The Sorcerer's Apprentice

It never occurred to me in the initial round of trailers that The Sorcerer's Apprentice is based on the classic segment of Fantasia; with no hint of a connection in the first trailer, why would anyone? Only when I got to a theater early one time and saw one of those extended previews that starts before the actual previews -- can't they just shove all the regular ads for Coca-Cola and such into that space and devote some time during the coming attractions to spotlight a particular film? -- did the filmmakers mention in talking heads the source of the film's inspiration. When I heard that, all I could think was, "Why bother? Did anyone watch that animated classic and wonder what it would be like if Mickey were substituted for a nasally Canadian geek?"

This ran through my mind almost constantly as the film played. Director Jon Turteltaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are two filmmakers always in search of grand spectacle, yet the great irony of the finished product is that they manage to remove the magic of the original. Instead, they subject an audience to a disconnected series of sporadically stunning magic fights, not a one of which communicates the wonder or the seductive properties of magical powers.

The nasally Canadian geek in question is Dave Stutler, shown first as a 10-year-old who stumbles into a dusty magic shop on a field trip to the Statue of Liberty and meets Balthazar Blake (Nicolas Cage), a centuries-old sorcerer who apprentice under Merlin (yes, the Merlin). Seeking the prophesied child who will rid the world of Morgan le Fay, whom Balthazar keeps trapped in a Russian doll-like device called a Grimlock. The sorcerer discovers that the boy is indeed the one he's sought for 1300 years, but an intervening attack from rogue sorcerer Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) results in the two wizards trapping themselves in a mystical vase and leaving a frantic Dave to try to explain himself to his peers, in water-soaked pants that the children take for proof of urination, no less.

This comprises the first 15 minutes of the film, and I've spared you the prologue in 750 A.D. and the thick exposition Cage has to deliver to a 10-year-old. Turteltaub and Bruckheimer's previous team-ups, the National Treasure films, made American history into something genuinely captivating for younger audiences; granted, they did so by turning history into fiction and sprinkling in an unacceptable dose of Dan Brown -- any dosage of Dan Brown is unacceptable -- but the cumbersome dialogue gave way to a believable enthusiasm for the subject, and the look of reverence and uncontainable glee on Cage's face as he pored over documents sold the film better than any of its action scenes.

Why, then, do the director and producer not extend the same care to the boundless opportunities of magic? When an older Dave (Jay Baruchel), having since suffered a breakdown over the immense shame of that event 10 years prior, meets Balthazar again and learns that he will himself become a sorcerer, he reacts with perfunctory skittishness instead of unvarnished excitement. Here is a nobody, a physics nerd who honed his genius partly due to his innate cranial capacity but also as a side-effect of hiding from the world after his ridicule, suddenly told that he can wield the power of a god, and the best he can muster is, "Sweet."

Baruchel is slowly but steadily gaining traction in my mind as a viable alternative to the Michael Cera/Jesse Eisenberg school of geeky detachment; he's endearingly awkward and believably sweet where Cera has an edge to him and Eisenberg falls somewhere in-between. But he's shackled here, unable to explore the emotions that would run through the head of the typical hero in training whose life turns upside down for the better. All he can do is make a few wisecracks, which he always backpedals out of cowardice in the face of stronger wizards, or women.

More tragic is the waste of Cage. To paraphrase Richard Roeper, the rule of thumb for the quality of Nicolas Cage's performance in any film can be directly tied to his hair: the sillier the wig, the more outlandish the performance. The Sorcerer's Apprentice bucks this trend, and that's not a good thing. Rather than the magnificently campy Nic Cage who commits to kitsch more completely than anyone, we get a neutered Nic. Despite the kooky nature of his character, a millennium-old sorcerer whose methods of training Dave in the ways of the "sacred art" recall Rip Torn's mad coach from Dodgeball, Cage heads in the opposite direction, turning his usual manic energy inward until he delivers every line with grave severity. Amazingly, Molina brings the camp more readily than Cage, all bored villain who kills anyone who remotely crosses him out of exasperation for the inanity of mankind. His snarled threats and incessant sighs of loathing are the film's only steady source of entertainment.

