More Like This

For all that I bitch about Hollywood's nosedive into hackery, I do truly believe that the best films of my lifetime are, in fact, the best ever made. Of course, the canon of the best anything of a given era is always in flux; of course, some of my favorite movies are widely reviled, or were greeted with cries of "what the hell is this?"

So, below, those I consider the most underrated films of my lifetime (the last two decades and change). If you also love it, awesome! (Fuck those other guys, amirite?) If you've never seen it, check it out, with as open a mind as you can muster! If you hate it, maybe try again? These are too incredible to remain storied failures, and there's only one way to recoup 'em. Go to!

10. Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski, 2005)

So, one of our greatest living filmmakers tackles one of our greatest dead novelists, and everybody forgets to show up. Nice. All bitterness aside, though, I'm still astonished that this superb adaptation failed to find an audience. Polanski was again deemed relevant following his deservedly adored The Pianist, and Sony decided to lob him one over the plate. They ultimately botched the project, but he hit it square: like few other movies in recent memory (War of the Worlds also comes to mind), Polanski's Twist serves as a reminder that shopworn, studio-gig material can still shine in the right hands. Any Polanski picture is worth watching for the masterful camera angles alone, here literally offering us a fresh perspective on a story we rightfully ought to be sick of. Of course, at this point, it's well nigh impossible to separate the director's work from his story, but in his case, biography is illuminating rather than deadening. Unlike, say, period-fetishist Martin Scorsese with Gangs of New York (see here), Polanski actually knows these winding European streets, their crumbling edifices and cobbled alleyways. He also knows that even as they overflow with life, those cities are/were hermetic seals for the less fortunate; how better to explore those looming walls than through the eyes of one of the definitive fictional children?

As with The Pianist, the vibrant, gorgeous sets can't quite hide the blinding moments of violence and despair cutting through them. Also as in The Pianist (and Chinatown, and Bitter Moon, and The Ninth Gate...) Polanski's protagonist is ultimately helpless in the face of institutional decay, preferring to fade into the background, maybe after profiting from it all first. This is eloquent, professional filmmaking, the perfect blurring between craft and art--the sort of thing that keeps me coming back to multiplexes, asking for more. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Was it really just too familiar a story for us? Yeah, probably, but Polanski has built his peerless career on plumbing the soul-shaking depths behind generic surfaces, and there's nothing stale about his Twist.

9. Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2002)

This is the only non-English entry on the list; commercial American film distribution being what it is, most great foreign films seem to me painfully undervalued, and it can be difficult to pick out individual cases. Trouble Every Day is an exception, and a true forehead-smacker at that. After her tutelage under Wenders and Jarmusch and building a remarkable filmography to (mostly) silence throughout the '90s, Claire Denis finally broke through at the international arthouse level with her dangerously luscious Beau travail in 1999. Predictably enough, her follow-up genre oddity was castigated as dark and difficult, and the hosannas melted away. Anyone who'd paid attention to Beau travail should've recognized Trouble Every Day as being perfectly of a piece with her remarkable aesthetic. Yes, Trouble Every Day is about cannibalism; sexy, sexy cannibalism. But it masterfully elides expository overload, performative histrionics, and fanboy pandering in favor of the director’s elliptical sensuality. Forget camera-as-eye, pen, gun, and certainly penis; for Denis and brilliant DP Agnès Godard, the camera’s a hand, outstretched, alternately caressing and flinching away from the film's fluid gore and feral sex.

That Denis' earlier I Can't Sleep turned out to be a serial killer drama deepened, rather than devalued, its examination of urban immigrant life, and the same alchemy's at work here. Look at the title. Trouble Every Day is about a constant, almost banal struggle, a drama of worry and restraint; it's an accumulation of suspense driven along by visual detail. A drop of blood on a shower curtain, hungry fingers intertwining through a crude, desperate fence, an imprint on a mattress where a woman once lay but doesn't any more...Trouble Every Day doesn't explode the horror film so much as refocus it, avoiding all poses but catching in every throat. Or at least, it ought to have. C'mon, cinephiles: it's a defiantly non-hipster film, yet still stars an ashen, skeletal, and beyond-sexy Vincent Gallo. What more could you want?

8. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)

This one's less a case of active dismissal than sight-unseen obscurity; people just didn't go see it. It's an unsurprising fate, though The House of Mirth is precisely the sort of impeccably arranged, flawlessly written, and beautifully acted humanist drama that the Academy (among others) should exist to reward. On the surface, Terence Davies' oeuvre epitomizes what Eddie Izzard perceptively labeled the "staircase to a room with a view of a pond" style that dominated British filmmaking before the country began playing a desperate game of catch-up with Hollywood. Yet films like The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices/Still Lives couldn’t be further from fussy, framing the pitiless cruelties of insiders toward outsiders in drifting, slowly unraveling narratives. The House of Mirth, with its Wharton pedigree and emphasis on stately dialogue scenes (strict acting math, of twos and fours), is less formally deviant than his previous work, but is no less thorough—or tragic—in its examination of silver-tongued savagery. The pleasure of watching big names like Laura Linney and Anthony LaPaglia slither and dart their way through such breathlessly eloquent, emotionally loaded encounters can’t be overstated. Any aficionado of film acting should be delighted beyond measure. Still, the soul of Davies’ work is primarily both meditative and wearily fatalistic, a dichotomy that finds its soul in the eternal Lily Bart.

Gillian Anderson orients her performance around her voice, throaty and amused and strident and ever out-of-place, like no player since Streep in Bridges of Madison County. Her painstaking downfall, sketched with such empathy by Davies (writer as well as director) is a product of both high New York’s relentless cruelty and her own delusional pride. Neither are blunt bogeymen, but living, kinetic forces, peering through Linney’s narrowed eyes and bursting forth in Anderson’s ragged final laments. Watch that impossibly lovely fade leaving a mansion a veritable mausoleum, or that merciless closing text stranding these vibrant souls forever in “New York, 1907,” and tell me that replacing Merchant Ivory with frenetic dreck like The King’s Speech was anything but a huge own goal.

7. Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1996)

This masterpiece is gradually being recognized as such, as critics have set aside the knee-jerk belittlement that greeted the film's release and gotten lost in its weird, remarkable depths. Rightfully so: Dead Man is one of the greatest American movies ever made, full stop. It's also a two-hour justification for the continuing relevance of Jim Jarmusch, whose status as hipster deity has increasingly cut both ways in the decades since Stranger than Paradise. Dead Man is full of deadpan humor and shaggy-dog tales and aimless wandering, but there’s little irony to be found, and no one would call it minimalist. It’s sprawling and shifty, as committed to letting Johnny Depp die as The Godfather was with Brando, but more interested in the artifice of and decay behind America’s masculine mythos than the bolstering of the same. Jarmusch’s outside-ness isn’t a generational pose here so much as a national one; indeed, as with Richard Linklater, there’s been far too much press on Jarmusch’s supposedly epochal qualities and less on his timeless vision.

