The CIA-led Iranian coup of 1953, which deposed Mohammed Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi, was something of a Patient Zero in the warped relationship the United States has with the Middle East. The Shah became one of the world's most despised leaders and the Iranian people, quite rightly it turned out, blamed the United States (and the UK) for meddling in its internal affairs in favor of a man who ran the country as a ruthless autocrat. The Muslim world in general came to distrust the intentions of the United States, and the end of the Cold War focused that mistrust into a mutually-held fear of the Other.
I don't mean to damn Argo with faint praise when I say that its opening section, when it summarizes this history in the form of a Persepolis-esque series of cartoon images, is perhaps its most impressive. Director Ben Affleck manages to hit the major points in this history in an interesting visual way, setting the scene for the film's tableau during the 1979 revolution that ended the Shah's reign and put Ayatollah Khomeini in charge of the country. It is, to be fair, at least a slightly simplified history, mostly leaving out the justified fear that the Western powers had that Mossadegh would draw Iran closer to the Soviet sphere of influence in favor of a purely oil-based justification, but it is still very effective.
As everyone surely knows by know, Argo is the story of six American diplomats who managed to escape the US Embassy in Tehran for the Canadian ambassador's residence just prior to the 1979 hostage crisis, and their extrication from the country before they were discovered by the Ayatollah's agents. Affleck stars as Tony Mendez, an exfiltration specialist, who concocts a cover story in which the six diplomats pretend to be the Canadian film crew for a Hollywood-produced, low-budget science fiction movie named Argo (in reality, an adaptation of a fairly well known science fiction novel, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.) John Goodman and Alan Arkin portray the production team that helped Mendez build the cover story, and Bryan Cranston plays Mendez's boss at the CIA.
Argo neatly cleaves into two stories - there is the plight of the six diplomats, both before Mendez shows up to help them and after, and there is the story of Mendez putting together a fake movie in sun-drenched 70's Hollywood. The mid-film tonal shift into the Hollywood portion is somewhat jarring, but Affleck has enough confidence as a filmmaker (and as an old Hollywood veteran himself, who certainly knows his subjects as well as anyone) to make it work. It helps that Goodman and Arkin give the film its two most interesting characters, Hollywood hustlers par excellence who see the Argo plan as their one big shot to do something of true substance. The six diplomats are much less well-defined - the film only gives them a few scenes to develop as characters, and other than the way they wear their hair (and facial hair) it is sometimes difficult to tell them apart, except for the fact that a few of them are played by semi-recognizable actors (Tate Donovan, Clea DuVall and Rory Cochrane are the three whose names I knew). Mendez is also something of a problem - Affleck gives himself by far the biggest role in the film, and while his performance is perfectly serviceable, it lacks anything remotely resembling a spark. I tried to think about how I would recast the role, and my initial instinct was Mark Ruffalo, but there are just a lot of working actors who would have brought more to the role than Affleck is capable of.
But we're not here to discuss Affleck the actor, who is what he is, we're here to talk about Affleck the filmmaker. And while I thought the storytelling was solidly delivered in Argo (despite the relative flatness of the characters) my biggest complaint of the film was just how flop-sweaty some of the thriller elements were. There are just too many scenes where everything is on the knife's edge of completely falling apart, and while I am willing to allow some dramatic license to enhance the story, at some point I just stopped believing what was happening on screen in any meaningful way. The story that Argo is based on is a fascinating one, and I wish Affleck had trusted in its details more, and embellished them less (some of this also has to rest on the shoulders of screenwriter Chris Terrio). It is still a good film, and the storytelling is extremely efficient. I have yet to see The Town, but between this film and Gone Baby Gone, Affleck certainly has an eye for the lived-in details of the worlds he is creating (the Argo table read in the Hollywood section is worth the price of admission all by itself, like Ed Wood's version of the Star Wars cantina). I wish this film had more trust that the audience would follow the real details of the story, as opposed to the Hollywood-ized version, but I suppose that's what happens when you make a fake film within a real film about real events. On some level, everything that comes out of Hollywood is bullshit, and eventually it all comes down to arguing about degrees. B
There are three groups of players that orbit around one another in David France's documentary about the early years of the AIDS epidemic, How to Survive a Plague (the film mostly takes place between about 1987 and 1996). There are the politicians, responsible for setting the policy for how the government is going to respond to the crisis. There are the scientists, men and women both in the private sector, as well as at NIH and the FDA, doing the work to identify and bring to market some sort of cure. And there are the activists of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), some of whom are HIV-positive (many, or even most, of the people France focuses on within ACT UP seem to be positive, although not all), agitators for changes both in policy and in how the scientists do their business.