Nothing makes any blasted sense in this movie, and not in the way that would make for a better depiction of magic. Dave's proficiency with magic depends entirely on plot convenience: without a single lesson and only a vague instruction, the boy manages to take out a deadly sorcerer, then spends the rest of the film ineptly practicing and quitting magic out of frustration, only to intermittently control his powers with mastery. There's no logic to his progression, simply contrivance after contrivance that robs Dave's evolution of any meaning or weight. Even the moment that recreates the possessed broom bit of the original Fantasia sequence doesn't conjure memories of that animated masterpiece but raise the question of how Dave, who five minutes ago couldn't perform a single spell with consistency, can suddenly summon an army of the inanimate.

Occasionally, a funny line seeps through, such as the confrontation between Dave and a vain disciple of le Fay who made his living as a Vegas magician, in which the villain cannot believe that the boy doesn't know who he is. "Are you in Depeche Mode?" Dave asks the spiky-haired, New Wave-looking fool. The romantic subplot between Dave and Becky (Teresa Palmer), the girl he liked back in fourth grade before his breakdown forced him to transfer schools, exists mainly to give the villains some leverage against Dave and to prove that old point about love being what allows good to triumph over evil. The two do, however, share a surprisingly touching scene involving Dave's Tesla coil and the musical sounds its sparks emit.

But too much of The Sorcerer's Apprentice is somber, treating the ineffable wonder, the magic of magic, with the same solemn reverence afforded to history in National Treasure, fictionalized as it was. I haven't seen Nicolas Cage give such a lifeless performance in years; never before has he so blatantly looked as if he's only doing the job for the paycheck. I expected little from the film and was still disappointed, my eye occasionally catching on something of interest only to return back to the sheer dullness of it all. Everyone involved takes a narrative and emotional shortcut, avoiding anything that sticks in the mind in favor of silliness. I return to a scene in the film where Balthazar chastises Dave about distractions whilst wearing a hat that directs any and all attention onto itself. Somehow, the entire movie is in that throwaway moment.

Steven Spielberg: Raiders of the Lost Ark

How Steven Spielberg and George Lucas ever got Raiders of the Lost Ark is as impressive a feat as the finished product. Made on the heels of the director's first box office disappointment, Raiders compounded its risky prospects with its very premise. Released one year after Heaven's Gate put the kibosh on New Hollywood, the thought of another historical epic coming out so soon after Cimino's effort tanked must have put Paramount on edge.

Spielberg avoided falling into the same trap that ensnared Cimino, though, through some key differences. One, Raiders of the Lost Ark, unlike Heaven's Gate, does not strive for historical veracity, as it pays tribute to the old adventure serials that Spielberg and Lucas enjoyed in their childhood. Two, the fact that the film draws from those serials gave the film more commercial prospects than the more dramatic Gate. Three, and this is most important, Spielberg still had 1941 weighing on him.

The two friends spent years working on script revisions and storyboards, so when Paramount finally greenlit the film Spielberg didn't spend time (or money) wracking his brain over the story or how it should be told. Despite the film's grandeur and multiple location shoots, Spielberg started and stopped principal photography in only 73 days. He shot as few takes as possible and rewrote planned action sequences into shorter, wittier bursts -- thank Harrison Ford's dysentery for possibly the most memorable moment in the film, when a sword brandishing warrior challenges Indiana Jones, who simply draws his gun and shoots him, bypassing a planned fight sequence. He kept costs low and avoided the sort of indulgence that sank other big pictures. "Had I had more time and money," Spielberg said later, "it would have turned out a pretentious movie."

Raiders of the Lost Ark is as much a passion project as any of the other latter-day accomplishments of New Hollywood, drawn from the inspirations of its auteurs' youths and mounted on a scale that would previously been afforded to only the most proven masters. It also cements, for better and worse, Spielberg and Lucas' "takeover" of the box office, begun with Spielberg's double-whammy of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Lucas' first two Star Wars pictures. If I keep comparing Raiders to Heaven's Gate, it is because they, taken in tandem, show the handoff from one era to the next. Like guards at a border crossing, they separate the boundaries and reflect some of their cultural traits despite being right next to each other.

