James Hynes

My favorite movie this year was New Zealand writer and director Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which puts me, I know, pretty far out on the fringes of awards handicappers. It's won a few awards—Brad Pitt got a best actor prize at the Venice Film Festival—but as a going concern, the movie seems to have sunk without a trace. It didn't even play in very many places, and the only reason I can think of that it played at my local multiplex in South Austin for nearly a month is that distributors must think we'll watch anything with horses and guns in it down here. Not that I'm complaining, because, a) that's sort of true, and b) like I say, I loved it. It went straight to the top of my list of favorite westerns, right up there with My Darling Clementine, The Searchers, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. (Don't get me started on Westerns.) Everything the critics hated about it—the pace, the unusual cinematography, the literary narration—I just flat-out loved. I read Ron Hansen's novel years ago, as well as his novel about the Dalton Brothers, Desperadoes, and together the two books are, along with True Grit, Little Big Man, and Max Crawford's Lords of the Plain, the best literary westerns I've ever read. The movie stands spectacularly well on its own, though, an art house Western full of melancholy, with some of the best performances I've ever seen in a Western, especially Casey Affleck and Brad Pitt.

But I mention it only by way of coming to Dominik's first film (he's only made two so far), a wild, funny, and terrifying true life crime drama called Chopper. Based on the bestselling memoir of a real Australian criminal named Mark Brandon Read, the movie's remarkable for lots of reasons—it's lively, smart, unpredictable, and inventive—but I want to mention two reasons in particular.

One is that it shows that Dominik's portrayal of Jesse James as a charismatic psychopath has its roots in the earlier film. Both films, in different ways, examine the effect of a charming but unpredictably violent criminal on the lives of those around him. The focus in Jesse James is divided a little more evenly, since James's murderer, Robert Ford, is the point of view character and gets equal time with the man he killed. In Chopper, the point of view character is Chopper himself, though the film is carefully engineered not to take sides.

But, having seen Jesse James first, I already knew that Dominik is an astonishingly gifted filmmaker. The real revelation for me was Eric Bana, whom I'd only known from his stalwart, humorless, and tormented roles as the main Israeli agent in Speilberg's Munich, as Hector in Troy, and as Bruce Banner in Hulk. Not that he's bad in these films—he's especially moving as Hector—but he doesn't show a lot of range. I'd pegged him as good-looking and soulful, and not much more. But in Chopper, he's amazing—loud, boisterous, violent, alternately charming and bullying, not to mention self-pitying and paranoid, the sort of guy who demands all the attention in the room, whether anybody likes it or not. As portrayed by Bana and written by Dominik, Chopper is a complex and conflicted character, and as kinetic as Bana is in the part, he's just as convincing playing Chopper's guilt after he's hurt somebody—in one scene, only moments after he's stabbed a guy—as he is playing the man's menace. It's a brilliant, memorable, thrilling performance.

In fact, I could scarcely believe I was watching the same actor who glowered his way through Hulk. In Chopper he's less like his performances in other films than he is like the young De Niro in Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, cocky and crazy and kinda sexy all at once. The comparison is reinforced by the fact that he put on 30 pounds to play the part, so he doesn't even look like the lean warrior he plays in other films, but like the real, beefy thug Mark Read was in real life. (The DVD features interviews with the real Read, who's nearly as scary in middle-age as Bana plays him as a younger man.)

Bana is also, in between shootings, beatings, and icepick stabbings, really funny throughout the film. Wondering where this Eric Bana came from and why I'd never seen him before, I checked out his IMDb entry and found out that before he became a straight actor, he'd done stand-up in Australia for ten years, specializing in celebrity impressions, and starring for a time in his own TV sketch comedy show. Here I'd thought he was another Aussie smoulderer like Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce, and it turns out he was more like Carol Burnett. Perhaps a better comparision might be Alec Guinness, who also got his start playing comedies and worked his way up into more serious roles, but whose stock-in-trade throughout his career was his ability to vanish into a part and play convincingly all sorts of of men (and even at least one woman, in Kind Hearts and Coronets). The antic inventor of The Man in the White Suit is scarcely recognizable in Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia, but it's the same man playing both parts.