The memorable characters in the film are, with one exception, entirely from the ACT UP side of the proceedings. There is playwright Larry Kramer, who gives the film its title with an impassioned plea for unity from his fellow activists when everything seems to be spinning out of control within ACT UP. There is Mark Harrington, the brains of the treatment activist group, who teaches himself (and his fellow activists) to speak to the scientists with an astonishing level of sophistication. There is Garance Franke-Ruta, the young true believer with the dodgy taste in hats. There is Peter Staley, the natural spokesperson, who faces down Pat Buchanan on Crossfire and gives a rousing speech to a packed house at the 1990 International AIDS Conference in San Francisco. And there is Bob Rafsky, author of this famous campaign moment, whose fatalism about the short time he assumes he has left on Earth is matched in intensity by his drive to find a cure one way or another.
The one character who cuts a memorable figure within the film and is not a part of ACT UP is Senator Jesse Helms, shown in file footage, representing the fear and the bigotry of an entire group of Americans who had no interest in pushing for a cure to a disease that disproportionately affects gay men. Most of the drama in How to Survive a Plague happens in scientific conferences and board meetings, as scientists and activists work, sometimes in tandem, sometimes at odds over logistics, but always towards a common goal. But the specter of Helms always lingers over the film, the foot-dragging that he represents linked, explicitly and implicitly, to a body count that could have been lower but for people like him in positions of power (including the Archbishop of New York, John O'Connor, responsible for some truly backwards writing on contraception and AIDS prevention) having no real interest in AIDS prevention.
The problem here is that Helms himself is a minor figure in the broader AIDS drama. His inflammatory speeches from the floor of the Senate provide good sound bites, but there is a pretty clear implication from the film that there was an institutional rot within both the American government and the scientific community when it came to confronting the AIDS epidemic (which is, presumably, why ACT UP came into existence in the first place), and it is never made terribly clear who the players really were, and how anti-gay bigotry helped foster an apathy towards finding a cure. Ronald Reagan's name is invoked a couple of times, and George H.W. Bush is on the business end of at least one (quite unfair) potshot about him playing golf while people die, but the dots are just never connected between federal foot-dragging on the "gay plague" and what is going on at the FDA or the NIH, where treatments are either being tested too slowly, or else being neglected entirely. When the scientists finally settle on the combination therapy (including the breakthrough of finding protease inhibitors that specifically inhibit HIV replication) that works to truly extend the lives of those who are HIV-positive in 1996, it is clearly a triumph for everyone involved, but because of the lack of clear dot-connecting between the work of the ACT UP activists and improvements in how the treatment and approval processes were carried out, it never coalesces on screen just what, exactly, ACT UP was responsible for, and what was just normal scientific progress. France also makes the choice to hold the revelation of which of the film's characters have survived to the present day thanks to combination therapy, and which ones succumbed to the infection, until the end of the film. It's a bittersweet moment to see the faces of the people from the archival footage, 20 years older, knowing that so many of the people in the film didn't survive to see their work come to fruition. They are emotional revelations, no doubt, seeing people who were already HIV-positive in the late-80's still alive and in good health in 2013, but it has the unfortunate effect of robbing the film of the contemporary perspective of so many of the players in the drama.
There is an important and powerful story within the raw material from which How to Survive a Plague is constructed. Oftentimes it comes through, and the collective force of the personalities involved forces you to take notice one way or another throughout much of the film. But the narrative is too often muddled and unclear, and the story suffers for it. B-
It's widely-accepted conventional wisdom that Jaws was the first modern summer blockbuster. Coming out right smack dab in the middle of the auteur-driven 70's, June of 1975, Jaws was an enormous, inescapable hit, and is effectively the foundation upon which Steven Spielberg's career was built. It would be two more years before George Lucas created the still-followed template for the special effects-driven franchise film, and three more years after that before Michael Cimino put the final nail in the coffin of the auteur 70's with the disaster that was Heaven's Gate. But Jaws was a harbinger of a film, for good and for ill, a movie that delighted audiences and critics and also paved the way for the destruction of the weird, personal, studio-backed movies that those New Hollywood directors like Scorsese and De Palma and Hal Ashby were making during this period (filmmakers that Spielberg has never hidden his admiration for).
