Bryce Dallas Howard in "The Village"

I feel sorry for M. Night Shyamalan. After “The Last Airbender” debacle and the graceless marketing scheme for “The Happening” as his first rated-R film, M. Night needs an overhaul, and maybe some kind-hearted praise for what he’s done right in his films. There is a divisiveness evident in nearly all of his films—you either watch them with derisive condescension for figuring out the plot-twist before anyone else (well, aren’t you so smart!) or your gullible, bleeding heart is pulled over to the side of admiration and even respect. I admit that for some of his films I fall into the latter category. There is something about Mr. Shyamalan’s unabashed earnestness and imaginative-audacity-verging-on-ridiculousness that I have always admired. Mr. Shyamalan’s best films are mercifully free of cynicism, but still have darkly humorous undertones, such as in “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs.” Yes, they were both serious films about seeing dead people and hostile aliens, respectively, but they had their tongue-in-cheek moments as well. Bruce Willis’ hapless attempt at magic tricks and the sight of Mel Gibson as a preacher running around his house wielding a baseball bat whilst being forced to scream expletives are only two examples. Mr. Shyamalan puts his imagination and his emotional gut on the line, and that takes nerve, even if you think he’s a directorial hack. Yes, I am about to defend M. Night Shyamalan’s films. Well, one of them at least.

I must begin with a proclamation to all of those smart-asses who may be reading this: Please, get over the fact that you figured out the plot-twists before everyone else and take a moment to appreciate this film. There is no denying that “The Village” is well-acted, gorgeously shot and propelled by an elegant musical score. It is also thematically rich. “The Village” scrutinizes a 19th century community’s struggle to cling to innocence, unadulterated beauty and love, and the painful sacrifices they must make to protect this prelapsarian existence. The members of the village do not venture into the surrounding woods, and never have, due to an intrinsic fear of creatures known as “the one’s we do not speak of.” There exists a truce between the villagers and these unspeakable creatures, and the townsfolk take ritualistic precautions to hinder their threat; the color red is forbidden, as it attracts them, and sacrifices of meat are given. When Noah Percy, (Adrian Brody) a mentally disabled villager, ventures into the forbidden woods, the creatures begin to infiltrate the village. Their presence is at first unseen; they stealthily enter the village and leave disturbing omens, such as skinned animals. Eventually, they do make quite a terrifying appearance. But even more terrifying than the creatures themselves is the sense of claustrophobia that Mr. Shyamalan creates through the omniscient threat of the surrounding woods. Even the scenes in broad daylight of the villagers’ communal outdoor meals are fraught with tension and disquiet.

Above all, there is a strong cautionary tale inherent in the “The Village,” and here we have our first plot-twist: as it turns out, the real threat is not a supernatural monstrosity, but a human one. The woodland creatures are a “farce” invented by the founding villagers so that future generations will not venture into the corrupt, impure and violent towns. The village was established because each founding member has suffered from some heinous human act of violence. Their decision to seclude themselves from the darker side of humanity can be perceived as cowardly, but also admirably ambitious and idealistic. But the true horror of the film is that there is no escape from senseless violence and death. This tragic truth is realized when two of the film’s most innocent characters, Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Noah Percy (Adrien Brody) become unwitting perpetrators of their own love crimes.

Noah Percy’s character exposes the first blemishes of this supposedly untarnished village, and it is not because he is an outcast or mistreated by the townsfolk because of his mental illness. Noah symbolizes the consequences of being encased by innocence one’s entire life and of being incapable of knowing or understanding how to cope with the dark side when it begins to surface. When it becomes known to the villagers that Ivy and Lucius Hunt (Joaquin Phoenix) are in love and are to be married, Noah feels betrayed by Ivy, his best friend, and comes to embody the animalistic, brute anguish of uncontrollable jealousy and repressed sexual desire. He brutally stabs Lucius and leaves him critically wounded, and Ivy demands to go to the towns for medicine. Ivy, who has been blind since birth, learns that the creatures are a fabrication from her father, Edward Walker (William Hurt), who is also the founder of the village. In this way, Ivy alone can venture into the woods without fear or deception.

When Ivy falls into a vast muddy ditch, the “safe” amber colors of her robe become soiled, and even though she knows the creatures are not real, she frantically attempts to wipe away the mud. We now arrive at our second plot-twist, which is actually a plot-twist within a plot-twist—a Russian nesting doll behemoth of a plot-twist: the unspeakable creatures are real! Ivy knows she is being hunted by an “unspeakable” when she can hear it mimicking her movements, which they are rumored to do before they attack. The creature then appears behind her from afar, menacingly still and quiet, cloaked in red, its features indiscernibly black and hollow within a red robe. When Ivy out-wits the creature and leads it straight into the ditch she had fallen into moments before, our plot-twist nesting doll opens its outer shell, and it is revealed that the creature is actually Noah, who has found a hidden costume underneath the floorboards of the room in which he had been sequestered after his crime.

Instead of feeling relief that the creatures are in fact still a farce, the revelation that Noah was masquerading as the creature and stalking Ivy in the woods is even more disturbing for the sexual violence that it implies. If you think I’m reaching too far by suggesting that Noah had intentions of raping Ivy, I’d like to invite you into the realm of yonic imagery. Yonic imagery is basically the feminine version of phallic imagery. Caves, ditches and small oval openings of any sort are the most common forms of yonic imagery. Yes, Mr. Shyamalan has Ivy fall into a muddy ditch for some cheap suspense, but more tellingly, to augment the sexual confrontation that is about to unfold between Ivy and Noah in the woods. When Ivy leads Noah straight into this ditch where he falls to his death, it would not be a stretch to say that Mr. Shyamalan is making his own twisted version of a feminist statement.

In stark opposition to this violent and sexual turmoil is the presence of delicate, chaste and restrained love. I watch “The Village” annually around this time of year, and what stirs me every time are the nuanced, intimate and restrained moments that are laced throughout the film. “The Village” certainly has its sensational-verging-on-ridiculous moments, but it also has moments of unassuming solemnity. In one of the film’s most tender scenes, Ivy finds Lucius sitting silently on her front porch at dusk. Even as a young boy, Lucius was drawn to Ivy by a primal instinct to act as her protector, even though, as the film will make clear, she needs none. Just as their heads come together for their first kiss, the camera looks modestly away, instead focusing on an empty rocking chair bathed in mist and twilight. When Ivy’s older sister decides to marry a man she presumable does not love, there is a brief but telling scene during her wedding in which Ivy embraces her sister. Ivy hugs her sister few beats longer than what may be considered proper, and the camera lingers for its entirety. Ivy’s face is hidden, but we realize that she is not congratulating her sister on her marriage, but thanking her. Now that her older sister is “spoken for,” Ivy is free to pursue her own love—Lucius.

This same subtle elegance is also inherent in Mr. Shyamalan’s script, which is perhaps one of the most mocked elements of “The Village” because its attempt at 19th century colloquialism feels quite forced. For example, we have mouthfuls like, “What manner of spectacle has attracted your attention so splendidly I ought to carry it my pocket to help me teach?” But we also have quietly devastating lines. Edward Walker and Alice Hunt (Sigourney Weaver) are in love, but cannot fulfill their love because they would be scorned and punished in the confines of their close-knit village. So when Edward sends Ivy to the towns to fetch medicine to save Alice’s son, he tells her, “It is all that I can give you,” and then repeats the phrase with sacred, almost prayer-like finality. Edward wants to give and receive so much more from Alice, but this one act is literally all he is able to give. And again, when Edward is justifying his decision break the villagers’ oath and send Ivy to the towns: “The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.” The first time I watched “The Village,” I was so taken aback by the graceful, unpretentious poetry of that line that I wanted to kneel before it in awe myself.

Perhaps my favorite line of the “The Village” is spoken by Lucius as he reads a letter to the village elders explaining that the creatures will not harm him if he enters the forbidden woods. It is a line that I believe encapsulates the brilliant but flawed filmmaker who is M. Night Shyamalan: “They will see I am pure of intention, and not afraid. The end.” Come back, M. Night! Restore and recapture the earnest and inspired, daring and divisive film-maker you once were.

And no, I will not reveal the final plot-twist. Stop assskiiinng.

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Vanessa is the press representative/blogger for The Plaza Cinema & Media Arts Center in Patchogue, NY. You can read her blog at stickyourthumbselsewhere.wordpress.com

This film surprisingly begins to go farther down the path of a downright epic societal drama in the mold of a David Lean, or, even an earlier George Miller film, with the kind of brash, starkly bold and mythic tone that the first film arrived and left off at, with its narrative relying on the survival of the penguin colony as their world comes crashing down, and how they respond to the trauma that surrounds them. Whereas the first movie began in the light and descended into the dark and grandiose as it went along, this one picks right up from the urgency of the first movie’s end notes and only gets more dramatic from there. The core of it is entirely about how this community tries to keep together in the face of starvation, famine and vulnerability to birds of prey, and the caustic changes of the barren wasteland environment itself, which Miller incorporates as a real element of narrative impact like never before.

And yet, it’s also a more immediate story. Where the first film was structured, like “Mad Max 2″ (“The Road Warrior”), as a mythic fable being recounted by a narrator whose presence in the story becomes known later on, from the very start of this installment, with it’s unsettlingly quiet opening notes as a single drop of water leads through eventuality to the cataclysm that spurs the film, that we’re made known as to the shift and flux that this entire micro-cosmic world is right in the middle of, and all of the characters are defined basically by their reactions to it – either evolve or die, which is one of the more obviously stated thematic spines running throughout the film. Indeed, most of the larger musical numbers here carry this train of thought onward from the very first scene, placing an emphasis on songs about the need for communities to band together in times of struggle and change.

Within this framework of potential societal breakdown, Miller places an even stronger importance on the relationships within it, and in particular, the one between new father Mumble and his son Erik, and his attempts to raise him in fractured times. What initially looks like the beginnings of a very similar “outsider finds his way” story soon becomes, with the arrival of the iceberg and its impact on the community, more about Mumble’s pragmatism versus his son’s misplaced idealism coming to a head, rendered in stark terms, with the character Sven acting as a more palatable and escapist influence on the child and the community at large – later on, Sven is revealed in no uncertain terms as an ultimately sympathetic false prophet. This revelation leads to the disillusioned child’s near death; and it’s only after a grand and tense rescue by his father that Mumble is truly lionized through his eyes, and besides all of the impact he has on the rescue of his society and that kind of stuff, it all comes down to one core thing on an emotional level: he comes to realize the essential value of his father’s humbleness and “great heart” toward others, simple heroism even in the face of his own peril, as in the relatively grim and traumatic elephant seal sequence or his own rescue earlier on in the film. And with all of Miller’s films, it seems to always come down to this in the end – while they might be surrounded by social and moral cataclysm of all kinds, what pushes his Max or his Babe or his Lorenzo or – now – his Mumble forward is simple idealism and compassion in the face of it all, even if it might be at first reluctant. The theme of interconnectedness is writ large through the film’s narrative, and it’s here, through a focus on this essential sense of honor and debts that Miller brings this down to the personal level – through a series of interwoven connections and good deeds that allow Mumble to rally every species behind him in the attempts to save his people, from the neighboring penguin nations to the elephant seal leader, Bryan.

