The Iron Giant

It's sort of appropriate that I watched The Iron Giant in the middle of my Spielberg marathon, because the E.T. parallels are almost impossible to miss.  A visitor from space.  A young, lonely, impressionable boy.  A single mother.  A bunch of government types who are tracking the creature.  The Iron Giant, Brad Bird's directorial debut, owes a significant debt to Spielberg's (in my opinion) magnum opus about loneliness, and friendship in unexpected places.

After the titular Giant (voiced by Vin Diesel, of all people, who proves to be the stand-out member of the cast) crash-lands in rural Maine in 1957, young, curious Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal, who played the younger Stifler brother in the first two American Pie movies) befriends the alien visitor.  In order to hide the Giant first from his mother Annie (Jennifer Aniston) and later from a humorless G-Man named Kent Mansley who is consumed by Cold War-era paranoia about the Giant's provenance (Christopher McDonald), he enlists the help of a local beatnik, Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.) who owns a metal junkyard which provides the Giant with the sustenance he needs to stay alive.  But Mansley relentlessly stays on the trail of the Giant, and after discovering incontrovertible proof of his existence, calls in the army led by General Rogard (John Mahoney) to destroy the visitor.  Mansley is just as desperate to convince everyone of the Giant's malign intentions as Hogarth is to convince them that the Giant poses no danger, and Hogarth's attempts to save the Giant from the army are complicated by the fact that the Giant is more than he seems at first blush.

The thing, in my mind, that sets the two films apart is the cultural milieu in which they are set.  Spielberg set his alien visitor/coming-of-age story in a place that isn't really a place, but an Anytown-type simulacrum of his own suburban childhood that can (and was designed to) stand in for any time, and any suburban place, in post-WWII America.  The culture that Elliot and his siblings (and friends) consume is a mish-mash of signifiers - an old rock song here, a game of Dungeons and Dragons there.  The Iron Giant, in comparison, is very clear about the time frame in which it is set, 1957 (right after the launch of Sputnik), and this period infuses the film all the way through.  Mansley is literally terrified of the Giant as a Communist plot to bring about nuclear annihilation; on a smaller scale, Hogarth's class watches a version of one of those "Duck and Cover!" videos from the 50's, and Hogarth's taste in comics runs towards the cosmic, the sort of half-optimistic/half-pessimistic sci-fi fantasias that were born out of the clash of the dawn of the Space Age with the knowledge that humanity was constantly near the brink of wiping itself out.  Hogarth reads a comic called Atomo, whose titular villain bears a striking resemblance to the Giant - when Hogarth points this out, the Giant balks at the comparison, and says he prefers to be Superman instead.  Bird's fondness for the sci-fi culture of the 50's comes across throughout, and the decision to make the film a period piece ironically serves to augment the film's timeless quality.

The Iron Giant owes a debt to E.T., but it's also in the same class as E.T. in the amount of genuine emotion it wrings out of its story, and that is the highest praise I can give the film.  It goes without saying that the film never talks down to its intended audience - this movie was made before the increasingly execrable Shrek franchise turned the art of filmmaking for children into a game of reference one-upsmanship designed to appeal exclusively to the parents forced to take their children to see the film, leaving the actual audience of children nothing but to wallow in the shallowest smorgasbord of scatalogical jokes that the filmmakers seemingly threw in as an afterthought.  Of course, it's worth noting that the American public roundly rejected the Iron Giant when it came out in theaters, so the suggestion that Hollywood is simply giving people what they want is probably accurate.  But when a smart, sweet, heartbreaking movie like this comes along, it's worth celebrating its simple existence.  A

