The Talkies

...It is the latter case that seems to be richer in dramatic possibility...

...Bowman's regularly updated "Movie Takes" are available on the TAS web site— http://www.spectator.org...

...Jaglom) and Stephen Dillane...

...The paranoid believes himself to be the center of attention of the whole universe where the noir hero is the object of cosmic indifference...

...As we noticed in Primary Colors, it is apparently hip and sophisticated thus to presume that everybody is a whore, but it is dramatically catastrophic...

...But Joba is as emotionally closed down as he is...

...In fact, he has rather a lot of jobs to do in Déjà Vu, in order to make sure that the lovers get their hearts' delight...

...Confidential, for example, didn't understand that an incorruptible police department can be much more scary than a corrupt one...

...The producers of the much-praised L.A...

...The result is that the whole movie resembles a paranoid dream—even to the point where it becomes possible to wake up from it, groggy and bewildered and as far from understanding as ever...

...And that, in a nutshell, is why the noir-style, for all its renewed fashionability, does not work in the 1990's...

...Why should we care about any of these characters — or, indeed, since we are presumably whores as well, about anybody outside ourselves...

...Needless to say, the police and the social elite are corrupt and God and his legions are nowhere to be seen peering through what Macbeth called "the blanket of the dark" that hides these evil deeds...

...He contents himself with showing us the indications of its diabolical cleverness from poor Joe's point of view...

...We must give Mamet credit, I suppose, that somewhere Even the bad guys these days lack gravitas...

...Finally it becomes fatiguing, and we long for some dramatic or romanticcontext in which to place these excitements...

...S o used are we by now to the solicitude of this cosmic waitperson that we shake our heads in amazement when a picture like the Movie of the Month comes along...

...Mamet never bothers to give more than perfunctory explanations of its membership or methods...

...You could say that classic noir was the opposite of paranoia...

...But even back in the days when the criminals were supposed to look real, the bad guys were often, like Milton's Satan, more attractive than the good guys...

...She must feel just like Wallis Simpson...

...In Wenders's original the focus was on the angel, played by Bruno Ganz, and the strangeness of the realm which he inhabited...

...E-mail him at WBowman@compuserve.com...

...That's the kind of thing people used to believe that old man God, the granddaddy of all the now-discredited patriarchs, got up to...

...Something similar happens in Wild Things by John McNaughton, in which the wild things are the people who, like a pond full of the alligators we keep seeing, are all snapping at each other's tails...

...Where the deity might be expected to be disapproving, he is simply left out, even in the form of the reassuring police siren which used to sound in the distance just after the good guy had sent the bad to his reward...

...That's why we could understand why those old-fashioned movie criminals had to fight the old guy even though they were destined to lose...

...Not surprisingly, the Hollywood treatment stands this perspective on its head...

...Both types were classic romantic heroes, as was the proto-existentialist noir hero of the 1940's, a little man born to be crushed by the sheer weight of the world's indifference...

...Campbell Scott as Joe Ross is the victim of a vast criminal conspiracy to steal a valuable formula he has developed for the company he works for, but he is alone...

...But our admiration for the heroes of movies like The Postman Always Rings JAMES BOWMAN, OUT movie critic, is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...The strangeness and the mystery of the angelic regions is so far domesticated, the pleasures of the fragrant Miss Ryan and the Angeleno garden of earthly delights so insistently hymned, that the sacrifice hardly seems a sacrifice at all...

...Yet, grown up, Jacob Willem (Fedja van Huet), finds that his needs always seem to revolve, in spite of himself, around the figure of Dreverhaven, who seems to have conceived a deadly hatred of him...

...So pervasive has this late-century cynicism become that even an honest and a sympathetic hero like David Mamet's in The Spanish Prisoner cannot fight free of it...

...Perhaps McNaughton and his screenwriter, Stephen Peters, just wanted to give us a few tips on how to organize a criminal conspiracy to steal eight and a half million dollars...

...I now know what no angel knows," he writes near the end and almost makes us proud to be human...

...Character by Mike Van Diem, the Dutch winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, is an astonishingly old-fashioned movie, of asort that could hardly be made in America today...

...The man comes as near to an endearment as is possible for him when he says to her, "When is the wedding, Joba...

...40• James Bowman welcomes comments and queries about his reviews...

...As their love apparently has the imprimatur of the supernatural accounting department, we must expect it will take precedence over the two principals' commitments to the others to whom they are already contracted— inconveniences, now, among which Jaglom would doubtless count his own marriage vows, should Miss Foyt discover an alternative "soul mate...

...Marshals service, but the point is to leave us with the paranoid cloud still hanging over our heads...

