Self-Analytical Frustration
Egoyan's characters live on multiple planes simultaneously. Lanny, for instance, is a hardscrabble Jew who has reinvented himself as an assimilated emblem of America's swinging id, like Dean Martin fused with Jerry Lewis. Lanny's partner Vince is more like a slow-burn Oliver Hardy or Bud Abbott type, with a splash of Cary Grant's transatlantic urbanity-a voice of reason pulling Lanny back from the abyss. But both men disclose additional layers as the film unfolds. (The film got an NC-17 for a rough sex scene that's not gratuitous, but actually critical to the plot. Some reviews have already complained that the scene is framed in a reactionary way, which seems absurd considering that the movie hopscotches between two less enlightened times, the Eisenhower and Nixon eras.)
Even our guide and surrogate, Karen-who once appeared on one of the duo's telethons dressed as Alice in Wonderland-gets lost in the film's hall of mirrors. In 1974, she's a young journalist assigned to tease out long-buried facts about the girl's death; 15 years earlier, she was a star-struck naïf who idolized Morris and Vince and credited them with ending a childhood illness (a miracle that's never satisfactorily explored). While interrogating and bonding with the duo, Karen discovers that while she makes her living as an observer (a journalist) she's more inclined to participate. As Karen interviews a skittish Vince for his book publisher-as part of a scheme to unearth saleable details of the young woman's 1959 death in the duo's hotel room, details Vince omitted in his original manuscript-Karen adopts a second identity, then teases out a third.
Before the movie ends, Karen will have undergone an adventure that's like a "Red Shoe Diaries" version of Alice's adventures down the rabbit hole. Just in case you don't get the analogy, Egoyan throws in a scene where Karen and Vince visit a children's hospital wing that Vince funded, and watch young performers dressed as Lewis Carroll characters singing Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit." You know it's only a matter of time before the girl who plays Alice faces off with Karen, who played Alice on the 1959 Morris-Collins telethon, for some red-hot, symbol-on-symbol action.
One is reminded that before Egoyan was lionized for being mature and respectable (with The Sweet Hereafter and Ararat) he was making the celluloid equivalent of taboo-teasing experimental theater-stories where the characters blatantly dramatized the subtext of their own lives, as if every day was a kinky Halloween party. (Remember Exotica, which centered on a strip club where Mia Kirshner, dressed as a Catholic schoolgirl, gyrated to Leonard Cohen's "Everybody Knows"?)
At the same time that one is grateful for Egoyan's deep awareness of allegorical and psychological devices, one sometimes wishes he didn't foreground them quite so strenuously, because it makes it seem like he's showing us his notes, and makes an important but lively subject-the casual corruption and deception of Hollywood as a metaphor for what plagues the wider world-feel like a ham-handed thesis paper. And he mutes Bacon and Firth's performances as showbiz casualties (they both evince a Hamlet-like mix of self-knowledge and paralysis) and draws attention to the movie's performance failures (including Bacon and Firth's lame vaudeville patter and Lohman's anesthetized-little-girl line readings.)
Egoyan fights the material's inherent comic-book rowdiness by pulling it apart and inspecting each piece. Like Paul Schrader, he analyzes pulp in a mainly literary rather than cinematic fashion, and so dulls its appeal. Imagine what Brian De Palma might have done with this material-not hard to do, given cinematographer Paul Sarossy's Playboy-glossy, anamorphic widescreen compositions-and you realize what's missing: a sense of naughty fun.
Innocent Voices, about a young boy surviving the war in El Salvador 20-some years ago, is more furiously cinematic than Where the Truth Lies, and while its approach is outwardly simpler-no self-decoding monologues or theatrical costumes here-the result is more visually sophisticated and ultimately more affecting. In place of Egoyan's collegiate descriptive devices, director Luis Mandoki (When a Man Loves a Woman) offers a mix of lyrical and subjective camerawork. For much of the movie's running time, you're either seeing the war-torn countryside through the eyes of 11-year-old Chava (Carlos Padilla) or watching him navigate it.
Chava tries to help his mother (Leonor Varela) and his siblings while savoring his last year as a child; by age 12, he'll probably be recruited as a child soldier, either by the authoritarian government or their savage guerilla opponents, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation front (FMLN). He sees stray bullets shatter his home, watches government soldiers beating up a priest accused of helping the guerillas, passes corpses splayed out on the ground and hung from trees. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchía (Spartan) evokes the twilight of Chava's innocence by emphasizing the blue-green Edenic loveliness of the El Salvadoran jungle, then disrupting that loveliness with nauseating splashes of red.
Screenwriter Oscar Torres, who survived a childhood in El Salvador similar to Chava's, fills the movie with moments you know must be drawn from reality because you've never seen them in a movie before, like the moment where Chava and two of his siblings take cover in their home during a crossfire, and Chava comforts his brother by drawing warpaint markings on their faces with mom's lipstick. The casual juxtaposition of childhood innocence and adult desperation and cruelty links Innocent Voices to a number of great films, including Los Olvidados, Panther Panchali, Empire of the Sun and Hope and Glory.
Innocent Voices isn't rich enough to withstand direct comparison to those movies; it's more purely visceral and less reflective. And there are a few shots and moments that feel overplayed, too Hollywood. For instance, I don't doubt the sight of Chava walking down a street full of soldiers while listening to "I Will Survive" on a transistor radio. But something about the boy's triumphant expression as he hoists the radio aloft makes the moment seem calculated.
But these are minor complaints. There are long stretches of Innocent Voices where you're more or less alone with Chava, seeing what he sees and feeling what he feels, and the muscular lyricism of the filmmaking feels radical and pure. Padilla's unaffected performance matches Anchía's penetrating camerawork, which uses a tricky combination of dollies and zooms to suggest how an adrenaline-jacked witness lets his eye roam through his environment, focusing and refocusing his attention. The most intense sequences induce a fugue state where details seem to leap right off the screen. It's like a silent movie with sound. You don't just watch it; you feel it.