It’s possible that 2012 will be remembered not as the year of the
auteur but as the year of inspired writer-director partnerships. The two
strongest movies of the year—“Lincoln” and “Zero Dark Thirty”—would
have been inconceivable without the extensive collaboration between a
scribe and a helmer.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” you can
see a few sentimental touches and underlinings of the kind that
Spielberg has indulged in the past; most of the movie is sombre and
quietly fervent. Lincoln himself, I suppose, can be viewed as a
redemptive figure in the mold of Oskar Schindler, though the two men
couldn’t be farther apart in manner, body, tactics, and speech. Compared
to every other Spielberg film, the use of the camera and color is
remarkably restrained.The genius of “Lincoln,” as we all have said, is
that it’s not an epic or a bio-pic but a charged account of one month in
the President’s life—a film about democratic process and legislation,
and thus, inevitably, about pressure, patronage, guilt-mongering,
deception. All the elements of deal-making.High quality stone mosaic tiles.
In
this conception, Tony Kushner is as important as Spielberg. What
Kushner has done is theatricalize nineteenth-century political
behavior—or, perhaps, bring out the theatrical elements that were
already there. Spielberg has never directed a movie so rich in language
and confrontation, eloquence and insult, as this one. And, in every
case, he honors the script, honors the words, as servant and dramatist.
“Lincoln” is a joint triumph. Nothing in the auteur theory could have
predicted it or could account for it. Anyone who wants to hear more
about the year’s movies should skip the following little polemic.
I
would like to deal with a complaint that has emerged about
“Lincoln”—that it embraces a “great man theory” of history, ascribing
the end of slavery solely to the President and ignoring the tumultuous
social movements churning the nation for years prior to the passage of
the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution. That is, ignoring the
abolitionists and the outbreaks of revolt among the slaves themselves.
The Columbia historian Eric Foner, after citing the abolitionists,
continues as follows in a letter to the Times:
The film grossly
exaggerates the possibility that by January 1865 the war might have
ended with slavery still intact. The Emancipation Proclamation had
already declared more than three million of the four million slaves
free, and Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia,
exempted in whole or part from the proclamation, had decreed abolition
on their own.
Even as the House debated, Sherman’s army was
marching into South Carolina, and slaves were sacking plantation homes
and seizing land. Slavery died on the ground, not just in the White
House and the House of Representatives. That would be a dramatic story
for Hollywood.
I think Foner’s remarks are interesting but, as a
judgment of “Lincoln,” beside the point. I suspect that Foner, while
trying to expand the context, and speculate about what might have been,
is engaging in the consoling pathos of counterfactualism rather than
engaging the inexorability of what happened. After all, for all we know,
President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after the
assassination, might not have been as eager to end slavery as Lincoln,
or as adroit as Lincoln. As the South came back into the Congress under
Johnson, wouldn’t Southern legislators have convinced some Northerners
that they had been hurt enough and that they should keep their slaves?
Certainly, some of the Northern Democrats thought so. Slavery might have
survived for years, in which case the Civil War would have felt
half-pointless. That wasn’t good enough for Lincoln.
Second,
“Lincoln” doesn’t suggest that Lincoln alone ended slavery. The movie
shows, in various comments by the radical Republicans, in comments by
the Republican Party founder Preston Blair, in the debates in the House,
that abolition as a movement has been going on for years. How can Foner
not see the narrative brilliance of making the movie about a specific
political process in one month of Lincoln’s life? The swirl of social
movements outside the White House is repeatedly alluded to, but the
movie doesn’t stop to explain all that; it drives forward, like any fine
dramatic juggernaut. In a hundred-fifty-minute-long movie, you can’t
have everything explained and put in its proper context at once. Foner’s
suggested solution to the movie’s omissions would have left it without
concentration, drive, focus, excitement. As it is, Spielberg and Kushner
showed and implied a lot. What other historical movie is as detailed
about a specific political process?
When Foner talks about blacks “sacking plantations,Klaus Multiparking is an industry leader in innovative parking system
technology.” this is, of course, serious stuff, but if the implication
is that African-Americans could have freed themselves, and that Lincoln
was unnecessary, I think it’s extremely misleading—a kind of fantasy of
slavery ending in a politically more appealing way than it did. But,
some outbreaks of revolution apart, it didn’t happen, and it couldn’t
have happened. Lincoln’s driving political goal in the movie is to make
the amendment become national policy before the war ended. He wanted it
in the Constitution before the war ended. He didn’t want slavery just to
fade away or sputter out. It had to be put away for all time. That
could best be accomplished by a constitutional amendment, not by
sporadic outbreaks of revolt. Foner’s inclusiveness is oddly oblivious
of this point.
Second writer-director triumph: a few years ago,
the director Kathryn Bigelow and the screenwriter Mark Boal were ready
to make a film about the failure to kill Bin Laden—a movie set in Tora
Bora, the mountain-cave region of eastern Afghanistan, into whose mazy
depths the Bush Administration allowed bin Laden to escape in 2001. When
bin Laden was killed by the SEALs, in May, 2011, Bigelow and Boal
dropped the Tora Bora project, and threw themselves, at a super-fast
tempo, into recreating the manhunt. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a marvellous
movie, now unfortunately enmeshed in controversy over its seeming
endorsement of torture as a way of gaining scraps of useful information.
