THE THIN RED LINE

For Terrence Malick (Badlands,Days of Heaven), the world is a cathedral. Even the most venal acts of man take place in sanctified space because it’s all sanctified. Malick hears celestial music emanating from the sky and trees, sunlight piercing a forest, water running over rocks. He communicates the celestiality he sees and hears through film’s essence, light. No director save Godard so adores or is so attuned to the luminescence of the world. Malick’s pursuit of that luminescence, and the indirect naturalist cadences of his dialogue, makes him a poetic realist.

The natural world cries out, begging man to see the potential for transcendence. But man’s too neurotic and self-invovled to heed the message. It’s not that he’d necessarily rather kill. He just wants a moment’s peace from the questions that torment him, and that rampant nature underscores. Might killing or avoiding being killed still even one of the voices in his head? Sadly, no. Men argue, mostly with themselves, about abstractions that the nature surrounding them—not to mention the other men trying to murder them—renders moot. Nature goes about its business, and that business contains no mercy. Malick embraces it all.

The Thin Red Line opens with a crocodile that seems to be Satan incarnate sliding into a scummy green pond—a transcendently beautiful scummy green pond—and sinking out of sight as apocalyptic church music soars. There, as they said in Vietnam, it is. We are entering a jungle, and it’s not that the jungle doesn’t like us. The jungle doesn’t care. The law of the jungle is exactly that, and it is that law which will keep the jungle what it is. But this indifferent jungle contains much man-made evil. That croc’s swimming around in the scummy green ponds of our souls. It’s bound to resurface somewhere. Keep heading into the jungle, and Satan’s going to manifest.

And boy does he ever. Based on James Jones’s novel of the American invasion of the Japanese-held Guadalcanal island in World War II, The Thin Red Line presents combat as a fever dream, and we are the dreamers. Malick edits so that every cut—every single cut to a human being—puts us instantly into the psychological state of the person he’s cut to. No film was ever edited like this, a $70 million indie art-house war epic that hurls us from one character to another for 171 minutes. Wounded men shrieking for enough morphine to kill them, soldiers within arm’s length shooting one another, generals throwing psychotic hissy fits (Nick Nolte as the embodiment of abusive paternal rage), whatever. The action might dominate the moment, but the men’s internal dialogues are not altered by the mayhem around them, or by the subsequent peace and quiet.

Criterion’s print captures all of Malick’s luminescence. The Extras feature a telling interview with casting director Dianne Crittenden, and a number of actors. The most articulate proves to be Sean Penn. While everyone’s in awe of Malick, Penn best describes what it meant for all these stars and 22-year-old then-unknowns to head off to Australia for who knew how long a shoot for the minimum possible money: “Career suicide.”

SHEEP HEAD NOIR FROM THE FROZEN NORTH

There’s much to be learned about Iceland from the bleak new noir Jar City:

1) Hardened, cynical, monosyllabic Icelandic homicide dicks pull up to drive-in takeaway windows—at establishments where they’re all crushed out on the serving girl—and order ‘the usual’: sheep head. ‘Sheep head’ sounds like Icelandic slang for almost anything other than a sheep head, but no...The serving girl hands the hardened, cynical, monosyllabic Icelandic homicide dick a luscious cooked sheep’s head under plastic wrap with mashed potatoes on the side, all ready for the microwave.Can I get that to go?

2) Hardened, cynical, monosyllabic Icelandic homicide dicks consume their pre-cooked sheep heads in their lonely apartments by gripping the sheep head at the jaw hinge, tearing off the upper half of the head, holding that head-half just above the sheep teeth and gnawing off succulent, juicy hunks.

3) Sheep head takes some chewing.

4) There are no attractive women in Iceland except the serving girl at the sheep head takeaway. Every other woman in Iceland is either a) side-show overweight or b) past seventy and really bitter.

5) Icelandic men are either a) tall, spare and monosyllabic or b) horribly fat, multi-chinned and physically degraded.

6) Icelanders are perpetually cranky.

7) Or drunk.

8) Or both.

9) Cranky/drunk Icelanders can tell hardened, cynical, monosyllabic Icelandic homicide dicks to piss off with no apparent criminal, civil or physical repercussions.

