Dinner, Drinks, and Dread

As moviegoers, each one of us has our own dipstick for chaffing out films that are great from those that grate on our nerves. In my case, it is a simple matter of whether I am thinking ‘How will this end?’ as a film nears its dénouement or ‘When will this end?’ In other words, what I am watching has to be engaging enough to keep me guessing till its climax and well into it. Speaking of which, there is another hallmark for a memorable film, in my opinion.  It either ends exactly where I thought it would (for example, Hitchcock’s Notorious [1946]) or it throws a curveball and floors me completely (for instance, Scream of Fear [1961]; The Ninth Configuration [1980]; Dead of Night [1945] among many others). What makes Nick Tomnay’s maiden feature film The Perfect Host (2010)—which he edited and wrote as well—based on his own short The Host (2001), tick is that it manages to tick all the right boxes.

The one-line descriptor for the film on IMDB: ‘A criminal on the run cons his way into the wrong dinner party where the host is anything but ordinary’, and the accompanying poster do both a service and a disservice to this unknown little gem. They give away the spine on which the story hinges. The trailer on YouTube is even worse. While viewing it, it will not take long for the discerning eye to spot a ‘twist’ in the tale.

Thankfully, The Perfect Host does not get affected by these inadvertent revelations primarily because it is not a one-trick pony. Like an offering from a gourmet chef, the film is multi-layered, with tantalising surprises galore.

The tone is set quite appetisingly, in one of the early sequences of the film, when John Taylor (Clayne Crawford), a career criminal on the run from the law after robbing a bank enters a departmental store to buy some medication for his heavily bleeding foot. At that precise moment, there occurs a stick up in the store by a revolver-wielding woman. In a darkly comic scene, when the thief asks the store owner to put all the cash in his register in a bag, the Chinese man asks ‘Paper or plastic?’ The woman settles for the latter—an obviously wrong choice, thereby auguring an incorrect decision that John will be making a few minutes later. Another important foreboding is weaved into the same sequence when John manages to outwit the robber, by pulling a gun on her, instead; followed by the store owner sticking a pistol at John’s face. Tables are turned, as they will continue to be, on quite a few occasions henceforth. 

Desperately seeking a safe haven, armed with a lie, John manages to get inside the impressive house of Warwick Wilson (David Hyde Pierce, whose claim to fame is portraying Dr Niles Crane in the TV series Frasier). Warwick is an affable guy and a cleanliness freak with a curious gait, who is alone at home, busy preparing dinner for four of his old friends—Roman (Tyrees Allen), Rupert (Cooper Barnes), Chelsea (Annie Campbell), and Monica (Indira G Wilson)—when the doorbell rings.

Offering John an unlimited supply from his stock of red wine, while admitting ‘I’m a bit of a white man myself; red’s a bit heavy for my constitution’, Warwick ushers his guest in, in a manner in sync with the title of the film. But as times passes by, both John and we, the viewer, will learn that even though red wine is not to his taste, the colour red is something Warwick definitely fancies.

A film that effectively turns the ‘home invasion’ genre on its head—and is reminiscent of the Anurag Kashyap-penned, Ramgopal Varma-directed superlative Kaun (1999), sans Urmila Matondkar’s histrionics—The Perfect Host is one of those rare films that encourages us to listen carefully. For it peppers the dialogues—major chunk of the film is nothing but a tête-à-tête between Warwick and John—with clues. These clues pertain to both what is about to happen (‘Cleaning up your nasty mess’) as well as an insight into both their characters (‘You’re my guest and I’m glad you’re here, but you only got yourself to blame’). The essence of a dark comedy, laid down during the departmental store scene, is also kept intact with such classic lines (delivered to perfection by Pierce) as Warwick exclaiming ‘You can’t kill me, I’m having a dinner party’ while being threatened by John at knifepoint. 

While deftly handling the minimalist setting of his film, Tomnay displays that he is equally adept at visual metaphor. In one scene, to hide John from the eyes of a prying neighbour, Warwick puts a mask on his guest—a mask of the creature from Jack Arnold’s cult-classic Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). As the masked John tries in vain to communicate with the lady, while being restrained by Warwick, we realise how the concept and depiction of the ‘monster’ has changed in the past six-odd decades. At the same time, we also marvel at Tomnay’s mastery in portraying how the face our next door neighbour wears can be a mask in itself.

It will be thoroughly unfair to review The Perfect Host without showering accolades on David Hyde Pierce’s performance. It is indeed difficult to point out, after Malcolm McDowell’s Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), another character on film who elicited so much dread while dancing.

