PARASITE: Who Can Afford a Future?

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-Shik try to find a signal in the midst of poverty in PARASITE.

 As the epigraph to the published edition of her deeply moving play about reproductive rights and Irish immigration, What a Young Wife Ought to Know, Hannah Moscovitch quotes political activist Linda Tirado:

Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain….Whatever happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.

In the play, it relates to the plight of Sophie and her husband, who desperately need to control the number of children they have in a society (1920s Ottawa, though it could be anywhere in the early 20^th century) that keeps all information about birth control away from the lower classes for fear of cutting into the pool of servants and unskilled labor.

I read the quote and the play while flying to New York, and it also applied to the first play I saw there, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Henry, a well-off businessman, counsels his boyfriend and future husband, Eric (the equivalent of the novel’s Margaret Schlegel), about the need to plan for the future. The concept is alien to Eric. He’s a social justice worker living hand-to-mouth. Without solid financial prospects, Eric has no way of planning a future.

A month later, the quote came back to me again while watching Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, my choice for the best picture of 2019. At one point the father (Song Kang-ho) of a family living a tenuous life in the slums says he has the perfect plan to solve their problems. That’s no plan at all, “Because life cannot be planned.” Shortly after that, his wealthy employer (Lee Sun-kyun) tells him about his own future plans. Like Eric in The Inheritance, Song looks at the scion of privilege as if he were speaking another language, because to people like Song and his on-screen family words like “plan” and “future” seem to come from a vocabulary they never learned.

Yet planning is so much a part of modern culture it’s almost a conditioned response, no matter what the class. Song’s family lives in crippling poverty in Seoul after a series of failed business ventures. Their son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), has aced all the exams to go to university but can’t afford the tuition. They leach wifi signals from nearby businesses and fold pizza boxes to make any kind of money. Then Choi’s university friend asks him to take over a tutoring job while he’s out of the country. The student and her parents are loaded. Within a few days, Choi has gotten his sister hired as the younger brother’s art teacher/therapist. Then they push out the family chauffeur so Song can get his job and the housekeeper so their mother can take her place, all without letting on that they’re related to each other.

The scenes in which Choi and his family move in on their employers are a kick, and for its first third, the film recalls the best of screwball comedy. In films like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Easy Living (1937), have-nots move into the world of the rich and save the haves, who are emotionally crippled by their privileged lives. The difference here is that Song’s family isn’t trying to make life better for their employers. The long-term goal is to get everything from them they can, with Choi even planning to court his student when she’s old enough. Their opportunism feels liberating, particularly with the working poor now facing quarantine and unemployment. And the family they move in on is so foolish they almost cry out to be duped. Lee is narrow-minded and somewhat vacant about what goes on in his home. His wife (Cho Yeo-jeong) comes across as something of a ditz. She’s like a younger, prettier Alice Brady, and the scenes in which she falls for the family’s manipulation are delicious comic gems.

Of course, that’s just the first third of the film. As things progress, Choi’s family makes a few mistakes. Song keeps threatening to overstep his place as chauffeur, and we gradually come to see just how jealously Lee guards the social distinctions that tell him he’s better than his servants. Jo’s daffiness has a harsher side, too. She may be clueless enough to fall for the family’s manipulations, but she’s also clueless about basic human decency. When the wealthy family returns unexpectedly from a camping trip, she thinks nothing of calling the housekeeper to demand a hot cooked meal be ready for them when they get home in eight minutes. Later, she and her husband just expect the housekeeper and chauffeur to throw together a birthday party, with no real physical help. After all, they’re paying them extra.

That’s just part of the tonal shift that takes place during the film. As it turns out, the ousted housekeeper has more roots in the house than they’d expected, which takes the film in a more violent direction. Screwball comedy becomes absurdist thriller, and once again, the plans of the poor fall apart. Bong pulls off the transition almost seamlessly. The comic and the serious, after all, are only a question of point of view. As the stakes rise for Song and his family, the film’s absurdities grow increasingly dark. In one virtuoso bit of filmmaking father and children sneak out of their employers’ house in the middle of a rainstorm. To get back to their basement apartment, they have to descend a steep flight of stairs (staircases figure heavily in the film as markers of social distinction). As they go down the steps, things get colder and wetter until they discover their entire neighborhood is flooded. It’s a horrifying moment of abjection that underlines just how few resources they have without the jobs they’ve cheated their way into.

Bong also loads minor details with meaning. The younger child has been traumatized by seeing a ghost in the kitchen late one night. That’s why his mother thinks he needs art therapy. As it turns out, the ghost was the housekeeper’s husband, who’s been hiding out in the house’s sub-basement since the wealthier family moved in, because he’s on the run from loan sharks. Like Choi’s family, he’s one of the dispossessed who literally haunt the world of privilege.

At the birthday party, Lee and Song hide out wearing dime-store Native-American headdresses as part of an elaborate scheme to make Lee’s son feel better. They’re going to attack his sister as she brings in the birthday cake, so the child can play cowboy and rescue her. The levels of cultural appropriation here are dizzying. The westernized, wealthy South Koreans are imitating a culture the West has spent centuries trying to erase and doing so using standard Western tropes that render the colonized peoples’ reality invisible. They’re stereotyped right out of existence, much as Song’s family are often invisible to their colonizing employers. And yet even the wealthy family is, in a sense, colonized by globalization. Their dreams of opulence are empty as they move through their sterile mansion (a great piece of art direction) with no sense of what’s going on around them. They don’t even know where all the rooms in the house are.

After his attempts to take over the wealthy family are destroyed, Choi can’t stop planning. At the end, he fantasizes about going to university and eventually becoming wealthy enough to move his parents into the house where they once worked. We see his dreams, which makes them real for us, before we’re pulled back to the reality of his life and the crushing poverty from which his family has managed all too briefly to escape. Is this the best Western society has brought us? Empty dreams of affluence without humanity? Bong depicts a post-human world, where the poor have no time for anything but survival, and the rich have no sense of reality. No wonder the picture has struck such chord with U.S. audiences.

Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman

The Witcher

Freya Allan and Anya Chalotra provide most of the magic in The Witcher.