Zero Dark Thirty

There's a moment towards the end of the second act of Zero Dark Thirty when the CIA director (played by an actor in a mostly unbilled cameo that I won't spoil) polls his operatives, including dogged pursuer Maya (Jessica Chastain), about the odds that the compound in Abbotabad, Pakistan actually houses Osama bin Laden.  Sixty percent they mostly agree on, although one says 80 and Maya is absolutely, 100% certain that UBL, as they call him, resides there.  60 is a big number but it's not that big in context, given what Maya's ultimate goal is, which is to kill bin Laden.  Maya would prefer to simply drop a bomb on the compound but that number, 60, means that the higher-ups are skittish about the operation, and they choose to send a strike force in instead, a decision which puts American lives at risk but which allows for a bit more nuance in terms of who lives and who dies inside the walls of the compound.  If a Saudi drug dealer lives in the compound with his family, and a bomb is dropped on top of it, very uncomfortable questions will be asked of the US government by the Pakistanis.

Zero Dark Thirty is a film that, more than anything else, pulses with the energy of a supremely confident filmmaker who knows exactly how to ratchet up and release tension, even when not much more is happening on screen but two people talking to each other about what some tiny shred of intelligence actually means.  Kathryn Bigelow has always been a talented visual stylist, but she's found a collaborator in screenwriter Mark Boal who has allowed her, first in the masterful Oscar winner The Hurt Locker and now in this film, to deploy her talents on a film that has real substance.  The story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden is one of countless numbers of people, working across all manner of intelligence and bureaucratic agencies, painstakingly putting together the pieces of where bin Laden was hiding.  Boal takes that story and filters it through Maya, a character who, thanks to Jessica Chastain's typically excellent work, we come to empathize with and genuinely care about, even though we know next to nothing about who she is.  A rotating cast fills out the edges of her story; Kyle Chandler, Jason Clarke, Mark Strong, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle and a number of other actors flit in and out of the story but Maya always remains, with her eyes fixed on the one target that she desperately wants to find.

That 60 percent number is where the film resides.  If the Maya (and the other CIA agents) had been wrong, no one ever makes Zero Dark Thirty, because it's just another failed, and subsequently covered-up, operation.  Sixty percent is, realistically, the best anyone can do under the circumstances, because that is how intelligence works, with percentages and probabilities, not certainties.  Maya believes in her own certainty, but the people in charge of making the decision can't afford to be anything less than completely honest about the mission.  In the end, the film is, at its heart, a revenge flick, and revenge flicks don't exist without closing the book on the target of their vengeance.  The toll the hunt takes on Maya is obvious in the closing scene but the truth is that the killing of Osama bin Laden from the audience's perspective is a cathartic moment.  Just like there is no such thing as an anti-war movie, there is no such thing as an anti-revenge movie.  This film earns its vengeance, even if it might not be completely satisfied with it.

It is, of course, not possible to talk about this film without at least mentioning its politics - I believe that it is a film whose politics are, by and large, those that a person brings to bear on it.  If you believe that America's torture program was (and is) absolutely crucial in the fight against international terrorism, there is plenty here that would suggests that you are right.  If you believe (as I do) that America's torture program was a practical failure and a morally repugnant turn for this country, there is evidence for that too.  However you feel about legally sanctioned torture, the film does not allow anyone off the hook for what it actually looks like on the ground, the brutality and degradation of it, and I appreciated that fact, even if I maintain some degree of trepidation about just how much of the film's point of view is with the CIA.

This is a film about the slow but steady accumulation of intelligence, and also about how quests for revenge change the perspective of those who engage in them.  Just as surely as Osama bin Laden ultimately got precisely what he deserved, it is reasonable to inquire what, exactly, the continuing quest for justice, one that did not truly end with his death, has cost America.  Zero Dark Thirty, by focusing on Maya, asks that question obliquely, but it is always there, traveling along with the film, even as it thrills on the surface.  A

Django Unchained

One of my favorite characters in Neil Gaiman's Sandman series is Hob Gadling.  Hob essentially declares that he is going to live forever and Death, who is in the tavern when he makes this declaration, grants him his wish.  Dream, the main character of the story, who is also there in the tavern, visits with Hob once every century, to check up on him; their friendship is one of the few tangible things that Dream seems to truly value.  In any case, at one of their meetings (during the 18th century, I believe, although I may be mistaken), Hob tells Dream that he is currently in the slave business, and marvels at the efficiency of the triangle trade, and how little effort it takes him to make money at it.  Dream tells him that it's a bad business, and he should get out of it (which he does, of course, since New World chattel slavery ultimately ceases to be any kind of profession at all), and life continues for Hob Gadling, all the way into the present day.

