Review: Paths of Glory (1957)

Paths of Glory (1957) 
Dir. Stanley Kubrick 
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Adolphe Menjou, Ralph Meeker


Stanley Kubrick once said, "Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly....I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because that is the true image of him." The tension between this cynicism about mankind, its essential animalism, and our attempts to evade such a truth permeate much of Kubrick's work. Certainly this attitude informs his stunning 1957 anti-war film, Paths of Glory; rarely is mankind's foolish brutality so clearly at play.

 Set during a near impossible offensive by the French military during the First World War, it dedicates itself to the purgatorial idiocy and shocking arrogance of military middle-management. The officers here are self-satisfied, wealthy men belonging to a crumbling imperial age, of the sort who believe that all common soldiers are dispensable and that any slight unwillingness to die like a dog is an act of treasonous cowardice. Truly in the tradition of the "lions led by donkeys" approach to the Great War, Kubrick takes care to capture the officers' absurd near-grotesquerie, their handling with kid gloves of all issues, making such remarks as, "Your men died wonderfully," with utmost preciousness.

  The only man to seemingly see through this repellent charade is Colonel Dax, played with upright, righteous aplomb by Kirk Douglas. He has been asked to lead his men into a suicidal mission; when three of his men are court-martialed for cowardice in the face of the enemy, he takes a stand and attempts to defend them any way he can, knowing they have been made examples of. Kubrick was already showing his capacity for staging actors compellingly against filmic space; several long tracking shots follow Douglas around the trenches, barely flinching as artillery explodes overhead; men huddle to his left and right,  clusters of bayonet-ends poised idly in the air. In another scene, we see the regimented ornament of soldiers and officers standing at attention; they form odd black pockets and quadrangles against the courtyard where they gather, an alienating portrait of the insect uniformity of the military.

 In a scene where a tearful young German woman is shoved onto a stage in front of an audience of raucous French soldiers, we may fear for the worst. Her terror, and their lechery, is palpable. Instead, she begins to sing - in the language of the enemy, nonetheless - and the soldiers' faces slowly slacken from their hardened poses into a collective, cathartic reverie. Kubrick has allowed a small sliver of redemption for the human spirit, after all; decent men and women are crushed by the injustice of indifferent politicking, but also the fundamental absurdity of the war machine.

Periodical - Issues 2+3

 I'm very proud to be a part of Periodical, a quarterly iPad-oriented film publication created by Adam Batty from HopeLies.com. Issue 3, focusing on Children & Film, has just been released as of this week, featuring my article 'Fatalistic Children: Out of the Blue and The Cinema of Dennis Hopper'. The previous Issue (2), on various New Waves, featured my article about Richard Brooks' 1977 film, Looking for Mr. Goodbar. It was an academic piece entitled, 'Freedom to Go to Hell: The Dialectic of Male Rage and Feminine Viewing Pleasure in the Hollywood New Wave'. You can find links to all of these below:

                                           Periodical 2 Online 

                                           Periodical 2 for iPad 

                                               Periodical 3 Online

                                               Periodical 3 for iPad

   

Review: Prisoners (2013)

Prisoners (2013)
Dir. Denis Villeneuve 
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Maria Bello, Paul Dano, Terrence Howard 

      Prisoners is the sort of commercial fare that holds up its end of the bargain in the endeavour to thrill, terrify, and entertain -  a draining, grim, and at times, vicious drama. Taking place in the colourless pine barrens of a Northeastern winter, the story centres around the kidnapping of two young girls on Thanksgiving Day, just outside their suburban homes. A mysterious RV has been seen parked nearby, and Jake Gyllenhaal, as black-clad young Detective Loki, is set on the case to arrest soft-spoken local oddball Alex, played by Paul Dano. Keller Dover (Hugh Jackman) is the father of one of the girls, a local survivalist-type who is enraged when Dano is released without charge. As the clock ticks away and Dover grows frantic, he decides to imprison Alex himself and take matters into his own hands to find out where his daughter is.

