Month: January 2018

Dogville

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Dogville (2003)

Dir. Lars von Trier

Written by: Lars von Trier

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany

 

Dogville, in which a stranger named Grace (Kidman), stumbles into a remote town in the mountains of Colorado, where she is reluctantly accepted into a cloistered society and discovers that behind many acts of human kindness there lies an avaricious motive, may be Lars von Trier’s defining masterpiece. The film marries the Danish auteur’s dark thematic explorations with the most radical example of his challenging and ever-evolving visual style. It’s a film that has challenged me since I first viewed it shortly after its release, sometime during my freshman year of college. Like the other von Trier films that I’ve written about, Dogville is a difficult film to “enjoy,” due to its dark and depressing subject matter, but it stands out as a startling and immediate piece of art. The film strips away the artifices of traditional cinema, replacing them with a starkly minimalist visual aesthetic that utilizes chalk outlines on a soundstage to block out its only setting. This extreme minimalism allows von Trier to focus in on the film’s narrative and dig deep into the roots of human nature, revealing a pessimistic, challenging world view that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who is familiar with the director’s oeuvre. Dogville is a profound film, seeking to explore aspects of the human condition rarely considered, and despite its barren aesthetic, it’s often a beautiful film. It’s an emotionally taxing, mentally exhausting experience to watch, but its host of strong performances and von Trier’s artful directorial choices make for an engaging, unforgettable film.

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Dogville is a tale told in nine elliptical chapters and a prologue, in which we are first introduced to the residents of Dogville, Colorado, a mining town hard hit by the Great Depression. Our guide to the town is young Tom Edison (Bettany), a self-styled writer who has rarely put pen to paper, but who doesn’t shy away from trying to inflict his own morality and high-mindedness on the often resistant townsfolk of Dogville. Early in the film, Tom is walking the town’s main street at night when he comes upon a stranger, Grace, who is on the run from a gang that Tom had previously heard firing shots in the valley below the town. Tom agrees to shelter her, but he must first convince the rest of Dogville’s residents to keep Grace secreted away from harm in their village, and many of them are less than eager to put their own safety and tranquility on the line to harbor a stranger, particularly one who may be dangerous herself. However, they eventually consent to offer Grace a trial period, provided that she earn her keep in the town by doing housework and chores for each of its residents. This arrangement continues well for some time, as Grace proves herself to be an asset to the town, and nearly all of the townsfolk begin to warm to her presence, particularly Tom with whom Grace begins a tentative romance. However, the situation begins to become more tenuous and dissolve when Grace’s pursuers, as well as the local police who are in the pocket of the gang, come sniffing around town, raising the stakes for the people of Dogville. Their initial welcoming attitude begins to gradually turn to resentment and suspicion of Grace, as the townsfolk’s true nature starts to reveal itself as they inflict an escalating series of cruelties on the stranger.

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This is von Trier at his most radically experimental, as he’s fully abandoned the realist tendencies of the Dogme 95 movement that he helped to spark nearly a decade earlier, creating a fully stylized and symbolic, if completely minimalist, visual aesthetic. Von Trier has mentioned that his choice to adopt such radical and theatrical staging for his film was an attempt to strip away the distractions of setting so that audiences would focus on the characters, the narrative, and the performances. Another side effect of this chosen visual aesthetic is that it makes the film immediately engaging because it is such a radical departure from the visual presentation of any sort of traditional narrative film. Taking a page from famed theatrical provocateur Bertolt Brecht’s playbook, and staying true to his own theory that cinema should be “as a rock in your shoe,” von Trier presents the audience with a set of distancing effects that counter-intuitively work to foster audience engagement and identification. As there is little to recognize about the physical setting of the film, audiences have no choice but to deeply and personally invest themselves in the characters and their highly-charged chamber dramas. In Brechtian theory, this would then cause the audience member to internalize the performances and undergo a sort of self-reflection, unearthing heretofore unknown truths. As a highly analytical and critical filmmaker, von Trier no doubt is seeking the same sort of agitation and self-examination in his audience, and if they take the lessons and attitudes of the characters in Dogville to heart, the truths that they find reflected may be challenging, to say the least.