That's the way the universe works - people make awful moral decisions and, at best, they live long enough to renounce those decisions and choose a different path, but usually the world keeps spinning and no one really cares and no one ever pays the price for them.  But that is not the way Quentin Tarantino's universe works, and perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of his filmmaking is what a starkly moral universe he inhabits.  Those who make compromised moral choices, even at something of a remove, are punished for them, and the audience is forced to reckon with both the moral choice that has brought the vengeance down upon it, as well as its own culpability in desiring the vengeance in the first place.

Django (Jamie Foxx), a slave who has been separated from his wife Brunhilde (Kerry Washington) by a particularly sadistic master, is enlisted into the bounty hunter trade by King Schultz (Christophe Waltz) because Schultz needs his help in ID'ing a trio of men who were former overseers at Django's last plantation.  Django discovers he has a knack for the bounty hunting business and he and Schultz spend the winter of 1858-59 hunting fugitives from justice until their travels bring them, finally, to the plantation owner who currently owns Brunhilde, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), a plantation-owning scion who is also a Francophile and not a bit of a dandy.  Django and Schultz devise a scheme to free Brunhilde from bondage, and, as this is a Tarantino film, an orgy of blood follows.

Waltz's ability to hone in on Tarantino's weird cadences, and deliver them with something resembling actorly ability, is nothing short of remarkable, and it is not surprising that he has become the filmmaker's latter-day muse, because he is perhaps the only person capable of making Tarantino's dialogue work as well on screen as it does on paper.  Between Waltz's presence and DiCaprio's go-for-broke performance (and it is very nice to have DiCaprio working outside of his taciturn comfort zone; some may legitimately balk at the bigness of Calvin Candie but I, for one, loved the character as presented) Foxx is almost the odd man out in what is, ostensibly, his film.  Django doesn't truly come into his own until the final act but when he finally does, it is a moment of triumph, and the point at which having the supremely confident Foxx playing the character really pays off.  But the film is, in many ways, stolen by Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, a slave who is Candie's closest confidant and who clearly regards the status quo as the proper order of things.  He is, in a weird way, something of the film's moral compass, a character who is both a victim of the slave society into which he was born and also a perpetrator of it.  Calling him the film's true villain isn't quite accurate - he is the most dangerous and treacherous character in the movie, but he is also perhaps its most human.

This is a film that is awash in slavery, in its brutality and in the way that it forces those who live under its dominion to make awful, compromised moral choices, some of those people happier to make those choices than others.  The third act of the film is set into motion by a choice that Django makes, one that initially horrified me but which I came to understand in the context of the film, and which I will not spoil.  The first time we meet Brunhilde she is being subjected to a particularly brutal bit of torture that forces the audience to contemplate the true horror of what it means for a person to own another human being, to have their life completely under the dominion of another.  That the commeuppance of first-order slavers like Candie is the primary goal of the film is of no surprise; that second-order slavers like the trio of, essentially, escort men who are charged with sending him to his final destination (a mine which uses exclusively slave labor) in the third act are also in Django's sights is perhaps more surprising, and that the film finds little reason to mourn their loss is perhaps its most subversive notion.  But Stephen presents a real moral dilemma, one that the film does not have particularly easy answers for, and that is perhaps its most truly surprising idea.  And no one ever gets to say, "I was just following orders", because there are no orders, there are only men and women under human bondage, and those who allow that system to perpetuate itself.  A