Steven Spielberg: The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Having filled my viewing gaps in Spielberg's filmography, the status of The Lost World: Jurassic Park as one of the director's weakest films, if not his worst film, has never been less in doubt. Other low points in the director's career have at least shown promise or intriguing premises: Hook may rely far too much on its regrettably hip version of the Lost Boys' hideout, but it sports two great performances and a high concept floated it through many of its glaring flaws. 1941 showed the director's first major, explicit attempt to revive the films of his youth for the modern multiplex, an approach that would soon bear fruit with the Indiana Jones franchise. Even the forgotten Always, with its too-broad combination of haunting movies A Matter of Life and Death and Only Angels Have Wings, had moments of beauty worthy of those wrenching melodramas.

In comparison, The Lost World seems such a cynical cash-in for Spielberg's biggest hit that hardly any visible reason exists as to why he would do it. It's not like the world's richest and most powerful director needed to do this to get approval for another film. His previous two films, the first Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, eradicated whatever sliver of doubt remained that Spielberg was King of Hollywood. The knowledge of the uselessness of the sequel makes its wretched, slapstick construction all the more grating.

Safe

The climax of Todd Haynes' Safe is so intense, so gripping, so utterly terrifying and yet so impersonal and calm at the same time that it cements the film as one of the great horror pictures of our time. Like the rest of the film, it features no monsters or villains, nor even does it resort to a single shock cut. The ending serves as the flash point of the film's insidious vibe, in which it becomes horribly clear to the audience that something has gone wrong with this world. Haynes' masterpiece -- and it is a masterpiece, possibly the greatest work of unorthodox horror since Kubrick's take on The Shining -- never gives us a second of comfort, subtly but insurmountably building until you'll beg for it to stop.

At its core, Safe functions as a sort of common ancestor for Mulholland Dr. and Haynes' own Far from Heaven. It shares the hauntingly oneiric tone and the sinister, synthetically bubbling score that made Lynch's best film so unsettling, and its subversive period recreation would form the basis for the equally pristine-yet-somehow-off presentation of Haynes' ode to Douglas Sirk. Where his most well-known picture used its period to examine then-current issues of race and gender roles through the prism of modern ethics, Safe's late-Reagan setting is merely a means of tracing an issue that affected the country in 1995 (and today) to a point in time where it first became noticeable.

For its 1987 setting corresponds to the first public mentions of something known as environmental illness, dubbed Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or, more popularly, the 20th Century Disease. Its diagnosis stated that patients suffered a reaction to chemicals present in air and food, though the verdict is still out if the rashes and other reactions were purely physical or triggering psychologically. Some have made Safe out to be nothing but an examination of the disease, of Haynes' morbid curiosity with a bizarre illness and, perhaps, an AIDS allegory as well. But that ignores the inherent implications of the disease, to say nothing of Haynes' remark that he "sided with the disease."

The afflicted protagonist of Haynes' film is Carol (Julianne Moore, in her finest performance), a well-off homemaker in Southern California who enjoys the beneficial side of Reagan's voodoo economics. She lives in a mansion with her husband, where she spends her days fussing over interior decorating and lunching with other rich wives. As the opening credits roll, we ride home with Carol and her husband Greg as the camera takes in the high-class suburbia around them, rows of equally garish mansions spruced up with the "personal touch" of the bored, jobless women in each one. They arrive home where Carol sneezes as they get out of the car and complains about how cold the garage is. Haynes then cuts to the couple engaging in passionless sex -- in the missionary position, further emphasizing the banality of the coupling -- focusing on Carol's vacant face as Greg grunts his way to climax. The next day, Carol heads for a workout at one of those aerobic dance centers that used to be so popular, where her friends comment that she didn't sweat a drop.

This becomes the harbinger of a slow breakdown, as Carol's cushy world slowly constricts around her. She cannot stop coughing after being caught behind a truck that spews fumes, disorienting her as she speeds through a parking garage seeking a place to stop and catch her breath. Her nosebleeds at the salon after receiving a perm. At a friend's baby shower, she exchanges vapid pleasantries with the guests and their children ("She's gotten so big!" before suffering what appears to be an asthma attack. Doctors can't figure out what's wrong; neither can psychologists. An allergy tests reveals only a sensitivity to milk, which Carol drinks without incident throughout the film. Everyone assures her that this is all in her head, but her condition worsens until Carol's well-kept appearance deteriorates into a haunting visage of dry, outbroken skin. Her inability to pinpoint what's happening to her drives her to paralyzing fear of the world around her.

