The Immigrant Review

The Immigrant
Directed by James Gray
Released in 2014

A title like The Immigrant, announced in large, white-on-black text that bookends the first and last frames of the film, casts a wide net. America is a nation of immigrants, we are told, and so a movie with such a bold, generic name should aspire to convey that common experience. Thick accents, obscure diseases, the Statue of Liberty. The Immigrant has all that, as would your Hallmark movie or Oscar-tuned period piece. But what makes The Immigrant a great film — certainly a highlight of the year so far, especially amid this artistically bankrupt season — is how it so studiously and tenderly trains it focus on its suffering protagonist. She does not stand in for some broad concept of the archetypal American immigrant; she is only herself, and a tormented, fully realized person full of contradictions she is.

Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island after a long voyage from Poland. It is 1921, and the Great War wasted her country and family. All she has is her sister, Magda (Angela Sarafyan), and even then not for long, since Magda looks ill from the moment we first see her and the callous doctors there herd her along into quarantine. Only five minutes in, Ewa has already felt hope and suffered loss, a cycle that will recur throughout the film. We catch a quick shot of Bruno Weiss (Joaquin Phoenix) eyeing Ewa from afar, and so we know why he swoops in to sponsor her, before the officials can deport her. The high of finding a friend, with money and resources, gives way to unease when he shames her into dancing at his cabaret club and, quietly but insistently, coerces her into prostitution.

The conflict of this film boils down to a modern woman trying to survive in pre-modern times. To paraphrase Amy Poehler, no one plans on being a prostitute. Before she hits the pillow her first night in Bruno’s apartment, Ewa instinctively grabs a blade from a coal bucket by her bed. The camera follows this movement so naturally, smoothly that we immediately grasp Ewa’s history, fear and sense of self-worth — no dialogue necessary. Ewa stands erect, alert, with her arms to her sides and eyes darting from face to face. She does not enter America fooling herself that she has now found peace; she arms herself from the beginning. As both Bruno and the girls in his company push her to loosen up, and as she faces a steep price to save her ailing sister, she begins to drop her guard. She loses herself in absinthe and sees an advantage in returning Bruno’s clammy gestures of courtship. She opens herself up, and yet she is adamant when she says, “I am not nothing,” to a kowtowing prostitute. Marrying agency with prosperity — in her situation, with her acquaintances, with her looks — is a quixotic dream.

If this all sounds sad, know that the movie is, yeah, quite sad. But it’s not cheap, nor is it fake. Director James Gray (We Own the Night) takes cues from melodrama but restrains himself. Chris Spelman’s emotional score stays quiet, never drowning a moment. Cinematographer Darius Khondji (Amour, Midnight in Paris) absorbs all the rich period detail before him with filmic grain and lots of haze, not unlike Bruno Delbonnel’s work on Inside Llewyn Davis last year. But Gray never force-feeds us this beauty or makes, say, an establishing shot of Manhattan’s Lower East Side an event in itself. Many bustling shots that ostensibly required a lot of planning last no longer than a couple seconds. I am reminded of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, or at least what the great critic Dave Kehr said of it: “A brief glance is all we are given of a particular composition, and then Malick is off to something else, rarely granting us the leisure to contemplate and assimilate the images he puts before us.” Here, this briskness affords this two-hour film a tremendous pace, which never sags and does not seem to waste a frame. Most importantly, this inspired editing style, executed by John Axelrad and Kayla Emter, burrows us into Ewa’s head: The color, noise and stench of the city overpower her, but she can’t be bothered. She’s got other matters to sort out.

Marion Cotillard has long been a captivating screen presence and her Ewa may just be her most lived-in performance yet. There is a moment of transcendence when Ewa, in centered close-up, pours her soul out to a priest during confession. Either the camera lifts slightly up or she drops her head slightly down, but even as we see less of her face and all the business on it, her voice gains volume and we sense all that latent strength inside. The camera flirts with a god’s point of view before returning to its original, centered composition. This incredible cinematic moment takes a stereotypical sign of weakness — a woman baring herself, sins and all — and redirects it back to Ewa, for her to re-affirm her right to happiness without a god thumbing his nose in disapproval. This is how a film earns its sincerity.