10) The most wounding insult for an Icelandic man is to be called a pussy.

11) Icelandic men who don’t chain-smoke or gnaw mad sheep head are pussies. Icelandic women tell them so, right to their faces.

12) Icelandic men attempting to order a vegan meal in an Icelandic cafeteria-roadhouse are told: “You’ll find none of that guacamole bullshit here, asshole!”

13) Icelandic men and women really do wear those frightening sweaters with antler designs and buttons the size of Communion wafers.

14) The landscape in Iceland makes everyone feel insignificant and temporary upon this earth. They then drink to excess and feel cranky.

15) Forensic police in Iceland handle decades-old corpses without benefit of rubber gloves.

16) All Icelanders are related to one another through a confined and isolated pool of common genetic material. Yet none of them sit on their porches playing the theme to Deliverance on their banjos.

17) Everywhere in Iceland looks simultaneously end-of-the-world apocalyptic, industrially wastelandic, repetitively bourgeois and smugly moderne.

18) Icelandic doctor/expert types have perfectly symmetrical, perfectly groomed snow-white beards.

19) In Iceland there is no shortage of thick white steam. It blows across bleak Icelandic highways in clingy, lingering, existential clouds.

20) Obese, multi-chinned, raving homicidal Icelandic loonies escape from solitary confinement with ease.

21) In Iceland, even the happy endings are tragic.

There’s a wonderful moment in the haunting, lyrical, self-consciously beautiful and faithless 1997 Swedish noir Insomnia when Stellan Skarsgård attempts to interrogate a surly Norwegian high school rapist. “I don’t speak fucking Swedish,” the dude tells Stellan. And since neither do we, we suddenly understand, without excessive exposition on the director’s part, that Stellan is a fish out of water, a herring out of Stockholm, flummoxed by the incomprehensible ways of his brunette neighbors to the east. And they are equally baffled by him.

Similar moments abound in the astonishing, streamlined, brutal Danish cinéma vérité street sagas Pusher (1996), Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands (2004) and Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death (2005). It’s not clear which Scandinavian city hosts these gritty, post-Scorsese, post-Dogme blood-fests. Wherever it is, it offers plenty of smack, crank, blow, whores and hoodlums killing each other over the right to sell same. The Pusher protagonists must cope with their own rabidly self-destructive natures, constantly escalating social/financial debt and extremely violent immigrant neighbors and co-workers. Some of these immigrants hail from the Middle East and some from Mother Russia. Their violence pushes the Danish (Swedish? Norwegian?) locals to behave even more like degraded animals than they usually might, which is plenty.

The Pusher series passed straight to DVD without benefit of American theatrical release. The Pushers form the most engaging, rigorous and thrilling body of thrillers made in the last decade, and the finest trilogy of films, period. Each one bests the last. Each is more violent, direct, credible and better cast than the previous. And each features mercifully less Swedish (Danish? Norwegian?) death metal on its rigorously ambient soundtrack. The only other trilogy that constantly improved would be Leone’s Clint Eastwood Westerns. If you disagree, please go rent Godfather III.

Jar City comes from Iceland, a land we’ve been indoctrinated to believe consists of high-cheekboned girls and boys giddily bouncing around low-ceilinged bars listening to Sigur Rós cover John Phillip Sousa or something equally Icelandically loveable and incongruous. Or else they’re all getting along famously while sneering at outsiders who don’t share their island utopia and limited, self-regenerating high-cheekboned gene pool. Perhaps if Iceland, Sweden and Denmark weren’t held as the very models of social utopia, the deep strain of hopelessness that infects these far northern noirs might be less shocking. Clearly American capitalist society generates crippling nihilism and inertia in every sensitive citizen. But way up and over there they’ve got in its place socialized medicine and free bus service, etc.. What’s bothering them all so?

Whatever social benefits he enjoys, the hardened, cynical, monosyllabic Icelandic homicide dick at the core of Jar City is being devoured from the inside out by something. And so, apparently, is everyone else (except maybe the vegan-ordering, non-smoking, non-sheep-head gnawing assistant homicide dick: you know, the pussy.) And as they are being eaten from within, recurring close-ups of steaming, viscous gobbets of animal flesh being shoveled into gaping Icelandic maws would suggest that Icelanders are simultaneously devouring their culture and taking little nourishment from the meal. Everyone stares—with a full belly—shell-shocked into the Icelandic middle distance with such resignation, such knowing acquiescence to Lutheran predestination. And yet, they strive to make order out of Icelandic chaos.

