Frankenstein (Guillermo del Toro, 2025)

Hail, Mary

(Warning: plot twists and story discussed in full and explicit detail!)

If you don't know anything about Guillermo del Toro's

Frankenstein (2025) know this: he spent eighteen years sketching, researching, talking, all-around wheeling and dealing with talents and studios to make this, his Great White Whale film adaptation of what he calls his 'favorite novel in the world.' So if he changed anything in Mary Shelley's book while making this picture-- know that he did so out of love. 

Is the film worth a look? Well let me tell you.

Superhero movies

Ubermensch

You could start a discussion on superhero movies at any point-- from the first Zorro movie in the '20s to Marvel Studios' 2011 Captain America-- but in my book the genre properly began in 1933, with a superpowered vegetarian.

Blade 2 (Guillermo del Toro, 2002

Hot Blood Sundae

Blade 2 doesn’t so much improve on the first one as it does evolve-- like the creatures at center stage-- beyond. Both movies are based on Marvel’s comic book series, about a half-human, half-vampire hunter who uses a stylish mix of whirling chrome knives and state-of-the-art tech to hunt his bloodsucking brethren.

Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, 2022)

Little wooden head

Guillermo del Toro's adaptation of the classic Carlo Collodi fantasy fits seamlessly into his gallery of monsters and freaks, but the changes he's wrought on this darker less sanitized work brings it closer to the Collodi original, places it in my book a notch above the 1940 Disney classic.

High claim, I know (and I like Disney's Pinocchio a lot). But hear me out--

Best of 2021

Film year 2021 

was if anything more confused than 2020. The previous year we went into lockdown; last year we emerged  only to go back to lockdown due to Delta, partially re-emerge, partially go back in response to Omicron--a chaotic state. I think the best films didn't reflect that confusion so much as express themselves despite, raising their collective yet distinct voices above the turmoil. Hence:

Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)

Dead end

(Warning: plot of the 1946, 1947, and 2021 discussed in explicit detail) 

Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, adapted from William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel, is arguably his most unabashedly grim head trip--leisurely paced, impeccably acted, sumptuously designed and shot, it forsakes the science fiction and horror tropes del Toro is fond of wielding (sometimes like a sledgehammer) to translate Gresham's nihilistic vision to the big screen.

The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

The drowned world

Guillermo del Toro's latest begins with a world already underwater--fish fluttering down a carpeted hallway, chairs and tables spinning in slow motion, a lamp and alarm clock settling gradually down to arrange themselves on a side table while the princess--head wrapped in a sleep mask--sinks into her couch. Then the alarm rings jerking Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) out of her gentle greenlit dream. 

The good if not great films of 2015

The good if not great films of 2015

Participated in two End-of-the-Year surveys: Film Comment's and Sight and Sound's, the latter having the advantage of making every voter's list (mine included) available online. 

Two titles that impressed me the most--Aleksei German's Hard to be a God and Isao Takahata's The Tale of Princess Kaguya were released in their respective countries in 2013, on DVD in the USA in 2015; they're included in my 2014 tally. 

Good as the following may be I really haven't found anything that engaged and moved me as much as those two masters' final works (one died, the other retired)--hence my title.

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg), Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro)

When worlds collide

Steven Spielberg's latest Bridge of Spies is ostensibly about the Soviet Union and America collaborating, two distinct if mistrustful sensibilities joining tentative hands on an unlikely venture. What it's really about in my book is Spielberg and the Coens collaborating--two distinct if mistrustful sensibilities joining tentative hands on an unlikely venture.

Book of Life (Jorge Gutierrez, 2014)

Flores para los muertos

In the flurry of lame gags, British pop songs and overbusy digital animation stampeding across the big screen, the question pops into your mind: where's Guillermo del Toro? The man's the perfect choice to handle this, the Mexican holiday Dia de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, when family and friends not so much mourn the loss of loved ones as celebrate their memory. His films show the right mix of Gothic morbidity and childlike fabulism to present this most unsettling of public holidays properly, as a fascinating central facet of Latino culture--which presumably is what the filmmakers intended all along. 

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014); The Immigrant (James Gray, 2013); Night Zero (premiere episode of 'The Strain,' Guillermo del Toro, 2014)

(WARNING:  plot twists and story of the two movies, one TV show--and in one case an entire franchise--discussed in detail)

Aping The Planet of the Apes 

Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is arguably better than its predecessor, the remake of the third sequel to the original adaptation of the Pierre Boulle novel. Where the latter traces the nascent development of human-level intelligence in apes, this--the sequel and remake of the fourth sequel to the original adaptation (pay attention!)--has the full-grown Caesar (an impressively motion-captured Andy Serkis) struggling to lead his band of brothers into an Arcadian paradise. Apes at this point are capable of serious log cabin construction (their spiky spiraling structure could stand proudly beside some of the cruder motte-and-baileys seen in the Game of Thrones series); the words "Ape not kill ape" are scrawled prominently on a teacher's neolithic Smartboard. All that's missing, really, is some seriously decadent vegan cooking to transform this into a particularly esoteric episode on glamping from The Travel Channel.

Then the humans come in. Tense moments follow. Hope for the future is offered--and quickly dashed to the ground, resulting in large-scale digitally rendered, fairly engaging action sequences. The movie ends on the same image it began, with camera tight on Caesar's ominously pensive face--nice little touch, there.

