Shades of Caruso

BFI LFF 2010: Blue Valentine / Biutiful / Essential Killing

It’s been a tough year at Shades of Caruso HQ. Not wishing to get into personal details, but if 2010 was a boat, it would be the Titanic after crashing into the Lucitania and the Poseidon on the slopes of Mount St. Helen. There’s been some highs among the lows, but we’ve had our fill of crappy luck. Obviously we’re not alone: the dire economy and the miserable cultural and ideological battles being waged in the West have tried the patience of at least a few dozen people, I’m sure. A bad time to release non-cathartic downer films, then. As this year has proved even crowd-pleasers have struggled: good luck to anyone who has made anything that challenges the Mass-Pacification Template that mainstream cinema often uses.

It would be nice to think that some emotional weakness on my part is the cause of my antipathy towards the three most downbeat films seen at the Festival, but honestly they’re just not that great. The reflexive addition of miserable finales as some kind of response to the often pandering feel-good endings of much cinematic output is the sort of thing that makes independent film such an unappealing prospect. If the downer ending is earned, I’m all for it, but too often it is appended through some misguided appeal to profundity, a futile attempt at cocking a snook at the “corporate product” that is just being used as a sugar-coated opiate to dull the senses of the masses, man.

The trilogy of cinematic downers I endured tried with all their might to harsh my mellow, though one of them managed to accept that maybe there is some beauty in the world, only to make a point that this will inevitably be destroyed by the unremitting bleakness of the human condition. Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine depicts the beginning and end of the relationship between Dean (an amazing performance from Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (arguably an even more amazing performance from Michelle Williams), skipping back and forth in time between the two states, adding poignancy to the drawn-out final day, and tragedy to the slow genesis of their love. For every happy ukelele song and dance moment there is a dead dog: for every declaration of undying devotion there is a brutal beating. It’s an up-and-downer!

There’s not much more to it than that, other than some unappealing Indie™ photography: 90% of the film seems to be little more than shots of people’s ears, as the camera seemingly sits on the shoulders of characters as they stare off into the distance or stumble over their semi-improvised dialogue. Cianfrance throws in a couple of final act revelations that cast the rest of the movie in a new light, but his decision to cross-cut between the hope of the past and the misery of the present means there is little else to be surprised at: we see how it started, but we also know it will end in acrimony and anguish. It’s an unavoidable side-effect of this otherwise quite interesting narrative choice, one that takes the equally-interesting time-skipping structure of Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer to its logical conclusion. It also serves as a warning to all star-crossed lovers to just not bother staying together as there is nothing but soul-crushing misery on the horizon: at least that’s what I took away from it.

Which, apparently, is my bad and nothing to do with Cianfrance. In the Q&A that followed the screening the director and co-writer revealed that his decision to order the movie in this way allowed the viewer to experience both the joy and the pain of a relationship from birth to death. If he meant for us to enjoy the moments of innocent euphoria in the courtship, he failed miserably by starting the film off with scenes of negativity and tension. When the admittedly charming courtship scenes are juxtaposed against the horrid bleakness of the break-up scenes, the overwhelming feeling is one of imminent doom.

This isn’t helped by the choice to supply no real information about the events that doomed this love in the years between their happy marriage and unpleasant split, other than to provide ambiguous hints. Admittedly, Cianfrance deserves praise for his bravery in leaving some moments unresolved. While the large black plothole in the middle of the movie might skew the tone of the movie too far into a nihilistic extreme (for this viewer, at least), the messier moments are ambiguous enough to generate much post-screening discussion. Nevertheless, it reinforces the apparently unintentional message that shit will go haywire and you’re going to end up semi-bald and/or crying in a kitchen somewhere down the line no matter what you do. Yeah, that’s right, not even a ukelele can save you. (I really hate that whimsified instrument.)