Given that context, what maybe stands out at first blush to me about Jaws is how unassuming it is. It has the one special effect, so it is technically a "special effects-driven blockbuster", but that effect sucks, and is in the film for a total of no more than about 10 minutes. Mostly what people do in Jaws is they talk about just what exactly they are going to do about this enormous shark that has taken over their beach, and then when they finally formulate a plan, those people talk about what they are doing, and why they're doing it. And then eventually the shark shows up, and they make their stand, and it's over.
Here is the briefest of plot summaries, because most people have seen this film, and I don't feel that I need to go blow by blow. A shark kills a girl on Amity Island, a summer destination off the New England coast. The new police chief, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) suggests closing the beach until the shark is dealt with, but the politicians talk him out of it because they need summer dollars, and are afraid that once the tourists are scared away, they won't come back. So the beach stays open, and the shark kills a little boy. Brody (temporarily) manages to close the beach, and calls in, among others, a shark expert named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss). Some local yahoos claim to have killed the shark but Hooper convinces Brody that the shark they found isn't the same one that has killed two people already, and after one more person is killed by the shark, Brody hires a salty local shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw) to take him and Hooper out on his boat, the Orca, where the three of them will take down the shark. It proves a significantly more difficult task than they anticipate, and the shark manages to eat Quint before Brody finally kills it.
There's a bit of nuance that I've left out but honestly the story is fairly streamlined (with one exception, which I'll get to) and that plot summary pretty accurately sums up what happens. The stakes are set up efficiently (Brody's concern for public safety is overridden by the short-sighted avarice of the town mucky-mucks, until they have no choice but to listen to him), and the story really hinges on, at most, five characters (Brody, Hooper and Quint, plus Brody's wife and the town mayor). Six if you count the shark. The danger that the shark poses to the community, both in terms of safety and in terms of the economic impact, is easily understood.
Where the exception to the streamlined nature of the story lies is in the back part of the second act, when the film goes a little flabby. In Duel, most of the film's surprises had been deployed by the end of the first act, so there wasn't much left for Spielberg to do but repeat himself, in slightly different ways, as the film chugged along towards its climax. Jaws is significantly better paced, and it opens up and reveals itself to the audience in bits and pieces all throughout. But what that means is that, given how slight the bare bones of the story actually are (shark menaces population, shark is dealt with), the stall before the third-act shark hunt goes on just slightly too long - specifically, it goes on exactly one kill too long. The girl who is killed at the beginning, that sets up the entire plot of the film. The little boy who is killed after the town higher-ups refuse to close the beach, that sets up the central conflict of the film, and what the stakes for everyone are. The third kill, the man who is eaten by the shark (in lieu of Brody's own son, who was also in its vicinity at the time)? Well, it gives Brody a direct connection to the danger that the shark possesses, I guess. But Brody was already on board with that danger. And more importantly, we were already on board with that danger. The little boy's death proved how short-sighted the mayor and his cronies were acting. The third death feels like an unnecessary button, an answer to a question that no one was asking any more.
The crux of the movie rests in that third act trip that Brody, Hooper and Quint take in pursuit of the fish. First, I should remind anyone who was half (or less) paying attention that the last time I saw Robert Shaw was way, way back here, where he played the brooding Soviet menace. It's not a particularly memorable villain turn, and most people probably don't even remember that he played a Bond villain. Shaw has two moments in Jaws that are iconic, which is two more than most film characters get - his introduction, where he interrupts a meeting by scraping his fingernails across a chalkboard and proceeds to tell the townspeople that he'll catch the shark if they pay him his fee, and the story that he tells about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis:
It occurs to me that the boat trip represents three distinct styles of acting (and if it doesn't, just go with me for a minute). You have Richard Dreyfuss' twitchy Method weirdness. You've got Shaw's old Hollywood scenery chewing. And then you have Roy Scheider's lived-in naturalism. Perhaps the adjectives I've used give some indication of where I'm going with this - more than anything else, Jaws really made me appreciate just how good and interesting (and probably underappreciated) of an actor Scheider is. He carries the movie from beginning to end, and even when a couple of hams like Dreyfuss and Shaw show up to steal it away from him, he is always there, the solid anchor embedded in the sea floor, keeping the whole thing from spinning out of control. There's a scene after Hooper has come to the island, when he comes over to have dinner with the Brody's. Dreyfuss is talking to Lorraine Gary (who plays Mrs. Brody) and Scheider, telling them some story while they look on in quiet attention, and the entire time he was talking my eye was drawn inexorably to Scheider, casually opening and pouring a bottle of wine as Dreyfuss speaks. That's a movie star. Given no lines, he was still doing more interesting things than his costar.
