Next Stop, Faith
But starting with 1994's Forrest Gump, Zemeckis became more overtly ambitious and "serious" and philosophically harder to pin down. Arguments over the politics of Gump originated in Zemeckis' sphinxlike tone, which simultaneously seemed to mock and glorify its dimwitted everyman hero. His followup, Contact, was as contradictory as Gump-at once a rare hard sci-fi film that bothered to dramatize its scientific theories, and a rebuke to secular humanism's insistence on empirical fact. To some extent, all of Zemeckis' recent movies-including Death Becomes Her, What Lies Beneath and Cast Away-knock down the barrier separating science and reason from myth and faith (as in the climax of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which demolishes the wall separating Los Angeles from Toon Town).
Zemeckis' latest, The Polar Express, is another confident, opaque but palpably conflicted blockbuster-a massive adapatation of Chris van Allsburg's children's book about a young hero, known only as The Boy, who doubts the existence of Santa Claus, but relents after a magical train bears him to the North Pole. Expanding on van Allsburg's book, The Polar Express seizes on the snarky skeptics' definition of Santa as the theological equivalent of a bike with training wheels.
There's transformative emotion in the boy's staunch eagerness to defend endangered or unfortunate people. The film's straightforwardness is truly dreamlike, and its tactile details are stunning. (Note the sparkling snow, the roiling locomotive smoke, the spiraling Devil's Tower-like mountain and the wallpaper patterns in the hero's house.) And there are several sequences that take full advantage of digital filmmaking's freedom from gravity, including an extended setpiece in which a magical train ticket flutters away from the train like Gump's feather, gets caught up in the wake of a rampaging wolf pack and winds its way back into the same passenger compartment, wedging itself in a heating vent (frame left, foreground) where it goes unnoticed by our panicked hero. Yet The Polar Express is still an oddly off-putting movie, wondrous in places but also prone to lose faith in its persuasive powers, grab the audience by the scruff of its neck and yell, "This is magic, do you hear?" (Regular collaborator Alan Silvestri's alternately syrupy and bludgeoning score hurts more than helps.)
While not entirely successful as children's fantasy or philosophical statement, it's surely Zemeckis' most esthetically daring movie since Gump. Granted, to varying degrees, The Phantom Menace, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow went there first, and photorealistic computer animation-the modern version of animator Ralph Bakshi's two-dimensional 1970s "rotoscoping" process-has been pushing the envelope of so-called "realism" for a decade or more. But The Polar Express goes further.
Zemeckis and his design team covered the actors with tiny reference markers so that their performances could be scanned and reconfigured as 3-D models. (It's digital puppetry-Gollum software applied to an entire world.) The technology allows Tom Hanks to make like a CGI cousin of Peter Sellers and play five characters, including the train conductor, Santa, a mysterious hobo, the boy's father and, astonishingly, the boy himself. (All the children's roles are performed by grownups, digitally dressed in children's skin.)
But for all its boldness, the science isn't quite there yet. As in Final Fantasy, there's something slightly rubbery and unreal about the recreated characters, which contributes to a certain heavy-spiritedness. You find yourself being amazed more by Zemeckis' sheer ambition (and technical prowess) than by the film's feelings and themes, which ring like Chinese gongs when a tuning fork would have sufficed. The Boy is one of the film's two committed skeptics. In the end, he comes around, but how could he not? The Polar Express frames the Boy's odyssey as a journey from skepticism to faith, but cheats by giving him one piece of irrefutable empirical evidence after another, including a mammoth, very coercive elf rally in the North Pole town square that feels a bit too much like a yuletide Leni Riefenstahl. (The film contains several Jewish/Yiddish throwaway gags, which raises the question of whether Zemeckis is poking fun at coercive Christmas movies. But of course, it's Zemeckis, so it's hard to tell.)
In a way, even though The Polar Express is outwardly more of a fairy tale than Contact, the latter asks its protagonist to take a much greater leap of faith. Like van Allsburg's book, Zemeckis' movie equates rational resistance to unseen, unknowable worlds with emotional numbness (the curse of adulthood). The Boy is spiritually dead because he can't hear Santa's bells. The Polar Express drives him toward the truth. The movie isn't asking you to believe; it's almost commanding you. It's saying, "This train is leaving the station. Get on it."
JOURNALIST AND SOLDIER turned B-filmmaker Sam Fuller never had much tolerance for people who thought World War II was a noble enterprise. He worked out his cynicism about the myths of war in a series of pulpy, honest melodramas, starting with 1951's The Steel Helmet (the first U.S.-produced Korean War drama, and the most corrosive until M*A*S*H).
His 1980 war picture The Big Red One-a spiritual autobiography of his experience in the Army's 1st Infantry division, starring the great stone-faced Lee Marvin as a tough but emotionally shattered sergeant-was the summation of all his feelings on the subject. It was butchered on first release by now-defunct releasing company Lorimar, which got cold feet over the picture's nearly three-hour running time, and indiscriminately cut 50 minutes. Time magazine critic and filmmaker Richard Schickel recently oversaw a reconstruction of Fuller's version based on the director's notes, and the result of his effort can be seen Nov. 12-18 at Film Forum. It's not technically perfect-according to Schickel, about 10 percent of Fuller's version could not be restored, and some of the reconstituted bits seem to have been salvaged from a digital interpositive, which makes the resolution and color inconsistent.
Unlike Apocalypse Now Redux, Fuller's war baby never attains the epic depth and scope it clearly seeks-with or without new material. This is due to Fuller's own limitations as a filmmaker. He always made films on a micro, not macro, level; in some sense, during his whole directorial career he remained a journalist, better at description than representation. Coming 18 months after The Deer Hunter and a year after Apocalypse Now, The Big Red One seemed a continuation of Vietnam pictures by other means, and a handy excuse for Fuller to explore contradictions deemed off-limits in most prior WWII pictures: murder vs. killing, sanity vs. insanity, Nazi vs. German, Vichy vs. French- arbitrary distinctions in Fuller's world, and self-serving, too.
But it's still a savagely funny war picture, and now there's more of it. A new printed opening reads, "this is fictional life, based on factual death." Among the changes is a cameo by Fuller as newsreel cameraman and an intriguing parallel narrative involving a German officer (Siegfried Rauch, glimpsed briefly in the original cut) who somewhat accidentally tails Marvin and company across North Africa and Europe.
All the original's startling moments are preserved, including a massacre at an insane asylum (by a machine gun-wielding inmate who yells, "I'm sane!") and a Michael Herr-like sight gag in which a poor grunt gets blasted in the crotch by land-mine shrapnel. The Sarge declares, tossing away the grunt's blooded left nut, "That's why God gave you two."