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Art as Pastiche: Kill Bill Vol. 2

It’s important to acknowledge that Kill Bill Vol. 2 has been made in very much the same spirit as Vol. 1. Sure, there’s much less bloodshed, fewer fights, and slower pacing, but what we see on the screen is, once again, a pastiche of Tarantino’s favorite exploitation movie genres—kung fu, spaghetti westerns, bad-ass chick flicks, B-horror pictures, grindhouse cinema of practically any variety. He himself has likened the Kill Bill series to Raiders of the Lost Ark, for which Steven Spielberg and George Lucas plumbed the annals of 30’s/40’s adventure serials and threw all their favorite moments and touches into a sort of reappraisal of the genre. This sort of aspiration applies equally to both Kill Bill films, and it would be foolhardy to try to find any new motive in the second installment. Vol. 2 is not, strictly speaking, any more mature than its predecessor, though there may be more dialogue and less action. Granted, “mature” is a problematic term, but let’s tentatively say it refers to a certain sense of confidence on the filmmaker’s part that does not manifest itself in showy exuberance or tugging at the sleeves of the audience, but rather in subtlety, or grace and legerdemain. That definition may be a mouthful, but it’s immediately clear that such a sensibility is not easy to find in Vol. 2. If anything, Tarantino’s latest is even more of a homage-driven narrative than was Vol. 1. At least the first film had a unified thematic and stylistic streak, in that the entire picture (with the exception of the opening black-and-white images of Uma Thurman’s The Bride, bloody and prostrate) emulated a cartoon. Now, Tarantino uses black-and-white footage extensively, developing it into alternately a spin-off of Sergio Leone westerns (as in the scenes in the wedding chapel) or, more strangely, an ode to film noir (as in the shots of The Bride driving and the opening art deco credits).

At the same time, “homage” to kung fu pictures virtually gives way to recreation in the chapter involving Pai Mei’s tutelage of The Bride. Those scenes have a grainy look and a muted palette, as if they belonged to the era of 70’s Hong Kong action pictures; to ram the point home even further, dramatic zooms are frequently used and, of course, Pai Mei’s character could have been plucked straight out of an old kung fu TV series. What Tarantino seems to be doing here is less reapplying and reinventing those parts of movies and shows that he loved best, and more aiming toward a systematic approximation and reproduction of exactly those movies and shows. Whereas Kill Bill Vol. 1 maintained a certain stylistic coherence, Vol. 2 shifts gears dramatically from one type of ode to another. The first big surprise of the picture comes with the credits I referred to earlier, designed to emulate 40’s/50’s noir. Right from the beginning, it is clear that Tarantino has extended himself past the realm of exploitation and cartoons. He is broadening the scope of his collage, but without any significant deepening or strengthening of the narrative.

Granted, surprises such as these do make for a thoroughly enjoyable picture. While the dazzling but incessant swordplay of the first movie grew somewhat tiresome by the end of two hours, Tarantino exhibits enough variety and flare in his latest offering to keep his audience hooked for an even longer span of time. The only worrisome feature is that he seems to have retreated into an increasingly dramatic reliance on homage and filmic intertextuality, rather than proceeding in the direction we might have hoped given Vol. 1: simply telling a good story. There’s a visceral brilliance in all of his movies, I would argue, and there’s never any doubt, watching Kill Bill, that you’re in the hands of a great talent. But brilliance is not exactly maturity. Maybe I’m nitpicking; I must confess that personally I love the Kill Bill series, perhaps simply because it represents such a unique approach to moviemaking. The completed work stands as more of a grand canvas pasted with marginally related ideas and moments—as with anything Tarantino does, it is uncontrollably bursting with ideas—than a self-contained entity. A friend recently told me that Kill Bill was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly for our generation, and, though that may sound excessively celebratory to some, I do think there’s something to be said for the way in which Tarantino has turned an inherently comic method of allusion and homage into an impassioned, rousing, and exhilarating action picture. Let’s not forget that Leone’s classic western was panned by numerous prominent critics upon its release. Perhaps the real qualities of Kill Bill will only emerge a decade or so down the line, in hindsight. For now, it is difficult to determine whether the series is a retreat into film-school antics or a bold and audacious statement on how movies are made. There’s a kind of genius at play in the two films (especially Vol. 2, which, though at times overreaching in search of inspiration, does have a lot more going on in it than the first), but also something inherently problematic about their approach, their very raison-d’être. Maybe it all boils down to a purely philosophical argument: whether one can create purely out of adoration for another creation; whether pastiche can be art, or at least a viable reflection on art, if only in a post-modernist way. Or, simply, whether you can make a kick-ass action movie in 2004 with art deco titles.

From the Canon of Overlooked Movies: Ragtime

There's a lot of interesting stuff in the theaters at this time, but for now I've decided to look back at a movie that I've long cherished but that's received little recognition. Czech filmmaker Milos Forman is most famous in the U.S. for his American productions Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but Ragtime (1981) is an equally ambitious film, a lavish period piece weaving multiple characters and storylines into a grand vision of our country at the turn of the twentieth century. If certainly not a perfect film, Ragtime is an eccentric take on America that deserves far more attention than it has received.

Based on E.L. Doctorow’s novel, the film primarily involves a small, middle-class family; a black pianist, named Coalhouse Walker, Jr., who emerges in the second half as the driving force and the most discernible protagonist; and the aftermath of the true-life scandal of millionaire Stanford White and his chorus girls. In her withering review of the film, Pauline Kael noted that it feels “more chewed up than edited,” and, admittedly, the switches from one narrative to another are often awkwardly handled. Forman does not display the same grace and facility in weaving together his tapestry that are the hallmarks of a director like Robert Altman. Indeed, Altman was originally intended to be the director of Ragtime, and it is tempting to speculate how much better the movie might have been in his hands.

Such thoughts are, however, misguided, for Forman brings a decidedly unique vision to the material. One of the things he does best, as exemplified in his more recognized triumph Amadeus, is melding the soundtrack into the narrative. Randy Newman’s score runs the gamut from plaintive string lines to jaunty dance-hall tunes, and it never feels out of place. Instead, it helps distance the viewer from the material in a way that is hard to imagine Altman doing. Consider the scene in which Coalhouse Walker, Jr. runs up the stairs to meet his estranged lover, Sarah, who he now wants to marry. She steps back, frightened, and he stands in place, as if pleading. The orchestral music swells dramatically, and not a word is spoken between the two characters. The result feels a bit cheesy, and yet it is perfect because it is so reminiscent of an earlier form of cinema: the overt nature of the musical cue renders the scene more abstract, as if we were watching a silent movie. There’s an antique feeling to the moment between these two characters: it is overplayed and over-scored, so that a sense of the theatrical emerges from their confrontation and ultimate reconciliation.

