COLOR AS EMOTION, EMOTION AS COLOR; THE FILMS OF THE ARCHERS

BLACK NARCISSUS
THE RED SHOES
I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING
(CRITERION COLLECTION) 

“For this will to deceive that is in things luminous may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to fraudulent destinies.”   Cormac McCarthy    Blood Meridian 

And the abyss looks back...Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger co-wrote, co-directed, and co-produced films under the aegis of their production company, The Archers. Powell, born in Canterbury, England in 1905, shot stills for English silent film director, Rex Ingram—whom audiences know as the terrifying and vastly self-amused genie in Thief of Bagdad, on which Powell was one of six directors. Powell co-wrote England’s first talkie, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and, as did so many key American directors in the early 1970s, learned his craft directing low-budget quickies and B movies. These gained him the attention of Alexander Korda (another of Thief of Bagdad’s co-directors), who introduced him to Emeric Pressburger.

Pressburger, a Hungarian refugee escaping the Nazis, provided the compassion for human frailty that Powell seemed born without. Pressburger, who lost everything when he fled Hungary, possessed the outsider perspective that Powell, as an upper-class Englishmen, had trouble understanding. They forged a singular, enduring collaboration. According to film historian William K. Everson: “They proved to be one of those fortuitous combinations (Ford and Wayne, Astaire and Rogers, Laurel and Hardy) where the chemistry was felicitous in every degree. Powell’s delight in technique was given substance by Pressburger’s writing; and that sometimes gentle and subdued writing was given flamboyant release and emphasis in Powell’s direction.” And if Everson’s prose style seems somewhat 19th century, that suits the Archers, too. “Felicitous” is the word, indeed. It suggests the well-educated, light spirit (combined with a heavy heart) that marks the Archers’ films.

The Archers’ distinctive combination of literate, European, sophisticated perversity and lyrical flowing narrative place them in no school but their own. Purveyors of fantasy with an undertone of ever-looming mortality and Faustian bargains to be upheld—The Red Shoes—or chroniclers of barely concealed eroticism and psychological symbolism—Black Narcissus—Powell and Pressburger were structuralists par excellence. Nobody in cinema history—like, nobody—understood how to utilize color to underscore the emotions of a shot, a scene, or a sequence as did the Archers. And their films reward repeat viewing more than any other directors’s. In some viewings the plot holds the foreground, and you marvel at the classical, interlocking determination of the characters to unearth their fates, for good or naught. Other times the color palette and illustrative editing holds sway, and the story recedes as you bask in the magic and skill of the technique. Black Narcissus is my single favorite film, and one of the best films ever, period.

"No, I don't give two shits. Why do you ask?" David Farrar in Black Narcissus.

The Archers’s subject matter remains constant: the seduction of self-delusion, our interior confusions and the serpentine routes they follow to expression, the sweet sadness of romance, the difficulty of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, the enduring values and horrors of class identity, and our pointless rigidity in the face of our own stupidity/arrogance/vanity/desire/ambition/need for absolution and terror of adult responsibility. Wait—did I mention the seduction of self-delusion?

The distinguishing characteristic of the many disparate Archer scripts is the subtlety with which they present their sub-textual concerns. For the team, “story” serves only as the medium for their thematic ideas. Those ideas—always complex, sometimes paradoxically self-contradictory—lurk within the “action,” comment upon it, and never interfere with the “plot.” Plots and subtexts so intertwine and inform one another that the usual separations hardly apply. Often, plot and subtext are experienced as the Archers intended, as pure emotion. While in the moment, the power of that emotion overwhelms and obviates all that rational analysis nonsense, which only seems useful while thinking about the picture afterward, never while watching and immersed. Black Narcissus could be takenas a tale of nuns battling the elements and one another (as the mass audience did) or as a perverse classic about longing that happens to feature nuns: A treatise on the erotic power of memory and the tragedy of wasted love. Likewise, The Red Shoescan be a sentimental ballet story, or an in-depth analysis of the power wars between men and women, the desperate measures men will go to in pursuit of inspiration, and, guess what, the tragedy of wasted love.

Something’s always lurking beneath the spoken word. The Archers’s dialogue is not quite naturalist yet not quite theatrical, the delivery lightning-quick, the diction always precise and the pacing usually rapid. The Archers favor a traditional three-act structure with a climax and a dénouement. The formalism of their structure makes the weirdness seeping through—like the memory of a dream seeping through the whole day following—all the more compelling. And, always, everything—emotion, plot movement, character-building detail, dialogue—is polished and understated to the point of invisibility.

