"Wherever it hits me is where it's going to be": Reports from Cannes 2016

As those reading me at the Village Voice may know, I was at the 69th Cannes Film Festival over the past couple of weeks. Here, for your convenience, are all my reports from the festival (along with the films discussed), in one handy list o' links:

Spielberg and Horror

A conversation about Poltergeist today reminded me of something I’d been meaning to post about for a while. A couple of months ago I went through a Steven Spielberg binge – partly for this essay on his development as a political filmmaker, partly because, hey, Spielberg. But as I went back over his earlier work, it struck me just how much Spielberg’s filmmaking language owes to horror. Obviously, several of his earliest films – Duel, Something Evil, Jaws – actually are horror films. But I’m intrigued by how many of his other films rely on horror tropes.

'80s Action Week: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)

Yes, it’s still good. Steven Spielberg’s 1981 masterpiece hasn’t dated one bit, in part because it was already something of a throwback – a blend of cutting-edge effects and technique with a defiantly old-fashioned sensibility. Spielberg took the template of the action serial – those corny, disposable, cliff-hangery pieces of escapist pulp from the ‘30s and ‘40s – and crafted something whose speed, narrative shorthand, and element of surprise were very much of the moment. Its hero, wisecracking archeologist adventurer Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) was a combination of Buster Crabbe, Clark Gable, and, well, Harrison Ford himself, whose cynical cool had just made Han Solo one of the most iconic heroes in movie history. In a sense, this is what Spielberg has always done. (Heck, he did something similar in Lincoln – mixing a post-Nixonian study of the infernal American political machine with an earnest, Capraesque belief that men of good will can still accomplish great things.)

Ghosts in the American Machine: Amistad and Lincoln

“Sir, this war must be waged on the battlefield of righteousness.”
“The what?”
- Amistad

I’ve always had a soft spot for Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. I think this puts me in some kind of minority, as that film is often Exhibit A in the Case Against Spielbergian Sanctimony. It certainly has its flaws – John Williams’s score, while lovely, swells a bit too much; Morgan Freeman gets a couple of dreadfully on-the-nose scenes; and “Give…us…free” is probably some sort of low-point for the director. But dear god, there’s so much to love here, too, quite aside from the fact that it’s a gripping, well-told historical-legal epic. Consider: The haunting scenes depicting the terror and bewilderment of the mutinous slaves as their ship comes closer ashore, or the extended flashback to the “Middle Passage” that occurs right at the mid-point of the film and spreads out in all directions like a gaping wound. And it has some of the finest performances Spielberg has ever directed, including Djimon Hounsou’s as the slave leader Cinque. The actor makes clear that the character’s fury is rooted not just in plain old anger or fear but in frustration: Cinque knows what’s going on but, a stranger in a strange land, lacks the language to express himself.

Amistad has been much on my mind lately, because it makes an appropriate companion piece with Lincoln. Not only are both films about slavery, but they’re about the specifically legal and political machinations by which the institution was maintained and then finally dismantled. Together, the two make a uniquely American diptych: They’re about a festering moral crime which needed the wedding of idealism and practicality, along with the efforts of good men, to be righted.

"A Vessel Grim and Daring": Some Thoughts on Spielberg's Lincoln

The more I think about it, the more it seems that Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln – which I caught at the New York Film Festival some weeks ago -- might actually be some sort of masterpiece. I loved it when I saw it, but it’s also grown in my mind since then. I’ll be writing more about the film after I see it again, but for now I wanted to make some observations that struck me both as I watched it and as I reflected on it afterwards.

War Horse: You Can’t Go Home Again

Steven Spielberg’s equine bildungsroman has been called old-fashioned, and it is, I suppose, to a point. Because it’s essentially about the very idea of old-fashioned-ness itself. It starts off in a kind of bucolic, poetic reverie in the lush countryside of Devon; the first scenes are admirably wordless, as boy (Jeremy Irvine) meets horse. Then it settles, for a little while at least, into a kind of particularized geniality that has led many to recall John Ford films like The Quiet Man and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Seemingly uncinematic problems -- such as whether a thoroughbred can be made to plow a field, or whether a kind-hearted, drunk farmer with a limp (Peter Mullan) will be able to make rent -- are filmed with a wide-eyed momentousness.

Some will find this hard to take, but that’s what epics do: They make everything bigger and bigger until the whole world seems monumental, and then they force us to choose what’s important. And if War Horse seems old-fashioned at first, that’s because it has to be. It’s about how the old world was torn to shreds by the new -- which is, after all, the ultimate story of World War I.

The Adventures of Tintin: Bodies, Unrest, and Motion

I’ve been waiting for a proper Tintin movie for pretty much my entire life. The first time I saw a movie on TV (any kind of movie) was a Turkish TV broadcast of Tintin and the Blue Oranges, a live-action Belgian attempt from the 1960s to bring Herge’s comic book characters to life. Even my six-year-old self at the time knew enough to call bullshit on that one. I remember that halfway through the film, the power went out in Ankara and plunged us into darkness, as if willed by my refusal to accept some random dude pretending to be Tintin.

Seriously, This New Jaws Book is Pretty Great

Many serious film types have an allergy to coffee table books about movies. Maybe it’s the price (if you bought too many of these things, you probably wouldn’t have any money to spend on seeing actual movies). Or maybe it has something to do with a perceived superficiality – why spend time with large, glossy pictures when you can pore over a dusty, dense bit of theory or a thick biography.  Of course, there are exceptions: Taschen’s Stanley Kubrick books are a perfect example of big, expensive art books that are nevertheless seen as essential reading as well.

To these I think I can add another one. Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard, written by Matt Taylor and with a foreword by Steven Spielberg himself, is a dense, beautiful (and relatively inexpensive) volume full of anecdotes, interviews, photos, illustrations, and contemporaneous articles about the 1974 shoot of Spielberg’s blockbuster on the island. Of course, the culture at large has an image of Martha’s Vineyard as some kind of haven for wealthy elite types (witness the media silliness over Obama’s recent visit there) but its actual residents appear to be anything but. And Jaws is a film whose shoot was deeply intertwined with the community at large: town residents actually played parts in the film, and the film itself is steeped in a unique kind of atmosphere that no studio set would ever have been able to match.

All That Will Be Left Is Us: Revisiting A.I.

 

I cannot overstate my complicated emotions when I first saw A.I. Artificial Intelligence back in 2001. Here was a film that I’d anticipated for nearly a decade: First when it was to be directed by Stanley Kubrick; then during that somewhat confusing period when Kubrick was making Eyes Wide Shut, with A.I. supposedly to follow, either directed by him or produced by him with someone else directing; and finally, of course, that sad time after Kubrick’s passing, when the prospect of Steven Spielberg directing the film tore up many a Kubrick fan.

"I Can Bring Everyone Back…”: Spielberg's Fantasies of Reversal

So apparently there’s a Spielberg Blogathon going on, starting today. I just found out about it, and wasn’t planning on writing anything, but then it occurred to me to discuss something I’ve always found intriguing about Spielberg’s films. Plus, it gets me to discuss what is one of the guy’s most underrated films, Empire of the Sun. Specifically, this above scene near the end, in which young Jim (young Christian Bale) finally loses it and begins to think that he can bring his dead Japanese kamikaze friend back to life. As he pumps away at the dead boy’s chest, Jim intones, “I can bring everyone back…everyone…”