Fallen Angels

There is a moment in Paul Mazursky's fitfully remarkable An Unmarried Woman wherein the protagonist, Erica, speaks to a friend who suffers from bipolarity and now takes lithium to stabilize her mood. "Since I started taking Lithium," she says, "I feel more sensible than this month's Good Housekeeping." Then, with a combination of gallant flippancy and deep regret, she adds, "No more black, moody lows. But I sure as hell miss my highs."

Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels almost seems like its director made it to illustrate this point. It lacks the consistency of his previous breakthroughs, the so-ephemeral-it's-practically-spectral Days of Being Wild and the masterful Chungking Express, but for every moment that sags, another is filled with such power, such beauty and such impact that it challenges those daunting achievements for supremacy. Ostensibly a continuation of Chungking Express, what was intended as the third storyline for that film blossoms into a surreal stew of colliding plots, moods and colors to make the kaleidoscopic feel of Chungking seem positively straightforward in comparison.

One can spot the connections to Wong's previous masterpiece, some overt, others more sly. Still rooted in the Chungking Mansions section of Hong Kong, Fallen Angels features characters who work at the Midnight Express hole-in-the-wall, a character who remains mute throughout the film because he ate too many expired pineapples after having his heartbroken (the same actor, Takeshi Kaneshiro, played the character who ate the pineapple in the last film, and they share the same character name), and a female cleans up the apartment where her love goes, albeit in a much darker sense.

Yet Wong turns Chungking on its head, creating a movie where people do not find themselves through relationships but lose their identities through various types of relationships. Rather than forge their personality and move forward, they stagnate, conforming to what they think the other person wants. Exploring this idea curiously instead of cynically, the director digs into the ways that we sometimes try too hard to please people without truly getting to know them, and how romance cannot be built on a lie. He also cares deeply about the changing nature of relationships in the modern age.

After all, every relationship in Fallen Angels recalls a business transaction of some sort. A listless hitman played by Leon Lai relies on his partner, played by Michelle Reis, to set up his engagements so he never has to make any decisions, and he rejects her affection for him with the corporate mentality of not sleeping with co-workers. He even fakes a romance through business measures, having paid a woman $30 to pose for a photo so he could pass her off as his wife to inquisitive people, and he got a child an ice cream cone to be his "son." He Zhiwu, the mute (who speaks in voiceovers), breaks into businesses in the middle of the night in order to serve customers to make money but also perhaps a friend or two. When he meets a woman (Charlie Yeung), the first thing she does is demand change so she can call a former friend and cuss her out for stealing her boyfriend. When she hangs up, Charlie then drags the uncomfortable man back as he attempts to slip away and hilariously commands him, "Let me cry on your shoulder!" When he starts to develop feelings for Charlie, He Zhiwu refers to himself as a store and her a customer, and that he hopes she will shop there for a while.

This perception of love and friendship suggests modern alienation in big cities filled with giant billboards and a hodgepodge of corporate franchises (Leon meets the woman he takes as his lover at a McDonald's), which Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle emphasize through the mise-en-scène. Characters are grounded in focus in the foreground, while people in the background pass out of focus, either captured by a shallow lends or sped up into blurs. Even when a fight breaks out behind Michelle, Doyle does not switch focus and roots on her eating with a bored look on her face while fuzzy images of a fistfight crash in the background. People in small towns always seem to know each other, but cities are so populous and so busy that fewer connections are made. Faced with infinite possibilities of an urban jungle, people instead retreat into isolation, sticking to familiar haunts, tuning out the bustle with portable music players. Wong and Doyle make Hong Kong into a swirling cascade of colors and sights, but their frenzied rush through all the stalls and apartments overload the sensual enticement of the images and turn them into something intimidating and off-putting.

Therefore, love becomes another aspect of life that becomes isolated and one-sided. As free-spirited and joyous as Wong makes the sequence of Faye cleaning Cop 663's apartment in Chungking Express, he's also showing this woman imagining herself being the man's domestic partner without actually telling him about her feelings and maybe crafting a real relationship. Likewise, Leon reveals a mutual attraction with Michelle -- it would be hard not to find the former Miss Hong Kong sexy -- but he sticks to his silly code and finds a surrogate for his lust in the form of Blondie. Meanwhile, Michelle stays home and morosely masturbates to the fantasy of Leon, and in the film's most heartbreaking sequence, Wong cuts between Leon fulfilling his desire with Blondie as Michelle writhes on her bed masturbating and sobbing as if she can see her love bed another woman even as she still tries desperately to get off on the thought that he's thinking of her while sleeping with Blondie.

Doyle captures this sexual frustration through a series of amusing and wrenching visual metaphors. He Zhiwu breaks into an abattoir and toys with a whole pig carcass as if a lover, massaging it like he's engaging in foreplay and jumping up and down on it in an overtly sexual manner, and later he and Charlie vent their pent-up sexual aggression by kicking the hell out of a blow-up sex doll without simply acknowledging each other. As Michelle lies on her bed in agony and ecstasy, she wears a plastic sheath over her silk dress, clashing a modern, Westernized accessory with classical Chinese clothing but also conveying how she has encased her sensuality. Doyle would bring an eroticism to the silk clothes that could top pornography in In the Mood for Love, and for him to obscure it here shows how much Michelle is wasting by not moving on.

Yet, for all the somber, mangled looks at crumbling interpersonal connection in the world, Fallen Angels contains more comic moments than any of Wong's other features. Leon shows off his fake family photo to an old classmate he meets on a bus while escaping from his first filmed hit (the murders themselves are amusingly choreographed like classic John Woo shootouts but shot in Wong's artier style), and the man enters into a one-sided conversation as he excitedly tries to catch up. The forgotten friend offers to get Leon a good insurance rate, and the killer tunes the guy out by musing whether a hitman could get insured. Later, the director literalizes the idea of the characters changing themselves to fit their partners' tastes when He Zhiwu, who has to console Charlie constantly over her hatred for Blondie, actually starts turning blond himself. Much of the visuals are non-sequiturs anyway, and Wong never attempts to stifle their absurdity with his weighty, insightful themes. Who else would insert a scene of Michelle warning a hidden Leon to stay out of sight because cops are searching the apartment complex for him, only for him to clearly give away his position in a cramped cupboard by continuing to smoke inside it. Only Godard at his earliest would put in such a loopy goof on a criminal.

One of the all-time great cinematic romantics, Wong has a particular interest in the transience of love. When he breaks off his relationship with Blondie, Leon does not feel too guilty for breaking her heart. "For her, I'm just a stopover on the journey of her life," he says. "I hope she reaches her destination soon." What he doesn't realize is that we are all stopovers, that the transience these people force themselves into is not a contrast to the supposed permanence of normalcy when it is really just a self-absorbed perversion of the wayward nature of life that we all experience. Cramped in their withdrawn lives, they retreat from contact and seem to look for answers in false copies of life (i.e. the typical depiction of romance in the movies). One of the biggest breakthroughs in the film is delivered so plainly that you might miss it: as He Zhiwu lets Charlie cry on his shoulder for the umpteenth time, he notes in his narration that she will never sort out her issues on the phone, and that she won't feel better until she has a real conversation face-to-face. When he sees Charlie later, she's a flight attendant and doesn't recognize him, but he accepts that her path has taken her elsewhere and has now built enough of his own identity to take it in stride. Leon doesn't have this epiphany, and he realizes too late that he should have been more open and made his own decisions. As for Michelle, she ends up cleaning up an apartment after her partner just as Faye did for her love, but Michelle's wash has a much darker context. Where Faye cleaned to cheer up her crush and set him up to accept her, Michelle scrubs away the memory of Leon, somewhat literally. Hideous as the act is within context, it too frees her, and when she accepts a motorcycle ride home from He Zhiwu, Wong sets up the two characters who have learned to accept the ephemeral nature of life for a possible romance. "I haven't ridden a motorcycle for a long time," Michelle tells us, practically confiding in the audience. "Actually, I haven't been so close to a man for a while. The road isn't that long, and I know I'm getting off soon. But at this moment, I'm feeling such lovely warmth."

After watching and loving all of the director's output, I only just now pin down what I adore about his cinema: Wong Kar-wai is the William Faulkner of filmmakers. His stories occur out of order but typically without flashback. Snatches of stirred passion and denied love, Wong's movies cross several perspectives that can stand entirely outside each other even as they add greater dimension to the overall narrative. The first shots of Fallen Angels convey the different points of view of Leon and Michelle: the camera weaves around Michelle as she walks through the subway as if flirting with her and taking on her unfulfilled passion. When Wong shoots the same location for Leon moving through the area, he does so in a series of quick edits of static shots. This is a man of purpose and denial, and he will not even acknowledge his romantic side. It is when the director crushes these styles together, along with the different approaches of the other characters, that Fallen Angels crafts a more wholesome vision of love, lust, repression and regret.