Interesting--where Caesar in the original comes to the realization that apes are no better than humans, here he does a bit of syntactic sidestepping. "You are no ape," he declares, dropping his foe (and himself) down a long slippery slope involving precise etymologies (untermensch, anyone?).

Might add that the apes have not improved their tactics much since the last picture. Where previously they launched a full-on frontal attack against heavily armed troops on a suspension bridge (it's all right, they've got plot armor), here they launch a full-on frontal attack on a fortified city, and only when an armored car is commandeered (by an ape on horseback--see aforementioned story trope) do they actually make any headway. Some of the apes happen to be gorillas; couldn't they have taught their fellow anthropoids an alternate method?

Okay, cheap joke.

The movie's an impassioned plea for interracial/intercultural/interwhateveral co-existence; that much I got. Maybe my biggest problem is that it falls far short of what Boulle's novel was trying to do, what  the best science fiction (as opposed to sci-fi) tries to do: refract real-life issues through the genre's distorting lens, in an attempt at a fresh approach. The key word is distorting: Boulle's novel was satire in the tradition of Swift, with some withering things to say about our pretentions to standing on the top rung of the evolutionary ladder; Reeves (and Wyatt before him) seem to be trying to serve up a deadly earnest drama about yet another socioethnic minority group clawing its way to acceptability. Where Boulle and Franklin J. Schaffner's '68 film presented apes as exaggerated mockeries of the worse humanity has to offer, these two reboots present them as just an evolutionary step upward from what you see in your local zoo, down to the zoologically accurate body language of the motion-captured actors. Despite what today's filmmakers might tell you, realism is not a virtue in satire; a clear view of the target is required, shining through the effects. You miss the dark humor, the comic-horrific sense of ordinary life turned upside-down (Schaffner captured Boulle's satiric thrust best; Burton's, while scattershot shallow, still managed to plant tongue firmly in furred cheek). 

Plus I miss Helena Bonham-Carter's Ari, all ape makeup surrounding a pair of soulful, sensual eyes, the single most subversive element in Burton's remake. Cornelia, Caesar's mate (Judy Greer), is about as sensuous as a hair shirt--you wanted to give her not sympathy but a bottle of industrial-strength tick powder; Bonham-Carter's Ari on the other hand was capable of inspiring a serious erection--she made you want to rethink the arguments against the practice of bestiality.

Stranger in a strange land

James Gray's The Immigrant despite its melodrama despite its flaws is extraordinary, a retelling of Vito Corleone's entry from Sicily into New York, only from the point of view of a woman. Ewa (Marion Cotillard) has traveled from war-torn Poland to Ellis Island with her sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan) in tow. Magda's coughing gets her quarantined; Ewa faces a different problem--rumor has it that she's a girl of 'loose morals,' and will probably be deported.

The Godfather analogy is inevitable; Gray seems to be setting himself up as the millennial equivalent of Coppola (even his We Own the Night, which I thought was terrific, openly invites comparison), though not just Coppola--one is reminded of Guiseppe Rotunno's work on Luchino Visconti's The Leopard, and of Miroslav Ondicek's for Milos Forman's Ragtime, the kind of stately amber handsomeness that can be mistaken for White Elephant filmmaking--only Gray adds an emotional obliqueness that belongs more in an Ozu or Naruse film, and in the case of Joaquin Phoenix's Bruno a volatility that recalls--well, recalls Phoenix at his most unhinged. The emotional dynamics also resemble the tortured relationship between pimp and imprisoned prostitute in Kim ki-duk's Bad Guy, only told almost entirely from the prostitute's point of view--Phoenix does not make deadly with a paper dart, alas, but does share Han-ki's relentless, often contradictory obsession with his captive.

Bruno introduces himself gently into the picture, as a courtly well-dressed gentleman willing to take troublesome Ewa off state hands. He takes time in revealing his darker side; when he does it's an explosive outburst that frightens not because it's so violent or sudden, but because it's so indignant: he believes--or has long since talked himself into believing--that he's doing Ewa a huge favor setting her up, that she's being incredibly stupid or irrational or perverse turning him down. 

What sets Bruno apart from most if not all pimps is that he's enthusiastically backed up by his charges. The other girls are all over him, kissing and hugging, cornering him in all kind of sensual clinches. They're so convincing in their ardor and he comes through for them, especially Ewa, so often--sometimes at cost to himself--that you begin to wonder: maybe he's not such a bad guy after all, maybe it's Ewa who's the problem.

Cotillard is a marvel, and perhaps a measure of her achievement is that you can't quite put a finger on why she's such a marvel. Her Ewa is no pistol-packing take-charge heroine; most of the time she's just awkwardly stumbling into one form of trouble after another, helplessly clutching an iron pick plucked out of a coal bin to defend herself (rather feebly) against potential attackers. 

But--when you think about it--what can Ewa do? She's a woman in 1920's New York, a foreigner at that. If she speaks her mind, she's mannish and arrogant; if she resists she's unreasonable and stubborn; if she surrenders she's a whore. She's defiant after a fashion, but it's a furtive kind of defiance, defined by her strictly straitened circumstances: she has to steal her moments when no one's looking, keep them hidden like treasured jewels, like a secret identity. 