At the same time, one does need to acknowledge that the film itself is not ‘perfect’. The barrage of twists that are infused into the last quarter of its 93-minute duration might appear to be an exercise in overkill for some. The prolonged flashback sequences, dealing with Taylor and his fiancée Simone (Megahn Perry) can also be labeled as mostly redundant. 

However, what makes this under-seen, under-appreciated effort that flew under the radar a laudable one is that it relies largely on an intelligent interplay between two characters. It is a venture that reminds us and restores our faith in the fact that—in this age of CGI and ‘Bayhem’—there was a reason movies were labeled ‘talkies’ long time ago.

And for serving that sole purpose, if for nothing else, this is one host one would like to raise a toast to.

A Downbeat Tale of Drugs, Decadence, and Death

In one of several brilliantly-written scenes in Shane Meadows’ (of  the 2006 skinhead drama This is England fame) Dead Man’s Shoes (2004), a small-time drug dealer Sonny (Gary Stretch) and his gang accost a local guy Richard (Paddy Considine), who has just returned to the British Midlands after serving the army. Sonny is suspicious that the previous night Richard had broken into his house. The tête-à-tête between them goes something like this: Sonny: ‘You know the lads had this ridiculous idea th…’ Richard (interrupting): ‘Yeah, it was me.’ The abrupt cutting off in mid-sentence and the instantaneous confession take both Sonny and us, the viewer, completely aback.

In a sense, this short, but impactful scene encapsulates the film itself. Most of us, while reading the above verbal exchange might have formed a mental picture of Richard, the ex-army man, and Sonny, the drug dealer. Fed on the staple Hollywood diet of hard-as-nails, biceps-bulging soldiers and gun-toting villainous drug lords, the characters of Richard and Sonny in Dead Man’s Shoes are as different from the stereotypical portrayal of similar characters by Hollywood, as the astonishing repartee by Richard to Sonny’s half-asked question. Moreover, the confidence Richard shows in confessing does not stem from the power he feels in his muscles, but from his knowledge that deep-down Sonny and his crew of drug peddlers—Tuff (Paul Sadot), Soz (Neil Bell), Big Al (Seamus O’Neill), Herbie (Stuart Wolfenden), and Gypsy John (George Newton)—are a bunch of cowards.

The story of Dead Man’s Shoes, written by Meadows and Considine themselves, deals with the age-old theme of revenge. Richard’s mentally-challenged brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) was abused, humiliated, and tortured—both physically and mentally—by Sonny and his cohorts, while Richard was away serving the army. Now, that he is back, Richard seeks retribution for the wrongs done to his brother, who was too weak-minded to fight back.

Straightforward, the story may seem, but run-of-the-mill, it is not. In the opening monologue itself, when Richard says ‘God will forgive them. He’ll forgive them and allow them into heaven. I can’t live with that’, we realise that our protagonist is not like his American ilk from the Marines or Special Forces, who have god-like powers and prowess. So, is he the devil, then, as Soz enquires when he comes face-to-face with Richard? The answer, this, time, too, is in the negative. Richard is simply a man consumed with the single motivation to right the wrong done to his helpless little brother. Later on, though, we get to learn what is stoking the slow-burning fire of vengeance inside him has a lot to do with Richard himself, which makes the character all the more humane.

On the other side of the coin lie Sonny and his gang. While their corrupting influence on Anthony revealed a malevolent and immoral streak, but like Richard, it does not take us long to see through this veneer. Just as Richard is anything but the personification of the ‘one-man-army’, these small-time drug dealers, too, are nothing but scared little ferrets inside. After all, bullying is but a façade behind which hide the weak.

Richard is well aware that Sonny and his gang feed on others’ fears, and that they would crumple like the powder and pills they ply as soon as they are confronted with an individual who can stand up to them. And it is this very weapon—striking fear in the hearts of those whose business thrives on that particular emotion—that Richard uses in avenging his brother’s brutalisation.

Sonny and Co. are quite similar to Anthony in the sense that they are nothing more than a bunch of overgrown children. This facet becomes all the more clear over the five-day period during which  Richard strikes terror into the lives of Sonny, Soz, Tuff, Herbie, Al, and Gypsy John. Be it scaring the living daylights out of Herbie by appearing in front of him while donning an army gas mask or generating a frenzy of fright among the entire group by breaking into Sonny’s apartment and leaving behind a ‘colourful’ message of warning, Richard relegates the outwardly tough drug dealers into a group of crying, bumbling, panic-stricken collection of cry-babies, who refuse to be left alone even for a second.