For Raiders has the same scale as Cimino's film, yet Spielberg uses it to different effect. This is, at heart, nothing more than a crowd pleaser. Indiana Jones wanders through epic expanses, but he is not Lawrence of Arabia, nor Colonel Blimp; he's just a man charismatic and magnetic as he may be, and Spielberg cares not for who he is but what he does. Note that we meet him in the midst of an escapade, out in the jungle where he navigates booby traps in a temple to reach a golden statue, which unleashes a boulder that nearly crushes him. Only after this sequence finishes do we learn anything about our Dr. Jones, and even then we glean scarely more than the knowledge that he is maybe the worst professor a university could hire, showing up to teach a class only when he feels the need to recharge the sexual fantasies of his female students.

The dialogue is ludicrous, the effects -- incredible as they are -- designed to remind us of their cartoony artificiality. No one could accuse Harrison Ford of being too dynamic and actor, and his primary moods as Jones waver between frustrated and just plain angry. Karen Allen brings pluck and fire to the role of Marion Ravenwood, yet her spark is snuffed in favor of turning her into the typical damsel in distress. Everything has been modulated to resemble the old serials, down to acting styles and scripting. Raiders has one advantage over its influences, though: Steven Spielberg never directed those old serials.

Dubious politics and stilted acting aside, Raiders of the Lost Ark is so masterfully constructed that it effectively parlays a forgotten genre of filmmaking, warts 'n' all, into a fresh genre that renewed interest in the adventure film even as it set such a high standard that filmmakers did not begin to approach its achievement until computers allowed them to recreate much of the size of it for less money and effort. Even in a purely expositional scene such as that early stint back at the university, Raiders never sags, propelled by one of John Williams' better scores (buoyed, of course, by one of his most recognizable themes) and the sort of sure hand that the director didn't show on his previous feature but did everywhere else. Had anyone else been at the helm of this material, including George Lucas, Raiders would likely have been one of those films that comes with the immediate qualifier "for it's time." Oh, the film was OK, for it's time; the effects were well done, for it's time.

Every year, at least one filmmaker or writer or actor (or some combination thereof) will defend a film he or she made as dumb fun, as if making something stupid and dispensable is an actual achievement. Raiders of the Lost Ark is a dumb movie, but it is ingeniously mounted, and thus it lives on as mindless fun for generations. Its serializes structure lends itself to bigger setpieces: Indy can run from a perfectly spherical boulder in the first ten minutes before jetting off to Nepal to fight some Nazis before rummaging through Cairo to find clues leading to the titular Ark of the Covenant.

Even with the director's attempts to cut economic corners with fewer takes, Raiders never feels slapdash. As this fantastic article by J.R. Hudson points out, every shot, even the calmer ones, is meticulously planned, enhancing the thrill of the stunts and maintaining interest in the dialogue scenes. When Indy must do battle with a great brute of a Nazi at an airfield out at the archaeological site, Spielberg cuts to shots of spilled fuel gushing toward flames that will lead back to the plane that Marion cannot escape. When the gas finally catches, though, Spielberg frames it in the background, racing at the plane as we take in the entire situation: the lit fuel, the spinning plane, and the fight between Indy and the thug. When the big Nazi bites it, chopped up by the plane's propeller, Spielberg conveys his demise through a red spray across the emblazoned swastika on the plane's tail.

With all the Nazi caricatures, most notably Ronald Lacey's scenery-chewing Gestapo interrogator Maj. Toht, it's easy to forget what a compelling character Indiana's true foil, René Belloq (Paul Freeman) is. A French archaeologist who competes with Jones for every find and allies with the Nazis because they will fund his expeditions, Belloq is memorable precisely because of his proximity to Jones: they both seek the same treasures, look as out of place among the natives they hire (or exploit, and the lines separating the two are not so clear), and even pine for the same woman. Belloq addresses this, saying, "You and I are very much alike...I am but a shadowy reflection of you. It would take only a nudge to make you like me. To push you out of the light." Compare this honesty to, say, Avatar, which positions the scientists who sympathize with the Na'vi as beacons of ethics when they're just as responsible for the rape of Pandora as the corporation that mines it. It's a fleeting moment of understanding, of the character of Indiana Jones and the entire genre he represents, that speaks to the intelligence Spielberg brings to the project even in his boyish enthusiasm. Too, Belloq's character would stand out even more had Spielberg's idea for Indy's characterization, an alcoholic à la Humphrey Bogart's character in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, panned out, as Belloq in many ways plays like a funhouse mirror perversion of Claude Rains' character in Casablanca.

