The American

The American is a thriller with a different look and feel to it. Not flashy or particularly violent--not even very busy, plotwise--it's more interested in character than story, more focused on interaction than action on the screen. The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, relying on thoughtful development of incident and personality, and careful attention to detail, rather than fast pace and fireworks. Most thrillers use the latter to distract their audiences from the implausibilities of their twists and turns. The American is smarter than that, and more respectful of the viewer, and that's a nice surprise in a movie belonging to this overworked genre. As well as a sly irony in one named after a nation historically synonymous with showiness and speed.

The story is simplicity itself. "Jack," a professional assassin (George Clooney), hides out in a small Italian village after an assignment in Sweden ends badly and he becomes a target of killers out for revenge. His only ally is his superior (Johan Leysen), a mysterious figure on the other end of some rather testy phone calls, who arranges a place for him to stay and funds for him to live on until he can safely emerge from hiding. Posing as a photographer, Jack befriends a local priest with an understandable curiousity about the stranger in his village, and pays regular visits to a high-priced brothel in a neighboring town, where he becomes infatuated with a beautiful hooker named Clara (Violante Placido). In order to keep Jack busy while in exile, his superior puts him to work on a rifle for another of his agents, Ingrid (Irina Bjorklund), who needs a weapon with precise specifications for an upcoming job. In between assignations with Clara, who gradually begins to return his affection, and philosophical talks with Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), Jack meets periodically with Ingrid. Their reltionship remains coolly professional, but her refusal to discuss her assignment arouses his curiousity. And then one night he's followed home by a shadowy figure whom he suspects of being one of the Swedes on his trail. His haven no longer safe, Jack realizes he must act decisively to preserve not only his own life but the lives of those he's come to care for.

What's remarkable about The American is its calculated unremarkability. It's not a film of big moments or gestures but of details and shadings, where a precisely placed look or movement of the hand can communicate more than ten minutes of dialogue in another movie. Much time is spent on watching Clooney simply go about his daily business. He rises early, does difficult-looking pushups, walks through the empty streets of the town, sits in a cafe moodily staring out the window with a glass of wine beside him. There's an existential sparseness to all of this--a film stripped down to its bare essentials, its lines clean and simple, its parts fitted together with the precision of a rifle. In fact, director Anton Corbijn's understated presentation of events effectively mimics Jack's cool, efficient approach to his own work, revealing the seriousness of purpose of one professional in the subtle artistry of another.

What's more, the story's lack of trimmings allows the film to go beneath the surface of events and unpretentiously examine some basic questions of human existence. Clooney's talks with the aged priest touch on matters of guilt and sin, and his relationship with Clara introduces the age-old theme of redemption through love. Jack also reveals his more contemplative side through an interest in butterflies, particularly a rare one that he discovers in the Italian countryside and later reveals to Clara. The butterfly, a recurring motif, grows richer in meaning with each appearance, metamorphosing from elegant image into the film's most important symbol.

Underlying everything is the movie's tragic awareness of the fallible nature of human kind and the inescapable aloneness of every individual. We struggle for connection, for ways to be available to others, to reveal ourselves and allow our vulnerabilities to show. But in Jack's world, vulnerability is the equivalent of death, swift and unforgiving. He not only hides away, he keeps his inner self hidden, locked up tight, along with his true name. It's not a coincidence that the two times he winds up in the sights of a killer's gun, he's with a woman he cares about. He's at his most exposed at those moments, and that puts him in danger of paying the ultimate price for vulnerability in his world.

True to its name, The American rarely strays from its protagonist's side: nearly every scene is from his point-of-view. As Jack grows less trusting of those around him, the film employs silence to convey his increasing sense of unease, and invests even the prettiest shots of the village square and the surrounding countryside with the feeling of imminent danger. What the movie shows is always heavy with the presence of what it doesn't show. Darkened streets and secluded spots in the woods express the usual kind of threat, but busy sidewalks and brightly lit restaurants add to the paranoid atmosphere in less conventional ways. The sparing use of violence artfully enhances this mood. What The American lacks in action, it makes up in tension--the film operates like a coiled spring. You watch it tighten little by little, waiting for it to snap. And when it finally does, it's quick and explosive, over almost before you know it, and shocking despite the fact that you were expecting it to happen.

The star power of George Clooney made this film bigger than it would have been otherwise. Without his presence, The American would have flown under the radar, but he made it a player at the box office. Unlike his character, who is out of place in the tiny community sheltering him, Clooney is perfectly at home in a picture of this modest size and means. The role of Jack is perfectly tailored to his intensity and smoldering good looks. It's essentially a silent part--Clooney does very little talking and rarely even smiles. Though known for his easy charm and gift with dialogue, he surprises by relying mostly on facial expression and posture to convey his character's burden of guilt and wariness of all around him. Grim-faced and brooding, this unusually introspective American gazes reluctantly inward, examining his violent identity with unwanted insight. Jack veils his eyes as a matter of professional caution, but he can't hide their haunted quality--when nothing is happening on the screen, that's when something is happening most profoundly in him. The drama is in Jack's face, a mask of disillusionment with himself and bitter mourning for the corrupt world he cannot leave, or change.