Unlike most revenge-films that focus more on the final culminating act of virile violence, Dead Man’s Shoes derives its message from the drugs that wreaked havoc on Anthony’s life. Richard believes that by peddling drugs to the youth, the dealers control their minds. And to teach these dealers of death a lesson or two, he turns the tables on them by doing exactly that—meddling with their minds first before delivering fatal blows. In fact, he had carved this philosophy on the wall when he had sneaked into Tuff and Soz’s apartment. The graffiti ‘Cheyne Stoking’ that he had spray painted on the wall denotes a breathing pattern in terminally ill patients that acts as harbinger of impending death.

Richard decided to turn every breath taken by Sonny and his band of miscreants into a poisonous inhalation—a fact made all the more ominous by the gas mask he wears. A vérité vengeance, indeed!

A Tribute to the Triumphant Tramp

‘There is no essential difference between the material of comedy and tragedy. All depends on the point of view of the dramatist, which, by clever emphasis, he tries to make the point of view of his audience.’ — George P Baker

In the history of cinema, perhaps there is no singular instance of an artist who knew this truth more instinctively than Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, or ‘Charlie’ Chaplin as he is fondly known. By poking at problems, and not confronting them squarely, this pint-sized pantomime artist made us laugh at the absurdity of it all, and revealed the universal truth that not only can the human condition be depicted better through comedy, but also that making the audience laugh is a better way to pontificate at a social malaise, rather than resorting to the power of the fist.

The term ‘comedy’ originates from the Greek word ‘kōmōidía’, which roughly translated means ‘to revel’ or ‘to amuse’. In its earliest form, comedy arose from the revels associated with the rites and rituals of Dionysus, the Greek god of grape harvest and wine. Today, when we see a Hindi film star donning the role of a standup comedian, while promoting a cellular service, it might seem an innovative idea. But very few of us would know that it was, in fact, Aristotle, who in his ‘Poetics’, written as long back as 335 BCE, had sown the seeds of the concept, when he stated that the foundations of comedy lay in improvisation.

In sync with its Greek roots, the classical definition of ‘comedy’ cites that its primary objective is ‘to amuse’. It has a ‘corrective’ motive, and it is based on truth, no matter how exaggerated. However, to make comedy effective, the foundation must always be believable. As Sir Peter Ustinov had once said, ‘Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious’.

Even though it is one of the most popular film genres, ‘comedy’ is unique as an art form simply because within that generic term lies a plethora of narrative structures. The most commonplace avatar of modern comedy involves a plot with the following plot points: boy meets girl, the two fall in love, and they unite after overcoming several obstacles. This age-old formula was made popular by doyens of literature like Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, and is till date keeping the wolf from the door for innumerable screenplay writers worldwide.

Next are ‘parody’ films. Stretched beyond its expiry-date today, in the form of a sub-genre called ‘spoof’, by the likes of the Wayans Brothers, Jason Friedberg, and Aaron Seltzer (Scary Movie series, Disaster Movie, Meet the Spartans), parody in cinema is essentially nothing but imitation—of the structure, style or subject of another film. Chaplin himself, in his early shorts, such as A Woman (1915) and Triple Trouble (1918) had taken recourse to parodies. 

The third variant of a comedy plot is reductio ad absurdum. In this, a social issue is reduced to a situation of chaos and utter absurdity. Perhaps the reason we laugh, when we see people making all sorts of wrong choices on screen and making all the errors of judgments possible is because all of these ring true—psychologically this is all very real. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), which deals with a serial killer of rich women, is a classic example.

Then there is the narrative structure that draws a distinction between how people react differently to the same stimuli and similarly to different stimuli. Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator (1940) exemplifies this aspect by offering several perspectives—from a barber to the barbaric leader—to depict the interlinkages between human conduct and the social milieu.

The fifth structure of comedy films is characterised by a central figure—the protagonist. It is through his/her eyes that the viewer experiences both the main character’s and the other characters’ responses to the events that unfold as the film progresses. Chaplin’s iconic tramp, who was introduced in the short Kid Auto Races at Venice (1914) remained the central figure in all his films till Modern Times (1936), which, in its climax, had the tramp symbolically trudging down a long winding road towards the horizon.

Once Chaplin had famously stated that ‘All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl’. The genius that he was he knew that comedy, like music, is not dependent on the accoutrement, but on hitting the precise notes. And the tramp succeeded in doing just that. As depicted in what is now considered one of the—if not the—greatest comedy scene ever filmed, when he boils and eats a shoe in The Gold Rush (1925), while his companion keeps thinking he is a live chicken—no matter how bleak the circumstances and how towering the odds stacked against him, the tramp never accepted defeat. It appears as if the character had an in-built mechanism that forever prevented him from giving up. No wonder then, the tramp is the universal figure of comedy, without whose signature, the smile, the human society will find it extremely difficult to survive.

