The Face Knife

For a film that has as its background The War on Drugs, Miami Vice is curiously devoid of political or social context. There’s a little intimation that people in the FBI might be up to some good, and for some reason the Aryan nation seems to be stockpiling RPGs, but that’s about it in terms of implications beyond which vehicles are associated with the drug trade (apparently there’s a type of boat called “go-fast boat”. It’s much popular than the “float-there boat” ).

Even stranger, if you didn’t know what drugs looked like before seeing Miami Vice, you’d think they were color-coded packages about the size of ream of paper. Not once do any of the characters, main or peripheral, snort, shoot up or smoke any of the wares (though we are given a long, redundant laundry list of what the drug kingpin has for sale). There’s not even one of those charming scenes during a drug deal where one of the principles sticks a knife in a kilo of coke and tastes it to make sure it’s real. A drug film without coke-tasting must be a first.

For a buddy film, Miami Vice is completely devoid of homoeroticism, which is a tricky thing to do. There’s never any meaningful looks or pats on the butts between the principles; I don’t think they even look each other in the eyes, at all. They certainly don’t seem to like each other all that much. They’re just co-workers whose shared office space is a Ferrari or private jet or beachfront house.

I can recommend Miami Vice for really only one thing: The unintentional comedy factor is through the roof. The dialogue is atrocious, and poor Jamie Foxx is only given lines when he’s piloting a plane (he does a nice job with those coordinates) or whenever someone has to remind one of the drug dealers of the existence of AWACS, whatever those are. Anyway, here’s some samples of the hilarity, which caused my friends and I no end to laughter, though it seemed the rest of audience was only laughing when someone got shot in the head (in that case, I don’t laugh - I just say “Oh, SNAP!” really loud. I’m a horrible theater citizen, it’s true).

“Patch me through to your SAC”
(Colin Farrell, on phone, with intensity)

“You hire us because we guarantee loads”
(Colin Farrell, to Gong Li, mixing business with pleasure while bragging about his and Jamie Foxx’s services)

The Face Knife uses too many Capital Letters
Towards the end of Scoop the pleasantly ditsy journalist played by Scarlett Johannson asks the apparently rhetorical question “Who wants to get caught?”, and although the reference is to a prostitute-slaying serial killer, applying the question in a more general way provides the key to understanding Woody Allen’s last three films (this one, Match Point and Melinda and Melinda), if not the overriding concern of his art.

Taken together, Match Point and Scoop are sort of Melinda and Melinda redux - the same basic story told in two different modes, tragedy and comedy, and the difference between tragedy and comedy in Allen is that someone gets caught in the world of comedy, whereas the apparatus for apprehension and punishment is absent or ineffective in the tragedy.

Scoop is a detective story, which means it’s about the accumulation and application of knowledge about the world. Detective stories are epistemology in action - either knowledge of the world is possible or problematic or anywhere in between (or “the world” is the sum total of all possible knowledge - whatever, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do with the detective mode - see The Crying of Lot 49 or Memento or The Big Lebowski or even Broken Flowers).

Right off the b(o)at, though, it becomes apparent that Scoop is not the typical detective story, because the impetus for the investigation comes from the great beyond - the Ghost of a dogged and effective journalist (Ian McShane), who delivers his lead to a somewhat ditzy American journalism student (Scarlett Johansson) while she’s locked in the cabinet of curiosities of a hammy stage magician (Woody Allen). Now, Woody Allen, director and writer of the film is a professed non-believer, so the presence of a Ghost certainly signals that the world in which the movie takes place is not the “real” world, but in the world of Comedy, the world where people get Caught and Punished. Only in a world where metaphysics are real can such a thing reliably happen - but - and here’s the thing that reviewers have seemed to miss¹ - upon the end of the story, it becomes apparent that the investigation had been preceding along FALSE pretenses. The investigation began based on some red herrings, and only coincidentally (like the coincidences that keep the sociopath safe in Match Point) does the villain become apprehended. To spell this out completely, here is a paragraph of SPOILERS:

Ghost gets his lead from a secretary who claims she might have been poisoned because she noticed a missing cufflink that might be connected to the murder. This is the information the Ghost provides to the Reporter, which is more or less wrong in all particulars - the cufflink was NOT lost during a murder, and there is no confirmation that the secretary was actually murdered in the film (she probably was not). The Murderer only actually becomes a murderer AFTER the investigation has been launched, and -arguably- only becomes a Murderer because of the investigation - because he falls in love with the Reporter. Wait, did Philip K. Dick write the script for this?