It’s not all bad. Both of the leads are phenomenal: it’s worth watching just to see them taking on temporally-separated emotional states that are so starkly contrasted it’s as if they’re playing two characters each. The soundtrack by Grizzly Bear is also commendable, though much of it sounds like remixes of cuts from Veckatimest (no bad thing, really). To be honest, talk of these positive aspects will do less to generate interest in the movie than the controversial sex scene in the middle of the movie. It’s the most curious and unresolved moment in the film, and shot in such a way that it’s difficult to attribute blame for what occurs later to either one of the protagonists. An interesting choice, though sadly one that will damage its box office chances. The MPAA’s ruling that the purposely confusing scene merits an NC-17 rating appeared to have angered producer Harvey Weinstein so much he crossed the Atlantic to rail against the rating prior to our screening. What a showman: I wonder how much coverage was generated in the trade press by his surprise appearance.

Consider Blue Valentine hesitantly recommended. It’s much harder to pass that judgement on to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful, a starkly shot but mostly worthless wallow in exquisitely-shot tragedy and misery that makes his previous films look like remakes of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Javier “Sex-Bomb” Bardem plays Uxbal, a low-level criminal using illegal immigrants to sell stolen goods on the streets and populate a grimy sweatshop making crappy clothes. He’s also the father of two children, struggling to raise them without his manic-depressive wife Marambra (Maricel Álvarez), who is having an affair with his sleazy nightclub-owning brother. On top of that he has terminal cancer, and only has a few weeks to live. Oh, and he’s psychic, and sees dead people: a characteristic that would be the focus of most other movies but only warrants a couple of mentions here.

That’s not to say I think it’s an unimportant trait. It’s the one thing that keeps Biutiful alive in my mind, as it turns what is otherwise a purposeless vacation in poverty-wracked “Real Life” into some kind of allegorical, fantastical mystery. Inarritu doesn’t blink from presenting Uxbal’s life as a purgatorial horror, as Bardem wanders through relentless, exhausting tragedy like a haunted St. Bernard. It’s a fantastic performance, the one solid element in an otherwise ridiculous movie that amounts to little more than Inarritu’s guilt-soaked The Passion of The Criminal. Like some kind of weird sadist, the director makes Uxbal jump through ever-more awful hoops: losing friends, causing terrible accidents, pissing blood.

The bookending scenes suggest Inarritu was intent on injecting some form of religious context, with Biutiful‘s world potentially being a vision of Purgatory, endured by Uxbal before he finally moves on to Heaven. This is the only way I can see the paranormal sub-plot working, because otherwise all the psychic visions do it undermine Uxbal’s selfless concerns about his kids. He tries his best to provide a life for them after he passes on, but instead of this being the one bright, human action, borne of compassion and love, it is transformed by this Sixth-Sense-esque oddness so that it merely seems like he’s attempting to ensure he doesn’t get trapped on that Purgatorial plane after death, as it is well established here that, yes, people who die are unable to move on because of that hoary old “unfinished business” trope.

I’ve seen festival reviews from critics who were transported by Inarritu’s vision, drawn in by the shameless melodrama and relentless poverty-porn on display, but it left me utterly cold. It’s not even confined to Uxbal’s plot, with all the Christ-like sacrifice and angst. In a nod to his previous collaborations with writer Guillermo Arriaga, Inarritu shows us how Uxbal’s actions affect Ekweme (Cheikh Ndiaye), an industrious “employee” who ends up in jail and thus leaves his wife to cope with their child alone, and Hai (Taisheng Cheng), the Chinese owner of the sweatshop struggling with his homosexuality. There is nothing really to say about these underdeveloped characters: they’re just there to suffer. It’s, you know, deep and stuff.

Why should we have to suffer, though? Inarritu seemed like a fresh voice once upon a time, someone willing to buck the trend for sappy escapism and provide ample portions of wholesome artistic grittiness. After four movies filled to the brim with this flagellatory emotional modishness, it’s become increasingly clear that the man has nothing to say other than “life sure is tough for the people at the bottom of the pile”. Biutiful might be a return to the streets that he depicted in Amores Perros, after two movies connecting the strife of the poor with the affluent of the “first world” (sorry for using that phrase), but it’s not as if he has anything new to say. At least he’s dispensed with the unnecessary cross-cutting narrative tricks that Arriaga brought to the plate. Sadly now we see there’s little else there.

