March 5, 1997 [Donnie Brasco]

Johnny Depp wanted to get as far away as he could from 21 Jump Street--and jumped right into John Waters’ lap (lucky him--Waters or Depp, take your pick); and from there straight to Tim Burton, then Gilbert Grape--most of it good craziness, Depp as Toontown’s live-action favorite son, able to stretch and shrink like Daffy Duck through a keyhole.

But in Donnie Brasco he reshapes himself thoroughly into something closer to a Corleone than Edward Scissorhands--well, more Pacino than anything else, the two of them loping along the sidewalk, trading goombah-isms with actorly glee, giving in to the mounting tension of an old-fashioned Police Story/Prince of the City-styled procedural--with more humor and maybe even warmth, but with the same inevitable second thoughts and wounding regrets.  It’s almost as if Pacino’s Serpico cleaned himself up and took a good bite out of the movie-criminal cannoli--the richest stereotype of all, heart-attack stuff, fuh-ged-a-bow-dit--and strode next to himself, same gait, same hunched-against-the-wind posture, the walking double who’s younger and slicker--and who will replace the older man in a son’s betrayal with the requisite agony of recognition and descent.  

On the way down, though, the two of them have a wonderful time, Pacino with his Caddy and bluster, Depp with yet another new haircut, close and shiny in the same cold New York wind that blew Ratso and Buck no good as they too walked along the boulevard.

December 29, 1996 [Sling Blade]

It’s been about a month since I saw Sling Blade, and I keep hearing Karl’s voice thrumming like a resigned insect--and not in my head, not like Pete after watching The Fly (the one from the ‘50s, the big monster-Dad matched in fear and trembling only by the little elusive one, wizened and pleading for help); the boy was certain, at bedtime as he lay in the near-dark, that like Emily Dickinson he could hear a fly buzz.
 

No, it’s co-workers and people at the bus stop and behind me on the sidewalk grunting in assent that mm-HMM, they could have some-a those frenchfry potaters.  I get the gag, the throaty pleasure of doing that voice: like young Frank says, it’s a soothing sound.  But it makes me also think of a lawnmower at the back end of the yard, the blades beating like the wings of an angel--the kind who holds a flaming sword to cut down Things that threaten little children.  Billy Bob Thornton has shaped a character so mad/heroic that I half-expect him to don stiff Mycenaean robes and a mask and stand in front of a chorus to intone the poetry of lost childhood, time, and love--and the tenuous return of those things, momentary and amazing--as though the Minotaur were the victim, down down down in the high-walled passages, lost and hearing voices--but he finds the thing he must cut down, then stands there unmoving and waits for his breath to calm, and when he raises his face he’s in the open air with a little nervous boy, and he asks permission to hold him for a little while.

--And I turned away from that moment, I couldn’t bear the truth of this strange tale, on the surface uncanny but beneath as familiar as my own life--or the fear of where it could go: standing there with a hammer--I don’t know how I’ve come to be holding it--and then it’s something sharper, and I bring it down hard and lose everything to save the boy.

I don’t know if I could do it, could give it all up with one stroke--but Karl does, then smiles--Isn’t he always smiling? Isn’t it a smile?--and stands at the barred window like Antigone after pouring a little dust on her dead brother, certain she has done the gods’ work.

JUNE 23, 1996 [Lone Star]

In Lone Star the camera slips away from the talking figure, as though its eye were falling in discomfort or reminiscence, and wanders over to the next table where it's years ago and the sheriff's father is sitting there, about to become a sheriff himself--and after death beloved enough for the town to make him into a statue, a monument to his efforts to lay another row of bricks on the town's strong wall, set against the desert where the bullets lie in the sand for years and years, long enough to sow trouble, like dragon's teeth still hot.

But the son needs to see more than his father's statue--you can't interrogate stone; so off he goes, like some sideways Oedipus seeking a sand-blasted skeleton's murderer because that's his job, and little by little seeing where it leads, and swallowing the knowledge like a vengeful meal prepared by heartless enemies, his own flesh in his mouth.

John Sayles makes a Western film noir in which your gender and your race, your national origin--and your biological one, too--and even your point of view all get the third degree--and where the man who knows he's innocent finds out he doesn't know half as much as he thought, his loves haunting him out there all alone in the sand and scrub, a real Western hero one step beyond the frontier's margin where he finds little purchase to keep the past standing.