Jar City shares with Insomnia and the Pusher trilogy a believable, tragic sense of ever-present doom and an atmosphere in which every action—except those that stave off existential nausea by way of degraded kicks—is demonstrably meaningless. The spare, tough style of these films mirrors the air of dread and futility, of the claustrophobia of the social and interior prisons confining the characters. There’s a welcome Scandinavian horror of decoration driving Jar City, and the director holds the mood with only an occasional slip into self-indulgence.

Given that noirs are usually set in big cities, it might seem strange that so tiny a population could develop unsolvable crimes. But in such an isolated place, everyone’s business is everyone business. Which is why, of course, everyone’s becomes furtive and rotted from within by all their repression. With all those prying eyes, the social contract survives only under an self-imposed ethos of wide-spread passive aggression. No one can tell anyone off to their face—everybody has to see everybody else at the supermarket the next day. So everyone conceals their grudges and seethes.

Or murders.

THE FURIES

This human being possess identifiable gender characteristics.Can you name them? © Paramount Pictures

Winchester ’73, Mann’s revenge saga starring Jimmy Stewart (and featuring Rock Hudson in his screen debut as an Indian chief), seems closer to naturalism than any prior Mann film. Characters walked, talked, stood, shot and rode much as human beings actually might. Gone was the over-stylized speaking, the stone-faced men, the constantly hysterical women. The pacing, too, seemed to mark a new Mann-gone was the usual sense of glaciers whizzing past. So, it’s reasonable to assume that his following films would become even more naturalistic, more reasonable in tone and narrative, less operatic. But, no…

Mann is tricky. His films are acquired tastes. He made a couple of classic noirs that are almost impossible to sit through (please see: glaciers, whizzing, above) and yet irresistible—T-Men and Border Incident. And he made Raw Deal, an almost perfect, perfectly cheesy, perfectly perverse noir and the only noir in which a woman provides the narrative voice-over. Mann then brought his noir sensibility to the Western: humans treat each other poorly, love spells doom, men’s obsessions obliterate all common sense or worthy purpose, the landscape-the world itself-overwhelms human intention and all effort comes to pretty much naught. Unless that effort involves killing someone, and then it’s rewarded, no matter how difficult the aftermath. Lots of people die in Mann westerns. It’s usually the vanity of others that kills them.

The Furies - Mann’s first film after Winchester ’73- contains all the Mannian tropes, for good or ill: clumsy transitions; weird gigantic close-ups of actors speaking in forced monotones; vengeful murder and vengeance, period; supposedly sex-object dudes who behave like walking corpses and the overly-ardent women who love them. It’s an unsettling mix of Mann at his most naturalist (Walter Huston playing the daddy from hell with such force of personality and humor) and most artificial (Gilbert Roland and Wendell Corey doing their best I-Am-Robot impressions).

And yet, The Furies remains Mann’s masterpiece, the apotheosis of his style and themes. Barbara Stanwyck plays the toughest, most daddy-fixated woman in the history of Westerns. Her relationship with Walter Huston is astonishingly perverse, pretty much the sickest father/daughter connection until Walter’s son John made all The Furies’ implications manifest in Chinatown.

Victor Milner provides the epic, operatic cinematography, and he had shot 129 films prior to The Furies, including Unfaithfully Yours for Preston Sturges. Milner holds to Mann’s John Fordian motifs-the sky dominates, the earth reaches to the far horizon and the protagonists stand alone and abandoned in between, floating above one, crushed by the other. Milner brings the same grand aesthetic to interiors and close-ups, occasionally with unintentionally camp results.

The Furies concerns will, and how the world bends in the face of it. Stanwyck wants what she wants, and when she and her dad’s wills align, none can stand against them. But they clash, inevitably, and the collateral damage scorches the earth and the soul of both combatants.