At any rate, go rent Chopper and go see Jesse James (if you can find it)—the latter is genuinely glorious on the big screen, and Andrew Dominik is a terrifically exciting and ambitious filmmaker. And I can only hope that some studio or producer turns Eric Bana loose again and gives him a comedy or a really juicy character role. He's impressive enough as a leading man, but the man's a gifted comedian, a world-class mimic, and a truly great character actor, and he's capable of a lot more than just showing off his abs (which are, to be fair, pretty impressive).

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On a completely unrelated note, you can read Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize lecture here. She became my favorite Nobel Prize winner ever (not like I'm keeping score) because of her endearingly cranky reaction when a British TV journalist told her she'd won as she was carrying her groceries out of a cab. "Oh, Christ," she said, as if the reporter had just announced that he was from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Her Nobel speech is written in the same prickly mood, which only serves to sharpen her undiminished idealism. It's not particularly eloquent, it's a little too long and repetitive—like her books, in fact—but it's more memorable than a lot of more carefully crafted speeches.

 

Since I was 10, Joseph Conrad has been my favorite writer. Yesterday was his 150th birthday.

I came to Conrad through the movies, after I saw Richard Brooks' film of Lord Jim as a new film at the Big Rapids Theater in 1965. I've seen the movie since, and like a lot of well-intended Conrad adaptations, it's not very good. It does have luminous 70mm cinematography by Freddie Young, the man who shot Lawrence of Arabia for David Lean, and some good performances, especially James Mason as the corrupt Gentleman Brown and Peter O'Toole, in his second film after Lawrence, as another tormented English colonialist. But Brooks, who specialized in earnest adaptations of literary works (Elmer Gantry, The Brothers Karamazov, In Cold Blood), straightened out the novel's artfully tangled chronology and flattened all of Conrad's ambiguities and ironies, turning it into a conventional story of heroism and redemption.

But even so, I'm grateful to him and the film, because the day after I saw it, I bought the Mentor paperback from the little bookshop in my intermediate school, which was basically a folding table set up in the hall outside the library. As I was reading the copy on the back cover and trying to figure out if the book was going to be as sweeping and epic as the film, my science teacher (whose name escapes me now) passed by, gave me a condescending smile, and said, "You wouldn't understand it." Which guaranteed not only that I bought it, but that I started reading it that night. So I guess I owe her, too, because even though it was tough sledding for a 10-year-old whose main reading up till then had been the Hardy Boys and Ray Bradbury, something hooked me. Not only did I read it several more times in the next few years, but before I finished high school I'd read Heart of Darkness, An Outcast of the Islands, The Secret Sharer, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, The End of the Tether, Victory, and Nostromo, all of them more than once. (And I read them all before I'd ever even heard of Penguin books, reading them in those American mass market classics editions like Mentor and Signet and Laurel, all of which had tissuey paper, tiny print, and smudgy ink; my fingertips were always blackened after finishing a Mentor edition. It's how I read Mark Twain and Dostoevsky the first time, too.) And I've read most of them several times since, as well as Conrad's brilliant political novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, both of which were strong influences on my first novel.

Perhaps it's because I read them all before any of them were ever taught to me (I think we read one Conrad short story in high school; I wasn't assigned Heart of Darkness till college), I wasn't aware that he was supposed to be difficult to read or understand, and just plowed right through them the way I plowed through Isaac Asimov. (It's kind of like poor kids not knowing they're poor until they're told so.) So I'm probably a little more impatient than I should be when I see people whine about Conrad's prose or how difficult his chronology is to follow. (See Sam Jordison's fine defense of Conrad on this very charge in today's Guardian.)

I've run across this as a teacher on two occasions. The first was during my first time as a visiting professor, at Miami University in the early 90s, when I naively included Nostromo in a class on novel writing for graduate students and upper level undergraduates. It's still one of my favorite novels, and I still find the first third of it ("The Silver of the Mine") to be one of the most flawless opening sequences in any novel I've ever read. I'd expected a little whining about Conrad, but mostly on the usual political grounds (he's an imperialist, he wrote a novel about Latin America without being Latin American, blah blah blah), but instead what I got was a reaction I'd've expected more from a high school class than from university students: after spending the first twenty minutes of the class struggling to get any of the students to say anything (it was supposed to be a seminar), I finally realized that virtually the entire class had not finished the novel. When I asked them point blank, it turned out that most of them had given up after the first 50 pages,  and only one person had even finished the book. So I sent them all home in disgust, and next week we talked about Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping—a marvelous book, but much easier to read.