In Wong's films, as in Faulkner's novels, time and place are as vital to unraveling the meaning of the story as they are irrelevant to the telling of it, and the looming shadow of Hong Kong's handover is as key here as it is in his next film, Happy Together. The focus on transiency and adaptation speaks as much to the director's concerns over Hong Kong as it does humanity: the perfect blend of Eastern and Western aesthetic and customs, Hong Kong may well swing toward Chinese tradition when it's absorbed into the mainland. The final shot, of He Zhiwu exhaling a puff of cigarette smoke that Wong tilts up to follow, visualizes how everything in life drifts and dissipates, yet he also lingers on a skyscraper in the frame as if contemplating its future as well.

With its dark, sickly surreality, Wong's Hong Kong becomes the traumstadt, a dream city that can fit all emotions and moods because it does not really exist. Yet by not existing, it can break all the boundaries that prevent us from seeing things as they are, and Wong can shoot in a stream-of-consciousness style, such as cutting to a man shivering in fear with a tray of food as Leon blazes past cutting down his marks. Fallen Angels may be the sloppiest of Wong's films, but its messiness is part of its beauty and its intelligence. If the point of the film is that life itself is convoluted and discombobulated, then is there any other way to capture it than an insane mash-up of melodrama, comedy, humanism and the choked eroticism that marks Wong's cinema? Whether it's his best film is irrelevant; Fallen Angels is but one of the director's several examples of pure, atmospheric meditations on the distances, physical, emotional and completely artificial, we place between each other. Perhaps when someone else approaches him, we can fuss over ranking his oeuvre.

Brian De Palma: Obsession

At the time of its release, Obsession was by some degree the most refined of Brian De Palma's films, an ironic twist given how it is perhaps the most compromised of his pictures to that point. Rewritten to avoid certain controversies, and then slashed to the bone per the wishes of legendary score composer Bernard Herrmann, Obsession differs so thoroughly from the vision of its writer, Paul Schrader, that he disowned it during production. The cuts, however, make for a streamlined production, perhaps too truncated but nevertheless taut, and it's no wonder that the film proved the director's first noteworthy hit.

Patterned after Hitchcock's Vertigo, Obsession's moments of De Palmian trickery are few and far between. Instead, he captures the high melodrama of a past age and, more importantly, never treats it as anything less than silly. He does not look down upon the style, mind you, but he sidesteps the critical mistake of attempting to play the absurdity in the serious manner of 1970s cinema. Instead, he plays the film just straight enough to embrace the melodrama, and more than any other De Palma film to this point, Obsession keeps the audience wanting to watch the story rather than jump through his aesthetic hoops.

Opening with a lavish party for real estate developer Robert Courtland (Cliff Robertson) and his wife Elizabeth (Geneviève Bujold), Obsession communicates the heavy trimming upon its script immediately as it jumps along rapidly through establishing character moments and a sudden, random abduction of Elizabeth and daughter Amy by unknown assailants. They leave a note demanding $500,000, enough money to bankrupt Courtland, but police encourage him to place shredded paper in a suitcase along with a tracking device instead of the money. When the kidnappers discover the ruse, they enter into a car chase with the police that ends in a horrific crash that kills Elizabeth and Amy.

As you can guess, Robert is devastated, and the Vertigo influence enters the film when Courtland's business partner, Robert LaSalle (John Lithgow), encourages him to take a trip to Florence, Italy. Consumed by sorrow and unable to think of anything but his dead wife and child, Courtland agrees, without question for the sole reason that he met Elizabeth in Florence years ago. When he arrives and enters the church where they met, Courtland finds, to his shock, a woman restoring the paintings there who looks just like his wife. Sandra (also Bujold) hesitantly warms to the man's instant and passionate fixation upon her, but soon she enters into a relationship with the man and even acquiesces to his attempts to turn her into his wife.

At this point I found myself for the first time agreeing with De Palma's detractors that he appeared only to be recreating his influences, not working with them. Though it may be the director's tightest work yet, Obsession openly displays Herrmann's creative wishes, and one has to think that he had a hand in paring the film down until it played more like a Vertigo retread.

And yet, De Palma undermines the brevity of his shortened film, and in the process he subverts Hitchcock by introducing a complex romanticism into the Vertigo story. To better understand the split between the moments of outright plagiarism and the artistically fulfilling offshoot of his own vision, look at the contrast between the basilica of San Miniato in Florence and the replica memorial Courtland erects as the gravestone for his wife and child. One is a copy of the other, of course, but it reconfigures the meaning of the original into terms that are emotionally resonant for this character. A visual metaphor for De Palma's entire approach to the film, this juxtaposition lays the framework for a much darker yet more genuine exploration of Hitchcock's themes even with the most insidious implications of the plot left on the cutting room floor.

Where Hitch alerted us with an entire act left that Judy was Madeleine, De Palma holds off the revelation until nearly the end, by which point things move too swiftly for us to consider Courtland's psychological state. But by that point, we do not have to, because the director has used the preceding time to make a film not about the armchair psychiatry Hitch detested yet put on the screen so often but the emotion. Hitchcock had to suck us into his world with his tricks to torture us, but De Palma does not project Courtland's agony upon us but merely at us, asking to consider the horrible pain of a man left with nothing.

Compounding this despair is the truth of Sandra's identity, not Elizabeth as we might have guessed but his daughter, Amy. What layers of incestuous subplot existed in Schrader's script are left more to a dark corner of the mind, but the slight change in role proves the most ingenious alteration between the two works. The subject of Vertigo was obsession as much as it is in this one, but De Palma shows us how we all use grief to cover up truths that could cure us of our fixations. LaSalle, who organized the kidnapping to bankrupt his partner and assume total control, found Amy alive and raised her to hate her father, brainwashing her with the memory that he did not pay the ransom money and thus did not care enough for her or her mother to part with his money. Courtland, meanwhile, is so consumed by remorse that he does not ever consider that the woman he courts may look like his wife because she shares her genes. Both of them are blind to the irony of their lives: Amy/Sandra collaborates with LaSalle out of hatred for her father by entering into an Elektra complex with him, while LaSalle did effectively kill his partner's interest in the company though he did not bankrupt the man.

The spirals of the main characters, eventually looping into an extended déjà vu that reconfigures events around the truth, crescendos emotionally, demonstrating how we do not fully understand how much we love something until we've lost it. When Sandra fakes her kidnapping so LaSalle can have a second chance at ruining his partner and she can see whether her father actually brings cash this time, the mounting tension of Courtland's frenzy demonstrates that he's learned his lesson. He secures the money, only for LaSalle to swap out the suitcase for a fake, and he performs the same money drop. When he finally learns of his partner's deception, Courtland kills LaSalle and takes the money straight to the airport, where he hopes to kill Sandra for her role in cheating him. However, he breaks open the suitcase in front of her before he can shoot her, and Sandra/Amy can now see that her father did get the money after all and shouts "Daddy!" with glee. One might expect De Palma to have this ending, in which a child and parent are reunited through money, to be cynical, but there is no moment in the film as flamboyantly melodramatic nor as emotionally genuine as his nearly endless, whimsical circle around the hugging father and daughter.

The opening credits of Obsession contain the most overt indication that De Palma is directing. He intersperses a shot slowly tracking toward a building where the party is being held with slides containing pictures charting Elizabeth and Robert's relationship. Once the credits end and De Palma at last moves inside the mansion, we see that the characters are watching the slide show, which abruptly ends with the card, "And they lived happily ever after." He starts the film at an ending of sorts, and one that steels the viewer for the inevitable heartbreak. Elsewhere, however, De Palma is elegant, his tracking shots, pans and tilts graceful as they pore over numerous shots of art and of the heavenly haze around the characters (provided by Vilmos Zsigmond). For the first time, the romanticism that can be plainly seen in works such as Carlito's Way peek from behind De Palma's bag of tricks, and his technique is used toward a purpose, a purpose greatly aided by Herrmann, who may have hindered the director and writers' visions but contributed one of his finest and most context-appropriate scores as repayment. Hell, De Palma even gets one of his few unimpeachable performances out of an actor, in this case Lithgow, whom we can see here starting to perfect what eventually became his stock and trade: weak-bodied but able-minded schemers and villains. In a film built on dramatic and tragic irony, the greatest twist of Obsession may be that it is at once the most indebted to the work of someone else even as it makes the greatest case yet for De Palma as his own artist, someone who can think beyond his list of references to break them down and reconstruct them into something that can stand proudly alongside the works he plunders, even the masterpieces.

