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Under discussion:

Che  (2008)

You can’t say that Steven Soderbergh’s Che isn’t beautifully shot and scored. You can’t say that Benicio Del Toro doesn’t give himself completely to the title role. You can’t say that it’s not an extremely daring piece of cinema –– in fact, it takes incredible balls to make a film this long, this wonky, while giving the audience this little to actually care about. In four-plus hours, across which Del Toro transforms from mild-mannered 20-something physician to dutiful soldier to full-on disciplinarian bad ass, then pops up in Bolivia after Intermission as a crazed, wheezing optimist who leads a doomed mission fueled purely by his unshakable faith that past glories are repeatable, Soderbergh manages to show an almost complete lack of concern for the inner life of his protagonist. If the traditional biopic is felled by forced emotional touchpoints that exaggerate or misrepresent their real-life equivalents, Che has the opposite problem: in producing a versimilar portrait of two temporally disconnected chunks of Che’s public life, Soderbergh has made a movie called Che that tells us nothing about Che, which largely relies on that lovely cinematography and dynamic score to fill in the emotional beats that the directior hasn’t brought out of the material.

Soderbergh, who showed up to today’s post-NYFF screening press conference wearing a scruffy Che-reminiscent beard, admitted that he began working on the film (he and Del Toro started discussing the project in 200) long before he managed to define his attraction to his subject. “Sometime you say yes, and you’re not sure why you said yes,” the director said. “I went in with ore of an idea of what I didn’t want to do than what I did want to do.”

“It wasn’t until the films were finished, right around Cannes, that I realized…it was about engagement versus disengagement. Every day in our lives, we’re making decisons. Do we want to participate, or do we want to observe? And I realised that what was compelling to me about Che was that when he decided to engage, he engaged fully.”

If only the same could be said of the filmmaker.

As an auteur, Soderbergh’s main strength, at least from Out of Sight on, has been his ability to use style to pump up substance, usually in order to give the illusion that he’s paying more attention to subtext than I suspect he actually is. One would think the life story of Che Guevara would have more inherently going on under the surface than, say, a Rat Pack remake, but if so it’s not the target of Soderbergh’s concern. The first half of Che cross-cuts between Guevara in the 50s––traveling with Fidel Castro from Mexico to Cuba on a leaky boat which served as a grave for 70 of 82 men; forming an army and inculcating the troops with the basics of his brand of Communism; and finally taking over Cuba’s cities, overthrowing Batista and marching into Havana––and his visit to New York in 1964, where he represented Cuba at the United Nations and was interviewed on Face the Nation. Up until the last series of battles for Cuba, Soderbergh mainly relies on the interview device to allow Guevara, through an English translator, to narrate his own rise to war hero and international celebrity. Though Soderbergh drops this device in the film’s second half (which details the last year of Che’s life, spent trying to mount a revolution in Bolivia), between scenes of Guevara counseling his troops and peeks into René Barrientos strategy meetings with CIA operatives, on the whole Che is probably 75 percent spoken exposition. Unless someone is shooting or getting shot at, they’re probably making an explanatory speech about their political beliefs and/or military strategy.

In short, there’s very little human drama in this movie, and if that wasn’t problematic enough for Che as a biopic, it’s anathema for Che as a movie about war. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what attracted Soderbergh to the material if he hadn’t made that comment about “engagement versus disengagement”; from watching his film, I have no idea why Che felt that he must engage, and I could only assume that Soderbergh cared about that “engagement” because of an affinity for Guevara’s politics. But at the press conference, he resisted suggestions that he made Che to celebrate the ideology it dramatizes. “I guess I believe that any movie that accurately depicts anyone’s life, any movie that’s not a fantasy, that attempts to look at things in a sort of straightforward fashion, not polished-up, is a politcal film,” he said. “There is an ideology that’s being acted upon [in the film], and that’s political. But that wasn’t what drew me to the story. I’m obviously not a Communist.”

