ShaunHuston filmblog

Under discussion:

There Will Be Blood  (2007)

The second act of There Will Be Blood begins with a wide shot of train tracks heading off into the distance. It's a classic Western image. But one that's disturbed by a slight movement and a chugging sound from along the right side of tracks. A small car carrying Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) and H.W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier) comes into view. The shot is a perfect metaphor for America's shift from steam power to the internal combustion engine, and Daniel Plainview's role in bringing that change into being. It is also indicative of the film's impeccable artistry.

There Will Be Blood is both in the mold of a classic Hollywood epic, full of big people doing big things in a big land, and a risky independent work that is undoubtedly challenging audiences hoping to get a look at one of the leading contenders for multiple Oscars. Above all, it is a true collaboration between its makers on both sides of the camera.

I just saw Daniel Day-Lewis at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and he looked so pale and gaunt. Daniel Plainview, on the other hand, is a ruddy, beefy bull of a man. It's hard to imagine that the two are built on the same frame. Day-Lewis is, perhaps, the most skilled physical actor I've ever seen. In There Will Be Blood he not only transforms his appearance so as to be barely recognizable, but has to carry a leg injury the entire film, subtly worsening its effect on his movement as Plainview grows older. In the movie's opening sequence, he has the air knocked out of him after falling into a hole. My chest immediately tightened up as I saw him gasping for breath.

The challenge of taking on the role of antagonist to Day-Lewis' Plainview fell to Paul Dano as would-be prophet Eli Sunday. Dano is, I think, equal to Day-Lewis in his commitment to his character, but both actor and part are noticeably lesser presences. On the one hand, this makes the film's final scene an anti-climactic. On the other hand, I think that this is a deliberate choice on the part of Paul Thomas Anderson. Eli is meant to be a lesser man, a charlatan grasping for a greatness he knows he doesn't have. Plainview may be willing to fill people's ears with sweet nothings to further his business, but at no point does he lie about what he can deliver when it comes to developing oil. If I had any doubts about Eli's pitiable emptiness, they were erased when he declared Daniel to be a sinner because he had ???lusted after women.??? One reason that so many seem to wonder after H.W.'s mother must be that Daniel seems positively asexual. This imbalance between protagonist and antagonist is one notable risk that Anderson takes. Another is making his antagonist a misanthrope and, eventually, a monster (something ably signified by the film's title and its gothic, old English-styled font).

If you begin to feel There Will Be Blood's length, it is likely due to the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to sit and watch Daniel Plainview. First his son and then, briefly, ???brother??? Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor) provide Daniel with his links to the rest of humanity. As he loses or cuts away those links, his distance from others grows into full-blown hatred. Anderson and Day-Lewis take the frontiersman's typical unease with civilization, and civilization's unease with the frontiersman, and push it to a new level of mutual alienation. One of Daniel Plainview's unique qualities as a character is how he starts out as something of a classic American hero, taciturn, able to walk in society but without really trusting it, creating wealth from the sweat of his own brow, and then gets turned into a villain, full of bile, bitterness, and violence. This is redemption in reverse.

Johnny Greenwood's discordant score is another risky and challenging element of the film. Like Plainview himself, it is effective without being likable.

More subtle, but no less interesting, is Roger Elswit's photography. There Will Be Blood is shot in cool tones, an unusual choice for a movie where the characters spend hours working in the desert heat. However, it helps to punctuate Daniel's cold and calculating nature. The scene where he confesses his hatred for humanity to Henry is perfectly lit, bringing out both the fire and the ice in Daniel's soul.

Say what you will about the Oscars, in the case of There Will Be Blood, they are doing at least one thing that they should do, which is to draw attention to a worthy film that might otherwise only find a limited audience.

Under discussion:

Drunken Angel  (1948)

“National cinemas” is a central concept in film studies. At a broad level, it is a useful and effective device for discussing differences between groups of films made in particular times and places. Theoretically, it is given weight by the role that national states have played in developing cinematic traditions and movie industries in many parts of the world. However, like many frameworks for generalization, the idea of national cinemas starts to fray at the edges the closer one looks at individual films and filmmakers. The work of Japanese writer-director Akira Kurosawa is a strong case in point.

