9/11 Terror And Third World Porn
Red Eye
Directed by Wes Craven
The Great Raid
Directed by John Dahl
The Constant Gardener
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
Red Eye has been praised for its simple, efficient storytelling, which is, actually, undistinguished. What makes Red Eye notable is set out in Neil Young's great 9/11 song "Let's Roll," a folk-rock account of United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought the hijacking terrorists.
This airplane drama pits young professional Lisa Reisert (Rachel McAdams) against Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), a stranger in the seat beside her. Rippner knows all about Lisa's family and her job as a hotel hospitality clerk; he threatens to have associates kill her father unless she helps him set up the assassination of a Homeland Security official. The premise is simple enough to seem like exploitation, but it's shrewdly, subtly devised as a what-would-you-do?
Beneath the first rounds of McAdams and Murphy's wary flirtation, troubling anxiety appears. (What they don't say could have been scripted by Sam Shepherd.) As Rippner articulates his conspiracy, Red Eye becomes a character study set in the tightly wound close quarters of the modern distrustful world.
Wes Craven doesn't direct in his usual free-floating psychotic mode. Red Eye benefits from his straightforward Nightmare on Elm Street craft, precisely enacting the thoughts that now haunt every airline passenger. Nearly molesting Lisa's privacy, Rippner uncovers a scar from a past assault that has left her vulnerable yet guarded. She explains, "All the time it was happening I kept repeating one thing to myself." With creepy commiseration he suggests, "That it was beyond your control?" And her answer is a character-revealing, era-defining jolt, worthy of Larry Cohen's genius. It summons the idea of preparedness that is both a national and a natural reflex after Flight 93. Suddenly, this routine thriller is vitalized; no longer a vehicle of hollow excitement, it puts us in the same terrorized position that inspired Neil Young's new-millennium folk song:
No one has the answer/ But one thing is true/ You've got to turn on evil/ When it's coming after you/ You've got to face it down/ And when it tries to hide/ You got to go in after it/ And never be denied/ Time is running out/ Let's roll
Although Red Eye doesn't copy the draggy, mournful rhythm-and-blues tone of Young's elegy of an album, Are You Passionate? the film does match his realization of the disbelief and passion that courses through people during a crisis. "Let's Roll" was balanced by "Goin' Home," an epic track that begins by mentioning General Custer, a peculiar and complex reference and challenge. Young deliberately shed political reticence and patriotic ambivalence in order to better evoke history as a personal moment-which is Red Eye's particular success. "Goin' Home" builds to a modern extended terrorist incident through time-stands-still description: "Battle drums were pounding all around her car/ She saw her clothes were changing into sky and stars." That these poetic details (good enough for Spielberg's War of the Worlds) pertain to the song's female protagonist makes for an uncanny parallel to Red Eye. McAdams' Lisa is the least likely heroine yet she domesticates the late Todd Beamer's valiant 9/11 archetype. Her emotions are delicate and trenchant beyond typical action-movie heroics. When Lisa retreats to her father's home (past the American flag in the front flower bed), she protests, "Not in my house!" with the same complicated determination that informs Young's album.
That Lisa's personal drive rises to the occasion of the political moment distinguishes Red Eye from a Rambo-ideology movie. Since 9/11, politics, war and passion have become significantly complicated, and this moral density should be reflected in our cultural artifacts. We don't need another mere action-adventure film; Red Eye combines political-historical awareness with emotional need. Pop art that gives understanding to our common experience has value you don't crumple up with your popcorn bag.
This month's most infuriating film is The Great Raid, in which hack director John Dahl applies the cliche nihilism of his 90s neo-noirs to the story of G.I.s held captive in the Philippines by the Japanese army during World War II. Bad enough that the film stars Benjamin Bratt, Joseph Fiennes and the apathetic Connie Nielsen, Dahl cynically uses WWII to incite contemporary war distress. The Great Raid is proof that even in these trying times most filmmakers cannot think past political cliches. It becomes inexcusably offensive during an end-credits montage of 1940s newsreel footage showing the actual prison-camp liberation. Faces of suffering yet relieved American soldiers have an innocence and dignity disrespected by Dahl's approach. His banality resurfaces in Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener.
Here Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a shy British diplomat dazzled by Rachel Weisz's Tessa, an outgoing political crusader who travels the world attacking American imperialism and multinational pharmaceutical conspiracies. Despite the pretense of social awareness-and Casablanca-style suspense-this movie reduces the Third World's problems to a hill of beans. Fiennes and Weisz diddle while Africa burns.
There's a persistent Hollywood tendency to justify haughty, escapist, Western supremacy through the distraction of middle-class white love birds. Instead of probing the West's conscience like other film adaptations of John LeCarre (the best being The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Little Drummer Girl), The Constant Gardener uses LeCarre's protagonists in ways that ultimately detach them from global responsibility. Quayle and Tessa meet when she interrupts his press conference by ranting against U.S. foreign policy. Quayle utters a diffident defense but later tells Tessa, "You're quite right." Tessa sees through Quayle and his cowardly obsession with gardening. "He's dreaming about a world without any weeds," she says. "I need this creep to help me blackmail Her Majesty's government."
The romance-novel twists of their relationship are trickily rendered through director Fernando Meirelles' fanciful technique: flashbacks, quick-cuts and stylish, atmospheric panoramas. Mereilles (best known for City of God) disguises his banality with stylishness. He favors glass-and-steel facades, vaulting arches, soaring spaces in ultra-modern airports and train stations but loves semi-doc shots of picturesque poverty even better. And in the bedroom flashbacks where Quayle tests his memory of Tessa's love, Mereilles cinches his English Patient ruse by featuring fancy lovemaking against a white cyclorama: leading us on as Tessa did Quayle.
These frills sucker critics who scoffed at Sahara and John Boorman's In My Country, where the unique structure of their adventure-mission and personal-journalism plots conveyed each film's sincere African humanism. The Constant Gardener is actually less political and less intelligent despite giving lip service to "preliminary drug trials in Africa," and "arms dealing." And it's never profound like In My Country-a title that claims personal responsibility. To the contrary, Meirelles' slickness is an ideological foul. His visual audacity takes the place of conscientious documentation-a fault as insufferable as The Great Raid. In The Constant Gardener, the photogenic exploitation of misery, in hand with Hollywood romanticism, illustrates the height of liberal arrogance.