Ewa keeps saying it's all for her sister, and I believe her, or at least believe she is totally invested in  what she says, but at a certain point you wonder if maybe she uses that declaration as a rallying cry, a goal in life, an impossible dream she can look at above the muck she's in, neck-deep. Certainly it's for her sister, but I'd say it's also very much for herself; if she fails to rescue Magda, if her sibling dies before being rescued, she would probably have killed herself in despair.

Sometimes Ewa gives in, perhaps more often than she wants; but--crucial difference--she never gives up. Behind her eyes you sense an unbelievably tough kernel of intelligence watching, waiting for a chance. 

Ewa never gets that chance, at least not the way she would in a conventional drama (or conventional melodrama). Instead (and here I go into the film's climax in considerable detail) Bruno arranges for her to escape, but beforehand declares the true nature of their relationship once and for all. He tells her of how he first saw her, plotted her capture, sabotaged her chances of meeting her family; of how he treated her, abused her, used her worse than any of his women; he tells her her true role in their shared narrative--as a victim of sexual, emotional and spiritual rape for years on end, his plaything and slave, his unforgettable, unforgivable sin. She's his damnation--because of what he's done to her he's reduced to being less than a man; he's nothing.

And then her response. Not the blows she rains on him, a weak pummeling that wouldn't harm a kitten, but her absolute denial of his claim. "You are not nothing!" she declares, and in that simple little statement is a wealth of implication: I am not your victim--or I have been for years, but refuse to be only your victim. I refuse to play a role in your drama any more. I refuse to remain marked by your revelations, no matter how painful. 

I refuse to be your sin--to be the one who weighs you down, drags you to hell. I refuse to play the woman who hates you endlessly. I care for you, in as much as a person can care for someone who has both helped and hurt her so much. 

And I move on. I am free, and intend to live the rest of my life as I see fit.

Would like to take a moment to point out how closely (and rather recklessly of Gray, who I have to assume is a churchgoing member) Ewa's stance seems to hew to the Catholic position on such matters; to 'turn the other cheek' when one is wronged and 'love one another,' and so forth. Call Catholicism a passion or delusion but occasionally it's the evoking of older faiths--of centuries-old words or terms or ideas--that inspires the most potent emotional moments. Either it works for you or doesn't, you're free to respond according to your will (you must be; that's a crucial Catholic requirement for salvation, a defining characteristic of the human soul).

In this Gray joins the small group of fellow American filmmakers who focus on their Catholicism onscreen, or at least on the Catholic concepts of sin and guilt and redemption--Martin Scorsese, Abel Ferrara and, yes, Francis Coppola--with maybe a crucial difference: where Travis Bickle, The Lieutenant (or Thana, if you like), and Michael Corleone would probably seek retribution if they were in a similar position, Gray's Ewa opts for a more radical reply: not to kill Bruno or punish him but transcend him. She's a victim, but refuses to let that define her life.

In an extraordinary shot Gray slices the screen in two with a mirror and follows Bruno and Ewa as they flee to their respective fates. The moment isn't celebratory--if anything it has a pointedly mournful tone--but it does feel like a stopping point of some kind. Whatever future they have in store for them Gray isn't saying--we can choose one of several alternatives, or choose not to assign one at all; again, we are free to respond accordingly. 

Strained 

Guillermo del Toro's novel has been adapted for television with the filmmaker himself directing the premiere episode; the results sad to say are, well, not effortlessly achieved or easy to like. 

The contemporary setting directs our attention to the rather wooden characters; the dialogue lacks the kind of wit that enlivened the banter of a Blade or Hellboy (maybe they need to introduce a super-powered character or two, drily commenting on the action). The ostensible protagonist, a CDC officer, has marriage issues and is a control freak. We're basically setting up the story here, and so far the human side of the story is less than engaging. 

That said, it's handsome to look at, even on the small screen. Del Toro lights his huge sets in deep reds and greens, the better to set the tone, and during one of several exceptions--where everything is bathed in a dim steel blue--the impression is so striking it makes you want to shiver from sheer cold. 

That exception is actually a direct steal from the granddaddy of all vampire novels, Bram Stoker's Dracula, only instead of a dead ship we have a dead plane. The device still works, and del Toro still manages to direct an appropriately creepy little sequence, set inside the darkened jetliner. The episode is a study of contrasts, of juxtapositions between the medieval and the 21st century: ancient carved coffin sitting in an industrial warehouse; menacing sycophants in a plush corporate setting; an ancient evil loose in an ultramodern city. Del Toro is retelling the story, this time without the swooning sensuality and twinkling sentimentality; he's telling the story straight, using (to these inexpert ears) authentic epidemiological terminology, the latest CDC can offer. 

Two other sequences stand out: there's something unsettling about video footage depicting something inexplicable--in this case what looks like several hundred pounds of crated dirt suddenly vanishing into thin air. 

And then the morgue sequence: palm, burrowing worm, scalpel. Need I say more? 

I'm giving this one a chance. Hopefully they beef up the characters a little; unlike on the big screen, plot and dialogue matter more in a TV series. Del Toro directs with impressive panache--more than impressive, considering he's working on a TV budget--but he needs some solid writing in his episodes to firm them up for the long haul.

Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro), Antoine Doinel films (Francois Truffaut), The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls), Wagon Master (John Ford)

'Bakal' Boy Philippines

(WARNING: ALL  films will have their stories, plot details, twists and surprises extensively discussed)

Heavy metal

I can see the objections: it's a robot movie; no, a robot movie featuring giant dinosaurs; no, worse, a robot versus dinosaur movie with the cast of Top Gun emasculated to the last soprano trying to act, ferchrissake. It's a summer movie, a big Hollywood production, a multimilliondollar full-metal aesthetic prostitute out to hustle you out of your very last moviegoing dollar. On steroids.

I have to admit to loving Guillermo del Toro's vision of a postindustrial future, where the Jaegers (German for 'hunters,' the term referring to giant human-shaped mecha in the tradition of Japanese anime) clank and shudder and (unlike Tony Stark's flawlessly gleaming armor) sport rust stains and blackening from exhaust fumes, fly to the battlefield via fleet of cargo copters attached to an elaborate harness (you think of medieval knights lowered onto their horses by ropes and pulleys), step out of the Arctic mists like figures out of Norse mythology to collapse on the fallen snow. I have to admit to loving a movie that has the conviction of its cheesy drama, clunky and old-fashioned both, whose visual style is gloriously grandiloquent: human figures in a warm amber glow (they might be standing in a coal mine or--significant for del Toro--a New York City subway tunnel), the larger structures and machinery lit in a colder, more emotionally distant metallic blue. I love it when someone is pensive or makes a dramatic entrance or delivers a climactic speech and del Toro either shrouds him in a shower of welding sparks or cloaks him in roiling steam or floods him with the sun's glare--if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing in a big way. 

The kaiju (giant faintly reptilian/crustacean monsters in the Japanese postnuclear apocalypse movie tradition) lumber majestically; they rise to the ocean surface from an interdimensional portal like behemoths on loan from Poseidon and stomp or lean on or hide among skyscrapers like kids amongst towering sandcastles (you feel the urge to either admire and knock the elaborate structures down). With their mechanical counterparts they're larger than life, larger than legend, even--primal figures resurrected from our collective memories to raise havoc, perhaps even hell. 

And they're crafted. This is no Michael Bay shitpile where the director orders his team of digital SFX minions to manufacture robots by the crateload; the designs were carefully mulled over and show signs of wit. My favorites include the kaiju that (as del Toro puts it) resembles a Chinese dragon, spits out phosphorescent acid and in a wondrous moment spreads vast batwing arms; then there are the Russian and Chinese Jaegers (sadly underused), the former looking like a cross between a T-34 tank and a nuclear reactor's cooling tower, the latter having armor the color and texture of Chinese lacquer and an unsettling overall resemblance to a wolf spider. Gipsy Danger, our hero's Jaeger, is described as having the glower of the Chrysler building and the stride of John Wayne (I don't see it--the celebrity that comes quickest to mind is Babe Ruth--but like the idea). For inspiration del Toro avoided the Gojira films (which he admits to loving) and the various anime, instead seeking older sources: Goya's The Colossus, Hokusai's prints (also suspect a bit of Mignola's creature and graphic designs thrown in there, and of course Kirby).

I love it that del Toro uses as many practical effects as possible to sell the imagery, or has digital effects either helping or doing their level best to look like practical effects: the Drift suits look like the coolest Nautilus equipment ever conceived, and when the kaiju enter Hong Kong, you get a real sense of rubber-suited man stomping elaborate miniaturized set before an uptilted, overcranked camera--the details are lovingly rendered (as miniatures done by a Japanese studio often are), down to the Newton's cradle set in motion by gargantuan forces barely held in check. I love the cargo ship the Gipsy Danger drags ashore for a bit of batting practice--it's a mighty haymaker moment straight out of Walking Tall or Pale Rider, the righteous hero striding in with club in hand to set wrongs right: just as guilt-inducing, just as exhilarating. 

(Might as well throw in the observation that to my inexpert eye del Toro, unlike some filmmakers I can think of, seems to know just what happens when the cables or roadway of a suspension bridge are cut--well, his take on it is more convincing, anyway) 

It's not just the look, sound and heft of things; it's how they move, the kaiju and Jaegers facing each other like champions and dragons of yore, in grand slow motion. Del Toro shoots a little too close in but cuts at a reasonable rate, the fight sequences coming together with ease in your head. Telling that he doesn't take smaller action sequences for granted--a combat mat confrontation between a Jaeger pilot and a potential candidate boasts of intricate choreography, coherently shot and edited (though a later more conventional fistfight is disappointingly handled, del Toro apparently being more interested in martial-art matches than old-fashioned mix-em-ups).

Not as crazy about the look of the world beyond the portal: del Toro makes the unfortunate decision to use distorting lenses and to digitally add a kind of lit-from-within glow to everything, a letdown from the neon-cathedral look of Hong Kong or the vast stormswept waves of the Pacific just minutes before (you wonder if his budget came up short for the script's final pages). 

Del Toro ramps the visual intensity up to operatic levels; he has to, because the script is barely serviceable--about how a pair of pilots (triplets, in the case of the Chinese Jaeger) are needed to operate the robots, and have to be psychically linked to each other (the official term is 'Drifted'--interesting word that evokes the sensation of dreaming, as if the pilots indulged in a shared state of somnaumbulism). Del Toro takes a page from the seminal anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion to suggest that not all the pilots are psychologically stable, that some have trauma issues that potentially make them as much of a danger as the kaiju; once the big bads come however the issue is more or less dropped, and everyone comes together for the final confrontation.

