Tricks Are for Kids

In the BD era (before digital), movies had action scenes so exciting to watch that you were anxious to see them again–to marvel at the dexterity, the triumph of style over gravity, the imagination that transformed mere celluloid. Was that really an eagle flying across the screen in one of Abel Gance’s split-second edits in Napoleon? How was it that the tragic fates of three people were so sinuously intertwined in the foot-race scene of De Palma’s The Fury? Did the opening chase sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade merely provide back story, or did Spielberg’s metaphor and synecdoche simultaneously comment on the very nature of movie chases? In such instances, our vision was excited and elevated. But while the state-of-the-art moviemakers behind The Matrix Reloaded insist upon a sense of marvel, their digital gimmickry is so transparent that the marvel has gone out of their technique.

Reloaded puts us in a new era of jaded connoisseurship. Its incredible action sequences are clearly a synthetic illusion rather than the result of make-believe. As Neo (Keanu Reeves), Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) and a small band of rebels battle to save the city of Zion from robotic forces symbolized by the infinitely replicated Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving), the relentlessly choreographed mayhem winds up being spectacular but unimpressive. Sadly, technique is all that the brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski (who wrote and directed) have got in their hard drive.

This sequel to the 1999 smash hit The Matrix is an exercise in how many ways the Wachowskis can utilize the trick known as "bullet time"–the slowed-down view of action that is supposed to be faster than the human eye. They’ve added aerial views and movement into the frame (as when Trinity plummets backward out of a skyscraper firing a gun at her pursuers, or Neo somersaults over a throng of thugs) but this shouldn’t be confused with adding depth. The Wachowskis achieve a kind of visual drama you don’t get from Michael Bay or Bryan Singer, but Reloaded could just as well be retitled PlayStation Forever! due to the way it substitutes toy-like efficacy for meaning. NOW HEAR THIS: The Wachowskis have changed the state of movie-watching so that it is indistinguishable from the unfantastic, blatant manipulation of video games. It’s amusing in a new-fangled way, but no more than an old-fashioned flea circus was amusing.

The cinematic let-down in Reloaded comes from the film’s failure to do more than animate its human characters. A noteworthy sequel should go deeper into the issues raised by the preceding film–and they can’t just be esthetic issues. Artists must show commitment either to form or to humanity, and in the narrative, cinema-successful comic-book graphics are insufficient.

The Matrix had held some modicum of fascination for its critique of social domination–an unexpectedly snazzy appropriation of Baudrillard’s social theories and human-rights revolts by people of color. (Neo was drafted by Morpheus to save his enslaved tribe.) Not even Tarantino was as sly as the Wachowskis when it comes to combining politics with genre. The Matrix’s mix of anti-slavery sentiment with sci-fi dazzle brought it the closest any Hollywood film has ever come to true, underground subversion. Defending subcultural living ("Free your mind") by validating alienation and teaching biracial Neo the holy benefits of political skepticism, The Matrix was the kind of hit Walter Hill might envy: universal human dilemma viewed through an ethnic template while at the same time distilling a genre to its essence.

But Reloaded takes the brainless way out. The Wachowskis expend more conviction in their Americanization of Hong Kong gymnastics (courtesy of Woo-Ping Yuen, who worked on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) than they do in the depiction of human and class interaction. The plot emphasis on Neo’s romance with Trinity lessens the social metaphor and freezes the metaphysics. When Gloria Foster returns as the Oracle, reiterating the sexy mama act that was so astonishing the first time, her stated profundities ("We’re all here to do what we’re all here to do") just sound like gobbledygook. Despite promises that "The prophecy is about to be fulfilled," Reloaded doesn’t make good on the first film’s religious overtones. Its version of apocalypse looks like an extravagant tv commercial; the view of human survival is baldly borrowed from the dystopia of Mad Max, and Zion looks like a hiphop music-video version of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld.

After the "legendary" Morpheus addresses the multitudes (evoking Cyrus in The Warriors), encouraging them to do righteous battle, they erupt into a mass-mating ritual humping to strangely unrhythmic percussion. This vision of writhing, mostly black bodies dripping saliva and sweat ought to launch a more sensual, anthropological drama befitting the one movie franchise that took Star Wars boomers from adolescence to privileged adulthood. Instead, it seems a commercial ploy: Spike Lee’s "Da Butt" meets Gangs of New York.

The Wachowskis have an uncanny sense of what the modern audience can assimilate. The mix of Asian martial arts and philosophy with Western decadence and disaffection was well-timed. They don’t provide Keanu with a character to play, but he’s a great-looking mannequin in sunglasses, flipping through the air in that long black coat, its tail flaring out like wings. (When Neo goes flying, someone says "he’s doing his Superman thing," but what we see is actually Batman-dark, cool and sinister.) Shrewdly providing a black alternative hero in Morpheus, the Wachowskis secure a broader market (and Fishburne responds with a performance as serious as Othello). For intellectual heft, they’ve even included a part for black studies scholar Cornel West, who intones, "Comprehension is not a requisite of cooperation." A cynic might hear that line as exculpating The Matrix’s confusing premise, but it’s likely most viewers won’t notice or care–and that’s what makes the Wachowskis’ massive technological effort ultimately pathetic. Expert in pop art, pop philosophy and digital f/x, they’ve proven themselves specialists in triviality.

The Matrix Reloaded Directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski

Down with Love

All artifice and no style, Down with Love is simply the Far from Heaven of comedies. That’s meant as an insult–which needs to be made clear since the self-congratulatory approach of critics and audiences has made a virtue of clumsy, ahistorical pastiche in this Baz Luhrmann/Todd Haynes era. It’s not enough to recognize the old movies that director Peyton Reed is referencing: Pillow Talk, Sex and the Single Girl. Renee Zellweger plays a proto-feminist author who eventually falls in love with Ewan MacGregor, a big-time magazine writer, womanizer and cad. She’s Doris Day to his Rock Hudson. But if you do know the references, Reed’s smirky approach won’t do.

Doris Day/Rock Hudson movies don’t warrant remakes or critiques (they were pretty honest for their time). They simply deserve to be part of their era, enjoyed as such and left alone. And besides, they are exactly the kind of movies hip cineastes look down on. The emotional sincerity of 60s Hollywood is out of style now, and that’s why Reed humorlessly parodies it, even getting the visual style all wrong. (The bad color schemes–orange, olive and fuschia–and unflattering costumes get worse in every scene.)

Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) easily trumps this woeful mess. With a retro credit sequence and a carefully stylized set design, Almodovar recreated the context of 60s pop while telling an unmistakably contemporary story of feminist consciousness. Unlike Almodovar’s recent sentimental work, Women on the Verge balanced feeling with satire, style with verve–15 years later, the movie gets more perfect each time I see it. Down with Love, however, is painfully offensive.

Worst of all is a Zellweger confession that goes on too long. Reed doesn’t know to cut in close on her true emotion, which exposes the entire film as a facetious, insincere conceit. Like a lot of contemporary filmmakers, Reed just doesn’t understand emotion. That’s what made Vincente Minnelli’s film of Comden and Green’s Bells Are Ringing (especially the "Party’s Over" number) a 60s bellwether; those artists caught loneliness along with romance. They could be witty and serious simultaneously. Down with Love proves that’s a lost art.

Down with Love Directed by Peyton Reed