MILK (Gus Van Sant, 2008)

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Earlier this year, Gus Van Sant made Paranoid Park, another film in an experimental register that followed such works as Last Days (2005), Elephant (2003), and Gerry (2002). His new film, Milk, is a very different work, one in which Van Sant seemingly returns to his more mainstream works of the 1990s (Good Will Hunting [1997] Psycho [1998], and Finding Forrester [2000]). Clearly, Van Sant wants this more political work to reach a larger audience. However, I do not think he reverts to pedestrian style of his earlier mass audience efforts. In fact, I slightly prefer Milk to Paranoid Park. Both are near masterpieces of a comparable quality (if very different in approach), but Milk's greater political force makes me favour it more.

As a biopic, Milk is most interesting in how it rejects so many of the cliches of this mini-genre. It does not focus on Milk's early life. In fact, Milk's personal life in general takes a backstage to what actually made him interesting: his political activism. This is what the film is really about. Although Milk has been compared to Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992), it avoids the problems to which Lee's film falls victim. Malcolm X becomes so consumed with its lead character's life and personality that it fails to be a really compelling about its political activism. Malcolm X as a figure ends up feeling very safe and even co-opted. This is not the case with Van Sant's Harvey Milk. The biggest surprise about the movie is that it does not play it safe politically. It argues that there is a need for more radical approaches and that middle-of-the-road liberal centrism is not always (or even usually) the real motor for change.

For this reason, I was reminded of The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), a most unlikely and no doubt highly idiosyncratic comparison on my part. Seeing the Castro and the oppression it faced from those in authority (an oppression whose wider history is seen in the opening credits [Figure 1]), I recalled the Casbah under French rule. In particular, the street protests that Van Sant depicts have an edge to them that uses the realist style that Pontecorvo conveys so well (Figures 2, 4-7). Milk's role as mediator is to represent this outrage and make happen the changes the community needs, not unlike the position of the FLN. In the gay movement, there is not the terrorism of the Algerian War, but there is every indication that Milk and his followers would result to this if their civil rights and safety continued to be abused. If Proposition 6, which is a major part of the narrative, had not been defeated in 1978, as the movement first believed, violence seemed a real and maybe necessary possibility. For this reason, Milk is more than just conventional Hollywood liberalism.

A large part of one's evaluation of Milk turns on how you view its more conventional and melodramatic moments. If you see these as Van Sant sacrificing artistic integrity to make his film more palpable for the popular audience, your evaluation will be more negative. But there is a way of reading these moments as working in concert with the more political scenes of collective action. Here I'm reminded of another great political work, the little known Scream from Silence (Anne-Claire Poirier, 1979). There's even a direct connection here with the use of the whistle as a defense against heterosexual male aggression and violence, which Van Sant uses for his most poetic shot in the film (Figure 3). In her tour de force of feminist activism, Poirier establishes a dialectic between Godardian style counter cinema and the melodrama of a suffering female victim. In his article on the film, André Loiselle argues that this combination of distance and emotion makes it both more emotionally resonant and politically effective. While Milk is not in the same category, I do think its melodramatic scenes and devices serve a purpose. For example, the sequence of Milk's murder uses a rack focus in which Milk looks out at his favorite opera (Figure 8). It is rather overblown, but it does reflect Milk and the gay movement's own fascination with the operatic aesthetic and thus is appropriate as a depiction of his final moment. If this and similar tactics, such as the musical score, are seen as an extension of the importance of emotion as well as reason, Milk can be viewed as less compromised and more authentic in its vision, even if that particular vision is not as pure as Van Sant's other recent films.

André Loiselle, “Despair as Empowerment: Melodrama and Counter-Cinema in Anne Claire Poirier’s Mournir à tue-tête (Scream from Silence)” Canadian Journal of Film Studies vol. 8, no.2 (Fall 1999): 21-43.

BODY OF LIES (Ridley Scott, 2008)

Since returning in September, there hasn't been a film I wanted to see in the multiplexes. So yesterday I decided to see Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, a political thriller about the middle east. Not a great film by any means, but interesting enough for the most part.