Book Review: John Adams

Americans have an unfortunate tendency to disregard history. That is not to say that the citizens of other countries are uniformly scholars, but the indifference so many feel toward our past, to say nothing of world history, never ceases to amaze me. Perhaps the relatively brief history of our nation is part of the explanation: less than 300 years old as an officially recognized sovereign, America is also an immigrant's country, a place where people came to make a future, not carry on a past. Though we are just as stratified along class boundaries as any other developed nation and pass down class status through generations, we tend to think ourselves as all given an equal start, and those who focus too intently on where they came from will never manage to move anywhere else.

Of course, that's a broadly interpretative view of the situation. The likelier truth is simply that many find history boring, though how anyone could reach such a conclusion is a mystery to me. While anecdotal evidence is inconclusive, I can safely say that, of the five teachers who most inspired, enlightened and entertained me, three were history teachers. Those who study history understand that no Hollywood film nor even any tabloid newspaper could ever come up with anything half so salacious, scandalous and stranger than fiction than what is recorded in dusty old records books in the reference section of your local library. If you don't believe me, I would suggest thumbing through French history for a bit, as I was lucky enough to in my junior and senior years of high school, during which time I discovered that you could practically fit onto a single sheet of paper the list of important French historical figures who did not suffer from a sexually transmitted disease of some variety.

Unfortunately, one of the odd side-effects of going to university is that, in some ways, it inhibits your intellectual growth. No, I am not one of these nutters ranting against higher education, but the focus upon one's major naturally takes time away from hobbies. As a journalist, is not my first priority to keep abreast of current topics, a prospect that takes up much of one's time and leaves scarcely any for reviews of the past? And when I am done reading for all my classes, however much I enjoy it, do I not simply wish to lay down and watch a film?

The reason I'm writing all this -- and why I'm writing in the first person for a review of a presidential biography of one of our Founding Fathers -- is that David McCullough's John Adams has reignited a passion for a subject I once held so dear to me but let slip these past few years. I had previously known Adams, the United States' second president, as but a footnote, a bookend mistakenly placed between the great novels of Washington, our most enduring icon of what traits every American would like to ascribe to the nation and its citizens, and Jefferson, the architect of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The only concrete detail of Adams' presidency I could recall was his passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a horrid piece of legislation that violated individual liberties just as soon as the Constitution had guaranteed them, and that single shred of remembered trivia likely put me ahead of many of my peers in terms of Adams knowledge.

It's fitting, then, that the biography that completely changes one's view of the neglected president did not originally conceive Adams as its subject, or at least not the only one. David McCullough, already a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book on Harry S Truman, intended to focus on both Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Yet the more he researched, the more he realized that Adams, who left behind enough diaries and correspondence to fill a library, not only deserved more attention but was in every way more interesting than Jefferson, heretofore considered one of the more intriguing of the Founding Fathers. McCullough paints a portrait of a complex man, intellectual and overqualified but stubborn and vain to an extreme fault, occasionally contradictory but committed with unwavering resolve. While Washington remains an enigmatic figure who appears unflinching in his virtue -- a mythos McCullough wisely maintains, suggesting that there truly was no difference between the man and the legend -- it is Adams, with his short temper and human error, who ultimately comes to embody nearly everything truthfully attributed to the Founding Fathers. And in McCullough's hands, he practically comes to life before you.

Rather than start all the way at the beginning or even at a clear linear point, McCullough opens his book in January of 1776 as Adams rides out to meet George Washington and the newly formed Continental Army. The author then winds back to Adams' early days briefly in order to set a background for the man's law practice and to get to Adams' first brush with revolutionary fervor, the defense of the British soldiers charged with the Boston Massacre. The unlikeliest of starts to the political career of one of this country's proudest and most notable patriots, the court case establishes his character better than any perfunctory chapters of early life ever could. With public opinion furious at the British, such a move would be career suicide, if not a path to outright lynching. Yet Adams takes on the work, believing that all men deserve a fair trial. What's more, he wins the case, preparing a solid argument to counter the passionate but unresearched rhetoric of the prosecution.

Though the trial makes him unpopular, Adams' dedication is noticed by some who admire his principle, and by the time the First Continental Congress meets in 1774, Adams is among the delegates sent by Massachusetts. McCullough charts Adams' public life as that of an unlikely politician: too unwilling not to speak his mind as he saw fit (he always saw fit), he had no use for the intrigue and compromise necessary to navigate proper channels. His passionate arguments for independence ultimately sway a Congress decidedly uneasy with the prospect of secession, but he bores and alienates so many that, when Congress elects to send him as an envoy to France during wartime, one cannot help but wonder if they did so more to guarantee he'd be out of their hair for months than to win the conflict. Of course, the properties that make him a poor politician make him an even worse diplomat.

Much of McCullough's biography presents Adams by way of comparing him to whatever key figure he works with on each engagement. When sent to France, Adams pairs up with Benjamin Franklin, already ingratiated into the French court, where he is regarded as a delight. Immediately, the author underlines the differences between the plain, Christian Adams and the more Dionysian Franklin: Adams prudishly conducts himself, while Franklin is a flirt (though he did not, contrary to legend, contract syphilis). Franklin understands the game of negotiation within the court, asking for nothing and merely making himself a pleasurable guest. Adams, on the other hand, speaks out of turn and understandably lacks the patience to go along with the French aristocracy's sickly, pampered self-destruction while Americans are losing and dying without French naval support. Armed with Adams' candid correspondence, McCullough vividly sketches the farmer's anger at Franklin, whom he increasingly regards as corrupt, even as he grows more accustomed to French society.

(In the book's only flaw of note, McCullough appears to extrapolate from Adams' emotional reaction to Franklin's behind-the-scenes actions to have him shipped back to America in order to paint the diplomat in a negative light and fails to stress just how vital and successful Franklin's contributions were. Not even Jefferson comes off looking so bad, but more on that later.)

Yet just as Adams eventually grows as a politician, so too do his diplomatic skills grow. Fortunately for him -- and America -- Adams is removed from France before he can cause any further damage and makes his way to Holland, where the people are far more suited to his style. So serious and ponderous that even Adams marvels at their strictness, the Dutch regard him more highly than the French, and while Franklin pulls off his shrewd maneuvering to borrow the French fleet, Adams secures several loans from the Dutch bankers of equal importance to the war effort. He even meets with King George III, avowed enemy of the revolution, and conducts himself so well that the king resigns himself to losing his colonies.

Once he returns to America and reenters the political scene, Adams' main contrast is with Jefferson, with whom McCullough compared the book's subject earlier during their time in the Continental Congress. The two make for perfect foils, to the point that their narrative together moves in literary arcs and they seem to be fictional characters written to play off each other. Short, portly Adams works with tall, thin Jefferson during the Continental Congress to convince the colonies to secede. As McCullough writes near the end of the bio, Jefferson was "the pen" who wrote the founding documents of the nation, but Adams was "the voice" who brought the representatives to call on Jefferson to write them.

Their time together makes them fast friends, though the growth of political parties during George Washington's presidency and Adams' vice presidency begins to rend them apart. Stuck in the thankless, jobless task of vice president, Adams shows up each day at the Senate chamber and pontificates on his beliefs, while Jefferson, who never addresses his feelings in public, begins to manipulate the political scene behind closed doors. Adams' worry over how to address the president leaves him open to attack as someone who let his time in Europe fill him with a love of ranks, that he was no better than a monarchist. Jefferson funds newspapers that vilify him for this, and the attacks only become worse when Adams wins the presidency. To see such a friendship, one that not only bettered the two men but the country, so utterly shattered by politics and the rancorous birth of partisanship is frustrating and heartbreaking.

So vile are the presses toward Adams as president that, within context, the Alien and Sedition Acts, though still reprehensible, seem at least partially justified. The libelous drivel published by republican writers like James Callender and Benjamin Bache would land these men in prison today, so the prospect of Adams putting them away does not seem quite so authoritarian. The great tragedy of the dissolution of Jefferson and Adams' relationship, as McCullough emphasizes, is that apart from these squabbles, the two agree on nearly everything: they sue for peace in the face of a possible attack from the French and, Jefferson's meddling notwithstanding, have little regard for the new parties. Yet Jefferson still denounces him as a warmonger for building a navy to ensure a defensive power if war comes to America's shores, though when war is averted, Adams immediately disbands the army before the Federalist Alexander Hamilton can lead it into an altercation without justification.

