The Face Knife

Rage Against the Machine, Brooklyn Style
Recently, a friend of mine was trying to get me to argue with her about which is cooler, believing in free will or believing in determinism. Not that my opinion about what’s cool is so great, mind you - the request was directed at a number of people, most of whom are probably way more equipped to answer this question, and I can only be considered cool in so far as that I can come off as monosyllabic and aloof on most social occasions. Or is that being a creep? I forget. Anyway, not being long on style, I, as is my nature, avoided the question by flippantly observing that I only believe in over-determinism. Causes are multiple and of varying magnitudes, and end up limiting possible outcomes in ways that are unforeesable to you but totally fucking transparent to all your smart friends. No matter how much you whine about it, you’re probably just going to keep doing what you’ve been doing, whether it’s working some stupid cubicle job or writing badly proofread movie reviews or smoking crack in the elementary school bathroom.

Half Nelson is about a school teacher (Ryan Gosling) with a passion for dialectics, girls’ basketball and some of that “other stuff,” as his dealer calls it, (you and I call it crack). It’s also a film about the dissolution of idealism when the idealist can no longer reconcile his passion to change the world with the multiple and seemingly contradictory ways the world presents itself. His relationship with one of his students, Drey, (Shareeka Epps), whose world is a daily play of unstable oppositions, is the prism through which the light of idealism is hopelessly split. I guess the crack is a factor, too, though at first it seems like the only real side effect is forgetting to shave. But later in the film his cat dies! I don’t think the cat smokes crack, though. At least not on camera. Maybe feline crack smoking is implied. The cat thing is probably the part of the film I disliked the most, and if something as small as that is the largest hole I can poke, it should be obvious that I recommend this film.

There seems to be a critical consensus that when the film limits its portrayal of inner city school life to basketball matches and such it is succesful, while the interjection of overtly political material that’s not directly related to the narrative as such is a bad thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily true - I prefer to think of the interludes with the kids staring directly at the camera reciting factoids about Salvador Allende or whatever being as being a resurrection of the Brecht/Godard alienation effect, here placed strategically in a film with more mainstream, traditional virtues like strong characters, excellent acting and a decent if amorphous plot. Yeah, it’s sort of embarrassing, in the sense that I can embarrassed for anyone so earnest, but that’s a problem all of us very cool people (I lied, earlier) seem to have.

The discussions about dialectics are another issue. Gosling’s character talks about incremental change, that forces are always in conflict but that change is possible and even inevitable given enough time. Um, no. If this film has a moral message, it’s that we are all part of the machine, we are trapped in the superstructure and that the values that the “good” people of the world try to uphold have just as a tenuous relationship to the everyday experience of life as the values we impute to the “bad” people. Dialectics can be seen as the process of humankind’s alienation from and reconciliation to the material world through the creations of institutions like religion, prisons, schools, and while it’s nice to believe that historical materialism is inevitable perhaps it’s best not to do so when all you can think about is getting high. Or if some of my college roommates are any evidence, maybe it is.

While theoretically the world is spiralling ever upwards through the process of teleological change, one inescapable fact of life gives the lie to that. Say hello, mom and dad. Half Nelson shares with 2006’s mediocre junkie flick Sherrybaby a familial party sequences where some unresolved issues are revealed, but while Sherrybaby’s scene of paternal malfeasance is a melodramatic shocker that immediately drives her back into the arms of heroin (or more to the point, drives heroin back into her arms), Half Nelson’s scene is more a slow-burner, with the now-morbid 60s style liberalism of his parents turning into a hypocrisy that threatens to undermine everything they ever staged a sit-in against, if those gains hadn’t already been swallowed up by corporatism and the other unstoppable institutions that are crushing my, excuse me, our lives.

Like the character, the film “bottoms out” leaving us with a sense that things could go either way, for him, Drey, Brooklyn or the world. The future of Gosling, Epps and filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden seems not so dim, however. I look forward to their next projects and hope that some of the more radical elements of their filmmaking and politics are not recuperated by the kudos Half Nelson has received. The experimental and political parts of the film, while modest by some standards, are to be encouraged and not dismissed as half measures.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Dave Kehr writes about Steven Soderbergh’s process of creating The Good German, his forthcoming film about a correspondent in post-ww2 Berlin. I’m not really a Soderbergh fan, but I sure have a lot of sympathy for a director who wants to do something to elude the “contemporary vocabulary of close-ups and meandering Steadicam shots.” Soderbergh’s choices to use period styles and period equipment is certainly not unprecedented in the indie film world, either by necessity or perversity (Maddin), and no one should be surprised about his artistic choice. Soderbergh is the film world’s closest analogue to the “curator” rock of the top popular and critic friendly rock bands - good examples are Radiohead, The White Stripes, and Beck. These bands work within self-defined limitations to put more meaning on choices, and so even at their most period-influenced they don’t sound so much as a tribute or a descendent or a pastiche. Soderbergh’s wildly varying projects, like the side-projects Bubble and Full Frontal are like the equivalents of Thom Yorke’s solo album, or Jack White’s work with the Raconteurs, or Beck’s multifront onslaught (until he got a bit precious). The only danger is that these lateral moves can seem a bit calculated, and none of the artists mentioned have escaped that feeling.

The odd thing about Kehr’s essay, though, was the lack of mention of a very recent film directed by George Clooney that was also an attempt to capture the look and feel of old Hollywood. I’m of course referring to 2005’s Good Night and Good Luck, which I place squarely in the noir cycle in terms of subject matter and cinematography. To quore Kehr’s article again, in Good Night and Good Luck, “strongly accented camera angles, the dramatic nonrealistic lighting, the way actors move against each other within the frame and the way the camera travels across the set ? these are all elements of a vocabulary that has been lost in the post-television era,” (which is ironic as one of Good Night’s subjects in television). Maybe the student has influenced the teacher, in this case?

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.