Monthly Archives: March 2016

  • Bone Tomahawk

    Old YorkerFilm review

    S Craig Zahler (2015)

    The writer-director S Craig Zahler’s first feature is categorised on IMDB as ‘Adventure, Drama, Horror’.  It’s those three things in ascending order of magnitude:  Bone Tomahawk is the most visually gruesome Western I can remember having seen.  The main plot nods to John Ford’s The Searchers – ‘Four men set out in the Wild West to rescue a group of captives from cannibalistic cave dwellers’ (IMDB again) – but the violence is enough to suggest that Zahler means to out-Tarantino Tarantino.  A sequence that sees one of the captives, a deputy sheriff, dragged from his cell in the caves, stripped, scalped, castrated, cut apart and consumed is especially excruciating.  Running this a close second is a later scene in which the Native American troglodytes slice open the stomach of the posse-leading sheriff, and shove a hot metal flask into the wound.  (The deputy sheriff is conscious during a fair part of his torture and the sheriff through all of his.)  While these descriptions suggest a mindless blood-and-guts fest, the effect of other elements in the film is to make it hard simply to despise and deplore Bone Tomahawk.  There were a couple of other moments of extreme violence that caused me to laugh but I knew it was anxious laughter – that I wanted to pretend I wasn’t being horrified by what I was seeing. Craig Zahler, in spite of all the mayhem he inflicts on his characters and on the viewer, never seems to revel in it.

    Bone Tomahawk is, for the most part, well scripted and acted.  The small town where the main characters live has the too obviously ironic name of Bright Hope but the dialogue is literate without being meta-fancy and written for convincingly different voices.  The lines are delivered naturally and remarkably audibly.   Zahler is determined to take his time (the film runs 132 minutes) to describe the interactions of the searchers and convey the arduousness of their journey.  Benji Bakshi’s cinematography captures the arid vastness and perilousness of the landscape.  The audience isn’t allowed, any more than the protagonists, to see far ahead or round corners, which helps to sustain tension.  Yet although the direction builds up a strong sense of the near-futility of the posse’s enterprise, this comes to be eclipsed by a sense of the futility of the film.  Revisionist Westerns have become the generic norm so it’s hardly a novel insight to demonstrate the violent fragility of frontier life.   Major characters who might well have survived in an earlier period of Western movies fail to do so here.  That might seem to signal a modern realism but Craig Zahler, in order to avoid a complete wipeout of individuals in the story, still has to push beyond the bounds of credibility in devising the escape of those who do get out of the film alive.  (The cannibals, although they are extraordinary and frightening images, are not individuals.)  Because Bone Tomahawk isn’t eventually revealing about the movie territory it covers, it ends up being ‘original’ only in the exceptional graphic detail of its violence.

    I was in two minds about whether to go and see this film.  What decided me was the presence of Richard Jenkins in the cast:  we’d just watched on DVD his Emmy-winning work in the HBO mini-series Olive Kitteridge.  It was such a wonderful performance that it seemed daft to pass up another opportunity to watch this great actor, even though doing so would mean sitting through a lengthy Western.  As usual, Jenkins is quietly masterly.  He creates a complete character in the elderly Chicory, the lonesome, loyal backup deputy sheriff who volunteers to join the posse.  Its other three members are the sheriff, Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell); the smart, white-suited ladies’ man John Brooder (Matthew Fox); and the foreman Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson), whose wife Samantha (Lili Simmons) has been abducted by the cannibal tribesmen, along with the deputy sheriff Nick (Evan Jonigkeit) and a drifter called Purvis (David Arquette).  Kurt Russell is facially expressive; he finds much more in Sheriff Hunt than he did in the bounty hunter he played in The Hateful Eight.  As O’Dwyer, who has a badly broken leg even before the posse sets out, Patrick Wilson gives a more conventional performance but he’s nonetheless effective.  I’d never seen Matthew Fox before (he’s best known for his television work in Lost):  as the dandyish, vaguely sinister Brooder, Fox is vocally thin in the early stages but his characterisation gains depth and Brooder’s death scene is emotionally powerful.  Lili Simmons’s gestures and delivery struck me as too modern.   A solemn, rather beautiful song called ‘Four Ride Out’, written by Craig Zahler and Jeff Herriott, plays over the closing credits:  the New York Times rightly described this ‘frontier-ditty parody’ as ‘worth staying seated for’.

    3 March 2016

  • Heartbeat Detector

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La question humaine

    Nicolas Klotz (2007)

    Simon Kessler (Mathieu Amalric) is a human resources psychologist in an international petrochemical company.  (He works in Paris but the company seems to have German senior management.)   Simon has made his professional name through the extremely rigorous team-building exercises he carries out for the company, designed to test the commitment and emotional endurance of its employees.  One day, the number two in the company asks Simon to investigate its CEO, whose behaviour is becoming increasingly eccentric.  Heartbeat Detector is based on a 2000 novel by François Emmanuel called La question humaine (retained as the film’s French title).  The screen adaptation by Elisabeth Perceval shows little imagination:  there are many scenes consisting of first person narrative voiceover or when a character passes on a load of information to the protagonist, who (like the audience) has to sit and listen and try to react.  These sound like chunks of monologue lifted from the book and dropped leadenly into the screenplay without any thought for how they will (or won’t) play.

    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly showed Mathieu Amalric to be a very gifted actor but you wouldn’t guess it from this.  It’s one of those performances where the actor’s awareness that he’s working with weighty themes robs him of any natural expressiveness.  Amalric seems frozen:  we can see that Simon has a lot on his mind but not much more than that.  And he gets no help from the director.   It doesn’t seem an original insight to see a fascistic element in corporate culture but the artificial connections made between Nazi atrocities and the humiliations meted out to the participants in Simon’s seminars are an offensive mismatch.   And classical music as a key to open a Nazi secret past seems a tired idea.  There’s an accumulation of gruellingly boring sequences that go on so long you almost want to shout out, begging them to stop.  Neither the story nor the characters develop any depth or complexity.  The effect is eventually nightmarish:  you start wondering if the film is ever going to end – there seems no reason why it should.

    Heartbeat Detector is also one of those films so smitten with the darkness of what it’s going to reveal that there’s a miserable, sinister pall over virtually all its scenes.   If, at the outset, life at the company were presented in a way that described its phony bonhomous energy – to be stripped away like the characters’ forms of protection – that would at least give some tonal variety to the narrative.  But the film is shot in cold, glum, soulless colours from the word go.   (A brief exterior shot in sunlight, about twenty minutes from the end, is almost startling.)  The only pleasure and interest in the film is provided by Michael Lonsdale’s performance as the suffering CEO.  It was in 1973 that Lonsdale played, memorably, the detective on the trail of ‘the Jackal’ in Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth bestseller.  As well as being thirty-five years older, Lonsdale is at least thirty-five pounds heavier now.  In Heartbeat Detector, he uses that bulk uncannily – to suggest an intransigent accretion of pain and guilt – and in a way that makes the expressive delicacy of his hand movements all the more poignant.  It’s dismaying to think (but hard to avoid thinking) that the plumes of smoke rising bleakly from the chimneys of the petrochemical plant are meant to evoke the chimneys of concentration camps.   It’s one thing to make films about the afterlife of Nazi war criminals who become respectable, successful members of postwar society:  but the guilt-ridden lives depicted here are those of the children of Nazis.  This is a second order guilty secret.  On how many generations are the sins of the fathers going to be visited as a convenient way of jacking up a dark-side-of-the-human-soul melodrama?

    13 July 2008

     

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