The weaknesses are typical of many Hollywood films today: over-edited and over-long. The action scenes do not work at all, partly because of digital special effects used for simple chase scenes. There has often been a comparison lately between Hollywood action scenes and video games, but this may be the first film in which video game graphics are more realistic. In this case, a comparison to video games would actually be an insult to video games. The narrative structure is also far too loose. A tighter focus would have made the thematic clearer. However, as a Hollywood political film, this may not have been possible. The length and confusion is needed to make sure the politics are sufficiently blurred.

Despite this, Body of Lies does manage to make a point, albeit a very accepted one at this time: America is out of touch with how to deal with the "war on terrorism", especially when you get beyond the ground level and into the management class. To do this, the screenplay plays on the old American mythology in an intriguing way. Both opposing protagonists work for the state and are thus "official" heroes. With America involved in a global war, this makes sense. The autonomous outlaw hero of the past mythology would seem out of place in this story. However, the film's quite effective conclusion turns the lead character (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in another solid performance) into an outlaw of sorts, rejecting the war and government he has been fighting for and staying in the "frontier" of the middle east. And despite his allegiance to a woman, the ending is ambiguous over whether he can join her. Increasingly, American culture seems to want a return to the old autonomy and to disengage with being the "world police". Body of Lies is one example of Hollywood hoping to express and capitalize on this feeling.

Final note: both Body of Lies and The Departed were written by William Monahan, and they feel very similar. I would argue that they have more in common with each other than each respective films have in common with other films by their famous auteur directors Scott and Scorsese. Perhaps making films in the big budget Hollywood arena with its standardized style is making directorial self-expression more difficult.

GONE BABY GONE (Ben Affleck, 2007)

Gone Baby Gone is the directorial debut of actor Ben Affleck, adapted by Affleck and Aaron Stockard from the novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote the novel on which Clint Eastwood's Mystic River was based. Gone Baby Gone is the fourth of a series of five Lehane novels based on the P.I. couple Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro. Lehane has also contributed screenplays for the best show on television, now or ever, The Wire.

Like most actor turned directors, there is not a strong or distinct visual style here, although there are some shots that linger in the mind, especially the still included above as well as the final image. The power of the film comes from the story, and Affleck smartly allows the plot and its moral ramifications to take center stage. There are great performances here from Amy Ryan and Ed Harris in particular, and the casting of Affleck's brother Casey in the lead works because he does not overwhelm the role. The same is true with Michelle Monaghan as the his partner. These characters are meant to be the ciphers through which the audience must think about the larger political and social issues of the film.

There is a strong case to the made that the auteur here is Lehane, and this extends to Mystic River. I think, auteur theory notwithstanding, that there is a greater affinity between these two films than between, for example, Mystic River and any other Eastwood film. We'll have to wait to see where Affleck goes from here, but this is a better debut than anyone had any reason to expect.

I do not want to reveal much about the specifics of the ending, but it does deal with a situation in which a choice has to be made, and the values that represent each side of this choice cannot be reconciled. This makes the film an anomaly within Hollywood. In 1985, film scholar Robert Ray wrote his study A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980. For Ray this certain tendency was for Hollywood films to set up a choice between two sets of values, often variations on the Western's civilization/wilderness, community/ individual dichotomy, and two sets of heroes, often variations on the outlaw hero versus the official hero. The ideological project of most films was to reconcile these two binaries and convince the audience that American ideology was not in fact as contradictory as it appeared. The classical example of this is Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) in which the character of Rick Blaine joins the community at the end to fight against the Nazis but retains his individual freedom by sending away his love interest with the official hero. Thus no real choice had to be made between freedom and responsibility. And even today, few Hollywood films demand any real acknowledgment of the necessity of choice. Admirably, Gone Baby Gone insists on this choice and does not make any attempt to soften its difficulty by reconciling the deep social and political divisions the film depicts.