The other actors lend the star strong support. Bonacelli exudes a touching melancholy as the priest--a would-be confessor to Jack, his overtures to the quiet American make little headway and he ends instead by confessing the sins of his own past. Only Clara succeeds in penetrating the protective wall Jack has built around himself. Placido invests what could easily be dismissed as a cliched role--the beautiful prostitute with a heart of gold--with sensitivity and a sensuality that goes beyond conventional movie sexiness. Moreover, she and Clooney have good screen chemistry, enough to make both the charged sexuality and the growing affection between their two characters convincing, and at the film's conclusion, genuinely moving.

One of Corbijn's most impressive achievements with this somber, reticent film is the way it dusts off a number of other movie cliches--the sensitive, lonely gunman (familiar mostly from westerns like Gregory Peck's memorable The Gunfighter), the doomed romance between two social misfits, the irony of fate--and applies its simple, unadorned style to make them look, if not wholly fresh, at least more interesting than they would with fancier, more expensive treatment. The American uses these familiar tropes without apology or hint of irony, but introspectively, in a way that matches Jack's own melancholy musings. The result is a quiet, sober study of human imperfection, guilt, and the elusive nature of redemption, which evades one's uncertain grasp as easily as a butterfly.

Inception

Inception is a terrific idea for a movie. Actually, it's a terrific idea because it is a movie. It's a film whose story could exist only because cinema exists. If cinema hadn't been invented yet, it's doubtful that a novelist could have come up with the storyline or themes that writer-director Christopher Nolan explores in his latest work. Unfortunately, the idea alone doesn't guarantee a successful outcome. The film falls far short of its goal, which I interpret as the ambitious one of combining the logic of dreams and the logic of cinematic storytelling into a whole--or at least, into an experience in which the two wholly complement one another.

The premise is undeniably intriguing. Dom Cobb (Leonardo di Caprio) is the leader of a team of dream extractors, practitioners of one of those vaguely plausible fringe sciences invented to propel the plots of science fiction/fantasy tales. Extractors invade a person's dreams in order to remove information buried within the dreamer's unconscious mind. They do this for profit, working at the highest level of corporate espionage: one business rival wants to steal another's secrets, so he hires Cobb to hijack the rival and burglarize his/her brain. It's as illegal as actual stealing, which means extractors are essentially just sophisticated crooks. Cobb himself has legal problems apart from his nefarious work; he's an expatriate floating around Europe, unable to return to the U.S., for reasons which are only gradually revealed.

The beginning is ingenious, crafted around an audacious use of in medias res--the film actually opens inside one of the dreams Cobb and his crew have broken into. This opening gambit is quickly exposed as a deception, however. They have been hired by a Japanese magnate, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to ferret out a secret he has taken great pains to secure from discovery (in the world the film imagines, dream theft is a constant threat among the high and mighty). It's a test of his own internal security measures but also an elaborate audition, for the businessman wants to gauge the crew's skill before hiring them for the real job he has in mind--to enter a competitor's unconscious, not to steal an idea but to plant a new one, one which will benefit his own company's interests.

Around this slight premise, Nolan conjures a dark fantasy of revenge, guilt, and an uneasy sort of redemption. At its core, though, the film is a fanciful variation on an old genre--the heist/crime caper film. Cobb and his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are master thieves with the latest technology in their tool kits: they plan virtual robberies and steal imaginary loot. But their break-ins also involve elaborate deceptions and role-playing, so they're master con artists as well. The Sting meets Ocean's Eleven, in the realm of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In accordance with genre rules, a fair amount of time is spent recruiting new members to the team, experts in different fields who possess special talents needed for the job at hand. Those scenes are often among the most enjoyable in heist films, and Inception proves no exception. Tom Hardy, in particular, is amusing as a wisecracking grifter with the ability to shapeshift into different identities to fit the changing scenarios of his victim's dreams. But most screen time is devoted to Cobb's wooing of the suggestively named Ariadne, a bright young architectural student played winningly, as always, by the wonderful Ellen Page. Page brings her trademark blend of sweetness and sass to what's basically a stock role--she's the neophyte in the group, the one who needs schooling in the ways of dream intervention. Her scenes are therefore padded with exposition as Cobb and others explain to her exactly what dream extractors do and what it all means. This makes her the audience's surrogate, its symbolized presence in the world of the film. As she struggles to make sense of the confusing images and events around her, and later begins to find answers on her own, so do we--though undoubtedly with less authority than Page musters.

Ariadne is not merely a sounding board for plot points, however. She brings a much needed talent to the team--the ability to design a world that, despite being imaginary, is credible enough to fool their mark into believing his dreams are reality. Extraction/inception works only during dreams vivid enough for the dreamers to experience them with the intensity of real life--so-called lucid dreaming. During their incursion into his sleep state, the extraction team brings a carefully scripted and illustrated series of dreams that they share with the victim, and each other, so that they all can interact in the same storyline (the extractors must be asleep as well). Since the setting in which they act out these fantasies needs to look believable for the process to work, the team requires an architect to first build it image by image, then sustain the illusion or change it as needed, while the plot unfolds. Performing this complex creative task makes Ariadne a surrogate for the filmmaker; since she's also the surrogate viewer, Nolan has created in her a character which functions in a complex relationship to the film, both embodying the connection between the artist and his work and providing the thread which binds it to its audience.