If that kind of overloading of image and music—in the tradition of the musical comedies and dance-hall burlesques which Ragtime consistently evokes—removes the spectacle from reality, a notable contrast may be found in a far more melodramatic scene earlier in the film. Harry K. Thaw, the disgruntled husband of one of Stanford White’s chorus girls, spots White at Madison Square Garden (which looks charmingly quaint in its turn-of-the-century form) and shoots him in the back of the head. Onstage, a man and a line of chorus girls (appropriately enough) are performing a jovial dance tune, “I Could Love a Million Girls.” The anempathetic music (to borrow Michel Chion's term) serves as counterpoint to a moment of grisly violence, and, ironically, makes the violence all the more grisly. In other words, where the music does not fit the action, the corresponding scene is stripped of spectacle and, in its jarring juxtaposition of sound and image, rendered more realistic.

The fact that Forman can achieve both these contrasting effects with his use of music is a testament to his skill as a director, and to what he has achieved in Ragtime. For this epic film, in its obsessive indictment of American injustices (particularly racism) as well as its love of Americana, is an amazingly rich and textured view of the country that might not have been possible from a native-born director. We sense the outsider behind the camera whenever fragments of our nation’s cultural and pop history emerge onscreen: the flip-book, precursor of the animated movie; the silent damsel-in-distress film production; the ice cream sundaes and crowded New York streets; and, of course, the ragtime itself (though most of the film’s music is actually not ragtime). Booker T. Washington and Teddy Roosevelt make appearances, but these are not moments lifted from a history textbook; they pulsate with vitality precisely because we are allowed to feel and partake in Forman’s fascination with them. In the end, the precise nature of Ragtime’s vision is hard to put a finger on: it is a movie that is at once realist and theatrical, epic and eccentric, critical of America and deeply in love with it. Indeed, when one considers these attributes, it’s hard to imagine anyone but an outsider—Forman—making the movie and lending his particularly removed perspective on this complex setting.

The Passion of the Christ

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is a failed experiment. The aim of the movie is to shatter the 1950’s matinee-epic vision of the Messiah and replace it with a visceral sense of Jesus’s humanity and his suffering. Gibson is essentially reacting against the tradition of the effete, otherworldly Jesus whose death was anything but painful. The fundamental motive behind the movie, which must be understood if we are to make any judgments, is to show Jesus as a man, suffering just as much as any human being in that situation would.

Gibson attempts to realize this goal by translating the medieval passion play to the screen. Of course, he takes his cue from mystical writings and the Gospels more so than he uses any particular passion play. That said, his relentless emphasis on convincing the audience that Christ suffered—making us uneasy spectators to his ordeal—is unmistakably an extension of the passion-play tradition. Many of the most common criticisms hurled at the movie—overly blunt statement of its message, one-dimensional characters, too much violence—do not quite apply if the film is to be interpreted as a modern-day passion play, and therefore little more than a piece of propaganda. After all, we judge propaganda by its ends rather than its means, and the question must always be: Is the message effectively expressed?

The only problem is, the movie fails even as a passion play. First off, the use of flashbacks is embarrassing. That technique is one of the prime clichés of the movies, and for that reason flashbacks should always be handled very carefully. Unfortunately, Gibson’s pounding and brutally blunt style does not lend itself well to a matter requiring such care. The flashbacks serve two purposes: to provide context and allude to Jesus as a teacher, a carpenter, a loving son; and to offer momentary relief from the violence of his passion. However, these brief scenes represent merely the most superficial and cursory examination of Jesus’s life and teachings, and, more importantly, they are not in keeping with the passion-play tradition. Obviously, medieval passion plays did not take a break to show a moment from the Last Supper. Such contrast of tone helps make watching the otherwise gruesome movie more bearable, but it sabotages Gibson’s point. You can sense the uncertainty of the filmmaker during these flashbacks, as if he has decided to temper his material because he’s anxious about it. That nervousness is a major flaw: no work of propaganda can stand up if it does not at least feel assured.

The Passion falls flat in another even more glaring respect. Even though it may at heart be a passion play, it still has to work on the screen. Theater and cinema are two very different modes of expression, and, for Gibson’s film to work as a film, it needs to possess something that allows it to leap from the screen, so to speak, and truly touch its audiences. Unfortunately, by the end of its two hours, The Passion feels more like a prolonged snuff movie than a depiction of the Christian faith’s most important event. The flaw in this case lies precisely in Gibson’s attempt to humanize Jesus. Theoretically, I respect that goal, but I believe it backfires in the context of a full-length feature film, because there is so little to indicate, in any deep sense, what all the blood and gore is for. Jesus’s pain should indeed be portrayed as that of a man, but without any moral or spiritual context for the violence, it feels empty. Christ’s passion is the central moment in Christanity because, according to the doctrine, Jesus endured unspeakable suffering and was crucified so that humanity may be saved: he died for our sins. Although Gibson includes quick glimpses of Jesus’s divinity (he heals a Roman soldier’s ear, he forgives his executioners), I didn’t feel the movie grappled, in any deep way, with what his death meant. Gibson’s experiment is highly problematic here: perhaps the medieval passion play did not require anything more than a man suffering onstage, but the two-hour movie equivalent turns the audience into voyeurs of another man’s pain, not witnesses of a “passion.” I’m not saying Gibson should have used more extensive flashbacks—he should have used none—but rather that he should have expressed, in purely cinematic terms, the divinity behind the event, the grace behind the violence. The approach he chose might have worked for a half-hour movie, but at the end of two hours it beckons the question: Why do we care? As soon as we wonder that, the propaganda has clearly failed.

