The Face Knife

Fuck the cinema of nostalgia. Give any exile from the land of Selfawaria a camera and with some shaky hand-held shots, soft-focus, and all the right pop hits on the soundtrack they can manage to sentimentalize even the most brutal and scarring material from their formative years. But it takes a real tough and real poetic vision to relate those same stories with the grace that Dito Montiel brings to his autobiographical first feature, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.

Saints is a story the impossibility of escaping your certain boundaries until situations become such that *poof* the chains fall from your body and you are free. It?s also a story about a father and a son, a story about a boy and his friends, and a story about a time and a place. You can?t choose to whom you were born, where you were born or when you were born, but it?s sometimes nice to think that everything afterwards can be up to you. Unfortunately, we?re cast out into a superstructure of values that constrict our possibility for change, and sometimes the arbitrariness and contradictions of those values hit home like a baseball bat to the head. The cognitive dissonance that comes from being a part of something but possessing the realization that it?s totally fucked up can be the force that leads to change and liberation, or the force that leads to the narcissism of the nationalist or sociopath (of which Saints has a good variety).

Spilling your guts about the misspent youth of you and your friends is usually the act of a self-aggrandizing egomaniac, but you never get the sense that Montiel is turning his past into a mythic playground of heroes and monsters. The violence, when it comes, is swift, scary and brutal, as it should be. It?s not a learning process or sentimentalized, and there’s not a withholding of judgment that sometimes happens in this kind of neighborhood story.

Saints unfolds with a dream-time rhythm, a staccato jumping back and forth, settling for a while in one time, one place, one mode before jumping to another. The film acknowledges and embraces the peculiar characteristics of memory through the interesting way it?s edited, but never dwells on these insights or makes them more important than the story. If events didn?t happen the way the film says they happened, if scenes from the past and present converge, there?s no showy moment where the filmmaker reveals the modernist pinking shears that allowed him to quilt together these different solids and patterns.

My favorite sequence in the film, which is almost indelible, even, is when the actors playing Dito and his teenage friends walk directly up to the character and speak a line about themselves (e.g. Channing Tatum, as Antonio, the hunky petty criminal who enjoys playing handball with Dito’s dad “I am a piece of shit”). It?s like you?re seeing how Dito remembers them, seeing them in his mind?s eye, as they were probably never in real life, even as the scene quickly shifts back to the ?real time? of 80s Astoria.

Memory as a subject for art is a risky business. You can easily fall into some sub-Rashomon bullshit about the self-serving nature of memory, or overlapping subjectivities or even confuse personal memory with history, but Montiel anchors his memories onto the lines of Robert Downey Jr.?s face, in that actor?s most restrained performance of the year. Dito/Downey gained his freedom by leaving his family and leaving New York, which is dramatized in a devastating scene between Shia LeBeouf (the teenage Dito) and Chazz Palminteri, playing the father who undoubtedly loves him but gives him all the wrong messages.

Only, Dito hasn?t yet quite come to terms with the freedom. Downey?s face is heavy with guilt, and his life seems poisoned by the thought that he did the wrong thing to leave, and I think that?s a mistake. It is certainly a sign of maturity and grace to realize that freedom is only worthwhile if it is coupled with a responsibility to others, but there?s a balance to be maintained that a precious few are able to sustain, and sometimes, if only for a period of time we have to separate ourselves people we love in order to make the changes necessary to be more free and more responsible to ourselves.

While I am not currently nor have ever been a cinematographer, I’m enough of a fellow traveler to realize that the term “black and white” covers a wider variety of sins than the impression one would get from reading most reviews of contemporary non-color films, such as George Clooney’s civics lesson Good Night and Good Luck. The confusion tends to come from the mistaken impression that the film was shot so that the historical footage (most of it TV) would blend in seemlessly with the rest of the film, but even a casual observer should be able to tell that the styles are worlds apart, and in any case, most of that historical footage is shown as being mediated even within the movie itself - either projected on a screen or framed in a TV, so that it as much a different world for the characters within the film as it is for the viewers.

The cinematographer could have shot the film in a grainy, old-timey TV look, but instead the low-key lighting and hard shadows of film noir have been used, and one must wonder why that choice among all the types of Black and White photography available to the post-modern DP. The answer is very simple;
Good Night and Good Luck is a film noir.

Granted, there’s no hard-bitten dame but aside from that the movie brims with film noir signifiers - narration, incessant smoking, sealed envelopes, Scotch in the office, a suicide, a boss who might be playing both sides. And the milieu is - well, is there any venue more god-fosaken and savage than power politics?

Our fearless detectives Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly are adrift in a world where moral values are transposed like a television changing channels, and while they seem to score a blow for truth it is immediately recuperated by the forces of darkness. Good night, indeed.

The most satisfying thing about Grizzly Man was the realization that the tone of voice, the verbal tics, the odd concerns and methods of expressing them of Timothy Treadwell were pitched so closely to those of an Andy Dick creation that our favorite bisexual drug-casualty comedian would not be able to add anything to the comic absurdity of Treadwell’s life were he to distill the film into a satirical sketch. After receiving this epiphany about half-way through the film, it was impossible to watch the rest of the movie without Dick on my mind. I think this actually made me enjoy the film more than if I had tried to engage it on the terms I suspect it was intended.

Werner Herzog ends Grizzly Man with a look at Treadwell’s unexceptional nature footage and a rumination that although there may not be an inner world or an inner nature of bears that is accessible or unalien to human beings, Treadwell’s life and “work” can illuminate the human condition. I don’t think that Herzog was being ironic, but that’s the only way I could take that statement. Treadwell was very clearly a disturbed man whose existance was predicated about making huge category errors - not that he’s alone in that - but he’s clearly not an example of normal human drives in behavior except in an extremely negative way.

