A few days ago, I reread my review of The Force Awakens, and found myself in the odd position of being completely unable to recognize myself in it. It's not that I disagree with anything I wrote. But only two years after the film's opening, it lingers with me so little that the strong feelings I had about its plot, themes, and approach to the broader Star Wars universe feel positively alien. What has stuck with me are the characters--Rey and Finn and Poe and Kylo Ren--but even that has more to do with the actors' charm and charisma than with the rather underwritten roles the film gives them. When The Force Awakens came out, there was a lot of conversation about its essentially being a work of fanfic, a fun, well-made rehash of A New Hope without much personality of its own. Two years later, we're seeing the outcome of that, with the film existing more as a launching pad for the revamped, Disney-owned Star Wars universe than its own entity.
The Last Jedi is very much not this. Whatever else can be said about this film, it is so much its own thing that I half-wonder whether general audiences won't reject it for being neither the fun romp they associate with Star Wars, nor the grim but still conventionally-structured deviation from the norm that was The Empire Strikes Back. It is the first Star Wars film to actually try to be about something[1], and what it's about is, well, Star Wars. It's a film that is in direct conversation with the previous works in this series, most especially Return of the Jedi and the prequels. It spends slightly more than half its running time fooling you into thinking that it's merely going to recapitulate these movies, only to pull the rug out from under you, along the way asking some pointed questions about the Star Wars's universe's core assumptions. This doesn't entirely work, but the mere existence of the attempt, in a film universe as little given to self-reflection as this one, is shocking. It's a Star Wars movie that is interesting.
The Last Jedi takes place very shortly after the events of The Force Awakens. In its main storyline, Rey (Daisy Ridley) tracks down an embittered Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), now a hermit hiding out in the ruins of the first Jedi temple, and tries to convince him to return to the world. When Luke refuses to either come out of hiding or train Rey in the ways of the Jedi, she's left frustrated and open to the manipulation of Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who appears to her in visions in which he tries to persuade her to turn to the dark side. Elsewhere, the First Order's destruction of the central planets of the Republic has left it ascendant and the resistance on the run.[2] The ragged remnants of the rebellion try to escape the First Order's pursuit, and after Leia (Carrie Fisher) is disabled the fleet is taken over by Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern). Distrustful of Holdo's closely-kept plans, Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) dispatches Finn (John Boyega) and resistance technician Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) on a mission to disable the First Order's ability to track the rebel fleet.
That's already quite a lot of story, but The Last Jedi is, in addition, a very oddly structured movie. It switches between its storylines much more frequently than you'd expect, often stopping in one merely to set a scene or deliver a visual. Its middle segment is extremely talky and contemplative. It's not afraid to be weird--A New Hope had blue milk; The Last Jedi has Luke milking a brontosaurus-like creature who gazes at Rey with a resigned expression. And it's fascinated with the Force as something that can't be put into words, but only visuals. Rey has a long interlude in which she experiences a vision (clearly a callback to Luke's cave vision from The Empire Strikes Back) that is all about the inscrutability of the Force, designed to make the audience tense, and even frustrated by the lack of answers. Even concrete accomplishments, such as Rey clearing a pile of rocks blocking her friends' escape, are shot in such a way as to emphasize the wonder and strangeness of what's happening. The Last Jedi isn't an art film, but it's the closest the Star Wars universe is probably going to get to one, and it's perfectly happy to downplay the straightforward plotting of the previous movies in favor of something more meditative.
The heart of the movie is the Rey-Kylo-Luke triangle. When Rey first arrives on the planet of Ahch-To, she sees Kylo as an irredeemable villain. Like so much else about the Star Wars movies, this conviction is driven by the personal. Kylo had a father who loved him and risked his own life trying to offer him a second chance, and he responded with murder and betrayal. Rey, who has spent her life longing for a family, can't comprehend that level of rejection. But as Luke repeatedly refuses to train her and mocks her convictions, she's increasingly drawn to Kylo's insights into her inner turmoil. She finally becomes convinced that, just as Luke sensed the "conflict" within his father and was able to bring him back to the light, she can do the same with Kylo. That belief is spurred by her realization that Kylo's origin story is more complicated than she'd been led to believe. That his descent to the dark side was kickstarted when Luke, realizing how dangerously powerful his nephew was, tried to kill him.[3]
I watched the first half of this storyline with a slowly-mounting feeling of distaste. Director Rian Johnson, who also wrote the film, seemed to be diving head-on into the worst impulses of The Force Awakens's fandom, and of Hollywood's relentless determination to make excuses for handsome white men and give them second chances. Some scenes felt as if they'd been lifted, unaltered, from a pro-Kylo tumblr post--"Did you create Kylo Ren?" Rey demands of Luke after finding out about his abortive assassination attempt. More importantly, there is a sense in these scenes that The Last Jedi expects us to be interested in Kylo, to find him important, to a degree that is simply not earned by the self-absorbed, overgrown child showing up on screen. Aside from his skills with the force (in which he is repeatedly outclassed by Rey) Kylo seems to have no traits that might make him an engaging protagonist. Most of his screen-time is spent whining about his uncle's abuse or allowing himself to be browbeaten by his master, Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis). In the face of people like Rey, who raised herself out in the middle of nowhere, or Luke, who spent his life looking for adventure, the amount of investment that The Last Jedi expects us to have in Kylo Ren simply doesn't make sense.