Whether or not this failure demonstrates that the passion play can never be properly adapted to cinema remains open to speculation. It's important to remember that passion plays were usually performed just outside the church building, during the Easter season. They grew out of the liturgy that commemorated Jesus' passion—the last week of Lent directly preceding the celebration of his resurrection at Easter. For medieval audiences, the plays fused with their own experience of the liturgy and, within this context, with their witness of the baptisms at the Easter vigil and their participation in the celebrations of the mass on some of the days of Holy Week and at Easter. A passion play's performance, while portraying Jesus as a suffering human, was therefore part and parcel of a larger experience that constantly reminded these audiences of his divinity in all sorts of ways (as did their own faith). Moreover, when Christian churches today commemorate the stations of the cross the participants in the recreation are members of the church community who undertake the task, and thereby become performers, as an expression of their faith. As depicted in Denys Arcand's wonderful film Jesus of Montreal (1989), the audience and the performers are one, in a sense—a single body of faithful joined also by their belief. Thus, another problem with Gibson's movie is, ironically enough, the screen: it is a barrier that separates the audience from the performers. Gibson's passion play is removed in every sense from the context that, in the passion play tradition, constantly recalled Jesus's divinity as well as his humanity; the audience itself is further removed—placed in a modern movie theater, watching a screen, eating popcorn, etc.—and, of course, not necessarily composed of practicing Christians. On all levels, it's clear that the modern cinema prohibits the fusion of audience and performers, of the liturgy within the church and the play outside, of the suffering man depicted in this play and the sacrament of the eucharist in which Jesus's divinely empowered, sacrificed body and blood are eaten and drunk.

One last point remains to be made, and fortunately it's a simple one: The Passion of the Christ is indeed anti-Semitic. Whether it was actually fueled by anti-Semitism in its making is unimportant. The result on the screen breathes such hatred. Gibson goes out of his way to depict the Roman governor Pontius Pilate as a conscientious and tortured man—almost a tragic hero, who, by his weakness, gives in to the Jewish mob demanding Jesus's death. The film's Pilate does not exactly jive with the historical account: we know that Pontius was, in fact, a notably cruel governor who showed no hesitation in sending Jews off to crucifixion. But, then again, Gibson doesn't claim to follow the history books. The problem is, not even the Gospels are as kind to Pontius as he is. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Pontius's wife has dreams of a bad omen associated with Jesus's death, and so, out of fear instead of principles, she advises her husband not to crucify the man. Pontius gives it a few moments' thoughts—nothing like the prolonged soul-searching we see in the movie—before bowing down to the mob and sending Jesus to be beaten and crucified. (In The Passion, he first orders Jesus to be beaten but not killed, trying to buy time and hoping to appease the Jewish priests without crucifying him; only once that plan has failed does he finally, with great reluctance, send Jesus to die.) It's clear who the real villains are in the movie: Caiaphas and his fellow priests, who sneer at the bleeding Jesus and continually call for his death, not once displaying a shred of mercy. Thus, when we compare the authority figures in the film—Pontius Pilate v. Caiaphas—we find an obvious imbalance. Plus, the only Romans in the film who are truly villainous are the soldiers, who are depicted in such an animalistic fashion (and are even scolded by their own officers for their brutality) that they hardly seem to represent the Roman establishment. Granted, the movie also features the kind gestures of the likes of Simon and Veronica, but on the authority level the anti-Semitism is undeniable.

Although it may sound like I absolutely detested this movie, I did find things to admire. For one, if you can get past the ideological slant of the film, it's beautifully shot (though not as visually compelling as it should have been, in my opinion). In particular, the pietà is exquisitely handled: it's by far the best and most touching moment in the film. The resurrection is, likewise, well-done—not depicted in the same hammer-the-point-home style of the rest of the movie, but rather swiftly shown in a single take. Finally, one may admire the focus and clarity of vision with which the story is told. Is The Passion worth seeing? I would hesitantly say yes, but not on account of its quality. The movie is, at its core, an experiment, and it's unlike anything that has been done before. That's the reason to see it, and the only reason. Other than that, it's very little more than a brutal, sadistic, hateful, and fatally flawed venture. With a few nice shots.

Oscar Predictions

The time has come. This Sunday, the red carpet will be rolled out, and the winners will be announced. I have quite a few qualms with the nominees, let alone who will probably win, but, opinions aside, here're my predictions for some of the major awards on Oscar night:

Best Documentary Feature: Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling)
Best Animated Feature: Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton)
Best Foreign Film: The Barbarian Invasions (Canada; Denys Arcand)
Best Original Screenplay: Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola)
Best Adapted Screenplay: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson)
Best Supporting Actor: Tim Robbins (Mystic River)
Best Supporting Actress: Renée Zellweger (Cold Mountain)
Best Actor: Sean Penn (Mystic River)
Best Actress: Charlize Theron (Monster)
Best Director: Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
Best Picture: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (Barrie M. Osborne, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh)

Of course, the Academy always likes to pull a few surprises. Some of the possible wildcards may be Patricia Clarkson for her supporting role in Pieces of April, Alec Baldwin for his turn in The Cooler, and/or an award for City of God.

Gangs of New York: Part 3

I recently described Daniel Day-Lewis's performance in Gangs of New York as a blend of Method-style naturalism and exuberant artifice. To an extent, that same description fits the whole movie. Scorsese first earned his fame as a practitioner of a certain kind of cinematic realism. What are generally considered his greatest works—Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull—pulsate with the jittery rhythm of the New Wave films they emulate. The influence of Godard, in particular, can be felt in Scorsese's depiction of street-life—a world of seemingly spontaneous compositions inhabited by quirky and energetic characters who constantly bump into one another and are always, figuratively if not literally, on the run. Granted, even in these early features, Scorsese's eye is as careful in its observation and his shots as meticulous in their contours as Kubrick's. However, the fast-paced dialogue, the quickly-moving camera, the sense of immediacy rather than distance, all serve to create, in Roger Ebert's words, "a heightened riff on reality." (Though Ebert was actually describing Marlon Brando's acting in On The Waterfront, his phrase is perfectly applicable to Scorsese's distinctive style.) The impression of an alert, documentary-style filmmaking is never far from the black-and-white, frantically-moving images in Raging Bull's fighting sequences, or the slowly drifting camera capturing snapshots of New York's seedy nightlife in Taxi Driver. There was something fresh, unstaged, unpredictable, and utterly real about these movies. Then, Scorsese tried something new. He turned to the grand costume drama, executing meticulously staged works that were as much visual feasts as their characters were restrained and their performances unnatural: The Last Temptation of Christ, The Age of Innocence, Kundun. In the nineties, there seemed to exist two separate Scorseses: the poet of the streets, filming the lives of city-dwellers and criminals in an unsparing light full of realism and pathos (think Goodfellas); and the virtuoso painter, constructing shots that seemed to spring from DeMille, and transporting us far from not only the modern American city, but reality itself (think Kundun). Of course, he made films that fit neither category, or blended the two, but it wasn't until Gangs of New York that these opposing strands were successfully wedded.