With his co-star from The Master no longer with us, Joaquin Phoenix has a claim to the throne of greatest living (and working) actor. “Damaged” is a word applicable to almost any performance of his, and here we are reminded also of how unpredictable he can be. Like Paul Thomas Anderson, Gray lets him move around the frame or else follow him with tracking shots. He explodes one moment and drops to a forlorn whisper the next. Bruno Weiss reminds me of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, in how Phoenix enchants us to sympathize with a psychopath, even while we are fully aware of how manipulative and violent he can be. Bruno, like all memorable literary characters, is complicated.

Bruno’s rage contrasts with the romantic ease of Emil (Jeremy Renner), a handsome magician who falls for Ewa when he firsts see her and throws a life raft, to a perfect life, her way. But where a sappy film would raise him as some angel next to Bruno the brute, Emil boasts in the face of his enemies and believes his own pathological lies. Most worryingly, he never asks Ewa for her input on really anything at all, and certainly not on their plan to run away together to the west. He promises a paradise only possible in his head, an ideal conglomeration of the American Dream and Manifest Destiny that this film patiently, and never snobbishly, disowns.

Ewa will go down as a classic character of the movies. The America before her presents an abundance of options: it’s just that they all seem to barrel down to similar outcomes. Life with Bruno, or life with Emil? That’s not really the question here. She just wants to be happy, something she vocalizes at one point, something we are not sure is even possible. But The Immigrant is open, alive and humble enough that none of this comes across as doom-and-gloom cynicism. It closes with one of those staggeringly perfect final shots, the particulars I will leave for you to discover. Know that it, in my mind, aspires to depict the Heraclitus aphorism that “the path up and down are one and the same.” It surrenders to interpretation, and it is a rare thing when a film can leave so much unfinished and still seal a silencing, spiritual closure.

Final Verdict:

4.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was originally written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Tropical Malady Review

This is an essay I wrote on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, a movie I liked so much that this critical analysis sounds more like a laudatory review, by its end.

An Almost Fatal Spell of Tropical Malady

“I prefer the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater. I think those films are kind enough to allow you a nice nap and not leave you disturbed when you leave the theater. Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake me up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks. Those are the kinds of films I like.” — Abbas Kiarostami

I like – love – Kiarostami, so I agree with the sentiment behind this quote. I do not think it is a stretch to apply it to the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his 2004 film Tropical Malady. Watching it late at night on a comfy loveseat, I cannot deny the soporific quality to a soldier’s wordless journey through a dreary jungle, where rain falls and canopy dwellers drone on and on across a hypnotic aural ambiance. But because this is the second half of the film, following the loose if still narrative-bound and cliché-ridden love story of the first half, this slog does not need to make sense or be exciting to move us terribly, ineffably, irrevocably. The juxtaposition between orthodox tale of courtship and mystical, lyrical allegory affects the viewer on a subconscious level, where the associations can stay and fester and grow in significance for days and weeks after first viewing. That it does without analyzing it, reading it. So while it is not the most natural endeavor to break a movie like this down, paying attention to its visual form and parallels in narrative helps translate a hard-to-place but unforgettable experience into powerful, lasting lessons.

Tropical Malady opens with a scene of merriment, of soldiers smiling and taking proto-selfies. The camera adopts a handheld point of view akin to some unseen participant in the moment. It does not tilt downward so much as walk back a step or two to catch a glimpse of a flailing arm attached to what we realize is most definitely a corpse. A dissonance between emotion and context hits us, and we are not sure how to really react. The falseness of the human face — how it can never convey what we feel within — comes up again and again throughout the film, especially whenever two make eye contact. In that absence, Apichatpong finds truth in nature, landscape and, most crucially, juxtaposition. The film cuts from this embodied perspective to an extreme long shot of the soldiers traversing the heath, corpse in tow. The considerable duration of this shot, as well as its distance, stillness and sonic quietude, allows us to process the soldiers’ demoralizing actions just prior. A naked man, alone, stalks the brush not far away. From the very beginning, we know that things are not as they seem.

