Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

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

Bram Stoker's Dracula

Of all the old monsters, Dracula was always my favorite. As a kid I thought he was too cool to be frightening, what with the ability to turn into a bat (I haven't grown out of being easy to please). Then, as I got older, I picked up on the overt sexuality of the character, his appearance and mysterious demeanor. Not to mention his method of feeding, which Bram Stoker extrapolated from its folklore roots into a take on the sexual repression of Victorian society. It gives the monster more layers, to me, than any other classic creature, more even than the notions of ostracizing, mob mentality, science and the issue of "playing God" that Frankenstein's monster conjured.

Gary Oldman does his best to capture the various aspects of this dense and allegorical character, but he's fighting an uphill battle: against the script, against the direction, certainly against the other actors. He might as well have played Sisyphus, because he has to keep dragging everything up with him until we break through with a moment of adequacy before Oldman pauses to get a moment all his own and the whole damn thing comes crashing down again.

We first meet Dracula as Vlad the Impaler, a warrior who marshals Romanian troops to a victory over a staggering invasion of Turks in 1462. He returns home triumphant, only to find his beloved wife dead from suicide upon receiving false news of her husband's death. Enraged that the Church he defended condemns her soul to hell, he vows to use all the powers of darkness to bring her back.

Four centuries later, law firm clerk Jonathan Harker is dispatched to Transylvania to settle Count Dracula's latest real estate acquisition. Keanu Reeves portrays Harker as an apparently-American man trying to sound British and failing. At least if I think of it that way Harker becomes a half-assed metaphor for a pressure to conform to one's surroundings rather than a showcase for terrible acting. When Harker arrives at Dracula's castle, he seems to accept the rather frightening creatures who populate the area and the bloodthirsty count with no reflection. The Pope doesn't have that kind of faith.

Dracula spots a photograph of Harker's wife, who looks just like his own, and he departs for England to seek out the reincarnation of his beloved. To keep Harker from interfering, he traps the hapless clerk with his "brides" (Monica Bellucci, Michaela Bercu and Florina Kendrick), who leave him weak by drinking his blood and engaging in orgies. Now, I do my best to suppress my piggish man instincts, but sometimes I see something so shamelessly exploitative that I can almost identify with the thought the average guy will have watching this scene: "I'd let them drink my blood for that." I'm sure this scene is supposed to engender tension, but really it comes off as nothing more than pure titillation.

The rest of the film plays out as a sort of battle between Harker and Dracula for Mina (Winona Ryder), like a romantic comedy with a lot of blood. Mina herself finds herself torn between the two: on the one hand she loves her husband, and on the other Dracula uses all sorts of mysticism to awaken her past life. It creates a character in great sexual confusion set against the repressed Victorian ideals, a character that requires some serious chops. Sadly, Ryder isn't up to the challenge, though -- with the exception of Reeves -- I'm hesitant to blame any of the excellent cast for their work here. They're simply too boxed in by a terrible script that understands the themes of Stoker's novel, a script that the writer says he worked on since 1977. That's scarier than anything in the film.

Finally, there's yet more of Francis Ford Coppola's gradual descent into mediocrity. Now, the film does boast some incredible old-school effects; Coppola refused to use digital techniques, and the film has aged incredibly well because of it. However, he takes some big risks and they often fail; Dracula's story is of course soaked in blood, but Coppola literally dumps the red stuff around so much I began to wonder if I was in a modern art exhibition. At one point one of the vampire brides recoils at the cross around Harker's neck, only to wave her hand and make the cross disappear. Well what's the point, then? Why even establish the cross as a weakness if they can just banish it to the nether dimension? Coppola's life post-Apocalypse Now would make a far more interesting movie than anything he's cooked up since, and Bram Stoker's Dracula only stands out as one of the more noble failures of a once-great filmmaker.

The Silence of the Lambs

In my ongoing quest to grow the hell up and get over my childish fear of the horror genre-- though I believe most horror filmmakers would be delighted that I spent the first 17-18 years of my life desperately avoiding the genre-- I've been going through the classics and finding most of them to be too entertaining to frighten. When I watched Alien about a year and a half ago, it served as my gateway into the genre, a beautifully crafted example of how a gifted filmmaker could actually get scares out of something other than things popping in front of the screen (though there's plenty of that). Well, after slowly working my way through some of the more notable names, I've finally gotten to The Silence of the Lambs, the horror thriller renowned for giving us what, for many, is the greatest screen villain of all time.

I became less eager to see this film a while back when I heard Lecter only shows up for 16 minutes of screen time, and I'd seen at least half that on any TV show that mentions him. However, having watched it, I agree that Anthony Hopkins' performance is justly famous. The film is about Clarice Starling, and the villain is Buffalo Bill, but Hopkins walks away with the show. His Lecter is mannered, erudite and fiercely intelligent, which makes it all the more shocking when he suddenly reaches out to eat someone's face.

His performance is so good that it sadly overshadows the excellent work put in by both Jodie Foster and Ted Levine. Foster plays Clarice Starling as a cauldron of insecurities and trauma simmering under a collected yet clearly nervous exterior. At the start of the film she's in training to become an FBI agent and, for reasons that somewhat escape me, her boss Crawford sends her to interview the infamous, cannibalistic psychologist Hannibal Lecter in order to gain some information on a serial killer known only as 'Buffalo Bill.' Before she leaves, Crawford warns her "Don't let him inside your head."

She visits Lector's maximum security cell and, of course, immediately lets him inside her head. But he does not do so because Starling is some bubbly fool like most horror females; instead, we see how he uses his psychological knowledge to weaken and destroy his victims. The scene is less an insult to Clarice as it is a testament to Lecter's fearsome reputation. After all, with 16 minutes of face time, you have to hook the audience fast.

The two enter into a sort of a waltz; Lecter speaks in cryptic riddles and slowly extracts pieces of Starling's past and persona, while Starling solves his misleading advice. Starling uses that nugget of information, then the process starts again. You get a sense from Lecter that he's almost proud of Starling; after all, he got into her head early and stayed there, but she never backed down and she's learning enough about him to figure out his lies.

Demme cranks up the thrills as the film goes on. Buffalo Bill, a wannabe transsexual who, instead of elective surgery, has chosen to kill women and piece together a suit out of their skins, captures a senator's daughter, suddenly putting even more pressure on the Feds. Meanwhile Lecter stages a bold escape attempt, and at some point the psychological drama kicks into action overdrive. Eventually, Clarice finds Buffalo Bill, and it plays out in moments of incredible suspense aided by Craig McKay's skillful editing.

Overall, I found the film to be taut and intelligent. Though people always refer to it as a horror, I don't know if I'd call it one. A thriller certainly, but just because there's a cannibal and a killer doesn't make it a horror film. Then again, true horror stems from suspense, I think; I derive much more visceral terror from, say, North By Northwest than I do The Exorcist. The Silence of the Lambs isn't perfect, but it boast stellar acting, great writing and great direction, and I imagine it'll entertain audiences for generations to come.