Maybe it’s intentional that none of the male characters can match Huston and certainly all the women pale in the face of Stanwyck’s gender-bending power. Mann suggests a hierarchical universe, one predicated on Nietzsche (or the Hollywood system). Mann’s ruthless view of human nature elevates the story to another realm of profundity. Though the Furies claims to be a Western, it plays like the Old Testament, or Greek tragedy: when the gods rumble, look out below.

JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE'S LE SAMOURAI

A Puff of Smoke: 
Like Leone’s Westerns, Le Samourai invents a genre while transcending it.

Jean-Pierre Melville’s cool Zen-noir, in which style and substance are so intertwined as to be inseparable, relies a savoring of noir conventions, on deafening ambient sound (no silent room in any film was ever louder than the many silent rooms in Le Samourai), almost no dialogue and the willingness of the viewer to be entranced (that is, the film is really slow).

Alain Delon plays a mysterious hitman; the movie opens with a shot of an apparently empty room. We only know Delon’s there when he exhales a lungful of Galoise Blue. Thus Melville lets us know from the get-go that Delon’s character is all myth—he has no more reality than a puff of smoke. Yet, he’s fascinating…Delon’s pulls a contract job, leaves a witness alive, visits his mistress, steals a car, uses his pet canary to detect eavesdropping equipment left in his bed-sit by blundering cops, steals another car, beats the living daylights out of a couple of French hoods and takes a very long, complicated ride on Le Metro. The effect owes more to Bresson than Bob Le Flambeur (Melville’s comedy of manners masquerading as a bank-heist flick).

Delon and Melville are after transcendence, a Zen doing so perfect that the task becomes irrelevant. Both achieve it. This work of genius has been a Holy Grail for noir-heads, Melville devotees and uh, transcendentalists for years. Our suffering at the hands of shit VHS copies & grainy French-format imports is over. Film Forum showed an awe-inspiring print last year; now Criterion has brought out the DVD version the film deserves. Features include an interview with Rui Noqueira, author of Melville On Melville, archival interviews with Melville & Delon, and an essay from David Thomson. These add value and insight to the film. Go buy it right now.

LASHINGS OF THE OLD ULTRA-VIOLENCE

The Baader Meinhof Complex, Dir: Uli Edel; Surveillance, Dir: Jennifer Lynch

The Baader Meinhof gang—as the press called them - did not play around. In the early 1970s, the Red Army Faction—the name they preferred— set off bombs in US Army barracks, German newspaper offices and various police headquarters. They trained in Palestinian guerilla camps, robbed German banks, gunned down district attorneys and kidnapped police chiefs.Our pyschosis features a sexual/political agenda. © Constantin Film Produktion

The RAF did not lack for hubris or competence as they helped to invent modern day terrorism. According to this dramatization of the eponymous non-fiction book, they could bomb, shoot, kidnap and speechify.  But they sucked at avoiding arrest.

And so the second half of their grand political drama played out in German prisons and courtrooms. Led by whining complainer journalist/social theorist Ulrike Meinhof (while on the lam she would not stay anywhere without central heating and kept telling the Palestinians what uncomfortable shitholes their desert training camps were) and charismatic sociopath Andreas Baader, the RAF made a mockery of the German justice system –an easy target, granted. While imprisoned, they gained increasing control over their day to day lives to the point that their colleagues smuggled in pistols and ammunition. Meinhof hung herself after four years in jail, much of it spent in solitary and the rest in the forced company of Baader’s main squeeze, Gudrun Ensslin. Apparently Gudrun—something of a sociopath —made Meinhof’s life inside an utter hell.

After  members of the RAF had been incarcerated for five years, Palestinian-trained terrorists hijacked a German commercial flight with the specific purpose of ransoming out the RAFers and terrorists held in other countries. When the hijacking failed, and the hijackers were shot down on a runway in Mogadishu, theRAFers died in their cells. The film suggests the two with guns shot themselves and the others followed Meinhof’s example….shortly after, a kidnapped German industrialist was murdered by the new cells of the RAF in  revenge.

It’s quite a saga, and director Uli Edel captures all aspects of the gang: their charisma, the romance of their struggle, their sex appeal (apparently the women robbed banks with Uzis and leapt over teller counters in mini-skirts, peasant crop-tops and lace-up knee-high white boots). Not to mention their at one time good intentions, the repressive German police apparatus which they so despised and the state-sponsored violence against protestors. With equal emphasis, Edel depicts the horrific bloody consequences of the RAF’s actions and the internal blood-letting without which no revolutionary cell would be complete.