   Sparse and unadorned, with the aid of DP Roger Deakins' subtle, washed-out colour palette, the soundtrack is accompanied by little non-diegetic music, except for the occasional stir of faint strings. A bubbling tension builds as Loki - a prototypical noir cop everyman and a total cipher, emptied of any backstory - hunts for the kidnapper.  In the meantime, Jackman's Dover grows increasingly unstable as he clings to the illusion of control, and the families are put through ongoing trauma as the days stretch on with little hope. Loki's (at times uncanny) intuitive police work wins the day as Dover's brash behaviour becomes unhinged and detrimental. Utterly successful in its first act at twisting the guts of its viewers, it later falls into an over-reaching whodunit of sorts, knocking our willing suspension of disbelief one too many times not to interfere with the believability and cohesion of the story.

   Prisoners is one of those films that is so taken with providing suspense that it never truly addresses the moral dilemma that it plays its action against; revenge and torture as plot device, essentially. The film uses --  exploits, perhaps -- the backdrop of topical American issues, fiddling with its underlying social and political undercurrents, without any desire to interrogate or pass comment on them. Dover's torture of the suspect is never condoned, and a small moment between Loki and Mrs. Dover in a hospital hints at the detective's unspoken feelings where the distraught father is concerned. But in a plot that moves at too breakneck of a speed to consider anything too deeply, one should not expect any very serious contemplation.

Nonetheless, it's a story that is finely performed by its actors, and it sustains its 153-minute running time with a tightly-wound rhythm and faintly oppressive air. Unfortunately, the introduction of so many red herrings and plot twists late in the film leads to a convoluted, beleaguered third act. It feels like a shame for it to dig its claws in so deeply, only to retract them in the last 40 minutes of the film. Ultimately flawed but still a solidly gripping story, Prisoners' tension and miserablism is finely-tuned enough to make it salvageable from its shabby plotting.

        

Review: Los Olividados (1951)

Los Olividados (1951) 
Dir. Luis Buñuel 
Starring: Alfonso Meija, Stella Inda, Miguel Inclan

   Buñuel's first film in 20 years eschews much of his dabbling in Surrealist and Dadaist style; a director who changed approach and aesthetic frequently, he is quite unclassifiable in most respects. His grim realism here anticipates Pier Paolo Pasolini's early 1960's films; the directors share a mutual concern for the slums of mega-cities and and the moral ambiguity of the criminal underworld. Borrowing quite heavily from Italian neorealism, Los Olividados is an unflinching look at the vulgarity, filth, superstition, and illiteracy that these Mexican children have inherited as a result of terrible poverty.

  A group of street kids, including the misguided Pedro, are sucked into the dark orbit of the sociopathic ex-convict teen, El Jaibo - who eventually commits a murder and makes Pedro an accessory. Soon Jaibo is ruining every attempt Pedro makes at improving himself; he steals from Pedro's new employer, and turns up to wreak havoc outside the delinquent centre where Pedro is sent to clean up his act. Children, here, may be victims of their uneducated, indifferent elders and the vicious cycle of the slums, but they, too, are ugly and amoral; they attack the infirm, the crippled, and the blind with no pangs of conscience. In the fight for survival and bread, there is little time to spare for moral quandaries; and the adults they encounter are equally as vicious and petty.

Pedro's mother has no forgiveness or tenderness in her heart for her children; she is cold and bitter with her circumstances. Another hostile-to-change old man is, quite literally, blind to the realities of the street kids' lives and totally lacking in empathy. He is symbolic of the conservative attitude to law and order and juvenile delinquency; a hang-em-high mentality where criminals are seemingly created in a vacuum.

Buñuel, always a left-wing moralist at heart, sketches a bleak portrait of contemporary poverty; but the film's wild originality and bursts of poetic surrealism transform it into much more than a homage to the neorealists. An egg is thrown at the camera and slowly oozes over the lens; Pedro has a dream, closely aligning the maternal and death; a corpse reaches out from under his bed as he pleads for his mother's affections. There is little redemption to be found in the short, brutal lives of these peasants, child and adult alike. Much of the Mexican art community was disgusted with the film's portrayal of their homeland, but it went on to be shown at Cannes in 1951 and win the prize for Best Director. Buñuel cast an unflinching gaze on the moral rot of the slums, unwilling to ennoble the suffering poor or efface their worst qualities. Moralist or not, he maintained the urgency and honesty of neorealism by refusing to shy away from the unromantic conclusions to such dark, burdensome lives.