Brian De Palma: Mission: Impossible

Though not nearly as deconstructive as De Palma's '80s pastiche and travesty, Mission: Impossible feels like a classical, identifiably "'90s," art-for-art's-sake blockbuster, a bit of formal excess that uses the implausibility of the original TV series as an excuse to make no sense whatsoever. Unburdened from the need for logic, the film unfolds as an incessant series of double-crosses, grandiose setpieces and classical techniques. That coherent aesthetic propels the film long after its narrative becomes a mire of betrayal and intrigue.

Sent to intercept a diplomat selling U.S. secrets, the Impossible Missions Force team led by Jim Phelps (Jon Voight), stakes out an embassy with precision planning. But just as everything seems to be going perfectly, tiny cracks begin to form, and in short order sabotage leaves the entire team dead save for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise), who looks mighty suspicious when superiors inform him that they are hunting a mole in the organization. Betrayed by the true traitor and now suspected of treason by his bosses, Ethan has no choice but to flee and clear his name. These betrayals, real and imagined, are but the first in a film where the dead return and mirrored shots always reveal different perspectives.

Blow-Up

Michelangelo Antonioni takes so many risks with his first English-language feature, Blow-Up, that one wonders if he chuckled to himself as he set up all the various red herrings of the movie's structure -- after all, this was the same man who would name his static breakthrough feature "The Adventure." How delighted he must have been when audiences headed into what they would have guessed as a standard thriller capitalizing on the Mod craze hitting London instead became one of the great works of cinematic postmodernism and an attack on the movement that had nothing to do with the pish-posh dismissal of the older generation.

For the driving aspect of Blow-Up is not its snaking plot of a fashion photographer who believes he witnesses a murder in one of his pictures but its postmodernist fixation on simulacra. That the protagonist is a fashion photographer allows Antonioni to set up the Mod subculture as a movement that dissolves the line between the reality of life on the London streets and the false images of advertising that set hollow images of ideal living.

Such a phenomenon is not exclusive to the Mod movement, of course; one could say that advertising informed social perception since the rise of Madison Avenue. Heck, Thomas' (David Hemmings) whimsical detour into an old boutique selling busts suggests that civilizations have created hollow facsimiles of themselves and their citizens since artistic expression evolved beyond the point of cave paintings. Mods just happened to be the closest fashion within reach, so Antonioni dives into the oddly colored and plastic world of mid-'60s London to focus on yet another effect of modernity on human life.

Besides, the director makes great use of the massive contrast between the flashier tones of the subculture and the more dour, refined and, well, "British" demeanor of the city's architecture and the more formal residents. Antonioni opens the film with shots of busy London streets, played in silence when depicting older gentlemen headed to their jobs. When a group of young Mods runs through with their faces painted, however, the director turns the knob to full volume, making a small pack of collegiates sound like a filled football stadium. The constant clash between bright and dull only better visualizes the split between objective reality and the sheen glossed over it, a coating that prevents any meaningful connection even though people attempt to build a way of life on it. No moment of the film stresses how superficial the youth connection to their supposed lifestyle really is than a performance late in the film by The Yardbirds (with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page!) in a cellar club as a horde of Mods stand perfectly rooted as if soldiers assembling for their commanders, not processing the killer hard rock blasting out them in any way other than an acknowledgment of duty to the "movement," at which point I wondered if this club was by any chance a beer hall.

And what of Thomas? Oh, what a glorious pig. Though situated in a far higher class than David Thewlis' character in Naked, one can easily see the prototype laid down: Thomas is vainglorious, nihilistic, ragged and just plain greasy. Even more dismissive of his models than the artist in L'Avventura, Thomas viciously orders women around like chattel, placing them with props such as polarized, opaque screens that get darker as they are stacked in front of each other. Considering that he only ever moves the screens once for the re-shoots and berates the models continuously, he appears to treat the inanimate objects with more tact. When two nubile, young fillies walk in off the street and ask for an audition, he claims to be too busy to try them out, only to hop in his car and go out shopping.