The set-up is fascinating, but once the caper finally begins, the film quickly, and quite surprisingly, becomes less so. Getting all the pieces in place for the robbery was good fun, but the robbery itself is a confusing, overlong, turgid affair. Cobb and his cohorts, accompanied by Saito, trap their victim, Fischer (Cillian Murphy), on an overseas flight; once all are asleep, they break into his dreams and go to work. This work occupies the whole second half of the movie, and it takes the picture down the wrong rabbit hole.

The main problem is that Nolan seems to lose interest in the underlying notion of his film: projecting oneself into another's dream suddenly is no longer cool enough for him, so he complicates matters by multiplying the number of dreams his protagonists have to infiltrate. Once inside Fischer's sleeping mind, Nolan's dream team must move to a second level--a dream within a dream--and then to a third dream inside that. And, unfortunately, it doesn't end there... With several different scenarios unfolding at once, the film furiously tracks Cobb and his partners fighting their way through elaborate defense mechanisms consisting of security guards and fortresses in simultaneous but separate dream systems, all to get to the place where they can successfully plant the notion that Saito believes will eliminate Fischer's company as his rival. It's a fairly simple goal--why does it seem like it takes forever to reach? And why couldn't this idea have been dropped somewhere in Fischer's first, or even second, level of dreaming? That's never adequately explained. Or maybe I fell asleep and missed that part.

Nolan likes writing stories that play with structure, and he's usually good at it. Memento (2000) memorably runs backwards, as the hero searches for the origin to his mysterious form of amnesia. The Prestige (2006) takes duality between characters to such an extreme that it passes beyond logic into a kind of dream state of its own. Even the more conventional Batman films (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) fracture story time and space so thoroughly that they exist in a kind of hyper-real universe--not the safely iconic comic book world of other superhero movies, but a broken, more dangerous version of our own.

Now comes Inception, in which Nolan is once again looking for the edge rather than undermining the middle. He's clearly out to create something unique to movie screens, a film story that composes itself in part from the complex layering logic of dreams: a cine-dream, perhaps. To this end, he discards the usual duality of dream vs. reality for that of dream vs. dream, which in theory is interesting. Unfortunately, execution is another matter. The film expends far too much energy constructing its maze of interlocking story parts--there's little left over to make it meaningful for the viewer. In this case, more is definitely less. With each successive layer of dreamwork it penetrates, the film becomes less interesting, since its tension is diffused over a greater area. The basic lesson of cutting between two different courses of action to create suspense is as old as D.W. Griffith, but jumping back and forth between four dream stories--especially when the connections between them are as tenuous as they are in this film--drastically reduces the dramatic impact of each. Inception suffers from narrational hyperventilation--it aims for a powerful emotional experience but produces mostly dizziness.

Nolan does try to add some gravitas to the proceedings by giving Cobb a back story laced with tragedy. The dreams the conspirators use for their undercover work are shared, and despite their attempts to plan them out beforehand, each individual's thoughts and fears can send them on unexpected detours at any moment during the operation. The one who poses the most danger to the enterprise is its leader, Cobb. His psyche is a mess, haunted by images of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), easily the film's most arresting figure. Wildly beautiful and completely mad, the appropriately named Mal lives vengefully within Cobb's guilt-burdened mind, popping up at the worst possible times to expose Cobb as an intruder to the dreamer-victim and force him and his team to abort their mission. Sometimes she even tries to kill him. Why Cobb should be harboring murderous visions of Mal in his unconscious is the film's central mystery; its solution gives Inception its provocative, bittersweet climax.

The role of Cobb is perfectly tailored to di Caprio, an actor of such effortless intensity he could probably make ordering from a menu seem like a cathartic experience. But the script actually gives him little to work with, and the character is tame compared to earlier Nolan protagonists--the tormented, tragic Bruce Wayne/Batman and the Apocalyptic visitation of Heath Ledger's Joker. The narrative tries to make up for Cobb's lack of depth by the way it's organized: by inserting one dream inside another, the film mimics a literal descent into Cobb's internal hell, one circle at a time. But it never feels right because Cobb's demons aren't really depth dwellers; they live close to the surface, where--had they been released earlier--they might have generated more heat.

Inception's ultimate undoing, however, is its lack of originality, which is ironic given its aspirations. Behind the cine-dream experimentation and the Matrix-like visuals--the slow motion, suspended-in-air combat ballets, the vaguely futuristic dream settings and cityscapes--is fairly standard action fare (car chases, gun battles), disappointing by Nolan's standards, who raised the bar for summer actioners with his dark, poetic, psychologically dense renderings of violence in the aforementioned Batman Begins and the extraordinary The Dark Knight. There's little here that feels as fresh and inventive as the set pieces in those films. And apart from one sequence in which Ariadne performs the mind-blowing feat of bending an entire city block over on itself--buildings, cars, people, everything--the pictorial style of Inception is not very exceptional.

