Brokeback Mountain

The now-notorious movie Brokeback Mountain is a prime example of why a piece of work should not be considered great simply because it is provocative.  The film is one of the first American films of its kind, meaning a homosexual love story between two men, but more importantly it is the first major Hollywood film with two star actors as gay lovers.  That being said, Brokeback Mountain is no different than any other so-called “chick flick” aside from the glaring lack of “chicks” involved in the romance.  As an artistic piece, this film breaks no new ground, offers very slow plot development, does not captivate a critical audience, and is overall a poorly constructed work.

            On the other hand, if you’re looking for a mild, partially empathetic tearjerker, this is right up your alley.  In this overly politically-correct society, it was inevitable for a homosexual love story of this scale to be produced eventually.  Director Ang Lee should never have been the one to make such a film; who decided that a man of Hulk and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon fame should be the one to direct the first major male-male love story in Hollywood history?  Lee, himself, seems uncomfortable by the idea of two men having sex, as demonstrated by the incredibly awkward, random and spontaneous initial sex scene, which takes place on a tent on Brokeback Mountain.

            On that note, the pretentious nature of this film is almost insulting.  Director Ang Lee and stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger seem as though they only agreed to do the film so they could reap the financial benefits of its controversial nature.  With no intent of disparaging the character of any of these individuals, the enormous career boost that a project like this offers is too much to turn down, as long as you can stomach the idea of doing sex scenes with another man.  If you think I am off-base on this assessment, imagine you knew nothing of this movie.  Pretend you had never heard of Brokeback Mountain; pretend you were oblivious to the outrageous hype of this film; pretend you were 100% ignorant of the implications of the title and knew of nothing aside from what you saw as the film progressed.  How confused would you have been by that first sex scene?

            Despite my harsh criticism of this movie, I am very pleased that a film of this significance revolving around the concept of homosexuality has been produced.  I believe it was very much a necessary step in our society, though it should have been drastically more cinematically captivating.  My biggest regret is how pitifully this movie addressed the ‘issue” of homosexuality.  The phrase “cop-out” comes to mind.  The apparent goal of Ang Lee was to make it so it just seemed like another forbidden romance story, with the emphasis on forbidden, as opposed to homosexuality.  This is a noble effort, but poorly executed.

            The biggest symbol is the movie is Heath Ledger’s shirt, which was left on Brokeback Mountain.  Ignoring for a moment how basic and uncreative this metaphor is, it is also rather hastily placed.  Ledger’s character mentions after the first summer on the mountain that he was upset he had left his shirt.  The viewer then gets no mention of the shirt until almost two hours later, when Gyllenhaal’s character has died and Ledger goes to visit Gyllenhaal’s parents.  He finds the shirt in Gyllenhaal’s closet, takes it with him and hangs it in his own closet.  In doing this, he places one of Gyllenhaal’s shirts inside of his own shirt, representing Gyllenhaal’s eternal existence in Ledger’s heart.  This whole emotional scene takes about twenty minutes, with a brief intermission of Ledger speaking with his daughter, and it has no reason to take this much time.

            In my opinion, the ending was the worst part of the whole film.  Lee takes a scene that should be heartfelt but timely and drags it through puddles of tears and nonsense.  The final scene should not have taken more than five to six minutes at the most, and it lasts well over fifteen mind-numbing minutes.  At this point, the whole audience is fully aware of the emotional context of the film, we do not need an additional fifteen minutes of pure tear-jerking fluff.  But then again, the vast majority of this film seems to be tear-jerking fluff; there is overall very little substance to the movie.  It was a noble idea, to make a movie of this nature.  However, Ang Lee delivered a monster letdown, even for those with low expectations.

American History X

From the opening credits and first scene of Tony Kaye's American History X, it is quite apparent that this is a heavy movie.  The film opens with main character Derek Vinyard having sex with his girlfriend, when younger brother Danny hears glass breaking outside in the middle of the night.  The ensuing events are shown throughout the duration of the film, gradually giving the audience a better understanding of the night that got Derek incarcerated. 

            About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the audience is shown the most graphic and famous scene in the entire film.  This scene takes place right after Derek catches thieves breaking into his car, and involves a bone-chilling act called a "curb-stomp," which consists of teeth and curb interaction.  This is one of the most memorable scenes in recent cinematic history, as every audience member will have to struggle not to cringe.  Kaye does a phenomenal job of using texture as a method of illustrating the graphic detail involved in the violent act.  The audience gets to hear the victim's teeth grinding against the concrete of the curb, placing them in the situation personally.

            An interesting factor of this film that separates it from other heavy films is that American History X is a heavy film you can watch casually.  Obviously it should be watched start to finish, in one uninterrupted sitting with no commercials, as all movies should be watched.  However, it also makes a great movie to find on TV halfway-through and watch.  Other heavy movies of this general standard do not maintain this characteristic; see The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler's List, The Green Mile, Crash, Requiem for a Dream, and Memento for examples. 