March 12, 1996 [Fargo]

“All for a little bit of money,” the pregnant cop scolds the clumsy, evil little men who run to death and leave double-crosses face-down in the snow, half your face gone, your leg tamped down against the blades to a fine red spray while you wriggle on the motel bed like a rabid monkey as they finally catch up with you, nothing left but a lot of white as far as you can see, as far as you can go.

Frances McDormand’s Marge seems at first another Coen bros. caricature, as real as Nicholas Cage’s imaginary accent in Raising Arizona, her own voice stuffed with big round Upper Midwest “Aw, yahs,” an amusing mannequin for Coen-speak--as pseudo-formal as a Jacobean tragedy, and just about as bloody.  But she knows what matters: the baby inside with a big appetite, the little postage stamps people need when they least expect it, the sympathy for lonely men way out there on a limb--and even some pity for the psychopath in the back of the cruiser, wounded at last so deeply that no unguent will assuage the ragged hole he’s opened in himself, so big he manages to fall right in--but his face is still blank, his lidded eyes looking at the back of her head without even defeat to give them light.  So it’s all up to Marge, her moral compass always pointing True North, as cold as Santa’s outhouse but clean and clear and certain that she will go home and pack it in at a suppertime table nowhere near Fargo.

March 9, 1996 [La Haine]

The ocean is nearby, but that doesn't stop L.A. in summer from laying down a thick hot blanket of doomed haze, the wind straight desert, no chaser.  Perfect weather for world-wide tinder.

I thought of Rodney King, how everybody for some godforsaken reason wants their hometown to be L.A.--and they want it whether they want it or not.  That hot wind gets around, all the way to the blasted suburbs of Paris, where French mean streets meet futile attempts to do the right thing.  The young men's music and stance and boredom are pure Hood, chins high but hands empty--guns don't count, they fall to the ground sooner or later.

But should such misery look so good? Do these boyz deserve such a funny trip home--funny for a while, with something like friendship and love mixed in? Well, this is the thing that saves the movie: the chance to lean into the wind with these tough guys, while Scarface slogans--"The World Is Yours"--and Clockwork Orange desperation propel them almost all the way home.  There's no Oz, but it's still a road--more like Alice's looking glass, where "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place."  Like the man says, so far, so good.

March 7, 1996 [My Neighbor Totoro]

I cringe as I write, “My Neighbor Totoro is magical”—but here the cliche works: the movie conjures, performs a number of satisfying tricks. And the first of these is to place the mother in danger without alarm--away at the hospital, an undisclosed illness creating the need for the father and children to move to farmlands--and woodlands, a beautiful harmony of trim fields and sprawling wilderness.  The mother herself, we can tell, is in no real distress: She is quiet, perhaps even a little weak, but still kind and beautiful; illness has not made her sharp or haggard.  And the movie is not thoughtless in setting her aside, but loving toward her, inviting the children to miss her with optimistic melancholy.

This first magic trick gets the children into Totoro’s neighborhood--the big stuffed animal, a thousand times more wonderful to discover than hordes of Hasbro-ready Ewoks or numbing Smurfs, and infinitely more exotic--although they snooze and snore like wind-tunnel pugs, their bland, watching faces seeming to take in the children as though those small things are barely there--as though it is the children who are the half-hidden sprites, the fleeting figures at the periphery.

That is the second magic trick: to allow children themselves to be magicians, like Alice who could shrink and grow.  But these Japanese girls don’t need to contort themselves. Their curiosity is the spell that sends them to the other side, and their open hearts are rewarded with the third magic trick: the love of the Totoros themselves, more than happy to let the girls snuggle and bounce on their deep-pile tummies, to ride in the catbus--a little scary, as so much good magic is, but just enough to make the stomach flutter a little in anticipation of the next little plunge--not too steep, not menacing at all.  More like Alice again, stepping through the looking-glass without effort.

They call the director, Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese Disney.  But his touch seems more fatherly, more understanding of children, like Chaplin--or, once more, Carroll.  In the end, My Neighbor Totoro doesn’t play by Disney’s rules, but invents its own mythology of contact and acceptance, of surrender to both the supernatural and the natural, the trees and tunnels of undergrowth as magical as the big fluffy monsters--and of course they are: Ask any child where she would like to go, and stay.  She may not be able to express it clearly until you take her to see this movie--where she’ll point up at the screen and make the dust bunnies scatter as she shouts, There! At the edge of that field where the nice grandma gathers vegetables, where the giant tree shades endless paths where small things walk just ahead and look over their shoulders to make sure I’m following.

