Joel Coen and Ethan Coen | True Grit / 2010

out there

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joel and Ethan Coen (screenwriters and directors) (based on a novel by Charles Portis) True Grit / 2010

 

If I have several times in these pages chided the Coen brothers for their sophomoric cynicism and exaggerated characterizations of the human species, I have also noted time and again their brilliant gifts as directors, particularly when they work, as they have here and as they did in No Country for Old Men, with pre-existing sources. In both cases the sensibilities of the authors nicely match the Coens’ viewpoints. But the darkness of these films is far more profound than the shallow nose-thumbings that often occur in the Coens' more comic works.

     Indeed, I believe True Grit—despite Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey's proclamation in today’s paper that this film (as well as others this year) is far “nicer” than No Country for Old Men—is their most horrifying work to date. For in the earlier film, chaos and destruction was meted out by the evil villain; in last year’s A Serious Man, the sufferings endured by the hero were obviously the "gift" of a wrathful God. But in True Grit it is the so called “good people,” as well as the villains, who kill.

     True, the evil Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin) begins it, killing Mattie Ross’ father. But we soon recognize that in this   Arkansas frontier world of an "eye for an eye" philosophy, death or, at least, its image, is something no one can escape. From the moment the grieving 14-year-old daughter enters the town to identify her father’s body and send the corpse on its way back to her home, Mattie (excellently realized by Hallie Steinfeld) is faced with death. Having to pay almost everything she has for the embalming and shipping of the body, she is forced to sleep the first night, like Oliver Twist, in a coffin, sleeping beside three cadaverous criminals who, a few minutes after her arrival in town, are hung in the main square. When she finally does find other lodging, she must share the bed with an old woman whose dead sleep reveals that she is soon to become a corpse herself.

     None of this, however, truly fazes this intense moppet, and we soon discover that like most of those around her, when it comes to facing annihilation, she has a heart of stone. For Mattie is determined to get revenge, to track down the man who killed her father, presumed now to be in Indian Territory, a jurisdiction of federal marshals who are few in number and busy with larger crimes.  Spouting the gospel as if she were a child-preacher out a Flannery O’Connor tale, Mattie doesn’t even blink in her forward motion of righteous wrath. Unlike the 1969 movie version of True Grit, which significantly softened this figure’s indignation, the Coens transform her into a pint-sized prophet utterly determined to accomplish what she believes she is destined to do.

      When told that US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (played in the original by John Wayne, and here by Jeff Bridges) is the meanest of men she might chose to lead her on the chase, Mattie checks out a local trial wherein she hears testimony to his murderous ways. Cogburn, however, is not just a murderer—or, as some might prefer to describe him, a successful sheriff—but he is a serious drunk (ridiculously euphemized by suggesting he likes to “pop a cork”), and Mattie has not only to get around his reluctance to the chase but his questionable ability to accomplish it. Part of the film’s humor lies in her stubborn maneuvering of Cogburn and in his determination to keep her from attempting to join him in the task. Against her desire, Cogburn teams up with another man, LaBoeuf (hilariously played by Matt Damon), a roughly mustachioed and spur-jangling Texas Ranger who is after Chaney for a different murder and a large reward. Both try to sneak away early in the morning before Mattie can join them, but she is soon hot on their trail and thoroughly demonstrates her “true grit” by fording the river on horseback.

    In the Coens' telling, the three potential killers—thoroughly revealing, as The New York Times critic Manhola Dargis pointed out, D. H. Lawrence’s postulate that “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer”—now come face to face with an even greater emblem of death, the vast “out there,” the frontier itself. This is not the lush green or even picturesquely rocky landscape of most Westerns, but a bleached-out and barren world stripped of nearly everything, including the Indians. At the best the trio come across an occasional cabin or an eccentric loner such as Bear Man (Ed Corbin), a wilderness doctor cloaked in the entire pelt of a bear with head attached. In this world, death looms everywhere. And, as the two men—the grumpy and always woozy Cogburn and the bragging, self-centered LaBoeuf—inevitably turn against one another, Mattie is put into the position of a scolding, cajoling guide, leading them, as much as they lead her, into harm’s way.