Raiders of the Lost Ark ends with just about the best over-the-top ending ever committed to celluloid: I may be pissing away what little credibility I've stockpiled recently among some other writers in the online community, but God damn it, you show me a film that melts a Nazi's face and I'll show you a film that just sold a ticket. It is so dizzyingly absurd, so top to bottom (and back up again) ludicrous that it has no business whatsoever in a director's "comeback" feature, and yet there it is, a sticky puddle of fleshy sludge that probably congealed into a stiff middle finger just below the frame. Raiders is a grand simplification, of history, of character and of entire races and nationalities, which makes its own iconic status in Hollywood's timeline so amusing and fitting. Released in 1981, it precedes the explosion of action features it indirectly inspired and adventure epics that were practically remakes given how heavily other directors and screenwriters mined Spielberg's opus. Yet it's superior to all of them, anchored by a directing capability that far exceeded the talents of the copycats and given just enough self-awareness to gently poke at its own artifice and contradictions without getting too postmodern about it (which would make a great film on its own terms but would stick out like a sore thumb here). It's easy to forget how staggering the effects on this film are, living as we are in the wake of Peter Jackson conjuring armies and battles through computers, but one need only pop in a DVD of Indiana Jones' first, and by many leagues best, film and marvel at how brilliant "dumb fun" used to be.

Boogie Nights

Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights revolves around one of the most darkly comic MacGuffins in cinematic history. Like the shark in Jaws, the member of Dirk Diggler at once drives the film and remains unseen, achieving a mythic quality before the payoff. We gauge its size through the reaction shots of those who gaze upon it. Anderson films close-ups of widened eyes and slacked jaws; women (and jealous, insecure men) gaze lustfully at Dirk's diggler, and its symbolic import drives most of the film. Yet just as the shark ultimately didn't live up to the hype -- who can miss that bounce when the shark leaps onto the boat? -- so too does Dirk's member fail to measure up in the end, a flaccid and impotent fossil of the great beast it once was.

Boogie Nights' immediate and most pervasive influence is, of course, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas: both use highly stylized direction (Anderson's clearly derives from Marty's) to weave an epic tragicomedy of a seedy underworld, GoodFellas with organized crime and Boogie Nights the porn industry. Anderson defines his world with two early, extended tracking shots, one in a discotheque that briefly introduces the large cast and a second, at a pool party, that gives them shape and definition. Both of these tracking shots, as with the magnificent shots of the club and the Copa in GoodFellas, are shimmering and sensual, not so much calling attention to themselves -- as so many extended tracking shots do -- but calling attention to themselves through the narcissism of the world it paints; in both films, the shots justify themselves by reflecting the vanity and self-indulgence of the areas they profile.

At the discotheque works Dirk (né Eddie Adams), a high school dropout who cleans dishes in between working as a male prostitute. His home life recalls Rebel Without a Cause, a harpy-like mother who snaps at her submissive husband; Dirk has to take a bus from Torrance to Reseda to work at the nightclub, a job he could just as easily get closer to home, but then he might not enjoy the benefit of that extra hour each way away from his family. One night, Eddie meets Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), an adult film director who's heard rumors of the particularly gifted washroom boy. Jack invites the lad to his lavish home in the suburbs, a convenient offer when Eddie runs away from home, and before you know it Eddie renames himself Dirk and jumps into his new occupation with vigor.