January 9, 1996 [Twelve Monkeys]

Bruce Willis’ time-traveling lost soul sticks his head out the car window and breathes air he believes has no poison in it and listens to a song on the radio with such eyes-closed bliss that he made me ashamed not to do the same every day--even though his own days melt and warp as Terry Gilliam in Twelve Monkeys peels back the skull-flap of Time Bandits so that the reptilian brain can do its necessary work: survival at any cost, at any time.

I saw Chris Marker’s La Jetée on TV a number of years ago--PBS, probably, back in the ‘70s when you could see so many Janus films you felt as though the Cinématèque Française had turned up like a bookmobile outside your door.  Twelve Monkeys captures the sad suspension of Marker's still images and draws them along a ground-down Philadelphia that sees one shining moment--the giraffes on the bridge near 30^th Street Station--before it falls into wet wind and darkness--and maybe one more bright light, at least for a while: Brad Pitt in the loony bin, super snappy in his manic glee, seeing Something catching up with him and giggling at the look on Its face as It gets ready to gobble him up.

The movie feels bad for making its characters lose so much--but that’s what happens when you draw a circle, the graphite leaving a powder-burn spray as the pencil curves right back where it started and tells us that the start and the end meet one day--every day, maybe, and we should keep our eye on both just long enough to share the sadness of the little boy and the dying man, separated no more by the straight lying timeline.

December 31, 1995 [Restoration]

What a face Robert Downey Jr. has: charming, anxious, deadpan, melancholy, pensive, boyish, rueful, and on and on--and all at once.  I read a little gossip, see a little Entertainment Tonight, and know his reputation: another party boy raising his eyebrows at a square world that isn’t invited on the ride.  So far, it’s a part of the charm and a piece of the rue.

Restoration, then, sneaks in a little irony for him--and he puts on his wig and feathers and ruffles and wades into what may be his own needs.  But the picture’s more than that: It looks back at Hollywood’s Golden Age and sees much to restore there as well, and gets pretty charming itself with its contrivances and resolutions, rewards and losses.  It earns ours tears, but it knows it should--and I’m more than happy to comply, if only because it loves so much the world it’s making, and wants to do what it can for the people in it.  They made a humane movie, and Downey molds most of the terrain of that world, his eyes slow to blink as he appropriates the middle distance like no one else, claiming that suspended, uncertain space with a firm gaze--even while his grip grows unsteady and he looks away once or twice as he feels himself falling.

November 22, 1995 [Toy Story]

The bookcase of our old secretary desk, its glass-paned double doors locked with a skeleton key, acts as a family childhood museum--small things mostly, slender picture-books and staring dolls, dusty tiny figurines and gyroscopes, a three-inch-long cannon and a Chinese puzzle box, a Magic Pitcher left over from Pete’s backyard illusionist days, a Wham-O Air Blaster; plus familiar faces--Popeye, Mickey--mixed in with the long-gone or all-but-forgotten--Maggie and Jiggs, Skeezix.  A few Matchbox cars stand nose-first, their interiors dark, while a porcelain Peter Rabbit crouches, Farmer McGregor no doubt approaching.

I wandered over to look at it after seeing Toy Story--and knew that for every small thing kept safe, sitting in our living room so they could still see us, ten more are long gone, some of them dismantled or even firecracker’d--like the poor toys of the movie’s evil Sid next door--the old-time Bad Boy, Huckleberry Finn with a mean streak--and he’s as much in us as is our hero, Andy, who covets with an open heart.

And while this computer-cartoon is as dazzling as anything I’ve seen in this new Golden Age of animation, those two boys seem the most important, giving the toys their character, deciding their fates, showing us what to do with the little object we hold in our growing hand, while the toy stays small--but not young: in the end dust and rust and frozen clockworks will keep them still even when we’re not looking.  Andy doesn’t know that yet, which makes him the toys’ best friend and most reliable curator of his jumbled bedroom archive-in-progress.

May 7, 1995 [Picture Bride]

Toshiro Mifune suddenly arrives in Picture Bride to run a silent film in a sugar cane field and narrate the excitement on the makeshift screen.  He is an artificial samurai in a genuine war: between men and women, between labor and management, between lies intended to help and the truth that hurts and heals.  All of these big ideas occur in fields and by the ocean--both of them big, to be sure, but nothing like the cities and factories of other workers, where there’s little room to run and find.  Here in Hawaii it’s all green and blue and blue-green, with ghosts singing and water tumbling down.

