A slight premise - arranged marriage produces spontaneous love – that, in the hands of skilled professionals, bears more passion, heart and pump-thumping red-meat vitality than many other more complicated, less predictable romances of the star-crossed sort. It’s all set in a downtown gypsy camp where semi-modern Romani shuck the suits and skirts that walk into their fortuneteller storefront. The action takes place behind the scenes, though. Cornel Wilde’s brother, a Gypsy King, forces him to marry Jane Russell, a Gypsy Minx. “You’ll be king one day, you must have a queen!” The actors playing the unwilling couple clash and sparkle - they push against each other, compete with each other - and it’s all the script can do to keep inventing obstacles to throw between them and “passionately ever after.” Two scenes - both dance numbers - stand out sharply, glowing with the bizarre heat of perfect Technicolor images. The first is the newly wed’s nuptial dance, clapped out and strutted in front of the wedding party (a well costumed, garishly make-up’d gypsy tribe). Russell brings Wilde’s blood up as she dances seductively and he stalks, jungle cats in his feet, around the edges of the floor - he didn’t want marriage, but it’s all that his principles can do to keep him from diving hips-first towards his newly minted, unwanted (so he thinks) bride. He grabs a bolo whip instead, and lashes out at her, taming his own lust by tricking himself that he’s taming her. The second dance number, set amidst an outdoor caravan, has just as much fire. It’s startling how much vitality, how much unchecked life the director, Nick Ray, is able to draw from his actors. They leap through the screen, and register their emotions – anger, lust, jealousy – with their entire form. It’s like watching a whole new species of human, and it may make you hate all those calm, reasonable acting professors who have coached their charges not to “overplay for the camera.” To hell with that. If this sort of stuff is the result, “overplay away,” I say.
[Luther Adler, as Marco the brother and gypsy king, is exceptionally watchable. Standing, it would seem, under five feet tall he still projects, with the barest of efforts, a full voiced masculine command. He walks through the screen and owns it, his every cheek twitch and toe point commanding the audience’s necks and sympathies. He’s not one of those movie champions who’s power and leadership must be taken on faith. His visage on the screen, his voice, his very self, all convey a man not just in charge, but inevitably in charge. Adler might have walked off set straight to any local office tower and demanded a corner office with a view; he seems destined to own the earth. It’s exceptional. An actor like Joe Pesci, also diminutive and fierce, could learn a lot by screening this film and other Adler vehicles: an affection, a tenderness is needed to combat to revulsion and horror that comes from watching any short man “take what’s his” and “seek his advantage”; a quick fist must be tempered with a bone-deep sensuality. The man who can master this balance is the man who can find himself suddenly free from the hell of character acting.]
Screenhogging giants (Sterling Hayden leads) reach for greatness and fail, miserably and totally, for want of common sense. It’s a gas to watch, so long as you get off on suffering. The film – a robbery picture, where the theft comes off but the crooks are burned – is a downward sloping work from the very start. “Every man works for his vice” a bookie drunk observes early on. True indeed – we all work secretly for those things that will wear us down – but while some in the real world have made this vice jockeying work, in John Huston land there are no happy endings for hard fighting men. Grand tragedies of this sort, where the fall is predicted by the nature of the players, can be highly satisfying to a certain kind of sad sack audience, or just shocking and amusing to a genre audience struck unawares by the “serious” nature of the picture they’ve been suckered into seeing, but for the rest of us they are in general just a little sad, and a little too long. The first half of the film, building up towards a jewel robbery, is quite taut and watchable. A loose gang of hoods – an old con just out of the klink, a high profile attorney in need of fast cash, and a motley chorus of small, petty crooks with small, petty dreams – joins together to orchestrate a big score; we’re told just how big (the biggest job ever in the middle west!) but the shop talk means, as it does in so many crime pictures, very little to us. We’re impressed with the men’s ambition, but when pressed could care less about how well this heist will stack up against others at the next Mid Western Jewel Thieves Union meeting. But the enthusiasm of the men infects us, and the slow reveal of their individual personal failings (one is a pedophile, another a drunk, a third (the most likeable) a broken boy with chips littering his shoulders) is a fun counting game – “we know what will undo him, but what about him?” Once the actual robbery is attempted and accomplished, however, we’re left only with the long, slow descent, as one by one each player self-destructs and falls, wax wings flapping, into the void. The final few moments of the film, showing Hayden half dead in a field of horses, is beautiful and poignant, and redeems the film in some small part from the torpor and boredom of the preceding forty minutes. Recommended, overall. Screen this along with Ocean’s Thirteen and Dog Day Afternoon for a strong weekend overview of the progression of morality and honor among thieves in American cinema.
