The Talkies / Monstrosities
Bowman, James
Monstrosities by James Bowman F filmmakers in the 1990s suffer from what eighteenth-century poets and critics called "belatedness." Just as it was thought that the great poets of the past had...
...N eil Jordan is a bit more successful in conveying the sense of sex and danger in Interview with the Vampire...
...As Janet Maslin says, this "esthetically challenged loner with a father who rejected him, would make a dandy guest on any daytime television talk show...
...So when is the scary part...
...We rather sympathize with Lestat at the end when he listens to the tape that the journalist, Mallory (Christian Slater), has made of Louis's life story and says: "Ah, Louis, Louis...
...Luc Besson has done so in his first American picture, our dark horse Movie of the Month, The Professional...
...Just as it was thought that the great poets of the past had already said everything of any importance there was to say, so all the movies have already been made...
...In this case the monster is a contract killer called Leon (Jean Reno) whose dedication to his profession is so complete that he himself seems quite incomplete as a human being...
...I am going to be a cleaner...
...A companion, a female like me, so she won't hate me...
...He cannot read, can hardly talk, and lives a solitary, monastic existence in a dirty walk-up apartment in New York...
...There is a recurrence of the incest theme at the end with the death and reanimation of the sister-wife, Elizabeth...
...She wants him to teach her how...
...Ultimately, how we know that the taboos are no longer operative, or even very interesting, is that their violation has produced nothing more than this banality...
...Killing her would be consistent with his life...
...They were the best...
...The little girl who wanders into the monster's toils is Mathilda (Natalie Portman), a 12-year-old neighbor...
...It's time he got used to being a damn vampire, for pity's sake...
...He points the gun at her and then walks away...
...Branagh himself in the role of the handsome young Dr...
...Count Dracula and the Transylvanian schtick is all "fictions, vulgar fictions," but vampire camp straight out of the films of the 1930s to 1960s is still available as required...
...Louis and his young vampire-ward, Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), attend the performance, watching the jaded Parisians watching their fellow bloodsuckers...
...The mixture of homoeroticism, blood, and death inevitably suggests AIDS, and the contrast between the cruel and remorseless Lestat (Tom Cruise) and the gentler, conscience-stricken Louis (Brad Pitt) at times begins to look like an allegorical representation of the contrasting approaches in the gay politics of AIDS...
...Cool," she replies...
...He plays the flute...
...Well heck, doc, what's the problem...
...Still whining...
...She will do "anything" for him, she says—clean or cook or wash his clothes—if he will only teach her...
...Portentous conjunctions of the labels that describe their confused attachment—"sister, friend, lover, wife"—abound for no obvious reason...
...0 The American Spectator January 1995 61...
...This film has been much criticized for lack of realism and use of cinematic clichés by those who are under a misapprehension about what it is trying to do...
...Is life always this tough, or just when you're a kid...
...In decadent Paris •of the late nineteenth century, for example, we attend the Theatre des Vampires, run by Armand (Antonio Banderas), the king of vampire campiness—complete with opera capes and dim chapels and a cast of, well, forty or so...
...but the apocalyptic ending in the latter's self-immolation once again seems way out of proportion to the very down-to-earth human feelings of all the principals...
...He has feelings...
...He goes through the properties warehouse of cinematic vampirism, explaining that all that stuff about garlic and crosses and stakes through the heart was superstition, whereas what they say about coffins and sunlight and blood sucking is perfectly true...
...t's not as if a determined postmodernist director cannot come up with an original idea for a monster flick with a sexual subtext...
...she asks him...
...Tony greets her proposal that she work for him (and follow in her beloved monster's footsteps) by saying: "I ain't got no job for a 12-year-old kid...
...Astonished to be asked, he wrestles with his tongue to reply: "Always thees way...
...Yeah," he says, surprised...
...For a moment there is even a certain satisfying grotesquerie about the competition between monster and maker, between father and son (as it were), for the hand of the now monstrous Elizabeth...
...This seems to me a brilliant artistic response to the monster theme for the TV age...
...Maybe it's just that this kinky doctor's idea of playing God means forbidding love...
...Cutting across these images are the sexual overtones—which, though they are at times disturbingly suggestive of kiddie porn, are an essential feature of the film...
...I've had to listen to that for centuries...
...This is the stuff of cinematic post60 The American Spectator January 1995 modernism: Jordan knows we know it's fake, and that we've seen versions of it before, so he can just concentrate on inventing a theology of vampirism—the sort of thing that certain kinds of sensibilities enjoy—and producing special effects and striking images...
...All that remains is for the epigoni of a more decadent age feebly to imitate their mighty predecessors and pay them due homage...
...It doesn't work in either case, but Branagh's is the more lamentable failure of the two, since the incest theme seems quite gratuitous...
...And the sense of his innocence is reinforced when she offers to teach him how to read...
...What is the use of being a vampire if you don't like killing people...
...That is why, although November saw the opening of two new versions of classic horror films, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by Kenneth Branagh and Interview With the Vampire by Neil Jordan, I doubt that many of those who watched them were paralyzed with terror...
