Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987)

With Heaven's Gate currently in the grips of revisionist appraisal (to which I may soon add my own voice once my disc ships with some pre-orders next month), I thought I might use my latest Criminally Underrated piece for Spectrum Culture to address the Heaven's Gate of comedy, Elaine May's Ishtar. I have seen three of May's four features, and all of them show off such an immense comic talent that her marginalization and retirement from directing trigger a retrospective outrage. Ishtar is not as focused as either The Heartbreak Kid or Mikey and Nicky, yet its propulsion outward of all the lacerating, insular insights of those films turns the personal and social into the geopolitical, and her broad parody of Hope/Crosby pictures emerges one of the great satires of the Reagan era. Idiotically self-absorbed man-children looking to hit big in another land do not look or behavior too differently from the CIA agents who mold those other lands to US interests, and the description I saw somewhere comparing this movie to the symphony of political inanity Burn After Reading feels especially apt.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Parallax View

When The Manchurian Candidate hit theaters in 1962, critics loved its audacity, its tight structuring and the freshness and twist of irony that it maintains to this day. Audiences, however, generally stayed away. Perhaps its light sarcasm played as overly campy, its plot devices too fantastical to be considered an appropriate manipulation of Cold War fears. Twelve years later, Alan J. Pakula made The Parallax View, and the mood -- and box office reception -- could not have been more different.

Where John Frankenheimer's film did not take on a lasting relevance until after Kennedy's assassination -- at which point it had been withdrawn out of both lackluster box office rentals and a sense of decency in the wake of the murder -- Pakula's thriller has an air of possibility around it. Those who could not conceive, even at their most fearful of Soviet Russia, that the presidency could be compromised damn well knew it was possible by 1974. Compounded with the discovery of Nixon's corruption -- a subject, of course, that would inform Pakula's next film -- The Parallax View appeals less to a current of fear than a concrete event, and as such it appeals to an idea of probability that terrorizes more than a more abstract (and satirical) thriller.

For Pakula's world is one in which those with the knowledge of the truth can be instantaneously found and dispatched by an unseen presence. The truth is not an unknown property so much as an execution that no one will sentence himself to. The opening sequence shows Sen. Charles Carroll (Bill Joyce), a supposed independent whose refusal to bow to any party makes him a presidential hopeful, riding in a parade in Seattle. Throngs of supporters line the streets and his best allies meet him at the top of the Space Needle, where he is suddenly shot as he prepares to speak to reporters.

Watch the camera in this moment: it wheels around as if a member of the crowd, disoriented and frightened. However, it clearly recognizes two different gunmen, one of whom is chased and accidentally killed while the other escapes unnoticed. The implication of this direction is that at least some people managed to glimpse what really happened, even after a special committee assures the public that the assassination was the act of a lone gunman (gee, sound familiar?). Sure enough, the plot begins in earnest when one of the people present that day, a reporter named Lee (Paula Prentiss), shows up at her friend Joe Frady's (Warren Beatty) home with news that multiple witnesses to the assassination have all died under mysterious circumstances. A few minutes of screen-time later, so is she.

In Frady, Pakula has a terrific contrast to the real-life reporters who featured in his next thriller: unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Frady gets his stories by stretching facts to fit a preconceived agenda. Where most paper editors in the movies slowly turn against their star reporters when deadlines approach and leads fall through, Frady's chief distrusts him from the start and knows that the man will just come up with another fantastical story that he'll just have to retract.

Of course, anyone who caught a peek of what Frady eventually uncovers would surely kill his article too. The more he snoops around, the tighter the frame becomes; where All the President's Men operated entirely in the shadows, The Parallax View stays in the light, but Pakula maintains the same sense of mysteriousness. People turn on a dime when Joe comes to town: in one scene, he starts a fight with a deputy in a small-town bar, only for the sheriff to laugh and invite the reporter for a drink, but the next day the same officer traps Joe by a dam as it opens to release water, pulling a gun on the bewildered muckraker. Soon, oddly familiar faces keep popping up in crowds, and before you can ask yourself whether it's déjà vu, something horrible happens.

With his string of three great features in the '70s, starting with Klute and carrying through this and All the President's Men, Pakula established himself as a master of thriller direction; had he kept it up, he might well have stolen away Hitchcock's claim to the title of "Master of Suspense." Exceedingly little happens in his political thrillers, but Pakula places the thought into the audience's mind that something is happening, that someone is watching from the shadows or even in plain sight.