It's enormously rewarding, therefore, when The Last Jedi reveals that yes, Kylo is a person of substance, but no, he isn't worth saving. Rey's plan works to a T. Like Luke before her, she presents herself to Kylo and Snoke, and allows herself to be tortured in the belief that her suffering and defiance will shake Kylo out of his passive acceptance of Snoke's power over him. What follows is a genuinely exhilarating fight scene in which Kylo kills Snoke, frees Rey, and then side-by-side they lightsaber their way through an entire contingent of Snoke's guards. And then Kylo Ren, finally his own man, freed of the control of the men who have been messing with his head for decades, clear-eyed and of his own free will... makes the decision to become the new Supreme Leader and take over the First Order so that he can rule the galaxy. He'd like Rey at his side, because he does genuinely care for her, but what really matters to him is power, and that's what he ends up choosing when the choice is finally, truly his.
It's a rebuke, not only to some of the fannish reactions to The Force Awakens, but to the narrative spun by the previous Star Wars films, particularly Return of the Jedi and the prequels. Rey's plan, after all, is exactly what Luke does to Vader. But even though that ploy succeeded, when Luke hears what Rey means to do, his response is "this is not going to work out the way you think it will", as if to suggest that he's changed his mind over whether his father actually achieved redemption. Like Luke in that earlier film, Rey clings to the fact that Kylo is in "conflict" with himself over his actions, but the conclusion the film reaches is that this is meaningless. People who do bad things are often conflicted about their actions, but that doesn't make them secretly good. So long as you continue to choose to do evil, you are evil, and the film ends with Rey literally closing the door in Kylo's face over his choice to do just this, in a direct contradiction to how previous Star Wars movies have wanted us to see their villains, both Kylo Ren and Anakin Skywalker.
The problem here is that as hard as The Last Jedi works to argue with some of the core assumptions of the Star Wars universe, it's still very much in thrall to others. Like nearly every Star Wars movie before it, The Last Jedi is a film in which no one seems to have a firm understanding of what good and evil actually are. In which the metaphor of the light and dark sides of the force has been allowed to so thoroughly dominate that the actual meaning of it--the idea that people are "on the dark side" when they do bad things to others--is treated almost as an afterthought. The result is a film about a struggle for a man's soul in which the matter of morality never even comes up. In which our heroes try to convince a villain to become good without ever articulating either what good is, or why being bad is undesirable.
Despite what The Last Jedi--and most of the previous Star Wars movies--claims, Kylo Ren is not a bad person because he chooses the dark side of the force. He's a bad person because he is selfish, and thus able to decide that his own goals justify monstrous actions--massacring the villagers at the beginning of The Force Awakens, participating in the destruction of whole planets, or tolerating the enslavement of thousands of storm troopers like Finn. This is so obvious once you think about it, and so completely short-circuits the film's project with Kylo, that it has to be ignored. Luke and Rey, who are not selfish people, are therefore made to look monstrous when they behave as if the worst thing Kylo has done is kill his father, and never even try to make the point to him that his choices are causing real harm to real people.[4] Choosing to become Supreme Leader is yet another in a string of selfish actions that will end up hurting people, and yet when Rey tries to talk Kylo out of it, she has nothing to say on this count, because in all her attempts to reach him, she has never tried to make any sort of moral argument.