What to make of Pacific Rim? Boring title (sounds like an episode of National Geographic's "Toilet Bowls of the World") It's an empty shell of a movie, a belching, flaming, roaring carapace covering thin gruel about men bonding and fighting together--one wishes del Toro could at least have turned the picture into a workplace comedy, the way he did his Hellboy movies. Helps to have Idris Elba--looking more badass than any kaiju or Jaeger--authoritatively rolling back the apocalypse (if Morgan Freeman ever felt tired of playing President or God he's got a replacement); helps to have Ron Perlman as kaiju organ dealer Hannibal Chau (yes, a black market for kaiju body parts), flaunting a pair of shoes Joan Rivers might describe as "a crotch trap for convicted child molesters." The two veterans sadly aren't allowed to dominate the human drama, but they do reign over their respective domains nicely.

(Let me add that if the movie were set in Manila we'd have broken down the monsters' corpses into bite-sized pieces in minutes and served them with a soy dip mixed with calamansi and a crushed siling labuyo, plus a bottle of ice-cold San Miguel Beer)

(Do want to mention Burn Gorman and his thousand-word-per-minute mad scientist Hermann Gottlieb. Gorman was the intense, sex-obsessed medical officer of the Torchwood Institute--a charming bastard in the series, and couldn't be more different (though just as charming in a smaller scale) in this movie)

David Edelstein in his review might be on to something when he wrote: "In most films, scenes in which tight-ass superiors chastise maverick heroes for being mavericky are there to make the maverickness seem even more heroic. Elba makes you want to tell the mavericks to shut up and listen." Watching del Toro light Elba in his gleaming black neuroarmor as if he were Achilles urging his fellow Myrmidones to fight you can tell that del Toro is in love with Elba, or at least with Elba's character (he's given an awesome name: Stacker Pentecost. Say it again and feel all the hard consonants burst like grenades on your upper palate). 

Which I suspect says something about del Toro as a filmmaker: he loves his freaks and monsters and children. Hellboy, Blade, Jesus Gris; Ofelia, Aurora and Carlos--think about it and the juxtaposition isn't all that odd: children are most alert and appreciative of freaks and monsters, have a similar love of surprise and chaos as monsters. You might say that to del Toro children are monsters (and vice versa), that in his films this is not necessarily a bad thing, and that this attitude helps develop the distinct flavor of his films.

My point being maybe the Jaeger pilots aren't all that compelling because to del Toro they aren't compelling; the pilots are ultimately irrelevant--aren't the reason he wanted to make the film in the first place. He's here for the freaks and monster (or in this case robots and monsters), for freakish authority figures like Pentecost, and Hannibal Chau; he probably couldn't care less if the cast of younger actors were dropped into an interdimensional portal and never came back. 

And that's fine by me too; unlike Michael Bay or Tony Scott, del Toro doesn't fully buy into the need to have the male Caucasian hero (sop to the main audience demographic) dominate the dramatic landscape (probably why the picture is doing so poorly in the boxoffice). This is del Toro's valentine to the large-scale nightmares of his childhood, and he's not about to have some ho-hum clean-cut white-bread hero stand in the way of his geek obsessions.

Bad boy

The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) is arguably Truffaut's angriest film; most disturbingly so, because the gradual sense of abandonment--by mother, by father, eventually by society itself--happens to a child of twelve (though Truffaut cheats a bit by casting Jean-Pierre Leaud, who was fifteen at the time of shooting). Paradoxically, it's also one of his funniest and most purely pleasurable. 

Over fifty years since its premiere and still the film seems astonishingly vibrant, alive. You clap with delight when Antoine Doinel (Leaud) flees an office building with a stolen typewriter and startles a flock of pigeons into explosive flight (it's like a tripped alarm no one pays attention to), or when he climbs into a centrifuge ride and Truffaut evokes the workings of a zoetrope (Truffaut pours almost every trick and bit of lore he knows into his first feature, as if he would never make another for the rest of his life (he goes on to make twenty-four)). Your heart quietly breaks when in what may be the film's most beautiful sequence the soundtrack trembles with crystalline chimes and Paris flares to life with orchards of buzzing incandescents, topiaries of blinking neons, vast arrays of blazing windows, the streets gleaming with the benediction of fresh rainfall--one enchanted image after another beckon just when Doinel is being driven away in a prison van, to be incarcerated in a juvenile institution for (as far as we know) the rest of his life. 

A stunning debut, and we reel from its effects decades later.

The succeeding films--Antoine and Colette (Antoine et Colette), Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés), Bed and Board (Domicile Conjugal), Love on the Run (L'amour en fuite)--roughly follow Doinel (and Leaud playing Doinel) as he grows up, finds love, finds trouble, and basically fulfills the promise implied in the first film, of raising general hell (the more accurate translation of the title). But he's never as homeless or destitute--he's constantly losing his job, but just as constantly finding goofier ways to make a living (hotel clerk; TV repair man; private investigator; remote-control operator of miniature boats for a hydraulics company; finally, modest success as writer of a thinly-veiled fictionalized autobiography)). He's never as devastatingly rejected (women push him away but end up tumbling in bed with him), or as rebellious (he's more passive-aggressive than angry)--it's as if Truffaut in inflicting his own childhood on Doinel in The 400 Blows is trying to redeem his cruelty by refusing to inflict any more radical traumas on the boy. Life may change and flow and be funny, even slapstick, but the face that gazes at us with such harrowing despair in that film's final image will never wear that exact expression ever again (he can put on any other expression, just not that one). 