The ravishing restored prints of both Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes that Film Forum showcased have found their proper home in the mind-blowing new DVDs released by the Criterion Collection. Given thatThe Red Shoes devolves into fantasy from time to time, the rich presentation of those 1948 three-strip Technicolor colors—colors that no cinematographic method has yet matched—prove even more crucial. The Archers’ understanding of the potential of Technicolor as a narrative tool, and their use of color to illuminate narrative or psychological aspects, is unparalleled. The Archers were the greatest directors of Technicolor in the history of cinema, surpassing Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk. While the extras are—as to be expected from Criterion—classy, literate, amusing, and illuminating (just listen to Scorsese chat with Powell on the commentary track of Black Narcissus), the real worth here is the care Criterion lavished on the color reproduction, on the range of the palette, on the key separations of tones of the same color, of the Archers’s unceasing conflict between darkness and light. Play these on the biggest screen you can find.

The Red Shoes is an adult, cosmopolitan essay on the obsession that art requires and on the hypocritical battles in which men engage to possess the muse. The fantasy ballet sequence that marks the climax of the film, done with 1948 special effects requiring backbreaking, painstaking, repetitive efforts, is a masterpiece of pure cinema; a childlike, hallucinatory, nightmarish, Jungian, Freudian, Surreal/Symbolic, hypnotizing sequence that could be duplicated, in its multiplicity of messages and emotions, in no other medium. Amazingly, the passage of time notwithstanding, (The Red Shoes is 62 years old!) it also remains an effective ballet sequence. Shots and sets flow into one another with the seamlessness of a dream, with every image gleaming like a jewel, as impenetrable as the psyche that created it. The emotional power of the Archers’s films, and the clarity with which they draw their characters, only partially explain how this work remains modern no matter how long ago it was made.

A while back, Criterion also released the Archers’s I Know Where I’m Going—a deceptively simple, cosmopolitan adult love story of great charm, told in easy-going B/W, with no hidden messages save the clear happiness of a melancholy spirit (Powell) working on a thoroughly pleasant tale. Wendy Hiller is engaged to a loathsome businessman (who never appears onscreen). While waiting for him on a lovely Scottish isle, she falls, against her pragmatic judgment, for the local impoverished Scots lord. The relentless optimism, typical of a British World War II cheer-up movie, never detracts from the fully formed characters. The Archers’s sense of humor, and Powell’s great love for his native Western Isles, is clear throughout: The most literate love comedy of the period, still wonderful and among the most credible love stories on film.

THE BRUTAL FUTURISM OF GODARD'S PAST

2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle 

Jean-luc Godard lost interest in classical narrative structure about the same time he quit caring about the problems of men. In his early films, still exploring archetypes from cinema’s past, Godard depicted men who died (physically, spiritually, morally) imitating the onscreen icons of their upbringing. Cleansed of that struggle his own self, JLG turned from the problems of men to the problem of masculinity. That did not include profession or being a warrior or a father. Instead, he asked how does a man make the woman he loves fall and stay in love with him. Like Eric Rohmer, Godard has little doubt about the answer to that question: he can’t. At least, not intentionally.

Having dealt with men, movies and masculinity in ‘65’s Alphaville and Pierrot le fou, and finished with modern romance by ’66’s Masculin,féminin, (a period of creative output to rival Bob Dylan’s, only without the amphetamines) Godard turned to women. The dissonance between their social/sexual power and their political/economic oppression became the prism through which he viewed societal ills. Capitalism was foremost, with Vietnam and the consumerism-driven loss of the soul right behind.JLG’s favorite repeating metaphor for this tension—manifest by the lead character in 1966’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle—is prostitution.

Based on a non-fiction article in Le Nouvelle Observateur, 2 Or 3 Things follows a young mother who turns tricks—at the urging of her mechanic husband—to pay for their apartment in the soulless, newly-built, high-rise suburbs surrounding Paris. We first meet Marina Vlady, the lead actress, facing the camera as Godard whispers in voice-over: “Is her hair dark auburn or light brown? I can’t tell. Now she turns to the right—it doesn’t matter.” Godard whispers throughout the film, reminding us that an entire world of thought, politics, culture and assumption surround the story-telling.

Though story meant increasingly less to JLG—except as a chariot for his theoretical notions—here the human moments are perfectly observed, moving and never driven by plot necessity. It’s a measure of Godard’s influence that his fragmented narrative—interrupted by long shots of consumer products, epic tableau of building construction and meandering portraits of cars in traffic—proves easy to follow. Forty years ago it might have been confusing. Since then, the larger world of cinema has not caught up to Godard, but it has cannibalized what it can digest.