Haynes' aesthetic strongly emphasizes her growing disconnect from the world. He films in long shots with flattened composition, as if filming the pages of the furniture catalogs Carol no doubt peruses constantly to find the next accessory to make her house just right. A deliciously sly gag early in the film involves Carol receiving new couches -- those awful, modern things that look like the manufacturers removed the squashed mattresses inside fold-out couches and placed them inside large cushions for resale -- in the wrong color; she complains that they don't match anything in the house, so movers bring out the correct versions, which actually do match the house and thus magnify how creepy and off-putting the place is. Haynes captures the sets under stark, artificial light, a hyper-sterile version of the sickly, dripping lighting of your average David Fincher picture. The lighting does an even better job of undercutting the plush environment than Brendan Dolan's score, painting the world in a frightfully antiseptic tone, visualizing the chemical sheen that affects Carol so violently.

Eventually, Carol's desperation leads to full-blown paranoia, to the point that she walls herself off from the world and carries around an oxygen tank. At a hospital, she hears of a place in the desert called the Wrenwood Center, devoted to helping sufferers of Environmental Illness. Its leader, Peter Dunning (Peter Friedman), waffles between earnestness and creepiness. His solution for EI is a complete reprogramming of the immune system, accomplished by removing patients as much from the world as possible. Wrenwood forbids any irritable substances, be it food, cosmetics or controlled substances; activities are sexually segregated, and every patient gets his or her own room. Dunning teaches self-love as a means for building up the immune system, holding each patient responsible for willing himself well.

What makes Safe so gently terrifying is, at least partially, its ambiguity. Any discussion of the film will only spark debates over what it is actually about in the first place. The first half plays out as a wicked satire of Reagan's socioeconomic effect on America, focusing on its regressive impact on social and gender roles as a result of Reagan's celebration of the wealthy and his courting of the so-called moral majority. Carol devotes her life to appearances, never even sparing a thought for her child, who isn't really hers anyway but Greg's son from a previous marriage. Carol attends a support group before heading to Wrenwood, and after the speech she gathers with other women suffering from the disease and they prattle on like the gibbering nabobs with whom Carol normally associates herself. The character is often regarded, as with the rest of the film, as a test-run for Far from Heaven and its protagonist, and that speaks to how far back people like Carol took women. When she meets her psychologist, he asks her about her job and she says, "I'm a housew- um, a homemaker." She's just self-aware enough to realize she should be embarrassed for fitting such an old, reductive type, a trophy wife who spends money that her husband earns, but that doesn't make her any less an emblem of that type.

The second half blurs the themes somewhat, introducing various interpretations. The Wrenwood Center itself mocks religious cults, New Age liberal hangouts or both, depending on your perspective. Dunning not only suffers from EI but AIDS, so, according to one fawning disciple, "his perspective is incredibly vast." This open admission of AIDS confirms my suspicions throughout the film as vague references are made to a mystery illness that does not sound like EI. Near the start of the film, Carol chats with one of her friends who mentions a death in the family. Carol pauses; "Was it...," she hesitates. "No, not at all...He wasn't married," comes the reply. The doctors' puzzlement and vexation over Carol's illness could be a proxy for the initial reactions of confusion to the HIV virus, not only in their inability to treat it but from the wild rumors that sprang up over what caused the illness.

Which brings us to the third major interpretation, one supported by the director -- though he seems to be doing his damnedest to keep the mystery of the film alive, so we shouldn't be so ready to jump at the first explanation that he gives -- that it is a "gay" film. Haynes, an openly gay man, would certainly have an insight into the feelings of isolation and abnormality in a world that still doesn't fully understand homosexuals and certainly didn't 23 years ago. If Carol herself is meant to be gay, the only evidence lies in her ambivalence toward sex with her husband, but that's too vague to be considered proof and she need not be gay for the film to address the angst of the homosexual community.