I believe that in this context, Gangs of New York can be more fully appreciated for the monumental work that it is—in many ways the magnum opus of one of the most brilliant careers in film. It's a grand period drama, with none of the feel typically associated with the period drama. The style is too direct, too alert, too urgent to properly fit its costumed setting: this is the past depicted as if it were now. Eschewing many of the pretensions of the ordinary costume epic (which, by contrast, The Age of Innocence adopted whole-sale), Gangs of New York winds up being the most immediate period piece I can recall. (Note that immediate does not mean best: as much as I adore Gangs, it's not quite Rashomon or The Passion of Joan of Arc). It's visceral in a way that few films manage to be. I'm not talking about the rampant violence (which does play an integral part), but rather about the sheer sense of life that permeates the film—life that's spilling out of each shot, that can't be contained within the frame. Much of the time, the camera is weaving its way through streets, creating full circles out of its motions, swooping up, down, and around to capture the smallest (or most glaring) detail: a pickpocket at work, transvestites conversing on a corner, a dead body in the middle of a busy thoroughfare ("Is that man drunk?"/"Dead as Good Friday, miss"). As a result, there's a 360-degree feel to the movie, if that means anything at all. In other words, I can imagine Gangs projected on a screen that extends from one end of the theater to another in a full circle, the entire stretch of the image bustling with movement while at the same time crafted with the utmost care. So many historical movies claim to transport us to a different time and place, to make us feel like we're really there; Gangs, unlike most others, succeeds. Scorsese here is like a latter-day Sternberg in that he knows just how to crowd his shots with props, people, and details, and create the impression of a continual overflowing of sounds, actions, and images. While Dante Ferreti's glorious sets deserve credit, it's chiefly Scorsese's virtuosity as a filmmaker and his masterful command of the setting that instill the whole movie with such a palpable sense of place. We see the Five Points, we move through the Five Points, we hear the Five Points—sometimes it's as if we could even smell the Five Points, so vivid is this locale's depiction.

But what makes the movie really work is nothing Sternbergian. Cutting against the tradition of the staid (or rousing and gory, e.g. Braveheart) costume drama, Scorsese peoples his world with fast-talking criminals and low-lifes—the kind of folks he's loved all along. In conception, Gangs is like a mob movie à la Goodfellas or Mean Streets, only planted back a hundred and fifty years ago. Or rather, it continues the same tradition of studying New York's underworld that produced Scorsese's most recognized triumphs, and exports that tradition to an era of the city's history that has hardly ever been depicted on film. That is why this movie can and should be interpreted as an appropriate culmination of much of Scorsese's oeuvre—the marriage of the costume epic and the New Wave-style street-life picture. It's an accomplishment that few critics bothered to notice.

Rarely does a movie simultaneously work as a sprawling epic, in every sense of the word, and a precise study of details. 2001, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Birth of a Nation —these films are not concerned with the small things nearly as much as they are wedded to the big picture. Gangs of New York manages, in a feat of unbelievable ambition, to ground nothing less than a reappraisal of American history (how much broader or more epic can a movie's concept be?) in a veritable collage of carefully observed dialects, expressions, individual beliefs and forgotten traditions. Its dialogue is sprinkled with wonderful words and phrases plucked from the period ("turtledove," "chiseler", "it takes a lot of sand to . . ."). The screenplay is marvelously rich in idiomatic language, and the actors ably lend a variety of accents to deliver it: Day-Lewis's over-the-top New Yawkese v. DiCaprio's Irish-meets-American v. Brendan Gleeson's full-fledged Irish v. Jim Broadbent's slightly British-tinged American. Forget the sets: simply the way the characters talk is a chronicle of the times. Consider also their names. Has there ever been a cast of characters as colorful as that consisting of Walter "Monk" McGinn, "Happy" Jack Mulraney, "Hell-Cat" Maggie, and, of course, William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting?

Names do, in fact, play a significant role in the film. Besides the more obvious connotations of "Priest" and "Butcher," the name of the young hero, Amsterdam, is of particular interest. He is the son of Priest Vallon, part of a gang of Irish immigrants—the Dead Rabbits—seeking to secure their claim in the New World from the threat of the Natives, led by Bill the Butcher. If, as it seems, Vallon has named his son after New Amsterdam, the old name of the city before the English seized it from the Dutch, then he is trying to link his heritage to American history. His son's name harkens back to an age long before these Irishmen (or even the Butcher's ancestors) came to the New World, and may thus be interpreted as an attempt to solidify the boy's ties to the land, to establish him as part of a definitively American tradition. Though Amsterdam was not even born in New York, his name reflects the city's roots—as if the name was a way of saying "I am a New Yorker!" Intriguingly, the Dead Rabbits' agenda is not exactly to assimilate: they hold on tightly to their traditions, customs, and to their Irish Catholicism. There's an ambiguous duality at play in Amsterdam's name. As he is the member of a new generation of immigrants, his name represents an attempt to erase the Irish identity, while he himself fights to maintain it. The scene in which he meets Bill the Butcher for the first time as a man has a great bit of dialogue. Bill asks him: "What's your name, boy?" Our hero responds: "Amsterdam, sir." Bill: "Amsterdam? I'm New York." In this brief but important exchange, the movie emerges as a meditation on the identity of the city itself —this melting pot (or, as Amsterdam prefers to call it, "cauldron") of different names, communities and, in the film, tribes. What are, in fact, New York's roots? Gangs is, among other things, a valiant attempt to grapple with that question.

That's what I love most about the movie: its marriage of small moments and audacious scope, of foregrounded details and far-reaching questions. No one but Scorsese could have made this picture. It is a summation of his career, his style. Though "summation" may be the wrong word, since no one movie can "sum" up a master director's body of work, it is a sign of Gangs' greatness that its vision, feel, and conception are so quintessentially those of its maker.