Hemmings makes Thomas such a fascinating boor that he makes the typical inaction of an Antonioni film pass like a breeze. A 110-minute ostensible thriller should get to some basic plot outline in the first 30 minutes, but Blow-Up stretches a solid hour before Antonioni deigns to introduce a narrative. Yet Thomas draws our attention nonetheless, the ultimate symbol of mankind's inability to figure out what's real. He shoots a session with model Veruschka, a sensual sequence in which Thomas has the woman writhe around in fake ecstasy as he snakes with her. This erotic but unconsummated scene shows how even the manufacturing of simulacra is itself subject to detached, pop culture-informed ideas of sex. These two don't have sex, but the writhing and shifting positions that emphasize genitalia become a substitute for full copulation, allowing the false image of what sex is to completely replace what the image signifies. So caught up in this subjective state is Thomas that he spends his free time taking voyeuristic pictures of unsuspecting people going about their lives in order to turn reality into something he can understand, manage and even sell.

During one of these impromptu "sessions" in Maryon Park, Thomas photographs what appear to be two lovers. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave), spots him and demands the roll of film, going so far as to chase him back to his flat and seduce him to get the negatives. Intrigued, Thomas gives her a different roll and develops the contentious photographs. Blowing up the images of the woman and her older beau in the park, Thomas sees what appears to be a body behind the couple and a man hiding in the bushes with a gun.

Suddenly inspired, Thomas continues to magnify the images until they become abstract washes of film grain, so distorted that one cannot trust anything in the photograph. By expanding the photographs, Thomas (and Antonioni) exposes the false truth of photography, something that can only be examined up to a point before the supposedly undeniable proof contained in photographs. Furthermore, a photograph can only capture a moment free of context, so Thomas is left to wonder whether the woman knows about the murder and even if she's directly involved.

On some level, Thomas comes to understand this, and he begins to slowly fall apart as his fabricated worldview warps around him. He heads out to the park at night and indeed sees a body, but it's exposed in such a way that someone would likely have found it and called the authorities. Also, no blood or gunshot wound is visible, using the censorship standards of film boards to the film's advantage by raising the question whether this body is really there. When Thomas heads back with a camera to get proof, the body is gone, but news of a discovered body has not hit papers.

What's brilliant about Blow-Up is that Antonioni never misleads us, as much as one might go in with preconceived ideas for a thriller and a foreign director's stab at mainstream Anglophone acceptance. He raises the tension of the film without ever making the tension the focus. Rather than use harsh instrumental glissando to grip the audience into expecting a narrative payoff, Antonioni focuses intently on the shifting aesthetic of the film as subjectivity wrestles with what fleeting grasps we can get of reality. At a party looking for his agent to talk about the murder, Thomas runs into Veruschka again, and comments that he thought she was supposed to be in Paris. "I am in Paris," comes a terribly vacant drone in response, the model just as lost in her plastic consciousness as our protagonist. Thomas finds himself in that basement gig watching The Yardbirds, and during their performance Jeff Beck's amp malfunctions, leading to a Townshend-esque guitar destruction (Antonioni reportedly tried to get The Who). This moment of technical difficulty and vented frustration pokes a hole in the artifice of Mod music, and Thomas rushes forward through the immobile crowd to grab the remains of Beck's guitar as if taking a souvenir of the time he saw through the subculture for an instant.

Antonioni also mines a certain amount of unease due to the fresh memory of the Kennedy assassination. Thomas' obsessive manipulation and examination of a strip of film long past the point of clarity would not look too out of step with an analysis of the Zapruder film. Thomas' barely suppressed paranoia does not match the same conspiratorial fervor that informs much of the Kennedy case, but Hemmings subtly shifts his entire body, to the point that his slimy perspiration at the start of the film gives way to the full droplets of cold sweat.

Like the title of the director's 1960 breakthrough, Blow-Up takes on a wry import, putting the audience in mind for the literal or emotional explosion expected of a thriller, only to reveal that the title refers to the banal act of enlarging photographs, and then taking another turn and drawing suspense from that act. Antonioni does not let us off with a cathartic finale, gently building us up over the last hour until he simply shows that the body is gone. What happened to it, who took it, whether it existed it all remain mysteries, as Thomas deals with his shock by gazing upon a mimed tennis match by some of the face-painted Mods seen hopping around London throughout the film. Bringing the postmodernist nightmare to a close, Thomas ends up joining in, "throwing" back the imaginary that went out of bounds as the film closes with the sound of rackets hitting tennis balls as Thomas looks on, quietly and anticlimactically consumed by madness. Thus, the final triumph of Blow-Up is that achieves its greatest shock after the movie ends and the audience must head back out into an advertising-centric world and wonder what it is that keeps forming a knot in their stomach.