Rio comes all the way from Japan to meet her husband for the first time--his photograph, though, is only a memento of his youth, while his actual self proves a trial. 

But like so many farm tales in the movies, there is something noble stirring in the waving fields, a sense of heroism against the rages of nature and men, and a tender touch for lost children and the souls of the departed.  Riyo does not want to stay--but she also doesn’t go.  Instead, she stands up and gets to work and finds nobility without anyone’s help.  It’s like The Grapes of Wrath without the long final stare into nothing--because no matter what, the mornings are bright, if you get up early enough to see them.  And if you’re as good as Rio at work and love, you find the strength to dance.

January 30, 1995 [Before Sunrise]

Am I supposed to see F.W. Murnau peeking out between the frames, his Sunrise all those years ago shining along the edge of his flowing camera, the Man and the Wife rowing far from the Other Woman? Maybe--if only because the young couple in Before Sunrise have not yet doubted each other--despite the man's insecurity masked as cynicism, his unwillingness to be fooled by life mostly bluster--sad, sometimes, if only because the woman offers such a moment to him, such a rare whim--more like genius, inspired by her own urge to move forward into an adventurous stroll all night long.

They talk about nothing and everything, of course, and fool at each others' sleeves and the napes of their necks, children left on their own but not afraid, drawing together like Hansel and Gretel without any witches. And yes I thought of those long walks Jean and I took ourselves when we were new to each other, finding out secrets and making admissions without shame, laughing at nothing at all and quiet just long enough to remember what to say. Murnau's lovers curl hands in murderous fever or fear; here Richard Linklater lets them take the long way home without regrets--their own loss invented almost as a game, a dare to fall in love in no time at all.

December 15, 1994 [Blue, White, Red]

I managed to catch the final film in Krysztof Kieslowski's "colors" trilogy, Red.  The first one was last year--December as well, I think.  Each of them seems like winter or autumn movies, some chill creeping in that threatens to turn love into something else: a ghost-double that looks like love but may be nothing but straw and feathers--or something worse, something soft and yielding, still warm, as though it had been alive just before touching it, but gone now.

That's my memory of White earlier this year, last winter. The little Polish man (reminding me of Polanski, maybe in The Tenant right before he goes mad--or is he possessed?) crammed into the stolen trunk, beaten but unbowed, seeming to seek vengeance on the woman he couldn't satisfy--but really it was love, a cold and slick-ice thing sweating and freezing; then calm and cool, trapping her like a fly he will never eat, just visit down there in the web getting dusty from prison silt drifting down on her, his at last.

Blue, though: an act of dedication and liberation, art and love and memory and guilt and fulfillment, a crowded movie with the loved ones dead but the song remains--cupped in her hand, maybe too gently--and taken from her; but that doesn't last, she knows what she owns, and she broke my heart in love for her because she ran away so well, erasing everything--except herself; that she carries with her, and her grieving, living self haunts her until she sees the ghost--so that she can remember, draw the notes on the staff she has erased--another ghost, a melody that makes the both of us cry at the end, but in some kind of joy.

But these two serve as prelude to Red, the one I think I'll hold closest.  The peeping-Tom judge hunches down and waits for dark; but the young woman will not let him be--will not let him be alone, that is, and she and the mended dog pry open his secrets and shame, and finally love breaks open like a small box worked and worked in your hands until the catch gives and spills everything out, sinking to the floor like the ferry in the Channel at the end--and who survives?  Everyone from the three Colors, while the judge gets to be the last to cry over the fact of love, hard and cold and beautiful and necessary.

I'm not sure if I can watch a love story again--or remember the ones I love, all the way back--without the French flag fluttering away in the background--snapping sometimes, the cold wind leaving splinters of ice along the edge--but, sentimental fool that I am, also bathed in unusual sunlight, the kind of weather you don't expect on the English Channel as the engines smoke and a few lucky survivors blink at news cameras so that we can count them--lucky, I think.

October 20, 1994 [Grave of the Fireflies]

Seeing the edge-of-town landscape in Grave of the Fireflies so quietly beautiful, so full of promise for any child alone and waiting, I expected a Totoro to show up any moment, one of Miyazaki's round and solemn sweethearts, to take the child's hand so softly nothing but love could be possible.