It is difficult to write a review of a biography. In essence, it falls to me to analyze what is good about a work that analyzes what is good about a man's life. But the shear breadth of Adams' accomplishments and desires is stunning, so much so that it takes resolve not simply to list all of them and marvel at how ahead of his time he was. Not only did he ultimately win over the Congressional delegates to support independence, nominate George Washington to lead the army and secure the capital to fund the war effort, as president he fought partisan politics and pushed for an emphasis on education as the most vital interest of a nation trying to found itself. You can feel McCullough's passion infusing these tidbits, reminding us what we sacrifice today when we slash education budgets and determine who sits on school boards by what political body they support.

McCullough's enthusiasm for his subject manifests itself as a surprisingly emotional anchor for Adams' life story. Small details such as Adams and Franklin having to share a hotel room one night and quarreling over whether to leave a window open, or Jefferson joking with Adams in their friendlier days that he had to borrow so much money for Congress that Adams would have to secure a Dutch loan before being allowed into heaven, add flavor. But McCullough cares so deeply about Adams' accomplishments that such minor moments do not convey the zest of his prose, which he reserves for the details that normally read as the stuffier parts of biographies. He turns an act as significant as Jefferson and Adams' reconciliation and their renewed correspondence into an emotional reunion to rival any reunion seen at the cinema, and when people at last recognize Adams' work and compliment on it, we feel the president's rush of pride and fulfillment.

Yet the centerpiece of McCullough's book, and of Adams' life, is Abigail Adams. At several points, McCullough stresses that a few of Adams' actions, were any one of them his only accomplishment, would be enough to enshrine him in the annals of American history. However, I cannot help but think that, were his marriage to Abigail all he ever accomplished, and had their correspondence survived, John Adams would still warrant interest for the purity of his love and respect for his wife. When McCullough does zip through Adams' early life, he does so for two primary reasons: to lay the foundation for his worldview and work ethic, and to introduce Abigail. Before he ever disputed with them, Adams relied upon Abigail's counsel more than Jefferson's or Franklin's. In a time when women had no role in society other than as wives, Abigail not only performed the duties expected of her but argued for the rights of women and slaves, held her own in debates with the finest minds of the time and earned a reverence in the public eye that even the libelous newspapers would not attack despite hurling invective at her husband and even George Washington. McCullough rightly calls attention to the fact that the couple had one of the most touching romances in history, and Adams' method of addressing his wife in letters as his "dearest friend" has made me as proud to be an American as anything Adams got in the Declaration or the Constitution.

"Facts are stubborn things," as Adams argued in his Boston Massacre case, and McCullough wades through the vast collection of our second president's writings to bring out the vitality of the facts of his life, undiluted after more than two centuries. He was always being compared, and usually unfavorably, to others despite the singularity of his achievements. Yet McCullough comes to define Adams, without openly saying so, within the same role people that people vaguely remember him: sandwiched between the two most noted Founding Fathers, Adams can be seen as having his friend Jefferson's intellect, but his hero Washington's virtue. Obdurate, vain and obnoxious, John Adams was nevertheless devoted, inspiring and honorable, and no single man did as much to make this country an independent nation than he. McCullough wants us to understand that, but he does not resort to preaching. He doesn't have to. No one could read John Adams and not be astonished by the man, the nearly perfect moderation of his political stances and his drive.

There are any number of fine biographies out there, but this 650-page (without the additional hundred for endnotes and sources) book is the first I've read that I could easily have restarted instantly upon finishing and would have were it not for my backed-up list of reading material. When people abuse the memory of the Founding Fathers for political gain today, they get some of the proposed ideals but attributed them en masse to the group. McCullough proves that each of the men who helped found this nation was nothing more than a human being, but it was their arguments, their wildly conflicting views and even their gross contradictions and hypocrisies that collided into something beautiful and lasting. By focusing on a farmer's son as he rose through the ranks of a new empire, McCullough eventually charts not simply the life of a great man but a personification of the most idealistic and optimistic conception of this country. It should be required reading in every school in the Union.

British Sounds

The Dziga Vertov Group years, both Godard's most contested and largely ignored, take after the anonymity of the collective's ethos by setting no definite start point. Having contributed already to one anthology project in the wake of May '68, the Chris Marker-led Cinétracts, Godard made clear his intentions to head in new, radical directions with Le gai savoir. Yet there is still some debate over which resulting film truly marked the start of the DGV collaborations. Both Un film comme les autres (which I could not find in subtitled form) and this bear no attached name, but purportedly Godard was the sole figure at the helm of both, with Pravda being the first movie that everyone can fully agree on being a collective film. For all intents and purposes, however, let us take British Sounds to be the beginning of this controversial period in Godard's career, following as it does the plate-cleansing Le gai savoir and generally conforming to what one may envision of the Dziga Vertov Group based on preliminary readings of their work.


Yet, if Le gai savoir proved that Godard could subvert my expectations for his Maoist years, British Sounds, released in the U.S. as See You At Mao, largely conforms to the opinions I've heard of the DGV years even from noted Godard enthusiasts like Jonathan Rosenbaum. Divided into five or six (depending on how you treat a portion of the middle) segments, British Sounds continues to expand upon the director's fascination between the relation images and sound, but not even his previous reinterpretations can adequately prepare one for the leap he makes here. As a narrator intones early in the film, the bourgeoisie "make the world into their image" -- implicitly suggesting that they have a God complex -- and British Sounds is his most aggressive film yet to seek the destruction of that image, to the point that the mildest attack in the entire film is the title card, which sports an 'X' over the word "Images" between "British" and "Sounds."

Godard films each segment with minimal technique, using long takes broken up by the odd flash of still photos before returning to the scene as if the shot had not changed. Where Le gai savoir presented the director's polemics through visual montage, here he roots the film in quotidian, even banal images in order to experiment with the sound. The first segment follows an automotive assembly line as workers weld together cars from basic skeletons into finished products. It's an everyday sight, something that fills untold hours of "How It's Made" and programs of that sort.

In Godard's hands, however, this sequence exists to place a droning narration of a man reading Marxist rhetoric about the emptiness of these workers' labor. Banging on about issues of wage slavery, the narrator almost sounds like a nature documentarian describing the curious social arrangements of less enlightened creatures. As the Marxist narration winds around the images, the tracking shot comes to take on a wry second meaning, as if deconstructing the noted tracking shot of Week End and its endless traffic jam to the point when the cars have not even been made yet. One cannot hold that thought too long, however, or indeed any other one, once Godard introduces the other aspect of the soundtrack, the amplified screeching of industrial metal-on-metal as car parts are carved and welded. Strangely, this diegetic noise is so overwhelming, bewildering and just plain annoying that the tedium of the flat narration becomes the only steady line of coherence, even when presented with molasses-thick pronunciations like "In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present. In Communist society, the present dominates the past."

That enticing subversion of even Godard's standard of presentation makes up for its overall weakness, and both the intrigue and the frustration of British Sounds magnifies in the next segment as the director films in a nude woman walking around her home as two dueling narrations overlap. A woman, perhaps the disembodied voice of the figure seen on-screen, launches into an eloquent, intellectual rant on feminism, discussing the manner in which women are repressed in society through a series of small inequalities that form together into a prison. Then, a man joins in, his voice louder and his statements blunter. As much as he's confounding the listener, I wondered for a moment if Godard was making some comment on the communicative differences between men and women. Then, he breaks up the static long shot of the woman walking up and down the stairs to film her from the shoulder up in close-up talking on the phone. She says what the female narrator says, but not in unison, and their disconnect only adds to the aural overload when the man, too, inserts his thoughts, and the stab at feminist cinema -- albeit one clearly made by a male, what with the cutaways to the woman's pubic hair -- quickly gives way to Godard's other interests.

Thankfully, the film pulls itself together slightly in the second half. Godard presents a repulsive televised speech by a British nationalist who perfunctorily assures the viewers that his views are "not racialist" before launching into a venomous screed that denounces immigration and the extreme poor and suggests sterilization if not outright extermination for those who impede society's focus on capital. He then cuts to images of the targets of his invective. To emphasize the point, Godard, moves on to a hand-held shot of a group of working-class whites at a table as they discuss Marxist ideals. But where the previous narrations were intellectual readings of Marx and Engels, these men place ideas in concrete terms of their lives and struggles. It's unclear how much of the Marxist philosophy Godard fed these workers, but their hatred for their bosses is clear and real as they spit over the idea that they do all the work just so a CEO can live not even on the profits of their labor but the interest of the investment of those profits.

Taken with the lingering shot of the factory workers assembling cars, this round-table discussion suggests Godard's keen interest on the dissatisfaction of the working class and his hopes that they would rise up. Emphasizing the idea is the contrast with youth activists, hidden away at the very universities the DGV demanded their work be shown. As the workers break their backs to assemble society's commodities, these young men and women hunch over picket signs, etching out their condensed messages and changing lyrics to Beatles songs in a laughable attempt to politicize them ("You say U.S./I say Mao"). Godard doesn't appear to want to mock them, but one can hardly look at these youths and not think condescendingly of them in comparison to the workers.