Toeing the line between absurdity and epic tragedy, Boogie Nights charts the rise and fall of the Me Generation through the highs and lows of the pornography industry, the snowblind cocaine binge of its stars a microcosm for the nation's own drug escapism and the effect of the VHS tape on the business representative of the Reagonomic turn to cold, pragmatic capitalism above all else. Anderson, for his part, understands how ridiculous his story is, and he fills the screen with goofball characters too odd to be anything but believable, such as Don Cheadle as a country music-loving porn star who by day works as a stereo salesman and audiophile; Heather Graham as a young starlet who never takes off her roller skates; John C. Reilly as Reed Rothchild, the former big star who gets gently shoved to the role of the sidekick to make way for Dirk even before the kid enters the business; and William H. Macy as Bill, the cuckolded assistant director, always forced to suffer the indignity of his wife's (porn star Nina Hartley, who ironically enjoyed reportedly the most stable and longest lasting relationship in the business*) public adultery.

Too, Anderson uses his camera with a great deal of wit: he oversaturates the pool party with light, a cheeky emphasis on the sunny appeal of this line of work to the impressionable and, as we learn quickly, childlike Dirk. When Scotty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the gay boom operator, arrives, Anderson cuts to his POV, framing Dirk in an iris. Naturally, the scenes involving actual porn shoots are hysterical, with the characters woodenly delivering basic dialogue as Jack looks on, brow furrowed in concentration as if a compatriot of the New Hollywood filmmakers taking cinema to bold new territories around the same time. Anderson's stylistic quick-tracks and brightly colored sheen are captivating and immersive even as they are off-putting, gently separating us from the fast-paced, gaudy world he's documenting to allow us to spot the cracks forming before the world of leopard prints and suede crumbles around them.

Working with a cast of Altmanesque proportions, Anderson nevertheless adheres to Scorsese's GoodFellas formula of centering the action on a few characters and rooting the camera in the point of view of the main protagonist. Like Henry Hill, Eddie/Dirk falls into his seedy line of work in adolescence -- Henry starts working for the mob as a boy, while the emotionally stunted, teenage Eddie finds the same familial comfort in adult films -- and rises through the ranks by knowing the game in and out. Dirk even has a primal innocence that Hill never exhibited: in his first shoot, he sheepishly asks if he's doing well, gently asking for encouragement from both his partner in the scene and the people filming. Even as he edges Reed to the sidelines, he develops a deep friendship with the guy. Yet, as Henry before him, Dirk loses himself to cocaine, the white powder affecting his performance and seeding jealous paranoia in his mind, fueling an impotent rage that sends him into a tailspin. Mark Wahlberg, then underwear model and wannabe rapper who played like the New Kids on the Block (of which his brother Donnie was a member) crossed with Vanilla Ice, manages to walk the same tightrope Ray Liotta traversed, between reactive dependency on the factors that affect the character and propulsive acting.

Also key to the story and its thematic purpose is Jack. Played by Burt Reynolds, possibly the icon of '70s populist cinema, Jack represents a perversion of the nostalgia of the decade. As much as he's a seasoned pro, Jack genuinely believes the bullshit he's slinging -- that he's a true filmmaker bringing art to the genre, that he discovers and fosters artistic talent and that he's a father figure to these strung-out, lost children -- and Reynolds makes us like him almost in spite of himself. Perhaps the central performance of the film, however, is Julianne Moore as Amber Waves, the aging porn star who projects the matronly love she's not allowed to give her actual child, separated by her vindictive ex-husband, onto the people in the business, offering a bastion of warmth and support for kids too dumb to realize that she's worse than all of them. She acts out a reverse Oedipal complex with Dirk, her feelings falling somewhere in-between motherly love and sexual lust; a testament to her misplaced sensibilities, she is the one who first offers Dirk cocaine, setting in motion his downfall.

Boogie Nights takes a turn for the worse, symbolically, on the eve of the new decade, with a murder-suicide that grinds the festivities and optimism to a screeching halt. Bill's explosive solution to his wife's infidelity is brief and brutal, ushering in the age of instant gratification: soon, Jack's financier (Robert Ridgely) is busted for possession of child pornography, and his new producer (Philip Baker Hall) curtly tears down Jack's belief in the art of his films, forcing the director to make cheap, to-the-point pictures to be released straight to VHS.

