The Sad Life and the Imaginary Fiend

A middle aged man and his young daughter go to live by the woods in upstate New York. Tragedy follows them, though, in 2005's Hide and Seek. Robert De Niro and Dakota Fanning star as the man and his daughter in this movie with a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score. I wouldn't say the film is nearly as bad as that score suggests though I would say many of the specific criticisms are valid.

At the beginning of the film, De Niro's wife, played by Steven Spielberg's ex-wife (and Jessica Rabbit's singing voice) Amy Irving, is found dead in the bathtub. Dakota Fanning witnesses it and she remains traumatised afterwards, as you might expect.

De Niro's a psychologist and in his opinion the move to a distant house in the cold, gloomy woods is just what Dakota Fanning needs. His colleague, Famke Janssen, disagrees, but he calmly overrules her. How nice it was to see Famke Jannsen again.

This was back in the period when everyone thought it was a good idea to be the next M. Night Shyamalan so Hide and Seek has a twist ending. Most people will see it coming even though, as many reviews point out, it doesn't make sense. I wouldn't use the word "silly", though, because the movie is actually very dour. Whatever psychological weirdness and thriller stuff is happening, the bottom line is that there's this profoundly unhappy little girl who experiences trauma after trauma and every shred of hope for a better life is systematically taken from her. It's an extremely depressing movie, especially since Dakota Fanning gives a great performance.

The Only One

In the history of cinema, few killers have been as passive as Robert De Niro's Frank Sheeran. Oddly enough, it's completely credible and at the heart of what makes The Irishman so good. Seeing director Martin Scorsese team with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci again, with the addition of Al Pacino, for a movie about gangsters, one might expect something like Goodfellas or Casino. In some ways it is--rhythm of the dialogue, the complexity of the characters. But while those other two films were analyses of the worlds of gangs and greed, The Irishman simply uses that world to tell another story. Scorsese couldn't really do otherwise in a world that now has The Sopranos. And the Irishman is a brilliant step in the evolution of the gangster film.

We meet Sheeran in a nursing home and he recounts his story apparently to thin air. The film was based on a non-fiction book called I Heard You Paint Houses consisting mainly of an interview with the real Sheeran. But the isolation of De Niro's Sheeran, the idea that he has to tell his story to an empty room, underlines his tragedy very well.

Working as a truck driver, the young Sheeran first meets Russell Bufalino (Pesci), a major figure in the Bufalino crime family. At that point, he's just a nice man who helps fix Frank's truck. Gradually, Frank falls into the sequence of reciprocal favours that makes him a hitman for the mob.

A flashback to World War II shows how he first became comfortable with killing, ordering two prisoners to dig their own grave, in retrospect only wondering why the prisoners did it since they must have known what would happen. No remorse, no horror. From obeying the orders of the U.S. government he goes to obeying orders of his friends.

It's sweet watching the relationship between Frank and Russ but Frank grows even closer to the man he's assigned to protect, union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Hoffa gradually starts to confide in him, they share hotel rooms, and their families get to know each other. But we all know what happened to Hoffa--well, we all don't know, exactly.

The break between Russ and Jimmy introduces the first real conflict in Frank's life. When he tries to explain himself to his daughter later he's reduced to helpless stutters, not simply because the subject deals with matter he can't reveal but because it deals with things he can't articulate, truths he'd followed instinctively all his life. He's not equipped to talk to people who don't feel the same way, which inevitably leads to isolation for this man for whom friendships are everything.

The much talked about de-aging in the film isn't perfect but it certainly does a good enough job. If I can accept Steven McQueen in The Blob, I can certainly accept Robert De Niro here. And these really were the best actors for the roles. With so many movies to-day where the dialogue is endlessly simple and explicit, it's refreshing to see a movie that knows how silences communicate. How we can watch, without anyone ever saying it, Frank informing Jimmy his life's in danger and Jimmy's reaction, showing just the right level of hubris to miss Frank's point about a basic sense of loyalty which Jimmy mistakenly sees as a system of blackmail. A lovely film and a lovely showcase for these actors.

The Irishman is available on NetFlix.

Crossing the Old Bridge

In light of the frighteningly polarised political landscape in the U.S. to-day, it's strange to think there's a movie from 1984 called Once Upon a Time in America that starred Robert De Niro and James Woods as best friends. In 2018, De Niro has been targeted by a mail bomber for publicly denouncing President Trump and Woods' support of Trump has seen him reposting right wing conspiracy theories on Twitter, including a claim that the bombs were hoaxes. But that's not all that makes the film a freshly compelling commentary on America. Director Sergio Leone made a beautiful picture, visually and thematically; it's a subtle tragedy about the American love for independence gone wrong.

