Strangely Poetic Visions

LIFEBOAT

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

THE DYING GAUL

Directed by Craig Lucas

Vertigo became the consensus Hitchcock masterpiece during a period when the West could afford to indulge its romantic fantasies as superior moral suppositions. (It ranked eighth on the 1992 Sight and Sound international critics poll and placed second in 2002.) But 20th Century Fox's first-time DVD release of the 1944 Lifeboat proves there's another aspect to Hitchcock's greatness. Hitchcock's famous toying with psychological dread has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment.

The John Steinbeck?conceived story of eight passengers surviving a German torpedo attack, floating on a small boat in the Atlantic Ocean, was long dismissed because the microcosmic situation was judged "high-concept." Our contemporary critics feel no relation to Steinbeck's fiction, to judge by the DVD's recent reviews; they simply dismiss it as WWII sentimentality, just as many also demeaned Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. That's a convenient way of prioritizing personal fancies over the significance of a history-based work of art. However, Lifeboat deals with moral and sexual compulsion no less effectively than Vertigo, but Hitchcock here does it in the context of global warfare.

Glamorous Constance Porter, played by Tallulah Bankhead, is a celebrity journalist whose vanity evokes the recognizable supercilious attitude of her modern-day counterparts. Bereft of her social status, forced into low commonality with her fellow boatmates and serially stripped of her camera, fur coat and jewelry, Porter's sexual instincts struggle with her human nature. She's both enflamed and enraged by a working-class sailor (John Hodiak), and her worldly sophistication makes her the only person able to communicate with a German captain (Walter Slezak), who boards the vessel desperate to save his own life.

Porter's gradual demotion is part of the leveling Hitchcock understands about wartime stress. Who are we when put to the test? As might be expected, Lifeboat is a drama based on tense relations when each survivor's personality and back stories are launched. (Split the title in two.) But anyone who thinks this is simply in the service of Allied propaganda doesn't know how to look at movies. One of Hitchcock's most astounding transitions occur after a night storm when a strangely calm dawn finds four of the passengers huddled in two unexpectedly sensual, seemingly post-coital couplings.

If this sequence suggests a new version of The Rape of the Medusa, it's credit to Hitchcock's vision; he looks deeply into the circumstances of human crisis and creates in your mind (before your eyes) the essence of their terror, passion, vitality and horror. The reason Godard called Hitchcock "the greatest poet among us" in Histoire(s) du Cinema, his political-curatorial survey of 20th-century film, was to point out this gift for imagining the depth of human experience in the most deceptively simple, "popular" ways. Between silent Griffith and Spielberg/DePalma, Hitchcock stands as the finest exemplar of genre filmmaking. But actually, his best films transcend genre and become strangely poetic visions.

That's why Vertigo seems overrated among all the films of Hitchcock's post?WWII "art" period. He was more than "the master of suspense" when he exercised suspense tactics to reveal spiritual and philosophical mystery. Thus Lifeboat achieves profundity akin to The Birds. When Slezak's Nazi tries outwitting the passengers, they turn on him-not as a good-vs-evil metaphor but a study of the beast in mankind. This is one of the most appalling, unremitting, brutal murder scenes of Hitchcock's career. Only Joe, the Negro sailor played by Canada Lee, abstains from the mayhem. But Hitchcock isn't patronizing Joe's gospel pacifism; Joe stands at the periphery of the violent orgy so that his non-participation signifies America's lynching epidemic-one of the other atrocities of the era. Hitchcock flips the sanctimony of most WWII dramas; refusing Hollywood's inane self-congratulation to focus on the war at home. That's what gives Lifeboat its vertiginous power.

Award season update: The Dying Gaul is my front-runner for Worst Movie of the Year. New York playwright Craig Lucas makes his feature film directorial debut only his subject is not what he knows as a practitioner of live theater, but what he fantasizes as the decadent, oh-so ethically-challenged life of a Left Coast screenwriter. Gay sellout Robert (egregiously overplayed by Peter Sarsgaard) gives in to the same lures that Michael Tolkin and Robert Altman satirized in The Player. His big payday includes sleeping with his scheming producer (Campbell Scott) and taking part in a platonic mindfuck with the producer's wife (Patty Clarkson).

This triangle allows Lucas to one-up his playwright colleague Patrick Marber. The plot's intrigue hinges on a version of the quasi-gay Internet seduction scene of Marber's hateful Closer. Call this Craig's shit list; Lucas' clever way of bringing New York raunch into L.A.-cyberspace quiet. Robert's down-low activity makes The Dying Gaul perhaps the most sinister alter-ego movie since Neil LaBute's rancid oeuvre. "You can do anything you want as long as you don't call it what it is," the snarky producer tells Robert. That's Lucas' snide suggestion that big-time filmmakers have to sneak intelligence into their compromised work; it's Lucas' way of declaring "I may be going Hollywood but I'm better than those beach bums because my neo-noir trashes the industry."

What's wrong with Lucas' self-righteous approach comes clear when the producer's wife Elaine, a fag-hag with a literary bent, tells him, "Your script is so beautiful. Don't become one of them." She's a treacherous manipulator whose hidden resentment about her own marriage of convenience and frustrated career inspires Robert to act out the fury of a rent-boy scorn, which then leads to everyone's downfall. It's still neo-noir cliché but this time with an extremely misogynist twist. Robert and Elaine have a dubious conversation about the afterlife and the improbability of "unconditional love." Their discussion obviously conforms to indie nihilism, but such pessimistic dialogue, spoken by a character who is presented as a loving mother, also suggests a particularly gay-male paranoia.

Although it's been a landmark year for gay-male characterizations (from Gael Morel's Three Dancing Slaves to Tim Kirkman's Loggerheads) Lucas offers the most cynical and least defensible. No doubt there are various sexual opportunists in the biz, but Lucas gives Robert the final, vicious coup, while also depicting him as victim of an unhealthy system. (Apparently a system that Lucas is eager to join. Consider the film's ugly-trendy video photography and moral relativism; Lucas seems to be sucking up to the New Hollywood.) It's also been a landmark year for dubious sex scenes (from Dallas Bryce Howard in Manderlay to Jennifer Aniston in Derailed), but Sarsgaard's petit mort is literally a howl-a weird combination of noisy and maudlin. He virtually cums to pieces-physically and mentally. Sarsgaard now joins that ever-growing list of actors you can't trust who'll do anything. In films like this and Jarhead, Sarsgaard trashes his talent in unreliable fabrications of life experience, almost canceling out his previous credible gay characterizations in The Salton Sea and K-13: The Widowmaker. Like Charlize Theron and Philip Seymour Hoffman, he's in the Showoff Phonies Club. Make Craig Lucas an honorary member, director's division. n