2 or 3 Things stands as the end of Godard’s classical period and the beginning of his more fragmented, primarily political, Brechtian, post-modern work. It also marks the height, until recently, of Godard’s adoration of visual beauty for its own sake. 2 or 3 Things is astonishingly beautiful. Given that many of the loveliest shots feature unlovely subjects—mostly suburban sprawl—it’s hard to discern now whether Godard sought a Brutalism/Futurist appreciation for the oppressive architecture of social fascism, or if he expects us to find it ugly. He doesn’t seem to find this new world lacking in seduction.

The film moves from parody (Vlady’s husband listening to Lyndon Johnson declare his intention to bomb Moscow) to social essay: Vlady works in a brothel featuring a day-care center and customers paying with consumer goods. “All I have is cat food,” Vlady’s trick mutters. “Will that do?” He adds his can to pile.

Interspersed are exquisite panorama of construction scenes, massive freeways and blank skyscrapers, evoking the framing, composition and just plain weirdness of William Eggleston. (That is, they evoke Eggleston now. 2 or 3 Things appeared a decade prior to Eggleston’s MoMA debut.) Godard’s genius cinematographer, Raoul Coutard (Jules et Jim, Le Mépris, Weekend), captures the oppression and machine-made sensuality of this alien universe: a robins-egg-blue dump truck jerking back and forth, the unbearable weight of a freeway hovering over the workers beneath, a slow pan across a horizon of glass and steel.

Because it stands with Le Mépris as Godard’s most beautiful, cinematographic and profound film—and because its modernity is both Pop and so of any age—this brand-new, remastered 35mm print is a revelation (new, more idiomatic subtitles have also been added). The Pop seduction of consumerism is explored via garish shots of detergent, the inside of electronic devices and construction cranes made ominous and sexual. Unlike the winter-cold irony of Alphaville or the snotty affection of Masculin, feminn, 3 or 2 offers an early glimpse of the exquisite heartache that so informs Godard’s more recent works, like 2001’s In éloge de l’amour and 2004’s Notre musique. Godard cuts between moments crammed with banal dialogue and ambient-sound dioramas of a new city being noisily created. He finds his poetry in the spaces between these moments/shots, and the irresistible horror/beauty of the industrial maelstrom as only Godard could perceive it. He creates an ineffable, purely cinematic poetry, where there is no accounting for the powerful emotions his juxtapositions provide. The impulse to become over-analytical is a by-product of sitting through any Godard picture. But 2 Or 3 Thingsis the rare Godard film in which the emotions hit harder and linger longer than the ideas. As always, he’s witty as hell. As one montage makes you ache, another makes you laugh aloud.

Contemporaneous critical writing insisted that Godard was determined to shatter filmic narrative convention. Forty years after 2 or 3 Things’ initial release, it’s clear that Godard simply replaced classic structure with his own—more emotionally driven—pacing, plot and emphasis. He may not longer care about what-happens-next, but he puts two images together with an awareness of their power, and, more importantly, of the resonance their montage creates. Nobody thinks like Godard, nobody cuts like him, nobody lets ideas carry emotion and emotion carry ideas as he does. With, like, ninety films made and who knows how many more to come, it’s tough to claim that one is his finest. But there is one you must not miss, one that must be seen on the big screen. This is it.

There’s No Aggression
Like Passive Aggression
Climates

Film Forum Limited Engagement

Nuri Bilge Ceylan may be the least-known of the world’s four or five greatest directors. Only his 2003 Distant (Uzak) is available on DVD. With Distant, Ceylan proved himself the first clear artistic descendant of Tarkovsky. Using Tarkovsky-like framing and pacing (that is, slooow), Ceylan explored the existential discontents of Turkey’s urban and rural cultures, through a story of an unwelcome country bumpkin coming to visit his sophisticated, emotionally paralyzed Istanbul cousin. Released in 2002, Distant had a tiny domestic theatrical showing in 2004, and was easily the best film of the year. It shares a kinship of look, feel, pacing and melancholy with another outstanding film of that year, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return.

Climates, Ceylan’s new film, focuses more on human connection than a larger cosmic or political theme. Ceylan cast himself and Ebru Ceylan (they are married) as a couple whose love has turned to grinding bitterness. Climates explores how a man who never says what he means drives love away even as he yearns for it daily. Some of the most moving scenes are practically dialogue-free, and all are shot in rich, painterly palette that is Ceylan’s trademark.

