On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen SOCIAL OUTRAGE SEASON By Raphael Shargel After months of summer frivolity, serious moviegoers look eagerly toward fall, when Oscar-hungry studio executives tend to release their...
...Set in the early 1990s, it covers three days in the life of a burned out New York City ambulance driver...
...Durden spouts anticapitalist clichés like "the things you own end up owning you," and the film seems to argue that the only way to correct the world's evil is to blow it up...
...The film's most memorable scene takes placelófloors aboveground...
...At the climax, when the voices in his head lead him to murder, the calm that subsequently overwhelms him, the soothing light that covers him in the film's last shot, seem to be arguing that his soul has at last a chance to be saved...
...This year, alas, the fall film that has so far won greatest critical acclaim is American Beauty, a repetitious, unimaginative exposure of wealthy suburbia's underside...
...That David Lynch, of all people, would be responsible for perking up the season is quite a surprise...
...Although Pitt at least appears appropriately charismatic, neither offers anything resembling a performance...
...A drug dealer is shoved out the window of his den and impaled on a grate two levels down...
...During the course of his six-week trek, he encounters a variety of brokenpeople whom he heals in various ways...
...Fight Club holds some interest throughout its two-and-ahalf-hour running time, but its nihilistic overtones and inconsistent narrative do it in...
...The doctors inside the emergency room clearly do their best, but they have neither the staff nor the equipment to help the ailing unfortunates who lie on gurneys along the walls, often in extreme pain...
...Because Frank dare not remove the spike that has cut through his body, the police are forced to burn off the entire grate and cart it and the attached body to the hospital...
...In any other year, turning from Fincher to Martin Scorsese would be moving from the absurd to the sublime...
...The film's qualities, however, disguise a hollow center...
...Scorsese, one of the country's best directors, has been producing masterpieces for decades...
...His many calls to duty make for an episodic film that contains some remarkable scenes...
...their trysts together seem inserted solely to convince us Durden is straight...
...Almost everything at the margins of Bringing Out the Dead is riveting...
...It is as impossible to believe that she was once a drug addict as it is to imagine that she has become a nice, working class girl...
...It is based on the true tale of Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old man who, forreasons that become clear as the movie goes along, is desperate to visit his estranged brother in Wisconsin...
...Arquette, who becomes involved with Pierce, is her typical somnambulant self...
...Why cast Pitt and Norton in the main roles...
...Early on, when Durden invites him to be his roommate, and later, when he insists that the Fight Club is for men only, no one notes the homoerotic overtones of Norton's character and organization...
...Unfortunately two of them, like American Beauty, wallow in unjustified and misdirected vengeance...
...Fincher, who cut his teeth making music videos, uses his customary pyrotechnics to mimic the demented characters' states of mind...
...Scorsese's surreal treatment is frequently funny, yet the picture remains profoundly effective as a bitter satire...
...Fincher makes a number of other bewildering choices...
...The actor's face and body are expressive and he is capable of dynamic outbursts, but he never reaches beyond the superficial...
...The critical difference is its steady revelation of Alvin's rich inner life...
...Both movies offernightmare visions of New York filtered through the perspective of an unstable character who cruises its streets from dusk till dawn...
...As Frank works on him, the evangelical Marcus makes the gathering teens join hands in a circle round their ailing friend and preaches as if they were at a revival meeting...
...The film offers a climactic revelation that, in spite of itself, places Norton and the duplicitous Durden on the same side...
...His previous efforts include the dreary and violent Alien 3, Seven and The Game...
...Of all the travelers, only Alvin takes the time to really see America, to touch and be touched by it...
...The film is much less sentimental than it sounds...
...Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader also collaborated on Taxi Driver...
...Richardson's soft-focus camerawork allows for some painterly, Turnerlike effects, but alsomakes Frank's stamping grounds unrecognizable...
...Part of Taxi Driver's, brilliance was that it brought us inside the mind of a madman, a character who, though impossible to sympathize with, was savagely compelling...
...To say that Fight Club, the first in this series, is David Fincher's best movie is not much of a compliment...
...Unlike the earlier film, though, Bringing Out the Dead feels as if it were made by people who have never even visited the city...
...The slowpace of Alvin's mower is contrasted with today's crazy speed as enormous semis blow off his hat and legions of touring bicyclists whiz by him...
...Lynch's characteristic quirkiness is thrown into calm relief by veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis' stunningly vivid camerawork and Famsworth's assured performance in the title role...
...Diseased and desperate to die, yettoo cowardly to face his end, he wanders the streets of Frank's beat and continually gets into trouble...