            Memento needs to be seen from beginning to end, otherwise the effect caused by the nonlinear method of storytelling is wasted.  Crash and Requiem for a Dream are both films that center around character development, and while American History X would arguably fall in that category, it does a better job of reinforcing the development.  The flashbacks of Derek's bigoted past remind the viewer constantly how much the former neo-Nazi has evolved, compared to Crash and Requiem, which both show the characters in one phase of their lives, then as the movie progresses they change to a different phase (in Crash, the characters were mostly bigots initially, then eventually they all grow to accept each other; in Requiem, the main characters are originally rather upbeat kids who occasionally use heroin, then eventually they become desperate junkies and ruin their lives).

            The central themes in American History X are not disguised thoroughly; it is clearly a story about race, class, forgiveness, growth and cruel fate.  The final message Kaye sends to his audience is of the latter.  When Danny has just completed his transformation from a youthful neo-Nazi to a "reformed" troublemaker, he is brutally murdered by an African-American boy.  This is followed by a tragic image of a hysterical Derek discovering the bloody and lifeless body of his young brother.  With this scene, Kaye is attempting to present a message to the audience that rapper Nas did in 1993 with his track "Life's A Bitch," the concept that no matter how good or bad of a person you may be, you could still be killed at any moment.  Danny had just decided to make an active attempt to get over his blatant racism, and that very day was shot point blank multiple times by an African-American boy at his school.

Fight Club

The 1999 film adaption of the novel Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, is considered by most to be one of the best interpretations of a book in cinematic history.  The unique style in which Palahniuk writes makes it difficult for any director to adapt his novels, as he tends to introduce fantasy-based elements gradually, with very subtle hints that generally only take up one sentence.  As a filmmaker, it can be extremely difficult to transform a single sentence in the middle of a rambling paragraph to a cinematic clue to the unfolding of the plot.  Director David Fincher does a terrific job with this aspect, as noted by the scene where Edward Norton’s character looks directly at the screen as if to make eye contact with the audience and explains how Brad Pitt’s character, as a late-night movie theater operator, splices graphic sexual images between frames into the movies he plays.  While it must have been a rather daunting task to interrupt the flow of the movie to have a character directly interact with the audience, Fincher’s decision pays off as the audience feels a new new level of connection with Edward Norton as the main character.

            The biggest theme in this film is the idea of having split personalities and not realizing it until it has become too late.  As in most of Palahniuk’s works, the general story is an outlandish but believable one, until one fantastic element is introduced.  In this case, that element is that Brad Pitt’s character, the alternate personality, has such a realistic presence that he appears capable of physically controlling Edward Norton’s character.  Toward the end of the film, Norton discovers Pitt is simply a figment of his imagination, but all the terrible things Pitt has supposedly done were actually carried out by Norton himself.  Upon this realization, Norton goes to great lengths to stop the inevitable carnage ready to begin and ends up getting into a fist fight with Pitt.  This all occurs as the final steps of the plan devised by Norton/Pitt to bomb all the credit buildings in New York are coming together.  This sets the stage for the single best line of the film: Pitt and Norton are fighting and Norton gets his hands on a gun, which he aims at Pitt, who is standing in front of a truck full of explosives, and Pitt shouts “WHOA! WHOA! WHOA! Okay, you are now firing a gun at your imaginary friend near 400 GALLONS OF NITROGLYCERINE!”  This is such a tremendous exclamation for two reasons: first, it is a moment of spontaneous comedy in the middle of a tense conclusionary fight scene; and second, because it epitomizes Norton’s entire struggle with himself and with his alter-ego of Brad Pitt in a single sentence, showing the exact gravity of the situation he has gotten himself into.

            The methods used by David Fincher to breach the barrier between audience and film are a significant reason for why this work is such a brilliant one.  Aside from the scene where Norton explains Pitt’s “movie-editing” techniques, he also crosses the boundary to speak directly to the audience on a number of other occasions, mostly when he needs to summarize an entire chapter’s worth of detail in a minute or two.  This is a genius method of communication, as the audience becomes entranced with the seemingly unending relationship between narrator and viewer.  Another interesting element of Fincher’s directive notion in this film is that the narrator, Edward Norton, never actually has a name.  In the concluding minutes of the film, we discover he actually is Tyler Durden, the name he had given to his “imaginary friend.”  While the name Tyler Durden is mentioned constantly throughout the movie, nobody ever speaks the name of the main character.  This is because his name is actually Tyler Durden, which adds a new layer of confusion to the plot once all the details of his split personality become available.  Once Pitt explains that he is merely a figment of Norton’s imagination, the audience realizes all the incidents throughout the film in which Norton would normally have given a name, such as when he introduces himself to somebody.  For example, after we learn that Pitt is not a real person, we discover that every time Norton introduces himself, he hands the individual a business card, instead of simply announcing his name.  This is a crucial detail that would be overlooked by many directors and screenwriters, but because Palahniuk made sure to wrap up all the loose ends in his novel, Fincher was not in the position to come up with a way to do so.

