Hooray for Hollywood

In a departure from my usual movie going habits, this week I took in two honest to god Hollywood movies. Good ones, too! 3:10 to Yuma is a decent update of a classic western, with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe glowering and charming their way across the Arizona landscape (actually New Mexico, if I read the credits right), en route to the title train. Let's give Ben Foster his due, since he gets to play the Crazy Sidekick, with all the scene chomping that entails. But I can't say much more for it than that. It's okay: you can see the story in there, know that you're supposed to be moved by the psychological drama, then - since it is a pretty well crafted bit of story telling - feel those things, or a reasonable approximation of them, when the long foreseen moments arrive.... but that's all there is. It looks okay, but nothing special. The drama is okay, but nothing special, nothing we haven't seen before, nothing worked out in great detail back in the 50s by films like the original 3:10 to Yuma (which I haven't seen) or any number of Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann films that did it all much more efficiently and honestly. It doesn't add anything to the western - compare its view of heroism and good and evil to that of Deadwood, which does add something... It isn't anything special to look at - a straightforward looking cowboy movie, cut to fit in with the times... seems rather like The Proposition, with some of the mythic elements redistributed and naturalized, though not exactly eliminated, and with the requisite poetic psychopath at the center, the tortured hero poised between law and disorder, a grizzled old bounty hunter/Pinkerton played by an Old Pro, and certain symbolism of home and hearth vs. the howling wilderness. Though what does it mean that here, the poetic crook is an Aussie playing an American, and there an American playing an Aussie? It gets confusing sometimes.

Meanwhile, speaking of confusing: I also saw the Bourne Ultimatum this week. Here's a thought: what if Paul Greengrass had directed 3:10 to Yuma and James Mangold the Bourne movie? If someone wants to revive the western, that might have some hope. Bourne Ultimatum is utterly ridiculous stuff - the amnesiac superkiller, the sneering CIA villains, the supercomputer surveillance machines that always need another 30 seconds to tap into that phone, not to mention Bourne's apparent ability to teleport (the only plausible explanation for about half the plot.) This nonsense is completely redeemed by the infamous camera on a bungee cord shooting style. This has been much debated in the blogosphere - David Bordwell (twice), Jim Emerson, and others (Ebert's readers, say) weighing in - most at least somewhat against it. I cannot agree. I found the film quite legible, and fairly engaging. Bordwell notes that the style covers up a lot of problems - the idiocy of the plot, for example. Yes it does. It pushes the plot (and characters and all that jazz) into the background - and keeps the background in the background. It's all surface: but it's a pretty interesting surface. Even when I was laughing at the story, I was engrossed in the pictures.

I think there are two basic reasons for this. First: it just looks great. The camera movements, the cutting, the action are all combined to create a lot of pure rhythmic energy. All on the surface, yes - literally: one of Bordwell's points is how this film obscures space, fails to clarify what happens in space - that's right, I think. There’s very little done with staging or space, the action and fights don’t take place in the kinds of coherent spaces Hong Kong films use, the fights don't exploit the movements of the performers, real, or as perceived against some kind of effect - here, everything tends to be crammed onto the surface of the screen (wherever it is in relationship to other things on the shot) - it is all surface. Even things seen from a distance are treated as part of the surface of the screen. It is, I think, a relentlessly, and deliberately, two-dimensional film.