It is with Bryan that the film’s “evolve or die” theme — a theme that interconnects with the overarching theme of interconnectedness and change as a necessity (see what I did there?) — comes full circle in one of my favorite scenes of the movie. Their initial confrontation is a pretty harrowing sequence, as Bryan ends up falling into a wide chasm after the narrow ice bridge beneath him breaks. The matter is complicated by the reveal of his children – he refuses to back up onto the ice in front of them because of its implied indication of weakness and submission within their species, and so falls out of sight and into the abyss. He makes it clear that he wants them taken home and looked after, and then he resigns himself to death. Mumble dives in and saves him through a contrivance with a leopard seal without a second thought, and a bond is made between the two. Later, Mumble goes off to request his nation’s help in bringing down the iceberg enough for the rest of the penguin colony to escape. Bryan tells him, essentially, to fuck off and look after his own kind. Mumble bursts back, “If I’d thought that way, I would’ve left you down in that hole!” It’s one of the few times in either of the two films where we’ve seen this character get visibly frustrated, and angry – the other also in this film being on top of the trapped colony arguing with his son over their fate – and, it takes you aback for a minute to hear a relatively innocent character like him state something like this so plainly and harshly. I like it.

Running alongside the core narrative of Mumble’s own struggle to save his people, there are a number of smaller stories occurring in tandem, including the B-plot about the krill, played by Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. Much has been made of the fact that they don’t really have any connection or impact on the plot until the very end of the film – but yeah, that’s the point. They’re very much in the mold of a more existential Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and it’s astonishing that so few reviewers have caught onto this fact. Within the framework of these two that Miller concisely reduces all of the existential themes that are running underneath the surface into their core elements, through a particularly ballsy and heady sense of humor, and parallels many of the larger and more dramatic conflicts occurring above into a more palatable and less serious minimalist setting.

They’re also a large part of how Miller furthers his ideas of interconnectedness that have now come to the forefront in the sequel, through ecological extremes, e.g., the film begins as a drop of water leads to the catastrophe that defines the film, and it ends when, unintentionally, the krill, tinier than a drop of water by much, respond to the sound above and give the final stomp that breaks down the iceberg. I’ve gotta say, when I heard that Pitt and Damon were going to be included in the sequel, I didn’t really imagine that these would be their roles, but they somehow manage to steal every scene they’re in. They’re just fantastic little characters, and the first sequence with the massive whale, which they catch sight of from afar, is an eye-opening shot.

There’s also Sven the puffin, played by Moe Syzlak – although this article’s running pretty long as it stands, so suffice it to say his entire arc acts as a continuance of Miller’s examination of religion, something the film makes no bones about. He arrives in Antarctica as an accidental prophet, and is revered for his unheard of ability to fly, and the green moss that he seems to have with him. By the time the film focuses on him, he’s already drawn a flock to the Adelie’s colony from far and wide and from every species of penguin who indulge in his groupthink and cult of personality. Although Miller includes Noah the Elder from the first film only sparsely, in his few appearances he acts as a reminder of religion’s essential goal of unity and solidarity, hope and perseverance in the face of social trauma, rallying his people like a Churchill to stand together in the face of vulnerability and fight back for the sake of The Great Guin and their nation in what’s also a rather stirring sequence (which I’ll get to later on, and then even later on in passing). Sven acts as the other side of the coin, all of that drawn inward toward his own ego – initially a curious and intriguing character, he’s given himself over to indulging in the worship of himself. And yet, even after he’s revealed for the huckster that he is, Miller aligns our sympathies with him, and his better nature underneath begins to poke through. Like in most other Miller films, there aren’t any real villains, only characters at the behest of their environment, doing what they can.

There’s a moment here that really establishes what I so love about Miller’s idiosyncratic approach to film, and a real hint that tells us that this isn’t any kind of traditional animated filmmaking; it’s a quiet moment that comes right in the middle of the film’s bombastic opening medley, a celebratory sequence that really strikes home what the rest of the film is about with it’s use of the aggressively communal “Rhythm Nation” to pull us right in – but no, that’s not it. Right as the music begins to hit its peak, Miller slows it down and his framing becomes an observer – Mumble and Gloria meet for the first time in the middle of the crowd, and the way Miller establishes the history between them that precedes this second film, and so defined the first, isn’t some long and drawn out dialogue. All it takes is a shot of their eyes, their faces meeting, their breath hanging in the air as they’re framed in golden hues. There are no words, but these few understated shots of pure emotion say more about these two characters and how their own love story has developed and deepened while we’ve been away than any other I can recall. And again, it’s a mark of the superb animation team, just by the way, that Miller can rely on the fact we can read this much into this scene despite the fact that these characters are beady-eyed penguins who leave trails of guano in their wake.

There are many other moments like this in the film – Mumble contrasted against the wide berth of the colony below, screaming up at him for help until their cries become a cacophony of noise; Erik’s first meeting with Sven; the penguins all huddling together in the raging snow of a blizzard after the approaching storm forces the benign humans to pick up and leave to the strain of morose, operatic tones; and another one of my favorites, the sequence I made mention of earlier where the vulnerable colony is attacked by the birds of prey is just breathtaking in its construction – from its tense, silent beginning of hundreds of tiny silhouettes cast against the open sky to its bombastic conclusion of chaotic fight or flight on the grounds below. Miller can still stage a scene like this better than anyone working currently, and it’s such a true and visceral action scene that it’s actually gotten me excited again for “Fury Road,” whenever that happens. And yet, so few of these sequences are the kind of eye-opening and massive musical numbers of the first, which is fine, because this film isn’t really about that, until the end, when percussion again saves the day. As a tap dancer and a hoofer from way back, I do love that we’re the heroes of these films.

And after all this emphasis on societal trauma and impending doom, the climax of the movie arrives as a positively mesmerizing stroke of kaleidoscopic, giddily euphoric brilliance. All of these elements coalesce together in such a stirring, visceral way that it seems even the most negative review can’t help but comment on it. It’s a number that builds and bursts forward organically with such pent-up, palpable energy in the way it contrasts the entire crowd of penguins in the colony with Gloria at the lead singing a version of an altered, communally emphatic version of “Under Pressure” that acts as the real epitome of all the pressures put upon them as a community in the film being released in one giant vocal swell against the rhythm of the penguins and elephant seals above, stomping and slamming primally toward survival, causing the ground to shake and the snow to fall, and the earth itself to move, with the vibrant, neon colors of the entire krill biomass responding to the beat and noise down below, all at once. This is the moment that defines and epitomizes the entire film, without a doubt.

It’s thrilling stuff, and to digress a little bit from the overall critical assessment for a minute, what’s great is that not only is all of this stuff explicitly stated without any mucking about — the thematic ballsiness of that first film still remains in full measure – but that Miller still manages to make this a true family film by inserting Erik’s story within it. In terms of narrative construction, he goes for broke and eats his cake too by having all of this thematic and narrative depth take place while somehow not alienating children or the oldies; the children relate to him and the basic outsider element of his own story, just as they did with the child Mumble from the first film, and as they grow older they’ll begin to become aware of the rest of the narrative context that defines the story. It’s astonishing how well he’s pulled this double-act off, both here and with the first one, and it’s to be admired. And that’s one of the things that’s so great about these two films, even if this one isn’t the total astonishment that the first one was. They’re right between the violent “Mad Max” films and the pastel children’s story-books that the “Babe” movies were. They’re family films, in the truest sense, for the adult in the child and the child in the adult.

The only thing that brings this film down a bit is the presence of a couple of strange out of place piss jokes – neither of which are particularly funny. Strangely enough, however, this is also kind of a motif in Miller’s movies, although one that had up until now, gone thankfully abated by whatever wise hand held the white-out over the screenplays. In the “Lorenzo’s Oil” draft I read recently there is this strange running joke that emerges about every forty pages where the parents will look for a sign of Lorenzo’s cognition, and get the slightest bit of wee in reply. The last shot of the movie was to be a golden arch of piss across the screen – and, then in the previous draft of “Pig In the City” I read, titled “Babe In Metropolis” (see guys, it was intentional) there’s a big moment not too dissimilar from what’s seen here at the beginning of the film with Erik where Babe, after causing Farmer Hoggett’s accident, goes into the barn and wets himself. I’m gonna be honest – I don’t get it, and it’s just kind of disgusting. Maybe it’s an Australian thing.

And to be fair, the film does start off as kind of an uneven jumble in terms of structure – especially in comparison to the first one, which is a masterwork of emotional and narrative orchestration. The first ten minutes or so are a good example of this, and especially during the opening medley: it feels a little disjointed and tries to pack a lot of contextual information into too few scenes. In theory I like that idea because it is intriguing how much this film relies on the context of the first film and how it moves onward from that, but it could’ve used a bit more breathing room. We’re informed of Mumble’s new place in the community as a leader, of his son’s embarrassment, of the incoming iceberg, of the krill and their journey, all in the space of about fifteen minutes. And, while individually I think a lot of those moments are great, when they’re placed together it just becomes jumbled. This is particularly obvious in the opening scene in the scattered way it seems to jump from song to song rather than allowing it to flow emotionally from one to another, as the first film did so well. It, jarring, but it finds it’s feet pretty quickly.

“Stories have to be experienced at every possible level of the human being,” Miller says. ”You have to experience a story emotionally, intellectually, viscerally. It affects the groin, the heart, the brain, the spirit. It affects an audience anthropologically.

”Some people look at the film and just might enjoy the dancing or some of the songs. It’s very spectacular in 3D, so you might just enjoy being in Antarctica and seeing the spectacle … The thing I most want is that people get an immersive and hopefully meaningful experience from being in the cinema.”

The way Miller describes his approach to the storytelling process kind of gets these two movies down pat for me.

And as to the film’s box office failings – well, “Twilight.” There, I just explained it in one word. And as for critically, well – that’s a bit more complex. From all of the reviews I’ve read, they’ve all basically taken a stance of “Hey, these penguins are singing pop songs. What’s our culture coming to, right guys?” Well, no. I mean it’s fine if you have a problem with that, I guess – but, it’s kind of lame to dismiss the rest of the film, and by proxy the first film, entirely on that basis, isn’t it? Also, it’s a little hipster, you hipsters. Put your coffee down, take your comically large glasses off and get back in the tollbooth.

Miranda July and Hamish Linklater in "The Future"

“The Future” took my breath away. And when I say it took my breath away, I don’t mean to say I was enraptured by its profound insight into the “frailty of the human condition,” a much loathed and overused phrase. Instead of being uplifted, I was left with a lump in my throat. This is because “The Future” does something unprecedented for its art-house, indie-genre: Instead of making light of the characters’ loneliness, desperation and terror through off-kilter humor and oh-so-clever dialogue, it shoves their fears onto the edge of the screen and lets them hang right in front of our noses in all of their pain and discomfort. No matter how hipster or eccentric or unbearably precious Miranda July can be, she is fearless when it comes to unabashedly exposing her fears. In her latest film, July expresses her fear of what the future holds through the claustrophobic paralysis of her characters.

