The Face Knife

I can’t say whether or not Match Point is a “return to form” for Woody Allen, serious artiste, because I’ve never seen any of his non-comedic films. I can say that I enjoyed the film more than I think I should have, given the flimsiness of the “philosophical” grounding of it. Stapling some banalities on chance to Doestevski isn’t doing nihilism any favors. I’m not going to bother to engage with the film on that level because I simply don’t buy into it.

Rather than a “metaphysical” work I prefer to see Match Point as an effective thriller with excellent performances from the leads. Matthew Hewett is great as the fop of a brother, Brian Cox properly avuncular as the father, and Emily Mortimer so very, very sweet as Chloe. After a period of quiet disdain which I’m sure had her devastated, I’m back on the Scarlett Johansson droolwagon. And Jonathan Rhys Meyer plays Chris Wilton so convincingly that it’s actually a shock when it turns out that, yes, indeed, we are watching a sociopath at work, as I imagine would be the case in real life.

Which brings me to my great idea for Mr. Allen. Why not make a series of films starring the same cast, since they’re so great together, cataloging the sure to be escalating crimes of Wilton until he finally gets caught. Play up the “Ripley”-esque portions of the narrative and drop the Doestoevski. It would be a lot more entertaining, and I would love to see more of the world of the Hewetts - the opera box, the galleries, the Gherkin. .

Admittedly, my lack of knowledge of opera bars me from commenting on the use of music, which I’m sure is some sort of clever counterpoint to the plot, so maybe the film has even more going for it than I care to admit.

Maybe it’s just because he’s the only crime fiction writer I’m really versed in, but I couldn’t help but thinking of On Dangerous Ground in terms of Jim Thompson’s moral universe, even though as far as I know he had nothing to do with the film. Robert Ryan is Jim Wilson, a big city cop who is just a little too brutal for his superior’s comfort. It’s hard to tell if Wilson is a sociopath or really just a man who is pushed too far, like he claims. When given a forced vacation upstate, he’s confronted with the naked rage of a farmer whose daughter had been murdered by a psychopath, a jagged mirror of his own drives for revenge and justice.

Their pursuit of the suspect leads them to the home of a blind woman, who is obviously hiding something, but for some reason believes Wilson when he says he will not harm the person she is protecting. The juxtaposition of the physical disability, blindness, and the moral and ethical injuries that deform the characters of Wilson and the father is text book Thompson. Would that Ray had taken the sickness of the Thompson world the whole way and come to a thoroughly horrifying end, this movie could have been a masterpiece. Instead, it ends on a redemptive note - but an odd one. The blind woman is blind, but perhaps her sight can be restored by a doctor. The treatment of the disability in this case near to that the club foot in High Sierra, where the handicapped person is treated as completely out of bounds of normal life, even if their mental and emotional health is completely normal. In order for the flawed “heroes” of these films to accept the very pretty, very young girls, they have to be perfectly physically intact. Of course, the healing the girl in High Sierra doesn’t work out exactly the way Roy wishes, so maybe a non-blind Myrna Loy in the universe of this film would be a sufficiently twisted character to torment Wilson in the way that would make everything right the wrong way in the world.

First off, the infamous octopus eating scene? Really cool. I’m not some sort of raw food iconoclast and I don’t self-identify with Renfield or anything but I can see that after a decade and a half of fried dumplings, one would want to eat something fresh, you know what I mean? I suppose the symbolism of the octopus has to be linked with the other being that protagonist Oh-Dae Su promises to eat alive - his tormenter, the guy who kept him imprisoned for 15 years without explanation and who must have metaphorical tentacles in every corner of Oh-Dae Su’s life, but just as Oh-Dae Su chokes on the octopus, he….