It's a gap that makes The Last Jedi's handling of Finn look rather troubling. Finn is, in many ways, Kylo's mirror image. Abducted as a child and raised in dehumanizing conditions, he has a justification for being evil that Kylo could only dream of. And yet at the first opportunity, Finn overcomes his abusive upbringing and chooses to run away from the First Order, because he does not want to hurt helpless strangers.[5] It's not just that Finn is a better person than Kylo, but that his journey casts into sharp relief Kylo's complete self-absorption, the fact that the fate of other people has never even entered into his calculations. In light of that fact, Rey's determination to save Kylo seems almost perverse. One wonders whether it's for this reason that she and Finn are separated for most of The Last Jedi, that he never learns about her connection with Kylo, and that they're only reunited after Kylo chooses to remain evil.
Instead, Finn is relegated to a comedic subplot which largely repeats the beats of his character arc from The Force Awakens. Initially driven by selfish cowardice, Finn tries to run away from the rebellion, only to be caught by Rose, who then travels with him to the glamorous den of thieves, Canto Bight, in order to find the help they need for their mission. His experiences with her teach Finn to believe in something greater than himself, to declare his loyalty to the rebellion just as, in The Force Awakens, he declared his loyalty to Rey. But the juxtaposition between his storyline and Rey's creates some odd resonances. In one scene, Rose explains that she hates Canto Bight because the rich people who party there made their money by selling arms to both the First Order and the resistance. The hacker that she and Finn recruit tries to convince him that he needs to look out only for himself, that ultimately there are no good guys or bad guys, only to turn around and betray Finn and Rose to the First Order. Both experiences teach Finn the importance of standing for something.[6]
It's an important lesson, and establishes The Last Jedi as a coming of age story for all three of its young leads, a moment where they all choose where they stand and what for. But it's awfully weird for the movie to hold back from calling bad people bad in the Rey-Kylo storyline, and yet go in so hard on people who refuse to pick a side in the Finn-Rose one. Once again, the fact that in the Star Wars universe evil is so completely associated with the dark side, rather than with the effects of evil acts, ends up making a statement that I suspect Johnson didn't intend. Rose can point to the concrete effects of the indifference and amorality that run rampant on Canto Bight--the poverty and exploitation experienced by the city's urchins, of whom she was once one. But Rey can't show Kylo the monstrous effects of his actions, because to do so would force the film to admit that he wasn't worth engaging with in the first place, and that it's only the conventions of the Star Wars story that made us think that he was.
If The Force Awakens was fanfic, The Last Jedi is metacommentary, an attempt to grapple with the limitations of the Star Wars universe that ultimately falls short because the choice is either to do that, or tell a Star Wars story. I might even go so far as to say that it ends up doing neither, but in a way that I found myself enjoying more than any other work in this universe--if only because there was so much more to argue with. And, perhaps more importantly, it sets up its story so that going forward, there will be fewer limitations and expectations on people working within this universe. It is no longer necessary for Kylo Ren to be won back to the light just because his grandfather was (and in fact we're led to wonder whether that earlier redemption was even worthy of the name). It's similarly no longer necessary for every major player in this story to be related to previous ones. When the answer to the great mystery of Rey's parentage finally arrives, it makes a powerful statement, not just about who gets to be a hero in this universe, but about what kind of story you can tell about it. It frees future writers from the burden of having to follow the template of the previous movies--a new hope indeed.