Scorsese has always loved to experiment, to stretch the boundaries of film, and here he succeeds in doing so on a grander canvas than ever before. Let me be more blunt: Gangs is the most audacious experiment in American film since the seventies. By experiment, I don't mean playing around with some neat technique, à la Memento: I mean creating something truly new. I've already explained how Gangs subverts the ordinary practices of costume dramas. In a similar vein, it unifies a strong sense of the theatrical with Scorsese's eye for seemingly unstaged and spontaneous eruptions of life on the street. As I noted in my last post, Bill the Butcher occupies his territory as if it were a stage and he were the principal actor. Note his fake-crying when he brings the slain rabbit to his policeman associate—"I want you to punish whoever's responsible for murdering this poor, helpless rabbit. . ." Never have I seen a more marvelous example, at once hilarious and disturbing, of a performance within a performance. Note also the prevalence of theaters, either established or makeshift, in the movie: Bill is shot by a would-be assassin in one, then thwarts Amsterdam's attempt on his life in another; he and Jenny (the film's romantic interest) used to perform knife-wielding acts for grateful audiences together; Bill's torture of Amsterdam itself becomes an act, performed in front of a mesmerized crowd. What does all this mean? The message is never explicitly spelled out, but it seems to me that the gangs in the picture, in all their tribal customs and lore, are simply performing their own play, acting out their own parts: everything must be scripted to the ancient codes of combat and honor, and their conflict is insulated from the reality that bubbles around and finally crushes them in the Draft Riots (which I'll return to in a moment). The film takes its cue from Children of Paradise —both explore a tawdry milieu swarming with street-life and examine the links between the world of the theater and the world outside. What may seem a little less obvious is the imprint of Renoir's masterpiece Rules of the Game. Both Gangs and Rules use theater and performance to comment on a decaying society about to succumb to the tide of history—in Renoir's case, the pre-WWII French aristocracy, and in Scorsese's, the tribes and gangs of the Five Points. Rules of the Game may be the greatest piece of social commentary ever committed to film, and, though Gangs is by no means as deftly or fully realized as Renoir's work, nor as perfect, it does something altogether amazing by adopting some of the same themes and very subtly layering them into what couldn't, on the surface, be a more different movie.

In the end, though, if there's one film in history with which to compare Gangs of New York, it's Griffith's Birth of a Nation. Why? Because Gangs is no casual, passive depiction of life back then. It's an aggressive statement about American history. The New York Times' A. O. Scott was one of the few critics to recognize just how radical Gangs of New York really is. As he noted, Scorsese's film pinpoints the defining moment in our country's history as the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. Without ever coming out and saying it directly, the film makes its point clear through the way it structures its narrative and builds, slowly but surely, up to the riots themselves. The shots of a burning New York toward the end of the movie are loaded with meaning: a new era is being ushered in, an old one swept aside. The old America of tribes imported from Europe, battling it out over their territory, is no more: a new identity has been forged for everyone, and the slate, so to speak has been swept clean. As Amsterdam narrates, "For those of us who lived in them furious days, it was as if everything we had known was mightily swept away . . . It would be as if no one ever knew we were there." I've heard so many complaints about the final quarter or so of the movie, that the personal story is subsumed by Scorsese's need to include historical events, that the struggle between the characters loses resonance, that the final battle is anti-climactic. All these criticisms totally miss the point. Scorsese is not interested in the conventional conceit of historical dramas—to mesh the personal, character-based story with the grander machinations that surround it. These two worlds are always completely divided in Gangs: the Dead Rabbits and the Natives and all the other gangs live in a world unto themselves, separate from America as a whole, and yet integral to the country's identity. When the Draft Riots arrive, they're not supposed to "mesh" or evenly collide with these tribal conflicts: one's supposed to stomp out the other. The divide is clean-cut because it must be. Scorsese finds in the structure of his narrative an ingenious metaphor for what occurs, in that the story of Amsterdam and Bill halts in its tracks as soon as the Riots interfere.

I should perhaps emphasize that the key word in that last sentence is interfere. There is a single moment that defines Gangs of New York as a whole: when Amsterdam's Dead Rabbits and Bill's Natives are decked out in combat gear, prepared to duke it out in Paradise Square, and out of the blue, before the battle-cry is given, a cannonball soars through the sky and smashes into the wall behind one of the gangs. That cannonball is shot from one of the Navy's ships, sent in to quell the Draft Riots. Suddenly, the whole axis of the movie has shifted. The Riots, to which the gangs paid little attention, have finally hit them, and nothing else matters. Their struggles, which before seemed so convincing and full of anger and drive, now seem petty and insignificant. It is hands down one of the greatest moments in movie history, and one of the most daring. We've spent over two hours getting to know the gangs, tracing the evolution of their opposition, and awaiting their final confrontation. But when at last the time comes, Scorsese throws in a cannonball to send everyone running. On one level, it's absurd and humorous; on the other, tragic. With merciless precision, troops march into the square and gun down one character after another. We can't blame them too much: after all, the Riots, which turned into an attack against New York City's black population, needed to be stopped by any means necessary. But, in the case of the two gangs, here we have men who have agreed to fight without firearms, who are living out of traditions that go back centuries, and all their yearnings and trials and tribulations are rendered meaningless by a line of soldiers with rifles. If the cannonball firing is the movie's definitive moment, the troop's shooting of McGloin, one of Bill's cronies, is a valid runner-up. Although this man has been established as a racist villain, we can't help but be moved by his frantic assault on the soldiers, armed with only a hatchet. One round of fire, and he falls to the ground in an achingly beautiful, bird's-eye-view shot. It seems to sum up the pathos of this moment—how a centuries-old tradition is being swept away. A more recent movie inspired by this same theme is The Last Samurai, which, though altogether a rather mediocre effort, has some good ideas and is worth seeing in comparison to Gangs.

The disparity Scorsese establishes between the quickly modernizing United States and his "gangs of New York" is a thread that runs through the entire picture, right from the beginning. In those opening shots, we wander through a cavernous tenement building filled with music and chants and prayers and warriors preparing for battle. As many critics have noted, this scene is something out of the Middle Ages, and indeed much of the movie's depiction of New York's gangland has that feel. In particular, the way Scorsese constantly grounds the battles he depicts in religion, and never shies away from the faith that led these men into battle (it's hard to even count the number of crucifixes or cross-like images that are contained in the film) harkens back to medieval warfare. And then arrive the ships with their cannonballs and the soldiers with their rifles. No film since Birth of a Nation has offered so bold a statement concerning the forging of the modern United States. As A. O. Scott argues, the great Westerns pointed to the conquest of the frontier as the crucial moment in American history; Griffith emphasizes Reconstruction. For Scorsese, it was the New York City Draft Riots. After all, as Gangs' motto goes, "America was born in the streets." Scorsese uses this perspective to shape his work, and to defy the conventional rules of storytelling. You don't begin a story, build it up to a climax and then deny a payoff. But that's exactly what Scorsese does, and what annoyed many of the film's viewers. Sure, Amsterdam and Bill do fight, in a brief, masterfully suspenseful sequence that's reminiscent of Enter the Dragon —but by then it hardly even matters any more. As hero and villain stare at one another, before Amsterdam finishes Bill off, it would be hard to find any deep hatred in either of the characters' eyes. Sure, Vallon scowls, but he seems to be playing a part rather than expressing his true feelings. Bill simply looks away to the sight of his fellow gang members dying at the soldiers' hands. There's the undeniable sense that the battle of these two men is no longer relevant—and they accept that. When Bill dies and we see his eyelid close over the image of the bald eagle, the sun is setting on his America, not just his life. It's therefore significant that Amsterdam never mentions the avenging of his father in the film's final narration. He simply describes the aftermath of the Draft Riots—which is all that's important at this point—and, in a wonderful line that recalls the closing intertitle of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon , he says: "Friend or foe, it made no difference now."