I didn't try Conrad again in a classroom until a couple of years ago, when I taught a semester at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Apart from the usual workshop class, I also taught a seminar in novel-writing, and asked my students to read one book at the start of the semester (John Banville's Doctor Copernicus, which went over like a lead balloon) and one at the end, Lord Jim. You have to bear in mind that at Iowa, seminars are not graded and (by long tradition) attendance isn't really required, so by the end of the semester, I was down to a core group of really committed students, most of the others having quit coming after we workshopped their own novels. I was prepared for another disaster, since the only Conrad most of them had read was Heart of Darkness, and since most of them had hated Doctor Copernicus (another favorite of mine). But to my surprise, they all gave it a respectful and thoughtful reading, and some of them actually seemed to enjoy it. I remember spending a fair amount of time graphing the chronology of the opening third of the book, which is pretty wild, but at least this time I didn't get any blank, sullen stares, like I had at Miami, but some really interesting questions, stuff I hadn't even thought of in spite of having read the book at least a dozen times. I think I also scored points by showing how Conrad's tangled chronology and shifting points of view preceded Mrs. Dalloway by 21 years, which meant that the Woolf-worshippers in the room, even if they didn't appreciate the novel viscerally like I did—having been infected by it at the age of 10—at least had to give my boy props for thinking of the technique first. Who knows: maybe even a few of them went on to read Nostromo.

But what can I say? He's still my number one guy. I even named one of my cats after him, with the unfortunate and unintended effect that when Conrad's name passes my lips these days, most of the time it's not to say, "Conrad was one of the founders of modernism," or "Conrad is one of the most profound and unflinching chroniclers of human nature," but rather, "Conrad, stop that," or "Conrad, get off the goddamn counter," or "Conrad, you're a bad boy."

So Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad, wherever you are. And whatever the other Conrad is doing, he better knock it off before I get home.

PS: This just in--Giles Foden's appreciation of Conrad from the Guardian. And Jonathan Jones' defense against the charge that Conrad was a racist, also from the Guardian.
 

Can a noir film or book even be revisionist? When we talk about a revisionist western, we talk about a western that still has the same images as a traditional western—landscape, horses, gunplay—but their meaning is reversed, so that the flamboyantly heroic Custer played by Errol Flynn, say, in They Died With Their Boots On becomes the raving genocidal maniac of Arthur Penn's Little Big Man, or Henry Fonda's stoic and decent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine becomes Kurt Russell's sexier but more murderously vengeful Wyatt Earp in Tombstone. The main thrust of the revisionist western is to reject the triumphal tone of the 30s and 40s and show the traditional heroes as flawed or worse, and to show Manifest Destiny as a bloody racial war.

I'm not sure you can do the same thing with noir. Is it possible to reject a pop ideology that already takes a bleak view of human nature, that already considers all humans to be weak at best, and vain, greedy, corrupt, manipulative, and violent at worst, that already rejects, in other words, a conventionally hopeful view of life? A revisionist noir, I suppose, would be have to be one where the regular guy hero—Robert Mitchum, say, in Out of the Past—would take one look at Jane Greer and head the other way, joining a church and marrying June Allyson instead going on the canonically doomed One Last Job. Or Burt Lancaster, when approached about pulling a heist, would go straight to the police. In other words, a revisionist noir wouldn't be a noir at all. The genre and its view of the world are stained irrevocably and irredeemably black.

But even if you can't reverse the worldview of noir without reversing it out of existance, what you can do, in order to keep the genre fresh (though fresh may not be the word) is update it and play with the archetypical settings and characters. This weekend I rented the DVD of a terrific Australian noir from 2005 called Little Fish. I'd almost rented it a couple of months ago, but while I was looking at the DVD box in Vulcan Video (one of Austin's two world-class video stores, the other being I ♥ Video), the guy standing next to me told me it wasn't very good, and, in some detail, why. Impressionable idiot that I am, I put it back, only to pick it up again this past Saturday, impressed by the cast on the box—Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Sam Neill—and unable to remember any of the details of why the film supposedly sucked. So I rented it, and now I have a bone to pick with that guy from a few months ago, because it's a terrific noir, one that stays true to the noir worldview but introduces some elegant variations.