[1] Or maybe the second if the reading of Revenge of the Sith as an anti-Bush movie is to be taken seriously. But I haven't watched that film since it was originally released and I'm not going back to check. ↩
[2] Like much of The Force Awakens's worldbuilding, this is something that doesn't hold water. To have gone from a functional space empire to a "rebellion" in the space of what appear to be only a few days, even in the wake of such massive destruction, doesn't make any sense. But Star Wars is clearly more comfortable operating in the realm of a David-and-Goliath story, and this is one of the ways in which The Last Jedi doesn't buck the trend. ↩
[3] Later when Luke tells his version of the story, he reveals that he only considered killing Kylo for a moment before recoiling in shame, but by that point it was already too late to take back his betrayal. It's one of the fundamental differences between Luke and his father and nephew, however, that he doesn't treat this as an excuse. He recognizes that the consequences of his actions are his fault even though he repents those actions, which is frankly far too rare in this fictional universe. ↩
[4] Of course, this is a lacuna that exists in most Star Wars movies, with the possible exception of Rogue One. The scenes with Leia on the rebel fleet don't have any more to say about the real people who have been, and will be, hurt by the First Order than the Rey-Kylo storyline does. It's a fundamental flaw of the Star Wars universe, but one that The Last Jedi calls unusual attention to by focusing so much on the dark side as its own thing, separate from the actions of the people drawn to it. ↩
[5] As I wrote in my Force Awakens review, this is a poorly-written character arc, and neither film does much with Finn's history of abuse and indoctrination. Nevertheless, it is a part of him, one that both J.J. Abrams and Johnson chose to put in their stories. ↩
[6] I haven't said much about Poe's storyline, which is my least favorite of the movie. In it, Poe objects to Holdo's seeming inaction, and launches a mutiny against her only to learn that her plan, formulated with Leia, is to distract the fleet's pursuers long enough to allow the rebels to escape to a nearby base. Not unlike the Kylo storyline, the purpose here seems to be to wrongfoot the audience, leading us to believe that Holdo is a pencil-pushing coward who must be outsmarted by the swashbuckling Poe, only to reveal that she's actually brave and self-sacrificing (and that the entire upper echelon of the resistance is run by badass middle aged ladies). This works a lot less well than intended. While there's no reason for Holdo not to reveal her plan to Poe, there's also no reason for her to confide in him--he's a captain and she's an admiral, and he should be ready to follow her orders. The fact that he behaves as if she needs to earn his trust and respect feels deeply gendered in a way that the film doesn't seem aware of and can't defuse simply by revealing that Holdo actually is a good commander. Also, Poe's actions end up derailing Leia and Holdo's plan--when Finn and Rose's hacker betrays them, he reveals the rebels' location to the First Order, and all of Holdo's bravery ends up being for nothing. That the resistance ends the film decimated is thus Poe's fault, which goes completely unacknowledged. ↩
Showing posts with label rian johnson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rian johnson. Show all posts
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Monday, October 01, 2012
Looper
I watched Looper two nights ago, and since coming out of the movie theater I've been trying to work out just why this film left me feeling so unimpressed. It's not that there's anything wrong with Looper, which in fact wears the crown of intelligent, thought-provoking SF filmmaking better than almost any other claimant to that title in the last few years. It's well-made, intelligent, and handles its time travel premise in brave and interesting ways. But it's also an almost airless work, one whose pieces never managed to engage me enough to make me care about its whole.
A lot of this comes down to the kind of filmmaker Rian Johnson is. Johnson's breakout film Brick was a pastiche that drew its power from a gimmick--that its high school age characters spoke like characters out of classic noir--but it elevated itself above a mere mash-up through its dedication to its style, and with the help of a magnetic, soulful central performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In his follow-up to Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Johnson seemed to be struggling with the questions of artifice and gimmickry raised by his previous effort. The heroes of that movie were con men whose method was to impose a narrative on their marks' lives. They were men steeped in artifice but desperate for something real, and yet the events of the film were as artificial as anything they might have concocted. Though a flawed film, The Brothers Bloom at least showed that Johnson was aware of the problems inherent to his storytelling approach and looking for a way to defuse them. In that respect, Looper feels like a step backwards. It lacks the raw emotional core of Brick, or the prevailing sense of self-awareness that permeated The Brothers Bloom, and yet it is as much a pastiche as either of these movies, this time of multiple genres. The premise may be SFnal--in 2044, Joe (Gordon-Levitt again, this time buried under distracting facial prostheses) is a looper, an assassin who kills people transported from thirty years in the future--but the setting, with its seedy clubs, hopeless partying and drug use, and kind-hearted but defeated prostitutes, is pure noir, and when Joe's "loop," his older self (Bruce Willis, the reason for those distracting prostheses), shows up from the future and announces his intention to track down and kill the future crime boss known only as the Rainmaker, who will send all the loopers back in time to be killed and in the process kill old Joe's wife, young Joe--whose own survival depends on killing his future self--plants himself at a farm belonging to Sara (Emily Blunt), the mother of one of the possible Rainmakers, and the film becomes a Western. There are even references to specific SF works--when Sara's young son Cid turns out to possess dangerous telekinetic powers that can erupt into murder when he's frightened or angry, the isolated farm with its seemingly endless surrounding fields of rustling cane recalls nothing so much as the classic Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life."