It's imperative to acknowledge what exactly Gangs of New York does, which is more ambitiously conceived than the vast majority of films ever are, takes more risks than most filmmakers would ever consider taking, and does so within the framework of what is, traditionally (by virtue of expenses), the least experimental of genres: the historical epic. Gangs takes a highly localized tale of low-lifes and gangs uneasily coexisting in an urban underworld, sets up an archetypal plot of mythic resonance, and turns it into a grand historical statement, and a meditation on modern American identity. Granted, it stumbles along the way, and parts of it are very clumsily handled (e.g. the romantic subplot), but, for all its flaws, this is a daring and important movie, that deserves more scrutiny (if not praise) than it has received. Let me end with the last shots. The gravestones of Priest Vallon and Bill the Butcher stand side by side (a further elaboration on Amsterdam's "friend or foe" comment) across the river from Manhattan. In a succession of dissolves, the skyline of New York evolves and rises, with the Twin Towers at the end echoing the two gravestones.

Some may find this finale cheesy. I see it as a fitting testament to what we've just watched. As we see the years fly past and the skyline of New York evolve, while grass grows over and obscures the graves of Bill and the Priest, we realize that we've just witnessed something incredibly expansive. The pull-back that the ending provides lets us take a breath and reflect on what has been nothing less than a redefinition of American history. It's a movie the history books should take note of, but, more importantly, it's a movie that all movie-lovers should return to. I can't hope to explore all its complexities in three posts, but I hope that I've given some hint as to the incredible amount of artistry and experimentation that is at work in Gangs of New York. I'm sure most will still not agree with me, but I believe Scorsese's film to be the crowning cinematic masterpiece of our time. It's one of the greatest movies by America's greatest living director, and my bet is that its reputation will grow with the years.

Gangs of New York: Part 2

I just read an article, published a few weeks ago, by A. O. Scott of The New York Times. His point is basically that we are currently in a golden age of movie acting. He makes a compelling case, and argues that the historical development of American screen acting, from the persona-based studio stars to the raw and energetic postwar performers to the second wave of Method actors, has now culminated in a softer, quieter, and more subtle type of acting, one which blurs the distinction between star and character actor. Daniel Day-Lewis's turn in Gangs of New York does not quite fit this trend: it's pure showmanship, a bravura performance that revels in excess. And yet I claim it's one of the great moments in screen history. Never in my generation has an actor exuded such incredible presence and swagger, so that you can't help but keep your eyes locked on him/her. Cases like that are rare in the cinema: we can point to the great silent queens, to Brando . . . and now to Day-Lewis's Bill the Butcher. Consider the following: Near the beginning of Gangs, the Butcher emerges from a ramshackle wooden house. First we see his boots, pressing against the snow as if marking territory. The camera rises to reveal a tall, imposing man, dressed in a bowler hat, with a large mustache. We cut to a wider shot of Bill and a few of his cronies, and then, in a startling procession, Scorsese cuts closer and closer to his subject, until Bill's glass eye, with an American eagle emblazoned on it as if it were his pupil, dominates the screen. Without a single word spoken, we feel the power of this man—the depth of his hatred, the magnitude of his threat, the force of his conviction—power which will drive and shape the entire movie. This is the greatest character entrance since Brando's Stanley Kowalski said "Oh, hiya Blanche" fifty years ago.

Of course, what I've described may seem more a salute to Scorsese's direction than Day-Lewis's acting. In fact, what is most remarkable is how the two mesh so completely and inform each other. Day-Lewis knows just how to occupy the spaces he is given, and Scorsese knows just how to follow and frame the actor with his camera. Just as Day-Lewis's acting is over-the-top, so too are the visual compositions he inhabits. He's constantly walking towards us, flanked by lesser associates, who are just as awed by his grandeur as we are. One early shot of him is at an impossibly low angle, reminiscent of Citizen Kane: we look up to Bill's towering figure, which is etched against a purple sky, backlit and framed by exploding fireworks. Certainly the Butcher knows how to dominate the screen, but the character's most compelling moments are in close-up. At these instances, we can see the glimmer in his eye, at once pure evil and admirable moral conviction—a deeply human feature, yet caused in part by the fake eye and its eagle decoration. I particularly recall when he stares Boss Tweed in the face and taps the eye with his knife. This simple motion unifies all the motifs that surround and inform the character: the nativist symbol of the eagle, the shadow of Priest Vallon, who helped precipitate the removal of the eye that was once there, and, of course, the knife.

I'll return to that scene in a minute, but first, let's step back and examine Bill as a whole. He breathes contradictions: he's a dandy and a blood-thirsty warlord, at once a politician, a butcher, and a warrior, eloquent in his speech while barely literate.

In one scene, he gently takes an upper-class woman's hand, sniffs it instead of physically kissing it (a small detail which I particularly love), and says: "Orange blossoms. Delicious." In another scene, he rams his head against Amsterdam Vallon's until he is so covered in blood, his hair so drenched in sweat, that he looks as though painted in extravagant make-up (appropriate, since this exchange occurs in a theater and pagoda). While Bill's racism and hatred of immigrants is repulsive, there is something almost righteous about his insistence on honor and his unyielding faith in his beliefs. His extended monologue concerning Priest Vallon (whom he kills in the film's beginning, thereby setting young Amsterdam, the Priest's son, on the path to revenge), reveals more of his strange psyche, as he muses about Vallon's greatness, and how it was "only faith" that divided the two of them. The Butcher lives by tribal rituals rooted in ancient codes: because he couldn't look Vallon in the eye when the Priest beat him to a pulp years ago, he gouged out "the eye that looked away"; he invokes "the ancient laws of combat" when squaring off with the Priest in the film's opening. Ironically, these customs are not ostensibly part of the traditions of the New World, but of Ireland and the lands from which Bill seeks, through nativism, to distance himself. The Butcher is, quite simply, one of the greatest, most fully realized villains in American screen history.

