Chopper: Violence, Violence, Violence; Iranian Films that Aren't Good
"Violence, violence, violence." That's what my grandfather used to say when he watched television. Raised poor on an isolated Kansas farm in the days before the Wright Brothers flew, he'd survived tornadoes, the Depression and the deaths of pretty much anybody who'd ever been related to him. He used to walk through the living room where my brother and I were engrossed in reruns of The Rifleman or the original Robert Stack version of The Untouchables, or original episodes of Starsky & Hutch or The Six Million Dollar Man. He'd pause for a second to take in the mayhem onscreen, then mutter those three words before heading down into the basement to build another birdhouse or something. Every once in a while, he'd sit down in his big easy chair and watch with us, perhaps because he wanted to see if there was something amazing about this stuff that he'd overlooked. He'd be silent for maybe 15 minutes, watching the shootings and knifings and guys getting dragged behind wild horses, then he'd finally say, "Violence, violence, violence," and move on, his worst suspicions about America confirmed. He just couldn't understand why anybody would watch people hurt other people.
The line ran through my head while watching Chopper, a new Australian crime thriller. It's based on half-autobiographical, half-gleeful-bullshit confessional books by Mark "Chopper" Read (Eric Bana), a Melbourne criminal whose utter disinterest in middle-class moral standards made him kind of an outlaw hero. The film is basically just a series of self-contained sequences that begin and end the same way: Chopper tries to get an acquaintance (cellmate, criminal cohort, girlfriend, whatever) to do something he or she does not want to do, and when he or she refuses (usually for valid reasons) Chopper beats, stabs or shoots the offending nonparticipant, drenching the set in blood.
Violence, violence, violence indeed: the repeated words might serve as an alternate title for this debut film by Andrew Dominik, who hails from (you guessed it) the worlds of advertising and music videos.
The story starts in prison, where Chopper, in for his role in a botched kidnapping, tries to convince two mates to help him topple a fearsome con with a bald spot who rules the cellblock. Said mates refuse, so Chopper goes it alone, sticking the guy in the head with a shank about 12 times, then having an extended conversation with him while he lies dying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. The most interesting thing about the scene is Chopper's schizoid reaction toward violence. He can't wait to lash out against the guy and take his place as the most feared person in the cellblock; when his mates advise against an attack, he champs at the bit like a child denied candy. But once he's done the deed, his face assumes the agonized visage of a little boy who got caught stealing and who desperately wishes he could go back in time and undo the damage.
Bana's performance as Chopper is the best thing in the movie?alternately charismatic and terrifying. Despite the absence of self-aware dialogue by Chopper, Bana manages to suggest the social conditioning that led the character to embrace violence and the humanity that occasionally wells up in him, even when he's doing horrible things. This performance is so carefully modulated (within an admittedly very narrow range) that on those occasions when Bana overdoes Chopper's mental instability?flashing a too-De Niro-like psycho grin?you can't help wishing the editor had pruned and shaped his performance just a bit more judiciously.
But despite these postproduction misjudgments, I admired his work. He's trying to dig into this guy. Too bad the film makes Chopper seem as simply shaped and impermeable as a brick. In the press notes, Dominik says he was drawn to Read's books not because of the boastful and ridiculously violent events?most of which are probably sheer nonsense, just as the majority of mock-regretful anecdotes about thug life recounted by ex-convicts are sheer nonsense?but because Dominik detected hints of guilt and remorse beneath Read's prose and wanted to see if he could draw them out via drama. "On closer reading of [Chopper's] book From the Inside, there were all these apologies to people peppered throughout, where he'd say, "I did this, but I regret that," and "If you're out there, I'm sorry about your leg."
But if Dominik was truly committed to this approach, there's not much evidence onscreen to prove it. Except for stray moments in Bana's performance, the film is a thoroughly amoral parade of "stylish" ultraviolence. It looks like another Calling Card movie; the director's brooding slickness suggests that of Paul Thomas Anderson's: "I've seen a lot of great movies and I can reproduce them with great flourish; now watch me as I direct a series of scenes in the most complicated way imaginable." Either the filmmaker didn't try hard enough to subvert Chopper's own storytelling approach, or else he was too dramatically incompetent to pull it off and decided to concentrate on the technical side of things instead.
That's too bad. Bana can't lend complexity to the movie all by himself; he needed help, and it appears he didn't get it from Dominik, who is far more interested in the look of the film, the rhythm of the cutting, the spray of aortal blood, the careful placement of showy visual effects (like a strobe light that pulses distractingly throughout a nightclub sequence). Strip away the semiautobiographical nature of the source material, and you've got a movie that's about as morally serious as, say, The Replacement Killers, or Belly, or The Negotiator or anything directed by Michael Bay. It's all about the look and sound, the sensation, the occasionally Scorsese-like freeze-frames, the way rooms are lit in single colors (blue, green, red).
The movie is an advertisement for violence, and for itself. A man gets shot in the forehead with a small-gauge shotgun and stares at Chopper as if he just got a drink in the face; a drug-dealing goon who achieved the high life Chopper always coveted refuses to lend the hero money and gets shot in the leg for his trouble, and Chopper makes sure to hang around while the man bleeds so he can make fun of him. It's jokey sadism that pretends to be horrified with itself.
The directorial strutting isn't connected to Chopper's inner life; in fact, much of the time, he seems to have no inner life. It's a film for people who watched A Clockwork Orange a dozen times in high school not because they found the film's sociological issues interesting, but because they thought Alex was a badass because he did whatever he wanted and didn't take shit from anybody. The pornography of death?which was seeded in 60s and 70s films by Peckinpah, Scorsese and other morally serious directors, then flowered in the 80s with Stallone-Schwarzenegger action trash?has gone global now. Dominik is its latest purveyor.