So eventually the shark shows up, and....it looks like shit. There's no other way around that fact. I actually wrote, "the shark really looks real enough" at one point, before it had appeared above the water in any capacity. When it's still underwater, attached to whatever rig it's attached to in order to get it to move, it looks real, and scary. Brody has that famous moment when he's chumming the water and the shark just appears out of nowhere, all gaping maw and black eyes, scaring the shit out of him. There, it looks great. By the end, when it's sweeping its head back and forth across the deck of the broken ship, trying to eat Quint and Brody, it's an ugly grey puppet. That has the unfortunate effect of sucking some of the terror out of the film's climax, and is at least a counter-argument to the idea that practical effects are always preferable to CGI (a counter-argument to that is that if it was a CGI shark, it might look even worse.) Despite this, I think the ending is well set up, with Quint sliding into the monster's jaws, screaming the whole way down, and Brody, alone (because Hooper has been forced to hide under the water after the world's most ill-advised plan involving a shark cage), improvising, and successfully carrying out, a plan to destroy it. And when the monster is killed, it's a triumphant moment, much more so than the fizzle at the end of Duel, with the shark going up in an explosion of fishy viscera.
All of the good parts of Duel are also good here, and the pacing of this film is significantly better than that earlier one. Spielberg takes his foot off the gas a little too much - there is an even tighter (and scarier) thriller to be made of this material, but he's a sentimental type, and he gives the film over just a little too much to Brody's wet noodle of a family. I land on this being a very good film rather than a great one, but someone could convince me that I'm being too harsh towards it. It's really good, and Spielberg crafts a real story out of a fairly thin premise (which, granted, was also a bestselling book, but it's still a slight premise for a big-budget feature film.)
A few bullet points:
Amity Island follows in the long tradition of Spielbergian Anytowns - there's a bare hint of local color, but mostly it's just a generic Seaside Resort, the kind that families the world over go on vacation. For all of his talents as a filmmaker, Spielberg is simply not that good at creating the sense of a real, lived-in space. He traffics in emotional warmth (to a fault sometimes), and yet his films can still feel a little cold because his settings so often feel like less than real places.
Dreyfuss goes way, way bigger than necessary in his second scene, when he views and comments on the remains of the first victim. I kind of just don't like Richard Dreyfuss very much, I have to admit.
When Dreyfuss and Scheider encounter the chewed-up fishing boat in the middle of the night, John Williams' music is really nicely subtle and creepy. Reminds me of Howard Shore's score for The Silence of the Lambs, which I guess would be more accurately phrased as, Shore's Silence of the Lambs score reminds me of Williams' Jaws score.
I knew the severed head was coming and it still gave me a jolt. That's a quality scare.
When we get back to Quint at the beginning of the second half, he is a lot less taciturn than he originally appeared to be, when we met him at the meeting in the first act. His constant stream of chatter starts to get a little irritating.
This one is for a very, very select audience, but Quint sounds a bit like Rob Mariano, the way he talks with his teeth. If you don't know who Rob Mariano is, you have made wise life choices thus far.
The "put Hooper in a shark cage" plan may have been the most ill-advised thing any film characters have ever done. It goes bad immediately. There is, from its inception, a zero percent chance for it to succeed in any way.
Brody pretty much kills the shark entirely by himself. Granted that by the end of the film he's the only one left in the boat, but most of the things that Quint and Hooper do on the way there adds up to jack shit when push comes to shove and the shark has to be killed. Hooper is hiding underwater, Quint is dead, and Brody formulates and executes a plan that has nothing to do with either of the other two or their planning.
The film sort of just...ends. Brody and Hooper swim back to the island, they banter for a little bit, and then Spielberg cuts to a shot of the island as the credits come up, no music, nothing. Duel ended in a similar way. I don't know if that's a particularly Spielbergian way to end a movie, but it's kind of jarring.
There is a scene midway through Silver Linings Playbook where Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) has been invited to the house of married couple Ronnie (John Ortiz) and Veronica (Julia Stiles, at least providing somewhat of an answer to the question, "I wonder where Julia Stiles has been, I used to like her a lot?"), ostensibly for a dinner party, but mostly so they can see for themselves what Solitano's mental state is, having recently been released from a mental health facility for beating his wife's lover half to death. Veronica's sister Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), who suffers from mental illness herself, is also invited to the dinner party (for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me) and Pat and Tiffany have a long conversation about the various medications they have been prescribed, and the side effects of those medications.
