Tuesday, January 13, 2015

A tale of two Docs: "Selma" and "Inherent Vice," my end-of-the-year 1960s wrap-up

It's hard to imagine two more different icons of the 1960s than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (played in the movie "Selma" by relative newcomer David Oyelowo) and hippy detective Larry "Doc" Sportello from Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel "Inherent Vice" (portrayed in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation by gonzo veteran Joaquin Phoenix).

Sure, one of them existed in the real world and the other very decidedly did not. But, forgetting for a moment Doc Sportello's status as a fictional character, it's hard to believe that the time period depicted in these films is only five years apart. If you ever want to get a sense of how our entire culture went gloriously insane in the late 1960s, just watch these two films back to back.

Selma (Ava DuVernay)





When I was younger, I always wondered why no one had made a movie about Martin Luther King, Jr. As I got older, I began to understand why. Even though the King's murder took place less than ten years before I was born (a fact that blows my mind now that I think about it), by the time I was old enough for him to enter my consciousness, he had already been so deeply sanctified and abstracted by history that he had a symbol. Like Mother Theresa and Ghandi, or — on the other side of the moral spectrum — Charles Manson and Adolph Hitler, it seems have become increasingly harder to look past what these figures represent (ultimate Good or ultimate Evil, respectively) to find the actual person.

Narrative needs "drama" (a fact that the King explains quite eloquently in "Selma"), and it's hard to wring drama from a symbol. The symbol is important, sure but by its very nature it has to be simplified.

It's much easier to turn someone like Malcolm X into a compelling character for a biopic, because as a man his complications and flaws were so obvious. He was driven largely by demons, rage and desire for vengeance, and his ultimate evolution towards a deeper sense of understanding and compassion before his murder was very public and striking. The story practically writes itself.

This is true of other famous subjects of biopics: Johnny Cash, Harvey Milk, Ray Charles, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, etc.

Martin Luther King, Jr. occupies a very different place in our public consciousness. He's as close to a bonafide saint as our country has produced in its history. He was, of course, also a human being with flaws and complications, but those complications aren't really part of the narrative. There was certainly a lot of "drama" in his too-short life. But how do we get to the drama inside the man? How do we create a compelling human character out of someone whose symbolic resonance is so blindingly brilliant?

And why would you do it? What good is served by tearing the symbol down? This is the very difficult line that Oyelowo, writer Paul Webb and  director Ava DuVernay have to walk in "Selma." They need to humanize King without sullying him or his legacy. They need to show us his flaws without sensationalize or rubbing our noses in them. And, in the end, they need to preserve his nobility.

They do it very, very well.

"Selma" is the story of the lead-up to the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches, where King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference joined others to protest the lack of voting rights for African Americans in the South. Stylistically, the film is a pretty standard biopic, and DuVernay doesn't do much to reinvent the wheel. This is to her credit. She clearly realizes that this movie isn't about her, but rather about the man whose story she has chosen to tell. If she had injected herself into the material any more than necessary, she would have risked despoiling it with her own ego.

But she's a much shrewder director than that, and she approaches the story with remarkable dramatic restraint. The movie is stylish in moments (the tear-gas attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge is almost like something out of "Apocalypse Now"), but DuVernay knows when to hold back and when to go for it. Mostly, she just stays out of the way and lets the story tell itself through the powerhouse central performance. It's a remarkably mature work for a relatively new director (her first feature, "I Will Follow," was a minor indie hit in 2011, and her second, "Middle of Nowhere," exploded out of Sundance in 2012). I wasn't aware of her before "Selma," but she's definitely one of the up-and-coming directors to watch.

The film does stumble here and there. Webb's script is prone to the typical biopic problem of wanting to speechify against a backdrop of swelling strings. Occasionally DuVernay loses her handle on the film's pace, and there are a few awkward edits here and there that make me think there were probably some holes in the coverage (trust me, I understand how that happens). But these are minor problems.

What DuVernay, Webb and Olewowo manage to do with startling deftness is find that human core to Dr. King while still preserving the integrity of the symbol he has come to represent. As they understand him, he's a proud man — possessed of a fierce intelligence that can be almost ruthless. He's staunchly committed to non-violence, but he's not entirely above provoking it if it serves his and the movement's needs (the above-referenced discussion about "drama" is both rousing and a little chilling). He can be occasionally venal and petty (at one point he hurls — and immediately regrets — an insult at his wife Coretta that is as cruel as it is hypocritical). And the film shows how close he came to losing control of the movement. His success was not a foregone conclusion, and he knew it. The draw of Malcolm X's "by any means necessary" ethos is a quiet but powerful undercurrent throughout the movie, and as the dangers of the march and the very real risk of injury or even death to those following him sinks in, we see him become almost paralyzed with self-doubt.

And the film does not shy away from King's infidelity. But DuVernay, Webb and Olewoyo (as well as Carmen Ejogo as Coretta) handle it exactly right. Rather than exploit it for tabloid thrills, they use it as an opportunity to craft what is one of the most quietly heartbreaking but ultimately uplifting scenes between a husband and wife that I can remember seeing.

Olewoyo, for his part, manages to channel the essence of King without resorting to direct mimicry. He inhabits King fully, and manages to give us many quiet shades and textures that show a few emotional cracks in the stoic facade. He does it with a specific posture, a gesture, a twitch of the eye, a quaver of the lip. Like DuVernay, his instincts are direct and unsentimental. He doesn't push the material, but lets it carry him away.

