Gray_Balloon_Bob

I want to openly celebrate this film for how it is able to continually lure you into comfortably thinking you have a grasp of the situation and then completely upturning the entire context of what you've just witnessed, yet what unfolds is so sickening that I'm almost nauseous thinking about it. Pedro Almodóvar does not explore the darkest human behaviour to emphasis the light; he does not orchestrate a grand tragedy of abduction, enslavement, rape, grotesque scientific experiments, incestuous suggestions and sexual mania just to warmly reassure with optimistic triumph.

He's not condemning anybody, even Antonio Banderas - who is so far removed from any image he ever cultivated as a suave Hispanic Clooney – a sociopathic scientist who evokes Doctor Génessier from 'Eyes Without A Face' (1960) more than anybody else, not just in his methods but his brutal persistence in willingly devastating anything around him to achieve his goals. He's losing constantly, losing the trust, admiration, love of those around him, losing control; his human experiment Elena Anaya who he observes in his living room through the one-way glass in her watching cell like a living artwork is losing constantly her identity as she is crafted by his will, losing the tether to her old self as she fails to escape her prison, his Mother a live-in maid is constantly losing her maternal grasp as she watches her family disassemble; it feels like everybody is by default losing until they can stop and win something. Even the ending doesn't promise anything.

So what kind of burdensome descent into darkness is this? Well, it's not descent so much as it is a flaying. The film opens with Anaya exercising most dutifully in her small contained room, posing taut like a sculpture, and then as she receives her food from downstairs and talking to the Mother through an intercom. It's like a bustling hacienda as we see food being prepared, servants working, people communicating in all the ambiance of domesticity in what should be a normal household. But the film challenges our comfort with the scene with odd details that prevent this situation from being usual. Anaya receives her food via dumb-waiter, and downstairs she is being watched on multiple screens. And why does she wear that tight, flesh-toned one-piece, as if she is a human figure not yet finished in its creation? The film doesn't take long to reveal the circumstances of this living-arrangement, but then when we begin to think we understand what is happening and why the film peels back another layer.

The film is strikingly composed like a Kubrikian pallet that burns intensely with certain colours, and if you thought red in the Shining was assaulting take a look at this. The film is so gorgeous in its art-exhibition style that there becomes a cognitive dissonance between the gawking that it elicits from you and the increasing repugnance of what is gradually being revealed, and even when the film is at its most clinical like Kubrick, there is so much abounding passion that it just leaves you dazed. Take the scene in which an assertive, perhaps unhinged man in a tiger costume appears at Banderas' home and tells the Mother that he's her son and he wants to come back into her life. She allows him in and he quickly devolves from assertive to perverted; and the whole thing appears like it's composed too rigidly for the sake of being lurid. But what's happening is important relationships are being tested at a level in which they shouldn't even exist, and the small details of the tiger costume are just realistic details of life; life doesn't stop in awareness of how peculiar it's being and modify itself so it appears normal. It's just f****d up.

And this is Almodóvar, existing in the f****d up, in the most swollen- ready-to-burst Melodrama of life in which people exist in craziness and depravity way beyond ordinary boundaries, and it's as if he is gifting us this madness so we can delight in just how spectacular human behaviour is. Sometimes it feels like it doesn't know what to say or doesn't have anything to say and is doing what it's doing simply for the delight of the perverse, trying on different skins so to speak, but when it pulls back it's skins and reveals whole new truths that you hadn't even contemplated this film really does impact. And it's pulling back those skins that reveal how successful the film is. It wasn't a deception, an elaborate magic trick in which the skin peeling was nothing but provocation eventually to peel back and to nothing but air. Underneath the film is flesh, real substance, and you can look at it and marvel at the creation, and honestly say to yourself as every fortunate human has at some point: "Has there been a better time to be alive?"

Think of the innumerable bad guys that James Bond has ruthlessly dispatched over the years. Not the megalomaniacal villains of infinite ego, just the faceless and nameless body-bags that are just mild plot inconvenience. These people are such an unquestionable part of the world and they're a cog in the machine that keeps the plot moving, but we don't really think about this because these films don't invite us to think deeply about them, about how they became involved in these ridiculous plots, about whether they have a family or if they're struggling with the guilt of what they've left behind to pursue this life. Clerks thought about this over two decades ago, in relation to Star Wars. 25th Hour gives its narrative to one of these people; Monty Brogan is one of these elementary parts that helps sustain an entire operation, something that is taken for granted. He's a drug dealer, and of course there's nothing noble or commendable about that, but rather than being solely defined by that title, he's just another guy.

So Monty Brogan is going to prison. Although this is an unalterable conclusion, he still exists in a kind of transitory state, 24 hours of purgatory, between the closing of his old life and the beginning of a new one, in which judgements can still be cast and relationships re- defined. Edward Norton always verges between 'everyman' and slick self-possessed star, and here he does kind of exist between those two states. As he goes about these final hours trying to ensure some sort of stability, we see both a man who's got that typical wit and verbosity of a protagonist who can always summon the correct words, a man seems to balance the immorality of the job from which he thrives with small moments of compassion, like his saving a dog in the opening scene or giving bills of cash to a sleeping tramp, but also the selfish dick who hasn't quite balanced the good deeds with the bad. There's sometimes a little of his character from Fight Club, except here it's not his masculinity that's in question, his impotence arises from the realisation that he might have wasted his life.

And that feeling of uncertainty and things being questioned exists throughout, both in camera and subject. The cinematography is often kind restless, jumping from this position to the next, giving energy to environment that doesn't seem to have any. When Philip Seymour Hoffman is in English class with his students, there's a feeling of listlessness offset by this cinematography, and then later when scantily-clad student Anna Paquin challenges him about her B grade, in her disarming approach of both flirtation and contempt, the erratic camera almost turns this into some sort of intoxicated sit-com. There's also this occasional editorial choice that happened twice early on in the film in close succession and then (as far as I could tell) not again until the end, in which a certain action is shown twice, from a different angle. This happens as Norton and Hoffman move to embrace each other, and it's almost as if the film is stuttering and re-adjusting itself. In these weird moments the temporality of events is being affected, because I thought maybe these were supposed to be small but defining moments in his life, but maybe the reason is indiscernible.

But what's clear is the film's immediate reaction to 9/11. The book was written before this happened, but just the very nature of it being incorporated into the film surprised me, not because it's a deliberately provocative move but because in the wake of such unfathomable tragedy people would choose to interpret it that way. But this isn't some fantasy land in which all real-world contexts can be ignored. They were edited out of Spider Man, but to do that here would be ignoring something very important about New York, and by extension America, and that's really what this film is. There's a moment in which Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman are standing before Pepper's apartment windows, with a full view of the devastation of ground zero. The camera never moves throughout the entire discussion, in stark contrast to what I previously described, and so what you get is an evocative mixture of character and real world consequence. Monty Brogan isn't even present, the topic of discussion, and the script changes perspectives really subtly throughout the entire film, because it's aware that we can learn about our protagonist effectively through other people, and vice versa, but also that the characters can represent something larger than themselves.

Barry Pepper is the slick semi-yuppie, voice of masculinity, Philip Seymour Hoffman, ever reliable, ever wonderfully uncool, is emasculated and anxious and never quite comfortable anywhere, his character described as someone who ran away from his privilege and Edward Norton lies somewhere in between, a man with money and composure but lots of things tearing at him underneath. During his now famous vitriolic monologue in a bathroom mirror, he sees the words 'fuck you' written on its corner and in retaliation releases and explosive condemnation on every culture and ethnicity present in New York, all reservation Norton had kept at this point gone as the melody of his words almost become a poetic performance piece, something which is echoed in the final monologue delivered by the father, Brian Cox. But here, as we cutaway to portraits of the people being described in borderline-racist terms, we're not seeing a character display a sweeping racism or misanthropy for everyone, but a man deflecting his own insecurities and defeats onto every other person available. It's America as both the large multi-cultural nation still thriving in its diversity, and America as a single man who is trying not to lose everything because he might have fuckedup the idea of the American Dream.