But the children here are dead--yes, slipping away in the firefly-haunted train, happy at last; but still gone, starved to death after the firebombing, mother dead too--never making it to the comforting hospital, ready for happy visits--and father as well, sunk by the Allies for the Emperor and the rice-paper Empire burning swiftly. 

I have seen the newsreels, the documents of bodies--Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, Bataan.  But here in a cartoon the little girl giggles and clutches her older brother---his face toward her bright and willing, firm and decisive--and then he turns away, and he is also a child, not even sure they're starving--not wanting to be sure, why would he?  Children are supposed to put up with anything--and maybe they don't know it, but they do, the strongest people in the world, the toughest and most resilient--and the grownups know it, too; why else would we batter at them as though we were hammering gold?--ah, what a lie.  We do all this to them because they don't complain, at least not much; instead, they slip away, out there to the hole in the hill where they set up a holiday camp by the water and pee where they like and cram down the rice--until it's gone and the little girl starves, slowly, while her brother watches, and then he gets to burn her up in one more fire and slink away to the train station where he can at last slump over and let go.

The little box he held with no more fruit drops inside but only ashes is tossed out the door and lands in the grass and spills out a few bits, some fireflies gathering to make a very little light.

September 30, 1994 [Ed Wood]

Before I can think about Ed Wood the movie, I must turn to Phil Hardy's science fiction movie encyclopedia, memorable because he says what must be said about a movie like Plan 9 from Outer Space: "It literally 'says' nothing, it has no characters, no story, no direction, no whatever"--this after frowning at those who "too often celebrate" it as the worst science fiction film ever.  But it's the kicker at the end that makes Hardy so smart: "it's a completely unstructured dream produced with no interference from the conscious mind at all."

Did Tim Burton and Johnny Depp read those words before grabbing piles of black & white film to run some light through it? Depp widens his eyes and plugs forward, one terrible shot after another dutifully poured like thin oatmeal into the camera, where it somehow becomes something Ed Wood called a movie.  Depp gives Wood a boundless enthusiasm for, even a kind of tender consideration of, the act of movie-making--but without any ability at all, not one little bit.  Hardy insists that Plan 9 expresses the "deep-seated fear of being taken over from within" without any artifice--read: ability to structure and shoot and edit and so on a movie--and thus "bizarrely shows how insubstantial such fears are in isolation." Wood does not engage us with his "barely watchable film"--and Hardy knows that it is "fitting" that it should be unwatchable--and Burton's movie refrains from laughing too much at Wood's dream rustling down there, deep deep down there in a camera obscura Wood's conscious mind has never seen.  Thanks to Hardy and Burton and Depp, I have come to see my own thoughtlessness in the movies, my own gaping stare, owning nothing, smiling like an idiot at the dim lighting and indistinct movement, or solemn as I stand with the man in the angora sweater by Bela Lugosi's coffin, waiting for the old dopefiend to rise and sneer at Karloff.

July 15, 1994 [Forrest Gump]

Tom Hanks has been eclipsed as our Beloved Everyman by Forrest Gump--and that's not so much an irony as an inevitability, the trajectory of both his and Forrest Gump's director's careers, a strange brew of sugar and brine, offering throwaway fluff one year and lead-pipe bludgeonings the next.  And out pops a movie that makes every heart swell in its final fifteen minutes--but earlier hammers away at the American Dream, a series of victories--on battle- and playing-fields, Great Plains open spaces and Gulf Coast waters--all landing randomly in the lap of a moron.

--And I mean that, as Broadway Danny Rose would say, with all due respect.  As Forrest makes his way through the second half of the 20th century, he discovers that everything he lacks is given to him, as long as he's willing to keep running.  It's as though Being There had been remade by Harper Lee on a dare: "Betcha can't turn Mortimer Snerd into Childe Rowland."  Because Forrest does brave many monsters, turns and turns and forges on--and always the Childe, never growing up all the way, the last finally first.

It's the best fantasy I've seen in years, Epic in an old-fashioned way--especially for the viewer, who changes as the journey goes on, even if Forrest doesn't.  Hanks never betrays Gump, never makes him to be less or more than he is.  It's a blank performance gently colored with the honest ink of a cartoon character, like Zemeckis' Roger Rabbit and friends, as affable an American as Marty McFly stumbling backwards through unyielding years, bullies and jerks at every turn.  I'm starting to think of It's a Wonderful Life, where another innocent is ground almost all the way down, until he figures out he's rich--which is, as Forrest notes, good: "One less thing."