A gifted still photographer, he composes a visually nourishing frame that bears the weight of his long, unmoving takes. There are images in this film that no film before has attempted and depictions of relationship moments too familiar to bear. Without a doubt, Climate is the best film of the year.

HURTS SO GOOD, ITALIAN STYLE

La mia prestazione é debole
Jules Dassin has a gift for depicting highly ritualized violence, both physical and psychological. Well, and psycho-sexual, too. The Code made sure the rough stuff in his American films was implied, never depicted—our loss. But once the Communist witch-hunt and Blacklist ran Dassin out of America, his already apparently seething rage (Check outBrute Force [1947] for a prison’s worth of dudes glowering shirtlessly and sweating at one another with deep multiple intent) boiled over.

Night and the City (1950), the most hysterical of all the hysterical-period noirs, includes an over-long, super-close-up, sweaty, squishy pro-wrestling grapple between two flabby squirmy guys in little tiny rubber underpants. It’s deeply unsettling, and functions as a physical metaphor for all the psychic violence the lead characters inflict on one another. When our poor schmuck of a small-time hustling hero gets his comeuppance, Dassin doesn’t even show his violent demise. There’s just a forlorn splash in the Thames to mark the spot where a real loser really lost: death as ritual.

There’s also an extended wrestling sequence between sumo-size squishy Turkish men in little tiny underpants in Dassin’s Topkapi! (1964), his one good-humored caper movie. For added wrestlingness, the Turkish men douse themselves with and rub into their sweaty skin about a gallon of (olive?) oil apiece. Then they grapple, squishily, oilyly. This event is framed as a traditional rite, so that we understand that the oily guys grappling are like totally manly and everything. Dassin clearly digs wrestling, of a sort.

As inflamed as Night and the City might be, it was only a warm-up. After a five year hiatus, Dassin returned with the magnificent caper noir, Rififi (1955). Showcasing his love of ritual, Rififi features a 25-minute wordless vault break-in performed as ballet. Dassin himself stars as a dapper safecracker. Among the several deeply perverse interpersonal dynamics that Dassin presents as utterly matter-of-fact, the foremost is between the leader of the caper and his former girlfriend. As of our hero’s release from prison, which commences the film, the girlfriend has taken up with the man who’s going to get robbed. She has a tearful reunion with said hero. After they hug and smooch with great tenderness, our hero takes off his belt, turns his girlfriend around, rips open the back of her fancy dress, and whips her to the floor.

The whipping is silent, save the crack of the belt. The man’s face shows no pleasure, only resignation; the woman takes it. Dassin kinda suggests that she takes it and likes it; but whatever, she definitely thinks it’s her due. The beating is for screwing the other guy, apparently. In a film renowned for its visceral encounters, this is the most heartfelt. The psycho-sexual beating touches Dassin deeply. His baldly presented interest in such things has no equivalent in films of this era.

 

Sado-masochistic dynamics move to the fore in every relationship in the revelatory La Loi (The Law), Dassin’s 1959 magnum opus, brought to light in an amazing B/W print by Oscilloscope Laboratories, the heretofore indie-only distribution company owned and run by Adam Yauch, MCA of the Beastie Boys. 

La Loi takes place in an exquisite, impoverished, improbable—except in Puccini—seaside Italian town with every possible narrative cliché in residence. There’s a dashing thug who runs the town’s underworld (Yves Montand with a killer spiv mustache); a rotting old aristocrat who’s ruled the town and everyone in it for his entire lifetime (Pierre Brasseur, the God-faced god of French theater and cinema); the miserable, lovely wife of a wimpy little judge (Melina Mercouri, married to Dassin and his great, epic beloved in an intermittently credible, but totally hot performance); a naïve young agronomist who arrives in town with his city clothes and “northern ways” (Marcello Mastroianni mailing it in); and a trio of va-va-voomish working-class sisters who serve and service the aristocrat.

One sister, however, refuses the old goat. Va-va-voom all-star Gina Lollobrigida is too proud, too wild, too full of ze romantic passion for ze life to succumb. For this, every man in town wants her and every woman of her class or lower hates her. She will, it goes without saying, end up with Marcello. Lollobrigida’s problematic inability to act and her, for me, problematic non-status as a lust object prove, how you say, problematic. For me, she’s always been the Italian Anne-Margaret, whose attempts to ape the behavior of someone experiencing lust come off as over-played, truly weird, and in the end, creepy. Her scenes with Marcello are, for the most part, laughable as they fight for camera position. Gina has lovely skin, and the energy pours off of her, but she never figures out how to channel it. Marcello responds to this onslaught by smiling wispily in a manner that makes one want to smack his face.