The link between these varied explications is the idea of normalcy and the innate human need for it. How many homosexuals today display self-hating characteristics, particularly those in religious and conservative circles, in an attempt to fit in? (Hell, the contested notion of Don't Ask, Don't Tell stipulates that gays must pass for heterosexuals to serve in the military). The normalcy argument in regards to AIDS can be proved by looking to the far more obvious Oscar vehicle Philadelphia, an admirable if overbearing picture that visualized the paranoid frenzy over the disease by showing AIDS as such a source of madness among the uneducated that people would actually avoid the chance to hang out with Tom Hanks.

Carol's illness serves as her body's rejection of the norm of her comfortable life, a break that terrifies her and drives her to extreme actions to cure herself. Still, Dunning's techniques, however stringent, do appear to work for people, leading some reviewers to cite the ending as cautiously optimistic, suggesting that they either saw an alternate cut of the film or simply lost their minds. But this ignores the key element of the film, that the disease actually helps Carol even as it makes her the closest the movie has to a villain. It separates her from the world and drives her to fear and hate it, a reaction that, despite her deteriorating condition, strikes one as healthy after surveying the horrible world in which she lives. Ergo, the final moment of the film, in which we see Carol move into the most seclusive and sterile room in Wrenwood, where she finally feels comfortable enough to look in the mirror and say, "I love you." This shot suggests that she might be cured after all, but the clear implication of the film is that the cure is worse than the disease, and the idea that she might one day rejoin society with the same obliviousness she'd viewed it with previously is more frightening than any violent climax. In its title card, Safe appears enclosed in brackets an indication that even the title attempts to protect itself. But Haynes suggests that being safe is the problem; Carol is safe at the start of the film in her rich, well-tended neighborhood, complete with Hispanic maid to be bossed about, and she's even more secure at the end, locked away in the most solitary room of a solitary camp. What could have been the turbulent metamorphosis into a superior creature instead becomes a willful -- desperate, even -- attempt to return to normality.

Safe doesn't try to instill a fear of what's under the bed, in the closet or next door. It does not even seek to make you dread something as vague as the dark. That's letting us off easy. No, Safe makes you fear the food you eat, the luxuries you buy, the political system you support, the economy you exploit, the vapid chit-chat you trade with your equally clueless friends, even the simple act of breathing. It is a hallucinatory snapshot of the hole we've dug for ourselves, and we can be sure that Haynes agrees, albeit with more cynicism, when Dunning gently assures his patients that they are the only ones to blame for their illness. What makes it even more horrifying is the knowledge that, 15 years after the film was made and 23 years after its setting, everything is exactly the same. There's a thought to keep you up at night.

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.

Far From Heaven

Green is the dominant color of Todd Haynes' revisionist melodrama. Green, the color of envy, nature, money and hope, all of which bubble under the surface of a quiet Connecticut suburb. through the director's carefully chosen color palettes. Said palettes perfectly evoke the look of Douglas Sirk's vivid Technicolor melodramas, with period sets to boot. Yes, just as Martin Scorsese strove to make New York, New York not only work as a musical set in the '40s and '50s but to look like it was made in classic Hollywood, Far From Heaven might very well have worked as a completely straight-faced depiction of the irony and banality of the suburban nightmare that became the American ideal. But Haynes takes it one step further by openly addressing issues that seem contemporary yet were every bit as present then, only buried beneath hardened exteriors both physical (makeup and clothes, consumerism) and emotional (denial).

Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) has such barriers; she lives in a lush manor tended by the family maid (Viola Davis), giving her all the free time needed to becoming the perfect trophy wife. She speaks the sort of ridiculous, pretentious dialogue that was present in all those old classics, that Sirk only had to spin slightly to place its absurdity on full display. Even her children speak with in such haughty tones, telling "mother" how "delightful" their school day was. She stands slightly outside the town gossip circle, yet they co-opt her perfection to share the glory and victory of her photo-ops in the local newspaper.

It's as good as life can conceivably be in postwar America, though she never sees her poor, hard-working husband (Dennis Quaid) because of his heavy workload. At least that's the reason he gives her; one night Cathy checks up on her husband just to say hello, only to find him in the arms of another man. Now, finding out your husband is gay and you're simply his beard is hard on even the most open-minded person today, so Cathy's utter shock is understandable. She handles herself with surprising calm, however, pledging to stand by her husband, who volunteers to see a therapist to determine what's "wrong" with him. "I'm gonna beat this," he assures his shrink, who lists his client some figures on the successful conversion rates back to heterosexuality.