Therein lies the problem with the film, possibly the Dziga Vertov Group as a whole. When DGV films arrived in America, they came with instructions to show them in art houses and college campuses, appealing to the intellectual crowd who, let's be honest, would be the only possible demographic for such films. Yet this undermines their Maoist intent and emits a more Bolshevik attitude, inspiring a group of bourgeois elite to rebel against themselves. Godard's focus on the workers within the film communicates whom he really wants to inspire, but he recognizes that he's a part of the bourgeoisie he wants to destroy (and if there's anything more bourgeois than an artist, it's an art critic, and he's both).

Still, there's a hint of self-awareness in his focus on the hippies, and perhaps his muted frustration with them explains the haughty tone of the rest of the film. In Le gai savoir, Godard's use of a child's dictionary and other such devices expressed a playfulness and a representation of his "return to zero" mentality. British Sounds contains numerous audio clips of male and female narrators teaching a child about various historical events of peasant and working-class revolts, which the kid dutifully repeats. Eventually, the entire film comes to fell like a lecture, a condescending polemic from a frustrated artist that seems less educational than editorial.

At 52 minutes, British Sounds feels incomplete, but that's a deliberate step on account of Godard. While certain trademarks are there, he stops short of making this an auterial work, and if he was not yet collaborating on his work, he was at least preparing himself to work in a collective. Narrations cut off, occasionally restart when the reader flubs a line and overlap into incoherence throughout the film. In the last segment, as a synecdochical close-up of a bloody fist moves along a white carpet, the noise builds to a cacophony, various clips of rhetoric crashing like waves on rocks. Then, at last, the fist makes its way to a blood-red flag and picks it up, and the image cuts to shots of the fist punching through the Union Jack as all the voices suddenly speak in unison. The message is clear: all voices of dissent -- male, female, intellectual, working-class -- are unformed, but only through a Communist revolt can we all unify. Unfortunately, Godard succeeds far more readily in tearing us apart with the film that he does in bringing us back together, and British Sounds never amounts to much more than a fleetingly engaging mess, and an often unbearable one at that.

Rome, Open City

Over a half-century removed from the release of one of the landmarks of art cinema, Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City no longer looks quite like the exercise in realism for which it gained recognition and acclaim. In the wake of the moment it helped to launch and the influence it exerts even to this day, what is most surprising about Rossellini's film is how conventional it is by today's standards. It hems closely to the melodramatic flair of classic films and has a clear progression of narrative.

What makes it entertaining today, however, is less its aesthetic than how Rossellini used the guise of realism to depict situations that would never have been approved for a studio production. Made in the wake of Italy's liberation and set in the last days of Nazi occupation, Rome, Open City contains startling images of torture, murder, sexuality and a sense of despair that wouldn't slip into American films (specifically noirs) for a few years. Even the film's fleeting moments of hope are undercut by wry cynicism: when a friend asks Nina, one of the key characters, if the rumored American GIs really exist, Nina simply points to a bombed-out building nearby.

The film does, however, flaunt its aesthetic innovation from the start, opening on grainy, naturally lit shots of Roman streets as German soldiers drive to a real house and bang on the door seeking to arrest one Giorgio Manfredi a.k.a. Luigi Ferraris, an engineer in the resistance movement. Giorgio sees them enter and escapes by jumping across rooftops, almost as if Rossellini staged what in reality is a fairly standard flight just to show that, yes, those are real rooftops the non-professional actor is crawling away upon unnoticed.

From there, the director tosses in the rest of the cast: Giorgio, like many other resistance fighters, rely on the local priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), for smuggled messages and money. Francesco, another Communist insurrectionist, is an atheist but wishes the priest to marry him and a pregnant Nina because a patriotic man of the cloth is preferable to collaborating city official. Nina, despite intending to wed Francesco and caring for Marcello, her young son from a previous marriage who acts as a child saboteur for the movement, is strangely apolitical, and more than any other character she exists to further the more staid conventions of the film. Pursuing them all is a curiously effeminate Gestapo major who colludes with a corrupt police commissioner to crack down on the Communists.

The film's first half has not held up well. Rossellini splits attention between the secret meetings of the resistance and the pure melodrama of Nina and Francesco's relationship. They share moments that could have been ripped from any one of the Hollywood romances of the day, faces pressed together as they look off in the distance wistfully and speak of how great life will be. Their treacly loveliness stands out sharply from visions of death and oppression around them, and Rossellini stresses their time together too much for such moments to serve as a contrast to the destruction.

Then, he pulls the rug out from under the audience. Were Rome, Open City a modern film, I might have seen the tragic development in Francesco and Nina's lives coming, what with the overemphasized happiness of the couple who feel that love will see them through the hard times. But the jarring, cynical end to their relationship feels stunning and utterly unexpected for its time: not only is Francesco arrested on information provided by a rat within the group, but when Nina protests she is simply shot and left on the road as the Nazis drive away in plain view of the gathered citizens, including Nina's son. Placed nearly at the hour mark, this action thrusts Rossellini's film into bold, terrifying new territory, and from that point the movie never lets up.

Nina's murder sparks the first true action we've seen from the resistance, who quickly mount an ambush to free all the political prisoners and to take out their grief and rage on the Nazis who murdered their friend. Having proved that no one can escape a war by trying not to take sides, Rossellini dives into heavy political content, pitting the Nazis against the Communists with the corrupt or the uncertain stuck in the middle. Basing the film's morality in a clear Christian perspective, the director twists a few ideals around to justify supporting the atheists, even putting words in Don Pietro's mouth to the effect that those who would die to defend liberty deserve support more than those who manipulate religious faith to motivate ethnic cleansing. That the atheists should ultimately represent the ideals of the priest's idea of good Christianity is but one of many of Rossellini's ironic twists.

Consider an early scene as citizens work themselves into a small riot. A sexton overlooks the action and tells a woman that it would be untoward for a sexton to involve himself in looting even as he casually snatches a pastry from her grocery bag. She takes it right back and chastises him, "Then you'll get pastries in heaven!" Elsewhere, he paints the Gestapo officer and Marina, Giorgio's ex-lover who becomes an informant, in usual tones, one the sadistic Nazi and the other the vain, self-absorbed collaborator who will sell out her countrymen for her pieces of silver (or, in this case, drugs and furs), yet the director also fleshes them out with transgressive characterizations. The Nazi's homosexuality is hinted at, but the lesbianism of his assistant Ingrid is as plain as could be. Instead of getting answers from Marina out of loyalty, she seduces the attractive woman for sex and then goads her boss into giving her cash for successfully getting information from her. Even the drunken, reluctant Nazi who rails against his party's racial purification is contradictory, mercilessly executing the priest at the end when Don Pietro refuses to crack and none of the German soldiers can stomach killing him.

These rich touches mingle with the more provocative and horrific of images, from sheep being shot by Germans to further dwindle the food supply to grisly images of Giorgio being tortured -- including a shot of a torch burning his skin and leaving a small flame rippling on his charred flesh. These scenes stick with you, still resonant and unflinching today. Unfortunately, the shoestring budget Rossellini acquired from the Allies brings down the film: the one aspect of the film most at odds with the neorealist approach, the use of a non-diegetic score, is also the most problematic. With no time or money to mix the soundtrack well, the music often blares over the scenes in which it plays, eradicating any nuance and even killing the emotion or tension of some scenes. When a fascist soldier comes to Don Pietro's cathedral and pulls out his gun, the music practically screams, but he immediately removes the clip even as the music continues to blast as we're in the middle of the shower scene in Psycho. The music even undercuts Fabrizi's thunderous showcase wherein he rages to the Nazis who torture Giorgio to death, shouting to the point that all of the Germans begin to nervously back away as if filled with the literal fear of God. Fabrizi's performance alone, already a programmed piece to make the audience cheer, is powerful enough, but the music here heightens the melodrama, not the passion.

The title credit of Rome, Open City, says as much about the film as anything in it. "Roma," written in black font stressing its dire straits, appears with "Città Aperta" placed over it in white, the hopefulness of the color matching the optimism of the city's designation as "open," referring to the governmental and military stratagem of abandoning defensive tactics for a city about to be seized in exchange for a ceasefire. Of course, bombs continue to fall on the city from both sides, giving Rossellini's usage of contradictions and hypocrisies a dire base in realism. Laid over each other, the words of the title card also allude to the city's checkered past, though Rossellini does not particularly damn the Italians for supporting fascism as long as they did. With the exception of a few rats, the Italians are portrayed as completely against the Nazi occupation that occurred as punishment for Italy's surrender to the Allies. I'm sure that the nation was ready to move on by the time Rossellini made the film, but it's tremendously unsatisfying that he doesn't hold his fellow citizens more accountable for what they did before occupation finally cured them of the last vestiges of fascist support.