As in his equally underappreciated Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, the director restlessly exposes the ugliness, banality, and oppression running through certain genre mythologies, and the resulting trip might actually reveal quite a bit more about America and how we tell it than (the brilliant) No Country for Old Men. But there’s the druggy storytelling and blown-out black-and-white and odd riffs on Western iconography and also Iggy Pop for some reason, and so Dead Man is still easier to dismiss as limp pastiche than wrestle with as a silent, sidelong strike at the heart of American grandiosity—and grandiose American filmmaking. The key to Dead Man may always be Neil Young’s crackling score: furious and mournful, seething like a low flame licking at the edges of the frame. Gary Farmer’s Nobody, a Native American, can sing along to it, while Depp’s William Blake, hunched under his name and inevitable death, can only stare. Such is the nothing-fate of blinkered white slackers, of whom Jarmusch might not actually be the patron saint.

6. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992)

Wait, so, why is this supposed to be a failure, again? Perhaps the least-regarded David Lynch film (right down there with Dune, which actually deserves it), Fire Walk With Me was stillborn in the show's long shadow, and has since been the victim of the curious blindness--common even among his devoted fans--to the director's feature filmography between Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. I wouldn't rank Fire Walk With Me alongside those epochal triumphs, and there's very little art I hold in higher esteem than Twin Peaks itself. But then, that's reason enough to love Fire Walk With Me right there: is 134 more minutes (three episodes’ worth!) of the most brilliant phenomenon network TV ever allowed on the air anything to sniff at? Indeed, I wonder if the movie is even remotely comprehensible without the show as an almost literal subtext. As is, it's certainly a more unsettlingly non-linear work than Eraserhead or Lost Highway, pointing the way forward to the digital abstractions of Inland Empire.

But perhaps more than any of his other works, Fire Walk With Me exemplifies why this often obtuse artist has so many decidedly non-film-geek fans. Lynch cuts and weaves in strange and baffling ways, but only to deliver on Emotions, all of them, often in the same scene, leaving both Cinema of Quality and austere Euro-art distantiation behind. The constant aura of the uncanny (often created by the simplest of contrasts and juxtapositions) lends his films’ overwhelming affectivity a sense of the sui generis. This will sound ridiculous, but it’s as if I’m feeling fear and humor and tenderness for the first time, which is perhaps why Lynch gets cast as a maverick oddball even as he flaunts his references and keeps faith with various filmic traditions. With the narrative stowed safely away, Lynch is free to conjure up some of his most exquisite compositions and unearthly sounds. Fire Walk With Me is Twin Peaks’ ghost, obsessed with untethered details, lingering long over what was once left un-visualized, driven by the almost unconscious sense of tragedy that is Lynch’s most overlooked quality as an intensely emotive artist.

5. A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Kubrick probably would've loved it, but the first step to fully appreciating Spielberg's greatest work yet is letting it be his, not his mentor's. Philosophical weight and emotional devastation aren’t glued together in A.I--they’re revealed as one and the same. Blockbuster aesthetics (including the dazzlingly tactile work of longtime Spielberg DP Janusz Kaminski) ground the director’s sincere exploration of the limits of humanity in stunning images of a neon future on the brink, and a too-clean household desperate to ignore it. It’s that cruel gap between the family and the world that Spielberg’s been exploring all along, given life in the ragged, sorrowful cut from an abandoned David to Gigolo Joe’s sudden introduction: it’s a moment so heartbreaking that it tears the very movie apart. The grave reverence of Schindler’s List is stripped away, leaving behind the terrifying unknowable future. On the big screen, fantasy is far less safe and can be far more frightening than history, as Spielberg would prove again with his War of the Worlds. Yet this film could be the origin story of prejudice itself, from the primal “Orga…Mecha” division among the kids to the howling adults tearing robots apart, tying the KKK and Glenn Beck rallies together in a very, yes, Kubrickian fashion, but with a tearing sorrow wrapped up in a child’s face that looks, even to the mass murderers, real.

But A.I. is still more than wondrous sci-fi myth-making or exquisitely affective drama. It’s that ending, that which infuriated the unwilling the most, which reveals what A.I. really is: a fable about the end of the human race. Like 2001, its vision of that ending, what it will mean and what will be left, is monolithic. That Spielberg’s attempt at reconciling such awesome, terrible truths to a mass audience was met with confusion and dismay is depressing, but understandable. For a supposed sentimentalist, Spielberg refuses to make the end of us easy on us, and A.I. is the most glorious testament to his complex, irreducible artistry.

4. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)

Maybe I'm a hopeless contrarian, or maybe (definitely) I'm just a helpless Verhoeven fanboy. But I can't help but love Showgirls, whose camp classic status blots out an actually brilliant movie. RoboCop and Starship Troopers, for all their comic-book vulgarity, are increasingly recognized as trenchant, groundbreaking satire, so why is the middle child still thrown out with the trash? Perhaps boobs are harder to forgive than blood or bugs. Is there some rule that a movie with a stripper pole planted dead center can’t say anything significant or deliver genuine emotional heft? In its tragicomic depiction of a showbiz giddily devouring its dreamers alive, Showgirls is every bit as goofily on-target as Verhoeven’s (relatively) more appreciated flicks. I’m tempted to argue that dismissive Hollywood insiders found the satire a bit too accurate, but Showgirls is rather a sadly classic case of a unique film caught between audiences. It was, of course, too overtly trashy to be redeemed by those who considered Forrest Gump to be the finest Hollywood picture of the mid-‘90s, but it was also too finely dramatic--and too doggedly sympathetic to its abused women—to appeal to the grindhouse-oriented Tarantino cult.

Indeed, post-Pulp Fiction, Verhoeven’s particular brand of exaggerated genre hysteria must’ve seemed increasingly of another era. The Dutch director is one of Hollywood’s greatest outsiders, worthy of belonging to the émigré canon of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Polanski. If comparing Showgirls to Chinatown and A Clockwork Orange seems absurd, it may be because high-low distinctions still carry more weight than the postmodernists would have us believe. Of course Showgirls is packed full of morons, drowning in their champagne bubble-baths, but I admire Verhoeven’s refusal to elevate (or even dignify) their struggles while still recognizing the nasty little tragedy at the heart of his spoof. If the film’s sleazy come-ons are more awkward (and, yes, hilarious) then sensual, perhaps that’s to keep our attention where it belongs: on the painful artifice of it all. Drunk on its own delusions, Showgirls is ripe for non-ironic recoupment. So good that it's just really fucking good.

3. Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)

The problem, of course, with using a mass medium like the movies to attack media illiteracy is that if you’re right, your work probably won’t sell that well. Besides which, if a passionate, overwhelmingly emotional drama like Spike Lee’s 25^th Hour got panned for featuring New Yorkers actually, y’know, talking about 9/11, then his Bamboozled never stood a chance. Furiously and defiantly ugly, Bamboozled unleashes its director’s righteous anger unfiltered, and so was met with the usual criticisms that keep his films out of multiplexes. All of which were not only shit, but close cousins to the “same shit done over” that Lee’s film exposes as inherent to a compromised, unthinkingly racist national media. Too scattered and fragmented? Bamboozled is indeed a cacophony of voices, cutting each other off and drowning each other out, none wholly sympathetic even as weary tragedy replaces black comedy—but this is the correct way, the only correct way, to plug in to the confusion and postmodern denial at the heart of contemporary American racial politics. Too stylized and over-the-top? No more so than Tarantino, whom the film specifically calls out and condemns for hiding real prejudice behind postmodern cool; Lee’s own aestheticization has to do with the deceptive powers of performance.