A dark comedy floats over the entire picture, but it dives into the blackest abyss in the third act. Buck (Cheadle) cannot secure a loan for his own stereo outlet, as the bank won't finance a porn star, thus trapping him in the lifestyle. His dream become a harsh nightmare, Jack's cool enthusiasm for his work transforms into bitter workmanship, and both he and Rollergirl unleash their pent-up fury on a derisive amateur performer. Dirk and Reed fall out of the porn business in their addled and attempt to land a record deal, and dire straits force Dirk to return to his life as a male prostitute, leading to an altercation with a group of homophobes.

Brilliantly illustrating the cultural shift from the carefree, self-appraising narcissism and the outright, desperate solipsism of Reagan's '80s is the final extended scene, in which Dirk, Reed and their buddy Todd (Thomas Jane) attempt to scam and rob a drug dealer (Alfred Molina). Molina's apartment condenses the difference between the two decades by replacing the faux-homely, gaudy, sickly warm splendor of '70s decor with icy modern interior design: harsh, white lighting illuminating the slick, mathematically precise furniture, speakers booming soulless synth-pop to match the feel of the decor. One of the most twisted, bizarrely funny sequences I can recall seeing -- and the only sequence in contemporary film that matches the odd tension of one of Quentin Tarantino's elongated scenes -- Todd's plan strikes us as doomed from the start and only gets worse as Molina bandies wildly about the place waving a gun around while a Vietnamese boy in the corner of the living room tosses firecrackers to freak these coked-up robbers out even further. It ends with the sudden, comic brutality of a Tarantino climax, paving the way for a change of heart in Dirk.

Boogie Nights ends with the characters reconciled, several living in Jack's home, the familial undertones of initial interactions now fully developed ties. Yet the comforting ending belies the tragedy of the film: whenever any of these characters interact with the outside world -- as they did in most of the third act -- they are beaten, shot, derided and shunned. Jack will never make another film that will play in a theater; Amber will never gain custody of her child; Dirk and Rollergirl are just two high school dropouts with talents that can be considered old and useless on a yearly basis (surf a few web sites on a virus-protected computer to see an industry that shoehorns its performers into the mature category before they even hit 30**). Anderson is kind enough (though perhaps naïve) not to show any characters ravaged by AIDS, as we so many porn stars during the '80s (among them John Holmes, the basis for Dirk Diggler), but one could scarcely call the ending a happy one. These characters are trapped in their version of Grey Gardens, cut off by a world that sanctimoniously condescends to them even as they increasingly embrace pornography's ethos of gratification and hollow glamor. Even in their glitzy, expensive estate, they're as manipulated and castrated by Reagan's economy and the rise of empty moralism as the poor.



*Research for this film was...interesting.
** Again, very interesting.

Dead Man

Jim Jarusch's '80s filmography was enough to make me an ardent fan, but nothing prepared me for Dead Man. At once a film far beyond his low-key, minimalistic satires and the fulfillment of their possibilities, it applies his unique style to a genre aesthetically antithetical to it: the Western. The Western is a genre about bigness: big settings, big personas and, most of all, big guns. For Jarmusch to make one, even an alternative "acid" Western, seems on paper to be madness.

Instead, it takes the idea of the Acid Western to its extreme. Acid Westerns grew out of the counterculture of the '60s, as well as the genre's appropriation by other countries, specifically the Italians with their spaghetti Westerns. Both genres praised individual strength and personal morality: classic Westerns depicted the individualistic hero as a beacon of general Americana, a reflection of our can-do attitude and a literal representation of pioneering spirit, while the Westerns of the post-Vietnam era presented the individual as the true source of morality in the face of corrupt society, even if the counterculture ideals could not be fully applied as the heroes still resorted to mass displays of violence that only a few seemed to genuinely regret (and none of them half so much as the samurai in Yojimbo and Sanjuro, the basis for the Man With No Name and therefore countless other Western anti-heroes).