Eventually, Frady uncovers evidence of a group called the Parallax Corporation, revealed to be a training group for political assassins. In the film's chief flaw, Joe discovers this group with astonishing ease, and even manages to find their facility and "apply" as if a Wal-Mart just came to town. Once within, however, the momentary lapse of reason gives way to a terrifying conclave whose members are innumerable and anonymous. Like the precursor to Fight Club's Project Mayhem but with a purpose, the Parallax Corporation is at once small and unknown yet omnipresent, capable of infiltrating any location and escaping undetected. And by the time Frady realizes just how complex and unstoppable the organization is, they've framed him for another assassination.

For the director, political power has completely corrupted, and their power renders them capable of striking down any dissent. Consider the opening: the fictional candidate campaigns on the image of being an independent who will change Washington, but his parade is farcical and transparent. The politician looks as if his float for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade got severely off-track and found its way to the opposite end of the country: dressed like a buffoon, Senator Carroll waves as children in Native American costumes dance about in front of his car. The judiciary committee that reviews his assassination is seen only in extreme long shot surrounded by pitch black, a few dots of flesh-colored blobs against a mahogany wall in the middle of nothingness. The message is clear: government, especially under Nixon's heavy centralization, now exists in a vacuum, able to refuse the press the right to investigate matters, to even ask questions, and to maintain the status quo regardless of incident. Is it any wonder that the most suspenseful use of music in the film involves patriotic marching band music played at a political rally?

But what of Parallax, then? If the government is so vile, aren't Parallax's members doing society a service by eliminating these crooks? No, because, if you'll note, the organization's targets are ideologues. Even if they're just putting on a show, politicians like Senator Carroll inspire the people, motivate them; by killing these fakes, Parallax puts the fear into genuine agents of change, thus solidifying the status quo that the entrenched government promotes in the face of these events. The darker implication of this is that the government itself is behind Parallax. It's too easy to find for it to be much of a secret, after all, and each killing only numbs the public further.

What really sets The Parallax View apart, though, even from its superior successor, is a montage past the halfway mark of the film that must surely ranks among the most transgressive six minutes to make any Hollywood film in history. Upon applying to Parallax, Frady is sent into an isolated room, completely dark but for a light shining down on a chair. A voice on a PA tells him to sit and watch a film, which begins abruptly. Looking like an experimental film from the '60s, the short comprises nothing but still photographs intercut with title cards. Initially, the titles -- LOVE, MOTHER, etc. -- correspond to appropriate images of couples kissing and women cuddling babies. Then, the soft music turns brassy but not overblown, and the images and titles slowly shift. Armies, death, aggressive sex, comic book images and more flash on the screen, in juxtapositions that the brain barely has time to process: take for example, an image of the pope and of Nazis separated only by the word ENEMY. The frantically edited mash-ups of serious images with comic book cells recalls the mid-'60s work of Jean-Luc Godard, and it would not look so out of place in his superb Pierrot le fou. Here, however, this borderline surreal montage stands out even more in the stark, geometric perfection of Pakula's style: his films attain their suspense partially through the perfection of his shots and the jarring effect that any movement has when something shifts and breaks up the static frame.

While (understandably) more preposterous than the realistic chills of his next political thriller, The Parallax View forms one half of the greatest double feature a thriller director ever made. Practically every great understated thriller of the last 30 years -- The Insider, Zodiac -- owes this and All the President's Men, the use of shadow, of ever-present evil just outside the frame and idealists whose commitment causes as much harm to themselves as good. Separated by the assassinations that inform the film by five years up to a decade, The Parallax View nevertheless feels of the moment, and the mood regarding those who would try to change Washington today suggests that we still haven't moved beyond the mindset of the post-Kennedy generation, which may be the film's most uncomfortable aspect.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller

It must be so depressing to be a director of ensemble films. Not because of any limitations of the genre, but because of the knowledge you'll never equal Robert Altman. That great maverick of American cinema has permanently identified the genre with him, with sweeping, incisive dramas involving impossible numbers of characters. For this film, Altman applies that approach to the Western genre, and crafts one of the ten greatest entries in the history of the genre.

At the start of the film, a man (Warren Beatty) enters the town of Presbyterian Church, a homely little village in the Pacific Northwest whose log cabins seem to be as much an extension of the surrounding forest as I imagine they were when they were trees. The man walks into the local tavern, surveys it, returns to his horse for a cloth, and comes back in to play some poker. Even before everyone sits down for the game the bar seems crowded, already overflowing with characters Altman does not introduce but who still have establishing dialogue. From the start the conversations overlap; the townsfolk wonder who this strange man is and why he walked out of the tavern as soon as he stepped in, but they could care less when he tacitly indicates he wants to play.

The man, whom we later learn is John McCabe, came to this town to start up a cheap brothel. His seemingly friendly game establishes his intellectual dominance over the simple denizens, silently letting them muse on a rumor that he's a gunfighter as he slowly makes ties through cards. At one point he calmly asks who owns a section of property in town, but at this point he seems like one of them and they think nothing odd nor sinister of his request.