Oh, Doinel still suffers--most poignantly I thought in the sad little conclusion to Antoine and Colette--and gets into trouble on occasion (as hotel clerk; as soldier; during dinner with a beautiful Japanese model); the shenanigans become funnier and definitely sexier, are enjoyable and have their own fleetfooted charm, but Doinel now seems to enjoy the unceasing protection of his creator from any permanent harm. 

You eventually realize that Doinel's seeming invincibility is itself sad. He never really faces adversity--he'd much rather avoid it, or as the last film's title puts it, 'run.' Instructive to contrast him with Colette, the last person to really wound him--in Love on the Run we learn through flashback that (as a kind of punishment, one is almost led to feel, for rejecting Doinel) she suffered a tragedy, managed to claw her way back up and become a fairly successful lawyer (albeit with strings attached). She's grown gravely beautiful (the luminous Marie-France Pisier, who Truffaut first cast in Antoine and Colette and who reprises her role years later) not just outwardly but inwardly, and Truffaut promptly rewards her with the privilege of judging Doinel's autobiography: he writes well, she informs him, but (echoing her criticism of a love letter he wrote her years before) will never be a real writer till he creates something completely fictional, from his head not his life. 

(Might as well add that there's little love out there for Love on the Run but I like it; arguably a prototype for the modern 'clip show,' it takes footage from the earlier films and deftly mixes them not just with new footage but also outtakes that Truffaut saved--suggesting the patently outrageous notion that Truffaut waited years to make this picture)

There is the faintest of hints by series' end that perhaps Doinel will settle down and grow up. Truffaut drops it at that point--or Truffaut intended to continue but God or life or random circumstance decided enough was enough (Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984--strange to think Leaud is now older by seventeen years). The series' very inconclusiveness is sad: there are no epiphanies for Doinel; no life-changing experiences or grand triumphs or absolute defeats, only this faintly unsatisfactory promise of a better life. Doinel's story--which ended in an ambivalent freeze-frame in The 400 Blows--ends the series with a similar pause, forever teasing us with untold possibilities.

Let me mention one more: Truffaut wrote a treatment, a sequel to The 400 Blows that shows an alternate life for Doinel, flitting in and out of juvenile institutions, serving in the military--a treatment that was eventually turned into Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Can you see Leaud's Doinel transformed into Belmondo's Michel Poiccard? Can you see Godard's feature debut as the true sequel to Truffaut's feature debut, Doinel running past the freeze-frame that ends The 400 Blows to flout for the rest of his brief life both social laws and narrative conventions alike? Mind you I've got no documentary basis to support this idea...but the mind nevertheless boggles.

 Runaway

You hear the name "Max Ophuls" and think luxurious melodramas like Letter to an Unknown Woman and The Earrings of Madame de...; great noir doesn't readily come to mind.

And yet The Reckless Moment is great noir. You might guess the radical angles, the menacing shadows, the sense of gargantuan urban architecture looming over hapless bits of humanity characteristic of noir would be anathema to Ophuls, but no--he takes his long tracking shots and retools them just so, their trademark qualities subtly transmuted to suit the genre: instead of smooth elegance (the camera's catlike glide), a sense of urgency; instead of displays of decadence (sailing past outspread candelabra, waltzing couples, towering potted palms), lean and malevolent inevitability.

Bennett's Lucia Harper is matriarch of the house holding fort while her husband is on a business trip, rushing from kitchen to living room to boathouse out back to resolve each domestic crisis with a kind of distracted competence--'distracted' because her mind is on other matters: her daughter may have killed her boyfriend, and someone is demanding money to keep from going to the newspapers.

Lucia dashes here and there with Ophuls following and not once does he pull back, not once does he explicitly clue you in but somewhere along the way you realize what this life is to her: a mousetrap, an elaborate inextricable trap designed to keep her paying her bills and instructing her housemaid and upbraiding her kids--all the thousand little things that make up the domestic life forming links in a chain caught tight around her neck, choking off her breath. Lucia races faster and faster just to stay at the center of her typical upper middle-class life, and before we know it the camera's stately drift has turned into an accelerating slide towards some unknown doom.

That's Lucia's life through her eyes: through the eyes of blackmailer Martin Donnelly (James Mason, magnificent as usual), her life means something else entirely--the road not taken, the kind of ordinary family life he never had a chance to create, much less enjoy. When Lucia and Martin talk you get the sense of two diametrically opposing points of view struggling not just to dominate but understand the other; you get the sense that Martin envies the absent Mr. Harper's position in Lucia's heart, that Lucia covets the disreputable freedom Martin (she believes) enjoys. 

Ophuls doing noir--unlikely, you say? But on the evidence of the film at hand, he makes the mismatch not just workable, but effortless, natural. Tragic that he wasn't given the chance to make more.

Family guy

Once got into a discussion on the merits of Kurosawa and Ford; the proposal was made that Kurosawa took what Ford did and improved on it. 

"I don't think so," said I (paraphrasing from memory); "Did his own variation, sure, canted the Fordian angles a little more, held the camera on the action a little longer, cut the footage a little faster. 