Nolan's film may also be the victim of bad timing, coming in the wake of last year's blockbuster Avatar, which fashioned its now famous story around a different type of psychic projection. Inception's vision is muddled compared to that film, which worked hard to make the notion of dreaming one's way into an alternate state of being accessible to audiences. The difference between the two pictures runs much deeper, however. Avatar made its imagined technology into a metaphor for cinema itself. In the story, the "dreamer" projects his/her consciousness into the body of another being and lives inside it. In an analogous manner, the movie spectator projects his/her consciousness into the world of the film story, passing through the screen to "live inside" that world for as long as the film runs. One of the things Avatar is about, then, is what it's like to watch a movie, how it feels to experience it fully. In other words, it's about itself.

Inception, on the other hand, is about what it isn't--but could become. The film attempts to turn our experience of watching a movie--watching this particular movie, that is--into something like what our mind experiences while dreaming. By adapting dream logic to film narration, Inception tries to replicate the way the unconscious mind creates the "stories" that live inside us all. It's using cinema to go beyond cinema, into the realm of the greater human mystery.

Avatar is much more successful at what it does, but of course it has the easier task. It's much simpler to make a movie about being a movie than to make one that imitates the unconscious mind. I applaud Nolan for the attempt. What would the cinema be without dreamers like him?

Avatar

If you haven't heard of this film by now, you might actually live on Pandora instead of Earth. It cost a lot of money to make and it's made a lot, too. It's returned James Cameron, fresh from his now 13-year-old triumph, Titanic, to the headlines. He's king again. Some people think it's great, some people think it's hype, some people ackowledge that it's both. It's both. It also has a serious mediocre streak running down its middle. Let's agree on one thing right now: James Cameron can't write. How else could he have taken one of history's most compelling, haunting tragedies and turned it into an unwatchable potboiler? Yes, I'm talking about Titanic, which for my money was an insult to the victims of that disaster. Avatar's script is a rough draft, but its special effects and visual style are polished beyond anything I've seen before. I recommend watching it in 3-D. It needs all the dimensions the screen can give it in order for it to deliver its full impact. That impact so far has been considerable.


Avatar

James Cameron once famously declared himself King of the World. I imagine this is why, in his latest film, Avatar, he has created an entirely new world so that he could make himself king of it, too. To a large extent, he’s succeeded. His new movie seamlessly blends live action and computer imagery, and employs the most dynamic use of 3-D I’ve ever seen, to create a vision that is breathtaking, bold, and most important, alive. Unfortunately, the epic sweep of its visuals is not matched by its story, which, despite epic pretensions, lacks the requisite scope. It’s also depressingly unoriginal.

The action takes place in the future on a distant planet suggestively named Pandora. There, an occupying force of U.S. marines tries to keep order among the indigenous population, the Na’vi, creatures shaped like elongated humans with pointed ears and blue skin. The marines are there to run interference for an American company that is mining the planet for a rare mineral (“unobtainium”) found in deposits underneath the woodlands where the Na’vi live. The Na’vi are a proud hunter-warrior people, similar to many Native American tribes, and they offer fierce resistance to the military, whose aggression is held in check only by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), director of a project that’s studying the Na’vi in order to negotiate a peaceful way of co-existing with them.

Into this volatile mix comes Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine who is recruited to take part in Dr. Augustine’s study. Her program is an ingenious one: she mixes Na’vi DNA with that of a human individual to grow a hybrid in the lab, then projects the human consciousness into the Na’vi body (the “avatar”) to allow him, or her, to walk among the Na’vi as one of their own . Jake is eager to join for personal reasons—it gives him a chance to start his life over, to once again inhabit a body that has all of its motor functions intact. But he quickly finds his position in the project compromised by the marine commander, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who recruits Sully to spy on the Na’vi and report his findings to him instead of Dr. Augustine. Quaritch is eager to mount a full assault on the Na’vi and conquer them once and for all, and he figures any information he gets that doesn’t go through Augustine will help him accomplish this. Sully goes along because he is still a marine at heart. But his heart is about to undergo a radical change.

The movie has been called Dances with Wolves in outer space because of what happens to Sully once he “becomes” a Na’vi warrior. He likes it, of course—who wouldn’t? Especially when he's being tutored in his adopted people’s ways by the beautiful princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), between whom initial antagonism changes gradually—and predictably--into mutual liking, respect, and finally, love. In the scenes detailing his instruction, we watch Sully slowly transforming himself, finding not just wholeness in a new body but wholeness of a different kind as his soul grows into that body--and into the life he was obviously destined for. When, acting on the information he has provided Col. Quaritch, the troops begin their invasion of the forest to drive out the Na’vi, Sully realizes the terrible consequences of his betrayal and makes a fateful decision—he switches sides and fights for the Na’vi, eventually becoming the leader of their desperate struggle to remain free.

