Old Yorker

  • Independence Day

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roland Emmerich (1996)

    Points of interest (I slept through much of the first hour so may have missed lots more) …

    (1) This alien invasion movie was made in the relatively short interval between the end of the Cold War and the onset of modern global terrorism. The film went into production midway through Bill Clinton’s first term as President, when the economic situation and outlook in the US and the West more generally were relatively very positive.  This and the great commercial success of Independence Day suggest that actual, immediate threat and adversity aren’t necessary in order for pictures like this to be conceived and to prosper.  The American economy was faring well too when Invasion of the Bodysnatchers was made in 1956 but the climate of fear – of nuclear war and/or Communist brainwashing – at that time was salient in contemporary culture.  Independence Day seems rather to tap into a public unease that things seem to be going too well.

    (2) Thanks to the lack of any obvious terrestrial enemy, the film’s President Thomas J Whitmore proposes that in future the Fourth of July should become a day of celebration not just for the USA but for the whole world. This gesture of American benevolence comes across as more egregiously nationalist than any anti-Commie or anti-anyone else statements in militaristic movies that I can call to mind.

    (3) High-fiving is a more recent epidemic than I’d thought. When the alien threat is overcome, people – even in America – merely hug each other and clench their fists.  Everyone on the planet celebrates, including a group of spear-carrying African tribespeople, who wave their free arm rather limply.   When the long-awaited Independence Day 2 finally arrives (it’s now scheduled for July 2016), it will be possible in the corresponding sequences for the representatives of all peoples of the world to high-five.

    (4) The character of Russell Caisse – who, according to Wikipedia, is a ‘widowed, alcoholic crop duster and veteran Vietnam War pilot who claims to have been an alien abductee prior to the film’s events’ – provides a connection to they-came-from-outer-space thrillers of an earlier era. As he heads to his gung-ho kamikaze end, Randy Quaid also recalls a character in a very different kind of movie:  Slim Pickens’s Major Kong in Dr Strangelove

    (5) Will Smith, as a military pilot, is a lot more annoying than Jeff Goldblum, an IT nerd, with whom Smith joins forces to save the day and the planet. Yet Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s father, who reconnects with his Jewish faith and eventually puts on a yarmulke to prove it, is nearly as annoying as Smith – so you wonder if, in spite of appearances, it’s the Smith and Hirsch characters who are really related.

    (6) Bill Pullman, as President Whitmore, is too quiet and tasteful for the whole enterprise – even when he gets into fighter pilot gear and leads a strike against an alien destroyer. It’s funny how good American actors (George Clooney in The Ides of March a more recent example) tend to underplay the crude grandstanding to which American politicians are prone – even when, as here, they’re delivering statements of jingoistic idiocy.  Mary McDonnell is more convincing as the doomed First Lady, with her fixed professional smile and highly resilient hairdo.

    26 December 2013

  • In Darkness

    Old YorkerFilm review

    W ciemności

    Agnieszka Holland (2011)

    The Dutch film-maker Agnieszka Holland’s best-known film is Europa Europa (1990), based on the autiobiography of Solomon Perel, a German Jewish boy who survived the Nazi regime by pretending to be not just a Gentile but an Aryan.   In Darkness is also based on a true World War II story.  Its hero is Leopold Socha, a Catholic sewer worker in Lvov, whose knowledge of the city’s underground geography was crucial in enabling him to keep a group of Jews hidden there for fourteen months until the Russian army liberated Lvov in the summer of 1944.  Holland and the Canadian screenwriter David F Shamoon (who adapted a book by Robert Marshall called In the Sewers of Lvov) present people living in such terrible extremity that one hesitates before criticising the film.  Besides, the characters’ physical circumstances – surviving in a lightless world of vermin and excrement – are a potent representation of the plight of European Jewry during the 1930s and the early 1940s.  But although In Darkness tells a story that’s remarkable (to put it mildly) I don’t think it’s remarkable drama.  The people in the sewers go through crises which, in spite of their extraordinary situation, are familiar in a screen story of survival against overwhelming odds.  I’m not saying the particular events in Shamoon’s screenplay didn’t really happen but, once you dramatise a story, it has to be judged as drama and the dramatis personae need to be more individual than they are here.  (The dark doesn’t help of course – the physical setting is undeniably powerful but it takes longer to get a hang of the human beings in the blackness.)  I watched In Darkness gripped by the subject but always feeling that the director was compelling admiration because of the subject rather than through her realisation of it.

    There are, though, some very impressive things in the film.  In describing this matter of life and death, Agnieszka Holland always keeps you aware of the matters of life, like sexual frustration and expression.  The Nazis’ brutality is more shocking because Holland uses it often as background to the scenes overground.  My eyes, like those of the Jews who escape from the sewers at the climax to In Darkness, took time to readjust to the light each time the action returned to the streets of Lvov – and the immediate natural sense of relief you feel at these breaks in the darkness is immediately confounded by the various violence that takes place in the world above.  There are emotionally powerful sequences.  The birth of a baby in the sewer (although you kind of expect this too) can’t be visually beautified, in a conventional sense anyway, but Agnieszka Holland makes it aurally miraculous:  the baby’s bawling expresses the defiance of all the people sharing this space.  It’s followed by an appalling silence, after the mother has decided the situation is hopeless and has smothered the baby to death.  The utilitarian callousness of a high-ranking Nazi officer, which saves the life of one of the principal characters, is devastating.  Perhaps best of all is the way in which Socha’s initially mercenary attitude and mild anti-semitism develop into a fierce protection of ‘his’ Jews.  He has been taking a weekly payment from one of the older men in the group, Ignacy Chiger:  it’s a fine illustration of Socha’s moral journey when Chiger tells him there’s no money left, and Socha hands him back a wad of notes – insisting to Chiger that, when the time comes, he should pay the next weekly charge ‘in front of the others so they don’t think I’m a sucker, doing this for nothing’.  Socha’s marriage is also very convincingly handled, both in the intimate details (the couple’s lovemaking, his wife washing Socha’s back) and in the arguments between them.  You get a strong sense of how unassailably devoted they are to each other, in spite of the tensions that flare up between them.

    Robert Wieckiewicz, who will play Lech Walesa in the upcoming Andrzej Wajda biopic, is outstanding as Socha and Kinga Preis as his wife Wanda has a very expressive warmth.  Otherwise, the main actors are committed but unsurprising.  In the closing legends, we’re told that Leopold Socha died in an accident very shortly after the war ended[1].  This seems shockingly unfair:  the words on the screen go on to say that, at Socha’s funeral, someone said his death was a punishment for helping the Jews.  Agnieszka Holland should have left it at that but she starts editorialising.  ‘Why do we need God’, asks the next legend, ‘when we can punish each other so terribly?’  She loftily dedicates In Darkness not just to Leopold and Wanda Socha but all the other six thousand ‘Righteous among the Nations’.  I’m probably being unfair but this pompous epilogue made me feel vindicated about what I experienced as Holland’s strong-arming direction through much of what had gone before.

    21 March 2012

    [1] I thought I read ’12 May 1945’ on the legend but the Wikipedia page on Socha indicates 1946.  He was thirty-six years old.

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