The female stars of Netflix’s adaptation of The Witcher are so much more interesting than the male lead, the series should really be called The Sorceress, the Princess and That Guy with the Cheekbones. While monster hunter Henry Cavill broods his way through the show’s impressive European locations, Anya Chalotra and Freya Allan are acting up a storm around him. They’re not the only ones strong women on hand. The recurring cast includes powerhouse performances from MyAnna Buring as Chalotra’s magical mentor, Mimi Ndiweni as an enemy sorceress, Emma Appleton as a female bandit and the wonderful Jodhi May as Allan’s grandmother. With her great, dark eyes, May seems way too young to be anybody’s grandmother (she’s only in her 40s). She’s also like the second coming of Kay Francis, one of the most unjustly neglected stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Cavill’s lack of primacy in a series named for his character can’t be blamed entirely on him. He’s saddled with some of the most turgid dialogue since the original Dynasty and a character who, though he’s destined to connect with Allan at some point, seems determined to avoid all human relationships. The script even has him spend most of the final climactic battle stuck in a flashback. For the most part his character is all about fighting. He has some limited magical powers, being a half witch (hence, “witcher”), but none of it is really defined, and he doesn’t rely on his magic all that much.

By contrast, Chalotra’s Yennifer is all magic, and the actress brings impressive levels of anger and wit to the performance. She’s a fascinating if somewhat maddening character, a half-elf (if this is starting to sound like an RPG, it’s no surprise: Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels have inspired two) born with physical disabilities. After a childhood of torment in the series’ pseudo-medieval world, whose inhabitants are anything but woke, she’s threatened with rape and magically teleports to another location. That leads to her being recruited for the local sorcery school, where she learns she has a powerful, dangerous and sometimes unpredictable connection with chaos magic. The physical transformation that makes her a full-fledged sorceress means she can no longer bear children. That eventually leads her to rebel against the society of sorcerers and go freelance while trying to cure her sterility because this whole thing is based on a series of novels by a man. I know I’m somewhat prejudiced by my status as a SINK (single income no kids), but every time a fictional character complains about not being complete because he/she can’t produce offspring, I wonder if they’ve ever heard of adoption. Surely in the near anarchy of The Witchers’ feudal society that doesn’t entail all the hoops people have to jump through here, or does their world have its own pseudo-Christian president out to deprive sorcerers of adoption rights?

Allan’s character is loaded with some mysterious power, too, apparently inherited from her mother (so at least for some women in this world power doesn’t necessarily entail sacrifice). When her kingdom is overrun with invaders, and May tells her she has to leave, she shouts, “No” and shatters a glass. Later she’s attacked by some peasant refugees she thought were her friends. After blacking out, she revives to the sight of their mangled bodies hanging from tree branches. That’s a rather satisfying moment in the current socio-political climate, and you can’t help wondering what she’d do to a Harvey Weinstein or Donald Trump. The actress does a good job at playing wide-eyed innocence convincingly, which is an accomplishment for any professional actor who’s survived the business long enough to land the lead in an international production like this.

While these two very gifted actors are exercising power, Cavill wanders the countryside taking out the occasional monster but never really getting anywhere. I’ve enjoyed his work in other pieces. He’s perfectly competent as a young partygoer done in by Cenobites in the direct-to-video Hellraiser:Hellworld (2005), which could be subtitled “Superman Gets a Blow Job From a Demon.” In the two films I’ve seen in which he plays Superman (I missed the first), he does fine in the one-on-one scenes. If the action scenes don’t work, it’s not his fault. They’re a hot mess even in Batman vs. Superman (2016), which didn’t have to be cobbled together from the work of two directors. In The Witcher he does his best work when he can just look someone in the eye and tell them the truth. Unfortunately, the series keeps saddling him with lines where he has to look off into the distance (or maybe at a vision of this world’s version of Jesus) and deliver something deep and sodden with meaning, and he looks lost. There’s also a problem with his physicality. Where other actors like the three Chrises (Evans, Hemsworth and Pratt) bulked up for superhero roles while maintaining a sense of ease and even grace in their physical work, Cavill just lumbers. At times it’s as if his muscles were wearing him.

Although the men clearly take a backseat to the women in The Witcher, they’re not totally lost. The sorcerers at least register. The strongest male supporting role is Jaskier (Joey Batey), a troubadour who attaches himself to Cavill for four adventures. Batey has all of the lighter moments in Cavill’s storylines, and they’re really needed. He has two main drives, sex and his art, and it’s a kick watching him come up with songs about their adventures. When he performs them, he uses some modern rock-star moves that are very funny.

There’s also something a little queer about the character. Although he speaks a great deal of his success with the ladies, when Batey and Cavill have a run-in with elves, he wishes their male leader were just a little more attractive. Were the writers with it, they might have followed up on that. Giving him a crush on Cavill would help explain some of the character’s choices a little better. As it is, when he finally exits the series, ostensibly because Cavill has hit him with one too many insults, you can’t help wondering if the actor simply wasn’t available for any other episodes, the motivation is that weak.

There are some satisfying moments in the series, particularly when the sorcerers get to fighting, but at other places it just doesn’t feel thought out. There are fights shot in such murky darkness it’s hard to tell what’s going on. One episode introduces a shape-shifter who takes on a mage’s appearance in an attempt to lure Allan into the enemy camp (the sorcerer, Mousesack, is her family’s house mage). That plays well, with a satisfying if predictable pay-off. But then he takes on the appearance of the enemy commander who hired him (Eamon Farren), and their fight scene is almost impossible to follow.

The series’ structure is a bit of a challenge, too. The story jumps around in time with little explanation. Complicating that is the fact that several of the episodes follow three different plot strands — one each for Cavill, Chalotra and Allan — that are all taking place in different decades. Picking up the context cues is challenging, and they don’t really become clear until halfway through the first season. This would seem to mirror the way in which the Witcher books were written. The first series is drawn mostly from the two volumes of short stories that precede Sapkowski’s five novels, which suggests season two will pick up with the first novel, making it somewhat easier to follow (unless they keep staging fight scenes in the dark). Why the series’ creators didn’t just follow a chronological approach is an issue. Perhaps they wanted to introduce Allan’s character earlier than she would have fallen in a more straightforward narrative. That doesn’t seem a good enough reason to justify all the confusion, however. In the first episode, she’s told to find Cavill, but you don’t learn why until the end of the fourth. By then, her failure to find him seems a rather clumsy delaying tactic.

I’ll probably give the second series a chance, assuming we’re all still alive when it drops in 2021. Chalotra’s Yennifer alone is a sufficiently compelling character to justify further watching. And there’s always the chance series creator Lauren Schmidt Hissrich will listen to the gay fans. Jaskier doesn’t turn up in the novels, but there are some queer characters in the games that could provide reason for more than hate watching. Lord knows, the series needs it.