In true Altman style, the camera darts not between individuals but between groups; people dart between social circles, inquiring about this stranger, yet not out of suspicion. Though the gunfighter rumor spreads, it carries with it more intrigue than distrust. He enters town not a legendary desert warrior, as most Westerns would have us treat all newcomers to peaceful towns, but as a soft-spoken businessman.

At the game's end McCabe's earned a nice bit of profit, and uses it to purchase 3 women to get his brothel off the ground. He must not have won as much as I thought, because he doesn't exactly pick the cream of the crop: one of the whores is fat, another toothless. But they establish McCabe as a permanent resident, and he views them more as an investment than "display-worthy."

Then the other title character enters town. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), a professional Madam addicted to opium, sees McCabe's makeshift brothel and offers to run the business better than he ever could. Constance, like many in her profession surely, has outgrown sex, using it only to make a living. She tells McCabe that he doesn't know women so she'll watch over them and make sure they're healthy and paying their share; she'll also import some classier prostitutes from her old gigs.

With this basic setup Altman crafts one of the saddest films I've ever seen. McCabe, who speaks chiefly in profane mumblings, occasionally lets some of the real John out from beneath his outer shell. "I got poetry in me!" he cries finally to himself unable to disguise his feelings for Constance any longer, yet unwilling to actually tell her. Yet Miller, like McCabe is too individualistic to be compatible; their only difference is that Miller knows where McCabe's romanticism will lead: eventually he turn into her, broken by the truth of the matter.

Other stories end in tragedy as well. When a man dies, his widow (Shelley Duvall) speaks with Constance. She knows, as does Constance, that she must become a whore in order to provide for herself. Miller offers the closest thing she can offer to comfort without lying, but it leaves you feeling empty. Elsewhere, a young cowboy played by Keith Carradine runs into a gunslinger who forces the lad into a duel. Carradine tries to charm his way out of it, but as the town looks on he knows he's going to die as much as the onlookers do.

The scene works as a parallel for McCabe's story; at the midpoint of the film, two businessmen ride into town and offer to buy out McCabe's property, and he drunkenly refuses. When he laughs about it to Miller, her face tells us how badly he just messed up before she ever speaks. She tells him that he better hope the two come back, and if they do to agree to their offer. The men do come back, make an even higher offer (though not by much) and McCabe gleefully refuses again. When he sobers up the full implication of his actions hits him and he searches for the two men, but they're long gone. He tempted fate, just as Carradine's character did, even though neither really did much. But there's is an unforgiving land, and many in this climate are born to die.

This second half brings the full pain of the relationship between McCabe and Miller to the fore, resulting in that revealing soliloquy with the perfect line about his inner poet, but Constance is the one really in pain; she, like John, knows he signed his death certificate, but she's the one who'll have to live with the grief.

The inevitable showdown between McCabe and the bounty hunters dispatched by the scorned Harrison Shaugnessy Company is one of the most inventive in Westerns, precisely because it meticulously identifies and dismantles the criteria of the Western shootout. McCabe, certainly never heroic in any of this, tries to evade his pursuers through heavy snowfall, rather than meeting his foes at the town square at high noon. The chief bounty hunter wields not a revolver or pistol but a giant elephant gun.

As McCabe meets his fate we are left only with Miller, who never acts like the mourning widow of the fallen hero. When we see her at the end she drifts off into an opium haze; though she certainly felt something for McCabe, now he's just another memory for her to try to purge through drugs. In a film full of sadness and regret, this scene stands above them all.

Aiding this depressing dirge is the beautiful yet haunting cinematography from the legendary Vilmos Zsigmond, who makes terrific use of widescreen by setting up characters by filling up the screen, be it with the awesome spectacle of the encroaching forest that seeks to reclaim its felled brothers back into the fold or stuff the frame with people. He also uses a number of filters on the lenses to give it a dreamy quality, making the film seem even more elegiac.

When you get right down to it, this is the death-knell of the Western. Altman cuts through our notions of the West and presents us with a truer vision though, unlike other revisionist films, not one filled with violence. Instead, he paints the West as a place of great sadness, where lofty dreams met unfathomable hardship and forced people to harden with them. Though he takes great care to get the look right, he scores the film chiefly with the songs of Leonard Cohen, an anachronism, yet one that perfectly fits what he's trying to say; Cohen's folk tales paint a portrait of a dying West as much as the images. In this world, McCabe represents the romanticized notion of the West, Miller the cold hard truth that remains after the dreams die, and the townspeople stand in for us. They see this all unfold, yet before it's even over they've moved on to more trivial things. If this is not Robert Altman's best film, it places at an indistinguishable second behind Nashville. See it now.