The second reason might be more important - and relates a bit to my disappointment with Mangold's western (maybe because I saw these two films the same week.) Bordwell talks about it's use of "intensified continuity" - especially the idea of putting one discreet piece of information into every (very brief) shot (a staple of the style). Ultimatum does this - but obscures the information - putting it out of focus sometimes, hiding it, decentering it (either physically or in time, slipping the information into only part of the shot. Bordwell also notes that a lot of the information in the film is on the soundtrack - things like the whoosh of a razor telling you what Bourne is using as a weapon. Now - I think this is part of the key to the film's ability to hold your attention. Every shot has one piece of information - sometimes hidden, obscured, sometimes implied, sometimes as much aural as visual. As you watch the film, you, first, realize that this is how it works - that every shot is going to show you something you will want to know to make sense of what is happening - and you know it may be hidden somehow - so you watch for it. I think, quite simply, the film functions like a game: it is presented, really, as a puzzle you have to figure out. And you CAN figure it out - it's not insoluble - you just have to commit to it - look at the pictures, pay attention to the soundtrack, and you will be able to follow it. Understand, at least in principal, what is happening - where people are and what they are doing - and so on. Bordwell also writes about genre conventions and expectations, and how they guide our ability to follow the film - this is certainly part of how it works. You know what should be coming - you have seen things like this before, so you look for the clues and hints and bits of detail that you know are part of the plot. The style and the conventions work together - the conventions, the expectations that there will be something important in every shot, etc. allow the filmmakers to hide this information - to make it harder to find, harder to see, or to divide the information between sound and vision. At the same time, this makes the puzzle solving harder and more engaging.

Now: the film's defenders seem to focus on certain claims about the style: its supposed "realism", it's "immersive" qualities, it's representation of Bourne's experience of the world, prominently.... Bordwell's posts deal with those claims pretty well. What I think makes it work is different - it's the mixture of the engagement the viewer has with film as a puzzle, as a problem to be solved... and the tendency toward both a pure surface and a kind of "telling" not "showing". Now I will say - some of this does relate to the defenders' claims, especially Bourne's POV. The viewing experience - the active requirement to figure things out as things happen on screen is analogous to how Bourne experiences the world. But this is distanced - the camera work does not work as a representation of his experience of the world, in anything close to a literal sense. But as a sign of the way everyone in the film is, essentially, playing a kind of live action video game against everyone else - well - yes, it is a pretty good analogy of that. A sign of it. Similarly - I don't think the film is particularly immersive, or realistic - or visceral: I had the opposite impression. Nothing in the film has weight, there's almost nothing tactile about it. It doesn't seem to exist in space: it exists on the surface of the screen. If it's "immersive" it is immersive intellectually - it engages the mind in figuring it out, but not in imagining a real world where the events could be taking place.

So then.... I liked it. It's not a great film - it gives up too much. Space, staging, depth, realism, acting, characters, stories, reference to the real world - all those things are good, and if you get rid of too many, you end up with nothing more than a diversion. A cross-word puzzle is distinctly less satisfying than a poem; a video game distinctly less satisfying than a movie. But it is a fascinating film. On the surface, and as a puzzle, it looks great and is very satisfying. And I think - though this is a bad time to get into it - that there could be something more to it. The way it "tells" things instead of "showing" them is itself interesting: it doesn't act things out, it indicates them, signifies them - it seems to me much closer in its methods of telling a story to a comic book - especially a fairly adventurous comic book - than a movie. It feels written more than shown. I don't know how typical this is of contemporary action films - I don't see a lot of them, though what I've seen don't do it very well if they do it - Bourne does. BUt it is interesting - and something I hope I can return to. There's a whole argument there (that I have to confess is related to some of Burch's ideas, that I've alluded to before). But it has to wait.

For now - I'll end by coming back to 3:10 to Yuma. It could have benefited from the kind of showy style Bourne Ultimatum featured. Bordwell says the latter used its style to obscure the weakness of the story - true enough, and so it should. Yuma could have used some style to obscure the plot holes and absurd situations (the ending gun fight namely) and creaky old genre conventions it trotted out. I think the Bourne movie used its genre conventions as a skeleton to hang its style on - like musicians improvising off a 12 bar blues. Its genre conventions allow it a lot more freedom in the actual surface of the film - they free it to show things moving and colors and shapes forming and disappearing on screen, until it approaches abstraction - without losing coherence. Yuma ends up being a story I've seen before, done not as well as it was done before, and not doing anything different... Which is a bit disappointing.