Gloria Bell

Julianne Moore and John Turturro have beautifully rounded characters in Gloria Bell.

Julianne Moore’s acting is so effortless it’s easy to take her body of work for granted. That may be why she’s only got one Oscar. Her performances are never obvious enough to catch the eyes of the people voting for awards. It took a showy role as a woman succumbing to dementia in Still Alice (2014) to finally bring home Oscar gold, and even that was a bit of a surprise. Still Alice is hardly a disease-of-the-week movie but rather a very subtle exploration of the dynamics of a marriage. She isn’t the whole show, either, as she gets wonderful support from Alec Baldwin as her husband and Kate Bosworth, Hunter Parrish and Kristen Stewart (yes, that Kristen Stewart) as her children. I’m just so used to seeing her work wonders with any script she’s given my first response on seeing her in last year’s Gloria Bell was, “She’s incandescent…as usual.”

Adapted from the Chilean Gloria (2013), the film follows a divorcee (Moore) dealing with a delayed case of empty nest syndrome. She’s been single for about a decade, and her children (Caren Pistorius and Michael Cera) are grown. All she has is a job as an insurance claims representative, and she knows that won’t last forever. In one touching scene, she bids goodbye to a retiring co-worker (Barbara Sukowa) with promises to reconnect that neither knows they’ll keep. Her only outlet is the dance clubs of Los Angeles, where she goes to release her energy and look for some connection. That’s where she meets Arnold (John Turturro), a recent divorcé looking for his own form of connection.

Under the direction of Sebastian Lelio, who also directed the original Gloria, the film gently explores the title character’s plight as a single woman. She’s got a lot to give. You can hear it in the way she speaks to clients over the phone. And you realize her children are drifting further from her, and her other major relationship, with her mother (Holland Taylor), is cordial but a little distant. Her future before she meets Arnold seems to revolve around a stray cat that keeps getting into her apartment.

Moore plays all this simply and truthfully. She never asks the audience to love her. She just presents Gloria with all her little quirks — the way she sneaks cigarettes when her disapproving children aren’t around, the uncertain way she offers to help her son with the infant child his wandering wife neglects, the distant look in her eyes as she dances. She’s a fully formed human being, and it’s hard not to get caught up in her story.

At times she seems almost the only fully realized character in the film. The rest of the cast is perfectly solid, but Alice Johnson Boher’s adaptation of the original screenplay by Lelio and Gonzolo Maza doesn’t give them a lot to do. That’s a problem when you have actors as good as Taylor and Sukowa. They don’t do anything to draw attention to themselves, but the mere knowledge of what they could do given half a chance becomes a little distracting. You keep wondering what’s going on when they’re not on screen. At a family birthday, we meet Gloria’s ex-husband (Brad Garrett). There are a few nice moments as they share memories. Then he breaks down with guilt over having failed to be there as a father, but the connections are missing. It’s not Garrett’s fault. The script doesn’t give him a way to get from nostalgia to regret.

The only other fully realized character in the film is Turturro’s Arnold. The actor has played so many demented roles, you almost expect his courtship of Moore to turn the film into a thriller, but he quickly dispels that. Turturro has a lighter side that’s rarely exploited. You have to see him in Allison Anders’ Grace of My Heart (1996) to realize he can be charmingly silly without losing any of the realism he brings to a role. The Anders films is ultimately a misfire. The veiled attempt to make a biography of Carole King sinks under too many soap opera twists and some new songs that aren’t good enough for a character inspired by King. But if you’ve seen it, you’ll remember the goofy grin on his face as he dances to cheer up the leading lady. You almost wish he were the one pursuing a recording career instead of her.

It’s easy to see how quickly Gloria is charmed by Arnold. Turturro really connects to Moore in their early scenes together, and the two actors create a powerful rapport. His role is so lived in that it’s hardly a surprise when problems crop up. He’s such a rounded individual, you’re not surprised to see he has a negative side. Arnold has baggage from his previous marriage, and you can tell the first time a call from one of his daughter’s interrupts a date that this isn’t going to be a rom com.

Moore and Turturro are so good, you keep wishing the other actors had the same opportunities to shine. It would be nice, in particular, to get some sense of what being women alone means to Sukowa and Taylor’s characters. That’s not to say that Moore can’t carry the film on her own. She’s so at ease in the role that moments where she’s overcome with emotion to the point you can’t tell whether she’s laughing or crying are like little gifts from the gods. It’s just that, given the wealth of talent at the film’s disposal, she shouldn’t have to.

2019 Round Up

Attack of the Killer Cockatoo!

Ruth Donnelly in LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT.

I didn’t want to go off for the holidays without posting another blog, particularly since my laptop doesn’t access Blogger the same way my desktop computer does. With everything going on around me right now (long story, boring), I haven’t had a chance to get my thoughts together on anything new I’ve seen. Suffice to say I was pleasantly pleased by A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, though I think the acting honors should be going to Matthew Rhys as the angst-ridden magazine writer, his performance keeps the film from dissolving into sentimentality, rather than Tom Hanks’ admittedly expert impersonation of Fred Rogers.

All of these started out as Facebook posts, but they haven’t all gone to the same pages, so this is really just a wrap-up of things I saw this year that were worth some kind of comment. In addition, I’ve made some revisions and added a few special treats for the faithful. Nonetheless, feel free to skim. There won’t be a quiz.

The Beguiled (1971)

Pamelyn Ferdin discovers the wounded Clint Eastwood

 

Visually, Don Siegel’s Gothic horror is a stunner. Cinematographer Bruce Surtees creates images as good as any in Ingmar Bergman’s color films. The tale of a wounded Union soldier taken in by a Southern women’s school has some great horror moments and fine work from Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman and child actress Pamelyn Ferdin. Clint Eastwood is good when his character is acted upon. All the women want a little Eastwood to call their own, and it’s easy to see why. But when he has to drive the action toward the end, he’s pretty embarrassing. I don’t think he really learned how to act until he got too old to take his clothes off.