The human smile, an icon of romantic cinema, betrays its emptiness in Tropical Malady. When the soldiers eat dinner at Tong’s family house, one of them eyes his sister with blatant intent. She returns the gaze with a suggestive licking of her spoon. Mother looks from man to daughter in disbelief, and we giggle because we know, as she does, that these two aren’t thinking of love —they want something easier. Meanwhile, the film’s protagonist, Keng, looks up to the sky as he occupies the lowest fringes of the frame, and then he does something odd: he looks at us. Well, maybe just over the camera lens, but he seems to enlist us, somehow, in this encounter. This reading only gains more traction with the next shot, of Tong, in profile, averting Keng’s eyes and looking awkward while doing it. We can attest to the intimacy of Keng’s gaze, and Tong avoids it not just because he is shy or confused about his orientation or whatever — he avoids it because he does not think there’s any substance behind that focused stare. Keng is not for real, right now, he thinks. Do not forget that Tong walks around with a forced mask of a smile for most of his screen time, a smile he sticks with because it beats nothing. He sure feels something warm inside when he spends time with Keng — their romance is real — even if that feeling does not come across on his face. But the condescending way he sniffs Keng’s hand, later, and licks it after Keng’s sincere sign of affection, and proceeds to exit the whole movie, confirms Tong’s distrust in genuine, loving two-way contact.

This distrust in intimacy as a sign of love — and, by extension, the existence of true love, itself — emerges as the film’s primary thematic struggle. On first viewing, I may have missed some nuances of the jungle-set half, but I know it culminates in that arresting shot reverse shot sequence between Keng and the tiger. Sensing that the tiger in the tree is a reincarnation of Tong, with the same memories and feelings for him (“I miss you, soldier”), Keng quivers at the sight. His one hand trembles with a knife, while the other shines a flashlight on the tiger’s face, so that Keng can study Tong’s gaze now, in his atavistic form, so direct and uncompromising. The tables have turned, with Tiger-Tong as sincere, to a prelapsarian degree, and Keng as conflicted. Tiger-Tong forces him to play in the gamble that is love, where committing oneself to another requires the destruction of the self, in hopes that it will sublimate to some higher unity. 

Is true love not so? If your devotion is serious, you will embrace your lover not only physically but spiritually: in an intertwining of your mind and soul with his or hers. Baring yourself in such a vulnerable way can lead you to a divine plane of existence, or it could leave you a mess of body parts and shredded clothing in the corner of some tiger’s den. Either way, it is your choice. Either way, you must destroy to create something better. Keng wrestles with this paradox, to some extent, for he bows to the tiger with the words, “Monster, I give you my spirit, my flesh and my memories.” 

Monster. Tiger-Tong returns Keng’s gaze with the severity that long eluded him and Keng responds by calling him a monster. Only a monster could demand such sacrifice. The rest of us are upright and civilized, and have no clue what he means. Thankfully we have this film, for us, in our seated solitude, to tap into and discover, through the irreducible language of cinema, the stakes, beauty and music of human connection. 

Talkin' World War III Blues in Kurosawa's Ran

This is an essay I wrote for a class I took on Shakespeare adaptations. I talk about Akira Kurosawa's unlikely modernization of King Lear via Ran.

Like any non-English adaptation of Shakespeare, Ran has both the privilege and the heavy burden to use the original text as a chassis, not a blueprint. Instead of translating King Lear’s verse to Japanese or condensing the plot to CliffNotes, Akira Kurosawa’s film reimagines the story in a country that has taken part in and suffered the most horrific practices of warfare. While the medieval setting may lend credence to Ben Jonson’s oft-mentioned praise of Shakespeare, that “He was not of an age, but for all time,” Ran derives much of its import from its context. Looking back on the Second World War that Kurosawa lived through, the film condemns the violence of the modern world through advanced, often overwhelming filmmaking techniques.

