DREAM LIVES
"Our
birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," Wordsworth told us. We may try
to wake and to remember, but it isn't easy to do, and - what Wordsworth
wouldn't admit - it isn't always worth the price. Three recent films
deal with people stumbling through their lives, trying to awaken, but
with very different results.
In
The Man Who Wasn't There, Billy Bob Thornton is Ed Crane,
a quiet, chain-smoking barber not given to the stereotypical barber's
gift of gab. Silent, almost catatonic, Ed drifts through life, in a
job he doesn't like much, with a wife (Frances McDormand) he doesn't
really love. Then fate intervenes in the form of Creighton Tolliver
(John Polito), a self-styled entrepreneur who offers Ed what just might
be a great investment opportunity. Typically unemotional, Ed decides
to raise the cash by blackmailing his wife's boss and lover. Then things
start to go wrong. One twist follows another as the characters' knowledge
runs panting to keep up with their ignorance and mistakes, always arriving
on the scene just in time to do the most harm. Ed narrates all this
in a forthright way. His loquaciousness belies the silence of his character,
adding to the sense of fate and cynicism that mark the downward plot
spiral of film noir.
Of
all the Coen brothers' exercises in cinematic style and homage to the
movie past, The Man Who Wasn't There may be the most technically
accomplished. Setting, plot and narration put us in that 1940s California
of films from Murder, My Sweet to The Postman Always Rings
Twice to Detour and Kiss Me Deadly. (One minor character
is even named Didrickson, evoking Phyllis Diedrichson of Double Indemnity;
and the story is set in Santa Rosa, the town of Hitchcock's Shadow
of a Doubt.)
Light
and shadow, whites, grays and blacks are lovingly recorded by Roger
Deakins, who captures the visual sense the look of 1940s black-and-white
film more faithfully than any picture that I can recall of the last
fifty years. As fits the story, the lighting becomes progressively low-key
and hard, the shadows starker, as the film progresses. Unlike many neo-films
noirs (or original films noirs, for that matter), there is no "spider
woman" here to lure Ed to his doom, no Barbara Stanwyck or Kathleen
Turner. But there is the spider woman's complement from those 1940s
films, the domestic angel, the figure of youth and purity (the daughters
in Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, the scriptwriter
in Sunset Boulevard, etc.) who stands in counterpoint to her
evil opposite. Here it's Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson), daughter
of Ed's lawyer friend whom Ed decides, like Charles Kane with Susan
Alexander, to nurture through a musical career. Birdy, though, turns
out to have some surprises in store.
As downbeat as the most unsparing of films noirs
were, The Man Who Wasn't There is a cautionary tale about detachment
and sleepwalking through life. The caution is against trying to wake
up. But how do we ever know if we are dreaming or awake, whether we
are actually alseep or not? And if we can sleepwalk through life, can
we only come to life in dreams? Those heady issues are the kinds of
things that Richard Linklater's Waking Life keeps circling
around.
A
young unnamed man arrives in LA and goes from place to place, sometimes
flying, sometimes as if by magic, once in a car shaped like a boat,
encountering many people who, like himself, are all animated (by some
30 artists) in an animated landscape that continually shifts and slips
away like the coherence of the film itself. Madmen rant from car loudspeakers,
philosophers hold forth in studies and in coffee shops, lovers talk
in bed and on the phone. Small details and gestures have as much meaning
as words; smoke, steam and shadow illustrate the talk.
If
some of this sounds familiar, it should, since Linklater borrows characters
and situations from some of his earlier films such as Slacker
and Before Sunrise (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy playing those
lovers). But aside from the character's struggle to awaken, there is
no real story here. The semblence of a plot is a string on which to
hang ideas, and how you respond to the film will probably depend on
how deep or meaningful those ideas seem to you.
The
issues - free will vs. determinism, consciousness vs. illusion, etc.-
are the stuff that we all wrestle with in our own ways. Snippets of
Sartre and Guy DeBord may or may not be a satisfying enough experience,
depending on your preference, or perhaps your mood. If you have spent
an evening over beer or wine talking about these things with friends
or lovers, if you've ever been caught up by a writer or a philosophy
teacher, then this film may catch you up in its flow. Whether it permits
you to awaken is another matter.
And
do we really want to awaken at all? Are dreams our only comfort - or
our only true reality? After an amazing digitally-overlaid credit sequence
featuring jitterbugging youths, Mulholland Drive opens
with a shot of a figure covered by a blanket and the camera seems to
plunge through its fabric into the depths of the body (and maybe the
mind) that is underneath. Like the eponymous road that twists and turns
dangerously through the Hollywood Hills, the plot veers sharply left
and right, doubling back on itself again, while the lights of Hollywood
gleam below.
A
refugee from a John Waters film, blonde and bubbly Betty Elms (Naomi
Watts) arrives from that jitterbug contest (in Ontario!) to make her
fame and fortune in L.A. In the meantime, a gorgeous brunette in a limo
(Laura Elena Harring) just avoids being shot by her escorts when their
car is slammed into by speeding youths on Mulholland Drive. Dazed and
amnesiac, she takes refuge in the apartment of Betty's aunt, who has
loaned the place out to her niece. (As if confirming that this as a
Waters film, the apartment complex is run by Ann Miller, as - of all
things - an aging Hollywood veteran.) Naming herself "Rita" from a poster
for Gilda in the apartment, she reveals herself to Betty and
the two begin a quest to discover her identity. In the meantime, hot
director Adam Kesher is being given an ultimatum about which actress
he should cast in the lead of his new film.
Then
things start to get strange. Never mind John Waters after all. Anyone
familiar with David Lynch's work will see parallels with his earlier
films and with his TV series Twin Peaks. (This film itself was
reassembled from the pilot to a failed TV series.) There are shifts
of identity and strange presences - a ruthless little old man in a glassed-in
room who seems to run everything, a homeless man who lives near the
dumpster behind a café, a sinister and implausibly dressed cowboy,
a blue box with an impossible triangular keyhole; a nightclub that offers
pure illusion (and Roy Orbison in Spanish) at two in the morning; small
people crawling under doors.
Even
without such trappings, things are strange enough. Betty turns out to
be a far more skilled actress than anyone could have known. Characters
pop up only to disappear. Some pop up and reappear, played by other
actors. And there's a very funny sequence about a hitman who just has
one of those days when everything seems to go wrong. If Mulholland
Drive's style also evokes film noir, its substance - like so much
of Lynch's work - deals with the same kinds of issues that Waking
Life would tackle. As a film, it is more compelling than Linklater's
effort; as philosophy, it is hardly deeper. And whether you can tolerate
one film more than the other- or either at all - will depend on your
own tastes.
But either of them will at least give you something to think about,
which is more than you can say for the usual multiplex fodder.
©2001 Don Larsson
CineScene