Too black, too strong; Bamboozled is sadly, horrifyingly dead on, locating the heart of contemporary exploitation of American blacks in a very sensitive source—namely, entertainment. “The New Millennium Minstrel Show” is set neither in the projects nor a plantation, but in a watermelon patch, stripped of history and offered up for the sheer passive pleasure of gaping audiences. Most of Bamboozled is shot in grimy video, the better to reflect the tawdry ambitions of those within, but the show-within-a-movie sequences are in grossly eye-popping film. So does Lee implicate his own medium, the great seducer and deceiver, in centuries of prejudice and hate. My least favorite phrase common to conversations about movies: “C’mon, it’s just a comedy!” Bamboozled betrays that lie. Few things can be more dangerous than the drive to “just make ‘em laugh.”

2. The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)

Film is a modernist, industrial artform, leaning towards self-containment by design. But it's also a link in the great chain of human expression, building off of the forms and contents of novels, plays, paintings, and music, linked to personal and collective histories. My disenchantment (a key word for The Village) with most contemporary American movies has to do in large part with the breakdown of this delicate relationship. Modern genre trash gets both sides wrong: it unthinkingly mimics the handed-down clichés of expression, stunting film’s growth as an independent medium in a digital era, while simultaneously disavowing critical engagement with older art forms, and more importantly, older mythologies. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village restores the balance to its properly disturbing, eternally questioning state; so, naturally, everybody hated it. Shyamalan’s storytelling and image-making puts, yes, even Spielberg to shame, but is suffused with the dread of a big lie falling to pieces. Suspense is built and then oddly cut off, as if our fingertips had just barely brushed some horrible secret. (Sigourney Weaver’s hand is outstretched, but William Hurt can’t let himself take it.)

Cinematographer Roger Deakins, of Coens fame, captures (suspiciously) vivid reds and yellows with sinister gliding shots and awe-inspiring use of foreground, but the most memorable shots are those that hint at a distance, at a jerry-rigged artifice that lays the unconscious framework for those shattering final revelations. An astonishingly touching romance is kindled on the porch, but the fog grows in the background. Young people heroically strive past the fictional world they’ve been handed, while the elders crowd behind the curtain, hands shaking and voices cracking as they try to keep the kids searching for the WMDs. When the lies are stripped away, The Village reveals itself, not as a thriller or a period piece, but a work of decidedly national fiction, rooted not in Hollywood genre mechanics, but in Irving and Hawthorne. The real (American) terror of The Village is not that there are witches in the woods, but that there aren’t, and even more so, that it was less frightening when we thought there were.

1. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)

I can't mention Stanley Kubrick's last stand, my very favorite movie, without linking to Tim Kreider's beyond-brilliant excavation of Kubrick's true themes and preoccupations; it's perhaps the greatest piece of film criticism I've ever read. Then again, like Bamboozled, a great deal of Eyes Wide Shut's shattering brilliance is practically predicated on dismissal, on confusion, on blindness. Eyes Wide Shut is about nothing less than a catastrophic collective failure to see and understand, on the part of filmgoers right alongside the unthinking Dr. and Mrs. Bill Harford. It’s no more a “parable about marriage,” as some contemporary revisionists would have it, than it ever was an “erotic thriller.” Kubrick never once thought that small. His films from Dr. Strangelove forward are one staggeringly ambitious suite cutting the big, dumb 20^th century open on a morgue slab, like the murdered woman who lingers, like an uncomfortable truth, behind the “sexual” “fantasies” of Eyes Wide Shut. Like Barry Lyndon, Kubrick’s last film takes aim at the present while couched within the past; the director’s adaptation of Dream Story, a novella set in fin-de-siècle Vienna, links the violent imperial oppression of Old Europe to the blind class exploitation of New Manhattan. But as in The Shining, Kubrick filters his colossal critique through one bewildered family, intentional ciphers who fall back on sex to forget about the hidden horrors of wealth and power—horrors often propagated, of course, by sex.

Eyes Wide Shut, then, is about perhaps the definitive tragedy of both the 19^th and 20^th centuries: the failure of the educated middlemen, the media-informed voters, the “nice people,” to protect the eternally exploited masses from the old, rich elites. What’s so frightening about the latter (“all the best people,” remember) is not their unrestrained power, so much as the casually, unthinkingly evil ways in which they abuse it, to the detriment of all not wearing cloaks and masks. What can those of us caught in the middle do? We have sex, go to movies, grumble if they aren’t sexy, and have nightmares about being unmasked. Do we wake up?

Uncle Boonmee, Take Three: Frontier Film

(Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is an incredible film. So much so that I'm planning on seeing it three times, in two different theaters, and bloggin' a new post for each viewing. Hopefully, this will help me get at the astonishing play of ideas at work in this movie; if not, at least it'll be an unusually-for-me organized attempt. Either way, really. Stay tuned!)

“The second bowl is always the best!” said Calvin, referring to his three-bowl tradition of sugary cereal. (I love quoting Calvin and Hobbes and then imagining the namesake philosophers saying those lines. Picture this guy exclaiming, “There’s treasure everywhere!” and then go forth and lead a better life.)

ANYway, my experience watching Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives three times over the course of its initial weeklong run here in London played out quite differently than Calvin’s daily binge. The first time (at the Prince Charles Cinema) was consolidation, all my built-up expectations and love of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s previous work flowing into the film, both enriching and clouding the experience. My second viewing (this time at the BFI) was the least of the three, as I began to appreciate and understand the film on its own terms, but also felt the pressure of doing so in face of such a complex work from such a prankster artist. It was the third time through, a couple of nights ago back at the Prince Charles, which ultimately proved the most rewarding. Everything that had stood out the first time was doubly familiar, and anything I’d forgotten had been re-emphasized; with all exposed, I wandered freely through the riffs and oddities, the sudden shifts and insidious drifts, the (seemingly) inexplicable and (eternally) ineffable. Thankfully, these elements lie at the core, not the periphery, of Apichatpong’s latest, simultaneously the most grounded and the most bone-deep schizoid film he’s made yet. The first time was watching; the second, thinking; the third, wandering.

So how can I properly finish (for now) talking about this incredible movie? By wandering back to the beginning, and thinking about the title. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. It’s a mouthful, which a reviewer on a handout at the BFI screening noted, before then emphasizing the accessibility of every other feature of the film. Damn straight, but the sheer open-faced size of that title shouldn’t be dismissed as mere quirk. It draws attention to a specific time and event in Uncle Boonmee’s life, a deathbed gift born straight from the tangles of ancient myth and daily existence discussed in my last two posts: the ability to see his past lives.