Watching the film, I couldn't help thinking about my colleague Armond White's review last week of Blow, which included a lengthy parenthetical slam against Scorsese's Goodfellas, an obvious influence on Blow and countless other movies. Since Chopper swims in the same cinematic waters, I'll digress myself in order to argue with him, because I think Goodfellas is a near-great film that's often misunderstood by detractors (Armond included).
"Blow's mixed-up moral stance can be traced to the cultural confusion that first became apparent in Martin Scorsese's 1990 Goodfellas with its wobbly sense of comic and horrific social history," he wrote. "The morally unstable Goodfellas (a huge influence on the worst, most superficial music videos and action films of the past decade) was a near-disaster of moral ambiguity paralleling Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, a more adroit disaster of amorality." Goodfellas, Armond argues, pandered to the middle-class that romanticizes "the dangerous criminal class it pretends to disdain."
I completely agree that Goodfellas inspired a lot of really rotten imitations?ultraviolent fables starring amoral heroes who act out middle-class fantasies of mindless materialism and what-the-hell brutishness. But it's not the least bit fair to hold Goodfellas responsible for the sins of its inferiors. It's like blaming The Wild Bunch for the high body count in contemporary action movies; the stylistic influence is certainly there, but Peckinpah, despite his macho romanticism and hatred of women, clearly had a moral and sociological agenda that subsequent bullet-fests could not be bothered to appropriate.
Having watched the film again recently, I fail to see any "moral instability." What Scorsese is saying and doing should be clear to any viewer who's willing to grant the film a careful reading (as opposed to just grooving on the violence). Like Taxi Driver, Casino and The Age of Innocence, Goodfellas used voiceover narration and point-of-view camerawork and editing to suggest the unbridgeable gap between the devastating impact of Henry Hill and his gangster pals on other human beings, and Hill's own inability to grasp that impact. It was as subtle and daring a use of POV as A Clockwork Orange?more daring, in some ways, because Alex the Droog wasn't as likably ordinary and identifiably middle-class American-suburban as Henry. In choosing (with cowriter Nick Pileggi) to tell this story in a way that was virtually guaranteed to be misread, Scorsese did a difficult, challenging and useful thing. The mind of a career criminal knows little of remorse; as moviegoers in a violence-obsessed nation, we need to see that fact demonstrated as intricately and realistically as possible. Henry's POV drew a subversive (and rarely noted) analogy between career criminals and average moviegoers; both groups routinely partake of lawlessness and think of it mainly in terms of personal adventure. The problem with Goodfellas imitations is that they reproduce the film's black comedic account of gangster mayhem while ignoring Scorsese's complex approach toward point-of-view. They're all about the violence rather than the damage it does, and how that damage is perceived by the audience. Don't blame Scorsese for that; blame the dummies who rip him off in the name of hipness.
Framed
Women and beyond: Iranian cinema has produced a string of masterworks in the past 10 years, but they have their misfires, too. Two recent offerings, The Circle and Smell of Camphor, Fragance of Jasmine, fail to make much of an impression, the former because it's too didactic, the latter because it's nearly inert.
The Circle, like the vastly superior The Day I Became a Woman, anecdotally explores the lives of independent-minded women in an Islamic fundamentalist culture. But unlike The Day, it's a rather dry, conceptual work, hopscotching from character to character (pregnant prison escapee seeking abortion, paroled female prisoners, a prostitute arrested for daring to speak her mind) and rarely if ever returning for a second look. The result plays like a feminist-minded Iranian variant of Richard Linklater's Slacker. Director Jafar Panahi (The White Balloon, The Mirror) shelves his extraordinary control over purely cinematic imagery and pursues social commentary instead. Concentrating on images of women huddled in fear and fleeing toward an uncertain future, The Circle repeats, over and over, in the most superficial manner imaginable, the fact that men run things in Iran and make life very difficult for women who desire autonomy.
Unfortunately, anybody with the slightest interest in that country and its cinema already knows this. The topic could have been much more meaningfully examined by concentrating for 90 minutes on the plight of just one or two of the film's troubled characters.
Smell of Camphor, Fragance of Jasmine is a botch-job of a different sort. For legendary director Bahman Farmanara, blacklisted in his own country and unable to make films for decades, it should have amounted to a grand return to importance. Instead, this black comedy about a widowed, censored, middle-age filmmaker obsessed with death (Farmanara, playing himself) is merely likable?an odd, often slow, bit of self-indulgence. Unlike a lot of Iranian movies, however, it's very funny, sometimes at the expense of typical Iranian-movie plot contrivances. The initial incident finds Farmanara giving a young female hitchhiker a ride, only to find that she's left an aborted fetus in his backseat; later, he visits the cemetery where his wife is buried and discovers that the funeral home has buried somebody else in the plot next to her, in the interests of conserving space. Talk about giving away the plot.
Walken Among The Bears. According to Variety, Christopher Walken has just signed to do his first children's movie, Walt Disney's The Country Bears. He'll be one of the few humans in this comedy, which concerns the adventures of a bunch of musically talented bears. Supposedly Walken plays the heavy, who wants to foreclose on the music hall where the title characters first gained fame. I don't know about you, but I'm a hell of a lot more excited about this movie than Lord of the Rings or the next Star Wars movie. I'm looking forward to a Kevin Spacey Saturday Night Live parody even more. "Come here, my little ursine friend, and tell me again why you don't think I should wear you."