Howards End

In the accompanying booklet for Criterion's new Blu-Ray for Howards End, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan bemoans how time has forgotten the movie, which was wildly acclaimed and received nine Oscar nominations (and two wins) upon release, has now faded into a sort of obscurity. I confess that I myself never heard of it until Criterion announced it some months ago. Turan calls it the apex of "a cerain kind of filmmaking, a landmark example of movies of passion, taste and sensitivity that honestly touch every emotion." Indeed, this deceptively clichéd story of British class warfare -- itself a genre that has largely been explored top to bottom in romance, period drama, verité, even comedy -- weaves such a rich tapestry of allegory and visual splendor that it commands our attention from the start.

The film, tightly adapted from E.M. Forster's novel, centers on the titular house, a large country estate that proves hugely important in the lives of three families. It is the first of many symbols in a script made entirely of them, clearly representing the quaint, idyllic perception of the "Britishness" of Britain. It is an august château, made of strong brick with interiors of rich, strong wood, with windows that look out upon fields of almost impossible green.

Through a series of misunderstandings, the Schlegels, a middle-class family of bourgeois intellectuals, find themselves connected to this symbol of rural tradition: the young, brash Helen (Helena Bonham Carter) gets engaged to the youngest son of the house's owners, the Wilcoxes, but the two break it off the next day. To sort out the embarrassment, Helen's older sister Margaret (Emma Thompson) visits the Wilcoxes in their London townhouse several months later and enters into an unlikely friendship with Ruth (Vanessa Redgrave in a minor but vital role), the matriarch of the Wilcox family. Compared to the progressive, outspoken Margaret, Ruth is hopelessly old-fashioned; she even expresses an opposition to women's suffrage. Yet Ruth sees something in Margaret, and Ruth spends many of her final days with her new friend rather than family.

Ruth's death serves as the catalyst for the film's action; in her will, she leaves Howards End, a house that's already taken on a sort of mythical quality as it's only been alluded to thus far, to Meg. The Wilcoxes are furious. They only let the house themselves, but that doesn't mean that someone can just move in and stay. Henry (Anthony Hopkins), the husband, burns the will, but he feels a tinge of guilt for his actions. When he visits the Schlegels, Margaret informs him that they can no longer afford their London house, and Henry offers to help them. Eventually, he asks for Meg's hand in marriage, albeit in a hilariously stiff fashion, standing awkwardly at the top of a staircase trying valiantly to put forward a romantic treatise without betraying any of those plebeian weaknesses known as emotions: "Do you think you can be induced to share?" he asks, and Margaret immediately picks up on what he's really asking and accepts with a similar sense of elite detachment.

With this arrangement, the Schlegels find themselves in the center of the class struggle that emerged in the Edwardian era of the early 1900s. Margaret marries Henry and her personality is slowly absorbed into the rigidity of the Wilcoxes, representatives of the new wealth of industrialism and the successors of the old aristocracy. Their greed is plain-faced and grotesque; Charles, the eldest son, is vacuous and feckless, traits that exist also in his wife Dolly. When they discover Ruth's will, Dolly is as hysterical as the "real" Wilcoxes, and she chirps in her airheaded voice, "It's only in pencil! Pencil doesn't count!" The children react to the news of their father's engagement to someone less prosperous than they (though we never see any of the kids do anything approximating work) as if their father admitted that he'd killed Ruth.