Perhaps this is why Dogville is such a difficult and divisive film, appearing on many best and worst films of the year lists when it was released. The suppositions that it makes about human nature, and in particular, about the American national spirit, are confrontational and challenging, if not down-right appalling. Dogville finds von Trier at perhaps his most misanthropic, sometimes giving the impression that he sees the characters (and perhaps even the actors portraying them) in this morality fable as specimens to be studied, rather than humanistic equals. The coldness that he shows towards his subjects is reflected in the coldness that is revealed to be at the core of their beings. Dogville is a film without any “good guys,” where no good deed goes unpunished, and the strong ultimately lord over the weak and powerless. The quickness with which the townsfolk turn to abusing, and taking advantage of Grace is horrifying, and the savagery to which they descend is shocking, but to von Trier, those traits are true to the selfish, rapacious nature of the human animal. We have seen before in his films that his worldview is bleak and uncompromising, but in Dogville there are no pure souls, no Selma or Bess, to point towards the existence of decency or goodness in the world. When Grace finally gains her comeuppance on the townsfolk and watches them murdered and the town burned, there’s little satisfaction in the revenge for the audience, because it is we that she is dispatching of, at the same time that it is we who are gleeful in the killing. Audiences are indicted as killers regardless of whom they choose to identify with, and are left with a preponderance of difficult questions about their own position on the nature of human kindness and charity.

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Even in a film so bleak, however, and so coldly antihuman, there are many moments of warmth, primarily supplied by the excellent performances of the cast. Although there are several great performances in Dogville, Nicole Kidman owns this movie with her performance as Grace. Released at the same time that she was starring in prestige period films such as Cold Mountain and The Hours, for which she won an Academy Award, Kidman’s performance in Dogville seems to sometimes get overlooked. Perhaps it is the film’s overall divisiveness that led to Kidman not receiving much mainstream consideration for awards or commendations, but what vibrancy there is in the film is directly related to her performance. Kidman is radiant in the film, both in her performance and physically, as she is often shot in golden light that reflects in her red hair and seems to make her personage glow. Early in the film, her kindness is palpable and it begins to seep into the dark crevices of Dogville, inflicting itself onto the town’s hardened residents. The film also requires Kidman to demonstrate extreme range as an actor, as her character is taken on an extreme emotional journey over the course of the film, experiencing and embodying fear, happiness, humble service, love, distress, resignation, shame, and moral vengefulness, among many other complex and difficult to convey emotional states. Though the performance may not be as singularly memorable as Bjork’s in Dancer in the Dark, Kidman’s Grace is equally as impressive. The performance is less outwardly expressive and showy, more inwardly-focused and nuanced.

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Kidman headlines an impressive assemblage of talent, with several other standouts in supporting roles. Von Trier is often able to find himself working with some of Europe and America’s finest actors, and though they don’t always find the experience of working with the famously irritable and demanding director to be a pleasant one, he usually draws great performances out of already talented actors. Dogville is no exception, with famous character actors such as Ben Gazzara and Philip Baker Hall turning in great performances as lonely, but ultimately reprehensible, older men, alongside film legend Lauren Bacall whose Ma Ginger at first seems to be a sweet, if reclusive, matriarch, but whose vitriol becomes evident by the film’s end. Of course von Trier regular, Stellan Skarsgård, makes an appearance as Chuck, a hard working father who resents Grace for what she represents as an outsider who had previously enjoyed a life of luxury. Chuck is the member of the town who harbors the most outward animosity towards Grace, and Skarsgård plays him terrifyingly well, embodying seething resentment and a physical type of malice. John Hurt’s familiar, soothing voice is used to great effect as the film’s narrator, helping to set the scene, and providing near-ironic counterpoint through his calm voiceover narration of events that are rapidly descending into cruelty. In fact, nearly all of the film’s supporting cast stand out in some way, with Kidman’s co-lead, Paul Bettany, being one of the more forgettable aspects of the film. He is fine as the naïve, moralizing Tom, but he doesn’t really add much to the film through his performance. I don’t say that to diminish Bettany’s performance, but more to point out how difficult it is to stand out among a field of such accomplished actors.

Von Trier handles the ensemble cast masterfully, though. His earlier films were often focused on highly intimate and personal narratives that centered on a dynamic female protagonist, and though Dogville certainly is that, the film sees von Trier expanding that focus to provide the sort of character depth and interiority that he previously explored on the individual level to a society. He allows the audience to get to know the citizens of Dogville gradually, affording each one enough screen time to develop their own personality, and to properly inform their motivations and behaviors. He’s brought in actors intuitive enough to make the most of small gestures or bits of terse dialogue, and the result is a town that actually feels as if it could exist. In spite of its lack of visual specificity, Dogville is clearly mapped out, quite literally, and the interactions and relationships existing between its residents feel true to life. Their petty disputes, and their over-familiarity with one another will ring true to anyone who has spent time living in a small town, and perhaps this is what makes their monstrous turn in the film’s second half all the more disturbing. The people of Dogville are people that we, the audience, know. Again, they are us. Dogville is a studied portrait of the callousness of modern human society, from the perspective of a filmmaker who often doesn’t include himself in the larger strictures of human society, and though its scope may be played out on a more violent and even Biblical scale, it hits the nail on the head at the rottenness that is often at the core of people’s petty slights and swipes at their neighbors.