Dassin always had problems with pacing, pacing within scenes, within sequences, even within shots. His story drags and his tour-de-force set-piece camera-choreography takes forever until, suddenly, a moment turns real and riveting. The momentary effect is maddening but the overall effect is oddly moving and memorable. There’s much to admire formally about the picture, even if the formal elements often interfere with any sort of entertaining or smooth narrative. The constant power struggles, their denial, and how that repression ends up expressed in eroticism, make the picture a bizarre, one-off classic.

What really grabs and lingers is when folks stop being polite and start hitting one another. In the first of those moments, Lollobridgida’s smokin’ sisters tie her to a thick wooden table and whip her repeatedly with leather straps. Their faces filled with envy and unknowing lust, they lash out at Gina’s considerable beauty. But they cannot mar her perfect skin; she takes every blow—and there’s lots of them—and smiles as they strike. The sisters considerately tied Gina down—in her thin, clingy Italian 50s-movie sundress—so that her breasts are upthrust by the rope just below them and her thighs exposed to the max. Gina looks like a cover illustration for True Magazine. Being tied down and writhing elicit her most credible moments onscreen.

Later, Yves Montand wacks his son in the face just as the boy was about to escape into a life of bliss with Melina Mercouri. She’s twice his age and they’re madly in love. They sneak onto the one bus outta town, but Yves finds them pre-departure. One of them would do anything for the other. One of them, sadly, can be turned from love with a slap to the face. When Melina returns defeated to the town that night, Yves drags her off to the room he keeps for his paramours. Telling her his son is a “whippersnapper”, but that he has what Melina needs, Yves commences an extraordinary dance of dominance and submission. He rips Melina’s dress, kisses her, pushes her away, waits for her to fight back, then tears up her clothes some more. She digs it. Neither speak, both pretend they do not know what they’re really about, and both are totally into it. This scene—the most perverse, moving, and real in the picture—speaks to something primal in the director. It’s hot stuff.

And it aligns/expresses the theme of La Loi, which depicts everyone in town as locked in power struggles and sado-masochistic symbiosis with everyone else. The Law of the title is a drinking game, a grim take on Truth Or Dare, in which guys sit around a table drinking and informing one another of their shortcomings. The psycho-sexual tension between the town’s menfolk as they verbally abuse, attack, and/or cower from one another makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? seem likeOn Golden Pond.

Dassin’s clearly got issues. And rage. And the betrayals he suffered during the Blacklist ramped up his already uncharitable view of humanity. His darkness makes La Loi sing. He stumbles only when he tries to be nice.

TO EVISCERATE, FROM THE LATIN: SPARTACUS, BLOOD AND SAND

Commitment to an ideal.

The “best shows in the history of television,” the avatars of “TV is the new cinema,” The Wire, The Sopranos, and Deadwood (all of which I love and re-watch obsessively) lost their nerve at the finale. None had the commitment to die as they had lived, and all succumbed to kitsch. All, in their last minutes, indulged in a sentimentality they had for the most part avoided over their various lengthy unfolding narratives.

 Deadwood is perhaps the most innocent offender. Its finale reeks of dashed hopes for one season more. Taken before its time, Deadwood made the grave tactical error of basing Season Three’s pivotal villain on a real historical figure who we all knew damn well didn’t die in Deadwood. So the villain never got his comeuppance— he rode out of town with blood up to his elbows looking all peevish — and we never got our catharsis. Which, even someone as poorly educated in the classics as myself understands, is the entire point of drama.

 The Sopranos cheated. That show seldom achieved a traditional season-ending climax. Composed as it was of small life-observances set against the larger backdrop of never-ending power struggles, The Sopranos’ telling payoffs were all in the nuance, with an occasional bloodbath to remind us of the true stakes. With its tricky jump-to-black ending, the producers simply admitted that they had no friggin’ idea how to end the thing. They resorted to gimmick rather than letting the story play out as it always had, another day in the life. The result was intense coitus interruptus. Shockingly, folks hailed this as innovation. .

The Wire failed not only in its final episode, but in all the finales of all its seasons. The creators painted themselves into a corner with their obvious montage-of-key-characters/moments/cityscapes-set-to-all-too-on-the-nose-music. Here’s a show renowned, and rightly so, for a hard-headed naturalism that permitted it to showcase the most egregious violence and heart-rending hopelessness. The realist style kept the nihilism from seeming exploitative or cheaply utilized. Then, in the last five minutes of every finale, they chucked the realism and served up a heapin’ helpin’ of sentimental nonsense to which, one assumes, we are all supposed to nod along in grave agreement: True dat!