On the other end of the spectrum, the impulsive Helen takes up the charge of the Basts, a couple initially set in the lower-middle class range who slide down due to misfortunes. Helen meets Leonard (Samuel West) when she carelessly grabs his umbrella upon leaving a music recital, leading to one of the most beautiful, wittiest and revealing scenes of the film: Helen, rash and impatient, brushes up with the poor (in this case by using the ratty old umbrella) without having to suffer any consequences, while the constantly put-out Leonard must traipse through the rain after yet another of his meager possessions is snatched away by someone rich -- it also suggests that even the middle class who wishes to help the less fortunate can be just as harmful in their own way. Nevertheless, Helen and Margaret are taken with Leonard's intelligence and his plight, and they invite him over on occasion for conversation and, one suspects, as a sort of social experiment. Henry gives the Schlegel sisters an inside tip that the bank Leonard works for is about to shutter, so Leonard quits, only for the company to turn record profits. Soon, his new employers fire him in a staff reduction, and the Basts are plunged into starvation.

This happens as Magaret is adapting her personality to fit with her new social status, so when Helen brings the Basts to the wedding attempting to wring some sort of repayment from Henry for ruining this couple, Meg shoos her sister and her "protégés" away forcefully. Before they can leave, though, a drunken Mrs. Bast recognizes Henry, and we learn that he had an affair with her some years ago when she had to prostitute herself for a time. Margaret feels shame for her deceased, cuckqueaned friend, yet she forgives her husband freely.

The shifting paradigm of the Schlegels' social existence reshapes the family and creates rifts between the sisters, yet this swirling torrent of emotion and uncertainty is restrained marvelously by Carter and Thompson. At the time of shooting, both Carter and Thompson were known but hardly household names: Carter had starred in another of Merchant Ivory's Forster adaptations, A Room With a View (as well as a cameo in Maurice), and Thompson had appeared with then-husband Kenneth Branagh in Henry V and Dead Again. Yet both display prominently the aspects that won them international attention, and both give a masterclass here on the amount of emotional weight the eyes can carry. Carter exhibits her off-beat sensuality through body language and simply by speaking her mind when everyone else shoves all of their impulses into their upper lips.

It is Thompson, though, who walks away with the movie. Margaret has always been more measured than her sister, and she largely suppresses her liberal politics for the sake of polite conversation with Ruth and, later, out of bridal expectation with Henry. Yet where Carter can use her entire body to display her passions, Thompson communicates hers through her deeply expressive eyes. Turan calls Thompson "an actress who can break your heart just by widening her eyes," just about the perfect summation of her power; Margaret is not wholly unhappy in her marriage, but the emergence of Henry's two-faced, callous nature along with the general abhorrence of the Wilcox clan bury any sense of independence until only her eyes betray her true feelings.

At last she has her moment to unleash all the pent-up emotion, when Helen returns from Germany pregnant with Leonard's child. Henry is outraged, refuses to allow Helen to stay at Howards End even for a night and demands to know who "seduced" her so that he might be punished. Margaret cannot contain herself: "Will you forgive her, as you were once forgiven?" and this sudden bluntness could move mountains. Margaret, whom we met as a seemingly flighty young woman and later became a model Edwardian wife, proves her wisdom with this shocking denouncement of Henry's hypocrisy.

When Margaret first came to Howards End, the housekeeper breathlessly noted that she walked around the place just like Mrs. Wilcox, absorbing its idyllic beauty and ethereal grace. By the film's end, she has completely replaced Ruth as not only the head of Howards End but, symbolically, the leader of the new England, a liberal who shall use the wealth of industrialism (Henry) to aid the poor and the future generations. A simplistic vision of a future utopia, perhaps, but a hopeful one, and one that certainly seems popular as Margaret walks around her new kingdom.

Howards End combines all the best aspects of what one might consider "English" filmmaking, from its perfect casting to art design so meticulously recreated that it seems perfectly natural. Period dramas tend to be pretty but vacuous, with the amount of effort ceasing once an attractive woman has been placed into a corset and then into a mansion or palace; how strange, then, that the two period pieces that have struck me as tangible and realistic lately are this film and Bright Star, two movies that feature a particular set as a matter of paramount importance. Yet the chief appeal of Howards End, beyond its design or even its acting, is its lasting relevance to the world. When Helen first approaches Henry with news of the Basts' misfortune, Henry waves her off. "The poor are the poor; one is sorry for them, but there it is." How often have we heard a more gently phrased version of this, delivered with the same hypocrisy and two-faced greed, in the current health care debate?


-Henry refuses to accept any blame for encouraging Leonard to quit; "The poor are the poor," he flatly states, "One is sorry for them, but there it is."; reflects health care debate