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Dogville is not a film for most people. It’s too avant-garde, too pretentious, too graphic, too nihilistic and misanthropic, to really cater to many audiences. Obviously, I am in the camp that considers it a masterpiece, which really shouldn’t be surprising given my affinity for von Trier’s other films. I don’t necessarily agree with the film’s totally bleak take on human nature and society, but I appreciate its provocative stance and von Trier’s willingness to be totally unrelenting in his vision, both aesthetically and in terms of his presented worldview. I enjoy films like this, ones that force their spectators to question aspects of their own identity or their own nature. I think that for every film that celebrates the beauty of life or of art, there should be another artfully challenging those assumptions and presenting necessary counterpoint. Life certainly isn’t all sunshine and flowers, and neither should our art be. Though I don’t recommend that anyone, myself included, watch Dogville often, I do think that it’s a film that people should at least try to engage with once in their life. It’s a stylistically audacious work of art that seeks to shake viewers out of their complacency and challenge their core beliefs. It’s a good thing to be shaken up from time to time.

Dogma

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Dogma (1999)

Dir. Kevin Smith

Written by: Kevin Smith

Starring: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Linda Fiorentino, Chris Rock

 

Dogma was the most recently released film in Kevin Smith’s View Askewniverse when my friends and I discovered the director. Coming on the heels of the critical success of Chasing Amy, Dogma represents a huge step forward for Smith and his brand of comedy. It is his first foray into bigger budget filmmaking, and it also shifts the focus largely away from the established world of his first three films, only tangentially tying back into them through the presence of Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), this time cast as unlikely prophets. However, Dogma also represents a return to his past for Smith, as he wrote a draft of the screenplay before he filmed his debut Clerks, and only returned to the passion project when he felt that he had garnered enough technical know-how and industry clout to produce the film with the proper budget and production value. The final result is something of a mixed bag, not totally fitting in with Smith’s brand of lo-fi humor but also not divorcing itself enough from that milieu to be the successful action-comedy film that it wants to be. When reflected on in relation to the rest of Smith’s filmography, particularly his first five features and Clerks II, the movies that make up the accepted View Askewniverse, Dogma feels like an aborted foray down an unfamiliar, and possibly wrong, path.

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Dogma opens with fallen angels Bartleby (Affleck) and Loki (Damon) plotting a way to return to their home in Heaven, which they may have discovered after they are tipped off to the planned rededication of a New Jersey church by Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) as part of his new, image-conscious marketing campaign for the Catholic Church, Catholicism Wow! Through a loophole in Catholic dogma, the angels can enter the church in Red Bank, New Jersey on the day of its rededication and be forgiven of their sins, allowing them to re-enter Heaven, thus proving God fallible, and rending the fabric of the Universe and all existence therein. In order to prevent this cataclysm, Heavenly forces recruit Bethany (Fiorentino), a reluctant Catholic who works at an abortion clinic, to travel to New Jersey and stop the angels from reentering the church. Assisting Bethany in her journey are two prophets, the aforementioned Jay and Silent Bob, who serve as her guides from Illinois to their native Jersey, Rufus (Rock), the 13th apostle who was written out of the Bible, and who reveals to Bethany her true identity as a descendant of Jesus Christ’s family lineage, and several other Spiritual entities. They’re opposed by the demon Azrael (Jason Lee) and his trio of devilish hockey playing lackeys, who have secretly been guiding Bartleby and Loki all along for their own nefarious purposes. When all of the disparate parties arrive in Red Bank, a scene unfolds not unlike Armageddon and as the last scion of Christ, Bethany is the only one who has the power to save the Universe.