On the one hand, it is easy to code Kurosawa’s films as “Japanese”. His best known works are historical period pieces redolent with characters and landscapes that appear to be so very culturally and geographically specific: samurai, Buddhist temples, light dappled forests. So, too, with recurring themes: honor, duty, fealty.

On the other hand, beneath the surface, it is possible to see Kurosawa drawing from a cultural heritage that is more global than national. He adapted and borrowed from various “Western” literary and cinematic figures, including William Shakespeare, John Ford, and Dashiell Hammett. From the other side, his works have inspired and been adapted by “Western” filmmakers such as Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and George Lucas, as well as influencing Hong Kong action cinema. Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel, recently released in a new DVD version by the Criterion Collection, highlights the blurriness of the boundaries between national cinemas.

Initially released in 1948, Drunken Angel is set in a Tokyo neighborhood immediately after World War II. The central feature of this district is a sump or bog. Bubbly, murky, full of waste and bacteria, the sump is a powerful signifier for the neighborhood as a whole as its residents struggle to survive against the challenges of resource shortages, disease, and domination by organized crime. As the central character, Dr. Sanada (Takashi Shimura), tells his gangster patient, Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), the bog represents all of the “scum” surrounding the young, TB-ridden yakuza, holding him down and keeping him from healing. Sanada’s fight to get Matsunaga to adequately care for himself, both in terms of his illness and the way he lives, drives the film’s narrative.

The dramatic tension rises palpably with the arrival of Okada (Reizaburo Yamamoto), formerly in charge of the neighborhood now managed by Matsunaga. Okada’s return also poses a threat to the doctor’s female assistant, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), who had some kind of unspecified, but clearly abusive, relationship with the older gangster before he was sent to prison. The movie culminates in a showdown between the two yakuza.

As noted by more than one of the contributors to the supplemental features included with the new disc, and notably by Kurosawa himself, Drunken Angel is often cited as the writer-director’s “first film”. This is not a literal statement, Kurosawa had already directed some seven features before Drunken Angel, but a figurative one, implying that it is the first film over which Kurosawa believed he had true authorship. And, indeed, the movie exhibits a number of qualities typical of his subsequent work.

There are, initially, the flawed protagonists of Drunken Angel. The title, in fact, refers to the doctor, who is an unapologetic alcoholic. His work in a down trodden part of the city is presented as the result of both an instinct towards serving the poor and the marginal and the good doctor’s alcoholism. Unsurprisingly, Matsunaga is a conflicted and conflicting character. Even his final decision to throw himself to the wolves can be read more than one way, as equally noble and ignoble.

Complicated heroes and deeply flawed central characters populate virtually all of Kurosawa’s later films, and particularly touchstone works like Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Ran (1985). Drunken Angel also shares with these films, Rashomon excepted, implacable, far less ambiguous villains for its flawed protagonists to face.

Throughout the film, Kurosawa, photographer Takeo Ito, and art director Takashi Matsuyama play with light and shadow. Characters continually move into one and out of the other, and, as in Sanada’s and Matsunaga’s first scene together, are sometimes bisected by light and dark. The careful use of light and shadow to signify qualities and complexities of character, and moral choices, is a persistent visual trope in Kurosawa’s work, one that also contributes to the distinctive look and feel of his films. Indeed, his movies often seem to be worlds unto themselves, and this is no less true of the gritty, contemporary Drunken Angel than it is of the fairy tale-like The Hidden Fortress (1958).

The Hollywood influence on Kurosawa is evident in Drunken Angel on a number of levels, including the costumes, especially the zoot-suited gangsters, the noirish urban setting, and the inclusion of musical production numbers. Indeed, like all Hollywood gangsters, the yakuza in Drunken Angel hang out in a dance hall-****-night club, the perfect setting for breaking out into song and dance.

The carefully selected and produced extra features included with the new Criterion Collection DVD all intelligently locate the film within its time and place and in the context of Kurosawa’s filmography. The disc includes a booklet featuring an essay by Ian Buruma and excerpts from Kuroawa’s own Something Like an Autobiography (Vintage, 1983).

In addition to a commentary track from scholar Donald Richie, the DVD itself includes two supplemental pieces. One, “Akira Kurosawa: It is Wonderful to Create,” is part of a series on “Toho Masterworks,” and is originally from 1998. It focuses on discussions with and about Kurosawa and the long term collaborators with whom he worked for the first time on Drunken Angel, chiefly Mifune, art director Matsuyama, and composer Fumio Hayasaka. The other, “Kurosawa and the Censors,” is a talking head documentary short featuring film scholar Lars-Martin Sorensen. The subject of this piece is the role that American censors and the attempt to re-engineer Japanese society after the War played in the production of Drunken Angel.