These failures of nerve or creativity were disheartening in ways beyond the usual frustration suffered at the hands of self-undermining lazy screenwriting. These shows were bastions of quality and afforded us the rare experience of not being insulted every second by the drama of our choice. The letdown at their failure to maintain their own standards bleeds outward; we’re reminded the world is crappy in general and mediocrity always ensnares even our most admirable creative minds.

The Shield, which never ever got the credit for dramatic cogency it deserved, suffered no such loss of nerve. The Shield proved to be the most consistently nihilistic public entertainment in the history of such. Its crushing cynicism found a welcoming demographic; The Shield ran for seven unrelenting years. Seven years of corruption, violence, malfeasance, racism, venality, dysfunctional families, thwarted love, murderous self-interest, and hypocritical self-righteousness.

All told with a dissonant camera and editing hyperactivity that would give Godard whiplash and leave Marcel Ophuls crying for Dramamine. Even more than The Wire, The Shield developed a visual language that perfectly metaphorized its narrative content: no sanctuary, no peace, no point of orientation, and no firm ground on which to take a stand. Its antihero, Vic Mackey, was no antihero: he was a straight up sociopath and proved himself so in the very first episode. That he could get all high and mighty about the sociopathy of others made him all the more realistic. 

We waited seven years for Vic to get his comeuppance or escape scot-free. As the final season built to its climax, either seemed possible until the final 15 minutes. I won’t play the spoiler, but suffice to say that as Vic sowed, so did he reap. The Shield ended as it began: unregenerate, hysterical, meanspirited, and demonstrative of the inherent unimprovability of the species. What a relief!

And what an inspiration — the creators had the courage to stick to their guns and never once devolved into sentimentality. It became clear in the last fifteen minutes of the last episode that The Shield was never, at root, a cop show. It was a Shakespearean tragedy.

Character is fate, thought the Greeks, and the creators of the sublimity that is the finale of Spartacus Blood and Sand agree. Sarahjane Blum admirably deconstructed Spartacus in March’s Rail and noted its addictive, futuristic blend of ultraviolence, one-hand-in-the-air declaiming, shaved scrotums, and naked Lucy Lawless. As Ms. Blum made clear, Spartacus don’t play. What might have seemed camp in Episodes One through Seven turned deadly serious and, as the season progressed and the blood went from ankle to knee deep, became only more seriouser. Horror/gore/humor genius Sam Raimi and his co-creators painstakingly revealed the genuinely classical motivations underlying what had seemed their heroes’ post-modernly self-aware retrofitting of classical stereotypes.

While the first half of the season played like Cinemax meets The Colossus of Rhodes, the finale brought genuine emotion and an avalanche of previously only-hinted-at classical themes: star-crossed lovers, star-crossed allies, triple-crosses, and lethal comeuppances. The language always worked as well. My tattoo is in Latin, and when I told my translator that I wanted it in as strong a command form as possible he said, “You’re in luck. Latin is a language made for giving orders.” That aspect of the culture was ever-present in Spartacus; no character ever spoke to another without each acknowledging the hierarchy that determined their life and fare.

You have to admire their deployment of cursing. Verbally chaste films set in bygone eras lulled us into thinking that “motherfucker” is an utterance as new in human history as Superfly. The version of Seven Samurai we all enjoyed for decades had subtitles that depicted dueling Samurai spitting out the Japanese equivalent of Robin Hood’s “Saracen pig!” “Saxon dog!” Then along came contemporary uncensored subtitles and guess what? Those noble ronin were motherfucking one another other up and down the Shogunate.

In Spartacus, never did you hear “unbefuckinglievable.” It was all more like “I’m going to cut your fucking head off,” which is, I’m pretty sure, what Menelaus said to Achilles when the latter refused to fight. Spartacus showed uncanny timing and precision in deploying foul language, used almost exclusively by those who were had power but not quite the power they aspired to. Those above the cursers in social station never once bothered to sully their tongues. They didn’t have to.

Hubris, as it so often does, proved the downfall of the villain, who, true to Homer and whomever, was revealed as far too duplicitous for his own good. As in the mythology of the age, the winner was the one most consumed by vengeance, even if his satisfactions came after his laying waste to everything that made life worth living. While anyone with any sense loves a good swordfight — why else were movies invented?— Spartacus grew increasingly mind-blowing as the finale neared by amping up both the gladiatorial snicker-snack and the human-driven drama that, astonishingly, made the swordfights utterly secondary.

