Monthly Archives: June 2016

  • The Milky Way

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La voie lactée

    Luis Buñuel (1969)

    It was twenty minutes or so in that I realised I’d seen it before at BFI (and as part of a Buñuel season) …  My only and lame excuse for forgetting is that the subject matter isn’t what you’d guess from the title.   The original name of the Milky Way was ‘the way of St James’.  The narrative thread to the film – which Pauline Kael described as ‘a guided tour of heresies’ – takes two pilgrim-tramps (Paul Frankeur and Laurent Terzieff) from their starting point in France to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, where the bones of the apostle James are meant to be buried.   The film is witty and Buñuel ‘s antipathy to religion is conveyed more strongly thanks to the sprightly tone, but it doesn’t appear to have many points to make.  A legend on the screen at the end stresses that each of the heresy episodes is based on scripture or church history.  The Milky Way would be a futile exercise if that wasn’t the case:  if Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, with whom he wrote the screenplay, needed to invent in order to advance the argument that Christian dogma is ridiculous, they would risk looking foolish themselves.   There’s no danger of Luis Buñuel doing that.

    The film depends a good deal on the originality and style of its various parts and there are plenty of highlights.  At a Catholic school concert, the performing children solemnly pronounce a series of heresies as anathema.  A maître d’hôtel (the superb Julien Bertheau) conducts brisk theological debates on the dual nature of Christ with his intellectually curious but always respectful staff.  Two seminarians (the charming Denis Manuel and Daniel Filon) swap their clerical garb for the clothes they steal from a couple of hunters who are swimming in a lake.   After discarding a rosary found in one of the pockets of their new outfits and having it returned to them by the Virgin Mary, the pair spend a curious evening and night at a Spanish inn.  The vivid eccentrics in evidence there include the innkeeper (Marcel Pérès ) and a priest (Julien Guiomar), who is both a fine storyteller and a determined preacher.  (When he’s locked out of the young men’s rooms, he takes to instructing them from the corridor outside and materialises in front of them a couple of times.)  Bernard Verley, who plays Jesus Christ, puts over something of the disturbing sense of humour you sometimes infer from the gospels.  It’s noticeable that Buñuel has it in for Jesus no less than he does for organised religion as an instrument of tyranny and brutal prejudice – there’s no evident distinction between the good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ here.  Michel Piccoli has a good bit as the Marquis de Sade; the remarkable cast also includes, among many others, Edith Scob (the Virgin Mary), Pierre Clémenti (the Devil) and Delphine Seyrig (a prostitute).

    The succession of costumes clerical and historical and the interaction of characters from different periods (they sometimes bump into each other in the same woodland settings) combine to convey what Buñuel sees as the malignant persistence of Christian beliefs.  At the same time, Raymond Durgnat in his study of Buñuel seems to me spot on when he writes that The Milky Way ‘compounds the cinema’s usual discontinuities of space with discontinuities of time’ and ‘engenders … a Christian sense of eternity’.   An extract from Durgnat’s book formed one half of the BFI programme note.  The other half was an excerpt from Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh:

    ‘… The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all … the film is above all a journey through fanaticism … The road travelled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology. …’

    As Buñuel must have known, this is disingenuous.  If he wanted his audiences to understand that he had any kind of fanaticism in mind, why did he stick with his own well-travelled road of using religion, and religion alone, as the exemplar?

    14 June 2012

  • The Men Who Stare at Goats

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Grant Heslov (2009)

    Maybe it’s just because I’m seeing more films than ever but the ones capsized by a poor script seem to be increasing rapidly too.  Quite often, the problem is that bright people take a subject that feels like a great idea – an idea whose attractions certainly have a mesmerising effect on the film-makers:  they don’t know how to make it work but they think the intrinsic brilliance of the conception is bound to pay off.    The Men Who Stare at Goats is ‘inspired by’ the British journalist Jon Ronson’s 2004 book about the US army’s experiments with New Age concepts and the paranormal as potential military applications.   This does sound like the germ of a rich political comedy, and the film has its charms and its moments, but the screenplay by Peter Straughan (also British) seems like an early draft.  Straughan and the director Grant Heslov (who co-wrote Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney, which Heslov also produced) don’t find an imaginative way of linking the flashbacks to the 1980s (and earlier) – when these unconventional post-hippie military techniques were supposedly being developed within the armed forces – with the ‘present tense’ of the story.  This takes place in the weeks immediately following the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.  There’s a point at which Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a veteran psychic soldier, and Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a reporter who’s come to the Gulf to prove his journalistic manhood after his wife left him for the editor of the Michigan daily on which Bob works, are stranded in the desert and have no idea where to go next.  The image seems to express the situation of the film.  These two men might as well be Grant Heslov and Peter Straughan.