If King Lear can be boiled down to the idea that the will to power usurps family commitment and basic decency, then Ran goes so far to say that the will to power, and the entrenched systems of power built atop it, breed pure chaos. This theme comes to the fore when Tango, the Kent equivalent, offers provisions to Hidetora, the Lear figure, and his men. In a medium shot, Tango bows before him, hoping to make peace, and raises his eyes after enduring an awkward silence. Instead of cutting to a medium shot of Hidetora, via a typical shot reverse shot sequence, the film frustrates us with an extreme long shot. On the far right of the widescreen frame, Tango continues to raise his head while on the far left, Hidetora stares down the hill, his body frozen like a statue. He does not seem to be processing Tango’s charity. Two umbrellas in the foreground roughly split the frame into thirds, and their presence brings to mind the heat punishing Hidetora’s bald scalp at the moment. The delirious, desiccated Hidetora holds the most tenuous nominal authority over this gathering, and this extreme long shot shrinks him to actual scale. 

Yet Hidetora still has power, for a little longer, on this otherwise beautiful, cloudless day. Those subordinates kneeling on the brittle white gravel look to him, worried by his silence, while miles of forest stretch across the background. Kurosawa’s meticulous framing does not hide the natural splendor of this setting, a huge contrast from Peter Brook’s austere adaptation, but it also stresses the heat and void and lifelessness of this anti-oasis where the humans reside. The obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informs this composition and the greater film, where death can be felt before the armies, with their arquebuses and cannons, enter the scene. In the famous sequence of painterly carnage soon after this scene, these forces destroy not only Hidetora’s men but each other, along with their codes of honor. When Hidetora, here on the gravel, waves his hand and rashly orders the destruction of a peasant village, and the blurs of soldier bodies whiz by in front of his face, he perpetuates this chaos, even if, and especially because, he is too oblivious and senile to grasp the consequences of such action. He bombs his own people when one gifts him food, practically razing all circles of life to the ground. This is a film sadly indebted to World War II and its paranoid Cold War legacy. 

The weight of war only hits Hidetora after Tango breaks the news that his son, Taro, decreed that anyone who assists him will be executed. Hidetora collapses onto his seat, and even in a medium shot, we can feel the unbearable anguish that fills his face. He sits there for over thirty seconds processing this information, that his child has sentenced him to death, and instead of asking us to “make sense” of this revelation and Hidetora’s reaction to it, the film floods its soundtrack with the shrill calls of birds. The film calls this what it is: chaos. The sonic dissonance speaks to the cognitive dissonance in Hidetora’s mind, at this moment, and the sheer volume of these clashing noises attempts to give voice to entropy, the most ineffable of phenomena. Kurosawa’s sound design graduates from monaural, 1950s art house minimums to overpowering, crippling stereo. It is fitting that the film uses this modern technology to assault its audience’s ears, to commit violence against them. In Ran, everything that can be used as a weapon is, from arrows to words to gestures to recording microphones. 

This scene leads into the film’s centerpiece, the Third Castle massacre, where sound cannot do justice to the bloodshed on-screen and, so, the film dives into abstraction. Toru Takemitsu’s score pairs corpses and soon-to-be corpses with elegiac accompaniment. The spattering blood resembles that of a Goya painting, especially under the hazy, somber quality of the lighting. No one enjoys a dignified death: soldiers splay their arms, fall on the arrows piercing their backs and get trampled by horses. The film does not center its violence in one location but emphasizes its omnipresence. For instance, a centered shot of a tower burning, with a corpse hanging over the bannister, cuts to a long shot of enemy forces galloping past the tower, which is now only visible in the background. From here, an extreme long shot of the fortress’ destruction shows a glimpse of the burning tower, obscured by haze, in the far distance. Finally, the film cuts to a shot of another tower, where Hidetora’s few remaining soldiers are fired upon, with their backs to the camera, by a line of enemy infantryman in the background. The scale of this massacre is massive. Hidetora’s men and women, implicit in their leader’s savage colonialist past, cannot hide from the agents of mass destruction now raining down on them.

Neither this scene nor the other is analogous to any scene from the King Lear text. Ran stakes out its own artistic territory by building off and tweaking the themes of that play. It is a film fearful of a world obsessed with destruction, where the will to power carries with it a drive toward death. It is a film that judges Lear’s famous plea, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning,” with the derisive laughs it deserves (III.2.57-8).