Like a lot of people interested in the arts I can get wrapped up in stories of the obsessive or borderline personalities that inhabit the worlds of genius, but I don’t think that their examples can tell us anything about anything except for themselves. Treadwell was not a genius - nowhere near a genius - just a sad, possibly exploited man who had the misfortune of acquiring a video camera and a taste for nature.

Gus Van Sant’s Last Days is best understood as a period piece. As when watching a film set during the French Revolution, the Great Depression or the Roman Occupation of Jerusalem, it helps for the viewer to have some prior knowledge about the milieu in which the action is taking place. Society in the early 90s had a number of endearing yet annoying quirks. For instance, it was once considered very proper for the very wealthy not to flaunt their largesse in the form of conspicuous consumption. Likewise, the superiority of older technology, like the LP record, was taken for granted. Sharing your feelings with even your most intimate friends was gauche. It was even quite appropriate to eat highly sugared breakfast cereal for every meal. And that’s not even getting into the headgear.

Like most period pieces, Last Days is three things simultaneously: It’s a comedy of manners, a commentary on class relations, and a lens to look at, as the Grey Lady would say, ‘how we live now.’

Michael Pitt (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) plays Blake, or, as he will be known for the remainder of this review, FakeCobain (or FC), a rock star living in remote, decaying house whose peeling paint and general squalor make it the sister-school to Fight Club University. Various hangers-on float through the house and environs, but the master has strangely absented himself, preferring solitude.

The period piece lives and dies by the level of care taken in evoking the past, and from our first glimpse of old-timey grungewear you can almost smell the 90s. The raggedy sweaters, the pajama bottoms, the undershirts, the hospital bracelet that FakeCobain wears look like the spitting image of the clothes Real Cobain wore in various publicity shots, and if you were a teen during the early 90s like me, at least part of your brain is ticking off the Cobains that pass through the movie - ‘Oh, that’s “Sliver” Cobain,’ ‘That was from SPIN’, etc. The cigarette burns in FakeCobain’s t-shirt were obviously applied by a master technician, and someone probably rolled around in real, live dirt to get his clothes so filthy.

This is a problem, and it’s an ironic problem insofarasmuch as it’s directly related to the problem that led Real Cobain to his death. No, I’m not saying that the costumers on the film were all bipolar junkies. It’s the problem of Authenticity and what it means to be authentic. Part of the Cobain Problem is feeling like a phony, and being pulled into a world that wouldn’t know if you were indeed a phony from a world that is arguably more ‘real.’

And the realism of Van Sant’s film comes not from purely cinematic sources like camera placement and moving (which is actually pretty expressionist, or against what passes for realism these days) but from the meticulous recreation of setting. It’s like the still photos of the era, up to and including the infamous Chuck-Taylors-on-the-floor-of-the-greenhouse shot, have come to life. You can tell great care was taken in choosing locations and wardrobe. Too much care. This kind of ostentatious realism, like filming a movie in Aramaic and Latin, is a cheap special effect. It’s a child’s conception of what it means to be authentic and faithful to a source. It’s a poseur’s conception. There’s this conversation in the film between a private detective and a grunge hanger-on about replicas of Stonehenge and London Bridge and it’s so fucking ironic because that’s what this movie is: It’s fake Stonehenge. Maybe Van Sant knows it; I don’t think he does.

The only ‘real’ moments in the film come from the no doubt improvised dialogue of the supporting actors, which injects some humor and surrealism into the low mumble of the film. Harmony Korine talking about how Jerry Garcia is a great Dungeon Master, now THAT’s evoking a time and place. The strength in the film comes in these accidental moments - FakeCobain dropping the sauce packet in the boiling water while making Mac and Cheese, watching Boys II Men on the TV. It’s no coincidence that these moments are also funny. There’s a lot of humor in the Cobain Problem if you know where to look for it.

Unfortunately, despite the Van Sant’s avowed naturalism, he loads up the film, especially at the beginning, with fatuous metaphorical moments - FakeCobain pissing the river, FakeCobain trying to figure out which path to take in the woods, FakeCobain not taking the stairs down the steep incline and tumbling instead, FakeCobain tripping over the exact same spot twice*, cutting between the Mormon’s talking about Jesus and FakeCobain. Etc. And the truly atrocious scene where the spirit of NakedFakeCobain climbs out of real Cobain’s corpse had most of the audience giggling.

There are things to be said for the film - for one, there’s a lot to talk about, and I’ve barely touched on class issues or the difference between interpersonal relationships 90s-style and those of today (see Me and You and Everyone We Know) . The camera work is exceptional and a lot is done with what would be considered “bad” shots - blown-out windows, reflections in glass - to make me admire the DP. There’s a great woodland tracking shot that while not coming close to the one in Week-End made me think about it and sort of put the FakeCobain character in the same dead-end position as these self-cannibalizing outlaw revolutionaries, which is a pretty appropriate metaphor for the failure of 90s alternative culture.

The film could have been a lot worse - and while I think it’s sort of pussy to say that I really wanted to like it and then slag it off, I really did want to like it. I do have one thing to be greatful for in this too sacred handling of one of my own personal sacred cows: At least Cameron Crowe didn’t make it.

*Though, there a few other repeated moments in this film that sort of evoke Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel. Maybe Cobain was caught in a trap of grunge mannerisms and couldn’t get out….I like that idea. Maybe I’ll make that film. Combined with the doorbell that keeps ringing and inviting disruptive guests (mormons, yellow page salesman, kim gordon…)