Yet the film lives on, one of the most important landmarks in cinematic history. Godard would later play on an old adage by claiming, "All roads lead to Rome, Open City," and his street shots certainly bear the influence of Rossellini's work. The movie would enjoy immense success upon its release and secure the director a far larger budget for the next film in his War Trilogy, Paisan. Whatever its shortcomings, Rossellini's breakthrough struck a nerve, and not even the bleak pessimism of its ending could turn away audiences. In fact, it is such confrontations that overwhelm the memory of the more conventional aspects of the film, adding up to a film that looks backward even as it paves the way forward.

Wise Blood

[This post written for the John Huston Blog-A-Thon at Icebox Movies]

When Adam Zanzie over at Icebox Movies commissioned his blogathon for John Huston, my unfamiliarity with the director's work both compelled me to join in for the purposes of education and to refrain in order to leave analysis to those who had actually analyzed the director. Indeed, Adam's entire retrospective hinges on the question of Huston's status as either an auteur or a studio hand, someone who moved from project to project and was simply damn good at handling whatever landed on his desk. I cannot say whether Huston was an auteur, for I have seen few of the director's films, and the ones that I have were seen so long ago as to be a faint memory, only The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre sticking in my mind with clarity.

But to play along with the overall conceit of Adam's blogathon, and to give myself a springboard, I mulled over the overarching question almost immediately by considering the subject of his 1979 film, Wise Blood. Huston started in the industry as a screenwriter, yet a closer look at his credits reveals that many of his directed films were adaptations. He sorted out the twists and turns of The Maltese Falcon, Huston's first time behind the camera, into a sharply defined portrait that brought out the core of the Sam Spade character and then matched that character so perfectly to Humphrey Bogart that the actor built his career off the role. But that was only the start: Huston would direct numerous other adaptations, some he reworked himself, others refashioned by hired screenwriters. A number of these adaptations came from hit novels of fleeting popularity, but look at some of the authors Huston reworked: Dashiell Hammett. Melville. Joyce. Arthur Miller. Flannery O'Connor. These are not ordinary writers but some of the finest of the last two centuries.

I bring this up because there occasionally rises the question of whether an artist can stake claim to being an auteur by working with the products of auteurs in other media. As Hitchcock told Truffaut, he would never adapt a literary masterpiece because he could not improve upon a work that was already a magnum opus, and furthermore that all great works of art are great because they cannot be separated from their medium. Now, plenty of accepted auteurs, including Hitch, didn't write their own movies, but they also left identifiable stamps on their work and carried pet themes with them, turning the written words of others into finished products that looked and sounded like artistic trademarks. It has long been my belief that such an effect, reliant entirely upon the execution of the film, demonstrates that a great film can be made from a great book, provided the director brings his or her own creative stamp to the material.

Watching Wise Blood, Huston's adaptation of O'Connor's first novel, I knew immediately that, whether an auteur or not, the director clearly envisioned the source material in his own way. The Gothic surreality of O'Connor, incidentally my favorite writer, does not inform the aesthetic of Huston's film. Instead, he delivers her grotesquerie in stark, realistic terms, colored in dusty yellows and rusted reds. O'Connor's occurs in the beginning of the 1950s as everyone returns home from Korea and lingering assignments to new Army bases in Germany and Japan, but as can be plainly seen in her passage, the economic recovery wasn't as complete as simplified history would have us believe. Deep in the South, faded billboards and broken-down cars litter towns populated by impoverished zombies; you would think from looking at such sights that America had lost the war and the Axis had nuked us instead.

Huston, on the other hand, sets the story in contemporary late-'70s America, choosing to shoot the film in Macon, Ga., mere miles from O'Connor's hometown in Baldwin County yet completely overhauling the setting. The effect, however, remains much the same: the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America is if anything more intimidating and lost than in the economic boom of the '50s. O'Connor's novel questions the commercialization of religion, making the time of Huston's choosing, just before the Me Generation would vote for Reagan and spend the next decade in pure capitalist bliss, all the more appropriate for the subject material.

Following an opening set of black-and-white still photos of perfunctory evangelical messages pasted on signs across the South (including one on a Dairy Queen marquee), Huston begins the film proper with a shot of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), freshly returned from serving in the Army, standing in the middle of a barren street in a small town and hitches a ride with the first (and only) car that passes. Hazel remembers a dirt road in the place of this interstate highway they ride on, and the driver informs him that it's just been paved, and that it's been there just long enough for everyone in town to have driven away on it. Upon reaching his old family home, Motes finds it deserted and heads out back to see a headstone bearing the name of his grandfather, a tent revival preacher who raised him. Suddenly, Hazel's demeanor changes completely.

Rather than give himself to grief, Hazel looks liberated but also unhinged. He buys a train ticket to the nearest city, Taulkinham, and he tells several people, "I'm gonna do some things I ain't done before" with dark conviction. The first sign of what might be motivating Motes comes in the form of a flashback to his grandfather's fiery sermons, but his true state of mind starts to clarify when he buys a suit and hat that make him look like a preacher, only to viciously lash out at those who mistake him for one. "I ain't no preacher," he tells a cab driver with such force that you worry Hazel might strike the man, who unwisely continues to press the point until Dourif draws his mouth so tight that he's nearly hissing through closed lips that "I don't believe in anything."

To this the cabbie wryly responds, "That's the problem with preachers. They've all gotten too good to believe in anything." It's a sharp line, but it perfectly sets up the city into which Hazel wades. Populous but spare, Taulkinham is dotted with churches and those religious billboards, yet no one in town seems to care anything for Jesus. A blind man, Asa Hawks (Harry Dean Stanton), wades into a crowd gathered by a salesman and starts begging for "dollars for Jesus." But the salesman is simply enraged that someone else would try to steal his crowd, though the gathered people are just as uninterested in giving to charity as they are buying the vendor's unimpressive potato peeler. Surrounded by rusted entreaties to the Lord, no one in town actually cares enough about religion to contribute to a blind preacher. This apathy is recalled throughout the film, particularly in a scene where Hazel stops in the middle of the road to glare at a "Jesus saves!" message on a rock until traffic builds behind him. When a man gets out of his car to ask Motes to move, the young man can only seethe at the rock and tell the man of his religious hatred. The other driver doesn't react at all, only repeating his request. Even in the Bible Belt, where people always talk of their religion and constantly air grievances over breaches of their delicate sensibilities, no one seems to mind outright atheism.

Yet Jesus still holds a certain draw over people, and Motes cannot abide to see Him lingering in the minds of others as He does in the man's own. So, Hazel elects to form his own religion, the "Church Without Christ," one that promises not to burden mankind with ideas of original sin, thus circumventing the need for a Christ figure to save us. For Hazel, raised by his fire-and-brimstone grandfather to have such fear for original sin -- which the old man illustrated by hiring a stripper to play Eve -- that he often wet himself in sermons and placed rocks in his shoes as a means of constant punishment and atonement, Jesus has become representative of sin. If Jesus existed in order to die for sin, than a denial of his existence allows one to believe that humanity does not have to atone for damnation.


It sounds optimistic, but O'Connor, possibly the most openly religious great author of the modern age, would never allow such a sunny view of atheism to hold sway. In her novel, as it is in the film, Hazel's crusade against Christ brings him closer to Him than ever, albeit in the most horrific manner possible. For the author, atheism cannot work because Jesus acts as the balancing act for the world's evils; without him, mankind has no guide outside of the sins of the flesh, sins that Hazel ironically embraces for all of his preaching against their existence. He shacks up with a prostitute, a bloated mess whose seductive pull over Hazel and several others may be the result of her gluttony appealing to their sense of greed. Sabbath Lily, Asa's daughter, appears virtuous and plain, but this is just an act, and she reveals her true nature to Motes by writhing on the ground in unbound sexuality like an unsaved Mary Magdalene, or perhaps the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Yet where Hazel cannot see his own sin, those around him commit various transgressions knowingly. Asa only pretends that he cannot see, having promised to blind himself with lye to win converts and donations years earlier. Sabbath Lily uses her virginal look merely to heighten her sexual appeal. Even Enoch Emory, the young, lonely man who follows Hazel out of loneliness, has a darker side to him, pursuing a human connection to the point of desperation (though Huston replaces Enoch's creepy isolation with comic relief in the film's most glaring flaw). People pay as much attention to Hazel's sermons as they do of proper Christian services, but a preacher named Hoover Shoats (Ned Beatty) spots Motes railing from his car hood and decides to promote the man. Part of Hazel's new religion stresses that you don't need to donate money, and Shoats demonstrates why the young man feels so strongly about this when he jumps in front of Motes and starts working the crowd into giving him money. This preacher sees dollar signs, commercializing Hazel's deeply personal attempt to purge himself of his childhood trauma and tainting this new religion the same way that Shoats and people like him ruined Christianity.