Or is it? Certainly, Uncle Boonmee is so overflowing with narrative divergences and absorbing subplots (any new character immediately becomes the most important figure on screen, before silently falling away again) that it becomes increasingly hard to discern a main trunk from which the branches sprout. Yet the opening one-off, Boonsong’s emergence, the fable of the catfish, even the stunning still-photo sequence at the ostensible climax—all feel of an emotional and visual piece with the quiet, funny family drama playing out underneath them. Herein lies the difference between “narrative” and “narration,” as Raymond Durgnat might term it. In narrative (plot) terms, these are indeed divergences, reflecting Apichatpong’s playful formalism, his inclusiveness, and his restless desire to compare, contrast, juxtapose, contextualize his scenarios, even as they remain firmly couched in elliptical myth-making. In narration (storytelling) terms, the “divergences” never feel as abrupt as the label might indicate. The loose, prowling camerawork, dreamy editing, and (above all) the suggestion of infinity in those northern Thai jungles unite all the threads as riffs on a single vision. It’s those moments of contact, white-hot as worlds rub up against each other, that shake the soul most, but are always graceful, like the end of a perfect chapter in a head-spinning book. The camera swirls endlessly underwater before releasing us, with a silent gasp, back to open air, where Auntie Jen swats absent-mindedly at mosquitoes; the sound of a jungle crying out (in despair? Ecstasy? Release?) bridges a lush valley and an urban funeral service.

These are instances, not of polemic head-hammering, but of forefronted tactility: I could almost feel the seamless soldering at work. Sensuality, for Apichatpong, is not a layer brushed over a film’s surface, but the medium’s raison d’être. By plugging us directly into the sensory grid, he lends subjective engagement to what, in other hands, could be a distantly amusing oddity of a film. For what I swear is the very last time, I reach for the Lynch comparison: if Eraserhead (or Lost Highway, or Inland Empire) is so very incomprehensible, why do its fervent fans (yo) respond so strongly? Perhaps it’s because the uncanny is a connective, emotive force all on its own, if the filmmakers are willing to commit themselves to it.

Such entwined collisions seem to descend directly from the title: these trailing stories are the past lives of Uncle Boonmee, blurring into each other with increasing speed and confusion as he nears death. Yet, while that’s a satisfying narrative construction, it isn’t borne out so neatly in narration. Certainly, there’s no explicit connection made between the dying man and the ox or the catfish, and yet the subplots are linked to the main plot: we shift from the ox to a Monkey Ghost (perhaps Boonsong, perhaps not) and the catfish tale is introduced via a series of gentle cuts, receding from a drowsing Tong into the wild jungle. Indeed, one could easily think of the opening sequence as Boonsong’s re-introduction to the human world (the film’s first collision of routine and myth) and the princess-catfish fable as Tong’s dream, an urban monk’s vision of this strange, fertile jungle. More importantly, the sense of transference, the mobility of souls, is not limited to the discrete branchings-off. One key scene finds Jen wandering away from a reclining Boonmee to pick some fruit. She feeds some to a friendly dog. The camera first holds Boonmee and Jen, then Jen, then Jen and the dog, then the dog. This flow of life is what animates Uncle Boonmee, beyond any one character.

As such, to reduce Uncle Boonmee’s straying strands to refractions of its titular character would be to miss the plurality of voices that make up Apichatpong’s film. Like Claire Denis (whose mortality tone poem L’Intrus makes for an instructive reference point), Apichatpong never shies from the political implications at the fringes of his scenarios, but allows them to remain at the fringes, insidiously inextricable from daily life, and practically synonymous with national myth. In Uncle Boonmee, politics reflect and inform the colliding dualities of real/mythical and modern/ancient. The film’s first conversation between Boonmee and Jen, the old guard, focuses not on corporeality, but nationality: Boonmee’s assistant Jaai is Laotian, setting off a clearly lifelong prejudice of Jen’s. “Is he illegal?” she asks, a question sure to be familiar to any American audience. “I don’t know,” Boonmee answers, a note of reproach in his voice. That night, Jaai is the last guest at the ghostly family reunion. Staring at Boonsong and Huay, and at the nonplussed reactions of Boonmee and Jen, Jaai murmurs, “I feel like the strange one here.” Yet Boonmee, the rural farmer who laments that, unlike his workers, he never gets to leave the jungle, is still far more tolerant and worldly than his urban counterparts. He eagerly learns French from another Laotian worker (who came across the river “when Laos fell apart”) and drinks Chinese tea Jen finds intolerably bitter. That tea, according to Boonmee, bears its own mythical qualities, able to heal the paralyzed. Perhaps the film’s central scene finds Boonmee and Jen resting at a hut as Boonmee painstakingly drains his kidneys. He blames his karma for his failing state, lamenting that he “killed too many Communists” in the Thai crackdown on northern insurgents. Jen reassures him that he did so for the state, to which he groans, “what a pain in the ass!”

The national, historical, and mythical blur together, not in the city, but in the jungle, the heart of the old legends. Here, Apichatpong’s question becomes one of ownership, rather than binary morality. To whom do these stories belong? Boonsong’s beastly transformation riffs on not only Thai legends, but also distinctly Western images: the comparisons to Bigfoot were inevitable, and to Chewbacca even more so. Yet his Monkey Ghosts were “the ones we heard as kids,” distinctly personal myths. As far as I know, even the most crazily passionate cryptozoologists/Star Wars fanboys don’t actually want to become Bigfoot or Chewie (I imagine Cap’n Solo is still more popular in that regard). Again, Apichatpong focuses attention on the contact point, this time between the individual and the endlessly re-inscribed myths. The Monkey Ghosts belonged to Boonsong, the curiously listening child. Now he belongs to them. This isn’t the (American) Borg, though—assimilation is a joyous (and sexy, evidently!) transcendence. And, of course, Boonsong steps beyond while snapping pictures, trying to understand “the art of photography.” It’s observation that collapses the modern individual and the ancient collective; ergo, postmodern cinema.

This may sound overly academic in the face of a film as warm and funny as Uncle Boonmee, but like his movies, Apichatpong’s artistic persona is increasingly defined by such dichotomies. On the one hand, he famously refuses the title of “director,” preferring “conceived by” to appear before his name in the credits. His response to Hollywood’s global domination isn’t a line in the sand, but (again, like Tolkien) a passionate retreat, placing modernity in a broad context but without the rigorous formalism or detached fatalism of the likes of Béla Tarr and Hou Hsiao-Hsien. On the other, Apichatpong is famously the only Thai filmmaker not to comply with the national censors, preferring to remove Syndromes and a Century from his native theaters entirely. His multi-media Primitive Project, the launching pad for Uncle Boonmee, draws attention to those rural parts of Thailand left uncelebrated (or actively neglected) by the growing urban empire; yet the Project is financed in Munich, as the Thai government was unsurprisingly unwilling to get onboard. Couching historical slaughter in local myth, bringing his national struggles to bear on the international festival circuit, and still accepting the nickname “Joe” from western writers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul both invites and confounds traditional academic dissection. His career, more than any other, makes it clear that as the field of film studies increasingly wrestles with questions of changing international distribution, English-speaking cinephiles need to find different ways of writing about foreign films.

The last few posts have been my attempt at doing so, and here’s the closest I’ve come to a conclusion: what makes Uncle Boonmee a strange, confounding film to these American eyes isn’t its fidelity to unabashedly local mythology, but rather its inclusiveness within that mythology. In surrendering the “director” tag, Apichatpong opens his work up to voices of all kinds, without ever flattening their distinctive histories. His films are overflowing, generous, promiscuous, ever aware of both the innate excitement and terrible power of the medium. All this is a far cry from the paring-down approaches of most of the “world cinema” beloved among western cinephiles, and this is why Apichatpong’s conceptions are so essential to the future of both film and film studies.