Taking up their cause is not without its consequences, however, and it is here that the narrative’s shortcomings are the most glaring. The film’s morality centers on doing the right and just thing, which in this case is presented as fighting for the oppressed against their oppressors. This is also the only emotionally plausible thing to do, since the story is dominated by Sully’s life among the Na’vi; his growing understanding of, and identification with, their values; and his romantic attachment to Neytiri. He never really has a choice, when it comes right down to it. The narrative relentlessly drives him in that direction from the moment he arrives on Pandora, and his conversion happens quickly and easily, without hesitation or inner turmoil over abandoning his human roots (Quaritch calls him a “traitor to his race”)--and therefore without dramatic effect. What should have been an emotionally wrenching moment in the story, imbued with tragic overtones, is treated matter-of-factly, like the forgone conclusion it is.

This has implications for the film’s politics, although undoubtedly not the kind Cameron intended. Much comment has already been directed at Avatar’s “liberalism,” which is to say it sides with aboriginal culture over industrialized society, with respect for nature over the worship of technology, with living in harmony with all forms of life instead of subjecting the natural world to human domination for purposes of gain. And it’s decidedly anti-military into the bargain. Oh, those Hollywood liberals--why do they hate America so? Actually, it’s hard to take Avatar’s “political stance” seriously, given the one-dimensionality of the conflict at its center and the predictability of its outcome. Even the least attentive member of the audience will have no trouble following the movie’s by-the-numbers scenario of Good vs. Evil: this is Melodrama for Dummies.

But Cameron courts controversy and contemporary relevance for his innocuous tale--he actually puts the phrase “shock and awe” into Quaritch’s mouth when he’s firing up his troops for the attack on the Na’vi. So Pandora is offered up as an analogue for Iraq as well as the American West, with Vietnam lurking in the images of warfare among lush tropical scenery: a roll call of American Imperialism’s greatest sins. Not enough guilt for you? Might as well throw in European Colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, India, etc. Cameron might think his targets are clear in all of this, but his aim is wild. The situation on Pandora is not like any of these historical ones because it has no solid context—the action takes place almost literally in a vacuum--so there is nothing to lend the would-be parallels weight. Pandora is not Iraq or the Great Plains--it’s a galaxy far, far away where a ragtag rebellion is fighting an evil empire that is superior both in numbers and technological sophistication but suffers from arrogance and overconfidence. When this saga unfolded on the screen in the first three Star Wars films, a savior arose from the ranks of the rebels to defy his father and his own past. Much the same happens here, with Sully defying his commanding officer/parental figure Col. Quaritch and turning his back on his marine, and his human, past to reinvent himself as the leader of the Na’vi.

Problematic in its politics, Avatar is far more successful in its introduction of religious themes. The Na’vis’ intimate connection with nature has been ridiculed by some critics as mere pandering to fashionable beliefs on the left, but in fact it’s an integral, and well developed, part of their conception as a race--and it plays the crucial role in determining their fate. The assault on their forest homeland is simply a strategic maneuver from the point-of-view of the culturally blind military: they need to drive the Na’vi out to get at the deposits of unobtainium buried beneath the trees. But in doing so, they unleash powerful forces they don’t understand and have no way to control. Some of the film’s most effective scenes explore the implications of the interconnectedness between the Na’vi people and the animal and plant life of their environment. Sully’s capture of the the Mountain Banshee (a winged, dragon-like creature that Na‘vi warriors tame in order to fly) is a thrilling action sequence but also a moving ceremony, a rite of passage for both as they form the bond that is the soul of all life on their planet. This bond finds its highest expression in the Tree of Souls, a rather banal name for the magnificent vision at the center of the Na’vis’ world, a gigantic tree glowing with the combined energy of all living things. Dr. Augustine discovers that it functions like a giant nervous system, providing a way for communication to flow back and forth between all forms of life on Pandora, and this proves to be Col. Quaritch’s downfall: when he orders his men to destroy the Tree to hasten the Na’vis’ defeat, the besieged natives are sent reinforcements by the planet itself.

Cameron effortlessly blends this animistic theology (shades of Star Wars’ famous “Force”) with some basic Christianity. One of several meanings of “avatar” is the incarnation of a deity, a god manifesting itself in human form. Sully’s consciousness is projected into the world of the Na’vi to inhabit one of their bodies and give it life, evoking Christianity's belief that God took the form of an earthly being in Jesus. Perhaps Cameron considered this allusion too obscure, for he pushes the analogy even further and has Sully make the ultimate sacrifice at film’s end, dying in his earthly (human) body so that his spirit can be reborn in the body of his Na’vi avatar—literally giving his life for the people he has chosen, or was chosen, to save. Deciphering the Christian allegory at play here is not exactly challenging.

But the real religion of the film is cinema itself. At this late date, does anyone doubt James Cameron’s total devotion to moviemaking as technology, art, and popular entertainment? If so, watch Avatar in 3-D in a crowded theater and you’ll see something that can truly be considered a modern spectacle. From the breathtaking vistas of Pandora’s mountains to the lush undergrowth and magnificent trees of the Home Forest, Avatar presents the spectator with a visually stunning and fully realized environment. In addition to these splendors, Cameron and his crew have advanced the technology of motion-capture filmmaking to the point where the animation is more than just smooth and supple--it has an almost tactile quality. The very process itself--recording a human actor’s movements, then transcribing them into the movements of a computer-animated figure--neatly doubles the technology of “avatarism” in the movie’s story, the process by which a person’s consciousness is transported into a Na’vi body and becomes its animating force.