Oh, and it’s called Biutiful because one of Uxbal’s children mis-spells Beautiful in a picture. Maybe this should be seen as a nod to The Pursuit of Happyness, replacing the “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps” ethos of Gabriele Muccino’s film with the worthy and unappealing message that all there is in life is surviving through an interminable and soul-sucking grind, sacrificing everything for those who love you before you get to move on to a place where you can resolve the things that made you unhappy in life: the worst kind of joy-negating spiritual bullshit. With apologies to Craig Brewer and his movie Hustle and Flow, Inarritu’s movie should have been called It’s Hard Out Here For A Terminally-Ill Slave-Owning Psychic. Happyness might not have been a good movie, and might be riven with untrustworthy Hollywood artifice, but at least it ends on a note of concrete positivity, instead of the false spiritual silliness seen here.

Although, saying that, that artfully presented nonsense is preferable to Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing, a truly pointless exercise that runs short but bores long. Cinematic firebrand and 24/7 performance artist Vincent Gallo (because I refuse to believe his off-screen antics are anything but a fitfully amusing pose) plays a fugitive member of the Taliban, on the run for his life after escaping from a US holding facility. And that’s it. Gallo has no dialogue other than grunts of effort and guttural exclamations of horror or pain, his face permanently fixed in a rictus of terror, his actions mostly comprising scrambling up snow-laden hills and hiding behind trees.

You might think I’m exaggerating, but no. (Warning: Spoilers abound!) At the start of the movie we get a nifty little suspense sequence that ends with him blowing some US military personnel to smithereens, before he’s captured and tortured by waterboarding (making this one of four films I’ve seen in the past couple of months with topical references to this barbaric practice: the others were Amigo, Salt and The Expendables). He then escapes through pure dumb luck, drives for a bit, runs up some hills, gets saved from recapture by a dog, runs up some more hills, eats some berries and hallucinates some more dogs (wtf?), accosts a woman with a baby and forces himself upon her lactating breasts, gets badly hurt when a tree falls on him, kills a guy with a chainsaw (less interesting than it sounds), hides in a deaf woman’s house for a night, rides off on her horse, vomits blood onto its neck, then dies. The end.

And for what? Does Skolimowski think he’s educating his audience on what it must be like to be a member of the Taliban? Is he attempting to shock us by putting an unsympathetic character into situations that might make movie-goers root for him (because who doesn’t love a story about an outlaw on the run)? Is it meant to be a long and boring joke about religion being a false path? That last point might be the most probable: the protagonist occasionally dreams of being given instructions by a voice that is probably meant to be Allah, but these instructions lead him nowhere. Okay, let’s be generous: Skolimowski just schooled us about the futility of relying on God to save you, a theory undermined by the incidents in which our anti-hero is saved by dumb luck. And then un-undermined by the times he rescues himself. Hold on, what?

After an hour and a half of shots of Gallo having difficulty getting up some slopes (what a perverse directorial decision to hide that fascinating and terrifying face from our sight for long sections of the movie), I was murderously angry at having my time wasted in such a careless manner. Everyone has different criteria for what constitutes a successful artistic endeavour, but it failed all of my subjective rules for competence. It has no allegorical dimension, no coherent metaphorical throughline, no momentum, no narrative point, no political message, no aesthetic merit (either in terms of beauty or aggressive grungy anti-beauty. It’s just there onscreen, being uninspiring), no energy, no wit or dread or suspense or cathartic aggression or whimsy or charm.

The only thing it can call its own is a kind of childish transgressive energy, but really, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that making a movie from the point of view of the enemy is an affront to your sensibilties, then you’re a very dull person and your sensibilities need to grow up a bit. Not even the sight of Gallo gorging himself on the breast milk of a woman who conveniently faints in order to make the scene a bit easier to stage is particularly shocking. It just looks like an outtake from Freddy Got Fingered. Maybe the point is that there is no point: there is only survival, and random happenstance, and religious and political differences don’t matter. If that really is all there is to this tedious exercise in cinematic masturbation, then someone needs to get Skolimowski onto Twitter, because he might find that 140 characters may be more than enough for him to get his “message” across.

December 1, 2010 - Posted by admiralneck | Alejandro González Iñárritu, Amigo, Blue Valentine, Craig Brewer, Javier Bardem, Jerzy Skolimowski, Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling, Salt, The Pursuit of Happyness, Vincent Gallo