look past the clutter and tune out the din, it's apparent that the film's set-up about a former CIA assassin hired to protect a child from kidnappers is unconscionable. At a running time of two hours and 26 minutes, Man on Fire laboriously seeks to justify killing and brutality as entertainment. (Despite the busy, messy images, this film has the same dull pace as Scott's 1990 Revenge.) Denzel Washington participates in this abomination playing former agent John Creasy with his usual surface charm and skin-deep bellicosity. Going from moody depression, smiling teddy bear, then avenging angel, the character remains a cipher. Washington, however, is exposed as an ideological puppet. Man on Fire is swill with ugly political implications.
Having built his career as an 80s striver, chasing the Hollywood prestige that Sidney Poitier once embodied, Washington demonstrates no reliable principles. Like Scott with his noise esthetic, Washington's only commitments are to mayhem and money. The level of whoredom in Man on Fire is remarkable even for a Hollywood movie. Actors like Washington, Christopher Walken and Mickey Rourke who probably never so much as participated in the armed services, here portray paramilitary and legalistic operants with the same dedication with which they've frequently played pimps and gangsters. It's make-believe, but it's also thoughtless glorification of American violence. Set in a hellish, criminal Mexico City, Man on Fire is virtually a colonialist bloodfest, presented to slake the frustrations of dispirited moviegoers. Coming so soon after Walking Tall, Hellboy, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and The Punisher, Man on Fire is Hollywood's latest vigilante movie. Some might think this is a response to 9/11, but it's really just the same old Hollywood con job, perhaps more devious and contemptuous than most due to the way race gets mixed into the mess.
Playing Man on Fire, Washington ignores the media's constant demonization of African-American men. Washington seems to believe that he (unlike Poitier) is free to portray hostility as simply an actor's choice; he may be fooled by the conceit of yet another awful screenplay by Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Payback, Mystic Riverall loathsome) that validates Creasy's vengeance. But this characterization is as fatuous as Tony Scott's wannabe-David-Fincher compositions. Washington and Helgeland never suggest that Creasy's rampage amounts to degeneracy. At the end of the movie, the character is no more humane than he was at the start.
The film's fake feel-good plot uses Creasy's protection of precocious little Dakota Fanning to normalize a black man's allegiance to nationalist privilege and racist ideology. Creasy proves his testicular worth by saving, protecting and sacrificing his life for a white female. By taking on this role, Washington disregards the social inequities black folk actually experience (which was also the problem with the ludicrous John Q.). Instead, he lends support to certain racial stereotypes while still appeasing cultural blood lust. (This is the real answer to the girl's question, "Being black, is it a positive or a negative for a bodyguard in Mexico?") It's doubtful that Hollywood would bankroll a film in which Denzel was allowed to wreck shit in L.A., Chicago or New York and still be portrayed as a hero, but Creasy gets to use unlimited force in a third-world setting, which is in line with American imperialism.
Man on Fire could be a subliminal spur to reinstating the draft. Consider its political implications: Denzel is enlisted to be the bodyguard to the white blond daughter of a Mexican industrialist. When he becomes her avenger, Tony Scott constructs the war-on-the-streets montages with portraits of young Dakota intercut as the emblem of Life worth saving. This "entertainment" is all about racial ideology. Man on Fire is full of twisted racial paradoxes (Creasy primarily exacts his vengeance upon people of color), but it fits neatly in the current taste for ass-kicking Americana. The story implies that sacrifice of self is a black man's national/natural duty. Creasy even instructs the girl on military habit when he becomes her swim-meet coach: "The gun shot holds no fear," he tells her. "In fact, you welcome the sound. It's the sound that sets you free." It also becomes an excuse for Scott to throw firecrackers in the audience's face.
"A man can be an artist; it depends on how good he is at it," Christopher Walken says in the movie, describing Creasy's course of unstoppable vengeance. He could also be talking about our general perception of actors and the question this malevolent role poses about Denzel Washington's cultural impact. But then, with a straight face, Walken warns, "Creasy's art is death. He's about to paint his masterpiece." That's one of the most ridiculous and shameless lines in all movie history. It makes you distrust the actor who says it and the actor he says it about. They're not just pretending to be cold, heartless and lethally cynical, they're promoting those traits.
Man on Fire proves Washington will do anything. He's finished with portraying the intelligence and honor of African-American men. It seems that he intercepted his roles in Fallen, Training Day, Out of Time from Samuel L. Jackson. Denzel wants to erase his former New Poitier identity by portraying the baddest black man on the big screen. (If comic Dave Chappelle wants to up the stakes of his satire, Denzel's thug-love will be his next target.) Working without conscience, Washington's artistry, and social priorities, are toast.
THIS SO-CALLED DISASTER Notices were unaccountably generous for This So-Called Disaster, the video-documentary of big-name actors rehearsing a Sam Shepard play. This contrasts the generally condescending reviews for Connie and Carla, the new Nia Vardalos movie that is a more agreeable and insightful meditation of what acting is all about. Vardalos (Connie) and Toni Collette (Carla) play Chicago lounge singers who witness a mob killing and hide out cross-country as drag queens in West Hollywood. Putting on make-up puts them in the closet. Still, they are literally giving the performances of their lives. Their act improves and they find an audience that appreciates their abundant and sincere emotional display.
Sam Shepard can be a different kind of drag. Michael Almereyda's reverent approach to the self-seriousness of Shepard's cast (especially Nick Nolte and Sean Penn) is the reason why you thank god for musical comedy. Yet critics haughtily disrespect Connie and Carla and Nia Vardalos' crowd-pleasing sense of humor. The smash success of My Big Fat Greek Wedding has been held against Vardalos even though it has entertained more people than Shepard ever has. Critics sniff at Vardalos' comedy as plebian, accusing her of ripping off Some Like It Hot, but her homage is equally (unabashedly) in debt to Victor/Victoria. She's made a crude but jolly anti-sexist farce. Vardalos knows a valuable secret that's revealed when the mobster tailing C&C by visiting dinner theaters, quickly yields to the irresistible sing-along charm of showtunes.
Her movie celebrates all kinds of artful fellowship, whereas Shepard indulges morose solipsism, repetitively. There's not enough drama in Disaster to let Nolte and Penn shine, but Vardalos and the unsubtle Collette are radiant. Their clown-like exaggeration of feeling is an affirmation. (There's actually better singing here than there was in Chicago.) With Denzel and Walken disgracing their profession and Shepard, Nolte and Penn entombing it, it's left to Nia Vardalos to rescue acting and theater as worthwhile arts.