As the revelation puts strain on the relationship, Cathy only compounds the issue by striking up a friendship with the son of the family's dead gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert). Raymond is soft-spoken and well-read: when Cathy spots him at the art gallery, he's the only one who can talk about the artists with any convincing sense of authority. Cathy's notions of her own open-mindedness reveal themselves as inflated when she awkwardly tries to assure him, "I'm not prejudiced. My husband and I have always believed in equal rights for the Negro and support the N.A.A.C.P." Raymond overlooks her nervousness, and soon they become the only genuine friends in a town where everything is planned for social perception.

Soon, everyone is town is wagging their tongues over the matter, especially after Cathy goes to the black part of town to eat lunch with Raymond. Frank, who spends most of the film in an alcoholic stupor over his inner torment, lashes out at his wife when news gets back to him; in a deliciously ironic rant, he accuses her of threatening to ruin his reputation and tear the family apart, even as he's contemplating divorce to run off with a man.

The relationship issues of the leads slowly tear them apart as the town around them loses itself to speculation and rumor. Cathy assures her closest friend that nothing illicit has happened between her and Raymond, but Mona simply responds that she is acting as if something did. Eventually, the town turns on Cathy and Raymond outright, and a happy ending quickly becomes nothing more than a pipe dream.

Far From Heaven is clearly crafted to appeal to the most discerning film geeks with its flawless reconstruction of '50s drama, from the stylized dialogue to the set and costume design and even the score from classic film composer Elmer Bernstein. Yet those attributes also make it palatable to anyone. The actors are uniformly excellent, with Moore giving the best performance of her career, and they make the characters work beyond the dark satire of the script. For my money, Far From Heaven is one of the finest films of the decade, and a career highlight for everyone involved.

Short Cuts

Sometimes I think people overstate Altman's state of affairs in the 80s. First of all, "Popeye" didn't flop, and regardless of whatever box office business his films did after that, it's not like he was a commercial titan in the first place. Nevertheless, everyone can agree that Altman returned to making classics with 1992's biting satire The Player, but it was this follow-up that confirmed one of the best late-career resurgences in cinema.

Consisting of 22 major players and 10 distinct and interweaving storylines, Short Cuts may not be Altman's best film (I gotta give it up for Nashville and McCabe & Mrs. Miller), it's certainly his most daring. If The Player examined the ins-and-outs of Hollywood, Short Cuts pulls the camera back a bit to capture all of Los Angeles, and he uses this larger frame to delve into the modern state of America. Here, community has given way to individuality too self-absorbed and detached to produce anything of worth, and even the ties that remain are weakened by dysfunctionality.

To tackle all of the films threads would utterly drain all the entertainment I take from this film, so here's a recap: waitress Doreen Piggot (Lily Tomlin) accidentally hits a young boy with her car, and the boy's parents (Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell) must deal with his comatose state for most of the film. Meanwhile, two marriages crumble from infidelity, one comes under strain due to the wife's occupation as a phone sex operator, and another, the most stable, survives on the husband's (Robert Downey, Jr.) sadism. Also, three fisherman spot a dead woman in the water on their trip but decide to continue fishing before altering the police. Yes, this is a recap.

It'd be easy--hell, almost understandable--if Altman lost his way amongst the disconnect of the original Raymond Carter stories, but not only does he make the stories work, he ties them together in ways that manage to be both tangential and vitally important. Jerry Kaiser (Chris Penn) cleans the pool of the Finnigans (the parents of the struck child), then he goes home to his phone sex operator wife (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Both are friends with Downey's character Bill and his wife Honey (Lili Taylor), the daughter of Doreen and her husband Earl (Tom Waits). All tiny, insignificant little threads, but they combine to make a much fuller story.

All of these individual stories confirm Altman's predictions in Nashville: with that film the director noticed the growing self-denial and personal isolationism of Americans, what with the constant pontificating of empty words no one really paid attention to and the immediate denial of the ending tragedy. Here, at last, is the final outcome of that mentality: some have labelled the film as misogynistic because its various abused women stay with their men, but it's because everybody's so wrapped up in themselves that interpersonal conflicts come second to internal ones.

There's something about Altman's direction that I just love: he gives us all these characters, but there's never anything episodic about his visual style. Even though the cuts between stories and characters are more jarring and sudden here than in Nashville and McCabe, Altman moves between characters with grace, and often tackles more than one story at the same time using overlapped dialogue that confuses as it enlightens. This style of visual narrative is much of the reason why I think Altman is one of the best directors ever and a true original.