The story of a group of poor kids in New York who become gangsters feels in some ways like an extended version of the flashbacks in The Godfather Part II. Instead of Vito Corleone, Robert De Niro plays David "Noodles" Aaronson--Noodles is played by an intense kid named Scott Tiler when he's younger. Tiler looks a bit more like Al Pacino, if you ask me.

The film is surprisingly frank about the formative sexual experiences of Noodles and his friends. There's a girl named Peggy (Julie Cohen) who trades sexual favours with the boys for pastries. The scene where she's introduced, when Noodles leaves the door unlocked on purpose while he's on the toilet and she walks in, effectively establishes the curiosity and insecurity of both kids. A later scene, where Noodles and Max catch a cop in a compromising situation with a prostitute, shows neither boy can perform sexually in a way that matches up with his bragging.

Max is the character played by Woods in the scenes where he's older--young Max is played by Rusty Jacobs with visible acne; a nice touch, I thought, to establish Woods' pock marks. In any case, with the uniform perfect skin in movies to-day, it's always nice to check in with the reality in 70s and early 80s films.

Max is slightly older, or at any rate taller, and more ambitious than Noodles. Woods has banner art from Once Upon a Time in America on his Twitter page now making me wonder if he feels Max's involvement with unions and eventual success in politics fits the model of a modern Democrat. One could as easily compare him to Trump, though--really, more easily, as Trump's real estate schemes and courting of blue collar votes combine to make him look especially like a gangster--his tacky personal style sealing the deal.

Noodles is accused by Max of having too much of the street in him--Noodles is happy to stay out of politics. Since most of the movie is from his point of view, he's relatively quiet, and he wants to stay small time, the viewer feels naturally compelled to see him as a moral centre but Leone's telling a more complicated story than that. Noodles assaults men and women to get his way. We understand why he is the way he is well enough to empathise with him--when he goes too far, it's saddening more than repulsive. We understand what motivates him, we see how his simple understanding of the world came together on the streets, learning from petty crimes and peep holes to get what he wants quick. The only question is if he really has any choice and this question is generally posed in scenes between Noodles and Deborah.

Played by Jennifer Connelly as a kid and Elizabeth McGovern as an adult, she seems to present an ideal in contrast to the childish operations of the kid gangsters. He watches her through a peep hole but it's to watch her dance ballet. Not that she's a prude--when she invites him to study the bible with her it turns out she wants to read from "Song of Solomon" with him. But she's no Peggy and when Max calls him away she makes it clear he's choosing between two worlds. Will he choose a path that forces him to consider others or a path where he forces everyone to defer to him?

I love all the apples and pears behind her in the scene.

Leone rather brilliantly evokes old New York in his shots, exploiting locations well.

Ennio Morricone's beautiful score has some of the grand wistfulness of the one he composed for Once Upon a Time in the West, his main theme playing at times that at first seem inappropriate. But the big, sweeping melody playing over a kid compulsively eating the éclair he'd bought for Peggy and that same melody playing over the aftermath of a rape scene later in the film unify the commonplace with the horrific. There are all these stupid, silly, terrible, beautiful, and ugly pieces under this same melody. The exact same recording in one scene that seems to celebrate what is will in another scene lament what has been lost. The story’s not linear—we get shots of older Noodles in the 70s at the beginning of the film and scenes from the 20s and 30s mixed with the 10s and 70s throughout. What’s lost becomes suddenly present again and then lost again in a moment with a closeup of De Nero’s eyes.

The Heist and the Clock

There's a melancholy in 1997's Jackie Brown not found in its director's previous two crime films. Jackie Brown has been described as a film about older people--certainly it remains Quentin Tarantino's most mature work--but it's not simply that. It's specifically about a criminal getting older, its final shot beautifully capturing the sadness in the growing awareness in its protagonist that her victories are becoming harder won as the hazards of her long misfit life are adding up to something she finally can't escape. There's an elegiac beauty in this film that makes it both fundamentally different from Tarantino's first two films but also a fitting finale for the three if taken as a trilogy.

One thing it absolutely has in common with the first two films is its ability to communicate with imagery. It's a brilliance achieved by Tarantino and his long time editor Sally Menke whose untimely death before Django Unchained is partly why I suspect the latest two of Tarantino's films lack something of the tight narrative flow found in his earlier films. It'd been many years since I'd last watched Jackie Brown before last night. One of the impressions that'd stayed with me were the scenes between Robert DeNiro's character, Louis, and Bridget Fonda's character, Melanie, because of how vividly Tarantino communicates Louis' motives through framing.

De Niro plays a very inexpressive character and we're forced to watch closely to see the subtle energy between Louis and Melanie in this film that is largely about reading hard to read people. Tarantino helps us along with Bridget Fonda's legs.