The Big Clock (1948)

This is one beautiful machine of a film noir, with its melodramatic twists and comic punch lines carefully set up. I’ve never been a fan of Ray Milland’s, but as long as he isn’t reaching for big emotional effects, he’s serviceable as a true-crime editor trying to get out of a frame-up for murder. The real stars are Charles Laughton — deliciously slimy as his boss, modeled on Henry Luce — George Macready as Laughton’s second-in-command, Rita Johnson as Laughton’s terminally sophisticated mistress and Elsa Lanchester as a scene-stealing artist.  If you listen closely, you’ll catch Noel Neill early on as an elevator operator. John Farrow directs stylishly and cast his wife, Maureen O’Sullivan, effectively in the female lead. Is it an after-effect of watching him in Gilda, or is Macready once again playing a coded gay character?

Broadway Melody of 1940

The script is aggravating because it keeps getting in the way of the musical numbers, and I could do without the operatic renditions of “I Concentrate on You” and “Begin the Beguine.” At least the latter is followed by a swing rendition by the Music Maids, which acts as a palate cleanser. And Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell’s dancing is just sublime. Early on, George Murphy and Powell share a dance duet with some fast footwork, and he looks like a dancer trying to keep up. Astaire has a similar routine with Powell later on, and he makes each move a work of art, like everything he ever did.

Broadway Rhythm (1944)

Even the worst MGM musicals have at least a number or two that’s worth watching. This one has a horrible script that can’t make up its mind what it’s about and Ginny Simms, a big-band singer Louis B. Mayer tried to turn into a star until she declined his marriage proposal. She sings well, but next to her even a serviceable actor like George Murphy looks like one of the Barrymores (and as a dancer, he makes a good Republican senator). Charles Winninger and Gloria DeHaven try to put some energy into the tired material. But the real pull is Nancy Walker belting out “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet,” Lena Horne doing “Brazilian Boogie” (an exercise in cultural appropriation if ever there was one) and “Somebody Loves Me” and Hazel Scott playing a swinging version of “The Minute Waltz.” It seems almost unfair that one of Horne’s numbers is followed almost immediately by Scott’s guest appearance. What mere mortal could stand comparison to those two dynamos?

Crawl (2019)

There’s some great visual filmmaking here, and it's a lot of fun until the characters start talking. Fortunately, that's not often. Barry Pepper manages to invest most of his dialogue with some weight, but can we declare a moratorium on "I never thought it would end like this?" Listen, writers, nobody expects to end up in an alligator-infested basement during a category five hurricane. The only proper response would be, "Ya think?"

Cry Havoc (1943)

Five fabulous women: Joan Blondell (c.) and clockwise (from top left) Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Margaret Sullavan and Ann Sothern

This World War II drama betrays its stage origins with too many scenes set in a dormitory for nursing volunteers serving in the Philippines, and it’s pure Hollywood flag waving. But the cast keeps things moving along. Margaret Sullavan is in charge of the women, and she has that wonderful voice to put a teardrop behind almost every line. Ann Sothern scores as the woman with a chip on her shoulder, Ella Raines is sympathetic as a society girl stuck in the Pacific, Connie Gilchrist is reliably sympathetic as their cook, but Joan Blondell gets the real acting honors as a stripper (“You know what you do to a banana before you eat it? Well, I do it to music.”). The camera follows her as she moves through the military hospital after an air raid, stopping to comfort a dying soldier before taking over a bandaging job. It’s a great bit of acting as she holds in her reactions to the horrors around her, building until her final breakdown.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

John Malkovch gives Zac Efron an acting lesson. Whether or not it will take is anybody's guess.

They left out “a little boring.” This Netflix original can’t seem to make up its mind whether it's a Lifetime confessional (“If you think your man’s a serial killer, it’s time to put the brakes on the relationship”), a docudrama or an ironic take on Zac Efron’s image. It’s kind of sad watching him butt up against his limitations trying to play Ted Bundy (a role much better handled by Mark Harmon in 1986’s The Deliberate Stranger and Billy Campbell in Ann Rule: The Stranger Beside Me, a 2003 USA Network film). When the judge played by John Malkovich tells Efron that his becoming a killer was a horrible waste of human potential, you believe he believes it because he’s Malkovich, for goddess’ sake, but he seems a little delusional for all that. One can only hope Mr. Efron paid a lot of attention in the scenes Malkovich steals without breaking a sweat.

The Forbidden Room (2015)

Some of the world’s queerest movies come from Winnipeg and are directed by the straight Guy Maddin. Case in point, this strange assemblage of stories inspired by lost films and co-directed by Evan Johnson. At one point, you’re watching a flashback within a memoir within a fantasy within a dream within a story that’s also a dream within a story. It stars Maddin regulars like Louis Negin and Maria de Medeiros, along with Geraldine Chaplin as The Master Passion, Udo Kier, Charlotte Rampling and the very handsome Roy Dupuis as Cesare, the sapling jack.

Gilda (1946)

One of the screen's great triangles, but who's at the apex? George Macready, Rita Hayworth or Glenn Ford?

With a romantic triangle that goes both ways, this is one of the queerest movies of the 1940s. You can never quite tell, even at the end, if Glenn Ford is jealous that George Macready is married to Rita Hayworth or that Hayworth has stolen Macready. Harry Cohn put Hayworth in so much schlock that when she finally gets to work with a half-decent script it’s surprising how good she is. She brings the film a wit and energy that keeps it from becoming too sordid, and her dancing in two musical numbers, choreographed by Jack Cole, is a joy to watch.

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944)

I don’t know if a perfect comedy exists, but Preston Sturges’ last Paramount release comes pretty darn close. Eddie Bracken stars as a 4F who lets a group of Marines headed by William Demarest convince him to go back to his small town posing as a war hero (just to make his mother happy). As in all of Sturges’ films, the comic timing is impeccable, particularly in the scenes between Bracken and Demarest, and the supporting cast is terrific. Sturges’ physical staging is just as impressive, from the opening shot that tracks from a tap dancer in a nightclub to Bracken sitting alone at the bar to the number of parades dotting the film and the organized chaos of the crowd scenes. In one of his best roles, eternally nelly Franklin Pangborn is the town’s harried event planner.

I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)

The complete film (with Spanish subtitles)

 

Sarah Jacobson’s short, shot in black-and-white 16mm, is an explosion of feminist punk anger as it follows a young woman (Kristin Calabrese) who starts killing the men who abuse her, from a casual rest-stop pickup (shades of Aileen Wuornos) to a man who poses as a fellow spirit only to reveal himself as misogynistic as her other victims. You can’t get very deep into a character like that in 27 minutes, but you sure can reveal a lot about the culture.

Intruder in the Dust (1949)

 Juano Hernandez domiantes the film but never made it to the cover of the video box.