Let's now return to that face-off with Boss Tweed. What does Bill say after tapping his eye?

"I know your works. You are neither cold not hot, so because you are lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth. You can build your filthy world without me. You tell young Vallon, I'm gonna paint Paradise Square with his blood—two coats [he makes the sign of the cross with his two fingers]. I'll festoon my bed chambers with his guts. As for you, Mr. Tammany fucking Hall—come near the Five Points again and you'll be dispatched by mine own hand."

Now, simply writing this dialogue down does no justice to Day-Lewis's delivery. He adds such color and flavor to these lines that they become almost Shakespearean. As his New-Yawkese accent emphasizes "festoons" and "guts," it's safe to say we're witnessing the unfolding of a new type of performance. The emphasis on the accent, on the pronunciation and diction of certain commonplace words, suggests the school of Method acting. However, Bill's exaggerated gestures, his over-the-top dress, his sheer verve and flare suggest something else—something more obviously theatrical. At times, Day-Lewis plays the role as if it were a part in a burlesque comedy or an antiquated vaudeville. He struts through each shot as if it were a stage, hamming it up along the way. And yet, in his twitches, the look of his eye, and other small details, we feel there's a quieter dignity to the character, buried underneath. When Bill is finally mortally stabbed by Amsterdam, he remains still for a moment, gazing into space. His end is far from the wild cackling of the Wicked Witch of the West as she meets her demise. Rather, it provides a pause for reflection: it's a restrained end to an excessive character. As he looks into space, he appears almost noble. Might we be forgiven for considering him a tragic hero?

Day-Lewis is a great actor, and his performance in Gangs of New York is, to put it in trite terms, decidedly unique. We've never seen anything quite like it before, and we'll never see it anything like it again. It's a marriage of cinema and theater, of the Method and performing for the sake of performing, of Brando and Lugosi's Dracula, of pure art and pure hamming. It's so highly stylized while being so incredibly convincing that it occupies a realm of screen acting all its own. It's wildly entertaining, simultaneously showy and nuanced, and it's a watershed moment in modern movie history.

Gangs of New York: Part 1

What makes a film great? Is it perfection? Historical influence? Innovation? Vision? I would argue that any of these features can feed into greatness, but that greatness itself is decidedly intangible and ultimately inexplicable. You can't explain away a great movie—it eludes any straightforward analysis, slipping from our hands every time we try to put a finger on it. Indeed, greatness itself is elusive, and it has more to do with gut feelings than academic appraisals. You feel a movie's greatness as it plays for the first time, its images flickering across the screen before you, its sights and sounds burying themselves within your mind. When I saw Gangs of New York on its opening day, I felt I was witnessing something monumental, something extraordinary—something great. Few friends or critics agreed. Though the film received a good deal of praise, it received just as much disfavor: people were disappointed by a project that had been so hyped and so anticipated. It didn't wind up being what moviegoers expected it to be. Its apparently shoddy construction, misplaced romance, and rampant violence seemed to have more to do with the action blockbuster than the artistic masterpiece, more the domain of Michael Bay than Martin Scorsese. However, as I said in my last post, I believed then just as strongly as I believe now that Gangs of New York is a definitive moment in movie history, the greatest American film in at least a decade, and a landmark in its own right. Over the course of the next few days, I will attempt to explain why I feel this way—though, of course, trying to explain greatness is a recipe for disaster. Gangs of New York is, moreover, a particularly difficult example, since it's probably one of the most flawed great films ever made. I can't ignore these flaws, nor can I easily account for them. Let's just say I'll try to include them in my discussion. After all, the flaws are, strangely, part and parcel of Gangs of New York's greatness, in that they exist due to the film's enormous ambition—the kind of ambition we haven't seen in ages in American cinema, and may not see again for years to come. The movie tries to redefine historical fiction on the screen, as well as to revise American history itself. That's already a handful. It's a Birth of a Nation for our era, minus the racism of Griffith's picture. Like Citizen Kane , it ingeniously and exhilaratingly combines the melodramatic and pulp with the naturalistic and artistic into a single aesthetic form. Its recreation of nineteenth-century street-life is the most evocative and persuasive ever recorded on film since Children of Paradise. And unlike these old classics, Gangs is a movie of the new millenium, a decidedly modern piece of filmmaking. Given all it strives to accomplish, Scorsese's film fails in many areas: it is by no stretch of the imagination a perfect work. But greatness is not perfection, and the sheer boldness and clarity of vision that shape Gangs make it a movie worthy of far more study than it has been granted. For my next post, in keeping with the closing lines of my review of Monster a few days ago, I'll consider the character of Bill the Butcher and Daniel Day-Lewis's performance—in my opinion one of the greatest ever to grace the screen. If I seem awfully full of superlatives right now, I'll try to account for the hyperbole, and why I feel the way I do, in the posts to come. Bear with me. . .

Of Movies and Monsters

A nod to Taxi Driver, in Patty Jenkins' Monster

Let me begin this review by saying that, no, Charlize Theron's performance in Monster has not, in my opinion, been overrated. Her accomplishment is to allow the audience to know, if not empathize with, a serial killer. This humanization of a villain is not the same as creating sympathy. I would compare it to Daniel Day-Lewis's turn as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002), in that both performances involve larger-than-life characters, distanced from the realm of the audience's understanding by the depth of their "evil," for lack of a better word. More precisely, the moral standpoints they occupy are so far removed (one would hope) from that of the audience that it takes a massive amount of work for the actor to render the character knowable. The way this task is accomplished is by grounding the performance in details. Every gesture, twitch, look, motion, and repeated line of Theron's acting job is so precise and ultimately so convincing we forget that the normally beautiful actress is even there, behind all the makeup and the gained weight. We forget there even was a makeup job. Wuornos comes alive on the screen in the same way that Bill the Butcher does: in fact, Theron must go even further, for she plays the role of protagonist instead of antagonist, and hardly a scene goes by for which she is not the catalyst. It's hard to describe this genuine feat of acting without referring to the little things: the way Wuornos bites her lip, the way she pulls back her hair, the way she struts into a room or swings wildly from one mood to the next, even the way she says "Fuck you!" (if you haven't seen the movie, you'll know what I mean once you do). On a broader level, the emotional scope of the role is equally astounding. By the end of the film, we have seen Wuornos proud and desperate, happy and sorrowful, frightening and pathetic, proud and timid. We haven't just witnessed a performance: we've witnessed a life.