In the finale, bloody swords were wielded in service not of exploitation, but of character and motivation.  Everybody that wanted revenge got it in the most explicit and gruesome way. Everybody that deserved disemboweling got that too. Save one, of course, the infinitely adaptable feminine trickster of every ancient culture. Well, Spartacus needs someone to obsess about in Season Two, and look who it turns out to be.

The last act of the last episode is as groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting as the final gunfight in The Wild Bunch. It raises the stakes not so much on gore, though there is so much gore, but on an idea. The idea being that once you put certain forces in motion, as the ancient myths demonstrate again and again, there is only one possible outcome. Unlike the makers of The Wire, Deadwood, and The Sopranos, the creators of Spartacus embrace that outcome and embellish it. They demonstrated what is possible when there is sufficient commitment to an aesthetic ideal, even if that ideal garnered viewers with more frontal nudity than the director’s cut of Caligula. By celebrating the virtue of shameless consistency, Spartacus elevated itself from pulp to profundity.

IRKSOME BUT COMPELLING

Noah Baumbach makes films that feel like indies, but feelings can be deceiving. Like indies, Baumbach pictures offer naturalist situations, realist dialogue, plots that center around emotion or smaller daily drama (the restructuring of a life-long friendship, a doggy falling ill, wearing outmoded shoes), and a sharp intelligence that flatters the audience by appearing to forgo melodrama. But his films are not indies; they are vehicles for movie stars. And movie stars don’t show up in movies in which they (a) look bad or (b) aren’t permitted to parade their usual shtick.

Irksome

Baumbach’s Margot At the Wedding failed to the degree it showcases both these hard truths. As regards (b), Jack Black periodically explodes the tone of the film with overdone, unfunny slapstick performed in the service of his brand, no matter what the context. Even worse is Nicole Kidman’s demonstration of (a). The entire film—the entire film!—was predicated on her character being narcissistic, self-obsessed, and conflicted about parenthood.

Yet in the final scene she tosses aside all the tools of her organized life—phone, wallet, passport—and chases after the bus taking her teenage son away. There was no justification whatsoever for this change of character, and the only sane audience response was: “Never happen!” No justification in terms of character dynamics, but plenty in Hollywood power terms: Nicole Kidman will not play a woman who just stands there as her son disappears. One assumes this is why big stars show up in Baumbach movies: they get caressed with an indie-brainy gloss, but without the concomitant brand damage that appearing in a negative light might produce.

Ben Stiller, amazing as it is to consider, is a big star. His movies have earned over a billion dollars. In Greenberg he plays a narcissistic failure, a guy whose skin, in the immortal words of Julie Klausner, “is only thin in one direction.” Greenberg has returned to L.A. after a stint in a New York loony bin to sit his rich and successful brother’s enormo Hollywood Hills house while his bro takes the family on vacation to Vietnam. Thus does Greenberg’s nose get rubbed in the wreckage of his past, the inescapable material consequence of all his failure, and the dismal nature of his future prospects. Understandably, this makes him cranky. And he was already pretty cranky to begin with.

Tempering these quite real-seeming and moving quandaries are repeated slapstick tropes, all jarringly out of place. It’s impossible to tell if they stem from Stiller wanting things to be quote funnier unquote, which with comedians often means more obvious, or from Baumbach failing to believe in his own ideas and reverting to the sign-posting that is his worst habit. Foremost among these signposts is Stiller sitting down again and again to write sanctimonious, aggrieved letters to airlines, coffee shops, and the like. These moments present Greenberg as a card-carrying loonie and feel at odds with the tone of the rest of the film. They draw one in and shove one away. They incarnate the odd push-pull of the film, which is  deeply compelling and equally irritating.

Into this life of past-regretting, dog-sitting, and letter-writing comes Florence Marr, played by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig showcases the problematic duality ofGreenberg, with Baumbach’s faux-indie approach, and with his desire to present himself as being in the Hollywood status game but not of it.

Greta Gerwig is a beautiful, soulful young woman with the unmistakable air of someone who has accomplished much and is on her own terms with the world. In the first moments of the film, revealed in long-take close-ups, she appears to be the star of the picture, and totally capable of carrying it.