But this “avatarizing” process is a metaphor for cinema also. In the film, the human subject lies down in a cylindrical chamber and goes to sleep, allowing her/his mind to “wander” off and merge with the avatar. In the act of going to the movies, we enter a darkened theater and allow our minds to wander as well, to be absorbed by the story playing out on the screen through the process of identification. That is, if the film is able to provide us with characters that can serve as conduits into its world. Although not a boldly drawn character—Worthington’s wooden performance doesn’t help—Sully is clearly designated such a “conduit” for the audience. A novice to the world of Pandora, as well as to the avatar program, he provides the film with an innocent, inexperienced point-of-view, much like that of the viewer—it is through his eyes that we learn about what is going on, that we are educated, at the same time he is, about the world we have entered. This is yet another version of the avatar relationship, of course: Sully is our avatar for “living in” Pandora. Through him, we are able to penetrate the cinematic realm projected upon--and in front of--the theater screen.

I suppose in a way Avatar is less of a movie than it is a phenomenon. It was designed to be that way, of course: designed to change the way movies are made, experienced, and thought about. But not to bear the weight of a morally complex universe. Cameron’s dedication to giving his audiences a new cinematic experience has all-too-obvious limits. Nothing else could account for why, in a film with seemingly boundless ambitions, the story has none. It stays snugly inside a comfort zone of borrowed plot elements and familiar tropes—a straight-line hero’s journey, a romance without real challenge, villains so wrong-headed they pose no meaningful threat. It’s basically a fairy tale, and while there’s nothing wrong with contemporary fairy tales in the movies (Penelope and Coraline are delightful recent examples), one that pretends to be savvy enough to preach to its viewers about geopolitical matters makes me nervous.

But it isn’t just an uninspired plot that plagues Avatar—there’s a certain laziness in its non-computer graphic details that undermines its overall impact. Cameron spent 300 million dollars on his movie and he couldn’t come up with a better name for the worth-dying-for mineral resource than “unobtainium”? How about “very-rarium”? When you’re dumbing down ideas, why stop halfway? “Na’vi“ is simply an abbreviated anagram of “native,” which is admirably economical but does not, in this case, prove that less is more. And although it’s a very talky film, Avatar’s dialogue is most definitely not in 3-D--it’s flat-out dull, and boasts not a single memorable line, unless you count the Na’vi way of acknowledging their regard for each other, “I see you.” When Sully in Na’vi guise says this to Neytiri during their long-awaited courtship scene, it’s probably a good Date Night moment, but beyond this, no one has anything important to say.

This laziness extends to character, as well. Sully’s blankness as a person may be calculated to make him more accessible to audience identification, but a handicapped ex-Marine who’s fighting against odds to win his life back ought to have a little more edge to him, a little more attitude, a touch of can-do bravado. Worthington gives us a decent guy who takes everything in stride, even his setbacks, like someone seriously into meditation. Col. Quaritch, on the other hand, is just what his name suggests: a hard-ass career soldier itchin’ for a quarrel. Lang delivers pretty much what you’d expect, strutting and snarling on cue, but he’s serving Patton Lite, and even some scripted character quirks can’t make him nearly as interesting as Robert Duvall’s similarly war-happy Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). Only Sigourney Weaver as the cranky, chain-smoking Dr. Augustine gives a performance with some spirit in it. Her presence is a tonic to the “meanwhile-back-at-the-base” scenes, which are mostly lackluster in conception and execution, since Cameron’s attention--along with ours--is elsewhere, caught up in the high-energy world of Pandora. Unfortunately, none of that energy is expended on making the Na’vi more than visually interesting. Zoe Saldana gives a sensitive reading as Neytiri, ensuring that her obligatory journey from suspicion to trust, from hostility to love, is at least believably done, but the character barely emerges from the clichés that make the Na’vi a rather bloodless creation, the latest version of industrial culture’s Noble Savage.

Avatar has been subjected to plenty of critical hits since its release, but it obviously can absorb them. It’s already made a gazillion dollars at the box office, so on some level--OK, several--Cameron knows what he’s doing. But does anyone, including himself, have a clear idea of what he’s done? Avatar is a movie about many things: heroism, love, community certainly, but also cinema and the spectator’s way of watching and experiencing it. The implications of this subject extend much farther, however, because the “avatarizing” process in the story actually gives us an interesting metaphor for the relationship between mind and reality as a whole—that is, for the interaction between mind and world that creates the reality we “know.” Sully’s consciousness enters another space and changes that space because of his presence and actions. It’s how all of us are in the world, of course--it’s just that he’s in it through another’s body instead of his own. The “avatarizing” technology is mirrored by the technology of the filmmaking process, in ways I indicated before—and both are mirrored in turn by the laws of perception that direct how we engage with the world and experience, or in Na'vi terms,"see" it.