The timelessness of Chaplin lies in the fact that absolutely at the onset of his illustrious career he had realised that there is a thin line that separates laughter from pain, humour from hurt, and comedy from tragedy. He embodied these apparently antithetical aspects in the way he appeared as the tramp—a coat that is too tight, pants that are too loose, shoes that are too large, and a moustache that is too small. But just like his films that seamlessly combined tragedy with comedy, his appearance was a smorgasbord that flawlessly came together to create one of the most everlasting images depicted on celluloid.

Thus, even though the tramp remains one of the most oft-copied characters in filmdom and Chaplin the unacknowledged inspiration for millions even today, it is indeed disconcerting that the world decided to overlook that April 16 marked the birth anniversary of this timeless thespian. If we consider Jackie Gleason’s definition of comedy that states: ‘Comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic—laughter’, then the reaction that Chaplin continues to evoke from his audiences, irrespective of age, caste, colour, and creed, 97 years after the tramp made his first appearance on screen, bears testament to the fact that he is, and always will be, the master of comedy.

And for those acerbic critics, who will invariably point out Chaplin’s discomfort with ‘talkies’, the answer lies in a quote from an American comedienne, Elayne Boosler: ‘To listen to your own silence is the key to comedy.’

Just who are the monsters here?

‘We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space’. — H G Wells

This sentence, from Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, has, since the 1950s, served as the template for a sub-genre of science fiction films—the alien-invasion movie. Notable examples include: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, remade in 1978, and re-remade as the inferior The Invasion in 2007), Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956), Independence Day and Mars Attacks (both in 1996), Men in Black (1997), Men in Black II (2002), and the superb District 9 (2009);  not to mention the attempts made at bringing that particular classic of Wells to the silver screen—the first in 1953 by Byron Haskin, and the next, an adaptation that came out 52 years later, helmed by a certain Steven Spielberg. The recently released Skyline (2010), and the upcoming Cowboys and Aliens (2011) starring the dynamic Ford-Craig duo and Battle: Los Angeles (2011)  make it apparent that screenwriters and directors are not yet ready to forsake this once-fertile sub-genre.

What is also common to almost all these aforementioned films is that in each case, the aliens seem to have a particular agenda—a hostile takeover of planet Earth. It seems we have all but forgotten that Wells had, in his writing also mentioned the words ‘unseen good’. It is true that Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010) does not delve into that particular aspect of an alien invasion; at the same time, it would not be incorrect to state that he has portrayed a scenario that makes the sub-genre almost come full-circle—back to The Man from Planet X (1951), where the visitor from outer space was not a belligerent foe but a benign extraterrestrial.

Six years prior to the incidents depicted in Monsters, we are told that NASA discovered alien life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s 63 moons. A deep-space probe was sent to Europa, which, however, crashed over Mexico during re-entry. Since then, new life forms have begun to appear in and around the area, so much so that half the country had to be quarantined as an ‘infected zone’. While the US and Mexican military are on continuous vigil against the ‘creatures’, a huge man-made wall has been erected at the US-Mexico border, while tall fences try to keep the tentacled aliens out of civilian-inhabited areas.

Our male protagonist, Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), is a photographer working for a magazine. Posted at San Jose, Central America, his intentions of following the story of his life suddenly faces a roadblock, when he is asked by his superior to take on a completely unrelated assignment—to escort the magazine’s owner’s daughter, Samantha (played by McNairy’s real-life spouse Whitney Able) to the US border. Thus begins a journey that will take the two of them through the dreaded ‘infected zone’.

The landscape is littered with evidences of large-scale destruction. Buildings have been turned into rubble, helicopters have crash landed by the road, an aircraft and a tank are seen sunk in water, and there are cars on trees. Curiously, amidst this bleak scenario, Sam and Andrew—as alien to each other as the creatures they fear might attack them anytime—start to drop their individual guard slowly but gradually, and begin to learn more about one another.

At the same time, they start gaining knowledge on the towering, tentacled tormentors. They are told by the group of armed men who are accompanying them to the US border that the creatures are amphibians—they stay mostly in water, crawl up to the land at times, and lay eggs in trees. They are also told that ‘If you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you’. Similar to the visitor from The Man from Planet X, who only turned violent after being confronted by an evil scientist, the creatures in Monsters are known to attack only when they are fired upon.

