My Year of Flops (24 page)

Kelly unleashes such an endless, dizzying torrent of ideas, pop-culture references, and incongruous juxtapositions that some are bound to register. A fuzzy social satire, surrealistic tour de force, half-assed political treatise, and vanity project all rolled into one,
Southland Tales
hits its targets only about 5 to 10 percent of the time, but when it does, it makes a Nagasaki-level impact. I can't say I enjoyed
Southland Tales,
but I can't stop thinking about isolated moments and images. The man atop a floating ice-cream truck filled with heavenly light, shooting a mega-zeppelin with a shoulder-mounted missile, for example, will stay with me long after better, more coherent films have faded from memory.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Wallace Shawn On Southland Tales

The son of legendary longtime
New Yorker
editor William Shawn, Wallace Shawn is an actor, playwright, screenwriter, and author known for the dark, incendiary nature of his plays. He has appeared in
Manhattan, My Dinner With Andre
(which he also wrote),
The Princess
Bride,
and
Clueless
in addition to providing the voice of Rex the Dinosaur in the
Toy Story
trilogy.

Wallace Shawn:
Well, I don't think anybody really had a literal understanding of the script, and I have to say, I was very influenced by the story of the English actor Ralph Richardson. Ralph Richardson had been offered
Waiting For Godot
by Beckett, and he read it, and he said, “Well, I don't understand a word of this, so I'm not going to be in it.” And he later said that was the greatest regret of his life. And he always felt bad about it. He really wished that he'd been in it. Should've just said, “This is great, it's got something.”

So I was kind of influenced by that, and I sort of thought—Richard Kelly had pictured me in the role of Baron Von Westphalen, so that was flattering and interesting. I saw his other film,
Donnie Darko,
and I thought, “Well, yeah. This is a very talented guy.” He's younger than me, so it was a bit of a risk. I didn't understand it; I didn't understand what he was saying. Also, I have a very deep regard and respect for Karl Marx. I'm a left-wing person, and I've read Karl Marx, and I feel he was a great man. And the movie—I didn't know what to make of the fact that Richard Kelly kept talking about Karl Marx. Was he making fun of him, or did he respect him, or was it just that the name was funny to him?

Nathan Rabin:
I think it may have been more of a Warholian kind of thing, where he was approaching him as an icon more than as a philosopher or political figure.

WS:
I think you're on to it, sort of. He wasn't commenting on Marx's economic theories, it was something else. It was a bit Warholian. I had a lot of questions about whether I ought to get mixed up in it, but then ultimately meeting him, he's an unusually charming and appealing person. And he's very handsome, not at all the sort of weird, mad, creepy kind of person you would think had written that. I would have pictured that he would have looked, I don't know, more like me! I was surprised at the fact that he was not a bizarre little madman. He
was someone who could go to any dinner party and delight old ladies as well as young girls. He was very un-weird in his presentation of himself.

NR:
Did you ask him what he was going for, or if there was a sort of Rosetta stone to unlock what
Southland Tales
was all about?

WS:
At first, I asked him a few questions, but I quickly could see that the answers were in the language of film. So you would simply add another layer of mystery. There was no way that he was going to translate this into something that you'd put in the
New York Times.
It didn't work that way for him. So I was astounded by the complete clarity and confidence with which each sequence of the film is made. The party on the spaceship, the blimp at the end, which is sort of a gathering of the elite of the United States. Everything is brilliantly done. Every single person that you see is magnificently cast, perfectly costumed. It's a totally confident vision. And when he has the porno actresses, they are all in a perfectly consistent world of their own. And when he goes on to the pier, though they go to a bar, all the people in the bar are still done with incredible confidence. So he knew exactly what he was doing in those ways. The meaning of the whole was definitely difficult to pin down, but that's not necessarily criticism. I did see it three times, and I liked it very much.

NR:
Did you figure out more each time you saw it?

WS:
Maybe a bit, but maybe if I'd seen it 10 times, I would have figured out more.

NR:
Was this the long version, the one that played at Cannes?

WS:
No, by the time I saw it, it was the shortened version.

NR:
The long version would almost have to clarify things or provide clues or hints that the truncated version didn't.