Gudrun held Meinhof in such contempt that while they were training at a desert camp, Gudrun gave Al Fatah the secret code word that Meinhof’s fugitive children and nanny would assume came only from Meinhof. Al Fatah made it clear to Gudrun that if they picked up the kids - who were safe somewhere in Europe - they would be whisked into Palestinian camps and thier mother would never see them again. Without consulting Meinhof, Gudrun gave the go-ahead.

Edel walks the narrowest of tightropes and never falters. He shows the broader political actions that  triggered the gang’s rage and the internal logic of their arguments, yet never once fails to also show the dismembered bodies of their victims. Or the profound sexual kicks the gang got from its violence. Edel takes no moral or political position. He’s a historian. It's brave a film, a film so willing and even more surprising, able, to embrace such a narrative with the complexity it warrants.                      

He takes a while to do it, too. Complex is over two hours long, and every sequence seems necessary. The opening is a bravura urban spectacle. Iranian pro-Shah apparatchiks assault anti-Shah protestors on the streets of Berlin, and, with the cops’ passive approval, beat the living shit of out of them. In a moment evokingPotemkin’s Odessa Steps, the German mounted police charge down the cobbled streets into Edel’s deliriously tracking camera, smashing the heads of fleeing students. A right-wing goon squad executes a student in the plain view of the cops. They do nothing. This is presented as the seminal radicalizing event for the RAF.The brutal thrills of this sequence evoke Edel’s model: Costa-Gavras’ Z and State of Siege, two of the most visually dynamic political histories and political thrillers ever made.

Ours omits the politics.

Once the leaders get thrown into jail, the pace slows. The RAF argues with each other in their cells and the judge in court. Baader had better instincts for political theatre than politics, and he turned the courtroom into his stage. Newbie cells sprang up around Germany, and their younger more hardassed members easily equaled the RAF founders for viciousness. Baader plaintively tells one cop: “These new groups operating in our name are so much more violent than we ever were.”

Surveillance

Jennifer Lynch, the writer/director of Surveillance, takes a much more American view of sociopathic violence; her protagonists kill and maim because, in a modern America of alienation, crippling boredom and dysfunctional relationships, it gets them off when nothing else will.

This forms a rather old-fashioned view of the cathartic killing off of squares by a hip elite. It springs from the heyday of arty low budget violent exploitation, the American International Pictures and their imitators of the early and mid 1970s.

Bill Pullman appears to have aged poorly. He looks like a drunk Irish cop. Julia Ormond was once briefly the next big thing and here reclaims her career by turning an exploitation caricature into an icon of sophisticated sex appeal and depth. Lynch’s last film— ten years back —was the abomination Boxing Helena, which showcased her dad’s disdain for narrative and her own inability to convincingly create atmosphere. Here, there actually is a plot. Serial killers terrorize the countryside; Bill and Julia play the FBI agents brought in to bring them down.

They arrive in psychotic American nowheresville, where the local cops shoot out the tires of passing tourists, so they can sexually humiliate and rob them. Again, just for kicks and pocket change – harmless fun. The traffic stop scenes prove as harrowing as the explicit serial killer violence and get as close to a theme as Lynch embraces: America makes people crazy. And what do crazy people like the best? They like to make other people crazy.

The traffic stop cops, who see themselves as morally superior to the serial killers, are presented as only the first falling domino in the collapse of society. They and the serial kiiller are not ying and yang, but only points on a continuum. How old-school hipster is that?

The tiny cast are unknown but recognizable character and stage actors. They relish their hinky roles and only occasionally drift into self-parody. The dialogue offers plenty of Lynchian quirk and some really unsettling subconscious character reveals. Lynch toys with the idea that the killers are the sanest folks in town, if only because they are the least in denial. But she chucks that notion overboard for an orgasmic bloodletting finale both truly disturbing and creepily hot. Very AIP.

This would be a smart genre picture if this genre still existed. Now it’s an anomaly: a self-conscious, amusing, far from perfect but still compelling journey into unease, madness and blood. And all, it turns out, in the service of letting true love thrive.