Allegory of the Man Cave

The boy loves music. He does not have the words to describe this love, nor does he know many words at all. He just listens to what his parents play in the car, at home, on the patio. He plays some of these songs, by ear, on the family’s grand piano, takes music lessons and learns the alto saxophone. He grows up and curates his own playlists, filled with songs his family and friends cannot stand. He loves this music and likes that he does not have to justify this love with words, even now. To him, music just is.

Meanwhile, he watches movies. He loved Star Wars as a kid because, sheesh, how can you not. He enters high school with a curiosity to catch up with the rest, so he looks to the IMDb Top 250. He checks out Platoon, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, Gladiator — guy flicks. He cannot believe how much blood and guts he sees. He knows these are not horror movies, where such cheap “splatter” is expected. He is watching serious stuff, with real carnage and no discernible continuity errors.

He lets himself be taken away by the experience of these movies, with their breathless battle scenes, plot twists and Hans Zimmer soundtracks. He declares a movie to be the best ever made if it gives him uncountable goose bumps by the end. He finishes watching a movie and knows, like that, whether he loves it or hates it — especially if he hates it. He hates movies that bore him or do not “make sense.” He hates movies that do not show their violence in slow motion, limbs-flying glory. He also plays a lot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare around this time, by the way.

He goes to college. He realizes how wrong he was, though not before falling asleep during a few silent films. Okay, he realizes how wrong he was and still sleeps through some silent films since he always manages to watch them at like three in the afternoon in a stuffy room with comfy chairs and always insists he does not need coffee, since his love of cinema will valiantly get him, sans chemicals, through the classics.

But he loves the classics. He loves the purity of this kind of storytelling, which treats plot as a means to engage with themes and not the other way around. He picks up on some radical ideas, on religion, suicide, sex and so on, these filmmakers subtly and persistently floated without bucking the strict censorship codes of their time. He takes notice of how Hitchcock moved his camera or how Kurosawa arranged characters within a frame or how Murnau laid images on top of one another. He does not just “take in” a movie but searches, while watching it, for a system of form, theme and inter-textual reference to tie everything together. He often fails to unite all these strands when transcribing an argument to print, but at least he feels this whole mental process has gotten easier.

He cannot watch the movies he once loved without jamming them through this intellectual crucible. He concludes, with arrogant certainty, that some of these movies, like American History X, are jejune, melodramatic slogs. He is relieved to see Total Recall again and discover a deliberate, gleeful deconstruction of action movie tropes. He is incredibly happy to report that Non-Stop, the latest Liam Neeson anti-AARP advertisement, is not only badass but also an intelligent and measured commentary on post-9/11 security. He knows, now, that some of this entry-level cinema is genius and much of it is overrated crap. He takes comfort in that.

He enjoys what once bored him. He would rather sit through a four-hour documentary about University of California Berkeley than that new Spider-Man movie, though he cannot and will not resist the chance to spin stupid jokes out of the latter. He appreciates the artists out there who see things that provoke them and probe back, whether through documentary or fiction modes. He watches Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up and wraps his head around the fact that perhaps the greatest movie he has ever seen was made for less than Simon Pegg’s Star Trek Into Darkness salary. He cherishes the original, coherent philosophy behind such a film. He esteems, above all else, how filmic the work ultimately is, unable to be replicated in another medium or summarized in a Wikipedia article.

He demands more and forgives easier, like when a film meets those demands only halfway. He believes that effort, effort to elevate thought and raise questions, is what makes the world a progressive and livable place. He sees this as the highest function of film, due to its narrative, humans-telling-stories nature. He continues to love music, all this time, without devising some elaborate theoretical framework in which to place it. He needs some time off, when he can just close his eyes and see something beautiful for what it is.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Nymphomaniac Review

Nymphomaniac

Directed by Lars von Trier

Released in 2014

I don’t know. I mean, what else I have seen by Lars von Trier (Melancholia, Dancer in the Dark) has also left me slack-jawed by the end. The Dane has a knack for translating his cruel, starless worldview into undeniably arresting cinema, both celestial and psychological in scope. But this is just something else. It’s not the inherent pornography of these images that leaves me at an impasse — take “Desire & Cinema” with Prof. Ellis Hanson, English, and your tolerance of, even appreciation for explicit art will grow and make you forever wiser. No, Von Trier attacks something close to home, for me at least: the act of criticism itself.