If the movie sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. As I mentioned, it was far and away the biggest project that Smith had tackled to that point in his career, with a larger cast, longer runtime, more locations, and more indirect approach to comedy than anything that had preceded it. However, rather than feeling like a culmination of everything that Smith had learned while working on his first three features, Dogma often feels like a rejection of those lessons. Smith has jettisoned his penchant for smaller indies in favor of action/comedy bombast, and the transition isn’t exactly smooth. Despite the personal nature of the project, and its lengthy gestation period, Dogma feels somewhat thrown together. It lacks the passion exhibited by the guerrilla filmmaking of Clerks and it doesn’t continue an exploration of the kinds of personal, emotional territory that Smith began to traverse with Chasing Amy. While that film found Smith beginning to peak as a screenwriter, with Dogma, he seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. There are too many characters involved in the film for the audience to become personally invested in any of them, and Smith doesn’t always do a great job of juggling the film’s multiple storylines and locations. Still though, I don’t think that tightening up the narrative would have improved Dogma, as it went through at least eight different variations before Smith settled on the final screenplay. The audacious scope of the film is part of its appeal, and it’s interesting to see the results of Smith’s first attempt to break out from his established niche. The fix for this film might have been in the works all along, however, as Smith reportedly shopped the film to other directors, including Robert Rodriguez, who turned it down citing Smith’s personal connection to the project as a reservation. I would be very interested in seeing what he would have done with this script, coming off of the schlocky, horror-action hybrid From Dusk Til Dawn.

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As intriguing as the prospect of a director slightly more suited to delivering on the promise of Dogma’s complex narrative and genre hybridity, I don’t know that it would have made up for some of the other major flaws that the film has. Overall, my biggest gripe with Dogma is that its cast is star-studded, but the big names are rarely used to their full potential. It may be the fault of the material that they were given to work with, but very few members of the cast are doing anything close to their best work in Dogma. Fiorentino is solid as the doubting, searching Bethany, but her performance isn’t memorable or dynamic. She gets a few scenes that indicate some depth as an actor, but overall her emotional and psychological journey are overshadowed by the mugging and zaniness that surround her character. Rock’s character, Rufus, is underdeveloped and doesn’t rise much above the level of a token black character, and his performance carries about as much enthusiasm as you might expect from the last sketch of the night on an episode of SNL. Rock isn’t the greatest traditional actor, but he is a gifted comedian, and it’s disappointing to see him fall as flat as he does delivering Smith’s dialogue. Selma Hayek appears half way through the film as a muse, Serendipity, whose role is to help provide Bethany with important information about her true identity, but again, she falls victim to underdevelopment. Her character is introduced in a strip club, and she’s largely used as eye candy throughout her brief appearances in the film. Mewes and Smith have a bigger part to play in this film than in the earlier View Askewniverse movies, but they don’t really bring anything new to their trademark roles.

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There are a few bright spots from a performance perspective. Alan Rickman is predictably great as the Metatron, God’s angelic messenger. His trademark sullen expression and exasperation are on full display as a condescending angel forced to deal with inferior humans. He brings a natural grace and poise to his performance that seems fitting for an angel. Conversely, Jason Lee is perfectly smarmy and calculating as the film’s primary villain, Azrael, a demon escaped from Hell with a penchant for central air and seer sucker suits. Lee again shows his ability to master Smith’s dialogue, and his performance as Azrael is my favorite in the film. He plays Azrael as sinister, but also charming, providing a much more nuanced character than do some of his more accomplished counterparts. This is one of the first films that I can remember seeing Lee in that really indicated he was able to craft a character, and that he would have a future as a mainstream actor outside of his collaborations with Smith. George Carlin’s Cardinal Glick is one of the film’s funniest characters, and even though Carlin isn’t stepping far afield from his stand-up routine, I could have used more of his character. Unfortunately, the most interesting characters in the film, including Azrael who should definitely be a more major presence, cede a great deal of screen time to the lesser developed and less dynamic characters. This imbalance is largely what I was referring to earlier when I mentioned that Smith has trouble juggling the film’s multiple storylines.

Affleck and Damon are enjoyable and multifaceted in their performances as the film’s main antagonists, but they’re both asked to do too much in carrying a film that just isn’t that good. I like Affleck a good deal in most of his performances, and he is pretty good here as Bartleby. Initially, Bartleby is the more level headed of the pair, attempting to reign in Loki’s murderous tendencies and keep him focuses on their mission. By film’s end though, the angels have switched moral positions, and Bartleby becomes obsessed with doling out lethal justice to sinning humans. Affleck handles this transition well, and his Bartleby is actually fearsome in the film’s climax, descending from the sky in golden armor, plucking up frightened humans and casually tossing them earthbound to an explosive and bloody end. Affleck had developed an edge to his performance style by this time, but unfortunately, Damon is less adept in the scenes that require him to play dark and villainous. Damon’s smirking visage is appropriate for Loki’s mischievous, trickster qualities, but when he actually follows through on the threats of his violence, the result is shocking but not quite believable. Still, the two have an obvious and natural chemistry, and their overall charm and ability to riff off of one another is a source of much of the film’s comedy.