A final note on perhaps Uncle Boonmee’s subtlest voice: again, look at the title. Uncle Boonmee. Uncle. It’s no accident that the film gradually shifts greater and greater weight to Tong, seen as little but a helpful shadow until after Boonmee’s death. He wore a T-shirt in the jungle, but returns to his monk garb (and cell phone) when back in the city. He’s the one left to parse out the meaning of what he saw and felt in the jungle, the myths and monsters and army fatigues, while sitting in an empty karaoke bar, simultaneously watching his country explode on TV. Uncle Boonmee had past lives, but it’s Tong who has future ones, and with nothing but a few cuts and a cheesy pop song, Apichatpong ties them together and passes them on.

Uncle Boonmee, Take Two: Radical Nostalgia

(Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is an incredible film. So much so that I'm planning on seeing it three times, in two different theaters, and bloggin' a new post for each viewing. Hopefully, this will help me get at the astonishing play of ideas at work in this movie; if not, at least it'll be an unusually-for-me organized attempt. Either way, really. Stay tuned!)

Just before dashing over to the BFI for my second viewing of Uncle Boonmee, I finished reading Patrick Curry's fascinating Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity, which I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago at a Wiccan bookstore. My relationship to The Lord of the Rings is, I imagine, quite typical for my generation: as a nerdy, book-loving kid, I first read it a little too young, and was left nonplussed by its fiercely ecological and unabashedly English elements. So, of course, the movies were perfectly designed for 13-year-old me, and I embraced them wholeheartedly (upon recent re-viewing, I have reservations, but that's another topic). Curry's passionate, insightful book is equally perfect for 21-year-old me, delving as it does into the multi-tiered mythology and anti-modernist subtext of Tolkien's epic, which I now can't wait to re-read for the first time in years. But back to the silver screen...

I walked into the BFI's Studio Theatre with plenty of half-thoughts from my first viewing to complete, but as I watched Apichatpong Weerasethakul's magisterial fable again unfold, Defending Middle-Earth kept returning to mind. Curry takes to task critics who've lazily dismissed Tolkien as a simplistic, sentimental reactionary, defending Middle-Earth as a locus of principled opposition to (and, yes, retreat from) the flattening and destructive forces of technological modernity. Nostalgic, yes, but never disingenuous and never passive: Curry's term is "radical nostalgia," an idea I loved immediately and which stuck with me throughout my second take on Uncle Boonmee.

As Apichatpong's work has gradually gained recognition outside his native Thailand (culminating in Uncle Boonmee's Palme d'Or), western critics have taken upon themselves the usual task of describing his films in terms of western influences, for their readers' sake (and for their own, probably). Certainly, films like Blissfully Yours and Syndromes and a Century are so generous of spirit that they could easily appeal even to subtitle-haters, and so the question (as usual, IMO) is really one of distribution rather than translation, but that, again, is another topic. Besides, I'm as guilty as anyone--in my last post, I compared Apichatpong to David Lynch multiple times, and I probably will again before I'm done. I've also frequently heard him stacked up next to Renoir and Malick, both of which are valid enough reference points (after catching All About My Mother at the BFI last night with fresh eyes, I'd add Almodóvar to the list as well). Yet Tolkien is perhaps the closest thing to a Western kindred spirit to Apichatpong's latest; specifically, those aforementioned elements of Rings that stand in fierce ideological opposition to the Wagnerian sound-and-fury employed by Peter Jackson & Co. Like Tolkien's book, Uncle Boonmee realizes its subtle social polemics via wholly immersive fantasy, including lived-in magic, a constant sense of multiple unfolding stories, and above all, a revelatory emphasis on place, with characters inextricably linked to their homes in nature. Radical nostalgia, indeed.

I closed my last post by arguing that Uncle Boonmee represented the collapsing of spaces (modern/ancient, real/mythical) that Apichatpong had previously kept separate even as they naturally cross-fertilized. It would be easy, then, to cast this film as depicting civilizations in clash, but there's little strife in Uncle Boonmee--a few muttered slurs and a pang or two of homesickness, but that's all. If the circumstances that the titular uncle and his family find themselves in are decidedly fantastic (ghosts, visions, and Wookiees, oh my!), their reactions feel more like a kind of poetic realism. They crack jokes and keep up their routines as long as they can. A reunion dinner for Boonmee, his sister-in-law Jen, and her nephew Tong is interrupted by the Banquo-esque appearance of Boonmee's dead wife Huay and the revelation that the mysterious beast glimpsed at the film's beginning is Boonmee's long-vanished son Boonsong. Shattering stuff, but not five minutes later the camera has again isolated the three flesh-and-blood humans, as Boonmee earnestly begs a stunned Jen to take over his farm when he's gone--after all, if Huay can come back, Boonmee can too, to help Jen with the day-to-day affairs. Tong looks on silently, as he does for most of the scene, which ends when he cracks a goofy, can't-keep-this-in-any-more grin.

This is the milieu in which these people live, and in Boonmee's case, die. Huay and Boonsong have returned because they sense Boonmee's looming death due to kidney failure. He knows it, too: in an earlier scene, even after a doctor has made the trip to drain his kidneys (in a quiet dance of medical making-do very reminiscent of Syndromes and a Century), Boonmee asks him to stay "until the end," and continually reminds a reluctant Jen of the need to think about the future. Just before the doctor scene, Apichatpong shows us something strange and beautiful: a lush, overflowing plain, in which Boonmee has erected several lean-tos below which he grows vegetables. The structures stand out immediately, but nevertheless look completely at home: Apichatpong's artfully arranged mise-en-scène harmonizes man and nature. We cut to Boonmee staring out his bedroom window longingly as the doctor unpacks his equipment. Perhaps we just caught a glimpse of Boonmee's mind's eye, knowing his fate and thinking of the beauty he's been part of.

Windows are a key component of Apichatpong's aesthetic, never more so before than in Uncle Boonmee, where they act as a sort of skin. Renowned political geographer Stephen Jones conceived of border studies in this way--borders as a definite but permeable element of states, allowing for both identification and communication. So, too, do the outside and inside visually blur and bleed into each other in Uncle Boonmee, reflecting the impossibility of separating the titular man's life (lives?) from nature. When Tong first arrives at Uncle Boonmee's, he and Boonmee's assistant Jaai set about unpacking in a darkened room, giving it life as they spread out their things and turn on the lights, but the room's most gorgeous feature remains the glimpses of the jungle's tangle through the open windows.

That jungle is a locus of almost absurd fertility; in the opening scenes featuring the ox, there's a palpable sense that if the camera doesn't keep a close eye on the ground, it'll float off into an eternal arboreal sea. Cross-fertilization--or, sex--is a recurring theme in Uncle Boonmee: Boonsong transforms into a Monkey Ghost (think a Wookiee merged with that thing behind Winkie's in Mulholland Drive) after mating with one, and the film's most memorable side-story involves a mottled princess giving herself over to a catfish-god. Apichatpong's collisions are joyous (and funny), but also messy and a little squeamish, which is probably as it should be. These are the engines by which myth is reified: weird sex and matter-of-fact magic. Sounds right to me, and though Tolkien wasn't exactly the most libidinous of authors, he'd probably agree.