The film begins with a shot of Jason (Hamish Linklater) and Sophie (July) sprawled on a couch, facing each other but looking into their respective laptops. Jason shifts his position and Sophie asks if he could get her some water. Jason corrects her assumption that he’s getting up and says he’s just changing his position. He doesn’t offer to fetch her water. This evolves into some idiosyncratic verbal interplay between Sophie and Jason, in which they playfully spat over devices and scenarios in which one can obtain water without movement or effort. This seemingly insignificant exchange foreshadows a more profound moment. Earlier in the film, Jason and Sophie choose a song that is their secret code—when the song is played, they will remember who they are and their love for each other. Sophie, feeling wistful and sentimental, decides that this is the perfect time to play this song and tells Jason to get his iPod. Jason, only half-heartily as moved as Sophie, says he’d love to play the song, but the iPod is in his car, and that she can get it if she really wants to hear it. These two people are terrified of moving; whether it’s getting up off the couch, taking an extra trip out to the car, or moving forward through time. “The Future” expresses this dread of inertia, of waiting, of uncertainty, unlike any film I have ever seen.

Jason and Sophie’s comfortable lives drift into unfamiliar territory when they decide to adopt a near-death cat, Paw-Paw. If given enough love and care, Paw-Paw will live a long a prosperous life despite its afflictions. Jason and Sophie, believing their future will be over once they adopt and devote their lives to this cat, decide to live the rest of their lives in the next month before the adoption date. They quit their jobs, turn off the internet and force themselves into feeling the freedom they are seeking. Jason becomes a solicitor for a tree-planting organization; Sophie, a former children’s dance instructor, is determined to perform thirty interpretive dances– “thirty days, thirty dances.”

Just as things seem to be progressing, Sophie and Jason begin to backslide. Inevitably, Sophie and Jason become unsatisfied with their new-found freedom, and regression and immobility take hold. Sophie is especially tormented, so much as to begin an affair with an older, affluent man in suburban Los Angeles named Marshall. Sophie was a nurturing, maternal figure with Jason; even the way they slept together suggested a mother nursing a child. With Marshall, Sophie regresses back to girlhood, and Marshall is turned-on by this girlishness. He asks that Sophie have sex with him and eat ice cream every night, causing Sophie to wake up guiltily clutching an empty ice-cream carton in an empty bed, like a little girl waking up from a sugar-induced sleep-over party.

Adding to this already bizarre arrangement is the presence of Marshall’s young daughter, Gabriella. In what I consider the most surreal moment of the film—more so than the talking puppet-cat, voiced by Ms. July herself—is the image of Gabriella digging a hole in the backyard of her house. Later that night, we find her immersed in the soil so that only her curly blond head is poking out, all smiles. Marshall, too, is all smiles, nonchalantly looking on as his daughter decides to spend the night in a grave which she has dug for herself. Sophie, however, is unsettled; she stares at Gabriella, mystified, and reassuringly tells her that she can come inside once she gets tired of being entombed in cold dirt. And Gabriella does get tired of it, and also frightened. Sophie wakes up in the middle of the night to find Gabriella in the kitchen, covered in filth and clearly upset. Sophie’s maternal instincts resurface, and in a moment almost too genuine and tender for a quirky Miranda July film, she embraces Gabriella.

Meanwhile, Sophie is being stalked by her beloved orange t-shirt, which serves as something like a security blanket that she is seen grasping and kneading throughout the film. Every so often, Sophie glimpses it creeping through the house and down the street—not billowing or floating as if carried by the wind, but crawling, as if desperate to be reunited with its owner. Like everyone and everything else in this film, the t-shirt is struggling for movement. When the shirt finally finds Sophie in Marshall’s bedroom, she dons it, and flows into the interpretive dance she’s been waiting to perform for thirty days—thirty dances culminating into one. Unlike Sophie’s first fledgling forced attempts with a videotape and a neck scarf resembling a lizard’s frill, this dance embodies the organic, effortless movement that has been eluding her. She pulls the shirt over hear head so that she is blind to her own gestures and stretches the shirt so that it consumes her entire body, like a strained womb.

This may be a stretch (pun intended, hell yes), but Sophie’s transformation within the orange shirt—elongated, faceless, even corpse-like—eerily resembles a certain Giacometti sculpture known as “The Walking Man.” Like the characters in this film, “The Walking Man” captures the viscosity and strain of labored movement. Although its legs appear long and capable, his feet are literally blocks of bronze that are affixed to the ground on which he appears to be walking. Sophie, Jason, and even Gabriella, stuck in her dirt hole, are desperate for movement, for change in their own lives, but fear the future so much that they are stuck in a paradoxical push/pull, like “The Walking Man.” Maybe I’ll go to some kind of low-brow culture hell for comparing a Giacometti sculpture to a Miranda July film, but better to reign in a pedestrian hell than serve in an elitist, film-hipster heaven.

In “The Future’s” climactic scene, Jason has successfully stopped time to prevent Sophie from revealing her infidelity to him. He is literally stuck in one place, afraid that if he moves his position just an inch, time will resume, and his life and their relationship will change forever. Jason’s entire body is tense and rigid with the strain of holding onto Sophie, and in his most helpless moment, he turns to the moon outside his window for solace, and asks if it can give him some sort of sign about what is to come. “I’m just a rock in the sky,” the moon genially replies. Jason and Sophie are not fixed rocks in the sky; they are mutable, even powerful, beings. The film’s ending, though bleak, at least reassures us that time has not stopped for Sophie and Jason. In the final shot, Sophie sits on her bed while Jason reads a book on the couch. For a few long minutes, they are completely still. Just as we begin to wonder whether Jason has stopped time again, he flips the page. At least it’s a relief to know that sometimes, the future and whatever it holds can be as be as ordinary and unremarkable as turning the page of a book.

Mr. Malick’s creation interlude, complete with dinosaurs and single-celled amoeba blobs, has been a divisive element of his film among audience members and critics alike. This is mainly because the more conventional 1950s-era plotline (done, in typical Malick fashion, unconventionally) is so flawlessly realized. It follows the coming of age story of young Jack (Hunter McCracken), and his relationships with his mother, father and brother. It conveys the unadulterated vigor of childhood with such boundless joy that at times, it made me want to do nothing more than run; run alongside the boys with their lithe bodies and lanky legs, through the tall grass and the paved streets and underneath the billowing laundry on clotheslines. It also captured the grief, the inexplicable rage, the fall from innocence in some stunning moments which have been haunting me since I saw the film. The interplay and conflict between these emotions of pity, rage, fear and compassion as we experience them through young Jack is where the purpose of our dinosaurs is revealed.

Shortly after the disgruntled woman’s unsolicited comment, we are introduced to two more dinosaurs. I know very little about dinosaurs and am wary about using Wikipedia as a reference, so I will just describe these dinosaurs as medium-sized and raptor-like. The camera first lingers on a smaller one as it lies in a creek apparently injured and near death. A larger dinosaur but similar in figure hops toward it, almost playfully. It studies the wounded creature and then forces its clawed foot onto the wounded creature’s head, either in an attempt to stomp it to death or suffocate it. Curiously, the predator lets up, and gives it’s former prey a couple of affectionate taps on the head, and hops away. I know what you’re thinking, and I’m just as cynical as the next person: “Dinosaurs can’t show affection,” or “dinosaurs aren’t noble or compassionate,” or “c’mon Terrence Malick, gives us some harsh, bloody realism!” Okay, maybe you weren’t thinking exactly that. But perhaps you thought the moment was either ridiculous, or, in my case, oddly moving.

I think the interaction between those two particular dinosaurs serves a vital purpose as the film progresses from prehistory into young Jack’s narrative. Yes, young boys in the prime of their youth can be mischievous and even cruel. But through Mr. Malick’s eyes, a child’s fall from innocence is a devastating event. The way the camera lingers momentarily on images such as a boy’s singed, burned scalp, or a dog with blood matting its fur; the dim lighting, the way the camera slithers in between and around the gang of boys like an unseen snake. The dinosaur’s urge to commit violence is animalistic, but is it also the same bestial urge which influences Jack to commit acts of vandalism, to break into a home, and most disturbingly, to tell his brother to place his hand in front of a BB gun and then pull the trigger? It is certainly valid to say that Jack’s expression of rage is connected to his fraught relationship with his father and that adolescent stalwart known as peer pressure, and not from any deep, primal, prehistoric urges. I mean, dinosaurs did not suffer from peer pressure or Oedipal complexes, did they?

Even more thought-provoking than young Jack’s expressions of rage is his extreme sense of guilt after he commits or even witnesses other boys committing these acts. Much like the dinosaur’s gentle pats, young Jack, after the BB gun incident, acts out silly but kind gestures when he and his brother are together in their room. Jack takes a small electric fan and holds it up to his brother’s face in an attempt to cool him off; he pulls brother’s his lips upward with his fingers in a forced smile. I can’t recall if Jack actually verbalizes an apology, but his actions speak for themselves, and he does look his younger brother in the face and tells him, “You’re my brother.”

In “The Tree of Life,” Jack, both young and old, asks questions to some unseen supreme being, questions that are never clearly answered. Malick’s film does much the same to its audience. What is that confounding flame? How did Jack’s younger brother die? And the query of this essay–why did “The Tree of Life” need dinosaurs? It needed the dinosaurs so we could ponder yet another question: what is that essence that drives us to commit heinous acts of violence one moment and act compassionately the next? And to propose the possibility that maybe, just maybe, dinosaurs and humans did share some shred of emotional intelligence. And, even more boldly, to suggest that whatever form of life may succeed us will inherit our emotional intricacies, and hopefully, surpass them.

James Cagney, the quintessential movie gangster

Seemingly always en vogue, gangsters have been especially so in recent years. The grand seigneur of American cinema, Martin Scorsese, finally won his long-deserved first Academy Award for Best Achievement in Directing for “The Departed” in 2007. Michael Mann’s 2009 effort “Public Enemies” was a big-budget production with high-dollar stars. The HBO drama “The Sopranos” attracted millions of viewers per week for eight years. “Sopranos” writer Terry Winter teamed up with Scorsese in 2010 for another acclaimed gangster series, “Boardwalk Empire,” which won two Golden Globes earlier this year. Warner Bros., the studio that invented the gangster film, is hoping to get back in the game with a revival of the classic genre.[1] And Scorsese, who made his name with gangster films like “Mean Streets,” “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” will likely return to the genre with mafioso thesps Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino in a new organized crime project tentatively called “The Irishman.” [2]

Because of the aforementioned successes and recently renewed interest in movies about criminals, it makes sense to have a look at the origins of the genre. The following is a narrative account that includes the development of the gangster film over the course of a decade; summaries of some noteworthy examples; how they were received by critics, censors, and the general public and what makes them still relevant today.

***

In the 1930s, a new film genre arises in the United States. It is a direct result of Prohibition, and Al Capone, the chief criminal of this period, serves as its key figure. Martin Scorsese in his documentary “A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies” dubs the gangster picture as one of the three “indigenous” genres of American cinema – the others being the western and the musical.[3] The director says that all three of them remind him of jazz, because they allow for “endless, complex, sometimes perverse variations.” Gangster films enable “filmmakers to dwell on America’s fascination with violence and lawlessness,” and those from the 1930s stand out for three reasons:[4] First, they deal with the extreme violence of the so-called ‘roaring twenties’ and portray “the gangster as the modern entrepreneur.”[5] Second, they mark the first significant shift away from the silent movies of the decades that preceded them. And third, there is a moral component to these films. They chronicle the rise and fall of the larger-than-life gangster. At the beginning, the audience follows his steep ascent in the underworld until he becomes rich and famous. But as soon as he reaches the top the tides turn, and the criminal always loses in the end. He gets what he deserves and usually dies at the hands of the righteous authorities.

