Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

 

Luck, pride and propositions—action!
Our films this month are three action films, one a revisionist western, and a remake of a Jane Austen classic.

The Proposition
The Western movie, like most commercial genres, waxes and wanes in popularity. From the early films of William S. Hart, through entries like Stagecoach and the other John Ford westerns to the violent and bloody revisions of Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, various directors and actors keep offering new interpretations of how the West was settled.
Just when it seems that everything has been said about the subject, some enterprising writer or director comes up with a new twist on the stock characters and situations. Such is the case with John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition. Seeing parallels between the American West and his native Australian Outback, Hillcoat and screenwriter (and rock musician) Nick Cave have fashioned a startling, tragic original variation on the myth of the Old West.
Hillcoat and Cave set their story in the Australian Outback in the 1870s, and the parallels with the American West are many, but they seem carried to extremes. Just as the stretches of open sky and barren landscape characterize Ford’s westerns, the Outback, a bleaker, pitiless and more desolate setting sets the tone for this uncompromising look at people driven to desperation as they try to force civilization onto the desert and deal with other people reduced to their rawest elements. Gorgeously photographed, often at sunrise or sunset, the landscape’s beauty and savagery overwhelm the people who wander through it.
Paralleling the Native Americans of the West are Australia’s Aborigines, and, like their American counterparts, the Australian natives often chose sides among the various warring factions of white men, and they fought not only the invaders, but also each other. Hillcoat tries to give an accurate picture of what racial relations were like among the groups at this time, and the picture is not pretty.
Like the schoolboys in Lord of the Flies, the settlers from England quickly revert to barbarism, despite their efforts not to, and Hillcoat uses literal flies to symbolize this quality. Flies buzz and swarm across dead bodies and across people’s faces. In a scene where people stand in a circle watching a man be whipped, flies swarm across the sweat-soaked backs of their shirts, implying the animalistic level to which they have descended.
The story centers around the outlaw Burns brothers—Charlie (Guy Pearce), Mike (Richard Wilson) and Arthur (Danny Huston). Mike, the younger, is somewhat mentally retarded; Arthur, the oldest, is a poetry-quoting psychopath; and Charlie, caught in the middle, is aware of his situation, but unable to change it.
As the film opens, the Burns brothers are being pursued after slaughtering a settler family as well as raping and killing the pregnant wife. Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), at the beginning of the film, captures Charlie and Mike. He offers Charlie the proposition of the title: go back and kill your older brother, and I’ll let you and Mike escape.
To make sure Charlie returns, Stanley keeps Mike as a hostage in the jail. Other important characters are Captain Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson), who has tried to carve a corner of civilization for herself in a barbaric environment; the bounty hunter Jellon Lamb (John Hurt); the man who owns the town, Eden Fletcher (David Wenham); and various aborigines, such as Two Bob (Tom E. Lewis), loyal to one side or the other.
Hillcoat, a first time director, has assembled an excellent cast. John Hurt’s bounty hunter is surprisingly ferocious, a grizzled creature of rawhide and bone whose brain may be addled from too much time alone or in the sun.
Huston (the aide in The Constant Gardener) pulls together the various strand’s of Arthur’s personality—loves poetry and music, is loyal to his brothers and is brutally sadistic–and makes them work. Winstone and Watson are also fine, but then all of the acting is fine.
Cave, in his first screenplay, has fashioned a spare, bloody account of family loyalty and the settling of the Australian frontier. He also wrote the quiet, often hypnotic musical score.
Parts of The Proposition are predictable, and the convergence at the end is inevitable, but just how it all resolves is less predictable, as is the question Arthur asks Charlie as they sit looking at the setting sun.
The Proposition is violent, bloody and often unpleasant, but also powerful, tragic and cathartic. Anyone interested in the evolution of the Western as film genre will want to see it. Top