That conversation is a window into a broad class of disorders that can seem mysterious to those who aren't affected by them. The medications that Pat and Tiffany have been prescribed presumably help with their mental health, but leave them in various states of dysfunctionality otherwise, whether it's jittery or zombified or anything in between. Pat is engaged in a quixotic effort to woo his wife back, despite being on the business end of a restraining order, and Tiffany, who fell into sex addiction after losing her policeman husband, uses Pat's overwhelming desire to get his wife back to convince him to become her partner in a major local dance competition. Tiffany uses the dance lessons as a device to focus her attention, and attempt to break her bad habits; she sees in Pat a fellow soul, and can see how destructive his fixation on his wife actually is, despite dangling the fact that she sometimes sees his ex-wife (through Veronica) and can get a letter from Pat to her in exchange for his agreeing to the dance lessons.
Pat's father, Patrizio (Robert DeNiro) has what is clearly a case of undiagnosed OCD; his mother Dolores (Jacki Weaver) appears to have adapted to Patrizio's own mental illness without ever asking him to get it treated. Patrizio and Dolores are of a generation where such things weren't discussed, and it never occurs to them that their relationship with Pat, loving though it is, is also toxic to his well-being. It is implied that Dolores worked legal back-channels in order to get Pat released from the institution at the beginning, and neither parent considers the possibility that perhaps Pat's best bet to get healthy isn't in their house. But he moves in, and he eventually goes back on his medications (after a very ugly incident when Pat accidentally strikes his mother), and begins to put the pieces of his life back together, with a whole lot of Tiffany's encouragement.
The acting in Silver Linings Playbook is as good as advertised - Jennifer Lawrence's prickly energy fits the character of Tiffany perfectly, and it's hard to imagine any other actress playing the role. It's always nice to see Robert DeNiro fully engaged in a performance, which kind of feels like it hasn't happened since the first Meet The Parents movie, way back in 2000. Bradley Cooper has to essentially carry the movie, and he does a nice job of subsuming his usual smirky persona for Pat's damaged, difficult existence. I can't really call Chris Tucker's very minor role as Pat's friend Danny from the institution a "revelation", because it's such a slight part, but boy Tucker is funny and charming in the film.
It's hard for me to really judge how well this film portrays mental illness. It falls into one of the classic cinematic traps of showing us a character's warped mental state by having them yell a lot, which starts to feel a little cheap after a while. On the other hand, it does a good job of avoiding knee-jerk judgments about the mistakes that both Pat and Tiffany have made along the way, and tries hard to portray them as two people whose actions are part and parcel with real, honest-to-God disorders. Ultimately, I think the film's balance is off just slightly, in that it spends too much time with Patrizio's obsession with the Philadelphia Eagles (which is how his mental illness is filtered to the audience, but straddles too close to the line of normal sports fan weirdness) and not enough time, quite frankly, on the dancing. The scenes when Cooper and Lawrence dance are delightful, particularly during the training sequences (who doesn't love a good training scene?) and even during the competition, when director David O. Russell chooses to film in somewhat off-putting close-ups (either as a stylistic choice, or because Cooper and Lawrence couldn't quite credibly pull the dancing off), the two stars give off a palpable chemistry that gives life to the film. Silver Linings Playbook is a good movie about mental illness that also involves some dancing; I think it could have been a great movie about dancing that was about people with mental illness. B+
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
Somebody can check my math if they want, but by my count Steven Spielberg has directed 28 films in his 40-year career (if you count Duel and toss out his segment of the ill-fated Twilight Zone movie, and also the did-he-or-didn't-he Poltergeist), and while I started this marathon with Duel, his feature film debut proper is The Sugarland Express, released in 1974. Terence Malick has been working for almost the exact same amount of time as a feature film director, and in his entire career he has directed a total of six films (if you spot him To The Wonder, his latest film that premiered at last year's Venice Film Festival and has seemingly disappeared since.) Malick's debut, Badlands, premiered in theaters in October of 1973, beating Spielberg's debut by almost exactly six months.