    One of the comic high points occurs in one of the flashback sequences, shortly after we’re introduced to Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey).  Hooper meets Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), the Vietnam vet turned New Earth Army philosopher who leads the psychic warfare training, at a spoon-bending party.  Django is impressed with Hooper’s effect on the cutlery and recruits him to his team of ‘Jedi Warriors’, as the New Earth Army are informally known.  We next see Hooper at a wedding reception when he congratulates the happy couple, adding, ‘Sorry things don’t work out for you two’.  There are other good lines in the script but not so many as to make the ESP jokes self-sufficient – the film still needs a propelling narrative.  And the tone is uncertain:  much of the time it’s droll rather than bitterly satirical, so that a warfare sequence in Vietnam or the appearance of Iraqi prisoners emerging from sensory disorientation sessions seems off- key.  Hooper is a dark arts man, inclined to the harmful application of paranormal techniques in warfare and the essential rival of Cassady, who’s traumatised by the knowledge that he violated the New Earth Army code when he agreed to use his mental powers to stop the heart of a goat.  The four main characters finally get together in 2003 at an American military base in the desert, where Hooper is now the head of PSIC, a private research firm carrying out psychological and psychic experiments on goats and Iraqis.  The elderly Django, fallen on hard times and much the worse for drink, is one of his employees; and Cassady is shocked to see the great man brought so low.  But the air of amused eccentricity that hangs over The Men Who Stare at Goats tends to muffle the moral contrasts between the characters.  You don’t really care what happens, you just relax into watching the performers.

    Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton is a microcosmic example of the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time syndrome which afflicts the film.  McGregor is playing Wilton presumably because of his Jedi Warrior past (as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Stars Wars prequel) and because that must have seemed a good joke when the film was cast.  McGregor does pretty well in the part but he’s at a considerable disadvantage (not least because he has to shoulder most of the first part of the picture, which is especially clumsy).  It’s not a problem, once the film moves to the Gulf War region, that McGregor gamely tries and fail to keep up with George Clooney’s wit – Wilton is essentially a hapless straight man to Cassady.  It’s more a problem that McGregor lacks a sufficiently definite persona from previous roles to make him an amusing stooge by his very presence on screen.   Even so, he has one thing in common with Clooney, Spacey and Bridges, which goes a good way towards redeeming the picture.    There’s a streak of self-indulgence running through this whole enterprise (you get it in the arch ‘More of this is true than you would believe’ that comes up on the screen at the start) but the actors don’t let the self-indulgence show in front of the camera.  They know they won’t be funny if we can see them thinking they’re funny – yet they’re skilful enough to impart to the audience their enjoyment in their roles and teamwork.

    Clooney easily overshadows McGregor but has a tougher time holding his own in the sequence when he and the goat stare hard at each other.  The animal is a natural – I especially liked the moment when one of its ears flicked.  What Clooney does with his eyes in this film is no doubt another in-joke but it’s pleasing anyway.   The Jedi Warriors’   armoury includes the ‘sparkly eyes technique’, which Clooney demonstrates to McGregor at one point on their drive in the desert.  Apart from locking eyes with the goat, however, Clooney, who has been known to overuse his peepers, keeps the ocular activity subdued.   The psychic soldiers in the 1980s are uniformed hippies – Clooney has a wig that makes him look convincingly younger (and a bit like George Harrison) and Jeff Bridges a pigtail.   Bridges overdoes Django’s decrepitude a bit in the closing sequence but he’s very likeable and his size and vigour give body to the film in more ways than one.   Spacey, with an ugly moustache (that makes him, as Sally said, look like a Bob Mortimer character) has, of course, done malignant smugness before but it seems a while ago – it’s good to see him back.   Stephen Root plays the ex-psychic soldier whom Wilton interviews for the Ann Arbor paper. Robert Patrick is the gung-ho head of a private security firm in post-invasion Iraq .  The cinematography is by Robert Elswit and the agreeable score by Rolfe Kent .

    14 November 2009

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