Lucky Number Slevin
Paul McGuigan (Wicker Park) has directed a clever screenplay by Jason Smilovic that will remind many viewers of The Usual Suspects and perhaps of a few of Hitchcock’s mistaken identity films. It’s clever (some reviewers felt it was too clever), witty and moves at a pace that keeps the viewer interested without his having to run to keep up with the plot’s revelations. Now and then, references to the Kansas City Shuffle, North by Northwest and pop culture icons like “the schmoo” are a little too clever, but I prefer overly clever to the usual dumbed-down Hollywood story.
The title refers to a race horse shot full of go-juice (a certain win for those in the know) who, nonetheless, lost a race. A man and his family are killed when he can’t pay for his losses, and the story moves forward fifteen or twenty years.
A young man (Josh Harnett) leaves home after finding his girlfriend in bed with someone else and arrives in New York, where he is mugged, slugged in the nose and his identity stolen. He goes to the apartment of a friend, but the friend isn’t home, although the door is unlocked, so he goes in. Across the hall lives bouncy Lindsey (Lucy Liu of Kill Bill I), who is a pathologist for the coroner’s office and is intrigued by the young man when she sees him stepping nude out of the shower.
Before he can get dressed, two thugs, who mistake him for his friend, drag him off to meet “The Boss” (Morgan Freeman) who wants him, in return for erasing some debt, to kill the son of a rival gang leader. He barely gets back home before two other thugs take him, in another case of mistaken identity, to meet “The Rabbi” (Ben Kingsley), who also makes him an offer he can’t refuse in return for erasing some debt.
Then there’s Mr. Goodkat (Bruce Willis) in a wheelchair in an empty airline waiting room (how weird can it get?) telling another young man the story of the racehorse. And Stanley Tucci plays Brikowski, the detective who can’t figure out why the first young man, now referred to as “Slevin,” and Goodkat are showing up in his city. Figuring out how all these pieces fit together is, of course, most of the fun of the film. It stayed ahead of me until near the end of the film, and the last line goes back to comment on the Kansas City Shuffle.
The acting was, at worst, convincing and at best, quite good. When people are not who they seem, it is often an advantage if their onscreen impersonations are not perfect—see Kim Novak in Vertigo.
Willis is excellent in a one-dimensional role, Harnett does the Kim Novak routine, Kingsley clearly isn’t exerting himself much and Freeman seems to be having a good time playing a not very demanding role. Liu was so kinetic you wanted her to sit down and be quiet for five minutes—must be her reaction to all the time spent around the still people in the morgue.
Lucky Number Slevin is nasty, clever fun, and if you are looking for more than teasing entertainment, look elsewhere. I enjoyed it for the riff on Tarantino and Hitchcock that it is. Top