Let’s stop here for a second. Part of the tendancy I like to call creeping Fincherism, beside the over-fondness for sick greens and mauves in the production design and the desire to move the camera like a spastic playing a car racing video game, is the purposeful insertion of plot “spoilers” (to use the geek argot) that preclude any serious discussion of why or why not a film works, story-wise, unless you want to give the game away to potential viewers. On the one hand, placing the viewer on the same epistemological level as the protagonist (various levels of ignorance) is, you know, in line with certain of my modernist sympathies, but on the other hand, how many times can one’s fictional world get TURNED UPSIDE down before the gesture becomes rote and meaningless? There is a certain kind of nihilism evident in this tendancy - that the agent in the world of the film will never, ever know anything until it’s too late - never know who is controlling their fate, why their fate is being controlled, and just how extensive fate is being controlled. As far as that goes, it’s sort of baby-grade existentialist, but then the conventions of narrative filmmaking require that the plot MUST be explained, and heck, its the work of a superheroically intelligent and/or rich individual WHO FUCKS WITH YOUR REALITY, man, and I can’t abide by that. There’s no DUDE like that, just like you don’t like in God’s potemkin village. The “reveal” is philosophically and cinematically meaningless, and as such these films more or less suck. There’s no need to treat your audience like children in order to build “suspense.” I’m firmly on the side of dramatic irony, where the audience knows more or less what’s going to happen to the protagonist but is forced to look on in horror as he tries and fails to avoid his fate. THAT’s suspense.

So what do you get from Oldboy besides this Fincherism? Not a whole lot. The plot, as such, doesn’t make a lick of sense, unless you buy that there are people out there who really CAN control you and have the whim to do it. The violence can be excrutiating, and the denouement, well, is totally expected and gruesome. It’s a well made film, within the context of it’s genre, but I certainly don’t think it’s a very good film.

There’s nothing more disreputable than fundamentalism, even when the infallible holy text to which the devotee pays obeisance is the Word of a half-crazy* anarcho-libertarian with a severe design sense and a warped sense of humor. The literal, humorless** fidelity of Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City (2005) to Frank Miller’s comic books somehow manages to warp to the parodic sentimentality and brutality of the source to such an extent that they’re no longer parodic - they’re bathetic. I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that the take-away of Sin City (the film) is that, as two of the protagonists say, there’s some things decent people*** weren’t meant to see, but they’re necessary in the pursuit of justice. That’s a fascist message, even if we, the audience, are implicated in the category of not-decent people since we’re watching the carnage on screen and presumably getting a kick out of it.

It may be too much to expect a responsible politico-moral stance from the Rodriguez/Tarantino axis. The early films of Tarantino were dismissed as being reprehensibly violent but at least they coupled that violence with a knowing, ironic distance****. Kill Bill and Sin City are all about KICKS, but the former is not as irresponsible as the latter because the former’s mission of vigilante justice is altogether personal, while the vigilantes of Sin City are a reaction to the amoral WORLD of Noir (and presumably, early 21st century America). It’s a political statement even if it’s unwitting, even if the point of the film was to be about the art.

Which, I have to say, is pretty good. It could have been better, as Rodriguez is not a great director, but the effects were marvelous. I have no problem with the movie itself; my problem is with the project, and it’s hard to take a moral stand against something without coming off as Bill Bennett. But although my lifestyle and tastes would most likely be considered as degenerate by much of the U.S., I feel like I have to object to the mainstreaming of the ethos that lead, not altogether hyperbolically, to Abu Ghraib and the idea that being Right is license to do anything in the pursuit of justice. Sure, the protagonists of Sin City are psychologically sick but they’re be more or less normal in the context of contemporary political discourse, and the further normalization of the anti-rule-of-law position without explicit (or even much implicit) condemnation is an unwise project.
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In addition to the faithful reproductions of comic book panels, there’s another interesting kind of reproductive dialogue going on here, with Sin City being shot on digital, produced digitally, distributed digitally and (when I saw it, though obviously not widespread yet) digitally projected. Someone want to go Benjamin on this?

* though not as comic creators seem to go
** the movie itself, however, can be funny
*** in the film, all women
****though this creeping Tarantinoism was the bane of 90s cinema just as creeping Fincherism is turning out to be the bane of the 00s.