GODSEND DIRECTED BY NICK HAMM JUNKY HORROR movies are distinguished from philosophical ...
JUNKY HORROR movies are distinguished from philosophical fantasies like A.I. and Jurassic Park with its can/should question about science and technology because junkiness trivializes moral predicament. Godsend starts promisingly: Schoolteacher Paul (Greg Kinnear) is mugged by a former student-an instance of social deprivation contrasted with Paul's son being inordinately showered with gifts. When the son is killed and scientist Richard Wells (Robert De Niro) swears to replace him by cloning, Paul even describes cloning as "about moral trespass." But director Nick Hamm ignores circumstances of heedless desire (the haves vs. the have-nots), evades the problem of can/should genetics and settles for shocks. He teases Paul and wife Jessie's grief and longing. Only De Niro gives the film credulity: "You can have him back!" he promises the parents, showing genuine empathetic urgency.
After that, Godsend is all boom! shriek! silliness, mixing genetics and the occult with hack filmmaking. The car accident scene where the child dies is insulting; a formulaic montage of crash/scream/fade-to-black. This was so depressing it brought to mind the recent news of actress Carrie Snodgress' death-a loss made uniquely heartfelt because of her car crash death scene in De Palma's kinetic, philosophical fantasy The Fury. As lovelorn Hester, Snodgress was a likable, sane presence. Her help in heroine Amy Irving's escape plan was turned into an unforgettable study of momentary liberation, dreaded fate and transcendent cinema.
De Palma simultaneously deconstructed and memorialized the unspeakable. As Snodgress/Hester ran across the suburban street, her wide eyes looking out for someone else's safety, she was struck by one car, then thrown slo-mo into the windshield of another. De Palma highlighted the emotion in Snodgress' face, then dared interject mortality. The director's craft and the actress' art converged in an image of bloody mortification. Though just a moment in the rhythm of the entire breathtaking sequence, it conveyed awe-and respect-when De Palma dissolved into the face of Hester's lover (Kirk Douglas), horrified by what he'd just witnessed. Nothing in Godsend is as profound. Nick Hamm's abbreviated crash isn't polite but dishonest.
Jean-Luc Godard referred to this scene of The Fury in his video series Histoire(s) du Cinéma, equating it to the classic Anna Magnani death scene in Open City as one of the signal tragic moments in movie history. Because it struck at the depth of a moviegoer's awareness, its memory carries over into an appreciation of Snodgress' contribution to movie culture and life.
THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD Guy Maddin stands on the feet of giants. Ridiculous is the word for his The Saddest Music in the World, a campy musical melodrama about a beer baroness (Isabella Rossellini) who runs an American Idol-like song contest that gives the film its title. Warhol and John Waters' deliberate travesties were also personal follies, commenting on the pop culture trash they loved; but their satire-pillorying their own sanctities-also helped the world to move beyond it. Maddin once seemed in their lineage. Careful (1992) was meticulous and winsome, valiantly transforming trash into personal feeling. Since then, Maddin's self-regard has increased as his technique has faltered. He's become as messy as Darren Aronofsky (standing on the feet of his offspring), piling on pop detritus with an absurdity you gotta call Maddining.
This artiste (proclaimed by himself and hipster critics) gives camp a bad name by indulging it ad nauseum. The b&w delirium of Saddest (actually filmed in a Canadian refrigerated warehouse) is based on the snow globe in Citizen Kane-for sheer novelty. By the time Rossellini's harridan/chanteuse/amputee (with beer steins for legs) damns all men for her broken heart, Maddin's archness and cluttered compositions become unforgivable. Worst of all, it's unfunny. It's our bad luck to suffer the tedium of smart-ass cineastes like Maddin, Aronofsky, Todd Haynes and Sofia Coppola, whose secondhand ideas even lack admirable craft. They're a self-infatuated clique, and their lousy fake art is exposed this week by the rerelease of one of the finest Art efforts in modern movies, Robert Altman's 1977 film 3 Women.
Funny that the American filmmaker best known for such atmospheric evocations of community as M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Short Cuts made this ironic depiction of the loneliness of the individual. On Criterion's DVD director's commentary, Altman himself says, "I'm rarely alone." Yet he suggests that the introspection of 3 Women came from the powerful effect of his first, solitary viewing of David Lean's 1945 Brief Encounter.
The very title of Lean's film describes the subject of Altman's richest movies. In 3 Women, chatty, ostracized Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall) works as a therapist at a Palms Springs convalescent home and takes the quiet new coworker, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek) as her roommate. Altman's commentary describes their relationship as "personality theft," but this film of deliberate plot twists and undulating rhythms can't be so easily pinned down. 3 Women is less committed to storytelling than conveying the feeling of attraction and repulsion among colleagues, acquaintances, intimates. It's a visual poem that presents variations on loneliness through the rhyming of personalities.
Altman's other, epic-sized films are hectic all-American panoramas. 3 Women is his most concentrated narrative, no less authentic to this culture than the Mississippi-set Thieves Like Us or the Houston fantasia Brewster McCloud but more psychologically resonant. Beneath the film's captivating, detailed surface, Altman deals with Millie and Pinky's discomfort at their workplace and focuses the awkward fit of their temperaments at home. Every scene closes in. When Altman traversed Los Angeles to Reno to show the brief encounters of gambling addicts in the great California Split (1974), he clarified the essential transience of American social relations. (And neither Paul Thomas Anderson nor myself was ever the same.) That film's liveliness gave existentialism an idiosyncratic whir. But as 3 Women flows along, it always seems to be winding, burrowing into the American psyche, attempting to visualize the place of Millie and Pinky's ordinariness. (Driving through the California desert, Pinky's father says, "It looks like Texas." Her mother disagrees. "It doesn't look like Texas to me." Altman's camera shifts to survey the unnameable wilderness.)
Though not a romantic story like Brief Encounter, Altman is open to showing the comic affection in these two girls' pairing. Both films have an equivalent sensitivity. Altman realizes that Lean achieved a superb harmony of mood and atmosphere. In 3 Women's tonally different setting of desert and sunlight and subterranean man-made pools, the deepening, ravishing sensuality tips the "love story" into the surreal. This audaciously experimental movie (with debts to Ingmar Bergman's cryptic Persona) stands now as a highpoint of the 70s American Renaissance-the period when a major studio like Fox could trust a director's instinct and an artist like Altman could believe the culture would welcome his exploration. That period is over, as proven by the quick disappearance of Altman's The Company. His jazz-inflected Kansas City (1996) fared only slightly better, but now it's appreciable as the movie that fulfills the ambition of 3 Women. Altman's ephemeral ideas on sex and ethnicity found graspable substance in Kansas City's historical, 1930s setting; its interweaving plots matched the class dynamics of America's different social strata.
That's not to say Kansas City is any less of a dream than 3 Women (Altman claims the latter came to him in a dream, yet it's the former that has uncanny psycho-political insight). Fact is, this DVD reissue confirms that in the 70s cultural climate, Altman was free to indulge his idiosyncrasy. And though the results are uneven, the effort is still astonishing. With cinematographer Chuck Rosher, Altman came up with visual distillations of our commonplace phenomena-working, socializing and daydreams that lead to nightmares. Through Millie, Pinky and Willie (Janice Rule), a pregnant artist who paints threatening erotic murals, Altman uses women's generational experience to express his wonder about human interaction. Scenes of Millie's brave perseverance against the world's indifference, of Pinky's unformed nature becoming an emotional leech are terribly recognizable. Just when you want to laugh at these women, Altman triggers the moral response Guy Maddin ignores: pathos.