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Unfortunately, outside of the relationship between Bartleby and Loki, and a few other standout instances that hit the nail on the head in their humorous critique of religion, Dogma just isn’t a particularly funny movie. Despite the assemblage of talent, Smith’s script doesn’t deliver on the comedy end. He attempts to balance high-minded satire with his standard verbose, crass dialogical humor and situational comedy. The results are disastrous, with the film’s satirical elements often feeling over-serious and obvious, and its gross out comedy descending to the levels of actual toilet humor and simply missing the mark. The film suffers from an overreliance on dick and fart jokes, and Mewes is too heavily featured for the first time in the View Askewniverse. I don’t think that my opinions on Dogma’s humor are the results of my maturity since first enjoying it, because I don’t remember ever thinking that the movie was particularly funny, as I did and do about Smith’s other 1990s movies. What has changed is my inability to excuse the movie for not being as funny as it could be, simply because watching Dogma as an adult it isn’t nearly as insightful, profound, or sharply satirical as I thought that it was when I was younger. Smith would later prove himself capable of creating a darkly effective satire in Red State, but Dogma is clearly the work of a younger and less experienced filmmaker.

On the whole, I was disappointed that I didn’t find more to like about Dogma on this rewatch. It’s probably pretty obvious that it was never among my very favorite Smith movies, but I did like it a good bit when I was younger. It still walks a fine line between being critical and reverent of organized religion, and Catholicism, in particular, but as I’ve matured in my own opinions about religion, the film’s tone doesn’t work as well for me as it once did. The film does have its bright spots, but Smith wastes the assembled talent of the cast, and doesn’t have the wherewithal to properly helm a narrative of the scope of Dogma. It isn’t a bad movie, per se, but it’s one that I think might have benefitted from a bit more collaboration and editorial guidance. Though I’ve seen nearly all of Smith’s films, Dogma was really where I stopped being a true fan of the director, and while it used to be in the rotation with relative frequency, I never had the affinity for it that I held for Smith’s first three features. Unfortunately, Dogma’s flaws have only become more apparent with time, and it will likely be a good while before I decide to revisit it, if I do at all.

Dog Day Afternoon

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Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Dir. Sidney Lumet

Written by: Frank Pierson (from the magazine article by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore)

Starring: Al Pacino, John Cazale, Penelope Allen, Charles Durning

 

Dog Day Afternoon is one of the oldest DVDs in my collection, both in terms of its place on my shelf and in terms of the actual production of the disc. I would imagine I purchased it sometime in the early 2000s, shortly after buying the Playstation 2 that my family used to play DVDs, probably on a whim based on my affinity for Al Pacino at the time. I know that I hadn’t seen the movie before owning it, and I’m fairly certain that I was only tangentially familiar with it and its subject matter. As a crime movie from the 1970s, with a highly pedigreed cast and director, Dog Day Afternoon fit squarely into my wheelhouse during my teens, and it became one of my favorite movies during that time. It’s a classic crime movie that I don’t think gets enough credit today for being as interesting and influential as it really was. Though I don’t watch Dog Day Afternoon with any regularity anymore, I think that some of its subject matter has only become more relevant in the 21st century with the advent of reality television and social media.

The film is based on the real-life robbery of a Chase Manhattan Bank branch in Brooklyn in 1972. In the film version, the robbers are Sonny (Pacino) and Sal (Cazale), who are woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to pull off the heist. The inept robbers have arrived after the bank’s deposit has already been collected for the day, so there is just over $1,000 left in cash in the bank. To make up for his miscalculation, Sonny decides to steal traveler’s checks and prevent them from being traced by burning the bank’s check register. However, the bank’s neighbors see the billowing smoke coming from the building and call the police, prompting the robbery to turn into a true hostage situation, as Sonny and Sal barricade themselves inside the bank with the employees. What follows is a tense standoff between Sonny and police Sergeant Moretti (Durning), in which Sonny attempts to negotiate a way out of the situation for he and Sal, while Moretti tries to ensure the safety of the hostages in the bank. A huge civilian crowd starts to form, as the situation devolves into a circus, with Sonny repeatedly attempting to incite the crowd and the police, clearly enjoying his brief moment of notoriety. Though he feels that he has total control of the situation, and that he will be able to extricate himself and Sal from the bank safely, it becomes clear as the hostage situation extends further and further into the night that there likely won’t be a happy ending.