Perhaps James Cameron is a master storyteller after all. For all the weaknesses of his movie’s internal tale, maybe the real story he’s telling is what his film represents as a technological achievement and how it relates to the way we experience reality in the first place. As an advance in filmmaking capacity, Avatar could conceivably be pointing the way to cinema's future. In watching a film, the spectator’s consciousness may be absorbed by the world beyond the screen, but the transfer is not a complete one—not yet, at any rate. Could the technologies of cinema and "virtual reality" merge one day into a single medium, making movies a truly interactive experience, and not just reflective of one? In the final analysis, that may be the story Cameron wants us to see while watching his film—see, and just possibly believe.

A Serious Man

I hope this film gets the recognition it deserves. I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since they burst upon the scene with Blood Simple. Several brilliant films, and only a very few duds, later, they have created what I think must be their most personal movie, and their affection for the subject matter shows. This one looks and feels a bit different than past films of theirs. Not always--it's smart-alecky at times, just as you'd want it if you're a Coen-head like me--but it also raises questions that haven't appeared in their previous work. Don't worry, they're not going soft. But they are looking around a little more, beyond the boundaries of genre and into themselves, perhaps.




A SERIOUS MAN

No one makes films quite like the Coen brothers. Since their attention-grabbing debut in 1984 with the neo-noir classic Blood Simple, the Coens have carved themselves a unique niche in American filmmaking. Creators of dark, cynical tales filled with violence and black humor, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn a map of the American Soul as a morass of greed, misguided passion, and uncomprehending desperation. Though many of their star-crossed characters come to bad ends, they’re usually too dim-brained or foolhardy to be considered victims of tragedy—it might be more accurate to call them victims of a fatal kind of bewilderment.

The Coens’ latest film, A Serious Man, has a different look and feel to it, however, which suggests they’ve got something else in mind this time. Eschewing their stock world of schemers, criminals, and people living on the margins of nowhere, the brothers take aim for once at the middle class--in this case, the Jewish-American middle class of the 1960s. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a professor of mathematics at a small Minnesota college. He has a wife, two teenage children, a tract house in the suburbs, and aspirations to nothing higher than tenure and a modest career as a mid-level academic. But beneath its seemingly calm surface, Larry’s life is on the verge of falling apart. His wife is bored with their marriage and wants a divorce so she can marry another man. His daughter and son barely acknowledge his existence, except of course when they want something. His very odd brother, out of work and living with them over his family’s objections, has gambling problems and perhaps is soliciting sex from local school children. The college is receiving anonymous letters blackening his character, which has placed his tenure status in jeopardy. He has money troubles. And then a student of his offers him a bribe to change a failing grade…

All of this is revealed in the course of a few days in the life of this not particularly heroic hero, a nebbishy Everyman who tries not so much to solve his problems as to figure out why they are happening to him and what they all mean. Despite the increasing desperation he feels, Larry’s role in his own life remains essentially a passive one. He remonstrates with his wife about her decision to leave him, but meekly complies with her demand that he move to a motel, despite the fact that she’s the one having the affair. He helplessly watches his brother’s mysterious and disturbing presence in his home further alienate his wife and undermine his authority with his children. A sexy neighbor who sunbathes in the nude awakens his sleeping libido, but his timidity prevents him from making any headway with her. And although he tries to get tough with the student who’s tried to bribe him, he backs down when the student threatens to sue him for defamation of character, and stashes the money in his desk without ever reporting it to the proper authorities. In short, Larry has trouble taking action of any kind to improve his lot. He seems incapable of helping himself. He’s stuck.

Perhaps if he were in someone else’s movie, he’d have a chance to get unstuck and turn his life around, but the Brothers Coen don’t create characters to show them mercy, they create them to parade their sufferings across the screen in ways both cruel and hilarious. Larry’s life is an updated version of the Old Testatment story of Job, and like that famously tormented patriarch, he desperately wants to understand why, since he’s tried so hard to live his life as a good (i.e.“serious”) man, his once comfortable existence is vanishing before his very eyes. But in his tormentors’ hands--not just God this time, the Coens as well--Larry’s search for understanding becomes an ironic journey toward greater confusion and uncertainty instead of enlightenment. This is for two simple reasons: 1) even if there were someone who could explain his life to him (there isn’t), 2) Larry most likely wouldn’t be able to grasp it anyway. His passivity precludes the kind of imagination necessary to transform the mysteries of existence into spiritual insight. As a mathematician, he’s comfortable with abstractions that lend themselves to numerical representation, not those that lead to transcendent thinking.

Larry’s failure to achieve understanding—his anti-quest, in effect—is neatly summarized by his visits to three rabbis. Job was visited by three friends who counseled him about his troubles and his relationship with God; Larry makes appointments with three spiritual counselors looking for the same kind of guidance—and gets bupkis for his pains. It is in these sequences that the Coens’ flair for satire really makes itself felt. The eccentric, patronizing, and seriously unhelpful advice Larry gets from the rabbis shows just how unprepared organized religion is--any religion, not just Judaism--when called upon to deal with problems that fall outside its limited purview. Whether genuinely obtuse or just so bored from years of listening to complaints they can no longer recognize real distress, the rabbis offer Larry nothing but platitudes and awkward silence. He leaves each meeting more frustrated, more lost than ever.