"What Ford did well that's inimitably his is that sense of a teeming community, of ordinary life bursting the frames of the movie screen. Kurosawa could do that to some extent--Seven Samurai, Lower Depths, Dodeskaden--but he always had to be dramatic about it. Ford's communities are often calm villages and towns that you recognized as part of the rural West (or at least the West of our collective imagination); the turmoil was often brought in by the hero, was eventually resolved, often in favor of the community. With Kurosawa there was often an intrinsic flaw to the community against which the hero struggled; what was important was the hero's struggle, not his eventual integration (or failure to do so).

"Ford delights in the community and the commonplace, where Kurosawa focuses on the individual and the extreme."

Which brings us to the wonderfully understated, horribly underseen Wagon Master. Where in most of Ford's films we find the community in place and having already put down roots (Innisfree in The Quiet Man, a Welsh village in How Green Was My Valley, Tombstone in My Darling Clementine) in this film the community--a group of Mormons--has been forcibly uprooted and told to move out. They plan to settle in the San Juan Valley in Utah, but have no means or skills to reach it till they meet a pair of horsetraders (Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr.) who agree to help. 

There isn't much of a story: the traders lead the Mormons, the Mormons intone a few songs (the film is a trove of old Western melodies), the wagons trundle forward. Gradually the realization comes to you that this, not the Mormons' quest for a new home, is the heart of the picture: lyrically shot and staged imagery of wagons rolling across the magnificent Moab landscape, of ordinary folk cooking and bathing and sitting together at camp, singing--a visual poem if you will of the great American migration westward, as seen through the eyes of the thoroughly ordinary people who did the migrating. 

A medicine show joins them featuring the prominently displayed charms (see above) of Joanne Dru, and the showfolk and Mormon folk and horse traders bond cheerfully, with much comic friction. Later the Cleggs, a family of outlaws, step in, figuring to hide amongst their number from a pursuing posse--and yes, there is tension, there is danger, but an odd thing happens: they start bonding with the Mormons too (about as open and charming a depiction of that branch of Christianity, incidentally, as any I've seen on the big screen). Not freely, no, and of course there will be the inevitable showdown, but one effect of travel and hard experience (Ford seems to say) is that even the unlikeliest of folk forge a connection. 

Perhaps the most vivid example of this comes when the wagon train chances upon a Navajo tribe--or rather the tribe chances upon them; the braves gallop into attack, to stop when they learn that the travelers are Mormons. "White men are big thieves," the Navajo chief maintains "Mormons only little ones." He invites them to camp.

Post-supper Navajo and white folk gather and dance in a ring round the firepit, the camera panning from one face to another--a visual summation if you like of what America is all about: races, professions and temperaments of all kinds come together to enjoy the mutual warmth and security of a blazing bonfire.

Suddenly a scream; we don't understand what's being said (and Ford to his credit makes it happen a touch faster than we comprehend) but the offending Clegg is tied to a wagon wheel to be whipped. The men whisper only a few terse words to each other, but their looks speak pages: we are in danger, we need to get out of this alive, but to do so we have to sacrifice one of our own. The fear is palpable and shared, so is the horror at what must be done. 

Aside from being one of the more interesting portraits of Native Americans in a Ford film (the Navajos here remain fully in control,  practice a coherent if rough sense of justice, enjoy a trenchant sense of humor) it's about as intense and memorable an example I can think of of--well, the consequences will be more complex (the Cleggses won't forget the incident, nor will they let the others do so), but for a moment the men form one of Ford's trademark communities, his band of select brothers, responding to stress and crisis the best they can. 

7.15.13

Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo del Toro, 2008)

The big red one

Mike Mignola's Hellboy stories aren't your typical superhero fare. They're basically grim forays into the worlds of science fiction and mythology (or rather, mythology used as science fiction, where the supernatural follows a vague, constantly shifting set of working principles, and the government is savvy enough to establish an entire department (the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, or BPRD) to handle the more unruly elements). The serious tone of the comic book ("graphic novel" is the fashionable term) is leavened by gallows humor delivered in an unflappable deadpan style; this, plus the constant sense that Hellboy--the hero of Mignola's stories--is doing his job, even if said job involves the dispatching of "tooth fairies," cute-looking tiny carnivores so named because they go after teeth first ("Bet you they don't leave money, either" quips Liz Sherman, Hellboy's pyrokinetic colleague and domestic partner). It's that disconnect between the often fantastic, often horrific activities of the BPRD and the more mundane attitude of the main characters that forms the series' appeal--that and the quality of Mignola's graphic line, which can suggest detail and depth of darkness (half the time Hellboy seems wrapped if not completely lost in shadow) using a minimum of penstrokes.

The films can't reproduce that line, and to del Toro's credit, they don't try. Instead del Toro takes the chance to flesh out Hellboy (Ron Perlman, preternaturally cast) and his colleagues: Liz (soft-spoken, sultry Selma Blair), Abe Sapien (physically and verbally eloquent Doug Jones), their boss Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor, every bit as droll as in the first picture, if less prominent). Add Johann Krause (John Alexander, voice by Seth McFarlane), and the film's a bubbling brew of power struggles, petty jealousies, and suppressed frustrations, punctuated by the occasional slapstick. Hellboy 2: The Golden Army after all is said and done is a comedy of the workplace--Office Space with supernatural hijinks and CGI effects thrown in.