For one thing, it reverses the gender of the protagonist. Noir's a genre that often depicts working class life in a (to say the least) unsentimental manner, and in Little Fish, Cate Blanchett is a 32-year-old recovering heroin addict who lives with her embittered mother and works in a video store in a Vietnamese neighborhood in (I think) Sydney. She's predictably astonishing in the part, banishing any memory of her Great Lady roles to portray a sad, nearly hopeless young woman who is equal parts self-loathing and grim determination not to fall any further. She's trying to get a bank loan so she can go into business for herself, with an internet gaming shop, but the banks keep turning her down because of her blasted credit history (all that credit card fraud she perpetrated when she was a junkie). Enter an old love, a strikingly handsome young Vietnamese guy who was her lover back when she was doing drugs and he was dealing them, and right away, you can see the classic noir set-up: sad sack, working class guy with a past who is about to be lured to his doom by a gorgeous ex-lover—only in this case it's not Burt Lancaster in a wife-beater undershirt, but Cate Blanchett in a pair of hip-hugger jeans, and it's not Jane Greer or Ava Gardner in stiletto heels, but Dustin Nguyen in a sleek new suit. The fact that it's a woman for a change who is scrambling to survive and making all the wrong choices for all the wrong reasons doesn't change the outlines of the story—things start bad and get worse, and the homme fatale turns out to be just as much of a liar and manipulator as the traditional femme fatale—but it makes it fresh and especially poignant. I don't know if it counts as a victory for feminism that a woman can now be the patsy in a noir, but it certainly counts as a victory for verisimilitude.

The rest of the cast is equally fine. Sam Neill looks exhausted and mean playing an aging gay gangster, and the Australian actress Nomi Hazelhurst is superb as the mother, who, like a Beckett character transferred to suburban Sydney, keeps going even though every relationship in her life, with her husbands and her children, has disappointed her on every level. If you know Hugo Weaving only from The Matrix or The Lord of the Rings, he's almost unrecognizable here, playing a former rugby star who has become, in his middle-age, a gay hustler and drug addict. His character doesn't quite have any dignity left, but Weaving brilliantly invests him with a deep and attractive melancholy. And the actor Martin Henderson, who was a mainly anodyne presence in the American remake of The Ring, plays Blanchett's crippled, drug-dealing brother here, and, again, is almost unrecognizable as a sad-sack, no-hope drug dealer wannabe.

Again, you'd find many of these same characters in any noir since 1945, but they are written and played here with unusual sensitivity and insight. Another element that isn't really a revision but still an interesting change is the setting, namely modern-day Sydney, photographed in those bright, candy colors that Aussie cinematographers specialize in. Sunlit noir isn't necessarily new—think Chinatown—and in the best noir tradition, the most harrowing scenes happen at night, but the bright landscape of suburban Australia makes a resonant contrast with the despair and desperation and conniving of the characters. The storytelling is also unusually layered and subtle; unlike too many American films, where every plot or character point is hammered home so the dimmest bulb in the audience can follow it, with this film you have to pay attention to figure out the relationships between people. And the plot (which is complex in the noir manner) proceeds as much by implication as it does by straightforward exposition.

Noir has always been a license for directors to indulge in striking visuals, and director Rowan Woods has a gift for eye-popping compositions, though never self-indulgently and always at the service of the story and characters. The superb script is by Jacqueline Perske, and while it starts with a traditional noir set-up, it does so with reimagined characters and a setting evoked with unusual realism. Best of all, while staying true to the grim worldview of noir, it doesn't end the way you think it will; while the characters in the last scene don't have any more cause for celebration than Burt Lancaster or Robert Mitchum do in the final reel, they've at least come to a clear-eyed awareness of themselves and each other that is bracing if not particularly encouraging. It's another example of a work of art that somehow manages to be grim and exhilarating at the same time.

So, to answer my own question, can a noir be revisionist—sort of, I guess. To return to my comparison with westerns, I guess the difference would be that with a western, the worldview may change, but the iconography stays the same, but with a revisionist noir, the worldview is enduring (dare I say timeless?) while the tropes and iconography can be changed.