The use of music in Short Cuts also adds a dimension to the proceedings. This is my second time viewing the film, and this time I paid attention to the music after flipping through Michael Wilmington's essay for the Criterion booklet. A mixture of somber classical music and upbeat jazz variations, they do what all great scores must: capture the mood. Of course, Altman's working with a soundtrack, and he has to capture moods within moods, so the fact that he and his music department pulls it off is nothing short of amazing. The classical music plays over moments of despair--indeed, the suicidal cellist (Lori Singer) is the only person who confronts her despair head-on instead of burying it under obliviousness or drugs--while the jazz songs, which all belie severity under their swinging tempos, characterize those who mask their pain.

All in all, this is a late-stage masterpiece from a man who had been dismissed by most in the business as a has-been. For a film with almost no character evolution, it gets out unbelievable levels of pathos, and it uses characters that would be one-dimensional in any other film to paint a complex portrait of personal interaction and the despair of the human condition. It's absolutely essential.

Blindness

There’s a lot of promise that comes with “Blindness,” the new film based on the richly metaphorical, Nobel Prize-winning book by José Saramago. Not only is it based on a great novel, it’s got a killer cast and it’s directed by Fernando Meirelles, director of “City of God,” a film that comes abut close as one possibly can to being an amalgamation of Martin Scorsese’s best work without being plagiaristic. Unfortunately, some books are better left alone.

The story takes place in three parts: the first is the outbreak of the blindness plague and the initial quarantining, the seconds covers the breakdown of the containment camp, and the third follows a band of survivors who escape the camp. Leading them are an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) and his wife (Julianne Moore); the latter seemingly the only one unaffected by the epidemic. They set up their containment ward to be a solid, peaceful fraternity. You’ve got everyone: a kid, a kindly ex-prostitute, a thief, and Asian couple, and a wise old man who not so wisely continues to wear an eye patch.

As the soldiers guarding the quarantine zone become more and more afraid of infection, they care less and less about the inhabitants, leaving them to ration their own food and chores, even take care of disposal of bodies. Enter the leader of another ward, the self-proclaimed “King of Ward 3,” who first forces other wards to pay for food (as if money or jewelry has any value anymore), then demands women after the tribute runs out. He has miraculously gotten his hands on a gun, though where or how remains as much a mystery as the pathology of the blindness. This eventually sparks a war, which of course the good guys win because they have a leader who can see the others frantically waving pipes and rods, hoping to collide with someone.

Little is done right in this film. The characters are all absurdly one note: the good guys in Ward 1 all stay good, and submit to the demands of the “King” in order to feed each other. Meanwhile, everyone in Ward 3 is entirely evil; they savage the women sent to them in glee, and not one for a moment pauses to consider the abject horror of their choices. Moore does all she can with the role, but no one has a background or any two-dimensionality, so there’s nothing to work with. The book can afford to be almost entirely metaphorical because, well, it’s a book. Books can do as they damn well please; that’s what makes them superior. A film, on the other hand, has to have something driving it, otherwise it just meanders.

The biggest surprise is the directorial ineptitude on display. Meirelles established himself as one of the most gifted new directors with “City of God,” and, from what I hear, he did a bang-up job with “The Constant Gardener” as well. But here he tires to recapture the alternately gritty and glamorous style of his masterpiece. Much of the film is dark, taking place in the shadow of shadows, making it impossible to piece together a scene. He shows us horrors, but these horrors do not help us understand the story better; they just disgust. Too often the screen changes into a bright, milky white, not only to visualize the “white blindness” but seemingly because Meirelles feels like it. This effect drifts in and out of thematic relevance to the point that it undermines the times it's used correctly.

Recently groups of blind people protested that the film (and the book, I assume) painted a negative portrait of the blind. I won’t say that they fail to see the point because that would be crass, but there is a definite misunderstanding; blindness is used only as a macguffin to bring out panic and base instincts in these people. To be fair, though, the allegory was a little thin as a book, and the lack of subtlety on display here could offend just about anyone. If you want to see a good film about a mysterious, unexplained disease that brings about a terrifying image of what man can regress to, watch “Children of Men.” Or stick to the novel.