      I don’t know how anyone might describe a film that shows a villain’s fingers being cut off, the knife then thrust into his heart, and presents a scene a few minutes later in which Cogburn shoots not only the robbers but LaBoeuf (it is debatable, given his obvious skill with a gun combined with his limited vision—he has only one eye—whether it was intentional or not) as being “nice.” But the directors have gotten to the heart of Portis’ fiction and come closer to the truth of the American west than most Westerns other than those by director Budd Boetticher. Without the controls of society, it is not a nice world, and Mattie, despite her determination and her own killer instincts—it is she who finally must face down her father’s murder and shoot him dead—ultimately learns that such an unforgiving world can only end in loss.

      While both LaBoeuf and Cogburn take bullets, surviving nonetheless, Mattie, falling down into a sink hole, must face nature itself, in the form of a true symbol of the evil of her and the others' acts, by being bitten by a poisonous snake. Even a mad rush across the starlit plane cannot entirely make her whole again; she loses her horse and one arm. We later discover that her strong-willed ways perhaps also left her in a life of loneliness, for she never marries.

      Although Mattie does not question her acts or attempt to justify her mad determination to gun down her father’s killer, we must, at some point, judge her, just as the people of the city had judged Rooster Cogburn earlier in the film. And we realize that in her fanatical grittiness there is something heroic yet ridiculous, that she is a figure at once comic and tragic, similar to US history.

 

Los Angeles, New Year’s Day, 2011

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (January 2011).

Charles Chaplin | A Woman / 1915

sunday in the park

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Chaplin (screenwriter and director) A Woman / 1915

 

The last of Chaplin’s three drag films is perhaps the most intricate in terms of plot and possible interpretations. In this 26-minute mini-feature we get a preview of sorts into Chaplin’s great films of the 1920s and 30s, bringing up issues of class, sexual abuse, spousal violence, and even possible hints of homosexuality.

       A Woman might even have been titled The Women in its crystal ball-like vision of some of the issues brought up in the 1939 George Cukor film version of Clare Boothe Luce’s play. Chaplin’s film begins, in fact, with two women, mother (Marta Golden) and daughter (Edna Purviance), accompanied on a Sunday outing to what appears to be Los Angeles’ Echo Park by the husband and father (Charles Inslee). The three of them, well-dressed, sit on a bench, the father and mother lulled by the summer breezes into sleep, while the young girl is so bored that she too soon finds herself dozing off. 

     Out of nowhere appears a true flirt (Margie Reiger) passes in front of them, catching the half-closed eye of the suddenly awakening womanizing father. Before his distaff side can release another snore he slips from the bench to join the flirt a bit further along the wooded path. They quickly get to know one another, and he suggests he might procure them a drink from a nearby refreshment stand.

       While the would-be homewrecker waits in her web along tramps a wandering spider, our always cheerful Charlie finding her to be such a lovely being he asks if he might sit down. The flirt is clearly fickle and before the father can even return she has struck up a friendship with her new courtier. He returns to find someone else in his would-be bed and furiously commands our hero to cease and desist. A fight naturally follows which, despite some nice rear-end passes, ends in the Tramp’s defeat.

       Now sitting alone on the bench along come a couple of males (Billy Armstrong and Leo White, the latter described in the credits as “the Loafer”) determining, without explanation, to sit extremely close to the Tramp who has already situated himself at the far end of the bench. They talk, gesticulating actively, eventually turning toward him. But when they look up, apparently for some noise overhead, he steals a sip from the straw of the nearest man’s drink, much like his attempt to take a swig of Fatty Arbuckle’s soda in the previous movie. Outraged by his behavior the two reprimand him, the far one poking him with his cane.