"Radical nostalgia" is that which asserts its place as if there never was anything else, but precisely by making room for the audience, relying on the slow excitement of magic coupled with magic's banality in this strange old world. The trees and valleys of northern Thailand, in Apichatpong's hands, are as fantastic as his film's more overtly mythical elements. These jungles are exactly where we expect magic to be, if it's anywhere. If the woods of New England are where Americans root their (gloomy, terrifying, morally severe) origin myths, as explicated in Irving and Hawthorne, then this jungle is the locus of Apichatpong's career-long pilgrimage. This is where the stories come from, and where they must return. And so must Uncle Boonmee; as Curry quotes Russell Hoban in Defending Middle-Earth, "We make fiction because we are fiction. We make stories because we are story." Step by step in Uncle Boonmee, nature takes back its own.

Yet the story ends in a modern hospital, among his survivors; Apichatpong's fable is broader and messier than simple transcendence. I'm getting more of a handle on what, exactly, it is; I'm looking forward to one more screening (tomorrow night, back at the Prince Charles), but I'm not expecting a feeling of "snapping into place," and I'm glad for that. Uncle Boonmee is above all open-ended; as Curry describes The Lord of the Rings, it's more rooted in hope than longing.

Uncle Boonmee, Take One: Ghost Stories

(Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is an incredible film. So much so that I'm planning on seeing it three times, in two different theaters, and bloggin' a new post for each viewing. Hopefully, this will help me get at the astonishing play of ideas at work in this movie; if not, at least it'll be an unusually-for-me organized attempt. Either way, really. Stay tuned!)

It’s a lamentably typical complaint among filmgoers: “I couldn’t keep my eyes open.” But why does this have to be a negative? Certainly, drifting off in a classroom is a bad sign, for both student and teacher; our standards for art, however, ought to be different. How many of us fight off bouts of insomnia with the help of soothing, hypnotizing music? Few traditions cut across cultures like putting children to sleep with stories. As much as our sacred fables help establish our collective values, fears, and hopes, they also introduce stories as a world in between the conscious world and the unconsciousness of sleep. The best bedtime stories, the ones we return to as curious, analytic adults, are perfectly pitched somewhere among the detritus of history, parable, and fantasy. Universes are blurred, cross-fertilizing, evoking the mixture of preconscious fear and elemental excitement with which kids the world over greet nightfall. Eyelids droop. Dreams follow.

I kept my eyes closed during most of the opening credits of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the latest cinephilic symphony from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, on whose shoulders I’m increasingly resting the future of the medium. In part, it was the sound. Before any words appeared onscreen, the sprawling basement theater of the Prince Charles Cinema was enveloped in the chirp of insects, the flow of distant streams, the creaking of trees, and that indefinable rustle that seems to hang behind every sound in the natural world. This may sound familiar, even banal, but the restful density of Apichatpong’s soundscapes introduce a calm anticipation like nothing I’ve experienced in any other art—like nothing I’ve experienced in anything outside of deep nature itself. Even the faint gray glow of the screen was too much. I closed my eyes.

I opened them to see an ox, tied to a tree, rooted in a silvery plateau surrounded by shadowy trees. The ox strains to pull free; the rope holding it forms a perfect line against the lush ellipticism of the surrounding environment. Apichatpong cuts to its human keepers, sitting and talking quietly in a nearby glade. The ox finally succeeds and trots off, with increasing speed and confidence, into the nearby jungle. The camera follows at first, but gradually begins to lag behind, lingering on the impossibly tangled trees, as if waiting for something to emerge from this moonlit mystery. Eventually, of course, one of the men finds the ox. A single, unbroken frame watches as he untangles the ox and strains to drag in back; as well as exemplifying Apichatpong’s wry, deadpan humor, the shot avoids any cuts that might have disrupted this enveloping jungle and the enchantment moving within. The latter is finally given concrete form, after a cut necessary and enlivening: a shadowy thing, hunched but huge, with laser-red eyes shining out of the jungle’s dusk.

Whenever I find myself somewhere overwhelmingly majestic, so beautiful as to seem unreal, I like to close my eyes for a moment or two. I imagine myself somewhere familiar, a street in my hometown, or a classroom, or my bed, waking from a dream. Just as I have my body and mind convinced, my eyes snap open again. There it still is: the stormy Atlantic, or the mountains of Hokkaido, or that fantastic creature lurking in Apichatpong’s jungle. When I opened my eyes again to Uncle Boonmee, I had one last glimpse of the beast before the title flashed onscreen. Waking up, or falling asleep?

It’s difficult to say. After the title, we jump out of the jungle and onto the road. The camera hovers inside a sedan, collecting still shots of each silently staring passenger in turn. Certainly, it’s a massive shift in mise-en-scène, and marks the introduction of the narrative proper in lieu of the opening one-off, but one element remains: the forefronting of sound. This time, we’re blanketed by the roar of the engine and the air-conditioning, yet the effect is the same—the sensorial domination of environment. But then, one of the passengers (Auntie Jen, played with immobile kindness by Jenjira Pongpas) cracks her window a bit, and a smile plays across her weathered face. The jungle whips by.

Such subtle dichotomies and ambiguous collisions define Apichatpong’s oeuvre, from which Uncle Boonmee marks both a diversion and an evolution. His earlier treasures Tropical Malady and Syndromes and a Century were radically split down the middle, initial narrative threads cast off and remade new. Malady’s feverish love story shifts sideways into a deep-jungle tiger hunt, while Syndromes literally starts over halfway through, transplanting its central fledgling couple from a small rural hospital to a sprawling Bangkok medical complex. Among Western critics, this recurring motif earned Apichatpong no end of comparisons to beloved formalist tricksters like Resnais and Lynch, but the Thai filmmaker is more playful, less capital-A ambitious, and ultimately less definable than his monolithic forebears. His virtuoso sequences are more synced to life rhythms, his imagist impact tied less to modernist deck-shuffling than nature’s eternal resurrections. Beauty and mystery pre-empt and replace theoretical teasing-out of meaning.

As such, while Malady and Syndromes may sound foreboding, academic, and mysterious in description, they couldn’t be less so in execution. Not that there’s anything wrong with those adjectives or the films they actually do describe, but Apichatpong’s filmography blazes a different path for explicitly elliptical narrative filmmaking. His films are meditative, horizontal takes on “total cinema,” immersive rather than suspenseful. Like latter-day Lynch, he works primarily with spare parts, but his sidling camera and graceful editing speak to a sparer, more accessibly rhythmic poetry than Lynch’s (brilliantly) overstuffed collages. For those familiar with his work, there’s nothing properly “mysterious” about Apichatpong’s filmmaking, because unlike Lynch (or Denis, or Haneke), he’s not actually hiding anything. His films’ constructions unmistakably concern themselves with the mechanics of narrative, but not at the ontological or ethical level, and teasing specific allegories out of Malady or Syndromes is an exceedingly difficult dead-end. Apichatpong is instead invested heavily in film’s relationship to ancient modes of storytelling, rooted in local myth, which is itself rooted in the kind of repetitions and gradual changes his work exemplifies. His full-length debut, Mysterious Object at Noon, is the kind of self-reflexive shaggy-dog story that ought to seem familiar to any Slacker fan, but is also grounded in (very specifically) Thai history, culture, and most thornily, contemporary politics.