...But audacity is what it takes to break out of our thralldom to the images of the past...
...she asks, instantly calling on her knowledge of the lingo of TV and cinematic gangland...
...What do you do, Leon...
...Lunghi), whose death in childbirth inspires him to try to conquer death, and engaged to his adoptive sister Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter...
...All the creature asks of its creator is a grotesque monster-domesticity, "someone like me...
...It is the only way he knows to deal with the problems posed for him by other people...
...But ultimately this serious theme is overwhelmed by the vampire trappings...
...Leon walks into the bedroom where she is sleeping with his gun and silencer...
...There must be, we are left to think, some way they all could have talked it over and worked it out in civilized fashion...
...A cleaner," he replies...
...The next day she informs him, "I've decided what to do with my life...
...Vampires pretending to be human pretending to be vampires," says Claudia...
...He is like a vegetarian tiger: at best a curiosity and at worst a death to credibility...
...But Branagh isn't him...
...Sexual taboos—incest in Branagh's case and homosexuality and AIDS in Jordan's—are added to freshen up the old stories and to re-create something of that lost frisson of horror at the curse of God...
...The pivotal scene takes place on the first night Mathilda is staying in his apartment...
...Admittedly, the people who make and watch vampire movies are likely not to be so worried as the rest of us about matters of credibility in the first place, but the humanization of the monster brings up another version of the Frankenstein problem...
...Then life gets a whole lot tougher...
...Now the interplay of innocence and experience becomes really complicated...
...He only goes out to kill at the command of a cliched mobster naturally called Tony (Danny Aiello), or to train for killing or to watch Gene Kelly movies...
...It is an audacious thing for a director to have a character say while his own game with the audience is still going on...
...There is too much puppy-dog likability about him, not enough of the sense of danger and fatal ambition...
...You mean a hit man...
...Both directors are reduced to tinkering at the margins of their subject in order to sustain the audience's interest—an extraordinary state of affairs, when you think about it, considering that the subjects are obtaining God-like power over life and death, and the lives and lore of the undead, respectively...
...In the same way, her decision to go kill the evil Stansfield and its consequences are the beginning of her discovery of the difference between movies and real life...
...Leon refuses, but she persists, trying to get him to see the two of them as a team—"like Bonnie and Clyde or Thelma and Louise...
...The game's over...
...But she is not the same either...
...Her father beats her, her mother is gone, and her stepmother and sister hate her...
...Jordan has a good time playing with his belatedness...
...We have seen such things before, as we have the reminiscence of the moment in the original Frankenstein where a monster confronts human innocence in the form of a little girl...
...Louis's delicate sensibilities render him absurd...
...B ut the worst problem is with the monster, who is too humanized...
...It should all add up to a portrait of the modem Prometheus, a hero who overreaches and whose destruction is a moral object lesson...
...He is a complex character...
...How avant-garde...
...That moment of self-restraint, with its sexual subtext, is the beginning of his humanization, a process that is never taken for granted (or completed) as it is in Frankenstein and Vampire...
...Nevertheless, we also know that it is not the same...
...It is never in the least made clear why he should have preferred the annihilationof himself and his entire family to this sensible expedient...
...For if the undead have feelings too, just like you and me, all the Grand Guignol effects associated with being undead begin to seem pretty gratuitous...
...she asks the pathologically uncommunicative Leon when she meets him on the stair one day...
...The contrast between her media sophistication (in a game of charades he knows none of her most obvious pop-cultural references except Gene Kelly) and her real-life innocence makes her into his mirror image...
...And when he is gone, so is her childish fantasy life...
...Leon is a kind of magician or shaman who provides her with a way into the world of Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise without even knowing, himself, who these people are...
...The bent DEA agent Stansfield (Gary Oldman) is one such cliché, as is the fact that he is made movie-frightening by popping pills, cracking his neck and listening to classical music before killing...
...Why not just rustle him up a little wifey and let the two of them settle down to produce baby monsters in a cottage on your ample Swiss estate...
...She herself is sure to be killed until Leon, whose only rule in killing people is "no women, no kids," takes her in with the utmost reluctance...
...It sets out to achieve its effects by the creative use of clich...
...Throughout the film, Branagh wants to place unnatural and forbidden things just out of reach, just behind the glittering surface of life of these beautiful people...
...In effect, the innocent meets the monster and asks him: "Teach me to be a monster...
...Here the belated have an original idea—to give the vampire a conscience—but it turns out to be a bad one...
...Stansfield wipes out her entire family because her pig of a father tried to cheat him on a drug deal...
...Victor Frankenstein is besotted with his mother (Cherie James Bowman, our movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...This kind of postmodernism, also to be seen in Besson's international hit of1990, La Femme Nikita, is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at realism...
...Her innocence, like that of so many kids these days, is of a particularly knowing kind...
...More understandable are the Oedipal suggestions of the wrestling match between the shirtless doctor and the naked monster (Robert DeNiro) at the latter's birth in a lap pool of amniotic fluid...
...Breaking taboos, crossing the line into the forbidden zone, and daring the wrath of God are already taken for granted before the opening titles roll...
...It's over...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 1