I’m rarely one to suggest that filmmakers should be more eager to use their work as a vehicle for their political bias, but in this case, Soderbergh’s unwillingness to make a statement may be a major part of the problem: the embodiment of “cool” media, Che is a film that bears no perceptible trace of its maker’s point of view. It’s greatest triumph is its complete and total dryness. Che may be an extremely accurate portrait of these two periods in Guevara’s life (although how accurate a portrait it can really offer without sketching in the years between the triumph in Cuba and the fatal folly in Bolivia is up for debate), but truly epic works of cinema have more on the agenda than the literal translation of life. Can this be said of Che? Not that I can tell, but I’m eager for its fans to tell me what I’m missing.

Ronnie Bronstein is unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Whip smart and endlessly self-deprecating, Ronnie’s acidic humor masks a sweetness and empathetic quality that’s rare for someone so talented and driven. His feature debut Frownland was for many, this humble author included, the definitive independent film of 2007, one that brings real credence back to that oft used, barely meaningful term. It screens this thursday at BAM.

What films or television shows have you seen recently? 

God. Not much. I’ve been sort of avoiding movies more and more. Mostly cause my own rickety grasp over my new project has turned me into a petty, anxious and wretchedly egocentric viewer. Basically, either a movie is great and decimates my confidence or it’s not and wastes my time….which is just a horrible way to look at stuff.  Though, I did recently get my hands on these two mind-blowing documentaries from the late 60’s by a filmmaker named Allan King, Warrendale and A Married Couple. Very much in the vein of Frederick Wiseman, but more intimate, less detached. Anyway, both of these movies absolutely cracked me in half. Particularly ‘A Married Couple’, which is just this staggeringly universal portrait of all the quotidian resentments, psychic warfare and argumentative tape-loops that seem to gum up communication between people who ostensibly love one another. That one hit me super hard. 

Does your interest in them have anything to do with your own work as a filmmaker? How do the films that you think of as “influences” affect your own style and preoccupations as a filmmaker?

Well, yeah, like I tried to say before, I’m a terrible viewer these days. I’m stuck in some kind of horrid siphon-mode, looking purely to see what I can take and use. And this agenda gets in the way of my ability to submit to or prostrate myself in front of a piece of work in the way that you have to. So, yeah, I’ve sort of ruined movies for myself for the time being. They’re way too tied to all this internal pressure and personal apprehension.

How often do you read fiction? Do you wish you read more?

These days pretty much all my reading is wrapped up in research for my new project and all of it is non-fiction. Like now, I’m currently burrowing my way through the works of R.D. Lang, who I’d previously idiotically dismissed as some hippy crackpot. His basic premise is that normal man is a shriveled, desiccated fragment of what a person can be and that whole domains of sensory experience are completely closed off to us. Yikes. To him, conventional psychiatric practice is little more than a degradation ceremony. Anyway, I dig how far out on a limb he’s willing to perch himself, and I’m struggling to find out how he thinks we can unlock this innate potential, and then more importantly, what he thinks we can do with it. It seems an impossible proposition. 

What would be your ideal literary adaptation and why?

Jeez. I have no idea. 

How, if at all, has reading informed your filmmaking?

The same way any life experience informs it, I guess.

What are you listening to recently?

Ok, I’ll put my ipod on shuffle and write down the first 5 tracks summoned…

1. Your Auntie Grizelda – The Monkees (Shit. This song stinks. Who told Peter Tork he could sing? My good pal David once said that Peter Tork was like the Zeppo Marx of the Monkees in that he couldn’t sing, couldn’t act, didn’t seem to contribute much creatively, and yet, the whole ship went down once he left the group)

2. Leppo and the Jooves – The Soft Boys (Robyn Hitchcock’s attempt to marry angular Beefheart abrasion with weirdo Barrett pop hooks. I love this stuff)

3. We’ve Only Just Begun – The Carpenters (Hmmm. Not the most exciting tune to comment on, but man, this thing still makes me well-up. Paul Williams wrote it. What an odd career he’s had. Stuntman, actor, singer/songwriter, honorary Muppet. The guy wrote the friggin’ Rainbow Connection for Christ’s sake! I guess most cinephiles know him best as the Phil Spector-type guy from the Phantom of the Paradise. Cool movie. I remember watching ‘The Boy in the Bubble’ on TV when I was really young and hearing the song that Williams wrote for the closing credits and just sinking into the most melancholy state. Same with ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, which is also one of his. Paul Williams had this unique way of writing songs that could make a 4 year old feel deeply downcast. That’s funny to me)

4. Moods for Moderns – Elvis Costello & the Attractions (Ugh. This has gotta be my least favorite song off this record. But, shit, Costello was on fire back then. A god damned moving target!)