Here the lines between O'Connor, the deeply committed Catholic, and Huston, an equally adamant atheist, meet. Huston attempts to define Motes through existential terms: first he dresses like a preacher, then adopts the role to fit the suit. Later, he begins to morph into a new Christ and changes accordingly. For O'Connor, atheism may be a flawed state of being, maybe even irreconcilable with the nature of metaphysics and the supernatural, but she paints men like Hawks and Shoats as no less vile than Hazel, and even a great deal worse. These snake oil salesmen make their living not by rejecting God but by redefining Him to sell a product. As Hoover says in the book regarding Motes' Church Without Christ, "It's based on your own personal interpitation [sic] of the Bible, friends. You can sit at home and interpit your own Bible however you feel in your heart it ought to be interpited." By denying God, Hazel at least has a clear idea of what the deity supposedly is, while Shoats encourages people to convert by sacrificing nothing and forcing God to bend to the rules set by each individual. (Could O'Connor's outlook in 1952 have been any more prescient to the age of the televangelist, of Bible outlets of various translations and of marketed salvation?) When Hazel attempts to cast off the man, Shoats rallies and tells him that he'll simply find someone to play Motes' prophet and run him out of "business." "What you need is a little competition."

Every O'Connor story contains a moment of "grace" -- in a loose, violent, Catholic sense -- and her fury toward Shoats is adroitly conveyed when she hinges Hazel's own moment, or one of them, on the murder of the man Shoats dresses up like Motes. A horrific play on the Cleansing of the Temple, Hazel may well be acting as God's agent in destroying the man, purging the world of a false prophet and setting the man on his path to becoming a perverted vision of Christ before Jesus, in Huston's own, direct terms, "wins."

Working in his more sober style, Huston cannot possibly see the event as graceful even by O'Connor's definition. The hired man, played by William Hickey, is a worn-down, penniless drunk who takes Shoats' money because he needs what he can get. When he speaks, he does so in a halting mumble, suggesting brain damage of some sort. When Hazel catches up to the man alone, however, he rams the impostor's car off the road, forces him to remove his preacher's clothes, and then runs the man over in quick succession. With only a minute or two of screentime, Hickey makes his character so sympathetic and ignorant that to see him murdered so brutally does not spark reminders of Christ's righteous purge but merely disgust. Huston commits to making Hazel into a Christ figure, but he gets the last laugh by portraying this turn as darker than anything in the man's previous character. After running him over, Motes gets out to insult the dying man, who begins to repent for his sins and even begs, "Jesus, help me" while looking right at Hazel, who is so consumed by hate that he leaves the man to die without another word. If Jesus must win, contrary to Huston's own wishes, then the director can at least make it a Pyrrhic victory.


Despite preaching for a new Jesus, Hazel had previously rejected replacements for Christ, going so far as to bash a mummified body Enoch stole to use as Motes' "mascot" against the wall and toss it out the window when Sabbath Lily brings it to him in swaddling clothes as if the Virgin Mary presenting her newborn son. Yet the sickening, chilling interlude with the impostor marks a change in Hazel that causes him to rapidly adjust to the role of the new Jesus he called for earlier. He actually blinds himself with lye, scaring off both Asa and Sabbath Lily by confronting them with true belief, returns to filling his shoes with rocks and screws and even wraps his torso in barbed wire. In a world where no one cares about Jesus, this upstart icon cannot even find someone who hates him enough to make him into a martyr, forcing him to do all the torture himself.

I realize that I have used all these words yet devoted none to Brad Dourif's performance. Dourif's presence alone challenges any preconceived notions of Huston's style. One of the embodiments of the old studio system, Huston would be one of the last people I would think to direct a film with Dourif in the lead. Dourif, who came to prominence as the stuttering, infantile yet intense Billy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, is one of the symbols of the more daring edge of New Hollywood, an actor so dedicated to his craft that he actually went back to acting school after being nominated for an Oscar. Where contemporaries like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper portrayed intense madness on the screen with a subtle layer of drug-addled mania, Dourif communicated pure insanity, an instability that seemed to come directly from him (speaking of which, how wonderful was it to see Werner Herzog play Dourif against his clearest mainstream descendant, Nicolas Cage, in Bad Lieutenant?). Dourif admits that he was not Huston's first choice and only got the part because Tommy Lee Jones was not free, but he brings his frightful dedication fully to bear: his icy blue eyes can barely hold back decades of Hazel's pent-up rage and pain, his frame shaking just as violently as his terrified childhood self. Every inch of him bristles as if connected to a live wire, and the venom in his voice seeps into your pores. My only previous connection of Huston to the New Hollywood movement was his performance in Chinatown, but his appearance was itself a reference and -- when examined in the context of his character in the film -- a commentary on Old Hollywood style and the darker implications of Hays Code films now brought out for all to see.

Reportedly, he and Dourif clashed at several points during the production, from the actor's presumptuous pursuit of the lead role to his protests over a scene Huston loved that Dourif felt killed the flow (the scene was later cut). Yet they find a beautiful, unexpected harmony together, Huston's workmanlike direction gaining an edge from capturing Dourif's fury even as it places us just far enough from Hazel's thoughts to allow us to be repulsed by him just as Huston and O'Connor want us to be.


"Jesus is a fact!" screamed Asa to Hazel in his first encounter, a loopy, stereotypically fundamentalist proclamation of hollow piety, yet one O'Connor agrees with on some level. Even at the beginning, she sows the seeds for Motes' transformation, eying a woman on the train who looks too intently at the price tag on his suit and asking her, "I bet you think you've been redeemed, don't you?" like the vengeful Christ who haunts Hazel's thoughts. By the end of the film, Huston has built upon such moments to turn Hazel into a Jesus who seems to only bring pain to others, not deliver them from it, though even that is giving him too much credit. Only the spinster landlady takes any interest in the mutilated Hazel, and her romantic feelings for him are tinged by budding religious need; when she declares her love for the Stoic, disinterested man, she phrases her statement as if preparing for a baptism, saying, "I've got a place in my heart for you." Motes balks at the suggestion and leaves without a word, but his wounds get the best of him and he dies in a ditch a few days later. Police cart him back to the landlady, believing him unconscious and demanding that he pay her owed rent, and the film closes with her entreating Hazel once more, only for him to lie on the bed sprawled and immobile as she tries to stir him.

O'Connor plays this moment as Hazel's relief from torment, a reunion with the God he hated so long -- O'Connor always forced her characters to die to know full salvation, death of course being a necessity for the afterlife. Huston, however, hints that this may be the start of the new religion, with one person, the one person who loved him, no less, taking up the charge for Hazel's Church Without Christ and using him as the martyr necessary to win converts. Naturally, she will speak glowingly of her idealized vision of Hazel, and if word can take root, Hazel may morph through the generations into a vision of purity to guide humanity. Ergo, Huston darkly and ingeniously postulates that this is the story of Jesus himself. No other figure suffered so terribly to fulfill the strict wishes of his patriarch, and who's to say that Christ wasn't a madman who gripped passers-by and screamed against the current state of spiritual being, heeded by only a small group before his death. It took centuries for word-of-mouth to make Christianity such a force that persecution could not hold them back, and the ending of Huston's Wise Blood turns the entire story on its head: what if Hazel didn't refashion himself into a Christ figure so much as Jesus once grew out of a man like Hazel? Auteur or no, find me another man in his seventies who would make such a film for his 33rd feature.

Ace in the Hole

By most accounts, Billy Wilder became a director not so much because he was interested in the visual craft of filmmaking but because he felt it the best way to ensure that what he wrote in his scripts would been seen in the final cut. Yet he's still earned himself a place in the pantheon of film directors, if for no other reason than he put Billy Wilder scripts on the big screen. Regardless, Wilder's visual talents, though certainly secondary to his calling as a writer, have been underrated by many; his style, as honed and sharp as his dialogue, serves the same purpose as illustrative passages in novels, to communicate setting and character in a way that speech cannot, complementing story and action with engaging prose.