        The Tramp, cornered as he literally is, pushes back on the cane, dislodging the man on the outside before taking up the bottle of the man next to him and hitting him over the head, both being temporarily put out of commission.

        Meanwhile, in a nearby glen the young flirt has suggested to the womanizer that they might play “Hide and Seek.” He loves the idea, and she blindfolds him so that she might disappear, the Tramp appearing just at that moment and taking up the game in her place.  As the man feyly waves his hand in search of his young companion, the Tramp relieves him of his bottle of soda, pauses, and hooks the crook of his cane around the elder’s neck leading him carefully to the edge of the lake. Searching for exactly the right spot he turns the man around to face him, the womanizer finally reaching out to feel the face of what he presumes might be his love in delight. But when he reaches the moustache, the mask falls, and he is appalled to see the Tramp meeting his gaze. Chaplin’s character takes up the bottle, hits him over the head, and deposits him into the lake, similarly pulling the policeman who comes up behind, having observed the incident, into the deep waters.

      Discovering the just awakening mother and daughter still on their bench, the Tramp asks if he might sit beside them and strikes up a conversation in which, it is apparent, they truly enjoy his company. Both invite him home, delighted by having such a good-looking young man in their midst, the daughter having evidently fallen immediately in love with him and her mother perceiving that she finally found the right man for her child.

      Her husband, meanwhile, finally struggles up to the bank to return to the urban paradise only to discover he is now alone. Fortunately, he quickly discerns his friend, the man the Tramp has previously hit over the head, on a nearby bench and they share their stories of their terrible woes. He invites the friend home, hardly able to resist without the help of his friend, other women he encounters along the way.

      Now sharing a snack of donuts, the Tramp has become quite popular with the two women. And when her father returns, his daughter is delighted to be able to introduce him to his new boyfriend. Obviously, the two immediate recognize one another as their foe, the father almost immediately attacking the young man with the Tramp pushing, pulling. and slapping back. Hearing the fracas, the father’s friend enters the room only to discover their mutual enemy in their midst and proceeds also to enter into the fray. At one point, holding onto the front of the Tramp’s pants, he twirls him around room until he has yanked off the young man’s drawers, the Tramp rushing outside in his underwear to scandalize an entire posse of neighbors, all women, who seem to be just passing by.

       With nowhere else to go, our young hero reenters the house and runs up the stairs locking himself away in a room where, suddenly, he sees a mannikin outfitted in woman’s attire. Somewhat like the later comedian Lucille Ball playing her famed role of Lucy Ricardo, we see that a crazy idea has just entered his consciousness: he will dress up as a woman!

       The result is mixed, particularly since his upper lip still sports his unforgettable bristle.  Fortunately, at this very moment his new lover arrives to witness his get-up. Realizing what he plans, she breaks into laughter, delighted at the idea that he might be able to fool her father. Ordering him to shave off his moustache, she offers him a pair of her shoes, and voilá, he has magically become her best friend from school, Miss Nora Nettlerash, a real knockout.

         Downstairs, the father of the house discerns that his friend has now spent some time in the kitchen getting to know his wife. We all know people who act entirely out of self-interest imagine that everyone behaves precisely as they do. He suspects the worst, stirring up another brouhaha about his friend’s untoward attentions to his wife. The two battle it out with the wife, shocked by his suspicions entering the room to say her piece. At the very moment when her husband swings his open hand toward the face of his former friend, the target ducks, and the slap comes hard against the cheek of his wife. 

          The abuse of both foe and friend has now wormed his way into his family life, and he retires to his living room to contemplate the fact. Fortunately, at that very moment his daughter enters to introduce her lovely classmate, Nora. How can such a man resist such a lovely face and shapely body? Within moments he’s chasing her around the house, and when his friend finally feels it’s safe to escape the safety of the kitchen where the wife of the house stands ready with a rolling pin to protect life and limb, he too witnesses the beauty of the new guest. Before our very eyes they are suddenly bartering for the beauty.