In its fairy-tale asides, its deadpan collision of wild fantasy and treasured banality, and its individualistically grounded allusions to Thailand’s bloody history and uncertain present and future, Uncle Boonmee expertly guides the Apichatpong project into its second decade. Yet given its relative lack of formal play, its restless, goofy humor, and its literal evocation of ghosts and hybrids (as opposed to Malady’s ambiguous transformations), it’s tempting for even (especially) Apichatpong devotees to demote his latest to the status of “minor work.” Yet Uncle Boonmee is already stirring the interest of wider bases than the open-minded art-house frequenters who embraced his previous works. Perhaps this is because, instead of dividing up his various ancient/modern, real/mythical spaces, Apichatpong is concerned here with collapsing these spaces into each other, centered on an old man facing death—but, as the title indicates, also confronting life.

I’ve barely begun delving into the film’s specific achievements; I’m taking the advantage of second (and third) viewings to develop my thoughts further. Repetition and, perhaps, transformation—surely, Uncle Boonmee’s creator would approve.

Latter Day Saint

An interesting fate: Martin Scorsese, whose career-long love-and-hate struggle with the Hollywood studio game is deservedly the stuff of legend, has finally reached the Promised Land of commercial impunity and critical immunity just as his films have largely shed their individual ambition. There’s a knee-jerk cynical connection waiting to be drawn there, the half-validity of which I’ll get to in a moment, but even as my direct interest in the old man’s latest works has increasingly waned, my fascination with them as Event Films has only deepened. At this point, I’m equally interested in looking at our reactions to Scorsese films as the films themselves, as his cross-fertilization of awards-bait banality and genre-steeped cinephilia is poking us in a very interesting place.

Gangs of New York, for example, remains a most intriguing failure, which is about the most polite thing I can say about it. Scorsese threw himself headfirst into the eternally tricky game of historical filmmaking, and to my mind, came up empty (at best) every step of the way. His depiction of American religion was superficial and inert, his take on the bloody political transitions of the 1860s felt pandering and simplistic, and his visual and physical re-creation of his beloved city’s past stood out both garish and cheap, putting me in mind of an over-ambitious high school play (or, more relevantly to modern Hollywood, an over-faithful comic book adaptation). Above all, the film’s hammered-upon connections to 9/11 were tenuous, forced, substance-free, and more than a little insulting, especially given Spike Lee’s utterly committed, utterly faithful, and utterly successful 25^th Hour that same year. Yet there’s something about Scorsese’s stubborn, catastrophic ambition, his undeniable panache for artfully loaded mise-en-scène, and his excavation (however clumsily) of a deeply embarrassing and easily forgotten time and place in American history that reminded me of what drew me to his films in the first place.

The critical community at large reflected a similarly confused unease. The film’s historicism and connections to modernity were faintly praised, but most reviews quickly honed in on the safest elements of Scorsese’s deranged spectacle: the fastidious design, Daniel Day-Lewis’ camera-magnet performance, and, of course, Marty (Still) Hearts NY. The film was dutifully nominated for Best Picture, but unlike Goodfellas or Raging Bull, nobody expected it to win, pulled passionately for it to do so, or was enraged when it didn’t. Gangs of New York seemed both more and less than what had been expected, and nobody was sure what to do with it; this isn’t the mark of a great, or even passable, film, but it did mark Scorsese out as a still-interesting, if not still-vital, figure in American film culture.

Indeed, the man was rapidly becoming larger than his movies, a trend which overtook The Aviator entirely. Scorsese’s filmmaking-as-OCD metaphor made for an instant talking point, and again, an excuse to talk about Scorsese’s career in facile macro terms. Ludicrous Citizen Kane comparisons were made early and often (because Marty loves old movies, doncha know), and older critics went into endless spasms of delight over Cate-playing-Kate (younger critics decrying Hollywood’s Broadway-style self-cannibalization were few and far between). Aviator remains a prime example of the growth of self-referential Hollywood hype machines. The film hadn’t even been released before writers were breathlessly wondering if this would be the one to deliver Marty his Lifetime Achievement Award Oscar, while the Academy, of course, increasingly takes its cues from that same overeager buzz. Certainly, there was more than a little retconning flop-sweat in the unanimous praise offered Scorsese’s (dull, fanboyish) biopic; as the director’s older masterpieces were increasingly being canonized as such, the Academy, among others, was almost explicitly looking to make up for lost time before the old man died on us.

As I said, it’s easy to argue that the Academy, et al only fully opened their doors to Scorsese when he started playing by their rules and letting his art suffer in the process. It’s also partially correct, as hinted at by his paint-by-numbers scripts and his films’ politics, alternately awkwardly forefronted and dangerously subsumed (the lack of attention paid to The Aviator’s Rove-ready conservatism remains a staggering critical gaffe). Still, I’m suspicious of any argument that casts Scorsese and the studios in rigid opposition. Like peer John Carpenter (now there’s a fun juxtaposition) he’s often spoken wistfully of his admiration for the studio-savvy directors of the ‘40s (Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock) and has always demonstrated willingness, even eagerness, to work within popcorn context. Keep in mind that the superficially auterist theories used to set Marty against Oscar are descended from the work of the Bazin acolytes (and Nouvelle Vague directors worshipped by a young Martin Scorsese) who filled the pages of Cahiers du Cinema with radical defenses of…Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock. Skip forward to the ‘90s, and Cahiers scribe and medium-shattering filmmaker Olivier Assayas is leading the charge to artistically recoup Clint Eastwood, whose superb drama Million Dollar Baby, unimpeded by studio pressure, would go on to upset The Aviator at the 77^th Academy Awards.

Such are the feverishly creative confusions upon which Martin Scorsese has made his career, which is why “cross-fertilization” seemed to me an apt descriptor of his contemporary studio-flicks-cum-passion-projects. If his filmography poses questions about the relationship between passionate artists and bottom-line studios, there are (as usual for that relationship) no easy answers to be found. Besides which, the aforementioned flattening trend among studios, critics, and awards ceremonies over the last decade is bigger than any one director, as 2010’s horrifyingly communal cheerleading of mediocre-to-awful American products (Inception, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right) demonstrated. Ultimately, The Aviator’s soporific success has more in common with Dances With Wolves, the po-faced snoozer that beat out Goodfellas for the Academy’s top prize, than with anything in Scorsese’s oeuvre.

I’ve talked a lot about The Departed on this blog and elsewhere, which is odd given that it’s a rather unsurprising film that I mildly enjoy. Such is the fascinating and maddening nature of the triangulation among an aging, nostalgic Scorsese, an adoring public including both lifelong fans and curious relative newcomers, and the fungibility of the films themselves. What The Departed is (a superbly edited, otherwise unremarkable crime flick) isn’t nearly as interesting to me as what it represents: a remake of a Hong Kong blockbuster that nicked its aesthetic from Hollywood in the first place, a stodgily mounted genre entry that still reeled in younger audiences who’d seen Pulp Fiction before Goodfellas, an almost ideologically generic box-office smash that nonetheless rode the vapor trails of its director’s signature obsessions. The Departed, in its genesis mythos as much as its guns and Catholic crosses, is perhaps the definitive modern film product, almost grim in its determination to deliver a good time, squeezing the world and its medium dry to do so, and only barely succeeding.

