Although I follow politics, I’m not a political junky and I don’t belong to a political party. Still, I really liked Anytown, USA (2006), a documentary of the 2003 race for mayor in Bogota, New Jersey. Why would I be interested in such a distant, small-time contest?
The up-close-and-personal documentary offers an insider look at a civic election. A lot of voters are furious with the cost-cutting Mayor Lonegin and his dismissive manner. Yet the Democrat challenger is pathetically incompetent: When asked by a reporter to state the most important plank in his platform, he cannot even say what he stands for.
The race got more interesting when a third candidate joined in. Dave Musikant was a Bagota football hero who had gone blind from a brain tumour, lived in his sister’s basement, was unemployed, and could not stand the way the Republican mayor was running the town Dave loved. He had two strikes against him: he was running as an independent, and, because he entered the race late, he was a write in. After floundering in his idealistic amateurism for a few weeks, he brought in the professional campaign organizer Doug Friedline, famous for making a pro wrestler state governor.
The suspense was constant without being artificial. The high school football team, which the incumbent Republican mayor had wanted to cut, started off the season with a dismal loss but fought on to victory after victory with Dave Musikant cheering from the sidelines, and Dave’s nephew scoring the crucial touchdown of the season. The football team even helped in Dave’s door-to-door campaign. Would it be enough to earn the good-hearted write-in a victory over the dismissive politico incumbent? On election day, the mayor is worried to the extent that we hear him on the phone trying to arrange one absentee vote from a foreign country.
All of this would lack impact for me if it was a Michael Moore-style documentary with an axe to grind or a point to prove. But it is an old-style documentary aiming to just tell the story. From 300 hours of footage shot over 3 months, director Kristian Fraga and crew spent 7 months editing it down to 93 minutes, with the guiding concern of “telling the story” or, put another way, letting the story tell itself. Just because such objectivity is technically impossible does not mean that it is not an objective worth pursuing. The result is a documentary that respects the people in it even when a less resolute director might have mocked them for, say, petty arrogance, deep-seated incompetence, or old-fashioned idealism. Ultimately, I trusted that the film makers were giving me a pretty valid and reliable picture of the race.
While the film makers say that the documentary gains resonance because it mirrors the national scene (think: Bush, Gore, Nader etc.), I thought the lasting power came in the results of the election. It left me thinking once again about the strengths and weaknesses of democracy, the worst political system except for all the others.
3:10 to Yuma (2007) is a smokin’ western. As a western, it is, by definition, politically incorrect. It’s a man’s world. Only two women appear in the movie, the second stereotype being so minor that you’ll have trouble remembering her. Gretchen Mol does a fine job of playing the rancher’s wife, but this role too is a stereotype. It’s a violent world in which shooting someone is, as the bad guy says, like shooting a wild animal: the most important things are speed and accuracy. It’s a macho world with the strong moral message that a man should be resolutely honourable above all else—a strange message in today’s society.
If the political incorrectness does not bother you, you’ll be riveted by the story of a desperate small-time rancher and the rest of a posse trying to get an incredibly dangerous robber on the 3:10 train to the Yuma pen. The rancher takes on the job partly because he sorely needs the $200 not only to feed his wife and two sons but to ward off a hostile take-over by a bigger rancher. He also believes that citizens have to step up and risk something to see justice done. But on a deeper level, he has tired of endless small humiliations: receiving $198 compensation for having his leg shot off while retreating in the Civil War, taking up ranching in a dry climate because his youngest son has respiratory problems, barely being able to feed his family, being pressured to leave his land so a large land owner can acquire it and the profits from a future railway line, and feeling the subtle disregard of his wife and the contempt of his older son. What gives the story depth is this father-son relationship as both the father and the son grow. The father meets challenge after challenge until he is alone in bringing the prisoner to justice. The son grows in a more complicated way—from hostility and rebelliousness, to a jejune maturity, to respect for his father, to love for his father, to a surprisingly deep maturity. A kid who initially appears to be a minor character who is in the movie to characterize the protagonist turns out to be a major character who develops in a more complex way than film characters.
The acting is excellent. Christian Bales as the rancher is amazingly intense: the super close-ups of his embattled face are riveting. Some who follow Hollywood gossip might say that Russell Crowe as the wily villain is playing himself but he creates an interesting character perfectly in contrast to the strict moral code of the movie. I think it was Shakespeare who said you may smile and smile yet a villain be. When the rancher’s son says that the villain is not infinitely evil but has a piece of goodness buried somewhere, we do not know if this assessment is juvenile or insightful, and it turns out to be right.
This leads to the only weakness in the movie. When the rancher is valiantly attempting to hustle the prisoner to the train, the prisoner has a chance to strangle him and does not. Although you could do a complicated analysis to justify this decision, it basically rings false. The bandit has killed so many people on a whim, why not one more to gain freedom? This is followed by another scene that rings false: the leader of the outlaw gang turns on his men. Unfortunately, neither of these dubious scenes is essential for the ending of the movie. The rancher could have run his prisoner through the gun fire to the train without an interlude where he was nearly strangled, and the prisoner could have gotten on the train (knowing he could escape) without turning on the men who were trying to spring him free. This weakness takes the wind out of the sails at the end of the race, but until then it has been a captivating adventure.
Dear Gela,
I know we agreed on US10,000 for me to act as a consultant on your remake of 13 Tzameti for Morabito Picture Co., but I have just watched the film, and I offer my critique for free. I’m glad you said that you plan to “change a lot of the story line.” I hope you go further than that and change even more. Don’t let the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize from the 2006 Sundance festival mislead you into thinking that substantial changes won’t improve the movie.