Melvin LeRoy’s “Little Caesar” (1931) is one of the earliest ‘talkies.’ In the tradition of the silent era, it opens with a title of a Bible quote, which reads, “For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Matthew: 26-52.” The film is concerned with the rise and fall of the mobster, Rico Bandello, played by Edward G. Robinson. At the beginning, the wannabe mafioso sits in a countryside diner with his friend Joe Massara (portrayed by Douglas Fairbanks, jr.) and tells him of his ambitions:

Money’s alright but it ain’t everything. Be somebody. Look hard at a bunch of guys and know they’ll do anything you tell them. Have your own way or nothing. Be somebody.

Mere seconds later, after a fade-out, Rico joins an outfit on the East coast headed by Joe Vettori. He soars and eventually becomes a gangster boss known as Little Caesar. His friend, who aspires to be a dancer, also joins the gang. But it quickly becomes obvious that Joe is not made for the criminal lifestyle. He wants to be a lawful citizen, and when he meets a woman, Rico is afraid that his friend will betray him. He threatens Joe, upon which Joe’s new girlfriend goes to the police. Little Caesar hides from the authorities, who subsequently tell the press that he is a coward. Rico comes out of hiding and is killed by gunfire. He dies with the words, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

The storyline of “Little Caesar” isn’t extraordinary. It is a fairly standard tale about the rise and the fall of a single man. What is more interesting, however, is the film’s lighting – bright for the first half which coincides with Rico’s ascent, dark for the rest when the protagonist’s career hits a downward slope – and the depiction of the hero, if he can even be called that:

As an individual with a name – marked emphatically by its allusion to an imperial ruler and its Italian ethnicity – ‘Little Caesar’ stands out from the crowd. The irony of the gang environment is that he must rise above it to rule it and thus ends up alone.[6]

Robinson’s screen presence deserves special mention, and his interpretation of the gangster gives way to many later cinematic representations and caricatures. In “Little Caesar,” he appears as a larger-than-life character. His whole existence is magnified in the film. We even empathize with him despite his ruthlessness and greed. We are drawn into the narrative because we want to know what will happen to him. The actor’s performance supports this:

Our interest remains exclusively on the level of the character’s response to the situation. We are interested, in Little Caesar, in what Joe’s disloyalty means to Rico, how it affects his feelings. Its importance is grounded in the character; it is not an intellectual concern of the film.[7]

Although flawed, the movie remains “fresh and vivid” even for contemporary viewers because it represents a “genuine achievement, sometimes unique that the genre” does “not attempt again.” That is why “Little Caesar” “is often called the grandfather of the modern crime film,” for it “rebelliously” challenges “traditional values” and marks the beginning of the genre’s first heyday.[8]

The evolution of the gangster picture continues with “The Public Enemy,” directed William A. Wellman, which appears later in the same year. Its star James Cagney gives a career-defining performance as Tom Powers. The story begins with the protagonist as a young man in 1901. He’s introduced as “the meanest boy in town” when he plays tricks on his best friend Matt Doyle’s sister. Powers and his companion are contrasted with their respective siblings: Tom’s puritanical brother, Mike, and Matt’s straight-laced sister, Molly. It is obvious from the beginning that the hero and his friend are crooked from childhood, when they steal watches and sell them in to a local hoodlum called Putty Nose. The film then moves on to 1915 and shows Tom and Matt as young men. They still work for Putty Nose, mostly running errands, but then he employs them in a much bigger job – the theft of furs. And they finally get guns.

This event, although a failure, triggers Tom’s journey through the underworld. His brother Mike, a virtuous character, tries to convince him to become a respected citizen again; Tom, however, refuses. Their mother is also drawn into the conflict. Tom is selfish, narcissistic and amoral. His proneness to violence is depicted in a legendary scene in which he shoves a grapefruit in his girlfriend’s face when she annoys. Tom, who will soon become involved with another woman, is a successful bootlegger in Chicago. This increases the conflict with his brother, who has returned from World War I as a shell-shocked veteran, only to see his brother swimming in a fortune of ill-gotten gains. Mike accuses his wealthy sibling of exploiting “beer and blood,” upon which Tom retorts: “Your hands ain’t so clean.. You killed and liked it. You didn’t get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.”

Tom continues to thrive as a gangster. Eventually, however, his greed and arrogance catch up with him. The moral overtones of “The Public Enemy,” which are also prominent in “Little Caesar,” make it clear that crime does not pay in the long run. Tom collapses in the rain-slicked streets and is taken to the hospital, where he makes up with his family. Ultimately, he is abducted by a rival mob and returns home a dead man. The film’s final title card reads:

The end of Tom Powers is the end of every hoodlum. “The Public Enemy” is not a man, nor is it a character––it is a problem that sooner or later we, the public, must solve.

In both pictures, the so-called heroes get what they deserve. “The Public Enemy” is a box-office hit. It helps Warner Bros. become financially successful and take its place as a major Hollywood studio.[9] Yet, it also sparks a controversial debate and brings about the wrath of the United States’ most prominent advocate of bowdlerization, Will H. Hays. When the film opens, he remarks that “the American public,” who he calls the country’s chief censor, begins “to vote thumbs down on the ‘hard-boiled’ realism in literature and on the stage” which marks “the post-war period.”[10]

The controversy surrounding “The Public Enemy” intensifies when Howard Hawks’ “Scarface” is released a year later. Arguably the most violent of all the gangster films from this era, it stars Paul Muni as Tony Camonte and is based on the life of Al Capone. The movie is supposed to come out shortly after “The Public Enemy,” but is delayed for almost a year due to censorship issues. Howard Hughes, “Scarface’s” eccentric multibillionaire producer, tells Hawks to ignore the problems: “Start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible.”[11] Most of the criticism surrounds the film’s extreme violence and the comedic elements interspersed within the more serious mood.[12] Capone himself has his henchmen threaten screenwriter Ben Hecht. Later, however, he becomes a huge fan of the film and buys a personal copy.[13]

“Scarface” opens with a disclaimer in the form of several titles right after the initial credits. The fact that the actual movie is preceded by a message is not noteworthy in itself. But the way in which the statement is made is. It is ostensibly directed at the theater audience, but its real targets are the censors who challenge the film prior to its release:

This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: “What are you going to do about it?” This government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?

The beginning of “Scarface” has Tony Camonte working for a local crime boss named Louis Costillo. The first time we see him is as a silhouette. He whistles a tune, cocks his gun, and shoots somebody three times, throws away the firearm, and leaves.

This gritty, violent scene sets the tone for the rest of the film. As viewers learn only seconds later, the killed person is Tony’s own boss. He is taken in by police, who interrogate him about the murder. At headquarters, one of the officers provides the audience with information on the life of the protagonist:

Tony Camonte. Aliases Gabe Rooney, Joe Black; assault; carrying brass knuckles; disturbing peace; street robbery on three counts; burglary; violation, Volstead Act; indicted for murder of Buck Kempner; member of Five Points Gang from New York in 1920. At present, bodyguard and strong-arm for Louis Costillo.

This biographical sketch bears an astounding similarity to Al Capone’s vita. It is therefore hardly surprising that Capone is concerned with his image being affected by the film. In “Scarface” Camonte apparently commits the murder on the orders of a man named Johnny Lovo, who then fills the void left by Costillo’s death and seizes control of Chicago’s South Side with the assistance of the protagonist as his chief subordinate. They sell huge quantities of illicit alcohol to the city’s speakeasies and muscle in on bars affiliated with rival outfits in order to make their fortune.

There is, however, competition from Irish gangs from the North Side. Lovo tells his top lieutenant several times not to take them on. But Camonte ignores his warnings. He starts shooting up bars in Irish territory and soon stirs the attention of both police and mobsters. But thanks to his recklessness, he also rises in fame and stature. Lovo, in the meantime, does not fail to notice that Tony is out of control in more ways than one; his top lieutenant also courts his blonde girlfriend, Poppy. At first, she rejects his advances, but as Camonte becomes more important, she also becomes gradually more attracted to him. Then the protagonist decides it is time to take over the North Side as well and declares war on the Irish. His close confidante, Guido Rinaldo (George Raft), kills their boss, O’Hara, in the latter’s own florist shop. This causes heavy retaliation. The hero escapes shootings more than once. Lovo cannot accept the fact that Tony has commandeered his organization, and confronts him. But Tony hardly pays him any attention at all. He points at a portable machine gun and says: “There’s only one thing that gets orders and gives orders, and this is it. That’s how I got the South for ya, and that’s how I’m gonna get the North Side for ya.” Camonte remains undeterred and his soldiers destroy the Irish gangs by-and-large and take control of their territory.

Disgusted by Tony’s brash leadership, Lovo arranges for his assassination. Camonte, however, escapes once more and subsequently murders Lovo with the help of Rinaldo. Thus, he becomes the undisputed boss of Chicago. Yet, just like the gangsters from the films before him, his fall is inevitable. The heinousness of his vicious rule enrages the public beyond placation. The fact that he is overprotective of his own sister, Cesca, further adds to his decline. When the protagonist finds out that she has secretly married his friend, Guido, he becomes infuriated and kills him. It is hardly surprising that Cesca is miserable in the aftermath and plans to murder her brother to avenge her husband’s death. Camonte holes up in his house and awaits the police, who intend to arrest him for murder. Cesca cannot bring herself to kill Tony and helps him against the police instead. But a stray bullet from police kills her, and Tony’s final stand ends with his demise: “I told you I’d get you without a gun and you’d squeal like a yellow rat,” says one police officer who ambushes Tony in his home. Camonte tries to flee one last time but is shot down. He dies, all alone, in the middle of the street. A cynical advertisement springs to the  foreground, “The world is yours.”

“Scarface” is followed by rigorous censorship. It thus marks the end of a circle of gangster films of the early 1930s, which “present their material with classic straightforwardness.” As Jack Shadoian characterizes, in his book “Dreams and Dead Ends”:

Their wish is to record the reality of the gangster’s world and his character, to convey, with non-metaphoric immediacy, the particulars of his behavior. The interest is in what he might really be like, the ways in which he is an actual menace. He is a character who exists as the film reports him to exist. These are essentially traditional, mimetic works––imitative, illusionistic, persuasively real. Conflict is used literally and transparently. The camera’s presence is hidden, its processes concealed.[14]

The gangster existence therefore becomes almost an existential drama concerned with the question of how to survive in an amoral world. That is not to say that justice is not restored at the end of these films. In each of them, the protagonist finds his death at the hands of either the law or rival mobsters. He receives his just deserts. But audiences are still fascinated with the criminal lifestyle, their recklessness and ruthlessness, and the danger they make for themselves and others. Or, as Howard Hawks puts it: “To stay alive or die: this is our greatest drama.”[15]

Later entries in the genre deconstruct the larger-than-life existence of the gangsters, in part thanks to the censorship of films and literature after 1934. Director Raoul Walsh’s “The Roaring Twenties,” a movie much revered by Scorsese, does just that in 1939. The fascination with criminals fades slightly, for a time, because Prohibition has been laid to rest for more than half a decade when the film is released. A decade has passed since the Great Depression, and the lifestyle does not appear nearly as glamorous as it did only a few years earlier. As Scorsese himself points out, with “The Roaring Twenties,” the gangster becomes “a tragic figure.”[16] The film informs the audience in a voiceover how the consumption of alcohol actually rises while the Volstead Act is in place. The narration is accompanied by newsreel-style footage that makes the scene look like a documentary, and also provides an authentic account of the era. Eddie Bartlett, the protagonist, is a young man who returns home victoriously from the World War I only to find that his job has been taken by someone else. In the meantime, the Volstead Act is introduced, and life in America changes.