5. Is it a Star? – Hall & Oates (Oh nice. I’ve been listening to this one a lot. One of the best discoveries of the year. It’s off an album called ‘War Babies’, which is pretty much the only focused, artful lp they ever made. The story goes that Todd Rundgren produced it under the dubious golden rule that he and the band be fried to the gills on LSD during each and every recording session. It certainly sounds like it, though in the end, it’s probably more of a Todd record than a Hall & Oats one. Either way, it single-handedly got the band dropped from A&M)

If you could collaborate with one musician on a film, who would it be and why?

I don’t know. Every single time I’ve ever met someone I’ve revered or looked up to creatively, I was either humiliated or self-conscious to the point of paralysis. 

What would be the ideal pairing of filmmaker and musician for a concert film?

Hmm. How about an early 70’s Mike Leigh with an early 70’s Randy Newman, both of them reveling in their impish, caustic preoccupations with the grotesque human condition.

Under discussion:

White Dog  (1982)

The next four months are to be the most intensely self-conscious, galvanizing, awkward, crazed, humiliating, uplifting, maudlin and surreal period in American racial history. A black man will or will not be chosen as the next President of the United States. My fingers tremble as I type this. As a black-and-white racial spectacle, this is bigger than black Jack Johnson casually beating the living shit out of white Jim Jeffries before all of Anglo-America in 1910. This is bigger than Bigger Thomas. This is bigger than Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Paul Robeson, the Edmund Pettis Bridge, Emmet Till, the March on Washington, OJ, Rodney King, Willie Horton, Jeremiah Wright, the riots, the assassinations, the aggregate of four centuries of two races trading hostilities while building up this nation. This is it. A partial descendant of slaves takes the helm of the American Empire. Or not: Maybe McCain plays into enough fears and received notions to convince his base and those volition-less swing voters that we can have morning in America once more.

Those geniuses at Criterion Collection have anticipated the moment andplan to give it something special. Their new high-definition restoration of Sam Fuller’s White Dog is due on DVD in December, just when all hell should be breaking loose. Fuller’s 1982 adaptation of the Romain Gary novel about a dog trained to attack and kill black people is a nightmare of the Reagan Era. Told with the broad earnestness of a sweeps week Diff’rent Strokes episode, White Dog is easy to dismiss as Public Service Announcement on hate crimes. Ennio Morricone’s somber score captures the heartbreak of racism but also emphasizes the movie’s cuddly, Benji-esque sentimentality. The presence of aging teen starlet Kristy McNichol as
the dog’s unsuspecting Hollywood-liberal owner is also good for a snicker to anyone over 30.

But Fuller’s mise-en-scene has never been more precise, operatic or unsettling. White Dog’s visual scheme is less about racism than about the panic and dismay that grips witnesses of racist violence and the loved ones of violent racists. Just as the real horror of Brian DePalma’s Carrie adaptation was not her satanic power but th casual cruelty she lived with daily, White Dog’s main subject is not the dog’s bite but its ugly, irrational bark. And a la DePalma’s slo-mo bucket of pig blood showering a prom dress, Fuller attenuates moments of shame and distress far longer than the initial or subsequent act of violence. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees covers the mayhem with the dynamism he brought to actioners like Dirty
Harry.

With its comic book compositions, this flick is virtually a graphic novel about national character and destiny, like 300, A History of Violence and The Dark Knight. But Fuller’s vision is a lot less polished, much more dreamlike–closer to Lynch’s Blue Velvet in its surreal flourishes than today’s all-business Big Idea pop spectacles. Never released theatrically and shown on cable TV sporadically over the years, White Dog is finally rearing it’s snarling, snapping head at the perfect time in American history.

If the Blue Velvet comparison sounds a bit extreme for those who have seen the movie and found it’s metaphors (not to mention the acting) pretty crude, I’ll let Sun Ra carry the argument further, from beyond the grave. But don’t click the link if you haven’t yet seen the movie–wait ’til December.