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The thing that’s immediately fascinating to me when watching Dog Day Afternoon in 2018 is how prescient and immediate the movie feels. Though perhaps not as much as Lumet’s next feature, Network, this film feels like, with very few alterations, it could have been made today. Though it’s been a feature of news media since the advent and proliferation of cable news, the type of instant celebrity embodied by Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon feels like a very modern phenomenon. Social media and the constant news cycle keep viral stories, such as the one presented in the film, in the public eye much more easily, and they allow for access to breaking news as it happens. It would be very easy to imagine a remake of the film in which the crowd doesn’t gather around the bank, but rather engages with the hostage situation via a Twitter feed, with the police not having to worry about the opinions of just New Yorkers, but of people around the world. It would be a more cynical type of film, but, were it made today, I can envision Sonny planning out the heist to further his YouTube brand. The bank robbery and subsequent circus scene that develops surrounding it have the perfect making of a viral marketing stunt, and, knowing Lumet’s other films, I have to imagine that he had at least some inkling of the watered down celebrity culture that was coming in the near future. While Warhol predicted that everyone would have 15 minutes of fame, I think that in modern culture that brief moment can be distilled down even further, and Sonny’s “Attica!” scene is a perfect example of the sort of brief video clip that has come to define viral stardom in the modern age. Lumet was often an acerbic critic of the media, and Dog Day Afternoon needs little creative interpretation to fall in line with some of his other cynical, satirical films.

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Of course the other aspect of the film that helps it to feel modern and alive is Pacino’s electric performance as Sonny. Delivered at the height of Pacino’s rise to fame, immediately after his star turn in the first two Godfather films, Sonny is my personal favorite Pacino performance of all time. The character is at the same time wired and exhausted, bursting with kinetic energy and mania, but always threatening to collapse in a heap from the stresses his life and his situation have foisted upon him. Pacino gets a (mostly) undeserved reputation for being bombastic and over the top in his performance style, but he plays Sonny to the hilt in this movie, and it absolutely works. He’s physical, he’s histrionic, he certainly gives evidence for some of the more overt tics that would emerge in his style in his later years, but he wraps it all in a believable and effective package, giving Sonny enough nuance to fill in the gaps between his outbursts. He balances his shouting, gestural performance style when hamming it up for the crowd and the police with the quieter moments that he shares with the bank tellers and with Sal, his accomplice. I had forgotten some of the truly touching interactions that Pacino and Cazale share in the film, seeming to genuinely care for one another as friends, and even more so I had forgotten about some of the great moments that Pacino shares with Penelope Allen, who plays the bank’s head teller.

Allen is great in her supporting role as a tough, no-nonsense bank teller who refuses to extricate herself from the hostage situation because she’d rather stay with “her girls,” and ensure their safety. She brings a matriarchal air to the film, but she’s also hardened in a way. She isn’t intimidated by either the robbers or the police, taking ownership of her role as pack leader among the bank’s employees. In many ways, she and Cazale’s Sal are the film’s stabilizing forces. Cazale provides an important foil to Pacino, as he did in the Godfather films. In Dog Day Afternoon, Cazale gets to show off his quiet, stoic side, much different form his better known role as Fredo Corleone. Although he doesn’t have much dialogue, allowing Pacino to do more of the verbose scenery chewing, Cazale’s reserved performance tells the audience everything they need to know about Sal. He’s maybe a bit dim, but he’s loyal and competent, and he’s able to keep a level head as the bank robbery continues to spiral out of control. Though his emotional register remains fairly neutral throughout the film, I always get a bit sad when Sal admits to being afraid to take the jet that Sonny has arranged for them to escape on as he’s never flown before. That extremely human admission, in a very small moment of the film, sells his performance for me entirely.