In order to make a living, Eddie works as a taxi driver. A passenger asks him to run an errand for him taking alcohol to a notorious speakeasy. He agrees and police catch him and he’s sentenced to sixty days in jail. Out of desperation, he resigns himself to the bootlegging business upon his release. Cue voiceover:

And so the Eddie of this story joins the thousands and thousands of other Eddies throughout America. He becomes a part of a criminal army, an army that was born of a marriage between an unpopular law and an unwilling public. Liquor is the password in this army. And it’s a magic password that spells the dollar sign as it spreads from city to city, from state to state. The public is beginning to look upon the bootlegger as something of an adventuresome hero, a modern crusader who deals in bottles instead of battles. And so, because of the grotesque situation, this new kind of army grows and grows, always gaining new recruits who care nothing about tomorrow just so as long as money is easy today.

Bartlett, played by James Cagney, rises in the underworld. Humphrey Bogart as George Hally becomes his chief competitor. The latter, a perfectly amoral character bearing some resemblance to Sam Spade from “The Maltese Falcon,” dies at the hands of the former. “This one rap ya won’t beat,” says Bartlett just before

The demise of Bogart in “The Roaring Twenties” is justified, because he is an unlikeable character; in fact, audiences of the era expect “Bogart to die on screen, and usually to die like a rat pleading for his life.”[17] Killing him thus gives the down-and-out Cagney protagonist an opportunity to redeem himself. But there is no happy end for this main character, either. He is murdered on the staircase in front of the courthouse. The scene is set in the darkness of the rain-slicked streets. When asked about the dying Eddie Bartlett’s business, his lover, Panama Smith, replies, “He used to be a big shot.” With this statement, the gangster ceases to exist as a glorified motion picture hero. Yet interest in criminals and amoral characters, or in violence generally for that matter, never completely vanishes. It simply manifests itself in other ways for a while in the aftermath of “The Roaring Twenties.” Film noir is one outlet. The Western is another. All genres which feature lonesome, melancholy, gunslinging protagonists. Audiences tastes really never changed much at all.[18]

—————————————————————————————————–

[1] cf. Matt Holmes: “Warner Bros Reviving The Classic Gangster Picture!” http://www.obsessedwithfilm.com/movie-news/warner-bros-reviving-the-classic-gangster-picture.php (retrieved on 6 April, 2011).

[2] cf. Sandy Schaefer: “Robert De Niro Says ‘The Irishman’ Will Happen.” http://screenrant.com/robert-de-niro-the-irishman-martin-scorsese-sandy-104739/ (retrieved on 27 April, 2011).

[3] Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies. New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion, 1997: p. 33.

[4] Scorsese and Wilson 1997: p. 47.

[5] Andrew Spicer: Film Noir. Harlow et al.: Pearson Education, 2002: p. 9.

[6] Jonathan Munby: “Gangs and Mobs.” A Companion to Crime Fiction, eds. Charles J. Rzepka and Lee Horsley. Chichester: Blackwell, 2010: p. 216.

[7] Jack Shadoian: Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film (2nd edition). Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003: p. 31.

[8] Tim Dirks: “Little Caesar.” http://www.filmsite.org/littc.html (retrieved on 29 January, 2011).

[9] cf. Howard Hughes: Crime Wave: The Filmgoers’ Guide to the Great Crime Movies. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006: p. 9.

[10] Will H. Hays, as quoted in Mark Vieira: Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999: p. 33.

[11] Howard Hughes, as quoted in Vieira 1999: p. 68.

[12] cf. Thomas Patrick Doherty: Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immortality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934. New York: Columbia UP, 1999: pp. 149-150.

[13] cf. Stephen Prince: Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999: p. xiii.

[14] Shadoian 2003: pp. 29-30.

[15] Howard Hawks, as quoted in Scorsese and Wilson 1997: p. 47.

[16] Scorsese and Wilson 1997: p. 47.

[17] John T. Irwin: Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: The John Hopkins UP, 2006: p. 215.

[18] cf. Robert Warshow: The Immediate Experience. New York: Atheneum, 1979: pp. 135-137.

Jennifer Lawrence as the headstrong Ree in "Winter's Bone"

I had recently watched Ingmar Bergman’s all-time-downer classic, “Cries and Whispers,” for the second time when an article critiquing the latest phenomenon of young, sexualized and violent female film characters appeared in the New York Times. Chief Times film critics A.O Scott and Manohla Dargis cite “Kick-Ass,” “Sucker Punch,” and the “Millennium” trilogy as films with young women who express themselves either through superpowers, sexuality, or heinous violence. In “Cries and Whispers,” a film nearly forty years old, I realized that the three sisters essentially express their repressed emotions in almost this same exact manner (save the superpowers, perhaps). The only difference is that the violence is self-inflicted and the sexuality is merely hinted through gestures, sidelong glances, and the occasional touch and kiss. The point is that it is possible to convey the “complex intertwinings of sex and violence” without female exploitation and special effects. Furthermore, we still see examples, few they may be, of young women who assert their power through more multi-faceted and subtle means. Mr. Scott and Ms. Dargis justly but briefly mention these films and characters. I will expand on their observations.

Two standout heroines who broke the mold of ass-kicking, gun-slinging girls were Ree in Debra Granik’s “Winter’s Bone” and Mia in Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank.”  In “Winter’s Bone,” Ree exudes her power over others—men included—neither through sexuality or violence; her voice barely even raises above a low whisper, save for one crucial moment.  Mia, although a decidedly more brazen presence than Ree, articulates her very fraught emotions through the silence and fluidity of dance.

Both Mia and Ree do share some interesting similarities with the women of “Kick-Ass” and “Sucker Punch,” such as the pattern of what Mr. Scott calls “reassuring and creepy” father figures. These are men who take young, vulnerable girls under their wing and proceed to sexualize them and/or persuade them into violent action.  Mia perceives Conor, her mother’s boyfriend, as a father figure, but is also attracted to him, a fact that Conor eventually takes full advantage of.  What is most disturbing about Ms. Arnold’s depiction of their relationship is that initially, Conor’s actions can be viewed as either extremely inappropriate or utterly innocent. When Mia falls asleep on the couch, Conor carries her like a baby to her room, lays her on the bed and takes off her pants, only to lift the covers over her legs and up to her shoulders, tucking her in. The “creepy” factor is definitely there, but also the possibility of a paternal figure.  Ree and Teardrop share a similarly complex relationship, minus the sexual innuendo, although the threat of violence is certainly there at first. Teardrop is the brother of her missing father, and despite his skinny, hangdog demeanor, he is one scary guy. We are first introduced to him as he ambles down the staircase of his house, still in his pajamas.  A cup of coffee is placed on the table in front of him and he hunches down and slurps the coffee, hands-free, hinting at his animal tendencies and rage. When Ree, who has come to inquire about the location of her father, asks one question too many, he lunges out of his chair and grabs Ree by the side of her head, not hitting her, but hurting her all the same. As the film progresses, Teardrop will not only become Ree’s only ally, but the one member of her immediate family aside from her younger siblings who loves and protects her. These two important male figures in the lives of Mia and Ree prove to be more intricately drawn than the “reassuring or creepy” type that Mr. Scott depicts—they are a disturbing embodiment of both.

Mia, and even the ever-stoic Ree, also personify the “female rage” that Mr. Scott describes and take their own brand of revenge against abusive men. Mia’s revenge against Conor’s emotional and sexual abuse is especially frightening because she demonstrates that her reckless abandon goes beyond merely head-butting other teenagers. In a bizarre and terrifying sequence, Mia kidnaps Conor’s daughter, snatching her right off her scooter and forcing her to march to cliffy seashore, where she nearly drowns. Mia may not take an axe to Conor a la Lisbeth Salander, but she hits him where it hurts most by invading his personal family life and staining his daughter’s innocence.  Ree also, if more symbolically, takes her own form of gruesome revenge on her already dead father not with a axe, but with a chainsaw. Ree is certainly more sympathetic to her absent father, whom she clearly still loves.  So when Ree grasps her father’s dead hands through the murky water in which his body has been dumped, and is handed a chainsaw, which she must use to cut off those hands as proof of his death,  it is a much more grueling and horrifying act than Lisbeth’s attempt at patricide.

The taciturn Ree is a stark contrast to the foul-mouthed Mindy/Hit Girl of “Kick-Ass.”  Ree’s might is measured by the force and consequences of her actions and, even more so, by the thoughtfulness of her silence.  She answers every question after a long stretch of painstaking silence; you can almost hear the wheels turning in her head. Ree’s one verbal catharsis is blunt, relentless, and free of expletives.  She stridently bellows the name of the town patriarch—“THUMP MIL-TON!”—over and over again, her cries intermixing with the groaning of the cows of the auction house to where she has tracked him down. Ree knows she will not get a reaction out of him, but she continues to holler those three syllables with dogged conviction. Ree’s verbal torrent will have grim consequences, and she knows this, and is not afraid. When it counts, Ree uses her words, and uses them fervently.

With Mia we encounter the opposite trait: a ribald, vituperative and sometimes dangerous teenager who spits out the coarsest obscenities as if it’s her own secret language. Above all things, Mia is a kinetic being, although her physicality is not of the action-heroine variety, such is the case with the girls of “Sucker Punch.”  An aspiring hip-hop dancer, Mia is constantly in motion, whether practicing moves alone in an empty room of an abandoned high-rise or prowling the dingy, drab streets of her town. Mia’s physical grace is the reason why her most defining moment in “Fish Tank” is devoid of words altogether. In a silent but tense moment of alternating confrontation and empathy, Mia and her mother dance together—not side by side, not in a loving mother-daughter embrace, but facing each other, toe-to-toe, an uncanny mirror image.

Ingmar Bergman would beg to differ, but sadly, you need a bit more than cries and whispers nowadays to get by in the movie land of sexed-up-women-with-weapons. So, you foul-mouthed, pre-sexual yet inappropriately erotic superhero; you mercurial, mohawked, axe-wielder; you sword-swinging, scantily-clad prisoners of a misogynistic psycho-ward/alternate reality–Ree and Mia would like you to know that all a girl needs to get by in this cruel world is the good sense to know when to make your voice heard, and some sweet dance moves.  And perhaps, in dire circumstances, to be used only as an expression of deeply repressed female anger and grief, a chainsaw.

Work cited:

Scott, A.O., and Manohla Dargis. “Gosh, Sweetie, That’s a Big Gun.” New York Times 27 April 2011: MT1. Print..

While Hathaway may not possess (or, has yet to demonstrate) the seductive cool required to tackle Catwoman (this appears to be the main complaint being levied against her), I’m sure she will be plenty convincing as the anti-heroine’s socialite alter-ego, Selina Kyle.

In fact, I don’t think the character will be Hathaway’s biggest obstacle at all…I believe the director will. Over the course of seven excellent films, Christopher Nolan just hasn’t shown much creative regard for his female characters.