With a budget as low as $800,000 (some mention it to be even lower, at $500,000); a meagre three-week long shooting schedule; location shooting for the entirety of the film in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Texas; and while helming the quadruple responsibility of director, writer, production designer and special effects, the Brit Gareth Edwards has taken a route diametrically opposite to his American counterparts like Michael Bay. Just as Andrew and Sam, while standing at the US-Mexico border stare at the gargantuan wall and realise that there are not many occasions when Americans get an opportunity to look at their country ‘from the outside in’, Gareth, too, wonders at our penchant to shut out what we do not understand because we immediately reckon it to be threatening.

For those of us searching for it, there is an obvious political subtext to the film—that of immigration, but there are two other aspects that make this road movie nestled inside a sci-fi fascinating. One is that the aliens, unlike the overwhelming majority of their ilk that has been depicted on celluloid, are completely without an agenda. In fact, they are trying as hard as us to survive on this unfamiliar planet. And second is how the fact that the overarching theme that humans and the creatures are two life forms that seem to be unable to understand each other is reflected in the story of Andrew and Sam. They started off as strangers, and when they understood each other, they understood the ‘monsters’, too.

It is indeed an irony that we are sending signals to outer space in search of intelligent life forms, but have this penchant for shutting out anyone or anything that does not seem to conform to our preset notions, views, and perspectives. It is communication that broke the mental fence that Sam and Andrew had erected between themselves. But the US military did not follow suit, while dealing with the creatures. They opted to open fire instead, thereby vindicating the words of another doyen of science-fiction, Isaac Asimov, who had asserted in Foundation, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’

A Master class in Minimalism

Taphephobia (from Greek taphos, meaning grave; and phobos, meaning fear) is the medical term for the fear of being buried alive. Those of us who have read the master of macabre Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado or the self-explanatory The Premature Burial would have had a second-hand experience of this terrifying situation. But in Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés’ single-character, single-setting, tour de force, Buried (2010), for Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds), the prospect of being buried alive is not a crooked literary concept, but almost a cruel certainty.

One day in October 2006, Paul wakes up in complete darkness. All he could remember was that he, alongside his other truck-driver friends—all of who work for Crestin, Roland, and Thomas (CRT), an American company—were ambushed while delivering kitchen supplies. While Paul was fortunate enough to escape the gunfire—to which most of his companions succumbed to—after he regains consciousness, he finds his current situation anything but lucky.

Paul finds himself gagged and bound inside a wooden coffin, just large enough to accommodate enough oxygen to keep him alive, with absolutely no clue of who put him there, and why—a predicament reminiscent of Oh Dae-su in Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece Oldboy.  While Dae-su had been imprisoned by unknown assailants in a room for 15-long years with only a television as his link to the outside world, Conroy finds that his kidnappers had left him behind a Blackberry, a Zippo, a pen, a flask, his medicines, a torch, his wallet (emptied), and a satchel.

After he realises that his cries for help are falling into deaf ears, Paul, with the help of his Blackberry, tries to figure out a way to wriggle out of his nightmarish situation. As any American would do in a similar situation, his first call is to 911. But since he is in a different country, he finds little help from that source. So, he calls the FBI next. And thus begins his earnest quest to get outside help, any help.

In the meantime, someone calls him and tells him in broken English that he has till 9pm to arrange for $5 million as ransom. With the phone’s battery, and the oxygen inside the coffin running out as fast as his own life, the stakes just got higher for Paul. After all, he is only a truck driver. Even though he had, somehow, conveyed his ‘situation’ to the US Department of State, and to his own company, what were the chances they would find him, when he, himself, has not even the foggiest idea of where exactly in Iraq he has been buried underground?

An individual trapped in an apparent hopeless situation is an age-old trope in cinema. However, what elevates Buried from others belonging to the same genre is the treatment. For the entire 95-minutes’ running time, the camera does not emerge, even for a second, on to the surface, thereby making us, the viewer, very much a part of Paul’s claustrophobic existence. Reminiscent of Kubrick’s experimentation with only natural light in Barry Lyndon (1975), the only source of light in the film are the ones that Paul uses—a blue mobile screen, the yellow flame of the Zippo and the torch, and the eerie green of glow torches.

Just like the letterings of the opening credits that break apart and bubble up, and the geometric lines that obstinately move down to form the first letters of the various crew members, Paul’s efforts at emerging out of the wooden casket seem to be bogged down by forces way beyond his control.

Like any other human being in his place, Paul undergoes an entire gamut of expressions—fear, anger, panic, frustration, hope, and despair. As an individual who has a history of anxiety attacks, Paul knows that his biggest ally and his biggest enemy are one and the same—himself. He gathers his wits, just when things appear to be hopeless, and tries to make the best of the meagre resources at his disposal.