(Marilyn Monroe appears for all of ten minutes as the attorney’s slinky squeeze, and spends nine of those ten attempting to wake up, with a luxurious lack of hurry, from an off-screen catnap. Wonderful.)
And so we come to Michael Bay. The artist. If anyone wants to deny him that title, well, they can go screw. His movies are unique, they are his. All media fields - television, film, games - have tried to steal his style, his flash, his self. Rarely to any effect. Michael Bay is inimitable. The only other director of the past decade to have exerted as much influence on the collective celluloid consciousness has been Wes Anderson, a director who plays to a different (more self important) crowd, but pushes himself towards essentially the same goal: raw sensation. Bay and Anderson, at their very best, represent the pinnacle of a certain kind of filmmaking, in which the minds of an audience are crowded out of the theater and viewing bodies are given over entirely to their particular, personal enthusiasms. Anderson traffics in the soul-sick, life-could-be-good-but-isn’t mope songs of America’s intelligentsia (both minor and major); Bay in the brass-trumpeted regalia of red-meat America’s Sunday morning myths. The audiences of both go for the same reason: to live for a little while in the mind (and outlook) they wish they had. Artists attract audiences like that. Michael Bay is an artist.
It sounds like I’m ramping up to defend Bay’s new film. I’m not. Since The Rock he has been on a downhill slide. The energies, the vitality of his youth are leaving him; he is becoming old, relying on habit and comfort. In his first two films, he delivered pictures that were both well-plotted (with defined, singular goals) and authentically himself (crass, juvenile, bawdy). Since then he has either tumbled through loose plot structures with incoherence and ugliness (Bad Boys II, Transformers) or has sought shelter from criticism (to no avail) with plodding sincerity (Pearl Harbor, The Island). His notoriety is driving his decline. I think he knows this. His second film is still, fifteen years later, his darling picture; he speaks of it fondly, like an old lover. Sean Connery, The Rock’s lead actor, is still his favorite player to have worked with. Now, retooling GM cars to carry firearms the size of sheep, the (gross, adolescent) passion that drove his early films seems to have left him. In interviews since Pearl Harbor, he has increasingly been emphasizing his ability to work quickly (and cheaply), and dismissing criticisms of his content, style, and tone with waves in the direction of his gross revenues. He has developed a strong (inappropriately strong) working relationship with the U.S. Military, and has been at pains in his last two films to reinforce and buttress that business tie - Bay features positive (flat) portrayals of “common man” soldiers, and unnecessarily flashy picture postcard shots of military hardware at every reel change. The cavalry is called in aggressively and often in Bay’s films, not because plot or scene demand it, but because doing so flatters the army and reinforces their affection for the filmmaker, an affection that Bay can then point to when artistic pride is fleeting. (“‘What do you think of your films?’ ‘Oh God well, you know I’m unique among directors. You know the Army just fucking loves me. No one has the access to personnel and equipment that I have. No other director.’”)
But even in decline, he is still an artist, and his new toy car commercial is unmistakably A Michael Bay Product. His little boy personality romps through every scene, its hallmarks hanging from every bedpost: short-sighted misogyny (of the sort that only a grown-up dweeb could harbor, a sort of ritualized hate worship of women); unsettling racial humor (black-face pulled off with shameless bravado; Bay acts like he has a home-made NAACP hall pass in his pocket); and action scenes executed with a rigid pride in difficulty, not effectiveness. Bay is Bay. His films are him. Arguing against one of his pictures, even a weak one, is an argument against a personality. You cannot say it is “wrong” or “bad,” you can only detail the points of disagreement, and explain why you would never act like that. Is Bay doing us harm? No. His films, recently, are so scatterplot and episodic that it is difficult for them to build up the momentum needed to be anything more than a little offensive, or a little entertaining. They are essentially harmless. The work of a dispirited artist.
