The modern history of the cinema (actually, the history of modernity as such) is the recognition of art in apparent ephemera. Some justly venerated movies come dressed as art (such as Dreyer?s ?The Passion of Joan of Arc?), while others (such as Hitchcock?s ?Vertigo?) come dressed as disposable entertainment. The great current in modern criticism and modern filmmaking arrives in the fifties with the recognition that there were artists at work in Hollywood making films in genres that had hitherto won little respect, such as crime stories (film noir), family melodramas (?women?s pictures?), and musicals. Some critics? trash contained others? treasures, and, for those who love movies, the release of the stealth masterwork continues to this day. It?s no longer a surprise that David Cronenberg is acknowledged as an artist for such films as ?The Fly? or ?Videodrome?; it remains, for some, a little more so when Jared Hess?s ?Nacho Libre? and ?Gentlemen Broncos? are cited as artistic wonders. (Overlooked for the same reason that comedies have trouble at Oscar time?things that are serious in tone are too easily taken to be serious in substance.) But, at the very least, few critics any longer doubt that there?s sublimity to be found in movies of the most mercantile provenance and the most popular genres.
Paul Thomas Anderson?s long-awaited intimate tale of titanic struggle, ?The Master,? was released last Friday, the same day as ?Resident Evil: Retribution,? the fifth installment of the video-game-based franchise, written and directed by the English director Paul W. S. Anderson. And, while most critics have been worthily exerting themselves on the mighty mysteries of the former, several exceptional critics of my acquaintance (I?m thinking of Jaime Christley, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, and Armond White) also offered encomia to the latter (most succinctly, in Ignatiy?s tweet that ?everybody knows RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION is the real Film of the Moment?) which sufficed to propel me to a multiplex and find out what I?ve been missing.
The under-the-credits sequence shows a cataclysmic battle on the open seas with Milla Jovovich at its center?and runs the action in reverse, which is a gleefully playful conceit. The story concerns the attempt by the monstrous Umbrella Corporation to spark an arms race with their new virus?which escaped from the lab and killed many, who returned, as flesh-eating zombies, to terrorize mankind. Meanwhile, Umbrella used elaborate urban simulations to demonstrate the virus?s power?and one woman, Alice (Jovovich), the corporation?s prisoner, must escape from the corporation and lead a fight against the zombies (joined, eventually, by some meaty cohorts) through several simulated environments in order to save themselves along with the remnants of humanity (notably, a little girl in her care).
Far be it from me to deny the pleasures found by others in a work of art, and pleasure is what other critics get from the movie. By and large, Anderson?s compositional sense is dead-center and uninflected, though a few are eye-catching (notably, one of Alice trapped on the floor of a huge, luminous cylinder). In particular, one element of Anderson?s direction offers kinetic invention?his taste for sudden action bursting into the frame, which, during the movie?s early scenes of a suburban setup (when an ordinary family finds itself thrust into a vortex of violence), occur with such a regular and ludicrous insistence that I expected the rest of the film to ramp it up into out-and-out comedy.
This doesn?t happen?though there are two moments of actual humor, one featuring Jovovich inducing Michelle Rodriguez (playing an anti-gun suburbanite) to shoot a gun by telling her, ?It?s just like a camera?point and shoot,? and, after the gun is fired, adding, ?Congratulations?you?re officially a badass.? Then there?s one moment of martial sublime, when one of Alice?s allied commandos, facing danger, says, ?I?m starting to enjoy myself?; soon thereafter, he?s gravely wounded and, as battle rages just out of his sight, he takes out a cigar and enjoys a last worldly pleasure before offering himself up as a target.
I think it?s a misinterpretation of classic auteur cinema to imagine that Hollywood directors of the studio era, feeling hamstrung by genre and script, kept themselves happy with visual cleverness. (There is the phenomenon of directors exercising a sort of critical eye on the script, staging action in such a way as to reveal peculiarities of the story, but that?s not the same thing as directing solely to create marginal ornament.) Anderson is a consistent but slenderly imaginative director, and he exercises the imagination of a cyborg, coming up with minor variations on themes of mayhem that suggest no emotional involvement in their significance.