Nymphomaniac: Volumes I and II, a four-hour sexual bildungsroman split in half to facilitate distribution and, in reality, make two times the money, straddles two different modes: Backwards-looking narrative and contemporary criticism of said narrative. The storyteller is Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), an intellectual, Stephen Dedalus-type, finds bloodied and incapacitated in an alleyway by his local convenience store. The alley’s vertical, recursive walls echo F.W. Murnau’s German Expressionism — that is, until von Trier rotates his camera some 270 degrees like Gaspar Noé and blasts Rammstein’s “Führe Mich” on the soundtrack. It is the first instance of bathos that totally undermines whatever impression you had been forming in your head to that point, and it sure ain’t the last.

Seligman brings Joe to his humble apartment, where he offers her tea and she tells him her life story. Her story starts at the beginning, with a now famous line, “I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old.” Joe narrates with as little emotion as you probably just read that sentence, so the word “irony” is applicable here, there, everywhere. Played by Stacy Martin in teenage flashbacks and Gainsbourg for most of the latter half, Joe covers a life’s worth, and then some, over four hours: Discovering beauty in nature with her father (Christian Slater, with a poor British accent); losing her virginity to an excitable older boy, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf, same); competing with her friend, while wearing “fuck-me-now” attire, in screwing a train’s worth of men, all for a bag of chocolate sweets; provoking the wrath of Uma Thurman (just phenomenal), playing the dumped wife of one of Joe’s most gullible partners; marrying Jerôme and giving birth to a child whom she does not love; searching for her lost orgasm through routine visits to a sadomasochist (Jamie Bell, sort of incredible here); dabbling in “debt collection,” a.k.a. organized crime run by a typically wraithlike Willem Dafoe; and, naturally, a lot more. 

The tone of the first volume is one of high comedy, where von Trier superimposes numbers and throws in split screen effects to alleviate awkwardness. The second volume, as the later plot summary only hints at, darkens and loses its voice as a result. The sex, meanwhile, is just there. You see close to everything, and sometimes actually everything, but von Trier does not bathe the intercourse in titillating lights or shroud it in I’m-Making-A-Statement darkness. It’s just sex. Moving on.

Throughout Joe’s retelling, Seligman interjects to draw analogies from the literature, music and history he loves. We are supposed to laugh at the extremity and banality of his similes, which range from prowling as fly-fishing and polygamous sex as a Bach fugue. Seligman does not know what to do with Joe and her insatiable sexuality but see her as another great text, to be studied and compared with. He does what a critic is supposed to do, except he extrapolates a bit too much, drawing connections too far removed from Joe’s experience, with which he cannot relate. Seligman hits gold now and then, like when he rebukes Joe’s self-labeling as a sinner when she also proudly disavows religion; in turn, Joe resolves, through minute, Tarantino-esque dialogue, his elitist thought process regarding how one clips their fingernails. Seligman does not judge her and even praises how she has, her entire life, retained her agency — which is true, in that no matter how much you dislike Joe by the end of this film, you must admire von Trier’s unorthodox commitment to female empowerment and, it must be said, some broad tenets of feminism.

Except at the end, when von Trier blows off the head of his own movie. I will not spoil it, but I will say it is outrageously cynical. It negates the film’s thematic momentum in its embrace of nihilism. It is too much. Or, perhaps, von Trier wants to remind us that the world of Nymphomaniac is still a text, and to take anything that is said, through Joe’s narration, her flashbacks, Seligman’s analogies or the very composition of the projected image, as a vehicle not for spoon-fed lessons but some higher, figurative truth.

What that truth is, I have no clue. Is von Trier just raising a middle finger to the critics — many of whom championed his work, of course — under some guise of deconstructionism, settling on a thesis along the lines of that immortal quote from The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons”? Given the way Joe ruins families and seeks out black men for sex, only to call them “Negros,” this throwing-hands-up-in-the-air tactic may be the most fitting way to critique Nymphomaniac. In that, these characters are above critique. Not a very comforting verdict, in my view, but clearly von Trier believes it. His films, and especially this one, must only, truly make sense to him. God help him.