To be fair, much of the power of the film should be credited to first-time writer/director Patty Jenkins. The movie has a momentum that so many other comparably grim films lack. There's a real storytelling drive that propels us headfirst through the cataclysmic changes in Wuornos's life and character. The scenes are perfectly timed, the overall rhythm and tempo ebbs and flows appropriately, and the sense of impending doom by the third act is well-handled. That said, I had problems with the movie's ending. (Spoilers ahead!) It was too melodramatic: the swell of music, the bitterly ironic last lines, the light flooding in. I would have preferred a quieter, subtler conclusion to such a shattering drama: a still, maybe, of a face or an object - something that would let us contemplate and reflect, rather than force-feed us the film's ironies. Bergman knew how to step back and scale down when necessary in his darkest and most despairing works. Monster's ending feels less assured than the rest of the film - a little rushed and a little too explicit.

There were other minor occasions where I felt Jenkins reached too readily for quick effects, but on the whole I would say the movie was excellent. There's an art to creating a flesh-and-bone character out of a "monster," so to speak. Shakespeare knew how to do it, and I think Jenkins and Theron do as well. Continuing in this "monstrous" vein, for my next post I'll take a closer look at another murderer, Bill the Butcher, beginning what will be a series of posts explaining why I believe Gangs of New York to be the greatest film of our time. But that's for later. . .

Risky Business

Filmmaking is a risky business. Movies are expensive to make (more so than, say, your average book or painting or musical composition), and, for that reason, there's pressure to get money back. That's always been the case: nothing has changed. What has changed dramatically is the way in which that pressure exerts itself on the industry, at least in the U.S. In order to illustrate the point I'm trying to make, let's take a look at Solaris (2002), Steven Soderbergh's remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film. Perhaps remake is the wrong word, since Soderbergh proved far more interested in the original Stanislaw Lem book and, most intriguingly, in Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), than in what Tarkovsky did. (I am indebted to Elvis Mitchell, whose lecture on Marienbad and Solaris dealt with the connections between the two films). The result was a picture the country couldn't swallow—to be precise, a huge flop. I remember seeing Solaris in the theaters and hearing, at the movie's end, the groans of the audience members. As one couple after another walked out, I heard phrases like "worst movie ever" and "horrible" and "hated it." Interesting. I, for one, loved it. Unlike so many films these days, it seemed to want to really do something. Granted, I wasn't sure what that "something" was, but this film clearly had ambition.

I would say ambition is in short supply these days. Imagine the risks Soderbergh took in making his version of Solaris. He was essentially transplanting Last Year at Marienbad - king of art-house movies, a deliberate, incredibly slow-moving (some would say incredibly boring) picture of existential dilemmas and philosophical puzzles - to the realm of the sci-fi, space-travel adventure. It had special effects, it had a star, and it had ambition. It failed miserably. In Mitchell's talk, he posited the claim that Solaris was the last movie of its kind to come out of American cinema - the large-scope/big-budget experimental picture. I'd add that same year's Gangs of New York, which, in my opinion, met a lot of the same misunderstanding as Solaris (though both films were praised by a handful of critics). But I agree with Mitchell's basic point: that we don't see this kind of "experimentation writ large" (his words) anymore in the movies. Could 2001: A Space Odyssey be made today and be successful? I highly doubt it. And whether or not that's the case, those kinds of movies simply aren't being made in the same number as they were a few decades ago. I'm not just deploring a decline in quality movies. There's plenty of great stuff being made today. My point is it ain't in the big-budget sphere. Directors just don't seem to have the same freedom of experimenting on an epic scale as they once did. Maybe Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, the 1980 flop, can be identified as the culprit. Maybe not. Even Last Year at Marienbad, not an inordinately expensive picture, though certainly a work of technical virtuosity, represents a sort of willingness to take huge risks (not explicitly financial risks, but risks nonetheless). As Mitchell pointed out, Resnais's decisions to cut in the middle of dolly movements and to depict the same object successively from multiple angles were unprecedented, shocking, and groundbreaking. A new grammar of moviemaking, as theorists would say, was being forged on the screen. These days, when does that happen? The epic has become the realm of the B-picture (see my review of The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Bold attempts to do something new more often that not fail in the box-office.

In the past, it seems audiences were more willing to embrace experimentation. It was genuine risk-taking on a daunting scale that gave us Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, 2001 (photo above), Lawrence of Arabia, Last Year at Marienbad, and countless other great works. Today, what goes down better are the safe movies. The Academy Awards bestow A Beautiful Mind and Chicago with Best Picture, and expensive fluff is the recipe of the day. Maybe what seems to be the current malaise or stasis in cinema is simply the result of a sort of self-imposed restraint. No one wants to do any more risky business.

The Upcoming Passion

Everyone's up in arms about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. The idea is that this film will be a no-holds-barred, brutally realistic depiction of that historic event. But here's the word I have problems with: historic. In what seems to be an attempt to create a heightened sense of reality, the film is in Aramaic and Latin. But very few people in Judea at the time of the crucifixion would have been speaking Latin. The dominant language would have been Greek. Aramaic's a correct choice, to be sure, but the use of Latin seems to reflect common misperceptions about the Roman Empire in that corner of the world (as if, because they were Romans, they had to speak Latin). Also: James Caviezel as Jesus? The image of Christ that is offered by the film is close to the typical Jesus we see depicted in Western art. Of course, it's pretty clear now that the real Jesus almost certainly did not look like that, but rather was darker-skinned and more rough-hewn, so to speak, in his features. He was not the cream-colored, fragile, long-haired hippy lookalike we've been fed over the ages (though, granted, Caviezel does appear to have acquired a tan in the movie). So, my question is, what is Mel Gibson's Passion being faithful to? This is supposed to be the Passion as it really happened, isn't it? Or at least as the gospels say it happened. Instead, it looks like it's going to be little more than a violent reworking of the standard Hollywood treatment of the tale, with, potentially, more overt blame placed on the Jewish priests. (I won't even get into the whole anti-Semitic controversy surrounding this film, which by now is pretty well-known). Nonetheless, I can't say I'm not eagerly anticipating the film's release. It's been a long and controversial journey to the screen and, love it or hate it, the movie's going to be an event in its own right.