That's not a putdown; if anything, it's the film's glory. The priorities of del Toro's characters are less the hell-spawned monstrosities confronting them than the everyday struggles they confront: issues like getting along with the boss (Manning frets at Hellboy's tendency to hog the limelight), dealing with a new employee (Krause is not just punctilious and Hellboy's superior, but also possessed of a thick Teutonic accent McFarlane stole from the terrorist villain in Die Hard With a Vengeance (and Hellboy hates Nazis)), hashing out domestic conflicts (between the empty cans of cat food and all the Butterfinger candy wrappers littering their bedroom, Liz has about had it living with "Big Red," as she sometimes calls him).

Cat food; pushy bosses; even pushier newcomers; trouble with the missus--unlike almost any superhero picture you can think of, there's a real dynamic between Hellboy, his friends, and the world at large. You can imagine them kicking off shoes after work and knocking back a few beers (and in fact in one scene they do); you can imagine them having worked together for years (too many, even), knowing each other's strengths and foibles to the point it's become a source of constant irritation, same time it's a source of unspoken strength (they quibble but when the chips are down, they have each others' backs). With this simple rearrangement of priorities Hellboy 2 upends the comic-book superhero movie genre, reveals to us where its real interests lie: not in computer-generated faceoffs but alcohol-fueled sing-alongs, to the tune of Barry Manilow's "I Can't Smile Without You."

Hellboy and Liz's relationship may have been crowded out along the way, but that's part of Liz's point--Hellboy's too outsized and chaotic for anyone to live comfortably with him, least of all her; wherever he's around he's center stage, causing havoc. But Liz isn't to be underestimated; in the resolution of their feelings for each other lies Hellboy's ultimate maturation, and Liz decides for both of them in one fell swoop, once and for all. Of course del Toro focuses not so much on what Liz does as on Hellboy's reaction to what she does, and as Perlman plays him, he reacts with a memorable sense of befuddlement--for once life is a step ahead of him, and he needs a moment to catch (or grow) up.

Not that other elements are neglected--far from it. Del Toro stages the action with admirable fluidity, using Hong Kong trained Brad Allen's fight choreography (one thinks of Yuen Woo Ping's work in the Wong Fei Hung (Once Upon a Time in China) pictures) to create graceful setpieces that wouldn't look out of place in a musical. If Hellboy and whoever he's confronting (usually Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) armed with a spear of varying length) comprise a pas de deux of violence, in del Toro's hands the action becomes something of a pas de trois, a far more intricate affair with the camera as third partner, weaving in and out of each other's dance. Set against a variety of backgrounds--a teeming underground Troll Market, a nighttime city street, a fantastic series of giant spinning gears worthy of a Busby Berkeley musical--the fight choreography doesn't lose but instead gains from the unorthodox treatment; with character front and center over action the viewer is kept surprised, off-balanced, not quite knowing what to expect, alert and delighting in what he sees (he is in effect left wanting more, not less).

Beyond the action are the villains--perhaps one consistent complaint against the first is the lack of a memorable antagonist; here del Toro corrects the oversight by giving us a royal family of elves, Oedipal in their dysfunction: King Balor (Roy Dotrice); Princess Nuala (Anna Walton); above all the aforementioned Prince Nuada. No mere evildoers they, from their standpoint we're the aggressors; they have been honoring their end of an ancient treaty, even if this means diminishment of their kingdom and influence (it's Nuada who's had enough, and wants to fight back). Later a plant elemental rears to life, looming over Brooklyn; Hellboy goes into action, but the outcome is more tragic than triumphant, more mournful poetry than spectacular effect (leastwise it's not the spectacle that strikes you first). "We die and the world will be poorer for it," Prince Nuada warns Hellboy; Del Toro drives home the point that even those who fight against us have their grievances, that every victory implies its own set of losses, that every creature no matter how destructive deserves at the very least a passing tribute.

Beyond all that Hellboy 2 is an occasion for del Toro to unleash a gift for creature design and poetic imagery exceeded only by--well Hayao Miyazaki comes to mind. The film's opening, where puppetlike figures play out the back story, evokes everything from Orson Welles' animated prologue in Le Proces (The Trial, 1962) to Jan Svankmajer's often unsettling stop-motion animation, giving us a foretaste; the rest of the picture is a full buffet, from the plant elemental and its snowfall of spores (perceptive of del Toro to observe that a creature's penultimate act is often a reproductive one--an attempt to disseminate what may be irretrievably lost) to the unstoppable gold soldiers, their combusting internal engines giving them the inner glow of fireflies swarming in a cavern, to the Angel of Death (again, Doug Jones) looming over Liz and a dying Hellboy to spread its many-eyed wings.

That last image--the Angel with his pair of many-gazed wings pronouncing Hellboy's fate--completes the symmetry of del Toro's scheme. Where del Toro grants Nuada a point of view and a chance to express it, with Hellboy del Toro suggests that death might, after all, be best ("it is his destiny to bring about the destruction of the Earth," the Angel hisses at Liz. "Not now, not tomorrow but soon enough"). Poor crabby Hellboy with his candy-apple skin, sawed-off horns, deep growl and hidden heart of gold may represent the end of the world as we know it--who would pay such a price for his continued company ( I won't, I guess, but would have to really think about it first)?

An aggrieved villain, a doomed hero, a wonderland of images--no, not your ordinary comic-book superhero adaptation at all. One of the best pictures to come out of Hollywood this summer, possibly all year.

First published in Businessworld 9.12.08