It’s amazing to consider that MGM and one of Greta Garbo’s favorite directors turned out this searing indictment of racism in the South. There are many marvels in this William Faulkner adaptation: Juano Hernandez’ uncompromising performance as a proud black man in the rural South, the depiction of blacks as living in a hostile country, the terrifying scene in which young Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman, Jr.) exhumes a murder victim’s body and the even more terrifying scene of people gathering in anticipation of a lynching as if going to a county fair. Even more disturbing, the current DVD box, which inadvertently suggests things haven’t changed that much since 1949.

The Killers (1946)

 Two stars a-borning: Ava Gardner and Burt Lancaster

With its themes of fate, betrayal and duplicity, this is one of the great film noirs. It’s actually structured like Citizen Kane (1941), with the story of Ole “Swede” Anderson (Burt Lancaster, in his film debut) told through a series of flashbacks by various characters. Lancaster does some pretty impressive work, especially in his first three scenes, in which he has to make a defeated character compelling. As the woman who leads him astray, Ava Gardner is pretty damned good, too (she was always rather underrated). The role made her a star, and you can see it happening in her first close-ups. The whole thing is expertly made, from Robert Siodmak’s direction and Woody Bredell’s cinematography to the polished, professional performances of actors like Edmond O’Brien, Albert Dekker, Sam Levene and Jeff Corey. Miklos Rosza’s score includes the four-note figure that would serve as the theme for Dragnet.

A Kiss Before Dying (1956)

Less film noir than film beige, this tepid thriller follows a young psychopath (Robert Wagner) trying to kill his way into a wealthy family. When impregnating one child, Joanne Woodward (channeling Shelley Winters’ most pathetic moments in 1951’s A Place in the Sun), proves the wrong move, he tosses her off a roof and then starts courting her sister (Virginia Leith), who has too good a head on her shoulders to buy his line for long. Wagner’s idea of how to play a murderous madman is to chain smoke while barely moving his face. Let’s just say, he’s no Bruno Anthony. Mary Astor has a few nice moments as his mother, and George Macready has a great reaction shot when he realizes the man who’s about to marry one daughter may have killed the other. This was director Gerd Oswald’s first feature, but it displays little of the stylization that would mark lower-budget films like 1958’s Screaming Mimi or his The Outer Limits episodes. At least Wagner and co-star Jeffrey Hunter are pretty, but I couldn’t help giggling every time someone introduced Hunter’s character, who has the same name as a popular 1980s gay porn star, because, to be honest, adulthood is vastly overrated.

Ladies They Talk About (1933)

What a strange if often delightful film! Barbara Stanwyck is a gangster’s moll who helps set up a bank robbery. She’s caught, but an old friend turned preacher (Preston Foster) is about to get her off when she has a pang of conscience and confesses. That leads to a stay in women’s prison and the film’s best scenes. The inmates include Lillian Roth, who’s as lively and gritty as Stanwyck and even gets to sing, Madame Sul-Te-Wan as a sassy black woman named Mustard and the delightfully wacky Maude Eburne as a “beautician” whose parlor offered, shall we say, a different line of services. Ruth Donnelly is the assistant matron and in one scene walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder, which somehow helps keep the inmates in line. There are also two jokes about a lesbian inmate who likes to wrestle and even seems to end up with a wrestling partner to call her own.

Libeled Lady (1936)

Pick your favorite: Myrna Loy, William Powell, Jean Harlow or Spencer Tracy.

 

The sheer expertise of this screwball comedy demonstrates what made the Golden Age of Hollywood so golden. The tight script features two squabbling couples brought together by a newspaper and a lawsuit. They wouldn’t be as likable played by other actors, but the four stars know just how to bring you into their characters’ lives. And Jack Conway’s direction keeps it all moving at a solid clip. You could do a personality test based on whether your favorite is Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell or Spencer Tracy. I vote for Loy, a master at injecting off-kilter line readings into her role as the sane one. The great supporting cast includes Walter Connolly, Charley Grapewin, Cora Witherspoon, George Chandler and, as a fishing instructor with a rather fluid wrist, E.E. Clive.

Light in the Piazza (1962)

Arthur Freed’s final film as producer is a decidedly mixed bag. Some elements seem dated in all the wrong ways — the travelogue shots of Italy, Mario Nascimbene’s score, which relentlessly Mickey Mouse’s the action, and the script that was thought daring at the time but now seems way too middle-of-the-road. In particular, screenwriters Elizabeth Spencer and Julius J. Epstein bend over three ways backwards to make Olivia de Havilland’s marriage to Barry Sullivan seem good, as if arguing over the care of a daughter with an intellectual disability were just a little bump in the road (and Sullivan’s assumption that he can just shove the girl into an institution seems monstrous today). I’m a big fan of the musical, and though I didn’t exactly miss the songs, I really wanted de Havilland to get to say “Love’s a fake,” one of her character’s most powerful lyrics, but the script tries to take a more conciliatory attitude. She’s good (as ever), particularly in the way she modulates her character’s change in attitude about her daughter’s romantic relationship. Her fight scenes with Barry Sullivan as her husband crackle, and she’s got great delicacy in her flirtation with Rossano Brazzi as the young man’s father. But the writers also force the character to talk to herself, and poor Olivia has no way of dealing with such phony writing, so she falls back on the testimonial tone she used to adopt in public appearances. The film’s big surprises are Yvette Mimieux as the daughter and George Hamilton as her suitor. I’ve rarely seen them so animated and believable.

Midnight (1939)

Mary Astor, John Barrymore, Don Ameche and Claudette Colbert.

In this champagne of screwball comedies, Claudette Colbert is a chorus girl stranded in Paris with only an evening gown and a pawn ticket (as one so often is). John Barrymore comes to the rescue as a nobleman who hires her to pose as a baroness and seduce his wife’s boyfriend. Mary Astor is the wife; Francis Lederer the boyfriend; and Don Ameche, looking amazingly sexy dressed all in black, is a taxi driver along for the ride. Even though he reads most of his lines off cue cards, Barrymore mugs so expertly he almost steals the film until Monty Woolley shows up as a divorce-court judge. Mitchell Leisen is best remembered as the Paramount director whose meddling drove Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges into the director’s chair. For that alone, we should thank him. He also had an unfailing flair for visuals (some of his actors’ compositions are worth freezing the frame for) and eliciting performances. With its disguisings, mockery of marriage and the presence of Woolley and Rex O’Malley, the film flirts with the queer (while Leisen’s 1944 Frenchman’s Creek marries it and bears it children).