Let’s face it, we have seen drivers emerging out of similar no-way-out scenarios unscathed (here’s looking at you, Jason Statham), but Paul is no superhero (ironically, though in his next film Ryan Reynolds will play a superhero, the Green Lantern). So, as he waits for the head of the Hostage Working Group (HWG) in Iraq to locate him by tracking his cell connection, he takes resort to his survival instinct to stay alive till the rescuers arrive. But, things are about to get worse for Paul.

Cortés’, who alongside directing, has also edited this edge-of-the-seat thriller, while staying true to a Hollywood-set template has steered clear of clichés. For instance, there are no villains of the piece. The film does not take sides. We learn from the head of the HWG that in a country torn apart by war, kidnapping is the ‘only functioning business’. (There is a wonderful tête-à-tête between the captive and the captor, when the latter exclaims: ‘You terrified? So, I am a terrorist?’)

What makes Paul’s experience equally harrowing for us, the viewer, is the fact that just like him, we only get to hear the people he speaks with over the phone. Just like him, we have to take their words at face value. Just like him, we do not get to see what the FBI or the HWG are doing to get Paul out.

A solo character, single-setting film is a unique challenge. No wonder then, such films have been few and far between—the few examples include Daniel Bourla’s astonishing The Noah (1975), Robert Altman’s seminal Secret Honor (1984), the recent Sam Rockwell starrer Moon (2009), and this year’s Oscar-nominated 127 hours by Danny Boyle.

What makes Buried by the 37-year old Cortés out-of-the-box is that he decided to film it in-the-box—in its entirety.

For Want of Objectivity, ‘The Kingdom’ Was Lost

When the tagline of a film reads 'An elite FBI team sent to find a killer in Saudi Arabia. Now they have become the target.', one knows before the movie begins that the screen will be laced with dollops of jingoism.

This statement, however, takes nothing away from films such as Gaghan’s Syriana, or Greengrass’ United 93. In fact, of late, at least some filmmakers belonging to mainstream Hollywood have tried to break the shackles, while attempting cinema with political undertones—Stephen Gaghan (mainstream Hollywood film: Abandon), for example, or Paul Greengrass (made The Bourne Ultimatum). To be very frank, I had not heard of either of these directors when I watched their ‘political’ films but was, on both occasions, pleasantly surprised. I did not have much clue about Peter Berg, either, director of The Kingdom. 

But from the opening credits themselves (although splendidly crafted with graphics reminiscent of the credits at the start of Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can), which is actually a short history of the land, beginning with the formation of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, one understands that this is not going to be a film that does the balancing act. 

In fact, there is one particular sequence in the film involving an Attorney General and Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) where it is made amply clear that 'the situation' will be seen through the eyes of the FBI agents. Ironically, this holds true for the entire film.

For those of us who tuned in late, or were not paying much attention to the voice-over that accompanied the beginning credits, the opening sequence left no stone unturned to emphasize the film’s stance. We open inside a secure American compound inside Riyadh. Some are busy playing that iconic of all American sport, baseball, while some are having a barbecue. 

Almost as alien in nature as a vehicle carrying individuals dressed in police uniforms, who in a few moments will inexplicably open fire on the American families, a 'gaze' enters the screen. We find a Saudi father and his son, side by side on the balcony of a tall building. The son has binoculars on. When the individuals in the car start shooting, the boy naturally wants to see what all the firing is all about, but the man urges him to look at the park, instead. 

I was, for a moment, tempted to think that this is some Western point of view of how people in Middle East crave for the American 'way of living', when a blast occurred in the middle of the park—a blast brought about by a suicide bomber. The boy, and his father, of course, watched the entire place go up in smoke.

Now, we cut to an American school, a kindergarten one, where we come face to face with the protagonist, Ronald Fleury. We find Fleury is a father as well, and he is attending his son’s class who is showing a scrapbook full of photos of himself and his father to his classmates.

Subtlety, be damned!

If this acutely insensitive contrast wasn’t enough to drive home the point, Fleury starts relating to the class the 'happiest day' of his life—the day his son was born. The screenwriter, Matthew Michael Carnahan, it seems could not resist the temptation of drawing a simile between a not-so-smooth birth of Fleury’s son with the 'Let’s go in and take it out' attitude of the Special Agents of the FBI.

I balked.

There really is nothing much to the story. The attack on the American compound, followed by another blast, kills hundreds. The US State Department is not really keen on taking any action primarily because of concerns over ‘territorialism’. So, a group of four special agents—bomb expert Sykes (Chris Cooper), forensic expert Mayes (Jennifer Garner), and Leavitt (Jason Bateman), led by Fleury, coax their way into The Kingdom. It so happens that one of their own was killed in the second explosion. Hence, the mission was quite ‘personal’, for at least two of the team members.