Dead Man, however, strips away all notions of nobility in the Old West. Everything that you need to know about the episodic film can be gleaned from its first vignette, a short film in its own right: William Blake (Johnny Depp), a broke accountant from Cleveland, scraped together just enough cash to head out to the frontier town of Machine where he's been guaranteed a job by metal works owner Mr. Dickinson. The roughly nine-minute sequence begins with Blake in a train car surrounding by passengers of his social status. They're all well-dressed, polite, headed out to the West for new and bold opportunities, ideal Western characters all. Jarmusch fades to some time later, and Blake looks up to see a few new passengers of the scruffier variety. This happens again, and suddenly Blake is sitting among disgusting rabble, scraggly beards and missing teeth. A coal-coated boilerman (Crispin Glover) approaches and warns him of heading out west to Machine ("to Hell," as he calls it). As the boilerman continues to caution Blake, the other passengers suddenly open the windows and fire at buffalo roaming the landscape beside the train. "Government reckons they [various passengers of this sort] killed about a million last year." In nine minutes, Jarmusch masterfully takes our idea of the cinematic Western and destroys it, presenting us instead with a group of ordinary people looking not to find prosperity through honest work out West but to taint and rape another part of the Earth after ruining someplace east beyond capacity.

The boilerman's warnings ring in Blake's head as he walks through the decadent town of Machine, and when he arrives at Dickinson's a callous secretary (John Hurt) says with ample derision that Blake's message was postmarked two months ago and the position has long since been filled. That night, a former prostitute takes pity on him when he helps her up in the street and takes him back to her place, only for her ex- (and Mr. Dickinson's son) Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) to pop in and shoot both Thel and Bill, killing her and lodging a bullet near William's heart.

If the film had not yet established its break from the genre to your satisfaction, here the film moves into marvelously, woefully uncharted territory. Blake is rescued by a Native American named Nobody, a man of mixed tribal descent and a European upbringing who tells Blake that he couldn't remove the bullet from his chest and that his days are numbered. Nobody refers to his new companion as "stupid fucking white man" until he at last asks for William's name, only to react with a start. "You're William Blake?" he asks incredulously, "Then you are a dead man!" Nobody is thinking of the poet William Blake, his literary hero and seemingly the one aspect of his Western education for which he is grateful. Suddenly enthused at what he believes to be the incarnation of the poet, Nobody decides to take Blake to the Pacific Coast so that he might return this vessel to the spirit-world, and along the way they will kill any white men who cross them. Jarmusch says that he used Blake's poetry in connection with the Native American history he studied for the film as he thought Blake's style and topics fit nicely with what he discovered about Native Americans and their perspectives, so perhaps he works through Nobody, realigning William Blake's legacy to the Indians by breaking violently from the Europeans.

That's not to say that Nobody is a well-cultured savage looking for revenge; on the contrary, Dead Man contains the fairest depiction of Native Americans I've ever seen in a Western. The materialistic, imperialist whites headed west for money and found harsh, unforgiving terrains. Even so, they subjugated the Indians there simply to claim the land as Manifest Destiny and stuck it out on principle. Perhaps the greatest example of this comes when Nobody sends Blake into a camp of mad fur traders led by "Sally," a cross-dressing, Bible-preaching trader played by Iggy Pop. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen in a Jarmusch film, yet it ultimately works brilliantly: the traders tread the line between absurdity and terror, a trio driven mad by the West's desolation that strike us initially as loopy until they reveal themselves as demented rapists.

Blake and Nobody's tripped-out journey shows how easily demons can be awakened in the face of the nothingness of the West. Nobody, witty and kind, is also a merciless killer in battle. Abducted as a child, Nobody was paraded around the United States before being placed on a ship and sent to England to be gawked at and, eventually, educated. Naturally a victim of white racism, his European adolescence alienated him from the Native Americans. That feeling of solitude is perhaps what drives him to push Blake into murder, but it does not explain why he would go out of his way to save the man's life without ever knowing him, nor his general amicability with others. The two men, cut off socially from their peers, must instead connect on genuine, personal grounds, and Blake simply finds that the Indians are more charitable and open than his own race.