My Name Is Julia Ross (1945)

One of the best of Hollywood's B movies combines gothic and noir in a twisted plot in which newly hired secretary Nina Foch goes to sleep in her employers' London townhouse and wakes up in a seaside estate with everybody telling her she's really George Macready's mentally unbalanced wife. Dame May Whitty is surprisingly nasty as MacReady's mother, and director Joseph H. Lewis pulls off some great shots. This was a B movie that looked (and sometimes was booked as) an A feature, but then, not every B movie had Burnett Guffey doing camerawork and Jean Louis designing the costumes. I'd love to see a drag remake, where an innocent young man wakes up as a woman.

Our Betters (1933)

Constance Bennett’s beauty usually overshadowed her acting, except when she worked for George Cukor, as she does here. In this pre-Code gem about American heiresses marrying English titles, she navigates Lady Pearl’s scandals as effectively as she handles her Hattie Carnegie fashions (you could do an essay on the impracticality of her high society duds in this film). Anita Louise and Charles Starrett are insufferable as the decent Americans who keep judging her, but Violet Kemble Cooper and Grant Mitchell are a lot of fun as her cronies. Mitchell’s Thornton Clay reads rather gay until Tyrell Davis shows up as Mr. Ernest, the dancing teacher, and sets the screen afire. It’s adapted from a Somerset Maugham play that was lots naughtier on stage.

The Phenix City Story (1955)

Although its 1950s depiction of depravity now seems almost quaint (the film opens with Meg Myles as a stripper who never takes off more than her gloves), Phil Karlson’s gritty film noir is still a pretty powerful condemnation of small-town depravity. It’s hard not to see the parallels to the U.S. today in this tale of how the good citizens of Phenix City (mainly father-and-son lawyers John McIntyre and Richard Kiley) take on local vice lords in Sin City, U.S.A. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the class Edward Arnold (in his feature debut) displays as the chief criminal, nor do we have a state governor to call on to help drain the swamp. Karlson shot the film while the story was unfolding and even turned up evidence that helped put some of the criminals behind bars. He also played a bit with the facts, inventing the murder of an African-American child to up the stakes and depicting Kiley’s character — future governor John Patterson, an ardent segregationist — as a friend to the city’s black community.

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

One queer school outing.

Timing is everything. Had I seen Peter Weir’s historical drama when it first came out, my neo-Aristotelian aesthetic would have been frustrated by the mystery that’s never solved and a plot that jumps among different characters. Seeing it more recently, with a queer aesthetic, I found the mystery a reflection of the elusiveness of all meaning and was particularly intrigued by the sexually ambiguous relationships. The young Englishmen played by Dominic Guard discusses a group of schoolgirls with his valet (John Jarratt) as if they were sexual objects, but as the young men’s involvement in the case deepens, the relationship does as well, moving from master-servant to bromance with hints it goes beyond that. The film is beautiful to look at — like a French Impressionist painting — with a marvelous score and a particularly fine performance by Rachel Roberts as the proprietress of a women’s college from which three students and a teacher go missing. It’s all about absence: the missing women, the unstated passions, the invisibility of the aboriginal population (even though there’s a reference to a native tracker who’s part of the search efforts) and, if it’s not too much of a stretch, the lack of connection between the colonists  — shielded behind their Victorian architecture and clothing — and the dazzling natural world.

Primrose Path (1940)

The Production Code supposedly made RKO clean up Victoria Lincoln’s novel about a young woman (Ginger Rogers) breaking free of the family business, but you'd have to be pretty dim not to realize that mommy and grandma are prostitutes. Rogers is great in the comic scenes, but she's something of a humbug when things get sentimental. Fortunately, director Gregory La Cava doesn't let that go on too long. As Rogers' mother, Marjorie Rambeau is luminous, while Queenie Vassar, as the grandmother, now seems to be giving Leslie Jordan's best performance.

A Slight Case of Murder (1938)

I used to tell acting students the best lesson in how to play farce was watching Carolyn Jones (and later Anjelica Huston) in The Addams Family. No matter how outlandish things got around her, she played everything with a total seriousness that was funnier than most of the series’ more clownish performances. I can now add to the list Edward G. Robinson in this gangster comedy. He’s so earnest as a former bootlegger going legit after Prohibition’s repeal that as things fall apart, particularly with the discovery of four dead bodies in his summer rental, you can’t stop laughing. He’s helped a lot by the usual Warner Bros. stalwarts — Allen Jenkins, Edward Brophy and Harold Huber — plus Ruth Donnelly as his wife, desperately trying to elevate her diction and almost always failing, Billy Halop as the delinquent orphan he takes in for the summer and, very briefly, Margaret Hamilton as the head of the orphan’s home. Director Lloyd Bacon learned comic timing working with Charles Chaplin, though his greatest gift here seems to be knowing when to get out of the actors’ way.

So Dark the Night (1946)

Another of Burnett Guffey's great images.

In a rare leading role, character actor Steven Geray is a French police detective on vacation in a small town. When a series of murders occurs, he sets out to solve the case, despite his personal involvement. Director Joseph H. Lewis and cinematographer Burnett Guffey create some wonderful effects, starting with pristine black and white images before the murders and creating more and more disorienting effects as the mystery unfolds. If you read the camera work right, you’ll guess whodunnit. Oddly, everybody speaks with French accents and occasionally breaks into actual French, which may be a bigger mystery than the murders.

Some of My Best Friends Are… (1971)

Rue with a difference.

This film about Christmas Eve in a gay bar is a trip down the queer-baiting rabbit hole. It has all the cliches of early '70s filmmaking and all the retrograde attitudes of that era. The dramatic scenes are dated and offensive. Just when you think they can't get any more ludicrous, they go even further over the top. With the current revival of interest in effeminacy, the comedy fares much better and is even endearing. And the cast is like something you'd dream while sick: Rue McClanahan as a wealthy fag hag giving Faye Dunaway's best performance (the way she channels some of Dunaway’s more mannered later work is almost prescient) , Fannie Flagg as the coat check woman, Gary Sandy as a hustler who can't admit he's gay, Sylvia Sims as the bar's cook and den mother, Candy Darling as a drag queen who hasn't learned to tuck yet, Gil Gerard as a gay airline pilot and Carleton Carpenter, stealing almost every shot he's in (he doesn't really get any scenes) as one of the nelliest queens. It's funny, insulting and rarely less than totally engrossing.