Consider Nolan’s peripheral treatment of distressed damsel Rachel Dawes in his first two Batman installments. The descion to replace original Dawes actress Katie Holmes (“Batman Begins,” 2005) with Maggie Gyllenhaal (“The Dark Knight,” 2008) was the subject of some ridicule, but little concern. Fans couldn’t have really cared less if she returned at all.

This was mostly because the character was never developed any further than “Batman’s object of desire.” Dawes’s existence as a by-the-numbers love interest would have been almost tolerable had she not been constantly dropped into situations where the audience was expected to care about her fate. Over the course of two films, the amount of time Batman spent rescuing Dawes was wildly disproportionate to the amount of time Dawes spent actually speaking.

For a more recent example, let’s look at Ellen Page’s portrayal of dream architect Ariadne in last year’s summer blockbuster, “Inception.” While early trailers and plot synopsis outlined Ariadne as dream thief Dom Cobb’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) reluctant partner in crime, the resulting film found her character to be far less essential to the overall story.

Which is not to say Page didn’t have a function in “Inception.” She did, and it was a very important one. Yet, despite her invaluable insight into Cobb’s subconscious and her pivotal contribution to his team, she was treated as little more than a marginal accomplice while the far less significant male characters played by Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were much better defined through their interactions and origins.

While other characters quipped at one another, had clearly articulated motives or spoke in a way which implied history and experience, Page was left to drably react to impossible environments. One could argue that Cobb’s late, tormented wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) was one of the films most memorable characters. But keep in mind that her most meaningful developments were mostly presented through Cobb’s voice-over narration.

Perhaps Nolan’s most depressing female fumble can be found is handling of Ellie Burr (played by Hilary Swank) in the loose remake of the Norwegian film “Insomnia” (2002). One would be hard pressed to find a role more ripe for personalization (Swank’s base character formula here is roughly the same as police chief Marge Gunderson’s in “Fargo” and FBI hopeful Clarice Starling’s in “Silence Of The Lambs”). Yet, in Nolan’s hands, Burr is reduced to a simple minded stake-raiser in Will Dormer (Al Pacino) and Walter Finch’s (Robin Williams) heated game of psychological chess.

The closest Nolan has come to crafting a truly memorable female character was the manipulative Natalie in his breakout film, “Memento” (2001). However, save for one emotionally charged exchange between Natalie and amnesiac Leonard (Guy Pearce) near the end of the film, Natalie still lacks the nuance of “Memento’s” more vividly defined men.

When it comes to creating psychologically wounded alpha-males, Nolan is arguably the best in the business. But the director has yet to imbue his female characters with the same emotional depth or complexity. The marginalization of women in film is hardly an issue exclusive to Nolan’s filmography, but it’s difficult not to expect better from one of cinema’s great modern talents. Fingers crossed that Nolan’s teaming with Hathaway will break the trend.

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Jaymie Baxley is a Fayetteville, North Carolina based journalist. He is currently a staff writer for local arts and culture publication, “The Fayetteville Feed.” Jaymie is also a student concentrating on his Bachelors in Mass Communications/Journalism. He can be contacted at Jaymie@fayettevillefeed.com

I don’t know if I understand the film, but I’m sure it understands me. Subversive, volatile, fascinating, even funny, Tarantino’s alternative take on World War II is a feast for the senses and the self. Set roughly after D-Day, but just before the liberation of Paris, it meets our discomfort with the iron-jawed assurance that we don’t just need to see what we’re seeing; we want to see it.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” Tarantino has said. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”1

The outlandish cartoon that he’s created solidifies his position as a cinematic circus conductor. Yet, to reduce Tarantino’s film to the shock-and-awe campaign that critics too eagerly evoke is to miss the point entirely. This film begs to be understood, yet its originality has managed to separate from its meaning. Whether intentionally or not, Basterds marks a point of cinematic reflection that has been a long time coming, a sure sign of the generational disconnect that has been slowly taking place.

I can trace an evolution in Holocaust cinema, all culminating in Tarantino’s work of hyper-reality. Holocaust films offer us a collective chance to reflect on the historical moment. But the fascination and the danger of Holocaust cinema reside in the process of rewriting, when the cinematic and the historical come together and our connection with history is questioned. Recent Holocaust texts illustrate the decay of memory that occurs with every passing year and every passing survivor, and Tarantino speaks for us as the voice of the distant, for those who, in the years since the Holocaust, have watched history detach itself from the tangible.

In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag writes that images are “a way of imprisoning reality… of making it stand still…One can’t possess reality. One can possess (or be possessed by) images.”2 Alain Resnais muses on this fact in his 1955 documentary Night and Fog (France), produced just ten years after the liberation of the concentration camps. In a mere 35 minutes, the film manages to cut to the heart of Nazi ideology and the horrors behind closed camp doors.

Using black-and-white archival footage, depicting the arrival of the exiled Jews by train, Resnais cuts through the lucid dark of the countryside with the razor tint of a switchblade. As he merges these images with color footage of the camps in their postwar fog, we are suddenly privy to the haunting stillness of an indifferent landscape, where once occurred such atrocity that we scarcely speak its name.

“I would have nightmares,” Resnais recounts of his time assembling the film. “It wasn’t until my time [at Auschwitz], interestingly enough, that I was freed of the demons…there was no longer interpretation; [the images] were gone and I was faced with reality.”3

"Schindler’s List." (Steven Spielberg, 1993)

Able to magnify a reality that might otherwise be ignored, film can also clarify the incomprehensible. We bear
witness to a creator’s subjectification of reality, and through this reach our own conclusions about the larger event. But in doing so, a potential paradox of catharsis and exploitation is realized. Resnais’s film, while offering a collective release by bringing attention to the atrocity, borders on this tendency. What the film does do unquestionably is ask us to consider the temporality of reflection—namely, when we look back and why.

The ten-year gap between the liberation of the camps and the release of Night and Fog allows for a particularly self-incriminating form of retrospection. Ewout van der Knaap once boldly reflected on the film’s cultural impact at the time of its release.”It was with the analysis of [Night and Fog], the process of viewing it, digesting it, that [our collective culture] was able to understand the Holocaust—that others had the ability to experience it. It created a sense of memory…it can thus be regarded as a litmus test for the state of collective memory.”4 Where Sontag speaks of the fleeting essence of memory and its relation to celluloid, Knaap claims that Resnais’s work granted us nothing short of reality, the ability to truly reflect on the horror of the Holocaust as an event.

Typically, film adaptations of history rely on the viewer’s application of their memory for the text’s progression. But Night and Fog instead works to create the memory, using its timeframe to grant a collective understanding of the event.
This was the moment the horrors of the Holocaust invaded not just Jewish history, but collective culture, where cinema transformed it into the people’s atrocity, asking us to consider the role of our collective memory, and what it means to reflect back with questions of accountability.

And then, we moved on.

"Nuit Et Brouillard" (Night and Fog). (Alain Resnais, 1955 France)

The further we got from the war itself, the more our texts had to adapt. Each film wrote about the savagery of those twelve years, and the body of work gradually became more homogenous. Take for instance Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), which crafts a fictional narrative around the realities of the camps. Spielberg, who shot almost entirely on location—even going so far as to use the actual Auschwitz gates—goes a step beyond Resnais. He refuses to simply allow us to reflect on the memory, and opts instead to recreate it, depicting the atrocity “as it happened.”

But to whom is he speaking? Resnais’s film addressed both the survivors of the war and its aggressors. It spoke to a country that, just ten years prior, had been affiliated with the Nazi regime. Spielberg crafted a film for neither the war’s survivors nor its collaborators, but rather an audience that craves the kind of conclusion that Resnais couldn’t give us, because the war never gave it to us either. It sacrifices its convictions for its viewer, resigning itself into a liberal-guilt film that parades its Nazi-turned-hero as not just a moment of cinematic revision, but collective redemption.  But the camera can never truly capture the history, the memory. It never went in those rooms, never witnessed those crimes. Yet we still crave the kind of simplification that the image provides.

Sontag once analogized this impulse to a model of consumption: “To consume means to burn, to use up—and therefore, to need to be replenished. As we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more.”5 Claude Lanzmann, the creator of the nine-hour Holocaust documentary series Shoah (1985, France), once stated that if he were ever to find a single reel of footage documenting the gassing of a Jew, he would burn the footage immediately. I never understood why, what the reasoning would be to destroy the footage of the atrocity itself.

But I realize now, as he did then, that the collective memory of the event enforces the need for something more than a recording. In the same way that my reflection can never articulate the films I’m writing about, none of the films can convey the horrors to which they refer. Instead, it’s the memory that must be preserved. The tastelessness of recreating the events bypasses cinema’s actual power to contextualize our relationship to history.

Then on the eighth day, God gave us Tarantino.

His sixth feature, Inglourious Basterds, depicts an alternative World War II, where the cinema plays a pivotal role in the defeat of the Third Reich, both in the narrative and outside it. In just over fifty years from the time of Night and Fog, Tarantino gives us the polar opposite reflection of Jewish history, the postmodern spin on memory and its malleability. If Night and Fog depicted the ambiguities surrounding spectatorship, then Basterds represents the absolute necessity of the spectator.

Consider its controversial finale. We see Lanzmann’s vow brought to life when 350 nitrate film reels are set ablaze in a movie theatre as the Nazis and Hitler himself (played with Chaplin-like excess) watch a propaganda film of their own making, Nation’s Pride. We watch them watch a fictionalized account of their history, and here Tarantino is aligning these two sets of spectators: the aggressors of the very war he’s referencing, and those that digest the history itself.
This is Tarantino’s most blatant affirmation of the film’s position as fantasy, one that could only take place in the movie theater. Resnais’s film took our detached relationship to history as a means to reflect. Tarantino’s film uses that detachment as a means simply to avoid the history itself.

But perhaps this is the most cinematically moral act of them all. Sontag cites the risk in remembering, stating that “heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together…to make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited.”6 Maybe this is Tarantino’s sideways attempt at Holocaust reflection in the postmodern age, crafting a way for us to truly reflect and remember: by choosing to forget.

It is now, when we have been divided from the history itself, that Tarantino is able to do what he has done. And it is in this way that Inglourious Basterds is not just unique, but necessary: a triumph of collective desire. The goal becomes simply to digest and find solace in what Tarantino himself dubs a fantasy. And it is just that, a fantasy that only film can offer.

I watch these films—Night and Fog, Schindler’s List, and Inglourious Basterds (the reflection, the revision, and the rewrite)—and am struck by how my memory uses them. These films teach me the power of conflict, both in the past and in my relation to it. They attempt to speak on a history, on a fleeting moment in time. But they speak to us, for us, about us, granting us the bemused awareness of an unavoidable truth: terrible things did happen. Resnais knew this when he gave us the memory. Spielberg knew it when he used it against us. Tarantino knew it when he blew it up.

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1 Goldberg, Jeffrey. “Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger.” Atlantic (2009). Web.
2 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Pp. 353-354. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
3 Knaap, Ewout Van Der. Uncovering the Holocaust: the International Reception of Night and Fog. London: Wallflower P., 2006
4 ibid.
5 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Pp. 367. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
6 ibid.