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The dynamic between Sonny and Sal is an important one in the film, and their opposing demeanors are borne out thematically throughout. Most obviously, the performance styles of the two actors vary wildly, with Pacino’s Sonny more outwardly expressive, performative, and rambunctious, while Cazale plays Sal with a restrained, calm efficiency. Lumet continues this dichotomy through his treatment of the film’s two primary locations, the interior and exterior of the bank. The bank’s interior becomes a still oasis, where Sonny retreats to think and plan his moves, while the exterior becomes increasingly raucous as the crowd of onlookers and police grows throughout the film. The film’s only moments of true physical violence all occur outside of the bank, with Sonny being attacked on the sidewalk by one of the teller’s boyfriends, and of course with Sal being shot at the film’s end. Although this doesn’t take place directly outside of the bank, it still happens outdoors. The bank’s interior, however, is home to moments of emotional authenticity and vulnerability, the vault becoming an important visual reminder of security and refuge. Sal’s aforementioned fear of flying is an example of this vulnerability, as is the bank manager’s (Sully Boyer) admission to Sonny that he has two children at home whom he would like to see again. But the film’s most immediate moment of emotional vulnerability is the scene late in the film in which Sonny finally speaks to his wife, Leon (Chris Sarandon), on the phone. By now, it’s been revealed that Sonny’s motive for robbing the bank was to pay for Leon’s sex change, and though their relationship seems to be contentious at best, it’s clear that the two really love one another. During this brief scene, you can see the realization that he’ll never see his lover again wash over Sonny’s face as Pacino physically slumps, weighed down by the reality of the predicament he’s put himself and everyone he knows in. The quiet resignation in his brief conversation with Leon stands in stark contrast to the bellicosity that Sonny has shown up to that point, and indicates a further layer of the film’s operative dichotomy of wild abandon and homebound safety playing out within his own character.

In Dog Day Afternoon, Lumet hews fairly close to the reality of the event that he’s depicting, with him and screenwriter Frank Pierson knowing a juicy story when they see one ready to be ripped from the headlines. It would be hard not to make the spectacular bank robbery into a good movie, but Lumet’s wry sensibilities and eye for capturing authenticity elevate the film beyond its already intriguing subject matter. He encouraged his actors to largely improvise their dialogue, allowing them the freedom to turn in personal, memorable performances. His sense of pace and of location tighten the film’s narrative and focus. As in any very good thriller, there’s no fat to be trimmed, and the tension is ratcheted up and released at just the right moments. The film strikes a delicate balance as individual scenes are allowed to play out with their natural ebb and flow while the overall work continues its propulsive momentum towards its ultimate, inevitable finale. It’s a slow burn that’s also allowed to crackle and pop from time to time. In short, it’s one of the better thrillers of all time.

District 9

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District 9 (2009)

Dir. Neill Blomkamp

Written by: Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell

Starring: Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, David James

 

District 9 is a film that I don’t watch particularly often, but every time I do watch it, I find myself wondering why it’s been so long since my last viewing. It’s a thoughtful, stylish exploration of social themes wrapped up in the guise of a sci-fi action film. It was an instant addition to the sci-fi canon upon its release, loved by critics and audiences alike. It was also one of the few movies that I saw in 2009, a year when I was almost completely disengaged from the cinema after having dropped out of graduate school. After some subsequent legal issues, I found myself changing jobs, fighting with severe depression, and I simply lost interest in going to the movies because they seemed so ancillary to the issues that I was dealing with in my own life. District 9 didn’t entirely reawaken my serious interest in movies, but seeing it on Christmas day that year did remind me that watching a good movie can be a soothing and restorative experience. Spending a couple of hours in this alternate version of South Africa, one which is inhabited by strange space aliens, was just what I needed at the time, and I find a similar sense of comfort every time I watch this movie.

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In the film, an alien spacecraft arrives on Earth in 1982, and begins hovering over the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. After some time with no successful attempts to communicate with the spaceship, and with the world’s population fervently awaiting first contact, an investigation team cracks the ship’s hull, revealing a crew of sick and dying alien lifeforms. These aliens, derisively called “prawns,” are corralled by the South African government into a slum outside of Johannesburg, referred to as District 9, where they live in an uneasy and tenuous peace with their terrestrial neighbors. After nearly 30 years of this uncomfortable arrangement, the South African government hires a private security corporation, Multinational United, to relocate the aliens to a different internment camp, further away from human civilization. Leading up the relocation effort is Wikus van de Merwe (Copley), a bumbling bureaucrat placed into a job he’s totally unsuited for by his father-in-law, who happens to be the head of MNU. During the relocation effort, Wikus meets Christopher James (Cope), an alien who, along with his young son and friend, has been stashing away alien technology for 20 years, hoping to one day repair the mothership and return to his home planet to lead a rescue mission for the rest of his kind stranded on Earth. During a search of Christopher’s home, Wikus finds a canister of fuel that Christopher and his friend have been distilling from their scavenged materials, which he confiscates. However, when trying to open the canister, Wikus accidentally sprays himself in the face with the fuel, which immediately begins to have a violent effect on his physical person. Wikus quickly realizes that his exposure to the black liquid is causing his human tissue to be replaced by alien tissue, and that he is gradually transforming into a prawn. When his condition becomes public, Wikus becomes a figure of universal scorn, while also being hunted by MNU mercenaries, who are hoping to capture him and study the only existing human/prawn hybrid. Wikus is forced to return to District 9 and seek out Christopher, hoping to find answers about his condition.