Your purpose is suspense, but the problem in the first section of the film is that we don’t care about the 22-year old roofer who is the protagonist about to go into a life and death situation. He should be an extroverted, lively guy we’d all like to have a beer with. At the same time, he should have a darker side—the frustration of the immigrant working below his family expectations. I’d like to see him toiling in backbreaking labour, and laughing over a pint in the local pub with his brother or best friend. I’d like to see a family discussion about how they’ve come down in the world, how they are depending on him to make ends meet, and how he takes this responsibility with a touch of irritation amidst his good humour.
As soon as we realize what the young guy has gotten himself into, we are shocked, and, unfortunately, that is the high point of the movie. Then the suspense changes to whether he will survive the game of chance. The suspense, however, is minimal because the game of chance does not make sense. It is strictly mathematical, and if you are reasonably good at mental arithmetic, you can calculate the odds as you watch the movie. This is not why men bet millions of dollars, and this is not why viewers sit on the edge of their seats. There must be something of a contest involved. In this bizarre game of chance, practice does not matter, talent does not matter, coaching and strategy are irrelevant—nothing matters except the mathematical probability, and, I must add, what you the writer/director decide the outcome will be. To create suspense, I suggest you read an old short story, “The Most Dangerous Game.” The aristocratic hunter, tired of such dangerous game as the Cape rhino, hunts a human, who, unlike the other humans hunted, proves to be more than a match. In case I have not made my point clear, I’ll state it another way: The high point of the movie is when we realize the game of chance is a game of life and death, but it does not matter that the pawns are people. They could be widgets or chips. There could be balloons popping instead of heads. The human elements of character, cunning, philosophy, and courage must enter into the equation. Then we will understand why men risk millions and going to jail as murderers; then the audience will be on the edge of their seats.
Of course you will get new actors for every role, as well you should. But I’d encourage you to keep the ring master, as he was by far the best actor in the movie, shouting out commands with enthusiastic authority and getting slightly more desperate with every round of the slaughter.
You’ll probably also change all of the music—a good thing because it is obvious and grating. I’d encourage you to take direction from the one bit of music that really worked, that pierced and stuck. When the fat contestant is playing on the out-of-tune piano . . . such diagetic music sneaked up and grabbed me. You have many other opportunities to use in situ music. Early on we could hear ethnic music in the workers’ home, and we could hear appropriately dissolute music in the decaying house the protagonist is re-roofing. We could hear increasingly distressing music on the car radios and in the train stations as our man gets further and further into trouble. And you could have train musak playing ironically over the final scene.
Lastly, you have to decide if you are going to say anything in the film beyond “this is shocking and suspenseful.” As you well know, Village Voice tried to do that for you by proclaiming your film “a brutal metaphor for the global economy.” Thankfully, you never made such ludicrous claims. But at the same time, you should think whether you want to go in that direction. By having multi-national businessmen (instead of only French) who are very rich (instead of a bunch of rag-a-muffins) meet in a palatial setting (instead of a decrepit building), you’d steer viewers toward such an interpretation. That said, you have to have something original to say. Everyone knows that a few thousand rich people run everything and don’t give a damn about us. Have you got anything to add to that?
I hope that the remake gets your creative juices flowing and that you’re proud of the improvement. Looking forward to doing business in the future,
JIMBELL
I believed I’d love the documentary Into Great Silence (2005), but it did not work for me. After 16 years of asking, Philip Groning was given permission to live with the monks in the French Alps for five months and film everyday. I have spent a little time in two monasteries and read several accounts, but Into Great Silence left me frustrated with a plethora of questions.
Groning says in interviews that if we want answers we should surf the net, which is what I had to do to learn much about this film. He also says he excluded commentary from the film because “you cannot use language to describe a world that revolves so far beyond the realm of language.” This is nonsense, as we regularly use words to describe lots of things that might be beyond the realm of language: the thrill of victory, the feeling of love, the paradoxes of Zen Buddhism, and so on. He also says that he wants you the viewer to focus on yourself and your perceptions, so you could ask questions such as why you are frustrated not knowing what is going on. This is a claim that any movie could make. Groning also claims that the documentary is not about the monastery but about being a monk. Unfortunately, the film seems the opposite because we do not get to know any monk or monks but we become intimately familiar with the monastery—the buildings, the light, the garden, the views from the windows, the daily routine, the sound of bells, and so on.
Once I sort through the verbiage, Groning seems to mean this: “Commentaries result from the montage . . . Through the editing, the viewer is left to make out for himself what he sees and hears . . .” For example, the repetition in the film is supposed to engender in the viewer the feeling of contemplation that the monks feel. I felt that the juxtaposition of images was unable to bear the demands Groning placed on it. I was left wondering about what was going on in the monastery and what the monks were experiencing. Rather than participating in the great silence, I was unengaged. Some of the religious retreats I’ve been on say that it takes most people about three days to “come down” from the hurly-burly of everyday living so that you can start working on spiritual stuff. The Roman Catholic monks have been working on it 24 hours a day for decades. Although the film doesn’t tell us, the monks never sleep through the night. After three hours of sleep, they rise for about three hours of prayer, and then go back to bed for another three hours sleep. With a few minutes left to go in the movie, I had to stop watching in order to not be late for a dinner engagement. I found that two hours of juxtaposed images did not engender in me a sense of the spirituality the monks had developed.