            My single favorite aspect of the film was the very last image on the screen, when Edward Norton and his love interest, Marla, are standing inside a massive corporate building, watching the enormous credit buildings explode and collapse.  This scene is magnified by the track “Where is my Mind?” by the Pixies coming on at the perfect moment.  Norton and the girl are in the middle of conversation, and Norton is attempting to rationalize his strange behavior and why he has a bullet wound in his head, and all of a sudden there is this massive explosion that interrupts them, and the song begins.  It is the perfect conclusion song for the film, and the scene comes to an end at the exact right moment.  With all of this going on, the viewer is also entertained with the images of a half-dozen skyscrapers being reduced to rubble almost instantaneously.  Being that the film takes place in NYC and the subject happens to be explosions of big corporate buildings downtown, and considering the past decade of terrorist-related acts, it is refreshing to witness such a scene without all the panic and hysteria that inevitably follows.  Instead, it is simply serene.  Both characters simply watch, awestruck, with a unified and passionate gaze into the carnage.  Even though they are about to be held responsible for mass terrorism and Norton has just realized he is a paranoid schizophrenic, everything is at peace, at least for the moment.  

Memento

The most significant aspect of the 2000 Christopher Nolan masterpiece Memento is the method of which the plot unfolds.  The general premise is that former insurance fraud investigator Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) goes through a journey to discover the man (or men) that raped and murdered his wife, and also gave him the injury that caused his "condition", which is that he cannot form new memories.  The concept of telling a story in reverse is not a new one (see The Three Sided Mirror, Happy End, and, later, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), though the unique manner in which Nolan goes about telling the story of Mr. Shelby and his quest brings a new feature of film to its audience.  This movie is made to leave the viewer guessing, plain and simple.

            By showing the audience the apparent conclusion of the story, Nolan lures them into a false sense of security.  For the first segment of the movie, the viewer is under the impression that Leonard has finally found the man he was looking for based off reliable notes he leaves for himself in the form of tattoos.  Leonard describes his system of note-taking so vividly that the audience is completely confident that the rest of the film will simply be the twists that his road takes that eventually leads him to his satisfying climax of finding revenge.  As the plot progresses, or rather, regresses, we begin to see a few missteps taken in Leonard's journey, which then unfold into blatant lies.  By the time the film has ended, the audience has a completely different perspective of how Leonard came to his "conclusion" and is left wondering if the right decisions were made.  

            What is most amazing about this film is how it captures the audience and drives it into an emotional hurricane.  At first we pity this poor man who seemingly has no legitimate reason to live aside from getting revenge on the individuals that ruined his life.  We cannot help but empathize with Leonard, as his entire life has been drastically changed by one incident, though we are not fully aware of what that incident was quite yet.  As the plot unfolds, we begin to see Leonard is an unreliable narrator; his original story actually seems to deviate substantially from the supposed truth, based off what the surrounding characters inform Leonard of.  For example, in one of the final scenes, we discover Leonard was the one who removed a number of pages from the police report regarding the incident.  While this is meant to show how unreliable a narrator Leonard can be, due to his condition, we are also left unknowing of who is telling the truth.  Teddy, who is one of the two characters that surround Leonard throughout the majority of his journey, starts the movie (but ends the story) by being shot by Leonard.  This being the case, we are immediately under the impression that Teddy is not to be trusted and will end up a villain.  However Christopher Nolan strays from typical storytelling and works in reverse order; Teddy ends up sounding more trustworthy as the movie progresses, and Leonard begins to play the role of villain.

            There is a similar case with Natalie, who is a woman that offers help to Leonard out of pity, but it turns out she is using him for her own benefit.  This becomes quite the motif in this film: everybody is half helpful and mostly selfish.  Because of the unusual and difficult nature of Leonard's condition, this reverse chronological method of storytelling allows the viewer to experience a combination of nostalgia and amnesia similar to the one Leonard endures.  While Leonard knows only what happened on that fateful night and what he has tattooed on his body, the viewer also learns as Leonard learns.  This changes as the story continues; by the time the film concludes the viewer knows significantly more than Leonard but is therefore significantly more confused, and ultimately knows nothing for sure.  Nolan manages to completely rattle the audience with this tactic, inevitably leading to most viewers seeing the film at least once or twice two, just to get a better grip on reality.

Analysis, Not Review

This blog was just created as a side thing; it stemmed from a Film as Literature class I took where we were required to submit critical analyses of the various films we watched in the class.  Usually these assignments had specific topics and questions to be addressed, but the concept was generally the same.  This blog will contain some of the entries created for the class, as well as some others I have written in spare time.