It's hard not to think of Badlands while you watch The Sugarland Express - it is something of a weird coincidence that two of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers debuted within months of each other with films that bear a striking superficial resemblance to one another. Both are based-on-true-story pictures about a rural couple evading the law and getting themselves in deeper and deeper with each subsequent action. In each movie, one half of the couple is largely responsible for the action, while the other passively tags along (in Badlands, Martin Sheen's character is the take-charge half of the couple; in Sugarland Express, it is Goldie Hawn's character who is ultimately responsible for what happens.) The comparison pretty much falls apart at any deeper level though, which is why Badlands is a bonafide classic, a major new voice planting his flag in the soil, while The Sugarland Express is an answer to a trivia question. Malick and Spielberg occupy opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of sheer bulk of output, and how a person feels about those two modes of artistic creation is something of a litmus test. Spielberg's highs are probably not as high as Malick's, while his lows are much lower, but Spielberg has a body of work that, taken as a whole, is almost unmatched in cinema history, and Malick's is just too slight, for my taste, to be held up against masters like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.
The Sugarland Express begins as Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) breaks her husband Clovis (William Atherton, probably best known as the "this man has no dick" guy from Ghostbusters) out of a fairly low-security prison in rural Texas. Lou Jean had also recently done time for a variety of fairly minor crimes, and she is concerned that the 2 year old son that they have together will be permanently taken from them and placed in the foster system, as he is currently in the custody of a foster family. On the way out of the prison, the Poplins' car is stopped by Officer Slide (Michael Sacks) and after a brief chase, the couple takes the officer hostage and orders him to drive them to their son's current foster home. The trail of their commandeered police vehicle is quickly picked up by Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson) and as they drive across the state of Texas, they are followed by a caravan of police vehicles led by Tanner, as he tries to end the standoff peacefully and save Officer Slide's life.
It's unfair to continue comparing this minor film to one, in Badlands, that is studied in film schools, so I'll only say one more thing along those lines, and that is that Malick immediately has an idea for exactly what sort of tone he's looking to strike in his film (contrasting Sissy Spacek's character Holly and her childlike naivete with the sociopathy of Sheen's Kit Carruthers), whereas Spielberg never figures out the tone he wants to set for the story of the Poplins. There is a distinct tenor of "the wacky shenanigans of rural folk" that permeates the film, especially in the first half, so that when Spielberg asks us to care about the fate of the people involved, it's a lot harder than it should be. When the Poplins first break out of prison, they hitch a ride with an older couple who had come to visit their son, and when the car is pulled over by Officer Slide, Lou Jean hijacks it while the couple is out on the road talking to the policeman. Slide tells the older couple to stay there by the side of the road as he takes chase, and they are revisited a couple of times, still standing at the side of the road and gently bickering with one another, for a bit of very low-level comic relief (their fate is ultimately left entirely unresolved by Spielberg, who eventually, for good reasons but still jarringly, abandons the subplot completely.) Later in the film, there is a big pileup crash involving the police convoy which has a very, very distinct Blues Brothers vibe to the way it's shot and edited. And towards the end, as the Poplins and Officer Slide approach their destination, they are greeted by crowds of well-wishers who have staged a makeshift (though surprisingly thorough) carnival at the center of town; less than about 5 minutes later, the violent climax of the Poplins' journey takes place. It's like one of those sitcoms where the couple spends 21 minutes insulting each other, and then in the last minute tack on an unearned bit of sweetness. Spielberg aims towards a sort of heartbreaking poignancy, but the bulk of the film is simply too wacky for it to take hold.
I've never really known Goldie Hawn in anything but late-period self-parody mode; she has a certain relaxed charm here as the fairly dim Lou Jean, although she's in over her head when the script asks her to emote, and while I won't call it a surprise that she presented a confident lead performance here (I knew she'd won an Academy Award early in her career, and that there must be some reason she became a star) it was still nice to be reminded of her effortless ability to be cute and engaging. Atherton and Sacks are fine as her co-stars, neither makes a major impression but Atherton has some nice moments with Hawn, and Sacks has a good scene with the two of them where he attempts to help them work through an argument (he identifies himself as a marriage counseling pro, which is probably true for a lot of real-life lawmen, especially in small towns). The real star of the film is Ben Johnson, who infuses what could be the cliched role of the stern Texas policeman with a real degree of humanity - I would almost recommend the film simply for his performance, which is one in his very long career that I think has been somewhat forgotten. He'd won the Oscar a couple of years prior for playing another, fairly similar Texan in The Last Picture Show, and he had carved out a long career before that playing variations on that character, because he was really, really good at it.
I don't mean to be quite so hard on this film - it is reasonably, though very slightly, successful, and it is narratively coherent even if its tone is all over the place. It doesn't aim that high, and if it is ultimately less interesting than Duel, it is probably because it feels like a film that was supervised much more closely by the people who actually paid for it. What I suspect, just from my own intuition, is that they wanted a light touch which Spielberg ultimately balked out, which is why the film is so internally inconsistent from moment to moment. The graft doesn't completely work, but there are enough small pleasures here to make it a worthy part of Spielberg's canon.