WS:
You'd think that, but I'm not sure. Because, as I say, in talking to him, you really move along into further questions. And then of course there are the graphic novels that are associated with the film, which raised further questions. It doesn't have a simple, clear plot or meaning that you're gonna one day get.

Big Green Brooding Case File #100: Hulk

Originally Posted January 8, 2008

2003's
Hulk
is perhaps the highest-grossing film I've written about, having brought in a gaudy $62 million in its opening week. But the film's box office nose-dived once poisonous word of mouth spread.
Hulk
represented a perverse case of bait and switch. The ads, poster, title, and fast-food tie-ins promised dumb fun about a big green monster who goes around smashing things. Instead, director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus delivered an austere, cerebral exploration of the plight of an existential nowhere man. They screwed up a perfectly good smash-'em-up comic-book monster movie with their infernal “art” and “ideas.”

Hulk
is driven by two seemingly antithetical concepts. Lee set out to make a live-action issue of
The Incredible Hulk
that borrowed heavily from the visual vocabulary of comic books. So he divided the frame into panel-like segments via split screens, and employed cartoonish transitions. Second, he set out to elevate the plight of a humble scientist/giant green brute to the level of a Greek tragedy. To the eternal regret of Universal shareholders, he succeeded. He delivered a comic-book movie for folks whose idea of comic books involves Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and maybe Art Spiegelman. Its target audience is
New Yorker
subscribers rather than acne-ridden teenagers.

The film's opening echoes the elliptical storytelling of comic books. It begins in the '60s with the formative trauma of its protagonist's life: being ripped away from his birth family and placed with an adoptive family. The boy, irreparably scarred by his mother's death and his father's unexplained absence, grows up to be scientist Bruce Banner (Eric Bana). The deeply repressed scientist sulks until enraged, at which point he transforms into a green giant with an appetite for destruction. He's a good enough guy, but you wouldn't like him when he's angry.

Bruce soon gets a visit from his long-lost father (Nick Nolte), a
maverick mad scientist with a look heavily indebted to late-period Unabomber. Bruce winds up waging a three-sided war against his crazy father, his own temper, and General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a gruff, authoritarian general played by longtime mustache enthusiast Sam Elliott.

In its first hour,
Hulk
boasts a hushed intensity that could easily pass for tedium. It's a bravely quiet film filled with solemn conversations conducted in near whispers. The Hulk doesn't appear in all his muscled-up glory until about 40 minutes in. Audiences who missed the opening credits could be forgiven for thinking they'd accidentally stumbled into an art movie.

Lee seems to go out of his way to avoid indulging in anything that might be considered fun. He appears hell-bent on denying a blockbuster audience the visceral kicks they angrily demand. Lee's Hulk smashes, but mostly he broods and aches. I appreciated the film's intelligent subversion of the comic-book movie. Yet me also like when Hulk smash stuff. Everyone does. That's why not even the film's failure could kill off the franchise.

Hulk
can be chilly and inert in the early going, but it gains a strange cumulative power as it develops into both a sad family drama about the sins of the father and an elegant metaphor for the war on terror. The more the government tries to destroy Bruce's Hulkism without understanding it or its underlying causes, the stronger and more resilient it becomes.

Lee succeeded in defunifying one of pop culture's most beloved monsters, transforming a potentially camp spectacle into an experience more intellectual than visceral. And when it comes time for the Hulk to do battle with another monster in the hokey climax, Lee is as lost as a poetry professor at a demolition derby.

Hulk
stands as a unique attempt to infect a blockbuster with the gravity and pathos of a small-scale drama. I suspect history will be far kinder to it than the present, especially when it's compared to the spate of comic-book adaptations that aspire to do nothing more than deliver the cheap thrills
Hulk
so assiduously avoids. Still, cheap thrills
can be awfully fun, especially when accompanied by indiscriminate smashing.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Secret Success

All-Time Action-Comedy Classic Book-Exclusive Case File: Last Action Hero

There's a wonderful passage in Nancy Griffith and Kim Masters' book
Hit And Run,
a juicy account of Peter Guber and Jon Peters' disastrous stint running/ruining Columbia Pictures. At the company Christmas party, Guber delivered a bone-dry, punishingly corporate speech. Morale was low. A great malaise had swept over the studio. Partygoers struggled to stay awake.