Final Verdict:

I don't know. Let's say 2.5 Stars out of 5 — right down the middle.

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here.

Transcendence Review

Transcendence

Directed by Wally Pfister

Released in 2014

Call me old fashioned, but I would rather watch a blockbuster with big ideas, conversing with the issues facing us today as well as millennia of literature and shared cultural history, than another superhero movie. The latest Johnny Depp bomb Transcendence — which grossed only $10.8 million last weekend, off a $100 million budget — fails as an action film, which the trailer makes it out to be, and could use a bit more pep as a thriller, which it actually is. By current Hollywood standards, it is sort of incompetent. But it succeeds, with pleasing consistency and formal rigor, as a film that raises questions, about our futures, plural, our presents and our pasts. It works as art.

I know I am fighting an uphill battle here, praising what Rotten Tomatoes has already canonized as trash, so let me complicate things further with some basic plot summary: Alongside his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), Will Caster (Depp) foresees a world where computer intelligence supersedes that of a human, in that it becomes sentient. An affectless scientist and even drier orator, Caster nevertheless commands a lot of respect, as seen by Elon Musk’s head peeking from the U.C. Berkeley audience soaking in his Jobs-ian keynote. Some radical Neo-Luddite faction led by a noirish Kate Mara (House of Cards) lashes out, bombing artificial intelligence research labs and shooting Will after his speech. He survives the bullet but succumbs to its radiation contamination a month later — just enough time for Evelyn, along with friend and fellow scientist Max (Paul Bettany), to “upload” Will’s consciousness to an advanced computer framework the three of them had long been developing, in order for Will to keep on living when his body cannot.

The trailer and poster give away as much, but Will makes it. Or some form of Will — therein lies much of the dramatic tension. Depp’s performance is not notable, but that is kind of the point: Will is so bland it is impossible to gauge any loss of humanity when he jumps to a computer screen. Perhaps Warner Bros. should have put $20-plus million to better use, rather than casting him in such a flat part, but Depp’s presence at least comments, if unwittingly, on the automatic trust we place in celebrities whose faces grace magazine covers. Max doubts this new Will is actually Will, because his crackly, disembodied voice rattles off most megalomaniac demands. But not Evelyn: She senses her husband through the 1s and 0s and agrees to connect Will to the Internet and facilitate his dreams, which are also hers.

This all sounds quite silly, describing the plot like this, but Jack Paglen’s script pushes forward at a believable clip, with only weak dialogue as its cardinal sin. Speaking of sin, the film’s richest dialogue occurs beneath the text and involves the story of Adam and Eve. Named, one can assume, in reference to Eve, Evelyn threatens the world with another Fall of Man, except self-awareness will not now plague humans, who already have it, but a being whose intelligence we cannot fathom. Eve has long been blamed for the Fall; in Paradise Lost, the most admirable defense Milton could summon was to point at Adam and basically say, “She was yours; you should have kept her in her place.” Here, Evelyn’s love drives her initial actions, which put mankind on the brink once again, but it is her genius and unfailing agency which seek to reverse that course.

Will does not make it easy: In the midst of his underground Southwest research facility, he sets up an intimate ski lodge bungalow for the two of them to share. Evelyn can only speak to his likeness on a screen, but when Will recounts his memories of how they fell in love, it is impossible to deny the grounded, human feeling of the moment. Yet director Wally Pfister has us doubt this exchange, for he toys with the multiplicity of screens Will uses to reach her. First Pfister gives us a standard shot reverse shot, with Evelyn curled on a couch and looking up at Will, who is framed and flatters like a cool Humphrey Bogart. At the end of this unusual love scene, however, Pfister frames Evelyn as before, now joined with another screen of Will’s, one she does not see. It’s the same Will that is projected on the other screen, we assume, but it hovers just over her shoulder, whispering sweet nothings into her ear like a serpent. Will is both human and machine, God and Satan in this one scene, embodying divine paradoxes in a plausible, fascinating conceit.