(There are at least two different versions of Duel, due to its origin as a TV movie-of-the-week, a 74 minute television cut that ran on ABC in 1971 and a 90 minute theatrical cut that played overseas in 1972. I'm not entirely sure if the 74 minute cut is available so obviously the version I am working from is the 90 minute theatrical one.)
It's not news that the made-for-TV movie has mostly disappeared from the television landscape. Broadcast networks have almost entirely given up on them, and the cable channels that still make them are bifurcated into two camps - the big prestige pictures from the art-house networks, like last year's HBO-produced Game Change, an Emmy-baity bit of insta-politics starring bonafide movie stars, and bottom-of-the-barrel shlock like Sharktopus, produced by Roger Corman and starring the remains of Eric Roberts' career. There is effectively no ground for a lark like Duel, a low-stakes but well-produced thriller starring a B-list actor that desires nothing more than to come into America's living rooms and entertain for 90 minutes. I don't necessarily lament that fact (bad TV movies significantly outnumbered good or even average ones, and young directors like the 24 year old Steven Spielberg are probably better off honing their craft in the DIY, indie film style than in the employ of a corporate-owned network) but it's a salient fact when watching Duel to recognize its time capsule quality.
Duel began life as a Richard Matheson short story which was published in Playboy, and which he eventually expanded into a TV movie length film. Matheson is probably most famous either for writing I Am Legend, which has been filmed several times, or for his handful of Twilight Zone episodes, including the classic Shatner-starring "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" (the gremlin-on-a-plane episode); I feel very confident in saying that he was the much bigger name on the film when it was produced. It unquestionably reflects Matheson's paranoid horror sensibility; Spielberg has been forced to bend his style into the shape of Matheson's script, rather than the other way around.
The film divides very neatly into thirds. The first act begins with our hero, David Mann (played by Dennis Weaver, who I gather was something of a That Guy for 60's and 70's era television) traveling into the boonies outside of LA in his sad, red/orange Plymouth Valiant on some sort of business-related trip. Along the way he passes (as in, goes around on a two-lane road) the ugliest, grimiest oil tanker imaginable, and is slowly but inexorably drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse with the sociopathic, unseen driver of the truck, who the film suggests was just looking for an excuse to make sushi out of a hapless driver. Mann manages to escape the chase when he crashes into a white picket fence outside of a rural diner, and the second third of the movie has Mann discover that the tanker, which he thought he had lost, is parked outside the diner, and then indulge his own paranoia about which of the customers at the restaurant is the driver of the truck. The final third picks up the chase on the road once again, with the driver of the tanker escalating the conflict to its breaking point, and Mann desperately searching for a way to end it.
It's something of an understood phenomenon that Spielberg is a much better beginner than he is a finisher. Raiders of the Lost Ark opens with a bravura action setpiece involving a man being chased by a gigantic rolling ball of death, and ends with people closing their eyes. Jurassic Park's most famous moments mostly involve the pre-sabotage "Holy shit, dinosaurs!" scenes, and it goes without saying that Saving Private Ryan is quite possibly the film with the most precipitous dropoff in the history of film from the stage-setting opening sequence to the long, intermittently interesting slog that follows. Duel falls right into this same category - the first act plays like the tautest, most viscerally exciting thriller you'll ever see, and then eventually things go flabby. A long opening scene tracks the passage of Mann's car from city to country, while the soundtrack is made up of nothing but diegetic sounds, the radio, the car, the sounds of nature. Spielberg takes the time to build the tension from the moment Mann first encounters the truck to the point at which he's barreling down the highway at 90 miles an hour, in serious danger of his life, and the entire sequence pre-diner takes less than half an hour. Cut it by about 5 minutes and it's a memorable episode of the Twilight Zone; add another 15 minutes and it's your grandfather's favorite Mannix, the one where Mannix is chased by the psycho truck driver for the whole episode and eventually outwits him.