What seemed like a goofball detective story is actually a metaphysical black comedy. There’s no other real reason for Woody’s chance death at the end. I myself am not so sure whether or not it as an effective an exposition of Woody’s themes as Match Point - the plot points that are key to understanding what the film is really about are completely absent from the text of the movie itself - e.g., no one spells out what I spell out above. But maybe that makes the viewer into a detective him or herself, who can stumble on the correct solution, or maybe get a hint from someone else and follow where it leads….

The bigger question, about Why Woody Wants to Get Caught, I will leave for the time being, but using the Muntian hypotheses of films as wish fulfilment might give you some good ideas.

¹Unless this is just incredibly shoddy plotting.

Recently, I read Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot, one of the many recently published industry-heavy accounts of the ascent of the “indie” film/aesthetic in the 1990s. Unlike other books about the “biz”, Waxman’s book made me want to go and rewatch some of the films by her chosen directors (and others in their circle), films that I liked a lot at the time and still think are pretty great. The 1990s were when my own aesthetic tastes were established, and I still have a great affinity for the styles of that time - whether in film, music or fashion. And a large portion of those films and directors still hold up to scrutiny. Of course, the best of the 90s was rapidly recuperated into the worst of the 90s, when every self-consciously quirky film was released in an attempt to squeeze cash out of the indie aesthetic. Although we are still beset by Fincherisms (Chan-wook Park, take a bow), and Sofia Coppola threatens to release a new movie in the fall, 90s-style filmmaking thankfully seems to have died off except for the all too rare Anderson, Anderson, Jonze or Russell film.

Except, Little Miss Sunshine which could have been sitting around in the can since 1996. It’s a compendium of every shitty film tic of the 1990s - characteristics instead of characterization, aggressively ugly/retro production design (the FUCKING VW BUS), spectacular familial dysfunction, profanity substituting for wit, heroin snorting. The directors of the film, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris, were previously most famous for their Melies inspired video for the Smashing Pumpkin’s Tonight, Tonight¹, but the emblematic 90s music video this film most recalls is the excreble Blind Melon’s No Rain, a horror to which I will not even provide a YouTube link, because I’m sure that as soon as you read the phrase “Bee Girl” it will all come rushing back to you. Sorry!

Aside from the bedsheet Nietzsche, which they should immediate start selling in the housewares department of Urban Outfitters, there’s not much to recommend about this film. Resoundingly unfunny, I nearly walked out of the film when it threatened to become As I Lay Dying (or Weekend at Bernies: The 90s). The hilarious Steve Carrell is utterly wasted as character who can be summed up (and probably was during the “writing” process of this film) as (a)Gay (b)Proust Scholar (c) Beard. Greg Kinnear can, as always, do unctious well but the script gives him nothing to work with in terms of depth of character. And the parade of beauty contest twerps at the end, well, they are definitely horrifying, but - this is actually what bothers me most about the film (and the part of the film that has the most 90s philosophy) - is it, um, ethical, for the filmmakers to film and edit these little girls as more or less freakish spawn of the capitalist beauty system when perhaps these little girls are doing exactly what they want to with their lives, unself-consciously, just like the fucking Bee Girl? These Jon Benets (shit, another 90s icon - god, how long were they trying to get this piece of crap made?) are definitely potential if not actual “villains”, and aside from them being kids and, you know, having little consciousness that what they’re doing might be fucking creepy, these filmmakers obviously hired ACTUAL PAGEANT GIRLS to participate in a film about how twisted their lifestyle choices are. That’s not exactly evidence of the gentleness or bigness of spirit this film has been praised for, is it?

¹ And speaking of films by Melies-inspired former music video directors, The Science of Sleep looks like it could possibly be pretty shitty. quel dommage. I like Gondry’s films but after seeing the trailer I have a bad feeling about this.