Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968)

Moon  (2009)

This review was originally published in slightly different form during the Sundance Film Festival. Moon opens in New York and LA on Friday.

A small, personal story wrapped in the trappings of classic sci-fi epic, Moon manages to be both derivative (most notably, of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001) and deliberately rebellious in its treatment of sci-fi tropes. Moving through familiar territory and yet sparked with a spirit all its own, like any great work of genre cinema Moon’s future-world scenario and super-slick techno-artistry are put to the service of a story that ultimately downplays the traumas wrought by technological possibility in order to dig deep into the trauma of being a person.

The film, directed by Duncan Jones (once known as Zowie Bowie, son of David), begins with a pitch-perfect advert for the company that contracts an astronaut named Sam (Sam Rockwell) to live and work on a space station for a three year stretch, accompanied only by a HAL-meets-Short Circuit robot named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey), and able to communicate with his wife and child on Earth only via taped video message. Wedding exposition (the ad is how we learn that the massive machines to which Sam tends on auto-pilot are “harvesting solar energy frpm the dark side of the moon”), to a sense of ease that’s almost unsettlingly easy, the opening sequence perfectly sets the tone for the coming inquiry into a fractured personality and the relationship between surface and depth.

Moon relies on a major twist to set this inquiry into motion, one which I’d feel criminal in giving away. Suffice it to say that Sam is at once not as alone as he thought he thought he was, and as fundamentally, incontrovertibly lonely as anyone could ever be. This dramatization of Sam’s sudden, tragic self-awareness gives Rockwell a platform for a terrifically exciting dual performance which, thanks to seamless, non-showy effects and a magic of faked chemistry, allows Moon to feels more casual and accessible than any cinematic exploration of the Lacanian mirror stage has a right to be.

What marks Moon as a potential sci-fi game changer is the complexity of its philosophy on The Future, one which allows for both limitless faith in human feeling and a skepticism over the human cost of innovation, particularly in regards to Saving The Planet. 2001 predicts that the more human-like machines become, the more they’ll take on the worst of humanity and, as an added bonus, that humans will lose the passion and compassion that makes them human in direct proportion to the degree to which they engineer machines to become more human-like. Moon approaches a similar scenario from a very different tack, imagining that the artificial intelligence that humans create will embody the best of what humanity can be, but will probably be used to the ends of, if not evil, than at least the individual-indifferent banality that keeps a capitalist society ticking along.

The timing is a bit uncanny. Is this a projection into a post- (or maybe post-post-post-) Obama world, in which “no drama” promises of a better tomorrow simply placate us into ignoring that even the most utopian visions of “change” must be fed into the capitalist machine in order to become a reality, and will likely be contracted out to the higest bidder even at the expense of human lives? Corporate culture bears the burden of Moon’s cynicism, but that critique is part and parcel of a film about self-knowledge, and the tragedy of stumbling upon it only when it’s nearly too late.

Under discussion:

Changeling  (2008)

Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)  (2008)

Gran Torino  (2008)

This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today.

Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque.

Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as Polish-American embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of their family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.”

Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t like it and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn from Walt the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness, while simultaneously fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer.

All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death.

In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess, and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit.