bastard_wisher

Whoa, talk about a mis-marketed movie! Never have I seen a film's trailer do so little justice to what the film actually is. I went and saw this for $1 at my incredibly sleazy neighborhood second-run theater expecting some neat cinematography ('cause I'd already seen some clips on Youtube) and that's about it. Oh how much more this turned out to be. To call this a "Hollywood" film seems grossly inaccurate (save for a few small moments here and there, which I'll get to in a moment), as I can't really think of any Hollywood movie to compare it to stylistically or thematically. It reminds me more of Michael Haneke's "Time of the Wolf" than anything else, but with a camera style which actually recalls Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible" (an almost absurd thought for a big-budget, studio-backed film). It is this insane cinematography which really earns the film such an outstanding score, since I guess I can see how the same screenplay could have resulted in a pretty stupid movie in anyone else's hands. While certainly not cringe-worthy and pandering, the script does struggle with some very clunky exposition (like every time Clive Owen's dead child is brought up, or when the midwife suddenly begins explaining her back story randomly for seemingly no reason), and strains credibility for the sake of plot-momentum at at least one point (namely where Clive Owen conveniently overhears how The Fish killed his ex-wife. The script's reliance on surprise moments also wore a little thin after a while (the scene where we think Jasper is dead but he isn't works, but by the time we get to where we think the prison guard is going to whack Clive Owen but he doesn't it's gotten contrived). I also found the very ending rather disappointing. Having succeeded so thoroughly at creating an uncompromisingly bleak tone, it feels like a slap in the face to the rest of the film when the "Tomorrow" boat appears. If it had ended just a few moments earlier, with Clive Owen and the girl floating alone in their dinky little boat, it would have been amazing. That said, none of these vague flaws do anything in the long run to diminish the sheer impact the rest of the film creates. Through the masterful long takes and unbelievably complexly choreographed mis-en-scene a sense of pure sensory overload and tension is attained unlike anything else I have ever seen. To compare it to the beginning of "Saving Private Ryan" feels cheap and does no justice to the film as a whole, yet it is the only comparison within mainstream cinema that I can think of. But unlike Spielberg's drivel, Children of Men refuses to soften up, or to take sides. The bleakness is overwhelming and deadening, the violence is jarring and frightening, as much the polar opposite of Quentin Tarantino's violence as I can imagine. The few moments of tenderness feel hard-earned and real, and pack just as much emotional punch to me as the film's violence. I find it remarkable now the film refuses to portray either the rebels or the government as admirable. In the context of the violent frenzy, "sides" don't even come into play, it's just pure terror. I loved how the camera would often wander indiscriminately, catching little visual asides and focusing on them for little moments, giving a greater sense of just how much is going on during all these scenes of intense combat, or even just the glimpse of Jaspar and his catatonic wife we get after Clive Owen and the girl leave, something a "normal" Hollywood movie would never do. The entire refugee camp sequence is as masterful a piece of virtuosic visual film-making as I have ever seen. Granted, all of this probably loses quite a bit of impact on a small screen, so I'm glad I saw it in a theater, albeit as shoddy a theater as one can imagine, especially since it's really as much of a last chance to do so as I could possibly get (hell, the movie's already out on DVD).

As a side note, anyone who dismisses the film's cinematography because Emmanuel Lubezki occasionally "cheated" with the long takes by digitally enhancing them is, in my opinion, not only entirely missing the point but also snobbishly denying the possibilities that digital post-production offer, in my eyes not at all different from refusing to listen to music made on a synthesizer or even to refuse to listen to music on compact disc or MP3!

There's no getting around the fact that Matt Dillon cannot possibly make himself ugly enough to look anything like Bukowski actually did, but he does his best to capture the writer's posture and way of carrying himself. If the end result does not resemble Bukowski as much as it does Humphrey Bogart, it is only because Matt Dillon is a good-looking actor. I suppose he could have tried to match Buk's voice more though. In all fairness, the film does try to capture some of Bukowski's harsher edges (his violence against women for example), in an effort to counteract the sense of sterilization brought about by the generally good-looking performers (sure, Lili Taylor may not be the best-looking actress around, but she's still in much better shape than a wino like she depicts would be). The use of very formal, long camera takes is an unexpected but interesting choice (and shows the film's Scandinavian roots), although the distance it brings adds a further sense of cleanliness into what is essentially very gritty subject matter. Of course, the film is supposed to be a comedy, and this camera technique does help to give the film a deadpan Jarmusch/Kaurismaki edge to it (although it still isn't ecstatically funny). Oddly, the screenplay somehow feels over-reverent of Bukowski in some aspects (full Bukowski poems are heard, read by Dillon in a notably un-Bukowski like voice, on the soundtrack), and at the same time too broadly drawn. With it's rambling, episodic structure and predominant focus on Bukowski's relationships with women, the film at times begins to resemble not so much a specific biography but rather any number of other stories about aimless twenty-something aspiring artist types and their relationship troubles (think "Jesus Son"). Luckily in my case, I have a naturally high affinity for these types of stories anyway, so it didn't bother me as it might someone more tired of these "angst and anomie among the young and bohemian" tales. Still, as far as on-screen Bukowski goes, your best bets are documentaries. The recent "Bukowski: Born Into This" is the most expansive, detailed, and definitive, but Barbet Schroeder's four-hour "Bukowski Tapes" is also worth seeing for it's intimate, in-depth nature, although it is exhausting and presented in a way that becomes repetitive. The "Bukowski At Bellevue" live performance video is interesting but unessential if you know the poems. But if fictional Buk is what you're after, I'd say that "Factotum" is definitely the way to go, relative to the limited choices that exist. As far as I'm concerned, "Barfly" is blandly crafted and over-acted, essentially reducing Bukowski to a drunken buffoon. "Tales of Ordinary Madness" is generally considered atrocious, though I have only seen a few minutes of it myself. "Crazy Love" is not really about Bukowski at all, and is a terrible film to boot. "Factotum" perhaps merely trades one cliché vision of Bukowski for another (in "Factotum"'s case, Bukowski as a sort of suave, troubled yet romantic working-class genius), but at least "Factotum"'s I can not only tolerate, but find enjoyable watching.

Small aspects of this film seem a bit dated, but Egoyan makes up for it by being so astonishingly innovative with everything else. It's strange to think that lost among the sea of crap that is most 80s cinema, is this deeply idiosyncratic ode to alienation that predates so much that has been come to be taken for granted in international art cinema. David Lynch is the only other filmmaker in North America I can think of who was even close to doing films this interesting in the 80s. Steven Soderbergh pretty much owes "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", and thus his entire career, to having the balls to steal what Egoyan was doing, relatively unseen, at the time, and passing off his own watered-down version.