Happy Feet, like the Mad Max films and Babe: Pig In the City, begins with an expansive, mythological vision of a microcosmic world in the midst of great transition. The film begins quietly, in space, which will becomes a constant visual motif throughout the course of the film. A wide, vast cosmos is spread before us, like a shot from the Hubble – a nebula. And, in the middle of it, the faintest of familiar outlines – a mother penguin, her head bent down toward her young. At first, all we hear is the softest of voices behind the stars – a slow cover of The Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” And, then we begin to descend – down toward the Earth, as the noise begins to build. The planet takes center frame, spinning until Antarctica is at the top, something that astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson notes as one of the film’s first examples of its implicitly anthropological (if that is the correct word to use, given that it’s a fable) point of view, similar to that found in Martin Rosen’s Watership Down, when interviewed by Variety: “From it’s opening, you come at Earth from space, and the Earth rotates until Antarctica is on-top of the world. From the beginning, it establishes a point of view, and you are … in the culture of the penguins.”i And, it’s here, in these first thirty minutes, that the tone – or tones – of the film solidifies, constantly shifting from the serene and light-hearted into the sudden and potently mythological. From the parents of the main character Mumble meeting in a relatively bright unity of song, and into the huddle of the males in the harsh, bleak red light of the setting sun, set against the primeval chants of the colony Elders in praise of their food god, whose visage appears above them in the swirling winds. The juxtaposition of these two scenes together, and how they relate and reflect off of each other, epitomizes Miller’s use of tone for the rest of the film, with a slight emphasis on the latter aspect.

And fittingly, this is a mythic tale, a fable fully realized – like Miller’s Mad Max films, intently so. “Most of my films are, in a sense, fables” Miller has said, “in that they’re worlds that exist only on the screen in the cinema, and in a sense, like fables you see them as allegory, or at least they’re metaphorical, and you read them as you would fables. And hopefully, they’re not specific to any time … and aren’t entirely specific to one moment in history.”ii And always, with the exception of that first Mad Max film, his movies have remained intently focused on the elemental community, and the relationship of the outsider to that communityiii; the outsider who becomes, in his words, an “agent of change, evolutionary agents”iv to a tribe in the midst of a wasteland that is either physical (as in the Mad Max films, and here as well) or cultural (as in the second Babe film, and The Witches of Eastwick). Here, the world and the community at the center of his story isn’t quite as picturesque and water-color storybook as those found in the Babe films, and yet at the same time, it’s not quite as harsh and grim as those on the sand dunes of the Mad Max trilogy. Here is something entirely other, a fable in the sensibility epitomized by the works of directors like Martin Rosen and Michael Schaack – a strong blend of the explicitly naturalistic, the real and the instinctive, with the implicitly allegorical, the mythic and the slightly fantastic. Although, they do share contextual similarities – beside those mentioned just previously, both employ a central narrator to create the consciously mythic framework of their stories, and where children are of importance in some form or another in the salvation of the society or community at the core of the story. The mythic composition of the story comes finally full circle as Mumble delves off the ice cliff and into the Unknown, and Lovelace makes a vow to tell his tale, even long after his death. And indeed, everything in the film leads up to the cusp of its first hour, after Mumble is forcibly excommunicated from his colony, becoming a pariah in the most spiritual sense – it’s here that Miller’s film hits its most mythic stride, with an archetypal camera tracking the penguin compadres through sweeping, vast – and yet, starkly minimal – ice-lands in search of that great Other (which is a pretty over-used critical term, I’ll agree – but, with a film that works on such an archetypal level, I think we can grant its use): the much whispered-about “aliens,” the identities of which the film makes no secret about, because that isn’t at all the point. Here, Miller employs scale in a way that creates an eye-opening dichotomy between the penguins and their environment, always a constant factor in his films – reducing his penguin compatriots to spare figures on an archetypal landscape, and moving over them, those shadowy, almost god-like machines from without, breaking through the mist and ice, represented often in a primal, visually elemental sense of wonderment and fear. That’s how you do it, Lucas.

More than any of his previous films, Happy Feet is a film that defines its characters in terms of their surroundings – framing its characters in against the wide, barren expanse topped by vivid blue skies, and clouds that seem to go on forever, a visual motif the film shares with the latter two Mad Max films, whose rhythm of composition is similarly mythic. Indeed, as Glenn Heath notes, “When Norma Jean leaves Memphis with their newly formed egg to fish with the other females, the season changes from obscenely bright to brutally dark, and in turn so does Miller’s use of color, lighting, and texture. Memphis’ loneliness and panic parallels the blue and black hues of the icy rain-drenched environment, not only in terms of character but also plot.” Miller’s mastery of environmental mise-en-scene and composition is emphasized most clearly here, in the stark white wastelands of Antarctica, which he uses in a similar fashion to the empty deserts of Australia – pitting character and locale together with growing tension. v This becomes most obvious in what I consider to be one of the best scenes of the film, where Mumble and his compadres, against the eternally setting sun, attempt to cross a tundra in the throes of a massive blizzard, only to be constantly pushed back by the winds – shot in Miller’s trademark panoramic widescreen, the scene is really a simple battle to move from the left to the right of the screen, made into a force of wills and compounded by Miller’s disarmingly simple manipulation of the frame. Leaning in to each other, bearing the winds, they make their way across – into the dark.

It’s also interesting how well thought out the primal religion of these penguins is – while the film posits itself primarily as allegory, this element of Miller’s penguin community also seems also to have been implicitly crafted to fit into the same kind of naturalistic mold as the one found among the rabbits in Watership Down, and other, similar works – this is a fairly tribal food god they pray to, certainly. Interestingly, we never do learn in full about the spiritual structures of any of the other penguin colonies seen in the film, outside of the Adelies and their fashioning of Lovelace as a(n admittedly false) prophet and a sage; this poses an intriguing question, one that in all probability might be confronted in the sequel, and that is – of what shape do any of the other penguin colonies in the film’s universe resemble? Taking the film’s implicit fable structure and sensibility into account, would it be potent to say that there are, say, African penguins with elements of something resembling Shamanism within their culture? I digress, however. There’s also a reasonable skepticism apparent here and there in Miller’s Thomas Aquinas-esque reconciliation of faith and reason, science and religion, the individualist and the collectivist, represented in the smaller community of the colony, also indicative of his oft-quoted philosophy, cribbed from astrophysicist Paul Davies, that “science is a faster way to god than religion.” There’s a bit of the Carl Sagan here as well, remaining from Miller’s time on the film version of Contact – in fact, some, like Rajik Djoumi of France’s Excessif, have posited that much of the film’s narrative comes by way of the several abandoned drafts of that film that Miller had writtenvi – it isn’t overly cynical about the mythology that holds this penguin community together at the bottom of the world, and it even seems awed and fascinated by it at certain points, despite the machinations of its Pharisaic Elders. This is a colony that must remain welded together to survive in this harsh wilderness, and indeed, the emperor penguin is the animal most emblematic of collectivism – and, it is this purpose that their mythology serves, as the concrete of their society. At the same time, there’s also a slight unwillingness and uncertainty about it, in hushed whispers at first – which culminates in the zoo sequence near the end of the film, where Mumble steps out of his plastic enclave for the first time and into the antiseptic white light of the aquarium, here represented by a long, drawn-out tunnel cast in silhouette, with the light at the end only gradually coming into focus. And, upon asking where this place is, the only answer he gets is, “You’re in Heaven. Penguin Heaven – and, it’s wherever you want it to be.” Ultimately, the film seems more focused on the personal relationships inside of this culture – of Mumble to his father Memphis, particularly, and the continuously developing arc of his father, by itself, as more and more his guilt overwhelms him over the course of the film until, by the end of the film, he finds himself as spiritually dead as Mumble was in the zoo.

Mumble the character is an idealist, as much as Max was a nihilist, and constantly, Miller places this idealism – or naiveté’, some would say – at the behest of a violent and often cruel world. As with all of his films, there’s an emphasis on the essential safety that the community provides, in the wasteland, and the inability of individuals to live outside their environment. The farther away that Mumble gets from his tribe, the more immediately dangerous the world around him seems to become – gradually, the size of the predators pitted against him increases, from a skua bird to a leopard seal to a killer whale – until, he ends up in a zoo, continents away. And it’s here, in this sequence in the zoo that Miller breaks the character down toward his “essential self.”vii As Matthieu Santelli notes, “the film revives the theme of the Mad Max trilogy and the Babe films, when the crossing of the line becomes inevitable. The danger in Miller’s films always comes from the other side. And, if they walk too far, they may find themselves trapped.”viii Yet, it’s only there, after months of isolation and being driven toward near-insanity, that he finds what he’s been looking for – just on the other side of the glass. And always, a cautious sort of optimism compounded by personal and societal salvation, something that acts as the real through-line between this and the latter two Mad Max movies, and everything in between pervades the film, even in its most darkest moments, when the main character finds himself screaming his lungs out at the faces behind the glass, staring down at him.

Music, and rhythm, both take an especially active role in the film, as well – the pinnacle of these penguin’s culture is the “Heartsong,” coming from the natural practice of the Emperor penguin’s mating rituals, represented here in iconic fashion through the use of prior-recorded music – a device that bears less similarity to that other Australian musical Moulin Rouge and more to Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain or Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop, though within a more mythological framework – and, it’s through this that we’re informed of much of their world, in more ways than one would think, initially – it becomes Miller’s centralized way of representing the unease growing within the penguins’ community; along with the use of The Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers” at the beginning of the film, mirroring it and bookending the movie is a rendition of “The End,” from the same album – and, to parallel the religious, almost ‘prophetic,’ subtext of the film, Gloria’s song during the two’s courtship ritual that marks the midpoint of the film is a simultaneously somber and bombastic rendition of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland,” a song about the loss of faith in prayer – and bell-bottom jeans, but I digress. And always, following the character is an almost Gregorian soundtrack, reminiscent of the chant of the Elders in the Huddle sequence near the beginning of the film, and repeated in defiance of the dancing below again near the end. When Mumble is awoken from his dormant egg early on in the film, it’s by the tapping on the shell by baby Gloria. Later on in the film, it’s this same rhythmic tapping, on the glass of the aquarium exhibit, that startles him from his emotional death – and into a rebirth, in a sequence that returns Miller to what he’d found so fascinating about cinema in the first place, images without sound, “visual music” in the clearest sense.