       By this time Chaplin is playing it as pure camp, swaying his hips, leading on her two suitors with every feminine gesture in his repertoire. The girl definitely knows how to lead a man on and at the very moment he leans in for the kiss butt-knocking them away at the very last instant.

      At one moment the men stand on either side of her demanding a kiss. She finally gives in, asking them, out of shyness, to wait for the count of three. “1-2-3”—she ducks—and in what may be the very first American on-screen male-to-male meeting of the lips, the two kiss.

       Finally, in total frustration the man of the house tosses his equally greedy friend out. Ready now to beg for her love, he finds Nora in the living room and kneeling on the floor while he strokes her buttocks and hips pleading for her love, in the process pulling down her dress to reveal the same stripped shorts that his friend had discovered under the Tramp’s pants.

       War is declared, but at that very moment his wife arrives with rolling pin in hand, his daughter pleading for her cause. The Tramp begs them all to put down their weapons suggesting an armistice of sorts: permission to marry his daughter if he keeps quiet about the gentleman’s philandering. “Come shake—and your wife will never know what I know.” Begrudgingly, the elder takes the younger man’s hand and, for a moment or so, all seems all his quiet on the western front—but a moment or two later as the younger pair kiss, he cannot contain himself and out goes the Tramp into the streets once again.

        A Woman plays almost like an athletic balletic version of a Feydeau farce, where instead of retiring into closets and hiding under beds, the desirous couples put their bodies into action to get what they want. But what they want is not always made so evident. Obviously the old man wants the love of every young woman he encounters, and the Tramp desires his daughter and she him. What to make with the Loafer’s phallic poke of the cane? And the friend is equally ambiguous in his desires. He clearly wants love, but there’s something queer in his approaches to it, sitting so extraordinarily close to two passersby, pulling the pants off a young man, holding the hand of a kitchen-bound wife, and kissing his friend—all unintentionally and accidental of course, but there it is nonetheless caught by the camera.   

       And the wife? What does she get out of all the chaos going on around her? One sort of wishes that she, following her husband’s lead, might throw the lot of them out. Perhaps then she’d at least some peace so that she might not have to take to that park bench to sleep.

      It’s hardly a surprise that Chaplin retired his drag act after this brilliant performance.

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

Constanza B. Majluf | Santa Lucia / 2019

at the entrance to the dragon’s mouth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pablo Simonetti (screenplay), Constanza B. Majluf (director) Santa Lucia / 2019 [10 minutes]

 

Constanza B. Majluf’s film, made in Chile, does not contain any material that hasn’t been treated by dozens of other short and feature movies. The subject here, in fact, represents a fairly common genre, young married men, seemingly happy heterosexuals surrounded by a warm home, good job, beautiful wife, and a young child, who suddenly discover themselves intensely desiring something that they have either so sublimated in themselves that it appears almost as a powerful obsession, or they gradually realize that what they felt they could control and alter, their homosexual desires, are not after all something they can any longer resist.

 

   In either case, acting upon that obsession or desire, so compelling that it seems impossible to control, it ultimately destroys everything they have created to previously protect themselves. And, as I have commented several times when writing on their works, their actions equally emotionally upend the lives of their wives and children, the wounds sometimes taking years to heal for all. Because of their own cowardice or the intense pressure of their societies to resist their sexual desires, lives are destroyed, the lovely fronts that have been created quickly collapse.

     What is remarkable about this ten-minute film is not that it restates this genre, but how beautifully it represents it. No words are spoken, no arguments occur, in fact, at least within the structure of Pablo Simonetti’s short narrative, we do not observe the relationship completely fall apart. What this film portrays with a beautifully rumbling musical score by Ignacio Pérez Marín and gorgeous and powerful images by cinematographers Matías Baeza and Liu Marino is that desire, the pull of the homosexual urge which has to do not only with sexual desire but with the very fact that such desire is defined as forbidden, dangerous, and probably destructive.