On the other hand, I think that the movie is not at all dismissible; on the contrary, as deadening and depressing as its numbing battles and explosions are, the feeling of emptiness it leaves is exactly the point. I?m not sure whether to ascribe this mood to Anderson, to the genre, or to the video game on which it?s based, but it would be wrong to relegate the movie to insignificance on the grounds of taste or, rather, of the movie?s tastelessness. The framed screens with which, at the beginning, Alice narrates and illustrates the back story seem derived from the housewares section of a discount store; the futuristic d?cor has all the eye-catching cheapness of a multiplex concession area, and the warriors? styles offer the beefcake intensity of reality TV. In short, the movie is a representation of another America than the one that usually populates art-house theatres, one that doesn?t usually read the cinephilic blogs that discuss this very movie?and, more important, one that does actually belong to the rough-and-tumble world that the movie reflects, the one in which gun ownership is common and in which participation in the military or the police is not an unfamiliar option.
At the same time, ?Resident Evil? is a relentless reflection of the tawdriness of strip malls, of the dun grimness of heavy industry, of the sense of decisions being made by abstract higher-ups that make for a plant closing or a store being shuttered, of the daily threat of violence and the need to stay vigilant and look tough, of the sense of embattlement in a harrowingly desolate landscape, and of the escape into simulation and the vicarious as the only, and fleeting, feeling of heroism that the daily struggle?or the daily round of boredom?offers. The absurd fantasy that Anderson offers up plays like a documentary of an extreme state of mind?and turns it into a stereotype which, in being represented with such efficacy, propagates itself. The virus of deadening fantasy is the one that the real Umbrella corporation lets loose; I don?t think that Anderson is critical of it?though there?s one strange moment, near the end, in which Alice is locked in mortal combat with her nemesis (Sienna Guillory) and he cuts from a side view of them to an overhead shot. For an instant, both women, their heads thrown back in mutual chokeholds, look skyward, into the camera, as if these two capable performers were asking, ?What the hell are we doing here??
Anderson is no ironist or critic; some of his violence plays out with a pornographically whooping glee, and the commando battle sequences, with different green-screen projections, could serve as recruiting videos for the armed forces. (Ignatiy Vishnevetsky praises the 2011 feature ?The Three Musketeers 3D? as Anderson?s ?most personal? film that transforms the story into ?a barely-recognizable vehicle for his own aesthetic predilections,? and I?m planning to see it to find out what that might mean.) As for whatever fun there may be in the execution of the film, Jared Hess?s ?Gentlemen Broncos? takes on the very subject of genre imagination?and the personal commitment that goes into it?with a lucid avidity; as a result, the action sequences that he films, on a ludicrous shoestring but with a touching empathy, have a true and awesome grandeur that befits a reverent aesthete?s tribute to a warrior.
I?m entirely sympathetic to the notion that a work of genre filmmaking that features stock characters in crude situations can turn out better that a movie with a nuanced script depicting well-developed characters in historically resonant stories; but it?s wrong to look askance at ?The Master? as a tailor-made work of art-house sophistication. There?s a remarkable visual thought at work in the making of that film. The abstraction of the clash of wills that the movie runs on seems to have liberated Paul Thomas Anderson, and his amazingly controlled yet fiercely expressive actors help him to lend a new meaning to the kinetic?a sneer or a raised eyebrow, in the right place in the frame at the right moment, is more exciting and more terrifying than the heaving gyrations of P. W. S. Anderson?s climactic sword fight. ?The Master? is a far greater film not because it is more human or more humane, but because it is, down to its details, more exhilaratingly, mysteriously imagined?because it?s inhabited by its filmmaker with a furious yet probing, assertive yet questioning engagement. P. W. S. Anderson may well have had some fun; P. T. Anderson filmed things that seem not to have been fun to film but were, rather, morally necessary despite their pain. ?The Master? is not as visually gaudy but, as an inner experience (of, among other things, violence), it?s vastly more complex.
P.S. As for the choreographic charm of the multi-digitized fight scenes, the upcoming film by Leos Carax, ?Holy Motors,? which will be at the New York Film Festival and will open here October 17th, outdoes them in a single scene that also turns them inside out.
Photograph courtesy of Sony Pictures Digital.
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