A Serious Man marks a welcome return to form for the Coens. After the lazy plotting and smug sarcasm of their last film, Burn after Reading, it’s good to see their jaded perspective used to deepen and darken a comedy already rich in the ironies of human existence, instead of merely adding a wiseguy attitude to a pedestrian story. Man is an existential comedy on a par with some of Woody Allen’s most memorable films of the 1980s, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Coens’ philosophical ambitions are announced in their movie’s black-and-white opening, a droll staging of a Yiddish folk tale in which a peasant couple is visited one night by an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (a troublesome ghost). As disturbing as his appearance in their home is, his abrupt departure is even more so, because it leaves them with a question: have they been cursed by the spirit’s presence or spared his wrath by the mercy of God? As viewers, we are left to decide for ourselves, and our dilemma mirrors not only the couple’s but Larry’s as well. Larry’s life, as it will begin to unfold onscreen moments later, is a series of such “visits” by events beyond his imagining or control—a succession of trials that stretch the shadow of this dark introductory fable across the length of the entire film.

As the hapless Larry, Stuhlbarg turns in a thoughtful, nicely shaded performance, comfortably occupying the focal point of the film’s conflicting emotions without becoming entrapped by any single one. Anger, disbelief, self-pity, indecision, and the mildest hint of rebellion all vie to be uppermost in his portrait of a man under siege, and Stuhlbarg performs the necessary balancing act between these varying responses with aplomb. The Coens do not ask for psychological insight from their cast of largely unknown actors, just that they keep their performances consistent with the mood of the film. If Larry seems to be repeating his confused reactions each time he receives a blow without making progress toward acceptance or a resolution of any kind, it’s because his makers don’t want him to grow or acquire depth as a person but simply to follow his preordained path to its end. This is the Coens’ modus operandi: even in a “philosophical” comedy, they’re more interested in external behavior than the inner life of people.

But there can be exceptions, and the one in this film is pretty remarkable. Richard Kind’s portrayal of Arthur, Larry’s deeply troubled brother, is so angst-ridden and intense it threatens to destabilize the film every time he appears. A bitter, tormented, dysfunctional personality, Arthur seems to exist mainly inside himself, emerging occasionally into the world only to wreak havoc: using his brilliance with numbers (he’s a mathematician also) to concoct elaborate gambling schemes, which gets him into trouble with a local bookie, or projecting his lonely sexual fantasies onto children. A peripheral presence in the story, Arthur accompanies Larry into exile at the motel, inseparable from him, like his doppelganger or darker half. By way of emphasizing this relationship, he is shown only in scenes that include Larry—never by himself or interacting independently with others—and photographed mostly in darkness, his sad figure framed in the background of shots or on the edges of the screen. It’s as if the shadow cast across A Serious Man by the opening sequence comes to rest in him: he is the movie’s actual dybbuk, a disturbing, unpredictable presence whose behavior cannot rationally be explained. Kind’s startling work in this small but crucial role makes the irrational frighteningly real.

And it does something else, too--it hints at the real emotions lying beneath the icy surface of the Coens’ sardonic attitude. It’s not much of a stretch to view this film as unusually personal for them. I read somewhere that Larry is based on the Coens’ father, himself a college professor, and they grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, much like the setting of this film. Larry’s teenage son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), could be a stand-in for the brothers themselves, in this regard. From Danny’s vantage point, A Serious Man is a coming-of-age story, and this vantage point literally becomes the film’s during the sequence of his bar mitzvah, much of which is shot with the camera taking his point-of-view. The bar mitzvah provides the movie with its emotional climax, bringing together many of the characters and allowing them a quiet interlude of reconciliation and rest as the moving ceremony unfolds (even Larry and his estranged wife, Judith, share an almost tender moment). Danny’s journey toward manhood means he will eventually inherit the world from his father, a melancholy truth the film captures in its haunting final shot: Danny and his fellow students stand outside their Hebrew School, watching the sudden, surprising approach of a tornado. The image of a whirlwind and the turmoil it symbolizes is from The Book of Job; its ingenious inclusion here is from the book of Coen.

Is A Serious Man the Coens’ most “serious” film yet? It’s certainly one of their soberest, and could be their most introspective, given the roots of the story in their family’s experience. Its narrative style subtly underscores this shift in tone and purpose. For once they employ no gimmicks or artful twists in the plot; it’s straightforward story-telling the whole way, at a more relaxed pace than usual and with the volume turned down. The tragicomedy of existence has long been the Coens’ playground, but only with this film do they stop and do some genuine thinking about it—specifically, about the sad injustice of bad things happening to a good man. Despite lacing the movie with their trademark black humor and satire, the Coens are very serious about their protagonist and his life. Larry Gopnik’s downfall comes, unhappily, without insight or redemption, because it comes without his having committed a sin or crime to bring it about. He has done nothing to deserve his fate, except, ironically, not to resist it more--to accede too easily in becoming its victim. Only if timidity is a sin does his punishment make sense. But in the face of A Serious Man, I see only bewilderment.