The Parallax View (1974) and Klute (1971)

An Alan J. Pakula double feature at the New Beverly, especially nice for watching master cinematographer and 'prince of darkness' Gordon Willis's widescreen compositions and moody lighting on the big screen.

I had seen The Parallax View before back in college and written a paper about it, but seeing it now confirmed one of my initial impressions: it's kind of a mess. Parallax is a fully paranoid, post-'60s thriller produced by and starring Warren Beatty as a small-time reporter who stumbles into investigating a shadowy corporation that may or may not be involved with a massive conspiracy to assassinate political leaders. In this world, the paranoia is bone-deep and the conspiracy has tendrils at every level of society, from the highest levels of government down to a local small-town sheriff. Even the politician targeted at the film's climax is a pitch-black joke, a Presidential candidate more interested in telling golf jokes and flirting with campaign aides than taking on the world's problems - he's no Bobby Kennedy, and he's barely even a George Wallace.

There's nothing wrong with the craft of the movie, Willis's cinematography, or Beatty's smart, angry performance, but the movie awkwardly tries to straddle a dry '70s naturalism with a more moody, expressionistic sense of visual dread and darkness - sort of as if Robert Altman had tried to remake a Fritz Lang film. And it could have worked, except that the screenplay has a rambling, uneven quality that never really lets us get too close to any characters or any emotions aside from dislocation. I'm a fan of conspiracy thrillers, but this one feels too much like an exercise. All that said, within the flawed package there are a number of great individual sequences, including a dazzling montage at the movie's midpoint that dissects the American dream and illustrates the spiritual malaise of America in the post-Watergate era. Given that the movie was made right at the height of that period, it's not a big surprise that the movie should give vent to the most dismal, pessimistic attitudes of the time and not have much room beyond that for characterization.

Pakula's Klute, meanwhile, is a very different animal, a more conventional romance/thriller that could have been made in the 1940s with Bogart and Bacall, except back then the movie would have been more interested in the hard-boiled detective's sense of moral outrage and honor instead of the personal emotional crisis of a high-class prostitute, which is what we get here.

Klute's set-up is classical: Jane Fonda's jaded call girl has to work with Donald Sutherland's uptight detective to solve a case. From that simple starting point Pakula takes his audience into a realm of subtle yet pervasive visual menace and modern psychological insight. Fonda's Bree Daniels is a sometime-actress and model who's managed to build a cozy little nest of denial in her secret life. Suddenly she's forced to come face-to-face with the seedy side of the world she's fallen into, and to open up to interactions with a man she can't seduce and manipulate, and who she finds herself falling for. That makes the movie sound like it has a conservative slant (detective gets hooker to wise up) but this is balanced by the movie's lack of moralizing about Bree's role as a prostitute, that she serves her clients' emotional needs more than she does their physical ones; and the movie's general sense of sympathy towards the have-nots, as highlighted in a scene where a pair of frantic heroine addicts are denied their fix by the presence of Sutherland, obviously a cop, in their apartment. A lesser movie would have smirked at these junkies, but Pakula chooses to simply watch and silently commiserate with the couple in their moment of woe. Add in Fonda's Oscar-winning work and Sutherland's understated yet strong supporting role as John Klute, plus a world-class creep performance from the movie's bad guy, and you have a modern classic, which I'm glad to have finally seen.

Miller's Crossing (1990)/ No Country for Old Men (2007)

I wanted to see No Country again after its Oscar win, but first I decided to revisit the early Coen film that had the least impact on me, Miller's Crossing.

Set amidst of the gang wars of Prohibition, Miller's Crossing is, for me at least, probably the Coens' most impenetrable movie, but that may simply be the result of Gabriel Byrne's Irish brogue combined with the defiantly un-hip '20s slang that every character recites (They could have called this Yeggs: The Movie). And watching the Oscars reminds me that the Coens, like so many of their characters, have severely low-affect personalities, from the laconic H.I. McDunnough of Raising Arizona to the stubborn Llewelyn Moss. It's great when it works, but for me, Byrne's Tom Reagan just isn't interesting or conflicted enough as a character to carry me through the movie, and his arc seems to be muddled. In the film's plot, which is borrowed heavily from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Reagan functions as the go-between, the guy who plays both sides against each other, and if his arc is to show him becoming disillusioned by his own actions within the world he lives in, it's not clear to me why a career gangster would be so affected by the specific events of this movie, to turn away from his father figure (Albert Finney) and the woman he may or may not love (Marcia Gay Harden) by the end of the film. It's a handsome movie and well-shot and performed, but it doesn't resonate with me as much as Raising Arizona or Fargo.

On the other hand, the places where Miller's Crossing falls short serve to highlight where No Country for Old Men excels. Where Miller's is stifled by its own production design and old-movie homages (the same factors that basically killed The Ladykillers), No Country is fresh, existing in a fully-realized 'real' world; for the first time in a long time, the Coens are interested in their characters as real people and not as movie archetypes.

The exception to this rule is Anton Chigurh, who's been described as an allegorical 'grim reaper' in plenty of reviews, but the truth is that he's just a mirror image of Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell (literalized in two scenes), with Josh Brolin's Llewelyn Moss an in-between version of both men, a silent man of the country corrupted by the intrusion of a crapload of money into believing that he can outwit 'the ultimate badass', and the progress of the movie is the temptation and fall of Moss. It's not that Moss fails in his face-off against Chigurh, it's that he never had a chance in Chigurh's world. At the end of the movie, it's Carla Jean's moral victory that she chooses not to play Chigurh's coin-toss game. For the bulk of the movie, it's Moss's failure that he keeps playing over and over again, like an addicted gambler. Of course, the twist of the movie's ending is that even though Chigurh has beaten all of his human adversaries, the house still holds the ultimate trump card - Chigurh can outsmart a Texas welder, but he can't beat the random whims of the universe.

I recognize that this is somewhat rambling - I'll pick it up again soon.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I'm trying to cram a lot of work into this week before I go traveling for the holidays and I've hardly seen any new movies. It's annoying.

I enjoyed Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, it's a highly diverting film and well-acted all the way around. It's a good reminder that yes, Marisa Tomei actually deserved her Academy Award for My Cousin Vinny, that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney are acting legends, and a good sign that Ethan Hawke might have finally outgrown the callowness of his youth and turned into a decent character actor. Add in some fun narrative twists and it's a good night at the movies.

The thing is, I can't really join in on the 'one of the best movies of the year' train that the movie's riding to some extent right now, because I found it good but not great.

(SPOILERS) It's your standard noir outline - losers who are brothers (Hoffman and Hawke) try to score a heist but in the process muck it up - with a domestic twist, that the jewelry store they target for a hold-up is owned by their own parents and in the process Mom gets a bullet in the belly and Dad, distraught, tries to figure out who's to blame, only to discover that the culprits are closer than he thinks. Great concept, okay execution. The basic problem is that the premise is crying out for Shakespeare-level dialogue and character development but ultimately we don't really ever find out that much about what Philip Seymour Hoffman's problems are or why he hates his father so much or how it happened that Tomei would be sleeping with Hawks, so that the drama winds up underdeveloped from the get-go. On top of that, while I don't agree with Armond White that Sidney Lumet is a terrible director, I do have to agree with him that the visuals of this movie are fairly undernourished - considering that we're working with such tragic subject matter, a little more chiaroscuro would have helped, I think.

I don't want to give the idea that I disliked the movie, because I did find it entertaining and well-made, but all in all I'd say that I prefer Lumet's last film, the Brechtian courtroom drama Find Me Guilty, as a richer and weirder cinematic journey.