Sorensen reviews censor notes on various versions of the story and scripts for the film and discusses how Kurosawa reacted to and dealt with these notes. This feature places the issue of national cinema, and Kurosawa’s “Japanese-ness” in a unique light, as it shows US government control over another country’s film industry occurring at a level far beyond that ever asserted at home.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Criterion Collection DVDs is the treatment of film as a form of art worthy of serious criticism and contextual examination. Richie’s commentary track is richly interpretative, moving from discussions of post-War Japan to Kurosawa’s body of work, and back to Drunken Angel itself. As it happens, Richie is able to speak about the film both from a more detached academic perspective and from first hand observation of the film shoot.

Interestingly, Richie and Sorensen offer radically different interpretations of the movie’s ending, wherein a ray of hope is brought to the film in the form of a 17-year-old school girl (Yoshiko Kuga) Sanada had been treating for TB, but who appears to have fought off the illness. Richie sees this ending as being consistent with other choices made by Kurosawa over the course of his career, and notably in Rashomon, while Sorensen sees it as false, at least as much a product of the censorship regime as it is from Kurosawa’s artistic vision.

Presenting these kinds of discussions of their selections is one of the primary values of a Criterion DVD. Another is in the attention paid to the film-to-DVD transfer. While hardly pristine, the newly restored and digitized film is bright and clear, and the sound quality is excellent.

One need not know much about Japanese national cinema or Akira Kurosawa or post-War Japan to enjoy and appreciate a film like Drunken Angel. Knowledge of the film’s historical and artistic contexts will enhance one’s appreciation of the movie and open up new ways of seeing the film, but its basic artistry, dramatic power, and eminently translatable narrative are perfectly capable of standing virtually alone. Whatever one’s interest in seeing the movie, the new Criterion Collection edition allows viewers to experience Drunken Angel on multiple levels.

Originally published 01/10/2008 by Shaun Huston on PopMatters: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/film/reviews/52837/drunken-angel/

Under discussion:

Lars and the Real Girl  (2007)

Juno  (2007)

As noted in take 1, David Reinhard devotes his sunday column this week to Juno. Predictably,  Reinhard praises the film for its ???life-affirming text and subtext??? (wow, the text and subtext deliver the same message, must be powerful). For those outside of Oregon, Reinhard is The Oregonian's designated columnist from the right. More particularly, he's a Republican loyalist and conservative Christian.

Reinhard's interpretation largely rests on his reading of Juno's encounter with classmate Su-Chin (Valerie Tian) outside the ???Women Now??? clinic. Su-Chin's exclamation, ???Your baby has fingernails!??? is taken by Reinhard as a moment that alerts ???Juno to the humanity of the unborn child she carries.??? And, as a result, she decides to have the baby rather than an abortion.

This is, of course, one way of reading the sequence of events in the film's first act. However, it is not a point so tightly made that one would jump to a ???pro-life??? interpretation of the text unless one was looking for it (subtext is, of course, notoriously more slippery, so fair enough on that score. Ha! I joke, but with love).

Screenwriter Diablo Cody, for example, claims that Juno's decision not to have an abortion was merely necessary for the advancement of the plot. Cody states that her interest was to tell a story about a pregnant teenager, and in order to do that credibly, she needed to, first, address the question of abortion, and then get beyond it.

I would point out that Juno seems primarily motivated by her determination that she isn't ready to raise a child. Once she reaches that conclusion, then an abortion seems like one viable option, and not one that she ever rejects on principle. Her ultimate decision is the other reasonable option: adoption.

Why does she opt for this alternative? As Reinhard notes in his column, we, and she, may not fully know. The women's clinic she goes to does not seem all that warm and welcoming, and, yes, her brain seems to have been scrambled by the declaration about fingernails, but are these words given any real moral weight in the film or by Juno? Reinhard certainly thinks they are, but they can also be looked at as an obscure, and questionable, bit of trivia that simply weirds Juno out. I think that there's room for Reinhard's interpretation, but I don't think that it stands as the only possible reading of Juno's rejection of the abortion option (and, indeed, I have to wonder to what extent Reinhard looked into Diablo Cody's biography and politics before writing his piece).