Where the Truth Lies
After David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan is Canada’s most highly regarded director. Less in the commercial mainstream than Cronenberg, Egoyan has pursued his obsessions (conflicting interpretations of reality and kinky sexuality) through such extraordinary films as Calendar, Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter.
Where the Truth Lies, as the title suggests, continues his exploration of multiple points of view and sneaks in some unusual erotica in the central scene as well as showing nude bodies in tubs of live lobsters.
The plot concerns a famous comedy duo named Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins (Colin Firth) who play the nightclubs and host a national polio telethon. Several reviewers saw obvious parallels with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, but I think the old Hollywood term, “suggested by,” is more accurate here than the men being modeled on Martin and Lewis. They are a comedy team and they host a telethon, but little beyond that seems to fit in any insightful way.
When the team are at the height of their popularity in the ’50s and have completed their first telethon, they go to their hotel room and find a young blonde woman’s body in the bathtub. She is Maureen (Rachel Blanchard), a waitress at the hotel. Since the two men have been in public view for the last thirty-six hours in another city, no one suspects them of the murder, but the trauma and publicity lead to their breaking-up as a team.
Twenty years later, an enterprising young reporter and book agent named Karen O’Connor (Alison Lohman), negotiates with Vince to buy the manuscript of his autobiography for one million dollars if he agrees to let her interview him as a publicity story to launch the book. What she actually wants to question him about is the woman in the bathtub, and he adamantly refuses to talk about it.
The first of two very implausible incidents is that Karen appeared as a young child with polio on the first telethon twenty years before. The second implausible incident is that, after negotiating with Vince, she ends up on a cross-country flight in first class with Lenny (OK, she manipulates the odds, but it’s still implausible) and seduces him. After a one-night-stand, he (surprise!) dumps her.
The rest of the film presents what various people think happened to Maureen the night of the murder and how Karen, who closely resembles the dead girl, finds out what she thinks happened. Additional characters with insights include the valet Reuben (David Hayman) and Maureen’s mother.
Bacon and Firth are both excellent as the comedy team, with Bacon never quite going over the top as Jerry Lewis did, and Firth displaying a violent side with dark underpinings. Lohman is less impressive, not quite making either her innocence or her cynicism believable. As one reviewer mentioned, having Lohman and Rachel Blanchard switch parts might have improved the performances.
Production values are first class, and the mood of the fifties night clubs is nicely captured. The story is adapted from a novel by Rupert Holmes, and some of the problems with the plot seem like vestiges of a novel that should have been eliminated in the screenplay.
The most unsatisfactory part is the very last scene where Karen meets with Maureen’s mother; Karen’s motivation here is unconvincing, especially given how little is told about the mother and given Karen’s earlier actions.
Where the Truth Lies, nonetheless, kept my attention, and Egoyan, even when flawed, is usally more interesting than lesser directors. His sequence at the Alice in Wonderland school play with a Grace-Slick character singing the White Rabbit song plays off against the following sequence, where he takes the White Rabbit girl home and feeds her drugs.
But even that episode is not what it first appears to be. The various interpretations of Lenny’s crying on stage during the telethon forces us to constantly reinterpret what is happening. It’s just that the film finally lacks that hard edge that would have been appropriate for classic film noir. Top

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen’s novels were widely filmed in the ’90s, perhaps culminating in the five-hour Masterpiece Theatre production of Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jane Ehle.
Why, barely ten years later, has the novel been filmed again, this time at a little over two hours? Are there that many “Janites” in the world? When the 1995 production was so universally praised, what could a shorter production do better? Well, as it turns out, with no disrespect to the earlier version, quite a few things.
The plot is well known enough that little summary is needed. Mrs. Bennett tries to marry off as many of her five daughters as possible to men with incomes because the family has little money. They will lose their modest estate when Mr. Bennett dies, since women could not inherit property in England at that time.
The eldest, Jane, attempts to gain the affections of Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods), and the second, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), although it takes her a while to realize it, is attracted to Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), the very wealthy and aloof friend of Mr.Bingley.
Most of the plot concerns how Elizabeth and Darcy come to realize their love for each other. Along the way, one of the younger sisters marries Lt. Wickham (Rupert Friend), an army officer no better than he should be.
One of the less noticeable, but yet significant differences in this production is that Elizabeth is the right age for her part—twenty years old—and somehow that makes a difference. Perhaps more important, director Joe Wright has removed the gloss from the settings and people. The girls’ hair misbehaves at times, the Bentley house is showing signs of wear and tear as it slides toward genteel poverty, chickens and geese squawk and fly about, and a huge boar saunters along through the barnyard.
At the dance, the girls are giddy, people don’t do all the steps perfectly and the house is not movie-set perfect. In this version, the need for money and its role in romance and marriage are much more obvious than in previous versions. Wright, when he first read the novel, referred to Austen as a realist, and his film attempts to capture a less idealized picture of the late eighteenth century than previous versions of Austen have done.
The novel has been trimmed down in a way that has not seriously damaged it, and the dialogue, although sometimes condensed, seems true to the spirit of Austen. The only character who suffers significant reduction is Lt. Wickham, whose charm and seductive manners are not as visibly displayed in this shorter version. MacFadyen is fine as Darcy, more shy in this version than haughty, and Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn are excellent as Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. Even Dame Judy Dench makes a brief and effective appearance as Lady Catherine.
Overall, this Pride and Prejudice succeeds on virtually all fronts, and anyone who enjoys the longer version will also want to see this one, which humanizes its people and its landscape. It is, one might say, a Pride and Prejudice for the rest of us. Top

—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

 

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