Let me be very frank. I did not start watching the film expecting a Battle of Algiers. But I was appalled at the number of stereotypes that were hurled at the audience one after another. The sadistic colonel; the inept local police force, who needs an American to point out that witnesses need to be questioned; the initially reluctant, but ultimately helpful ally; individuals who literally stare agape at the efficiency of an American bomb expert, who knows exactly where to look; people whose aim mysteriously go haywire when shooting FBI Special Agents… the list goes on and on. Needless to say, the film itself becomes a typical ‘search for the killer’ flick.

SPOILER AHEAD

If there is one redeeming factor in the entire film, it is its last scene. Berg goes back to an earlier sequence wherein FBI has just learnt that one of their own had died. Fleury bends down and whispers something (inaudible to us) to Mayes. In the last scene of the film we find a small Arab girl, whose grandfather was the mastermind behind the attack on the Americans, tell us and her mother what the last words of her grandfather was. It seems Fleury and the old man spoke the same exact words: 'Don’t worry, we will kill them all.'

We get your point, Mr Berg.

But it’s too little, too late.

‘This is who I am. This is what I do!’

There’s a certain euphoria involved when one, as a viewer, realizes that one of our childhood heroes has actually brought back a character one eulogized as a kid, and has made a film for all those fans out there.

That’s precisely what Rambo (2008) is all about—a film for the fans of a character that has crossed that threshold and entered the realm of an icon.

Like many others, I also can’t believe that it has been over 20 years since the bow-wielding, machine-gun toting, bandanna wearing Rambo made his last appearance. Yes, it made me feel old, because I still remember watching Rambo III on a VHS. I also remember watching First Blood Part II in a small movie theater in Calcutta, called Elite. Don’t know if the hall is still there, considering the plethora of multiplexes mushrooming in the city I was born and brought up in.

I actually watched the Rambo films in reverse chronology. In a sense, it acted as a boon—the manner in which I watched the then-trilogy, that is.

While we are at the subject of fans and Stallone, I might just touch on the other character that he has immortalized—Rocky Balboa—another alter-ego that Stallone himself brought back the year before Rambo. Well, boxing, as a sport, has never caught my fancy, and the only Rocky film that I have ever watched is the immensely forgettable Rocky IV. So, Rocky has never really been entrenched in my mind as deeply as Rambo.

However, of the little bit that I know of Rocky, I find there is a common thread between him and Rambo. One fights inside the ring of a sport, the other within the ring of life. While Rocky salvages victory amidst apparent defeat; Rambo, on the other hand finds defeat amidst apparent victory.

Created by David Morrell, the character of Rambo, to me, is nothing but a depiction of how every individual, irrespective of caste, creed and faith, will ‘kill when pushed’. Violence, as a trait, is inherent in all of us. And the word ‘Rambo’, quite aptly, (thanks to someone, who knows Japanese), supposedly means ‘violent’ (ranbu) in Japanese.

There are two shots in the film where John is seen trying to forge a piece of scrap metal in fire. That, somehow, to me, stands for the character of Rambo. In every film of this quadrilogy, I find how he is trying to salvage what little bit is left of his life. Irrespective of how much this Green Beret tries to stay away from violence, violence has a habit of finding him—violence and danger, as depicted by those cobras we see him catching in the very first sequence of the film.

'War is in your blood', that’s a part of the monologue that goes on in his mind. And Rambo is, nothing short of a killing machine. In a poignant scene towards the end of the film, John sees Sarah (Julie Benz), one of the Christian missionaries he had undertaken his current ‘mission’ to rescue, running towards one of her compatriots, while Rambo stands far away watching her, clutching his wounded shoulder. Caught in someone else’s war, he is, yet again, while his continuing battle with his own self shows no sign of abating.

It might sound a bit far-fetched, but as John and his band of mercenaries undertook a river ride along the Salween river to a Burmese village wherein a group of Christian missionaries, armed with only food and Bibles had been dropped by Rambo himself around 10 days ago have now been taken hostage, I inadvertently started thinking about Captain Benjamin L Willard’s journey to find Colonel Walter E Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. In both cases, where the journey ended, purgatory began.

And Stallone does not pull any punches (pun intended) when it comes to depicting hell. And hell is what this ‘war zone’ named Burma is. The film is gory, bloody, and uber-violent. Then again, every war is. The second half of the film has possibly a higher body count than any mainstream action film I have seen in a long, long time.