 

   The central character of this work, Sebastian (Diego Ruiz), a lovely-looking, doe-eyed young man lives at the very entrance to the dragon’s mouth, at the edge of a beautiful public park on a dark hill, where any young wealthy couple might wish to have an apartment. But what he observes from his nearby balcony are the actions of the good-looking young gay men who enter that park, and knowing what they might be doing there in the dark woods and bramble, watching them as they wait on benches and move off with others into the dark. For a man who has attempted to resist such temptation it is as if they themselves are calling out to him, luring him to join them in the woods.

 

    On this particular night, his wife Camila (Camila Hirane) has a work deadline, asking Sebastian to bed and tuck in their young daughter Adela. The couple have dinner, Camila reporting Adela’s conversations, the fact that she announced only yesterday that she wanted to be an “artist.” Sebastian laughs, perhaps even takes joy in his daughter’s dreams. Camila is amazed that her daughter has so much clarity about her life, Sebastian agreeing, perhaps somewhat less enthusiastically, that children now seem to know what they want in life. What doesn’t get said, of course, that he has not known, or if he has known, he has not been permitted the decisions he might have made. He takes out the dinner dishes into the kitchen.

      Camila argues that she still believes that Adela is more lucid than other children, her husband saying simply that it’s because she is her mother. When Adela mentions another such incident, Sebastien remains silent.

      Dressed still in his white shirt, he suddenly announces that he is going out. When she asks where, he vaguely responds, for a walk in the park. “I have to clear my head.”

      Like the martyred Saint Lucia, dressed in white, who brought food to the Christians hiding under the catacombs in Rome, Sebastian—himself named after a saint who refused to participate in the sexual desires of the male flesh—brings his own body to the men hidden in the park. The candles Lucia was said to have carried are represented here by a brightly lit cigarette, which the men sensuously share. The two men intensely kiss, the stranger, Claudio (Juan Pablo Mirado) jacking Sebastian off before he turns him around to fuck the new visitor to this world of outsiders hiding in the dark.

 

    Sebastien returns home almost in shock, his wife, observing his muddy hands, wondering what has happened. Sebastien can hardly speak, and when he does respond it is hardly believable: “I fell.”

      While the distressed Camila looks on Sebastien takes a long bath. Both look at each other without being able to express their fears, Camila responding only, “Well, tomorrow we have to get up early.”

     When he finally rises from the tub, we notice blood running slowly to the drain. Sebastian is surely no longer a virgin.

      In bed with his wife, their daughter curled up next to her, the couple might as well now be separated by an indeterminable space that will never again be breached.

Los Angeles, February 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).

Alfred Hitchcock | Vertigo / 1958

on edge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor (screenplay, based on a fiction by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac), Alfred Hitchcock (director) Vertigo / 1958

 

For years I have put off writing about Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo, not because I have nothing to say about it, but because I have so much! As I've noted elsewhere, the first time I saw this film at a small Manchester, Iowa theater in 1958, I was only eleven years of age. The film whirled around me like a mysterious, inexplicable virago. I was literally made dizzy by the film and felt sickened at what I had just witnessed; and I remember, as it ended, going into men's room on the second floor of the movie house, thinking to myself, "I am too young to see this film." Immediately, I went downstairs once more and saw the movie all over again!

     Since that first viewing, I have seen the movie perhaps 50 times, both on television and in theaters, on DVDs and computer screens. Only on the latter, did the movie suffer.

     Even as a child I realized this film was about a romantic obsession—an obsession for a woman (Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton) dreamily played by Kim Novak, and an obsession, perhaps even more importantly, by the director for a city of San Francisco. Just as the film's structure functions as a kind of double helix—the coil appears in the credits, shifting at moments into a pattern very much like Crick and Watson's later representation of DNA, and again in Madeline Elster's hairdo, modeled from the painting of Carlotta Valdes at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and in the rose symbolizing Scottie's descent into madness—in which everything that happens in the first part reoccurs in a slightly different form in the second; so too do these two obsessions weave around each other, the same woman appearing slightly different in the second part and the city changing from a magical world of lights (both sunlit and artificial) to a darker world of restaurants and a night drive to Mission San Juan Bautista.