As certain as Reinhard is about Juno's anti-abortion/pro-life ???text and subtext???, he worries about the film's lack of a clear ???moral universe.??? He describes the film's morality in terms of the slogan ???random acts of kindness and senseless beauty,??? a phrase that leaves him sad for its apparent picture of an irrationally good world. The key passage from the column is here:

Oh, the characters generally do the right, life-affirming thing in the end. But I'm not sure they -- or anyone else in "Juno" -- could tell you why. There are no moral or ethical structures to guide them. There's no overarching belief system. The characters are at the mercy of their feelings. Those feelings can prompt you to do the right thing -- not having an abortion, giving your child to a childless couple, not raising a child if you're a teenager -- but they can just as easily lead you in less life-affirming and responsible directions. And those feelings can change moment to moment even if you're not a teenage girl.

So, clearly for Reinhard, morality, the right decisions, can only come from a higher power. But for the existence of an explicit moral authority, humans will just as easily do bad as good.

The word ???feelings??? is important here. Reinhard seems to see people as prisoners to their emotions and impulses, and those emotions and impulses are often base and unpredictable. We need to control them, and the only way we can be expected to do that is if we accept a set of rules for right conduct and living that come from on high. Otherwise ???good??? becomes a matter of chance.

Of course, human beings are not simply prisoners of their emotions and impulses, at least not all the time. We develop relationships and a sense of obligation to other people. We often do react to situations such as the one at the center of Juno with base feelings of panic, fear, despair, desperation, etc., but we rarely rest on those feelings. In most cases, and I would argue in the film, our rational brains enter the picture. We reflect. We confide in our friends, families, doctors, and counselors. We solicit advice.

Maybe Juno's decision isn't the product of random kindness and senseless beauty. Maybe she arrives at her decision because she comes from a supportive, comfortable home, and  has close friends who also love her (and I would add that her step mom, Allison Janney's Bren, is overtly depicted as a Christian church goer, albeit a Unitarian one, which no doubt hardly counts to Reinhard). Maybe these things give her the strength to weigh her options and come to a decision that is right for her.

As much as Reinhard is dismayed by what he sees as a chaotic moral universe, I am left unsettled by his lack of faith in people. However, this lack of faith clearly explains why he wishes that Juno were weighed down by a script with an explicit moral message, and, more generally, why he desires to legislate away individual choice and freedom, particularly when it comes to what people do with their bodies.

It needs to be pointed out that as much as Reinhard is taken with Ellen Page's Juno, he, ultimately, cares more about what decision she makes regarding her pregnancy than he does about her. Doing what's right by herself, however thoughtful, however right even by Reinhard's standards, is not good enough. She needs to have the correct reason for her choice, which would seem to be because God or the Bible says so. It is short step from this statement to authoritarianism or fascism. What Reinhard seems to fear more than anything is freedom, and primarily because he fears what people, and one imagines he, himself, will do if empowered to make their own decisions about how to live. He has no trust in individual rationality and decency or human sociality.

If Reinhard wants a film where individual and collective choices are undergirded by a clear moral structure, I would recommend that he see Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Here you have people gathering together in a church basement to discuss how to support one of their own in a time of emotional crisis, and concluding that the right thing to do, the Christian thing to do, is to embrace Lars' (Ryan Gosling) ???girlfriend??? as a member of the community. However, I suspect that there is no room for anthropomorphized ???sex dolls??? in Reinhard's clear moral universe.

Both Juno and Lars and the Real Girl are about human relationships, not imposed moralities. Religion is one way in which we articulate our obligations to each other, but it is not the only way. Nor, I would argue, is it actually the cause of the good we do. If it were, there would presumably be fewer lapses, and convenient interpretations of doctrine, among believers of all kinds.

As Juno shows, people choosing to do right by each other is what makes the world a good place. This is why the question of whether Juno has an abortion or not is beside the point, despite the attention this issue has received. What matters is that we're there for those who need us, and here that includes Su-Chin as much as it does Juno's parents, her BFF Leah (Olivia Thirlby), and her "part-time lover and full time friend," Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). If Reinhard can't live with that, then no wonder he finds himself conflicted by his love of the film.