Month: August 2003

Bruiser is the only film that the great George Romero has been able to make in the last ten years. It’s about a man who lets everyone use him as a doormat, until one day he wakes up and finds himself without a face – there’s nothing but a blank mask. He goes on a revenge spree, killing his bitchy wife, his alleged best buddy who has ripped him off, and everyone else who has betrayed him, ending with his evil, sexist, exploitative, self-aggrandizing boss. The film is visually striking (in a nicely overwrought sort of way), psychologically tense and intense, and especially delicious in its sarcastic portrayal of corporate culture. All in all, though, it doesn’t quite have the allegorical richness and resonance of Romero’s best films (among which I would include, besides the Living Dead trilogy, Martin and Monkey Shines). But even this lesser effort shows what a brilliant director Romero is. It is sad, and a telling symptom of the general rottenness of the film industry today, that he has gotten so few opportunities to direct films under his own control in the last decade and a half.

Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully, cheerfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.

Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris is an impressive film, if not a successful one. Soderbergh set himself a difficult task in making Solaris, since he was competing against two undoubted masterpieces: not only Stanislaw Lem’s original novel, but also Andrei Tarkovsky’s earlier film version. The power of Soderbergh’s version comes from its claustrophobic visual style: harsh, quite dark lighting, mostly shades of blue and black; minimal, oppressive interiors; isolation of faces or bodes in the frame; brooding pace, with lots of waiting between the lines of dialog, slow pans, and painfully juxtaposed montages of past and present; and overall an emotional coldness, which was probably the main reason the film did poorly at the box office, but which is perfectly articulated and precisely right, for this story of failed connections and impossible confrontations with incomprehensible otherness.
The film ultimately fails, however, on metaphysical grounds. Where Lem’s novel was a meditation on the limits of knowledge and of human capacity, and where Tarkovsky’s film (much to Lem’s chagrin) was a spiritual meditation on loss and (heavily qualified) resurrection, Soderbergh ends up with a thoroughly unconvincing affirmation that love conquers all. The sense of otherness that is the main point (in different ways) of both Lem’s and Tarkovsky’s versions is evident in the early parts of Soderbergh’s films, but as the movie proceeds it drains away, without offering anything of similar weight in its place; the story is eventually diminished both intellectually and affectively. You might say that Soderbergh remains unimaginatively “humanist” where Lem and Tarkovsky both question the limits of humanism and the human (albeit from very different directions – Lem from an ironic socialist sensibility, and Tarkovsky from a deeply Christian one).
One thing, though: I don’t want to be misunderstood here. Soderbergh’s relative failure is emphatically not because he would have substituted a crassly American Hollywood mentality for a refined, reflective European one. I think it is almost the reverse: Soderbergh’s failure of nerve, his inability to push the story beyond human limits, as it were, so that he falls back on humanist banality, is precisely the result of his determination to make a pure “art film” rather than a crassly commercial one. I can’t help thinking that, if he had been willing to be less tasteful and more sensationalistic, he might have arrived at a powerful pulp-fictional American interpretation of Solaris, rather than, in effect, falling back on the mere external form of European art cinema without its philosophical depth.