But that’s what Rambo is all about. It’s about how even the most faithful of Christians beats an individual to death when faced with the prospect of his own life being snuffed out. And that, possibly, is the reason as a character Rambo will always be iconic.

While First Blood began with this soldier from Special Forces arriving at the interestingly named town of Hope in Washington; Rambo ends with a long shot of him arriving at his hometown of Bowie, Arizona, to his father’s ranch. The similarity in the shots, one thinks, cannot be coincidental. The recluse, reluctant Rambo has at last returned to his hometown, maybe to see if something has, indeed, changed.

And, if it hasn’t…he can always ‘reload’! 

Fascinating Look at the Desolate Human Mind

Even though photography and cinema are cousins (the latter being nothing but still frames running at 24 frames per second), films that bind the two together have been few and far between. In 1966, Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni came up with Blow Up—a major plot point of which formed the crux of what is inarguably the best black comedy made in India till date—Kundan Shah’s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron. 

In Blow Up Michael Hemming’s fashion photographer character Thomas’ camera became a witness to a crime that might or might not have occurred. Around 36 years later came another film, in which the camera once again played a pivotal role—not that of a fact-finder, but a seeker of justice. Though it may seem a little far-fetched analogy to some, but after viewing One Hour Photo (2002), one might be tempted to state that what Jaws did to the ocean, the film, in its own small way, did the same to the guy at the neighbourhood photo store one used to give one’s film rolls to develop (before the advent of the ubiquitous digital cameras, that is).

Seymour ’Sy’ Parrish (Robin Williams) is someone who all of us have met. He takes our film rolls, develops, and prints them, and more than often delivers the prints before the stipulated period of time. He is mild-mannered, soft-spoken, with a disarming smile. And if you are one of his regular customers, sometimes, just sometimes, he makes the prints 5 X 7, when you wanted the standard 4 X 6—at no extra cost.

Sy Parrish is the proverbial fly on the wall. Sy Parrish harbours a secret. Sy Parrish is a human time bomb about to explode.

Working behind the same counter at SavMart for almost two decades, Sy follows the same routine everyday. After work, he visits the same diner, has the same food for dinner, goes back to his apartment, and watches TV—alone. And when he is not busy staring at the reruns, he is engrossed with one wall of his apartment.
 
He looks at it and feels something that he has yearned for a long time—a sense of belonging. That wall, you see, is dotted with photographs of one particular family—the Yorkins—a family that Sy, has, over the years, grown unnaturally close to. Not in reality, only in his mind.

The Yorkins (an obvious take on the words ‘your kin’) comprise Nina (Connie Nielsen, of Gladiator fame), her husband Will (Michael Vartan, from the hit TV series Alias) and their adorable son Jake (Dylan Smith). Sy has a particular fascination towards Jake and prides in calling himself Jake’s ‘Uncle Sy’. 

So, what happens when Uncle Sy gets hold of an incriminating piece of evidence that shatters his notion of the Yorkins being the ideal, happy, made-for-each other family? 

The pent up emotions were building, the stress was gradually reaching a boiling point, the frustration was showing underneath the apparently placid face—all it needed was one more chink to appear to shatter Sy’s already shaky mental state.

In this context, it might be mentioned that Sy’s surname, Parrish, has an interesting connotation in the events that eventually unfold in the film. A ‘parish’, as we know is the ‘area around a church for which a priest is responsible’. Unsurprisingly, in the film, Sy takes it upon himself to ‘right the wrong’ that he deems has been inflicted upon a family he has become obsessed with. One Hour Photo is a fascinating look at the desolate human mind. It is a character study par excellence. Ace music video director Mark Romanek (veteran of the visually rich Madonna’s Rain and the striking Scream video starring Janet and Michael Jackson, among others), in his debut feature film has shown a maturity in handling the camera that many established directors strive to master.

The elements of photography have been skillfully woven into the cinematography. Nina and Sy emerging from the elevator is instantly reminiscent of a photograph gradually developing; there are photographic terms and references galore, and last, but not least, it is the camera that becomes the tool of revenge that Sy, in a manner least expected, unleashes.

Robin Williams, in his third venture at exploring the dark side of human nature (after Death To Smoochy and Insomnia) comes up trumps. It takes a superhuman effort not to like ‘Sy, the photo guy’. And that is where the accomplishments of both the actor and the director lie.
 
Bereft of all the technical wizardry that normally accompanies his music videos, Romanek has crafted a tale that could easily have turned Sy into a monster caricature. Instead, it becomes a probe into the psyche of someone who has, for a long time, been very much a part of all our memorable occasions, but somehow has always been missing from the viewfinder of life.