I think that my favorite thing about District 9 is Blomkamp’s choice to present his story in a pseudo-documentary style. This grounds the film’s fantasy premise in a realistic setting, giving us all the tropes of a nonfiction film, and also allows an unfettered amount of access to the few central characters in the film. By framing the narrative as a documentary, we get early moments of Wikus performing for the documentary camera crew, revealing key pieces of the character’s personality. The style makes the film feel ripped from the headlines while it’s obviously dealing with a farfetched science fiction premise. This verisimilitude is reinforced because not only is there a documentary crew filming the process of the relocation of the prawns outside of District 9, but several later developments in the film are revealed through news broadcasts, screens, and security camera footage. I’m often skeptical of films that try to bridge the gap between found footage, documentary, and narrative filmmaking, because often the narrative device is stretched beyond the point of plausibility or just used as a gimmick, but Blomkamp does a great job of walking the tight rope and meshing the film’s disparate styles together.

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The other aspect of District 9 that keeps me wanting to watch it over and over again are the great performances by Copley and Cope as Wikus and Christopher, respectively. The movie was Copley’s feature debut, and his performance as Wikus catapulted him into international stardom. As the film’s only non-alien protagonist, and as the subject of the faux-documentary that is being shot, Wikus is in nearly every scene in the film, and Copley rises to the occasion admirably. He is at times funny, pitiful, sad, and fearsome, as he turns himself into a reluctant warrior by the film’s end. The range that he shows in the film is impressive, providing genuine humor with the early portions of the film requiring a slapstick type of performance while later scenes find Copley evoking deep pathos as he portrays Wikus’s gradual understanding of the plight of the aliens whom he had never considered before. Copley became the film’s breakout star, but I think that Cope’s performance as Christopher is equally as memorable, in a much different way. Cope did the voice work for all of the prawns in the film, and the series of clicks, whistles, and skittering noises that they produce is actually emotive, even divorced from the context of the film’s subtitles. His performance as Christopher Johnson is the film’s emotional center for me, and it’s impressive that an actor can convey that level of emotional commitment while performing as a CGI character. Christopher Johnson feels every bit as real, and deserves every bit of pathos and sympathy that Wikus does, and Cope’s mostly improvised performance is to credit for that.

I think that District 9 is one of the more emotionally resonant science fiction movies I’ve ever seen, and I imagine that that is likely due to its obvious close association with the actual political history of South Africa. The film is a clear allegory for Apartheid, the legislated, state-sanctioned brand of segregation that was law in South Africa for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The prawns are very obviously stand ins for black South Africans, who were subjugated under minority rule by white South Africans until the early 1990s. The political practice had its roots in Dutch colonial rule of South Africa, and the descendants of the colonizers simply continued enforcing this form of white supremacy through legal actions and force, when necessary. Blomkamp’s personal history growing up in the final years of Apartheid undoubtedly had an influence on District 9. Though they’re shown to be mistreated by both white and black characters alike, the othering of the prawns has a distinctly racial feel to it, and though the film’s message could be applied generally and broadly to any class or racial divisions among society, its context as the work of a South African filmmaker make its cultural allusions obvious. While it would stand out as a great modern sci-fi film based on its intriguing premise, great effects and action sequences, and memorable aliens alone, the real world resonance of District 9’s narrative with the recent history of South Africa gives the work that much more artistic integrity, and pushes it over the top into “great film” territory.

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While Neill Blomkamp’s stock may not be as high now as it was after the release of District 9, with his proposed Alien spinoff series never coming to fruition and his subsequent films suffering both critical and commercial failure, District 9 still stands out as one of the early 21st century’s great films. Its successes have bought Blomkamp enough good will with me that I’ll consider his next film or two must see material unless they disappoint me as much as Chappie did. I’m even still holding out some hope that the sequel to District 9 that Blomkamp has teased at various times may eventually appear. But even if it doesn’t, and if Blomkamp doesn’t fulfill on the promise of his debut, nothing can diminish the initial rush that I felt on first seeing District 9. It was such a fun and original premise, presented in an action style that seemed both over the top and practical. The film’s world was engaging, both familiar and alien, but overall wholly formed. It arrived at my life at a perfect time, when I needed to remember the entertainment and distraction that a really good movie can provide, and I’m reminded of that every time I pull it off the shelf for a rewatch.