Their bond is juxtposed with a trio of bounty hunters sent by Charlie's dad, the metal works owner Mr. Dickinson (Robert Mitchum, in his final role), to avenge his son and also, perhaps preferably, retrieve his pinto. The three -- an African-American boy, a loudmouthed fool, and a sadistic cannibal named Cole (Lance Henriksen) -- sleep with one eye open watching each other, but wariness doesn't save the other two from Cole, who tires of both, kills them and roasts them on a fire. Another major white figure is a racist missionary (Alfred Molina) who denies supplies to Nobody that he in turn offers to Blake, then attempts to kill Blake upon recognizing him.

True to his style, Jarmusch uses sparse dialogue in the film, but it speaks volumes, as much, if not more so, than even the most intricate Tarantino riff. As Nobody confuses Depp's Blake with the poet Blake, William Blake's work seeps into the movie, always working within the context of the film and often on several layers above it. When Nobody tells Blake they're being followed, William starts to formulate a plan, realizes he has nothing and immediately asks Nobody what to do. "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow," Nobody responds sardonically. The line is a direct lift from Blake's poetry (far from the only one), but in that one moment we can read much into Nobody and his sense of irony: the eagle of course represents the United States, our proud vision of ourselves, while the crow, the meeker bird and, in the context of the quote, lesser and mediocre compared to the eagle, stands for Native Americans, possibly the Blackfoot that make up a part of Nobody's heritage (you could argue that it stands for the Crow Nation, but I think that's too literal and the Crow don't feature in the film and they were even enemies of the Blackfoot). Nobody's delivery of the line coldly mocks the white attitude toward the natives, and in a larger sense prevents the moment from becoming Hollywood "come together" tripe by pointing out how ludicrous it is for any white people to think this way instead of praising one white person for thinking progressively.

Blake's poetry isn't the only allusion to other works, however, and many of Jarmusch's references are slyly anachronistic. The names of several minor characters mirror 20th century musicians such as Lee Hazelwood or Benmont Tench. Nobody's real name, "He Who Talk Loud Say Nothing," is a reference to the James Brown classic "Talkin' Loud and Sayin' Nothing." In fact, I couldn't help but think of Homer's Odyssey in connection to Nobody: in the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus gives his name as "Nobody" so that when he attacks the beast, his screams of "Nobody is killing me!" turn potential helpers away. When Blake stumbles into Iggy Pop's (himself a 20th century musician) camp, he inadvertently lures the rapists into making the first move and sealing their fate by saying "I'm with Nobody."

Jarmusch said he was attracted to the idea of a Western because of its "inseparable connection to America"¹, and Dead Man certainly presents us with a vision of America. However, his West demonstrates the fascism that a celebration of individualism, when married with a sense of the superiority of personal morals over societal norms, can create. Nobody gives Blake hallucinogens to send him on a "vision quest," and part of his alignment with nature results in the death of two U.S. Marshals. When Charlie attacked him in the bed, Blake took three shots to hit a man standing still not 20 feet away. Slowly though, the influence of his surroundings and the people already converted by them reveal how easy it is to take another person's life in the wilderness. Jarmusch's Western doesn't celebrate its connection to America, it unveils our propensity to violence.

Neil Young's scattered electric twang of a soundtrack sets the mood for the picture, gently warping the background in its quieter moments and swelling into grungy, distorted nightmares as Blake's spiritual quest awakens the beast within to send him back to this sinister nature. It's the perfect capper to one of the most unique and rewarding cinematic experiences of my life. I'm never quite sure what constitutes a revisionist Western -- many include the spaghetti Westerns, but for my money Leone and many of the others never drifted far enough away from conventional Western tropes to qualify, save the odd duck here and there -- but either way Dead Man easily slides into my #2 spot behind Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Both are films that dismantle the structure of the Western, bringing it all crashing to the ground, but where Altman did so with regret and mourning, Jarmusch tackles the situation with pent-up rage, a fearsome rejection of the lie Hollywood fed us for decades. I would not go so far as to call Dead Man realistic -- anyone who has seen it knows that it's too out-there for that tag -- but here is a film that seeks to peel away the artifice of the Old West to show us an unforgiving terrain that consumes all those foolish enough to try to conquer it.

¹ http://www.nytrash.com/deadman/deadjj.html#2