Yes, it’s his best feature since Casino, but what’s the competition? Bringing Out the Dead? More importantly, notice how much it took to drag a decent film out of latter-day Scorsese: a framework on loan from Asia on loan from younger Scorsese, a script stuffed with as many rapid-fire quips and as much “local color” (the go-to critical buzzword for the recent slew of Boston crime flicks) as possible, a cast list overflowing with fame and testosterone, and a Sisyphean effort by longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who earned her Oscar far more than the director) to tie the whole damn thing together, all for a final product I’m comfortable giving a B- to, and then watching Inside Man for the 25^th time instead. There’s simply too much loaded on to The Departed, by filmmakers and fans alike, and the flimsy, work-a-day material can’t hold it. Which is a shame, because unlike his prior two features, The Departed’s ambition is more mechanical than theoretical, and as Saturday-night male genre porn, it holds up just fine. But neither I nor the Academy can nudge the film from out of the maker’s shadow. Witness his old buddies Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas handing Marty his Best Picture trophy, and his knowingly self-deprecating acceptance speech. The Departed had just few enough flaws, and faced just little enough competition, to hop the fence. Not exactly cathartic.

Which brings me, finally, to Shutter Island, which I saw nine months ago but have resisted writing about until the wave of popular reaction had long passed the film by. And so it has: Shutter Island, being the most genre-specific, least awards-ready, and (to my mind) most representative of its maker’s unmistakable headspace among the recent pack, offers significantly fewer overarching talking points than its predecessors. The critical reaction has been muted and split, resembling more Gangs confusion than Aviator/Departed rapture—which didn’t stop Shutter Island from becoming the highest-grossing Scorsese film ever. Of course, his first three Leo vehicles had accomplished the same feat, indicating that the director has finally achieved that coveted Spielberg status: whatever else they do, his movies will keep making money, and keep allowing him to make the next one and make it the way he wants to. That last point is a particular coup. Scorsese’s name is so ingrained in generations of moviegoers and movie-lovers that the notion that, at the onset of the 21^st century, he still had significant careerist terrain to conquer may sound absurd, but his story is full of disappointments, compromises, and films that simply aren’t his. His venerable reputation among critics, cinephiles, and especially fellow filmmakers has been cemented since Goodfellas (if not sooner), but not until Shutter Island outlasted The Departed was his stability as a commercial warhorse truly tested and fully established.

I can’t begrudge him this success, especially as I’ve yet to fully sort out my feelings about Shutter Island itself, as confounding a mediocre film as I’ve ever seen. And it is mediocre, make no mistake: ludicrously untenable in its narrative twists and turns, laughably histrionic in its pacing and constant, breathless upping of its wholly internalized stakes, while simultaneously (yet again) dubious in its period-piece absorption of history (including arguably the most unnecessary Holocaust divergence in recent memory, which is seriously saying something). Still, I find it easier to forgive “more! MORE! Flashbacks and HUAC and the hydrogen bomb!” than “whatever, just hit the 4/4 and don’t waste the producer’s money.” Ferocious, giddy pulp, even if largely unsuccessful, is vastly preferable to the sort of ham-handed, cool-hearted genre trash that seems to be all Hollywood can come up with lately.

I’ve somehow managed to get this far without talking specifically about genre, and that’s as silly as Shutter’s anagrammed climax. Scorsese doesn’t just “work within” or “wrestle with” film genre, he loves it, deeply and excitedly; this unabashed geekdom, as explicated in his documentaries My Voyage to Italy and A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, is arguably more central to his legacy than stunted gunplay or conflicted Catholicism. (Just ask Quentin Tarantino.) Shutter Island is fully fermented in its maker’s adoration of the hardboiled pulp flicks made in the 1950s, the decade Shutter can’t escape. As such, the film never comes close to establishing a distinctive identity, but I still enjoyed the experience of watching it unfold far more than Gangs or Aviator, if not as much as The Departed. Scorsese’s latest genre fixations (horror and period thriller) are rooted in the sensorial rather than the pseudo-intellectual (Gangs) or familiarly emotional (Aviator); as such, Shutter Island “just works” in a way those others didn’t. It’s difficult to argue with a jump or a flinch, and Shutter delivers plenty of both. It’s also hard not to admire the loving visual flairs (rusty, dangling manacles, rain lashing furiously against patterned windows, a still-lit cigarette on the edge of a cliff) and the Robbie Robertson-curated score, but even Shutter’s most acute pleasures are never grounded the way the generic and political are intertwined in Polanski’s masterful The Ghost Writer.

Scorsese’s film is the sort of half-competent drivel best enjoyed with a wandering mind, letting the eyes drift to the corner of every shot and doing one’s best to ignore the nonsense being spouted and visualized up-front. Lord knows I love watching masterful craft applied to B-movie aesthetics—my alltime favorite filmmaker is Brian de Palma, who could’ve taught his old pal Scorsese a thing or two about how to make this particular movie. (Remember The Fury? C’mon, let’s go watch it. Haha, John Cassavetes is exploding, awesome! Rewind!) Although Shutter Island as a whole betrays a director running seriously low on ideas, the (relative) lack of self-seriousness here is undeniably refreshing. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give it: Shutter Island may be the first Scorsese picture in over a decade not to be nominated for Best Picture.

The great irony here is that Martin Scorsese, a richly experienced cinephile whose aged perspective could hold many lessons for young filmmakers, appears to have embraced the worst aspects of many young filmmakers: unfiltered reverence for complex subjects, overstuffed mise-en-scène that reflects carelessness as much as obvious talent, tasteless politics, too many punchlines (of various kinds), and most painful of all in relation to Scorsese, a banal, overly stagey treatment of star performers. Decades distant, the Scorsese-DeNiro project stands as the most fruitful director-actor collaboration in film history. What’s to be said about Marty-Leo? Not much, beyond the self-duplicating aura of spectacle.

It’s that sense of a navel-gazing industry and artist that I keep returning to, as Scorsese’s constant teasing out of film-as-commercial-industry, film-as-genre-storytelling, and film-as-personal-project has stopped leading to soul-shaking cinema unlike anything before it and started leading to movies so schizoid and self-reflexive that they barely exist on their own, in ways both fascinating and deadly boring. Spread himself thin, losing his touch; pick your cliché, and then wrestle with the fact that Marty’s more successful at the box office than ever. Again, this isn’t a case of a simple binary between critics and audiences, or between hardcore and casual fans. This is a case of a truly strange artist becoming a little less strange, and thereby becoming something even stranger, practically unique in our time—with the exception, again, of Spielberg. Again like Spielberg, Scorsese has become a brand while keeping the personal and (perhaps more importantly) ever-evolving nature of his work alive. Even as I increasingly appreciate Scorsese more as a social phenomenon than a vibrant artist, and even as I stop enjoying putting my money towards his next seat-filler, I’ll keep showing up to watch.