     The two parts of the film are played out in almost oppositional worlds, the first the story of a glamorously beautiful woman, traveling in a kind haze through the sun-filled streets of the beautiful city and environs with Scottie (James Stewart) following and later joining her almost as if they were tourists, Hitchcock taking his audience along for the tour. 

      It is a slow story of developing love—lushly accompanied by Bernard Herrmann's Wagnerian-like score—which ends tragically as the suicidal Madeleine Elster seems to jump from the tower of the Mission to her death, from which Scottie has been unable to save her because of his vertigo.

     The film then turns to Scottie's inquest ("Coroner: He did nothing. The law has little to say on things left undone.") and his descent into a deep depression, a kind of madness that even his chipper and loyal friend Midge Wood (the wonderful Barbara Bel Geddes) cannot help him to escape.       

     The second roll of the helix begins with Scottie's accidental encounter with a young woman who looks somewhat like Madeleine. But this young woman is dressed atrociously, her hair hanging in tasteless bangs. She works as a shop clerk. And there is little mysterious about her as she reports in her flat American accent her background, her hometown, and even providing her would-be offender with her driver's license. 

      It has always struck me that if Judy had been made over by Gavin Elster into such a beautiful woman in the first part, why would she have chosen to revert to Judy Barton in the second? And reportedly—I have not read the article nor have knowledge of its existence except for a message board posting on the IMDb site for the film—Claude Chabrol, writing on Vertigo, claimed that she is not the same woman, but another whom Scottie makes over to look like Madeleine.

     Yet, obviously, that does not account for the letter of admission she writes to Scottie before tearing it up, nor her possession of the jewelry previously worn by Madeline, nor her verbal admission on the tower of the Mission near the end of the film. And that reading misses the point. While everything in the second part is the same, it has the same genetic make-up of the first. Everything has changed, which gives the viewer the slightly sickening sensation that things are not right.      

     Indeed, they are not right. For by acting as Madeleine, Judy has helped in the murder of Gavin Elster's real wife. She is a murderess first, but also a cheat, a liar, even a kind of whore for allowing Scottie to dress and coif her as someone else:

 

            Judy: If I let you change me, will that do it? If I do what you tell me, 

                     will you love me?

           Scottie: Yes. Yes.

           Judy: All right. All right then, I'll do it. I don't care anymore about me.

 

     In Hitchcock's patterning of the human DNA, we recognize the potential for humans to be two beings, to have the capabilities of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Although Scottie has throughout this second half of the film been seeking his past, in recreating Judy into her former being he has also symbolically taken away her current life, which gets played out into the final incident where he forces her to return to Mission San Juan Bautista and, overcoming his dizziness (not only his vertigo but the confusion of his thinking) forcibly grabs her, demanding the truth:   

 

          Scottie:  And then what did he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? 

                       Did he tell you  exactly what to do, what to say? You were a very 

                       apt pupil too, weren't you? You were a very apt pupil! Well, why 

                       did you pick on me? Why me?

 

    The sudden appearance of a mission nun so startles Judy, filled obviously with guilt, that she rushes to the edge, actualizing her previous performance of death.

 

   Again, Scottie has not been a true murderer, but this time, he is the direct cause. It is he who has forced her to return to the sight of the first murder and to confront her participation in it. And we know, in his almost existentialist pose at the edge of the roof—standing on the very edge of the abyss, hands out in despair of having no control over the events he has just witnessed—that even if he escapes the accusations of murder, he will never escape his anguish and guilt. In short, we can describe, at least metaphorically speaking, Scottie's act as one of revenge—growing out a kind of fatal disappointment in the woman behind Madeleine Elster—as a murder of love.

 

Los Angeles, February 25, 2012

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (February 2012).