But this is a movie, and there is still an hour's worth of material to pad out before we get to our conclusion. There are a handful of secondary characters in Duel, but none of them (with the possible exception of Mann's wife, who he has a phone conversation with midway through the first act) makes much of an impression. Mann is the only character of note in the film, and the script has to figure out a way to filter his perception of what's happening to the audience. The script makes an unfortunate, though probably not surprising, choice in the second act by including a narrative voiceover from Mann's perspective. I honestly wasn't sure that that's what it was doing at first - when it first happens, with Mann standing in front of a mirror at the diner, I assumed (given how I'm attuned as a 21st century film watcher) that it was simply a bit of soundtrack overlap, and the scene of Mann looking in the mirror would soon cut to a scene of him talking to someone at the diner, out loud, about what was happening. But no, this is spoken internal monologue, and it is really jarring. Mann is confronted by a diner full of taciturn, shit-kicking good old boys who all wear similar boots to the ones the driver of the truck wears (the only positive identification he has of the person who is menacing him, and I'm not sure if one would genuinely expect to find modern-day cowboys in the wilds of Southern California, but it's a nice nod to the film's Western roots, so I can go with it), and Mann slowly loses his mind, first in his interior narrative and eventually outwardly, as he tries to figure out how to deal with the fact that his tormentor is apparently sharing space with him. The film picks back up once we get back to spoken dialogue between Mann and the person who he identifies as the driver - the voiceover is not a fatal problem for the film, but boy is it a wretched choice.
So Mann eventually gets back on the road for the third act finish, and although it's a significant improvement from the static second act, the fact that we basically know all there is that the film wants us to know about the driver of the truck at this point robs the film of some of its suspense. The slow rollout of the truck driver's malevolent intent in the first act ratches up the tension in stages; the danger represented by the truck in the third act starts at 10, so there's nowhere for the tension to really go but down. The film futzes around with a strange interlude with the driver of a school bus, filled with supremely obnoxious children, asking Mann to help him give the bus a moving start - Mann insists his car is too small to do it, the bus driver insists he's wrong, eventually Mann is proven right, and then the truck shows up to menace Mann again. This scene in particular really belies Duel's TV movie roots, and wikipedia tells me that it was indeed added to the theatrical release to pad out the running time; it goes from nowhere to nowhere, but allows Weaver to yell at a bunch of children for immediately climbing all over his car the moment he stops to help out, which is extremely weird but kind of funny.
Ultimately, the biggest sin of the third act is the anti-climax that ends it. I won't give it away for anyone who hasn't seen this and wants to, but the movie really comes to an abrupt and deeply unsatisfying end. The choice is made very early on to make the truck itself the villain of the piece, and while I appreciate the sort of mysterious terror that this gives to the film, it means that, in the end, Mann's quest doesn't end with a satisfying payoff against a real-live person, but an (unsatisfying, in my mind) payoff against an object.
Weaver's performance is workmanlike, and I don't necessarily mean that negatively. He has a TV actor's weakness of not really being willing (or able) to alter the performance as he goes along, which is the sort of thing you rarely need to do when you're playing a guest character on a 48 minute episode of a television show that will only ever revert to the status quo ante once the episode is over. Mann's journey here is supposed to take him from a sad, shlubby loser who can't even fathom what is happening to him to a determined, somewhat courageous man who recognizes that his only way out is to fight back, and while he's good at the shlubby part of that the sense of steely determination never really comes across at the end. He does have a nice, expressive face, and he wears an ugly pair of early-70's sunglasses like no one's business. The film pushes very hard and unsubtly on the theme of male anxiety in the first act (there are two parallel conversations, one of which is between a radio caller and a talk show host that Mann listens to, and one of which Mann has with his wife, that both hit hard on the idea that the men of the early-70's are having a tough time figuring out their place in a world in which they are no longer the sole or even main breadwinners of their households, and the idea of the traditional male role is in rapid flux.) But it mostly drops that theme after that, which is maybe reflective of the film having trust in the audience to remember and reflect on it as the plot of the film progresses, but is also probably reflective of the fact that the script couldn't figure out a good way to work the theme back in organically. Spielberg also, after a nice, understated touch with the soundtrack in the 1st act (the sound design is really good, with the differential sound of the two vehicles' respective engines providing an underscore to the menace that the tanker poses to Mann's sad little Valiant) eventually goes heavy-handed with the music, especially near the climax. This is another problem he has evinced throughout his career, and it's one that can already be detected here.
Matheson's script never quite figures out how to efficiently tell the story it intends to tell without someone for Weaver to play off of, and Spielberg's direction spends too much time exploring dead-ends. But the suspense that they build together is undeniable, and if you can get past the fact that they come to an unsatisfactory conclusion, it's a pretty good B-movie for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Spielberg the visual craftsman is in here, no question about it, but he hasn't quite emerged yet.