...Norton has not solved the problem of how to create an interesting persona with no enthusiasm for life...
...It concerns the recruitment of a central figure into a secret, revolutionary organization dominated by an insane megalomaniac...
...Because his eyesight is too poor to enable him to drive a car, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) resolves to travel by lawnmower, slowly navigating his tiny vehicle for hundreds of miles down the highway...
...But Bringing Out the Dead, while worth seeing, is perhaps his most disappointing work so far...
...Instead, Maria Singer (Helena Bonham Carter) is abruptly introduced as Durden's sexual playmate...
...They abruptly replace the sparks with fireworks, a touch that only draws the viewer away from the immediacy of the moment...
...Appallingly, Scorsese has embraced the murderously redemptive ethos that has tarnished the conclusions of so many recent films, from Schrader's own Affliction to Sling Blade and The English Patient...
...Noel (Marc Anthony) is another recurring character...
...But these techniques, along with the director's palate of pale blue and vomit green, weary the eye, while Norton's narration weighs the film down...
...On the seconci night of the film's journey, Frank and his partner Marcus (Ving Rhames) are called to a Goth nightclub where a young man, costumed like a vampire, has collapsed...
...He has very little money and knows no one who can spare the time to accompany him on the journey from his little Iowa town...
...He speaks as if he's reading lines off a cereal box and succeeds principally in numbing his audience...
...Every night, in a dark alley or unused basement, waiters, policemen, business executives and other repressed members of the bourgeoisie gather to lash out violently at a sparring partner until one of them cries for mercy...
...The director of road movie horror films like Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Lost Highway has taken to the blacktop again, this time in a G rated release produced by Walt Disney...
...As Frank supports the dealer's head, sparks fly behind him, the city below lights up, and we are treated to a breathtaking view...
...Its subject matter is certainly unusual...
...Fight Club, reflecting its antihero, fulminates against a corporate culture that enslaves its creatures...
...Though no one ever says so, it is clear that Perpetual Misery fails to treat patients expediently and passionately because it is sadly underfunded...
...Latinos and blacks appear to have been doled out onto the streets in politically correct proportions...
...And Cage, as usual, is unconvincing...
...We are asked to empathize with the destructive desires that overwhelm Frank and are invited to be impressed by his lugubrious, purple narration...
...On Screen SOCIAL OUTRAGE SEASON By Raphael Shargel After months of summer frivolity, serious moviegoers look eagerly toward fall, when Oscar-hungry studio executives tend to release their more thoughtful efforts...
...Its protest, unlike that of Fight Club, is conveyed with admirable subtlety...
...Durden, a cross between Robert Bly and Timothy McVeigh, rouses the members into a hateful frenzy, and without Norton's knowledge, begins to mold them into a militant group of industrial terrorists...
...One of them is the bit at the beginning where Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) revives a dying man by asking the man's daughter (Patricia Arquette) to play her father's favorite music...
...Fight Club follows its director's pattern...
...Junkies, prostitutes, and the homeless make appearances that lack spontaneity...
...Considering that it is a Lynch film, The Straight Story is delightfully and refreshingly earnest...
...But the third portrays a considerate, determined figure tragically out of pace with fast-moving modern culture...
...Both have the look and manner of powerful celebrities...
...At another point, a Latino woman gives birth to twins while her male companion stands breathlessly by, insisting that both are virgins...
...When Cage wakes up in the grungy apartment that has been designed for his character, his large, toned, well groomed body is obviously not at home in such shabby surroundings...
...His love for his family, his quarrel with his brother, his native determination, and, perhaps most affectingly, his remembrances of World War II, give the film a thoughtful and unusually moving unity...
...More recently, three works have emerged which register social outrage that feels refreshingly genuine...
...When one of the babies falters, Frank rushes it to Perpetual Misery in a futile attempt to bring it back to life...
...The Straight Story is no less episodic than Bringing Out the Dead...
...Soap salesman Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) talks the film's Yuppie narrator (Edward Norton) into founding a club that will exorcise the rage of his class...
...She puts on a Sinatra album, and before long the man begins to show signs of life...
...But the shot wasn't sensationalistic enough for Scorsese and cinematographer Robert Richardson...
...Frank shares some affinities with Travis Bickle of the earlier film, but the distance Scorsese and Schrader kept from their antihero then is gone...
...Later, while dropping a patient off at a hospital, histrionically but appropriately called "Our Lady of Perpetual Misery," we meet a number of "types," including the forbidding police officer who guards the emergency room door and an admitting nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) who constantly lectures her junkie patients about the futility of providing them treatment...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 13