The amateur critic might write this off as "male gaze" and call it a day. But it's a specific male's gaze, the camera's attention to Melanie's body in this case establishing Louis' attention to it, and it explains the one or two moments where he seems flustered, his difficulty with the bong hit, his quick willingness to drink from a glass that had brushed against Melanie's toe. Suddenly the motives of this hard to read man are crystal clear and they become clearer after the two have sex.

Then Tarantino frames Melanie like a muppet, just head and shoulders over a table, talking shit about Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) and suddenly, now that she's out of his system, Louis' priority shifts to his loyalty to his old friend. We may understand how Louis feels but he and Melanie pay a price for relying on their guts so much.

Pam Grier's character, Jackie Brown, has probably lasted as long as she has because of her self control. In the ingenious scene where Ordell comes to her apartment to kill her she shows not the slightest hint of anxiety. Later on, Max (Robert Forster) will caution her to remember that clever cops like Ray (Michael Keaton) will never let you know if they've figured out your game. The same could as well be said of Jackie who betrays no awareness of Ordell's intentions until that perfectly timed DePalma split screen.

But as she tells Max later, she's more frightened of losing her job than she is of Ordell. She's aware now that time is running out on her precarious existence. She's a bit like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers; a mythic heroic American archetype, in this case a virtuous thief, that really only functions properly under very specific circumstances and is probably more a hazard to herself and others in most circumstances. But just like the Western hero, she's an inspiring figure, so much so that when Max first lays eyes on her he wants to give up his career. But in the end, is it any wonder he's also a little bit afraid of her when he's seen how smoothly she manipulates people?

Both Pam Grier and Robert Forster deserve all the accolades they've received for this film and more; both of them are uniquely crucial for creating these two people who have been around so long and have accumulated so much wisdom that their strategising is no longer contaminated by insecurities or rash compulsions. For the most part.

It's amazing to think that Tarantino followed this extraordinary character piece with--albeit certainly brilliant--revenge action films. I'm looking forward to seeing if he achieves something like this again with his upcoming film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Though I don't think it'll be successful at the box office and may well sink his career--but not because of the 2003 Howard Stern interview that's been going around lately where he defended Roman Polanski. For my part, I certainly strongly disagreed with Tarantino's expressed sentiments, even if he was, as he's claimed, playing it up for shock value to suit The Howard Stern Show. A thirteen year old girl is not capable of giving consent. Which leads to the question, how can Tarantino have expressed that opinion after making films so deeply insightful about human nature?

It's not unlike a question Molly Ringwald asked recently in The New Yorker about John Hughes--how could Hughes write so insightfully about teenagers and also indulge in humour that clashes with modern morality? Taking for a moment the assumption that modern morality is right and one should never joke about the things Hughes joked about, the answer is that before there was John Hughes there was no John Hughes. Certainly one could trace influences in his work--American Graffiti, certainly, among other films--but part of the burden of saying things that have never been said before, the real risk taking that makes a good artist, is that you have no blueprint. Something that seems totally wrong can end up extraordinarily right and vice versa. Partly I'd say this is why Tarantino was willing to follow a ridiculous line of thought, the other part is that I think he was influenced by a lot of talk going around at the time in the industry about Polanski where people seemed eager to think of some way the man could be exonerated. His victim had forgiven him--and even as recently as a couple days ago she seemed to be commiserating with Polanski as she criticised the AMPAS for expelling him. But I believed in 2003 as I believe now--if a man commits rape, he has to go to jail, no matter what the victim or anyone else said afterwards. If nothing else, that would set up a horrible precedent that could very easily be exploited.

But here's the thing a lot of people miss when talking about Tarantino's interview; this wasn't some backroom recording that was leaked. This was something that was broadcast nationally on The Howard Stern Show, at that time a terrestrial radio show whose ratings, even if they had declined in the aftermath of Stern's divorce, were colossal, so much so that when Stern later had 30 million listeners on satellite radio it was considered a drop. At the very least, millions of people heard Tarantino make those comments, made up their own minds about it, and still went to see his movies. There's a new generation of adults but most of those millions of people aren't dead. So that's why I don't think the interview will significantly hurt Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Instead I think it'll suffer because film is no longer in an era that supports movies like that, particularly ones with sizeable budgets. A big, splashy, revenge superhero film? Sure. But there's a reason Hateful 8 didn't do as well as Django Unchained--audiences are more willing to jump in with a character whose integrity and motives are easily apprehensible, someone we can root for when they turn someone into a bloody pulp, believing the fantasy that there are situations where that's not, at least, a morally complicated thing to do. The compromised Western hero or the true film noir anti-hero is a harder pill to swallow because it forces us to think about how complicated people truly are. On the other hand, there did seem to be an audience for that on television up until a couple years ago. So I guess, to quote Michael Madsen in Kill Bill, we'll just see.