Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)

Twelve Angry Men makes me feel great, and I'll gladly watch it again and again until the day I die, but I find myself thinking it more frothy than I used to, a liberal feel-good fantasy movie.

Of course, who doesn't want to feel good about the idea that justice will be done by democracy, that faith in the human individual can overcome the indifference of the institutions of justice, that a good conscience can make a difference even in the most difficult of situations, that twelve men locked in a room will come, after a little shouting and a few tears, to the right decision?

And what, I asked myself as I watched it again last week, and the shot at the start of the film in which the boy's anxious face dissolves into the empty jury room, what if we take the film as a fantasy that justice will be done - on the part of the boy himself as well as for us?

But this strikes me as a really uncinematic film, not just in its theatrical restriction to the jury room (and I was struck on this occasion by the script's continual insistence that we should imagine the scene of crime, and of the witnesses, imagine ourself looking out of the window, hearing the EL Train, and so on. What if the boy did do it, though? What, more importantly, if we were to see him doing it - or, conversely, to see that he didn't do it? How would our faith in the image, or our suspicion of it, react with the questions that we're invited to have about his guilt or his innocence?

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

As the Joker himself (not to mention GWF Hegel) would tell us, every force calls forth a force in opposition, inimical but somehow intrinsic to it. And for all the critical praise and the box-office excitement that this film has produced, it was (inevitably) possible, long before its UK release, to read a website devoted to showing exactly why The Dark Knight sucks. I guess it hardly needs saying that it has a plot full of absurdities, a narrative that replaces tension with contrived thrills, that it's little more than a mechanism designed for the duration of 150 minutes (with its metronomic music, repeated attention to clocks and countdowns, and so on) to reassure its target audience that they won't have to wait more than 90 seconds for another explosion - or perhaps that they can allow themselves 90 seconds' intermission before they need to lift their faces from their iPhones, or from their popcorn.

The first thing to say about this disappointing movie is that Heath Ledger really is rather good, cruel and charismatic, funny without campness. Poor chap. But the second thing is that I just don't understand the origin of the idea that it's a film with any moral or allegorical weight at all. I looked back at the Guardian reviews, expecting to find adulation for its darkness and seriousness, but found Peter Bradshaw describing it as "overlong and overhyped but hugely entertaining", and Philip French cautioning us that "whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter".

So why would I have expected anything else? In spite of its visual phantasmagoria, The Dark Knight strikes me as a vacuous film, a film that ducks out of more or less every opportunity for ethical complexity. Consider its conclusion. We spend the entire film being told that Batman is an outsider, a near image of the Joker (this month's Sight and Sound gives us the perplexing, absurd line that "the one key difference" between Batman and the Joker is that the Joker kills people, and Batman doesn't), feared and ostracized by the people of Gotham. We know that this is the allegorical potential of the Batman character: Batman can show us the objective violence inherent in the system of justice, he can show us the personal consequences for those who act on behalf of the good, his treatment can illustrate the way that the polis rejects its own good. But Batman ends this film as a self-imposed and unquestionably good exile, not an outsider. Even if the Gothamites fear him, we don't. The message of this final moment is not that justice and crime are uncomfortably close to one another, that justice somehow requires and fosters its criminals (and again, it's the Joker who tells us this) - rather, that good men like Batman sometimes have to take a rough deal for the greater good. Batman takes one for the team and runs off into the night.

Consider, too, the bloated Harvey Dent sub-plot, which distends the film long beyond its running time, but which seems to have been inserted to suggest moral ambiguity: doesn't Two-Face show us the cruelty, the arbitrariness of justice, the lawman and the criminal as two sides of the same coin? Well, no. It's a plot that comes out of nowhere. There's no suggestion in the first half of the film that Dent is anything other than a blameless moral crusader. The name 'Two-Face' comes only from the corrupt and resentful cops whose force he has cleaned up as District Attorney. And his moral transformation is accompanied by a comic-book physical transformation (as the website above says, it makes him look like half an alien from Mars Attacks!, not a scarred monster. There's nothing complex about this man, and actually nothing ambiguous at all, either. He's a good guy who turns into a bad guy: he's no longer the man he was.

Consider, finally, the prominent role that Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) have in this film. Was there ever a pair of actors who could be chosen to suggest decency, to neutralize any moral ambiguity that Batman's actions might have had?

Even the cityscapes, I came to think, sucked a bit. Nolan says in Sight and Sound that these computer-generated vistas are not just a legitimate resource for a film-maker, but something that a director ought to employ, a technological way of fighting cinema's corner against home entertainment. "It's incumbent on exhibitors but also on film-makers to provide the audience with a reason to leave their homes." And these are spectacular, and in a way I liked the idea that Batman's natural habitat might be not the subterranean Batcave, but the top of the skyscraper: an urban eyrie. But how, if your view of the city is habitually the sweeping panorama, are you going to suggest and portray moral dirtiness and compromise? Even if they're shot at night, these visuals leave us just too far from the streets, marvelling at the spectacle of the city but never seeing it from ground-level, never needing to be afraid of it.