Part of me hopes that Bay makes good on his promise to do a smaller picture next. He mentioned, in one interview at least, the possibility of a two-hander. That, at least, would be intersting. A film, small and explosion free, emanating directly from the man child’s heart, would likely be dark, hateful, and isolated (if it were true to himself; he could just as easily shoot a mindless romantic comedy for hire). It could be gloriously infuriating. Or perhaps enlightening. It would be, in the end, more useful and engaging (even if it engaged only our spite) than this new two and a half hour Transformers. If you see it at all, see it either alone or with someone very dear to you - someone with whom you can be silent. The film is so vacant, so inconsequential that, with a casual acquantence, the after-film conversation would be unbearable. Really. How many times can two people look together into the distance and intone softly, dispassionately: “Well…that was nothing much…”
The Hit, shot the year I was born (’84), plays fresh, smart and lean. An Eric Clapton opening riff sets the date, as do the Warriors-style graffiti credits, but the rest of the film is free from period vestiges. It’s one of those films where the parts are a little bit more than the whole, but the parts are entertaining enough to excuse the lack of gestalt. The film is a philosophical criminal picture - bad men talking deep - and is saved from self-serious suicide by witty direction and self-sufficient actors. Terence Stamp - wonderful, always, but perpetually miscast - is a world-wise snitch, hiding out in Spain for a decade after ratting out his bosses back in Britain. Two hitmen, John Hurt and Tim Roth, track him down and shepherd him home for payback. Stamp has a good face, and his arrogance is endlessly charming, but until the film’s final ten minutes his character is useless and forgettable. ”You die when you gotta die,” his Willie Parker intones, and his fatalism is so perfect, so calm and infuriating, you can’t take him seriously as anything but a movie concoction. Hurt and Roth, as the less certain, more human mobsters, buoy the film and save it from Parker’s stoic dead weight. Hurt, as Braddock, is old and slow, with a bemused morality creeping in around the edges of his violent deeds. He hesitates over killing a friend that has wandered into his kidnapping scheme, and he brings a coquettish mole (Laura del Sol), also in the wrong place at the wrong time, along for the ride after hearing she is only 15. As Hurt plays him, it’s uncertain whether Braddock is going soft in his old age or just displeased with the messiness of the situation he finds himself in. He’s a man accustomed to a certain level of propriety and his small acts of kindness (sparing the girl, hesitating over his friend’s death) may in fact be instances of disgust – he can’t bring himself to do work that is so untidy, with so many loose ends. Roth, as the young buck out on his first job, is fierce and flashy. He’s like the pit-bull puppy who gets so excited while playing fetch he starts mauling his master’s leg – his enthusiastic moments find natural, perfect expression in violence. Death makes him happy. Death is the big trip – for other people. Well, of course: he’s a kid. He’s never considered the inevitability of endings – real endings – for himself. Roth’s vicious, asocial absurdity has always made him a force on screen. He’s one of those freebie actors who, if you’re lucky enough to cast him, will be entertaining regardless of what’s happening around him. Frears wrangles Roth’s energies to service the character and the film, and ends up drawing out one of the actor’s best, most in-tune performances.
Direction and acting are strong enough, but the script is just a little too tooled. Dialog is sparse and most of the film takes place in silent action, both good things, but the few bits of vocalization that do find their way past screenwriter Peter Prince’s pen are all tip-toed and mannered – the writing is about as naturalized as in an M. Night Shyamalan picture. The actors play their lines cool and low, but with a script this didactic, it’s hard to get past that feeling of being in class, under the glare of a focused lecture on how things are. Harold Pinter did a fair number of these sorts of things back in his day, and The Dumbwaiter, absurdist and half-real, is about as good as it gets. Prince doesn’t push The Hit’s philosophy far enough, isn’t willing to cross totally out of reality and into the land of stage and thought. It hurts the film - the plot, the script - but gives the director an excuse to stage clever, focused scenes in the real world. It makes the film into a show-reel for Frears’ potential. He directed this early in his career, and you get the sense that he’s trying to save the material, working feverishly to keep the audience’s (and his own) attentions from wandering. Fist fights are staged with an eye towards the comedically awkward, and any scene that can be pushed slightly towards absurdity via camera angles is. The direction injects something of the mania, of the insincerity, that is missing from Prince’s script. It’s not Frears’ best film, but it shows his righteous stuff in waiting.
(Something should be said about Laura del Sol’s Maggie. Del Sol is beautiful and when working in Spanish may be an actress, but she’s given nothing of substance here. Maggie is an idiotic creature of surfaces. She is shrill and bestial, useful to the film only in so far as she can provide slinky looks and tears on command. In her most memorable scene, she bites John Hurt on the hand and the two sustain a test of wills – she dares him to pull his hand away, he dares here to bite down harder. The scene comes off bizarre and insulting. Hurt reacts with an emphatic panic, a very human response of “oh hell,” while del Sol glares flatly while growling. The filmmakers probably thought this gave her character spunk, showed how strong she was, but instead you watch her and think of a puppy in need of training. Maggie is a plot device - she gives Hurt an excuse to debate the big M’s of morality and mortality - and the worst part of an otherwise inoffensive film.)