But next thing we know we’re being told that Florence needs to “stand up for herself.” Florence is relentlessly depicted as socially clumsy, lacking in self-confidence, and wholly unaware of her astonishing loveliness/soulfulness/cool. This trope gets carried to its extreme when, as Greta sings into an open mic at a small club— again in ravishing movie-star close-up — her BFF says to Greenberg, as if this were some terrific scoop: “Isn’t she beautiful?” The line is meant to convey that Florence doesn’t regard herself as such, that Greenberg might not either, and that only her BFF has the insight to recognize Florence’s totally, blatantly obvious inner and outer loveliness.

The moment is insulting, self-serving, and false. It perfectly illuminates how galling, self-serving, and false much of the film proves to be. Which is a shame, because when Baumbach lets the story be, it proves insightful and moving, with painfully well-observed vignettes that only underscore the pretense of Baumbach’s more manipulative set pieces.

Compelling

 Greta Gerwig is a glamourpuss, although admittedly a downtown/Brooklynesque glamourpuss and thus an unfamiliar type in Hollywood. Casting her as an unaware ugly duckling is a typical piece of Hollywood-think arrogance.

Not that she isn’t amazing in the role— she is, and pulls off a couple of the most awkward, touching, and true sex scenes in movie history. The one wherein Greenberg launches himself at her, flings her down on her thrift-shop armchair, and shoves his face between her legs proves almost too human to bear. And demonstrates what Baumbach can do when he gets out of his own way.

But Gerwig’s performance, while stunning and star-making, perpetually screams: “Never happen!” The most egregious moment is when Florence, about to succumb to anesthesia, mumbles to Greenberg, “You like me so much more than you think you do.” Let’s recap: Greenberg is 12 years older, at least a head shorter, broke, mean-spirited as hell, just out of a nut-hatch, a crap lover, and incapable of connection. Florence is young, perceptive, soulful, kind, and sheltering. Shouldn’t Greenberg be saying those very words to her? Maybe in an earlier draft, he did.

Baumbach and his wife, Greenberg producer and co-story creator Jennifer Jason Leigh, seem unaware of their own counterintuitive misogyny in suggesting that such worthy young women are so relentlessly self-undermining.

Accepting the true moments of the story, and they are many and arresting, means digesting a number of slick falsehoods as well: that Greenberg and Florence grow intimate because of her convenient medical emergency, that a sick dog —a sick dog, for crying out loud— generates both emotional tension and sympathy for Greenberg. Because much of the emotion seems earned, and since every moment is couched in a particularly Baumbachian hyper-naturalist realism, it takes a bit of time to realize how obvious his ploys can be. This makes watching the film immersing and thinking about it later really frustrating.

Much of Greenberg is based on expert close examination of social scenes, class differentials, L.A. modalities, and Hollywood behavior. It’s supposed to be subtext but often plays as foreground. In interviews, Baumbach and Leigh have long cast themselves as bemused insiders in the nuevo/arty Hollywood orbit, and their eye for home decoration, nuance of clothing, and how physical posture suggests power differential (a key L.A. social trope) is keen. Those tiny observations, all New Yorker short story-like, are at times enthralling and at times precious and unnecessary. And that’s the issue in a nutshell— when that intent dominates the story, Greenberg irritates. When that intent loses itself in narrative and character, Greenberg satisfies.

Greenberg’s explosive outbursts are frighteningly real. When he accuses anyone who cares about him of repeating a former abusive relationship, the heartbreak of his determination to remain alone becomes manifest. His attempts to reclaim a past that wants nothing to do with him are equally memorable and sad. Those moments resonate after the film is over, and serve as reminders of how merciless and insightful Baumbach can be. Greenberg receives a number of comeuppances, some deserved and some not. We feel the pain of every one.

Then out of nowhere he decides to fly to Australia at a moment’s notice. Again it seems that Baumbach ran out of ideas. In a wilder, more free-form and less realist comedy, such a wacky madcap action might feel justified. Here, every real-world objection springs to mind. This broke carpenter, this house-sitter, this struggling loonie is going to drive to an airport and buy a same-day ticket? To Australia? All together now: Never happen!

Jennifer Jason Leigh co-wrote and co-directed The Anniversary Party with Alan Cumming. Like Greenberg, its drama depends on tiny observed nuances and alt-Hollywood inside jokes, like the overstated understatement of somebody’s perfect Mid-century Modern house or Gwyneth Paltrow playing a young, dumb starlet on Ecstasy. That film’s drama plays as more sincere, with less directorial puppeteering, than Greenberg. And in both films, what’s being dissected to the nth friggin’ degree is an observational snobbery that must be fully bought into to enjoy.

If L.A. means less to you than it does to Bambauch/Leigh, you may find that onlyGreenberg’s background is convincing. The foreground, not so much.