...where he can still serve a useful function— as the fashioner of the soul's mate if nothing else relating to the soul — he's still got a job to do...

...The defiant not-needing of Joba has created a passionate needing in the two men for each other, which can only express itself in hostility and, finally, physical violence...

...Dreverhaven tells Joba that "I'll strangle him [Jacob Willem] for nine tenths and the last tenth will make him strong...

...If the cops are just a bunch of greedy crooks, we may be glad to see them brought to book (however implausibly) by an honest man, but we have none of that complexity of emotion that true noir gives us...

...We need nothing of him," she tells the boy, Jacob Willem...

...Or else the bad guys were the good guys—lonely men with a past, like Clint Eastwood, living outside the law, or gangster chiefs from ethnically unfavored immigrant stock battling their way up from poverty and social isolation...

...Such a cozy universe is also presupposed in Henry Jaglom's DéjaVu, a film with many good things about it, but one which imagines an entire theology merely for the sake of bringing together Victoria Foyt (who in private life is Mrs.44 An incorruptible police department is more scary than a corrupt one...

...One clever villain gets the better of another clever villain until the cleverest villain of all is the only one left standing...

...Somehow it seems appropriate that it is Vanessa Redgrave who here stands for the right of mere feeling to trample all that lies before it in its headlong rush to "jump into life" — though of course romantic love is so much a part of moviedom as to be a special case within the larger picture of universal degeneracy...

...The point is that the absence of God from the neo-noir pictures arises from the same cause as the presence of God in the sentimental pictures—namely that Hollywood is treating us as worshippers only of our own desires...

...66 June 1998 • The American Spectator in the Establishment's warren of business and police and FBI he is finally able to locate the area representatives of God and law and morality in certain ethnic employees of the U.S...

...Some representative of the feminist thought police would have got to it long before it was finished and made sure it was the struggling single mother, Joba (Betty Schuurman), who was the hero, bravely facing up to the benighted prejudices about such domestic arrangements to be met with in Rotterdam in the first two or three decades of the century...

...The latter film, which is at least intermittently funny, self-consciously adapts the conventions of British comedy of the 1960's, most of them pioneered by Joe Orton, and takes a campy delight in the tunes of Burt Bacharach and Hal David...

...In other words, so long as the forces of law and order, morality, and social convention remained unassailable, it was possible to feel sympathy for little people who had the guts or the foolishness to challenge them...

...At every turn Dreverhaven tries to thwart him, and yet neither we nor Jacob Willem can avoid the suspicion that there is more to their relationship than hate...

...How better to stress, postmodern fashion, the harmlessness of its criminal heroes...

...Twice or Double Indemnity depends entirely on their actually being crushed...

...His inamorata was a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and not a yuppie doctor—more the eternal feminine than the prim feminist—and so his sacrifice was at once more impressive and more understandable...

...It's excitement without relief, like those thrillers that whisk you along from one spectacular explosion to the next or a porn film that merely multiplies images of the act of coition...

...Wild Things, for all its careful plotting, neglects to supply a moral context...

...In an odd way and with unsatisfying results, the conspiracy against him is taken for granted...

...As it is Joba is a taciturn presence, hardly sympathetic, who, as housekeeper to the sinister-looking Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir), is raped by her employer more out of his inarticulacy of feeling than anything else...

...Without God's invincibility in Paradise Lost, Satan would have been just a manipulative thug...

...Maybe God just got tired of fighting too and, like Nicolas Cage's angel, is now living in retirement in L.A., tasting things...

...Mamef s paranoid style is just the flip side of the sentimentality in a film like City of Angels, Brad Silberling's remake of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987...

...Ultimately, this is boring...

...The lovable, madcap criminal who was first introduced to us in the 1960's now seems to be making a comeback in films like The Newton Boys, whose premise is that bank robbery is just a business like any other, and Shooting Fish, which sees the criminal element as being made up of equal parts charm and eccentricity...

...The American Spectator • June 1998 67...

...There Meg Ryan plays an improbable heart surgeon who learns that not only is heaven personally interested in her but she's got her own special angel (Nicolas Cage) who is willing to give up his immortality and his angel friends and such really cool superpowers as the ability to fly and to disappear all for her...

...The angel would have to be a mug not to give up his trifling angel perks—especially as he'll get them all back (as the film makes clear) when he dies anyway...

...If John Garfield had got the girl and the money instead of the gas chamber, the whole point of his story, depending as it does on the simultaneous excitation of our feelings of horror and sympathy, would have been lost...

...Pregnant, she moves out to brave the taunts of "whore" and the demands of her young son with equal impassivity...

...They are, after all, meant to be seen as movie criminals and not authentic ones...