They Drive by Night (1940)

Almost relentlessly entertaining, Raoul Walsh’s truck-driving drama is really two films in one — a hard-hitting look at the lives of independent truckers like the brothers played by George Raft and Humphrey Bogart and a proto-film noir with Ida Lupino murdering her husband (Alan Hale) to get a shot at Raft — and both are a lot of fun. The latter is a remake of Bordertown (1935), and it was a lot easier to believe Bette Davis killing Eugene Pallette for Paul Muni. Until her final mad scenes, which are a little too florid, Lupino matches Davis’ performance with a lot of help from costume designer Milo Anderson. Ann Sheridan is the leading lady, and her low-key, wise-cracking performance almost steals the film. Then again, I’m prejudiced. Sheridan and Lupino are two of the best actresses never to be nominated for Oscars (Sheridan should have been up for 1942’s Kings Row and Lupino for Ladies in Retirement in 1941 and The Hard Way in 1943).

Tomorrow the World! (1944)

You could subtitle this picture “How Not to Adapt a Play.” The stage version by James Gow and Armand d’Usseau was a thoughtful melodrama about the havoc wreaked when an orphaned Hitler Youth member is sent to live with his American relations, and Skip Homeier was praised for his performance as the child. To get the film short enough for double bills, the writers cut the nuance and kept the preaching. Even more nuance falls to make room for opening up the action to show Homeier interacting with good all-American kids. Then, nobody explained to him that he wasn’t playing to the second balcony any longer. Lard on a score that would be over-the-top behind East Lynne, and the serious social drama turns into an exercise in camp. It’s a rare film that makes Fredric March look stupid, but his falling for Homeier’s machinations while the young actor is rolling his eyes and twisting his face at every opportunity makes the older character (a research chemist working for the war effort) seem moronic. Betty Field, in her movie star mode, comes off best as March’s Jewish fiancée, though I prefer the gritty persona she projected in more realistic films like Of Mice and Men (1939) and The Southerner (1945).

What’s the Matter With Helen? (1971)

Shelley Winters and Debbie Reynolds queer Golden Age Hollywood.

It's a mistake to view this picture as a horror film. Director Curtis Harrington has done much more effective horrors like Night Tide (1961) and Games (1967). Rather, it's a very subversive film set in 1930s Hollywood and dealing with what the Golden Age movies left out, particularly queerness. Debbie Reynolds (always a much better actress than most credit) and a surprisingly subdued Shelley Winters are the mothers of Midwest thrill killers. They escape their notoriety by moving to L.A. to run a children's talent school. It's really all about Reynolds' search for normalcy and Winters' repressed lesbianism (things don't get crazy until Debbie falls in love with a man). In the middle of it all is an hilarious kiddie talent show, featuring 11-year-old Robbi Morgan doing a weirdly sexual Mae West imitation on "Oh, You Nasty Man!" while her mother (Helene Winston) mouths the song and mimes her gestures in the wings. The supporting cast includes Dennis Weaver, a very sexy Swen Swenson dancing with Reynolds and Yvette Vickers, whose life story would make a much more horrifying film than most of what passes as horror these days.

Kids, Then and Now

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi and Scarlett Johansson as child, imaginary playmate and mother in Jojo Rabbit

Early in Taika Waititi’s new film, Jojo Rabbit, the title character (Roman Griffin Davis) walks through his hometown in World War II Germany. It’s a merry gambol as he skips along, accompanied at times by his imaginary playmate, Adolf Hitler (Waititi). Later in the film he takes a very different journey. The Allies are breaking through the town’s defenses, and he darts from one hiding place to another, not just at the street level, but sometimes racing through the basements of bombed-out buildings. His first journey is taking him to a Hitler Youth summer camp where he hopes to become the ideal Hitlerjugend, defending the fatherland from the horrors of Communism and Judaism. The later journey is a return to his home, where he fears the girl he’s come to love, a young Jewish woman his mother has hidden from the Nazis, may have been hurt by the bombing. The difference between those journeys is the story of Jojo Rabbit, an audacious little film that sets out to defang Fascism by treating it as a joke.

That’s not to say the film ignores the threat posed by the Third Reich. When Jojo first discovers Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding behind a wall in his late sister’s room, he threatens to turn her in, believing his government is right in sending Jews to the camps. She blackmails him into keeping silent by pointing out that her discovery will necessarily lead to his mother’s execution for hiding her. As events unfold, that threat turns out to be very real. Later there’s a tense scene as the Gestapo searches the house looking for anything that might implicate Jojo’s mother in the Resistance.

With the exception of a few scenes, Jojo Rabbit is a child’s view of the war. The boy’s embrace of Fascism is a thing of youthful enthusiasm. It’s a game, which scenes with the imaginary Hitler make clear. The Fuhrer romps through the woods with Jojo and at one point turns up in a Native American headdress. Even as he spouts anti-Semitism there’s nothing scary about him until Jojo’s relationship with Elsa makes the boy question his youthful values. Only then does the imaginary playmate become something demonic.

This juvenile approach is a good fit for Waititi’s irreverent, improvisatory humor. This is a man who, with co-writer Jemaine Clement, created what seemed the definitive comic take on the vampire mythos in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and then topped himself with the recent TV versions, including the funniest beheading since Monty Python dispatched Mary Queen of Scots. He also breathed new life into the Marvel cinematic universe with Thor: Ragnarok (2017), a film that managed to combine galaxy-sweeping action with a tongue-in-cheek approach. Essentially, he’s a master at having it both ways. With the Thor film, he embraced and kidded the genre simultaneously.

He does pretty much the same thing with the wartime thriller in Jojo Rabbit. He’s assembled some skilled comic actors — Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen — to make the Nazis look ridiculous, while also using Scarlett Johansson, in a powerful and very sympathetic performance as Jojo’s mother, Rosie, to underline the more serious issues at hand. Johansson’s Rosie is both a dedicated Resistance fighter and the ideal mother. In one of the few scenes not shot from Jojo’s point of view, she confides in Elsa that she’s horrified by her son’s embrace of Fascism, but she wants him to realize how wrong that is for himself (there’s also a practical reason for that; would you really want to trust a 10-year-old with secrets that could get you killed?). For all the tensions of her Resistance work, however, when she’s with Jojo she’s really with him. She helps get him through his youthful insecurities and often makes him feel they’re the only two people in the world. There’s a particularly charming scene in which she acts out a dance scene, playing both her husband and herself before getting Jojo to dance with her despite a limp from an injury sustained at the youth camp. She’s teaching him to survive, which proves to be a very valuable lesson as the plot develops.