This is the key to the film's success. By humanizing King without sullying him, they make him specific and that much more powerful. They put us inside his struggle as much as any film can. They make us identify with him as a person and remind us how important, noble, and brave he truly was. By not showing him as infallible, they make his realize that his triumphs were that much more remarkable.

And they do this for the Civil Rights Movement in general. Tina Fey had a trenchant joke at this Sunday's Golden Globe's — "...the movie ‘Selma’ is about the American civil rights movement, that totally worked and now everything’s fine" — that, in the face of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and the Supreme Court's recent rollback of the very Voting Rights Act that King was fighting for, cuts pretty deep. What "Selma" reminds us of is how dangerous the movement really was for those who participated in it. It's easy for us to forget the risk these people took by going up against a white establishment that was not afraid to hurt, maim or kill to protect itself. DuVernay brings this home with shot of the first group of marchers as they approach the  line police officers and troops at the end of the bridge. The moment is chilling. And what comes next is singularly horrifying.

"Selma" isn't a mind-blowing piece of filmmaking, or a stunning reinvention of the cinematic form. It doesn't need to be. It's simply an important story very well told, in the way only Hollywood — when it gets its shit together — can.

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson)





Speaking of mind-blowing pieces of filmmaking that try to be a stunning reinvention of the cinematic form, let's take a look at Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of "Inherent Vice."

Full disclosure: I only have a glancing relationship with Pynchon's work. I tried to read "Gravity's Rainbow" and — like most people, it seems — gave up after a couple chapters. Ditto for "Mason & Dixon" and "V." I found his language and ideas very compelling, but I just couldn't hang. It was too much, and after about twenty pages I felt like there were things exploding in there that were short-circuiting my brain. Anderson's film — which marks the first time that Pynchon has been adapted for the screen — makes me want to try again.

Like all Paul Thomas Anderson films, this is an unwieldy mess of a movie — and, like all Paul Thomas Anderson films, that is part of its genius. I like movies that aren't afraid to just grab you by the hair and drag you headlong into whatever whacked-out universe they've created. Anderson does that better than anyone else working today. He's never been interested in making things easy for us, and this makes him the perfect filmmaker to tackle the mind-exploding insanity of Pynchon's prose.

The "Big Lebowski" and "Long Goodbye" comparisons are inevitable, but try to forget all that. "Inherent Vice" occupies its own lunatic headspace. Technically, I guess it's a black-comic film noir. Doc is a perpetually stoned burnout in 1970 who also happens to be a private detective. This is the end of the 1960s dream (the Manson murders, only one year old at this point, are continually referenced throughout). The "story," such as it is, kicks off when Doc is approached by his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston in a breakout role) for help. She's our ostensible Femme Fatale here, a free-love hippy with a dark side who has become involved with an eccentric real-estate mogul named Mickey Wolfman (Eric Roberts). Wolfman's greedy wife (Serena Scott Thomas) and her lover (Andrew Simpson) want Shasta to help them set up a scheme to have Wolfman committed to an insane asylum.

The next day, Doc is hired by a black militant (Michael Kenneth Williams) who wants Doc's help in approaching a neo-Nazi who owes him money. The neo-Nazi has ties to...yep, Mickey Wolfman. So Doc starts to investigate, all the while trying to dodge his nemesis: a straight-as-an-arrow LA cop named Bigfoot (Josh Brolin), who's also probably insane.

This is the setup, but none of that doesn't give you any sense of how bonkers this movie really is. This is the type of movie where the line "he's technically Jewish, but really wants to be Nazi" is the least strange thing anyone says. The plot is utterly incomprehensible. The only way I can think to describe it is to imagine trying to put together a puzzle where none of the pieces fit and the colors are all wrong, only to realize that it's actually eight puzzles all mixed together with half the pieces missing. But Doc is as confused as we are, so it's okay. I was just happy to be along for the ride.

Anderson and Pynchon keep throwing bizarre twists and characters at us well past the point of absurdity. Eventually, there's something about the Golden Fang — which might be a boat owned by a movie star, or might be a tax dodge for drugged-out dentists, or might be an Indo-Chinese drug cartel, be all of the above, or might be something else entirely. We get to meet no end of dope-sick hippies, neo-Nazis, Asian prostitutes, saxophone players on the lam, New Age Gurus, stoned teenagers, vengeful titans of industry, hitmen, drug-dealing soccer moms, and — of course — Martin Short's Dr. Rudi Blatnoyd (one of the aforementioned tax-dodging dentists) in what may now be my favorite celebrity cameo of all time.

It's hard to call Phoenix an anchor here. But we get Doc, so he's as a good a guide through all this madness as anybody. The rest of the cast is note perfect — from Waterston, Brolin and Short all the way down through porn star Belladonna, whose out-of-nowhere cameo is at once erotic, hilarious, and deeply disturbing.

"Inherent Vice" is definitely a drug movie, but Anderson wisely eschews the overtly surrealistic trappings of most drug movies. We don't really get the typical bad-trip set piece we're used to from these films. Instead, Anderson mostly presents everything straight with just a few surrealistic flourishes here and there. We're just supposed to take it all at face value, which of course makes everything incalculably stranger. As Doc drifts deeper into the mystery and his own paranoia, the story spikes out in all sorts of directions like crystals forming in a cave. It seems random...but if you stare at it long-enough you might almost see patterns.

It would be easy to call this Pynchon's and Anderson's meditation on the death of the 60s (indeed, most critics have done just that). And it is that, I guess. But mostly it's just a wild, whoolly ride that'll take you somewhere unexpected in each minute of its two-and-a-half hour running time. It's a weird movie...but joyously, transcendently weird in a way that only an Anderson film can be.




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