And in keeping with that train of thought, this – like most of Miller’s films – is a movie fascinated with the possibilities of cutting, editing and visual kineticism, the relationship between the pure movement of the camera and the performer – which becomes most apparent in his musical sequences. Musicals have always seemed like the brother or sister to action films, with their collective emphasis on the kinetics of cinema, something that Miller has always cited as one of the primary formal interests that pushed him forward, initially – and, in several contemporary interviews, he’s identified the self-titled sequence in Singin’ In The Rain as what he considers one of the great action sequences of cinema -and here, Miller takes full advantage of that relationship, adapting his headlong, constantly moving and almost aggressively lyrical style to the unification of image and music, song and rhythm, voice and dance. Energy is constantly pushed forward, energy in explication of character, in spurts that appear at first haphazard, but upon examination reveal a careful composition; and, like his second Mad Max film, here Miller keeps his Puffin hero exclusively in the center of the frame and set against the vivid blue of the sky above – and, near the end of the film, when all in the colony has come screaming down, the implicit visual connection between the two becomes obvious, as Mumble returns and becomes the savior of the colony, through revolt. In a way, it’s all very much a return to the principles and style of the classical musicals of the forties and fifties, like Stormy Weather or Singin’ In The Rain – I hazard to mention Busby Berkeley, because what most people miss with his musical sequences is that they were entirely meant as pure escapism with little relationship otherwise to anything else in the films they were in, which isn’t the case here although there is much that is similarly kaleidoscopic and even hallucinogenic at times (Berkeley’s ideas applied with narrative relevance?) – but at the same time, it’s also a furtherance of those ideas, with a cast of thousands, spanning colonies and, in the final sequence, continents. There’s also a very strong stylistic connection to the Indian Bollywood films, through their textual interweaving and use of massive song and dance sequences and travelogue-esque movement to tell strongly emotional stories in an environment that is often alien to the viewer – something Miller posits he only became conscious of after-the-fact. A rendition of Freddy Mercury’s Somebody To Love early on becomes not just a song of forlorn romance, but a call for sympathy from the heavens above. A Blue Angels-esque musical sequence that, for the penguins, represents nothing so much as the equivalent of a spring break, with the contrails creating shifting geographical shapes and lines in the water, in the penguins wake. There’s a courtship ritual that breaks out of its cultural boundaries, one that seems at first similar to what we’ve seen come before, but whose tone and notes reveal a noticeably more somber context – here, Miller’s focus initially is not on any ostensibly incidental commotion in the background, but remains instead intent on the faces and the eyes of the two characters at the heart of it, constantly moving and circling each other, but always in the center. Later on, we’re presented dance as a rudimentary communicative tool, within the zoo and without – it’s an idea that has led some to interpret the end of the film as, among various other things, the discovery of sentience through an entirely other species, or even as a markedly less optimistic bit satire, as the human redeem themselves only in time to save a species they feel can entertain them. Myself, I believe the film is something considerably more utopian, and Capra-esque – there is something here about the relationship between personal and societal love, romantic and empathic, beyond everything else, something that is made obvious by film’s end, during the film’s dream-scale montage set under a softer rendition of The Beatles’ “The End,” bringing the film sonically full circle. Mumble returns to lead a rebellion against the perched, and a celebration of social salvation, something that ties the film’s societal eye in with it’s personal, as Mumble remains at the center of the crowd, physically scarred by his journey but not alone -

The role of Mumble comes as a three-way composite between Elijah Wood, Alan Lee, and Savion Glover – and, as a tap-dancer myself, it’s Glover’s role as both the character’s feet and the general choreographer of the film that gives the character an almost iconic feel, much like a Babe or a Max, or even an Odone; in contrast to what candy-colored Broadway floss might have come if someone like, say, a Dein Perry (of Australia’s own Tap Dogs) had been brought on, here Glover gives the character an individualized and gradually evolving artistry to the noise he’s creating with his feet – near the beginning of the film, it sounds like physical white noise, without rhythm and resembles nothing so much as a physical tick, or a strange walk; yet, as the film follows the character in his youth, he sometimes it’s very “light and bright,” and other times it becomes “real hard and heavy,” to use his own terminology. There’s a real love and respect apparent here for the form, inside the film and out – it isn’t trivialized, as most seemed to expect it would have been, given the ostensibly throw-pillow trappings of the general plot that had become known, early on. And along with the character, the use of dance gradually evolves throughout the film, becoming something larger and more unifying – first as a method of personal expression, and then of courtship and love, which is followed by its shift into something a bit more primal, a tool of mass rebellion and defiance, against those up on the perch above, who do their best to drown it out with their own ritual noise. And, as the helicopter arrives, all falls silent for a moment – before the penguins begin to move again in unison, following their new leader at the back. And, finally, dance becomes a tool of almost universal communication, as revealed by the final sequence.

There are a lot of interesting ways to look at the film, actually – as a religious allegory, as a veiled alien abduction story, or as the meeting of two societies and cultures, the Indians and the Spanish, which is a reading that Miller encourages to some extent – in an interview with Elvis Mitchell, Miller explains the use of dance as communication in the film thusly: “One thing I do recognize is that singing in a way of communicating is pretty human … a very basic way of communicating. When different people’s met each other, when the world was colonized, we – went out and met native peoples. They didn’t have our language in common, so the way they communicated – becoming clearer now through the record – they would use dance and music. It was through music that people first communicated – and so, there’s something very elemental about it.” And, since its release four years ago, it’s gradually become something of a favorite of online film writers, all over. I remember once, a while back, reading someone’s essay comparison between the film and James Cameron’s The Abyss, and – you know, it does make sense, and it’s a parallel that becomes especially potent in light of what was removed from the film, just before its release; there seems to have been almost an entire half hour cut out of the film, involving ‘aliens’ in a broader, more implicitly extraterrestrial sense – from those that I’ve spoken to, they seemed to resemble strongly the penguin deity seen during The Huddle sequence at the beginning of the film, which is something that gives a small hint as to the thematic breadth of that plot-point and how it might have intertwined with what’s found in the finished film, and existing concept artwork seems to depict them as shadowy faces poking out from underneath the ice caverns. But, again – I’ve digressed, and greatly. More simplistically, it could be a love story, a tale of the outcast, or even the gap between the new generation and the old. Or, it could be all of those things. Whatever you consider the film – a piece of children’s cinema in the vane of Golden Age Disney, a new sort of mythic fable from the same class as Martin Rosen’s Watership Down with a sense of humor, or something that sits somewhere in between – either way, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is something indelible in its imageries and vision, and will remain.

Henry J. Baugh manages the online film blog/journal The Filmist, from which the original essay that this article was drawn from can be found; previously, he’s written for Chazz Lyon’s now defunct film criticism collective, Gone Cinema Poaching, and Blogcritics, as well as a festival correspondent for Einsiders, among other places. He can be reached at henry.thefilmist.j0@gmail.com.

The film begins with a prominent Italian patriarch entering through the front door of his stately villa. The lighting is gray and there is snow on the ground. The camera frames the doorway from inside the villa and follows as he enters with regal grace. Through the open door, the snowy courtyard is visible. Various characters will cross the threshold of this doorway throughout the film. Some of these entrances and exits will be life-altering, and one climactic departure will be an exhilarating, if terrifying, flight of freedom—an exit from an old life and entrance into a new one.

The entirety of “I Am Love” is brimming with doorways being opened and shut. The camera peers through doorways and into rooms; sometimes, multiple rooms are visible through two or three doorways simultaneously in a mirror-like effect. In the first quarter of the film, most of these doorways belong in the villa of the Recchi family, where wife and mother Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) spreads her maternal and wifely grace throughout the household. As a transplant from Russia, Emma has humble origins, and hints of her status as an outsider still linger in her occasional need for solitude; she takes solace in the company of Ida, the house’s caretaker, and she often helps her with household tasks.

As the film progresses, the images of opening and closing, entering and exiting, become both more subtle and more obvious. An example of a subtle but momentous opening is Emma’s opening of a CD that she finds in the pocket of her son’s jacket. Within this CD, she unfolds a postcard which contains a picture of a young woman. The postcard is from Betta, Emma’s daughter, and written to her brother Edo. Betta tells him that she is in love with another girl—the girl in the picture. On the front of the postcard, in bold, black letters, is the word love. Emma’s inadvertent discovery of her daughter’s newfound sexuality is perhaps the defining moment for her in the film—Emma’s own personal re-awakening. I say re-awakening because Emma is content with her life; she is in no way repressed. It is Emma’s sense of general happiness and fulfillment which makes her eventual entrance into a new life that much more poignant—the only excuse for her transformation is love.

Emma’s newfound love is for Antonio, an innovative, rustic chef, and her son’s best friend. After essentially making love to him through ingesting his delectable cuisine (in a scene that is now referred to as “prawnography”), she and Antonio finally consummate their desire for each other at his secluded hill-top villa. After their tryst, Antonio has a vivid and impassioned fantasy about Emma; it begins with the camera peering through a brick entranceway which leads to a double-doorway that opens into his restaurant kitchen—another door-within-a-door image. There is a quick jump-cut to a door ajar though which sunlight from the street streams into the kitchen, then a cut to Antonio looking over his shoulder through the windows of the kitchen’s double-doors. He peers through the circular window, sees nothing. He opens the door and walks through to find Emma there, waiting for him. She fervently drops her bags and they embrace and begin to make love. Antonio is jolted back to reality only when Edo walks through those very same doors.

With the overwhelming images of doorways within doorways, rooms opening into more rooms, it’s hard not to interpret this imagery as a metaphor for a Russian nesting doll—those little wooden dolls that continuously open up to reveal up to four smaller dolls inside, each decreasing in size. If you really want play the English-major’s-ridiculously-deep-analysis-game, Emma herself is an obvious metaphor for a Russian nesting doll. As the film and her love for Antonio progresses, we see her break free of a multitude of outer-shells. Emma begins as a loving, maternal mother and ideal Italian trophy-wife; but midway through the film, she transforms into an ardent lover whose Russian roots continuously begin to surface through her affair with Antonio. In fact, the foreplay of an almost ridiculously epic love scene (in which Emma and Antonio make love outside in the dirt among the creepy crawlies) has Antonio methodically undressing her, peeling back layer after layer of clothing until she stands before him completely naked and unadorned. In this moment, Emma’s physical body becomes a means of expressing her opening up, her release. To prove I’m not pulling this Russian nesting doll theory out of my ass, the very next scene after Antonio’s kitchen sex fantasy shows Emma listening to Betta’s CD in her room, where, lo and behold, the camera strategically lingers on four Russian nesting dolls sitting on her desk.

Near the end of the film, Emma’s love affair with Antonio is discovered by Edo, whose latent homo-erotic feelings for him become painfully clear. During a confrontation between Emma and Edo in which he disowns her as his mother, there is a freak accident, and Edo is killed. The last quarter of the film after Edo’s death is as sensational for its lack of dialogue as it is for the gruesome transformation of Tilda Swinton’s face; Emma’s once soft features disintegrate into a ghastly mask of pain. During Edo’s funeral, Emma walks as if in a trance into massive, empty cathedral, where, once inside, she stares through one of the many elaborately adorned doorways. She also catches sight of a bird as it flies in an out of the open windows above her. It is here, among numerous doorways and windows where grey light filters through every open crevice into the cathedral, where Emma confesses her love for Antonio to her husband; it is her place of catharsis, among these open doorways, windows, and even ceiling. Her husband coldly but rationally replies, “You don’t exist.” Emma does exist, but on a different plane from her previous life.

Until this point, the Recchi villa has been a place of closed doors and sealed shades; now, in the last, utterly breathtaking scene, we witness Emma making one last mad dash through the house before she makes her escape from her former life, wrenching open doors and bounding through them. As she heaves open her closet door, we have another stripping scene, as she, with the aid of Ida, tears off her mourning clothes, along with her jewelry and wedding ring—quite literally freeing herself from her previous existence. As Emma flees the household, she and Betta meet one last time, catching sight of each other through a large open doorway. Emma and her daughter, who sparked her metamorphosis, exchange a speechless moment of mutual love, hands over their hearts, mirrors of one another.

In the film’s first shot of the villa’s main entrance, we saw a patriarch entering in the snow; in the last shot, we see the very same open doorway leading out into the lush, sunlit summer to which Emma has escaped. The doorway that framed a procession of patriarchal tradition has become the portal for a woman who is entering into her own transformation sparked by love unparallel to anything she has felt before—hence, the film’s unabashed titled. “I Am Love” is singular proof that sometimes, doorways lead to much more than just another room.