For this film, a C.

Double bills

Pat and I had been talking about double bills the other week, having watched Altman's Short Cuts for the first time in ages. It has such obvious links with Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia - Magnolia always seems much more than a film inspired by Short Cuts, more a remake than a commentary. It's also a film that I've come to know much better than Altman's. And as well as finding that I liked Short Cuts much more when the bravado of Magnolia was less fresh in my mind, it felt obvious that these two films would make a tiresome and very bad double bill - too similar, not enough distance between them for the marriage to be a productive one.

And then this month's edition of Sight and Sound arrived, with a feature on double bills (Iain Sinclair talks about them as an interbreeding, the formation of a composite work), and I thought it might be a nice idea to watch one of the pairs of films that they mention: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. And when Billy Bob Thornton's barber meets a coroner called Didriksen (the name of Barbara Stanwyck's temptress in Double Indemnity) about half way through the latter film, the light came on and the links between them started to flicker away.

The Coens are great pastiche-makers, of course, and their film is completely self-conscious in its pastiche - think of the final scene, in which we see Thornton transcribing his story for a "men's magazine" on the eve of his execution, not just an allusion to (and transformation of) Kind Hearts and Coronets, I thought, but also a tribute to the pulp fiction and cinema that the film mimics so well, and that surrounds Thornton on his desk.


But as we yoked the films together, as it became so obvious exactly what the Coens were pastiching, they pulled apart. And they pulled apart through their central metaphors. Double Indemnity is a film about the insurance system; the corruption of that system motivates all of its characters - the agents and customers of the insurance-game become complicit in its swindles, even as they seem to be pitched against one another. And Walter Neff's tragedy comes from the system itself: even as he imagines that he can play it from the inside, it drags him down, discovers him at the very end, at the moment when we realise that he too has been a passive instrument of an even greater swindle.


The Man Who Wasn't There, though, is a film about consumer culture. Everyone is a consumer, an investor; the film plants us in the affluent homes of the 1940s, post-war middle class, with their driveways and waste-disposal, their aspirations and their failures. Ed Crane is just a barber, but is he also more than a barber? That's the case that his lawyer makes at the end of the film, attempting to get him off the murder charge that he ends up facing. He's an allegory of modern man, says Riedenschneider, a simple little man caught up in a big system. And the film has existential ambitions - or at least Crane does, speaking about his alienation from the world, from the system that he has somehow stepped outside of. But has he? What's he hoping to gain from the $10,000 that he tries to extort? And hasn't his voice-over narrative distanced him from his world from the very beginning (unlike Walter Neff's, which is a way of reliving the squalid events that have landed him in his sorry predicament)?

I enjoyed the Coen film; I think it's beautifully edited, and I think the photography is sumptuous. But I guess I found it just a little uneven in tone, a bit baggy at times. There's a handful of scenes about flying saucers that interrupt the seriousness of the flow of scenes, and just don't seem to belong there; as the Coens overload their movie with references to the paranoias and quirks of 1940s Americana, they distance it in tone from the taughter, meaner Double Indemnity.

Then we watched Pick Up on South Street. Halliwell calls it 'over rich', and I suppose that just about sums it up. A gripping first scene, if obvious (and gross): the picking of a woman's purse in the New York subway as sexual violation. But then you're left with 90 minutes of macho-men, gritting their teeth and spitting as they worry about Commies, just itching to slap a confession, or a hundred dollars or a microfilm, out of one another. This movie had nothing of the qualities of the other two films, but it was amusing to see the neuroses that Wilder may have understood and the Coens may have pastiched, laid bare like that.

Terence Davies, Of Time and the City

I'm not sure how long the trailer will remain here, though there's a rather stylish website here, but I'm feeling really excited about this film.

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942); Rome: Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945)

Before I get onto Ordet: a double bill of films that we watched last night. Two films about occupation and anti-German resistance during World War Two, about patriotism and cynicism and about the moral choices that we make under duress: Roberto Rossellini's Roma, citta aperta, and Casablanca.

I don't know what I can say about Casablanca, except that to my surprise I found myself enjoying it a little more than Rome.


I think Rossellini's movie is absolutely great for about two thirds of its length, for which time it's a film about the connections that people make with one another in a city under occupation. A resistance leader has been sleeping with a young actress, but she doesn't know his name and he knows little about her; she is encouraged to betray him by a friend of a friend, of whom we know little; the inhabitants of a block of flats worry about the whereabouts of their children; a man is about to marry a pregnant young woman (Anna Magnani), and her family prepare for the wedding; a priest carries money to the partisans outside the city. The web of narratives emerges in a slightly confusing, piecemeal way. One meeting seems to drift to another, never quite coalesces into a single plot: it is an account of a city in which relationships are shadowy, in which men and women need to trust one another entirely but often know little about one another. A great urban movie: we see the comings and goings of city life under these terrible circumstances.