Consider the first scene of Ace in the Hole, Wilder's disturbingly prescient look at media circuses. Chuck Tatum, disgraced big-city journalist, is stuck in New Mexico with a broken-down car. We see him being towed, a visualization of his uselessness and dilapidation, yet Tatum sits in his car lackadaisically reading his morning paper, having turned the ignominy of being unable to fix his vehicle into making the tow driver into some sort of chauffeur. Without a word, Wilder establishes the character who will subsequently walk into the office of the Albuquerque paper he was reading and proudly crow that he's a "$250-a-week newspaperman" and doesn't look a touch humbled when he offers to work for $50, even $45, as a result of his numerous firings for slander, alcoholism and other issues. Played by Kirk Douglas, Tatum exudes even more sleazy arrogance; Douglas is the reigning monarch of cinematic slime, capable of playing the noble hero (both of his films with Stanley Kubrick) but in his element playing, in his own words, "sons of bitches." He practically seeps manipulation and avarice, acting traits he somehow passed on to his son Michael, who may be the last great anti-hero.

Tatum plans to stay in Albuquerque just until he can latch onto a story to propel him back to the big leagues, at which point Wilder abruptly cuts to the cocksure journalist still stuck in town a year later. Riding out with an idealistic young photographer, Tatum still maintains his bravado but can scarcely contain the look of hunger when the two happen upon a small town where a man has become trapped in a local mine while excavating Native American relics. No one on the scene will enter the unstable cave, but Chuck immediately volunteers to enter. Upon finding the man, Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict), Tatum displays a heretofore unseen soft side, reassuring the trapped man and speaking in a higher register as if parodying the stereotypical "'50s voice" of the fresh-faced innocent. When Chuck suddenly brandishes a camera, however, he exposes his facade: he just wants this man for the story, and the smile he gives Leo is genuine, but it comes not from concern for the man but a vision of the attention his byline will receive when he starts writing about this jackpot.

Made in 1951, Ace in the Hole came out in a time when radio had set in motion a shift in newspaper writing, away from the yellow journalism wars that actually created real conflicts at the turn of the century: with radio and -- as the decade wore on -- television satisfying the demand for sensationalist news by providing sight and sound to items that always relied on dramatic thrust, papers refined their approach, sharpening writing to concise, factual bursts with just enough style to make sure people read the substance. More than ever, you could open up a paper and trust that you were reading a true story and an important one.

Into this world Wilder introduces Chuck, a 21st century muckraker having traveled back in time to wreak havoc upon the public trust. Upon reaching the Albuquerque paper, he looks at an embroidered cloth reading "Tell the Truth" hung over a desk with such mocking smugness it's a wonder he can even speak kindly of it sarcastically. He immediately turns Leo's situation into national news, aware that, if he can stretch the story into a human interest series, not only can he attract the attention of the major papers, he might put himself in for a Pulitzer. So, he commits what must surely be one of the most monstrous acts in cinematic history, one committed not by a lurking vampire or a mustache-twirling bandit but a man charged with informing the public: he strong-arms the engineer tasking with digging through to Leo to use a procedure that will take six days rather than a far quicker one that will have the man out and safe in six hours. Before you can even wrap your mind around the sheer, unabashed evil of that action, Chuck then coerces the seedy local sheriff (played by a deliciously greasy Ray Teal) into granting him exclusive access to Leo, thus giving him all the relevant stories. In one fell swoop, Wilder anticipates the sensationalist, gossip-driven media climate in which we find ourselves today, and he does not limit the attack to Chuck alone: when other reporters arrive and find themselves blocked by the authorities, their outrage seems to bubble forth from their jealousy that Chuck got there first. They don't give a damn about Leo, either, but they want their share of the circulation-increasing story. "We're all in the same boat," one journo coos to encourage Chuck to drop the blockade. "I'm in the boat," Chuck replies, "you're in the water."

Yet the most damning aspect of Wilder's misanthropy is how he prevents his story from playing as a mere screed. He does not make Tatum into a symbol so much as simply the eruption of dormant public desire for thrilling news. Critics at the time, who all would have been newspaper writers, lambasted the film for its cynicism, but would any of them deny that, if one didn't know what strings Chuck was pulling behind the scenes, that Leo's story is truly compelling? Would any one of them not read such a story -- the scenario of Leo being trapped was itself taken from the real story of one W. Floyd Collins, whose unfortunate mishap in a Kentucky cave in 1925 won writer William Burke Miller the Pulitzer -- and not be moved? No, Wilder undercuts Tatum's vile nature by making him a writer who knows what makes great news.

And boy does this story make for great news. After the first article runs in the paper, a few curious tourists show up, speaking of offering their concerns but also willing to spend money and gawk at the site. By the end of the week, thousands have converged upon the excavation site, and a literal carnival has sprung up to match the media circus. It has often been said (rightly) that gossip tabloids and the like only cater to a market fueled by public demand. If one paper refuses to engage in the current fascination with celebrity and tearing down celebrity, another five will shove their way into the gap and make money that papers can't afford to lose. We are all in this together, and when even the kind, innocent young photographer is drawn into the party atmosphere and crows that his photos might earn him a spread in Life of Look, Wilder goes far beyond any facile summary of his cynicism and into a terrifyingly realized realm that looks only more acute today.

If the shadows weren't a big giveaway -- and Wilder was one of the great masters of shadow -- that Ace in the Hole is as unorthodox yet bona fide noir as Sunset Boulevard, then the character of Leo's wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), proves it. Chuck is a singular anti-hero in noir, and he requires an equally original femme fatale, but Lorraine delivers in spades. When Chuck heads over to meet her while working on his first story, the young bleached blonde reveals that she's planning to use the opportunity of her husband being trapped to leave him. Chuck convinces her to stay because he needs her looking supportive to sell what must end a happy tale for maximum effect with the readers, and he sways her by pointing out how much money she can make off the visitors.

Together, Tatum and Lorraine make for a despicable pair, each filled with as much loathing for the other as they are for everyone around them. Even Tatum marvels at Lorraine's open hatred for her humdrum husband and her desire to escape him for a more rowdy life, disgusted by her glee over the matter. She smiles like a schoolgirl telling him of all the cash she's taken in, and Tatum tells her to wipe the smile off her face before going back out to face a crowd that will notice her joy. To ensure she does, he slaps her twice with such unexpected force -- there is no pullback, and Wilder only shows Sterling's face as Douglas' hand moves back and forth across it, preventing us from reading his face and anticipating the strike -- that you feel it too. This pattern of abuse turns Lorraine against Tatum, and whatever trace of vulnerability, however perverse, existed in her is purged by the time she comes to him a few minutes later and quietly but forcefully tells the writer, "Don't ever slap me again."

Sterling forms a key foil to Douglas, matching the acrobatics of his over-the-top facial expressions with an endothermic scowl. She moves with an alien stiffness, playing the part of the shocked spouse until she gathers enough cash to satisfy her before leaving. Her sinister plotting anchors Douglas and enhances both performances because the actor is free to ham it up, to visualize the sheer madness of the public fascination with death and their belated wish for everything to turn out OK, while Sterling reveals that such behavior is not the product of people like Tatum but of her. People like her start the ball rolling with their non-expressive reactions, and it snowballs until someone like Chuck has to project of all of the pent-up emotion just to vent the collective schadenfreude and avarice of the public.

Naturally, one expects good writing from a Billy Wilder film, but this may be his leanest work. Entire characters can be defined in a single line, such as Tatum pointing out that the head of the Albuquerque paper wears both a belt and suspenders, signifying that he is overly cautious and wary. Later, Chuck encourages Lorraine to go to church to keep up appearances, but she replies, "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." These cast-off bits of wry observation fit the tone of a film about journalism: concise but powerful, telling you everything you need to know in a few sentences. (Wilder, like nearly all the great film writers of the classic age, started out as a newspaperman himself.)

It's a miracle this film got made, even with the wild success of Sunset Blvd. essentially guaranteeing Wilder whatever project he wished to make. The Hays Code office intervened, of course, forcing the director to soften the corruption of the town sheriff, but this is one of those films where you're glad someone stepped in and made sure the bad guy got what was coming to him. Chuck Tatum could very well have gotten away with all this today, plagued by a small pocket of guilt he could drink away upon returning to New York. Instead, he bleeds out just after Leo finally dies, stabbed in the gut by Lorraine after abusing her one too many times. Having finally felt some pang of remorse for his actions, Chuck nevertheless is beyond forgiveness, and he dies a moral Antichrist, his death damning his profession for all time instead of pointing the way to salvation. As ever, Wilder saves the best for the very last, as Tatum staggers back into that local paper for one final moment of self-indulgent triumph. "I'm a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman," he gasps defiantly at Mr. Boot, "But you can have me for nothing." Then, this wretched beast finally collapses, falling down dead and staring at the camera into the audience who will cluck and rage over the movie then fulfill its dire vision. Billy Wilder was the master of endings, but none stick with you quite like this. And thank God; one such case is haunting enough.