Considering he only got to sit in the director’s chair due to his Oscar-winning tenure as Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer, Pfister recognizes the visual supremacy of his medium. Crumbled, monochromatic desert reminiscent of that in the video game Fallout: New Vegas contrasts with sleek, Apple Store-white corridors — the former dwarfs those standing in it, thanks to the inhospitality of nature and such, while the latter merges with Evelyn, who has a penchant for white, as she walks through them. When Will’s cyber self begins to incorporate nanotechnology, blue strains of sentient particles ascend from the desert ground into the air we all breathe. I think of a line Cormac McCarthy uses to describe post-apocalypse in The Road: “The salitter drying from the earth.” That archaic word, “salitter,” means “the grace of God.” Here, Will extracts this essence from the earth only to join with it and, he hopes, create it in his own image.

There is a whole political dimension to this film, too, which presents a scenario of miraculous health care, through Will’s technology, only to rule it a reckless fantasy. It is not a very weighty take on the issue, but at least it beats Elysium. In fact, Transcendence trumps a number of recent movies at their own game: It is a more literate Biblical movie than Noah, a wiser dissection of private and public surveillance than Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a knottier machine-man love story in that one scene than all of Her. This is smart, big-budget filmmaking, folks. So what if Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman’s characters are so bad I purposefully neglected to mention them until now? You will not remember them — seriously, there’s not even, like, camp value in their awfulness — but, if you keep your tomatoes holstered, you should remember the rest.

Final Verdict:

3.5 Stars Out of 5

This article was written for The Cornell Daily Sun and can be viewed at its original location here. 

Still Life's Uncanny Distractions

Below is a short blog post I wrote for my Global Cinema II class. I talk about Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006).

Still Life commits to such an elegiac, slow burn style of realism that it shocks us when it does not. A digital video camera pans to the right, capturing passerby against the backdrop of a river. A man drives a sledgehammer into crumbling concrete, over and over. A Brutalist façade rockets into space—wait, what? Jia Zhang-ke throws us off at these moments, when the quiet misery of his characters butts against unplanned bouts of surrealism. He pursues the “uncanny” to alienating, politicized ends.

Almost midway through the film, Jia passes the baton from Sanming, the down-and-out miner looking for his wife, to Hong, the reticent nurse looking for her husband. He does so in about the strangest way possible: Sanming rests by a riverside bannister as the camera pans left, capturing mountains about a mile away in what is now an extreme long shot, save for a bannister chassis at the bottom of the frame. A hollow din is heard on the soundtrack as a heavenly light appears over the mountain, floats over the river and then shoots out the frame. Jia’s slow-moving camera carries the motion to the next shot, where Hong stands downstream, with only river, mountains and some buildings visible in the background, and follows the sight of the UFO. The apparition jets over the mountains, where it is never seen or spoken of again, but we sure remember it. 

This random burst of sci-fi, replete with an ominous, purposeful soundtrack, tears Still Life’s world from its muted reality. Considering that Americans may be the demographic most enchanted with UFOs, this is not a bad thing. We want to make sense of that sequence, which is a productive urge so long as we do not get obsessed with banal, irrelevant topics like plausibility, origins and so on. To me, the UFO signals an environmentalist message, in that an alien creature skirts just by Earth only to disappear because all it sees is decay. If the alien was set on destruction, in keeping with sci-fi genre tradition, it sees that its job is nearly complete without any input at all. The strangeness of its appearance, to us, mirrors the strangeness of what it must be seeing, from above.

And yet the UFO’s symbolism must speak to the characters lives, as well, considering it swaps the narrative perspective in one fell swoop. The camera leaves Sanming out of frame when the UFO first appears, so we are unsure if he actually sees it or registers shock at the sight. The camera rotates around Hong, however, emphasizing that she sees it and finds it intriguing. The juxtaposition between Sanming’s resting posture, with his back to the river, and Hong’s erect, attentive stance stresses the latter’s agency. In that previous masterful, unbroken shot set on a boat, where Sanming holds liquor with outstretched hands to no one’s notice, we notice his utter ineffectiveness. His invisibility becomes almost a surreal device on its own, and so it is fitting that he vanishes from the frame when a moment of life-changing consequence occurs. Hong may be the only human who notices the spaceship, and yet she continues about her day. The matters of extraterrestrial life mean nothing to her, for she has too much, too close to the ground, to fix first.