But then the film changes. It ends with a truly horrific scene, in which one of the resistance leaders is tortured. A blow-torch burns on the torturer's table; other implements of torture are visible for a moment; Rossellini's directorial restraint contrasts with the horror of the events. We had seen The Wind that Shakes the Barley a few days ago, and talked about The Battle of Algiers, and this movie brought both of those to mind: it is certainly no less harrowing than either, an incredible film to have been made in 1945. But it was at this point that, for me, it lost its moral complexity. It shifts from a depiction of the social life of a city under occupation to a glorification of the heroism of a couple of brave men under torture. And however terrifying this last section is, it has a little pantomime about it (the presiding officer, camp and cruel, with his threats - "you will never last out until dawn" and the suchlike - strutting away after throwing his gloves down on the table).

One of the resistance fighters says as he goes to his death at the end of the film that it is easy to die well: the really difficult thing is leading a good life. And that's what the best half of Rome, Open City is about: the mistakes that it's possible to make, the ease with which we can betray others, the way in which war and cruelty makes those social ties fragile, broken with great sorrow but little fuss, the terrible realisation of our casual wickedness. But the ending gives us a world of moral absolutes, the fearful courage of the silence of men under torture.

I'm giving Rome, Open City an A, and Casablanca an A too, dragged down by its structural simplicities, but bumped up for being just so slick.

Hiatus

I've been away for some time; but now I'm back for good. I'm shortly going to post some thoughts on Ordet, which we watched last night, but first of all, here are some of the films that I've watched since I wrote last time:

Wonderful films:

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)
Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)
Uzak [Distant] (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002)
Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966)
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
L'Enfant (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005)
Kes (Ken Loach, 1969)
All the President's Men (Alan Pakula, 1976)
Festen (Thomas Vinterberg, 1998)

Films that I liked a good deal:

The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, 2006)
No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
Sicko (Michael Moore, 2007)

A film that I was loving but was too tired to stop myself falling asleep after 45 minutes:

The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)

A film that I don't think is that hot, but which makes me feel great and which I'd gladly spend the last two hours of my film-watching life with:

Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)

Films that I quite liked:

Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979)
The Beat that my Heart Skipped (Jacques Audiard, 2005)
Stagefright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950)

Three films that I didn't really like very much at all:

Ratatouille (Brad Bird/Jan Pinkava, 2007)
The Silence (Ingman Bergman, 1963)
The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
O Brother Where Art Thou (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2000)

A film that I didn't like one bit (apart from Max von Sydow):

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007)

Pretentious, boring rubbish:

The Consequences of Love (Paolo Sorrentino, 2005)

And a few films that I would have watched whether I liked them or not:

Casino Royale; Bourne, Bourne, and more Bourne

And then, Ordet, which I think may have been the best of all. On which, more soon.

Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)

So.

Pat bought this DVD a long while ago, but we hadn't watched it together until last night - I think I was put off every time by these cheesy promotional images in which poor Cary Grant manages to look like he's anxiously forcing a smile and wishing that he was somewhere that he actually wants to be.

In the end, I was really glad that we saw it; and my prejudices about it were confirmed. It's a star vehicle through and through. Cary Grant plays a lawyer who has met a charming woman on holiday, and has arranged, impetuously, to get engaged to her. When he turns up at her father's house, he discovers that she is the daughter of a millionaire. And when we see her for the first time, we discover that the charming, witty girl that he has described in the very first scene is not, as we've been led to expect from the cheesy photos, Katherine Hepburn, but the dull, conventional Julia Seton (Doris Nolan), who is convinced that he can make a financial success of himself, that she can make him into an image of the self-made grandfather whose portrait hangs on the wall (and what is it about Cary Grant that leaves him, as in Notorious, overlooked by the portraits of his disapproving family and inlaws?) . Hepburn is her sister: unconventional and lonely, trapped in their cold museum of a house. The film needs to show the two stars getting together: Julia Seton stands in their way.

What Holiday left me realising, most of all, was what an amazing actress Katherine Hepburn is: I finished the movie in a warm daze of admiration. The essence of her screen identity in her best movies (e.g. The Philadelphia Story) is a process of self-discovery: she embodies a character who realises, over the course of ninety minutes, and as we watch her, that she has emotional capabilities and depths that she had previously been unaware of, that she can love and invite love. Hepburn is a mannered actress, and even her suggestions of a depth of character under the veneer depend at first on vocal mannerism (that lowering of her voice, at once a sneer and a suggestion of rough panic) - but then, as the film proceeds, her performance seems to discover an identity beyond that mannerism. That's what makes her so great, and so beautiful: that she can present herself on screen as the star that she is, so thoroughly aware of her established persona, so formidable, and also as a woman learning, before our eyes, what lies beyond that persona. And I wasn't prepared here for the pathos of that realisation, for the sadness of a woman who comes to see that in her isolation from the conventions of her surroundings, she may have put herself beyond love.

Holiday is a dull film, though, however captivating she and Cary are, because Hepburn's character discovers nothing, over the course of the film, that she didn't know at the beginning - and that we didn't know from the beginning. That's to say, she discovers that Cary Grant is charming, that he brings life into a deathly house. She already knows this when she first sees him. And we know it before the film even starts.

I give this film a B.