The film has been criticized for not attacking Fascism vehemently enough. I can understand that. In the current political atmosphere, anything short of a full-on denunciation can seem a betrayal. But I wonder if Waititi’s comic derision isn’t a more effective tool, at least cinematically. Yes, he leaves out the more serious attacks on Judaism to focus on childish myths about Jews, but this is anti-Semitism as perceived by a child. The myths are going to have a lot more traction with him and make more sense coming out of his mouth than the faux scholarship used by the Third Reich.

The film has also been accused of showing “good people on both sides,” primarily because of Rockwell’s character, who seems more foolish than evil. I think that’s a little short-sighted. One of the key jokes about Rockwell’s character is that he’s in the closet. It’s subtle but also quite clear that there’s something between his and Allen’s characters, and the places where they’re almost caught are very funny, because they don’t sink to stereotyped effeminate humor. They’re just human. I would suggest that Rockwell’s character is an important part of the film’s moral code. The good people are gay men, Resistance members and Jews — the very people the Nazis are trying to eliminate. Jojo’s transfer of sympathies from Hitler to them is a pretty powerful journey, one you can’t help wishing would happen more in the real world.

 

High school students Eric Deulen and Alex Frost with guns in Elephant; Is this the new normal?

The second episode of The Purge’s second season takes place in the days following a Purge, the neo-Fascist government’s night of legally sanctioned murder and mayhem. It’s a little disorienting, then, to be suddenly thrown back into the Purge. Even more off kilter, the scene is done with a subjective camera in which we fight off men attacking a woman. When she tries to thank us, she realizes, we’re about to kill her, but just before we can strike the first blow, the Purge siren goes off and a title informs us that the Purge has ended and asks if we’d like to continue purging. Ben (Joel Allen), a university student who was almost killed in the last Purge, has been playing a video game. There’s a loud knocking, and he pulls back a curtain to reveal he’s in a game arcade, and another player is waiting to use the game. After a moment of hesitation, he hands the controller to a child. That may be the sickest scene I’ve ever seen on television, and I’ve watched a lot of twisted shit on TV.

There’s a similar jaw-dropping moment in Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s film about a school shooting. Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen) are playing hooky, watching a TV documentary about the Third Reich, when a delivery truck pulls up on the street outside. They open the door and sign for a package containing a semi-automatic they had scouted on-line in an earlier scene. It’s that easy. In Van Sant’s film it’s just another detail in the mosaic of high school life he assembles leading up to the climactic shooting.

Elephant is a demanding but mostly rewarding film. Van Sant plays with time throughout. The camera follows various students through the school and its environs on the day of the shooting and then jumps back to the day before to show Alex’s being bullied and then spending the evening with his friend Eric. At times, we see the same event from different perspectives. Nathan (Nathan Tyson), one of the school’s leading football players, walks past a trio of young women who flirt with him casually before he goes off to meet with his girlfriend, Carrie (Carrie Finklea). Later, we play the same scene from the girls’ perspective before they go to the cafeteria. At another point, Elias (Elias McConnell), an aspiring photographer, takes a picture of John (John Robinson) in the hall as a young woman runs by. That scene plays three times, from Elias’, John’s and the girl’s perspectives.

Throughout the film, Van Sant picks up snippets of conversation and stray details that capture the students’ problems. The running girl, Michelle (Kristen Hicks), has body problems. Her gym teacher disciplines her for wearing long pants to gym class. When Michelle goes to the locker room, she changes in an awkward way designed to keep the other girls from seeing her body. Nathan and Carrie quarrel about their plans for later. He wants her to find some girls to bring as dates for his friends, but she’s not too keen on letting the other young women be exploited. The lunching trio discuss boys and clothes and going to the mall. Then they all go to the women’s room to throw up what little they’ve had for lunch.

 That last detail is almost too much. It feels like a gag and seems to have wandered in from another film. That’s how subtle most of Van Sant’s filmmaking is in the picture. The cast of mostly non-actors or beginning actors (with effective performances in adult roles from professionals Timothy Bottoms and Mike Malloy) is very natural. It’s like you’re eavesdropping on their lives, and you have to work with Van Sant to assemble the pieces of what’s basically a cinematic puzzle.

That makes for a fascinating journey, but there’s a problem with that kind of construction. It can be very hard to come to any kind of conclusion. Playwrights like Daniel MacIvor and Caryl Churchill have made it work, and it certainly works in short films like Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks” (1948). Alejandro G. Iñarritu got away with it in 21 Grams (2003) by not revealing how his key characters were related to each other until almost the end. That’s not how Van Sant plays it in Elephant. Once he gets to the school shooting that brings the various characters together as victims or survivors, he has nowhere to go. The film doesn’t so much end as it just stops. It’s hard to tell exactly what could have worked there. You want to see the ultimate fate of the shooters, but almost anything that could happen feels too conventional. Ending with their arrest or escape would seem like something from another film.

There’s also a curious moment before the shooting when Alex gets into the shower and Eric joins him. Certainly, the idea of their going through some kind of purge before the final act of violence makes sense. But then they start kissing, because, as Alex says, “I’ve never been kissed before, have you?” As much as we may think society has grown up in the last few decades, the sight of two men kissing is still heavily loaded. Although in context it’s very sad that this is the only connection these two young men can find, it reads as gay. That would certainly fit with the suggestion that both young men are responding to bullying, but I don’t think that’s what Van Sant is after. He seems to want these two to be no different from the other students (not that being gay makes them less human, but it does suggest a different story). As a result, the scene is inconclusive, and if it doesn’t quite sink the film, it seems almost too much of a question mark to leave with the viewer.

What keeps those inconclusive moments from ruining the film is the powerful nexus of meanings Van Sant has created within the rest of the picture. When Eric confronts the school’s principal during the shooting, he berates him for not supporting him when he complained about being picked on and then adds, “Anyway, Mr. Luce, whatever. You know there’s others like us out there, too.” Through the course of the film, Van Sant has created a world where emotionally absent parents, disengaged authority figures, bullying and bulimia are the new normal, along with violence and the ready availability of firearms. That sense of normality is really the film’s most terrifying element.