Truth and Consequences
by
Howard Schumann

Wayne and Eileen Hayes appear to be the ideal couple. They have a successful business, live in a wealthy Pittsburgh suburb, and have two well-adjusted grown children. But when Wayne is kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom by a former employee, cracks in their armor begin to show. Based on the kidnapping of a Dutch industrialist, Pieter Jan Brugge's The Clearing shows two different takes on the American dream.

Robert Redford plays Wayne, a self-made car-rental executive who has become emotionally estranged from his wife and children. Willem Dafoe plays Arnold Mack, an unemployed man who sees himself as a failure and is unable to handle the success of his one-time employer. The film tells parallel stories that operate in different time frames, a unique device that deepens the puzzle. One thread revolves around Wayne, handcuffed and held at gunpoint by Arnold, being led through an area near the Great Smoky Mountains. The other revolves around Eileen (Helen Mirren) and her interactions with FBI investigator Ray Fuller (Matt Craven) who has set up his unit as a control center inside the Hayes home while the couple's children look on.

Redford is outstanding as the intense business tycoon, and Mirren gives one of her best performances, portraying a tightly controlled suburbanite wife who refuses to panic even when her husband misses a dinner party she told him to be on time for. She keeps going even when it is obvious that something has gone wrong -- swimming in her pool, holding a birthday party for her grandchild, and waiting before calling the police because she thinks that her husband may have left her. Eileen discovers through the FBI search of phone records that her husband has continued seeing another woman, a relationship he'd told her was broken off. She visits Wayne's mistress (Wendy Crewson), and retains her composure, showing emotion only in the way that she purses her lips. Always self-assured, she wants to know only where their trysts had taken place and what gifts he had brought her.

As Wayne and his abductor walk through the forest, they engage in conversations about their lives and about opportunity in America. Wayne says that he made himself what he is today, and that Arnold had the same opportunity but failed. Both play a cat-and-mouse game, but treat each other with grudging respect, and it is clear that they've both paid a price. Wayne admits that his he has lost the love of his wife because of his overindulgence in his work, and the lack of attention he paid to his children. He tells Arnold, "I love my wife... we have two beautiful kids, and I'm just getting to know them."

The Clearing is a quiet, thoughtful film that slowly builds suspense that is not released until the very end. Although there are some contrivances in the plot, the acting is superb throughout and the film works as a psychological thriller, a meditation on loss and regret, and a character study of two flawed but loving people who have forgotten how to express their joy in living.

Encouraged by American foreign policy, the Kuomintang government in Taiwan in the 1950s instituted a campaign of repression of real or suspected Communists, who were rounded up by the military police, detained, and often shot. The facts concerning the White Terror, as these events came to be known, were suppressed in Taiwan, along with earlier massacres in 1947, without any public discussion for forty years. The story could not be told until martial law was lifted in 1987, yet even now the history of this period remains clouded with hints of undisclosed crimes.

Hou Hsiao-hsien's 1995 film Good Men, Good Women dramatizes the Taiwanese people's fear and reluctance to deal with their past, showing the effects of forgotten history on the destiny of actress Liang Ching (Annie Shizuka Inoh) in present-day Taiwan. Dedicated to all the political victims of the 1950s, the film uses the device of a "film within a film" to tell the story of real-life activists Chiang Bi-Yu (also played by Inoh) and her husband Hao-Tung (Giong Lim) who fought in China against the Japanese during World War II, but were arrested as Communists when they came home.

The film takes place in three different time sequences: the contemporary world of Liang Ching, her recollection of her recent past as a drug-addicted barmaid, and the world of a yet to be made film about resistance fighters in the 1940s. Hou suggests a contrast between the sterile, corrupt lives of the present generation and the young people of the past who acted with a social conscience. This is a complex and elliptical work, one of Hou's finest, filled with tenderness and sensuality, and an aching melancholy for a world whose promise has remained unfulfilled.

The picture opens with a parade of young people dressed as peasants, who march toward the camera singing a joyous song: "When yesterday's sadness is about to die. When tomorrow's good cheer is marching towards us. Then people say, don't cry. So why don't we sing." The camera then cuts to present day Taipei, where an unidentified caller telephones Liang Chang but refuses to speak. The caller has stolen her diaries, and faxes her the pages daily, prompting her to recall her tragic relationship with Ah Wei (Jack Kao), a gangster who died in a shootout. The director intersperses scenes of intimacy between the two lovers with the world of the 1940s, where Chiang Bi-Yu and Hao-Tung, have left Taiwan for the Chinese mainland to support the anti-Japanese resistance. The "film within a film" shows how Chiang and Hao are forced to put their children in foster care, while Liang draws parallels from her own experience of having to give up the things she loved the most.

Hou shows how events buried in a nation's past can have far-reaching consequences, and that history may be indistinguishable from personal memory. Yet the film is not one of ideas, but of images, and the great director has provided some memorable ones; for example, when Liang sits before a mirror putting on her makeup as Ah Wei sits closely beside her talking about the possibility of her being pregnant. It is a mundane event, yet Hou imparts it with a mysterious and timeless quality. In many ways, Good Men, Good Women is typical of Hou's films, with its static camera, long takes, and attention to the rhythms of everyday life. Yet it is also his most political work: a searing indictment of the squandering of a nation's heritage, allowing us to see that a country, like its people, cannot redeem its future until it tells the truth about its past.

©2004 Howard Schumann
CineScene