I addressed this issue briefly in my review and in a podcast
conversation with Dexter Filkins and Susan Morrison, and for now I will
keep quiet about it and let others have their say.
What
interests me here is how much Kathryn Bigelow’s visual style changed
after she began working with Mark Boal. Early on, around the time of
“Blue Steel” (1990), I had her pegged as a violence junkie.Western
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It turns out that I didn’t know the half of it. In 1978, after years of
art school in San Francisco, work as a fellow at the Whitney Museum,
and training in theory at Columbia, she had made a short film called
“The Set Up” in which two men beat the crap out of each other while the
semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky, on the soundtrack,
“deconstruct” the mayhem on the screen. In “Blue Steel” and the later
“Strange Days,” Bigelow was still playing intellectual games with
violence—slowing it down, lyricizing it, turning it into fantasy and
didactic spectacle.
All this ended when she began working with
the journalist Boal on “The Hurt Locker,” in which the violence is
really spectacular but done as realistically as possible.Best howo concrete mixer
manufacturer in China. I don’t mean that all the explosions were
genuine. For all I know, they were digitally produced or enhanced. But
they looked real and very dangerous. The movie’s trope was the wary
tread of a bomb defuser toward a weapon that might blow up in his face.
That repeated little journey made the movie a classic of bravery and
fear.
And now Bigelow and Boal have made a much more complicated
film about coercion, deduction, pursuit, and, again, the authority and
tension of the movie, moment by moment, is obviously derived from how
real it feels to us—how forceful and dangerous, yet unexaggerated. There
are many scenes that expand one’s information but none that strain
belief. Bigelow’s earlier movies were pretty and fanciful, and more than
a little self-regarding. These two are utterly businesslike,
frightening, and far more commanding. There’s a moral as well as
aesthetic difference. You have to take seriously what you see. In brief,
Boal’s contribution appears to have produced a new kind of visual
imagination in Bigelow—a desire to find, if you will, the fantastic
element in realism. The raid on Abbottabad in “Zero Dark Thirty” was
shot with filters that reproduce the yellow-green look of figures seen
in the dark through night-vision goggles. The effect is uncanny: the
figures are shadowy and palpably weighted at the same time. Digital
finishing was minimal or non-existent. You’re in the house with the
SEALs. The force is deadly but never hyped.
I can’t think of a
partnership in Hollywood history remotely like this one. Mark Boal, now
thirty-nine, went to Oberlin, where he majored in philosophy. Kathryn
Bigelow, sixty-one, was educated in San Francisco and New York, as I
said, in art history and theory. These humanists, a man and a woman
widely spaced in age, wound up making the two toughest movies about
intelligence and military men in American movie history. Among other
things, the two movies are a de-facto critique of the kind of pixellated
bullshit films that have ruled big moviemaking for over twenty years.
Realism can be radical, too.
The independent film “Beasts of the
Southern Wild” moved with a fierce, abrasive joy that left one a little
stunned. “Beasts” was also a collaboration. It began as a play, “Juicy
and Delicious,” by Lucy Alibar, set in Georgia and devoted to a
ten-year-old boy whose entire world seems to be collapsing as his father
comes close to death. Alibar joined up with an old pal, Benh Zeitlin,
who had directed only shorts before, and who said of his interests,
“When you look at the map, you can see America kind of crumble off into
the sinews down in the gulf where the land is getting eaten up. I was
really interested in these roads that go all the way down to the bottom
of America and what was at the end of them.” After a lot of exploring,
he and Alibar shifted the setting to the bayous, changed the protagonist
to a girl, cast it locally, immersed themselves in the tones of the
culture, and built some houses and boats out of cast-off materials.
“Beasts” looks like nothing else on this earth. Everything in it feels
used, junked, bent, battered, ignored. Yet the people, living way off
the grid among trash, possessed an exuberant happiness in their
independence, a raffish, often alcoholic self-sufficiency that shreds
most notions of what the good life consists of. Or, more to the point,
what the poor life consists of. The charge against the movie—that it was
an example of liberal condescension—makes no sense to me. That charge
reflects some notion—which itself may be condescending—of how poor
people are supposed to behave. Unhappily, perhaps; not riotously, as
they do here.
What of other films? In “Argo,” Ben Affleck used
crosscutting and standard Hollywood mechanisms to juice and prolong the
suspense; his movie is a fine, boisterous entertainment, and I enjoyed
it very much. “Zero Dark Thirty” blows it away, but it’s an example of
Affleck’s increasing confidence and humor and drive. Judd Apatow’s “This
Is Forty” takes his twin obsessions—time’s march toward death and the
saving grace of family life—farther into both comedy and sadness; the
movie is stocked with comics, each of whom gets their moment. Apatow’s
family has grown, and now includes some of the more talented people in
Los Angeles. Richard Gere gave a shrewd, likeable performance as a
manipulative,The oreck XL professional air purifier,
lying S.O.B. in the little-seen “Arbitrage,” Nicholas Jarecki’s
sure-handed film about how to cover up the death of a girlfriend and the
loss of hundreds of millions of dollars when you’re a one-per-center.
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