When Joe's boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), himself a traveler from the future, needles him for his old-fashioned (which is to say, contemporary to us) dress sense, he points out that Joe is merely mimicking movies that were, themselves, mimicking other movies, so it can't be said that Johnson isn't aware that he has, once again, created a work that is primarily occupied with referencing other works. And yet that self-awareness doesn't run very deeply through Looper, which for the most part takes itself and its story quite seriously. This is perhaps because Johnson has taken Abe's advice to Joe and tried to "do something original" with his SFnal premise, but unsurprisingly, this bit of invention is where Looper is weakest and least persuasive. That the mechanics of time travel and its implications for the timeline don't hold together was perhaps to be expected--when do they ever?--and it might have been possible to handwave this, as well as the use of time travel as a means of assassination, which just barely hangs together if you don't think about it too much. But Johnson tries to justify such an elaborate method of corpse disposal by having Joe tell us that in the future it's impossible to disappear a body, which hardly tracks with the lawless, poverty-stricken world of 2044, in which most of the non-criminals Joe encounters live on the streets or roam the countryside in vagrant gangs, and law and government appear to be nonexistent; perhaps we're meant to understand that there's going to be a movement towards law and order and greater government oversight in the next thirty years, but this clashes with the film's noir tone in a way that Johnson doesn't acknowledge, so that his attempt to create a coherent future world that includes time travel only calls attention to that world's thinness.
Even if you accept Looper's premise, however, Johnson's attempts to shade in this premise with invented SFnal idiom are awkward and unconvincing. Terms like "gatmen" (the mob's enforcers, named after their gat guns), blunderbuss (the gun loopers use to kill their victims, which, even with an entire scene devoted to justifying the name, doesn't feel like the sort of thing that a 21st century person would call their gun, and is anyway an unattractive mouthful that makes the characters look ridiculous when they say it), and even looper itself are cumbersome. When Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) loses his future self, Joe's ponderous voice-over tells us that "this is called 'letting your loop run'" as if this were a turn of phrase rather than a literal description of what has happened. At no point does any of this language feel like an organic slang that might have emerged from this technology and the criminal lifestyle it had created (I actually found myself wishing for Andrew Niccol's relentless time-based puns from In Time, which were at least a little witty) and the fact that the characters use it dehumanizes them in a way that the noirish language in Brick didn't--it's not believable that people would talk this way, but it's also not artfully unbelievable either, just awkward and distracting.
All that said, once the scenario of an escaped future self roaming free in his past, and the challenges facing both him and his younger self, are established, Looper does some very interesting things with the concept of time travel and the questions it raises that, even if they don't quite elevate the film to a complete and satisfying work, certainly justify its existence and make it worth discussing. There is, for example, a horrifying but extremely inventive scene in which old Seth is forced to report back to be executed by lopping off limbs and appendages from young Seth, keeping him alive to prevent a paradox even as old Seth's body parts disappear (that this represents as much of a paradox as killing young Seth would have--if his legs were chopped off, for example, how could old Seth have arrived in the past whole?--is yet another one of the points on which Looper's construction of time travel doesn't hold together). More high-minded, and more interesting, is Looper's handing of predestination. Time travel inevitably raises the question of free will vs. predestination--if the future is a place that exists and that we can travel to, doesn't that mean that our choices are set in stone in order to lead us to that future? Hollywood filmmaking, with its emphasis on the individual as not just a hero but the prime mover and shaker of their story, can't quite accommodate this notion, so films dealing with time travel, like Back to the Future 3 or Terminator 2, will often plump for the crowdpleasing but intellectually bankrupt conclusion that yes, time travel exists, yes, we've seen the future, but no, our characters are not bound to that future for reasons that can't be articulated.
Looper rejects not only this simplistic take on time travel, but also the stark division between free will and having your entire life laid out for you. The question, the film seems to be saying, isn't whether we have free choice or no choice at all, but how much free choice we have, how limited the options before us are, and how few of the choices available to us are good ones. Joe, we learn, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother and taken in by Abe as a child. Technically, he has free will, but in reality, his becoming an assassin was inevitable, and the choice to get out of that life all but impossible--emotionally and practically--to make. When they discover Cid's powers, both old Joe and young Joe insist that his becoming the Rainmaker is inevitable, but Sara believes that with her influence he can grow up a good person. But as young Joe realizes (and mirroring Abe's description of looking at Joe as a child and seeing the path of criminality he was set on if he weren't saved--by which Abe means, turned into a looper), it's old Joe's murder of Sara that will set Cid on the path that makes him the Rainmaker. So the inevitability of time travel is folded into the cycle of violence and of victims becoming victimizers, both a metaphor for it and a literal extension of it.
This is a very clever and original use of time travel, but it has darker implications that I'm not sure Johnson has fully appreciated. By paralleling the limited options of people born into poverty and crime with the predestination implied by time travel, Looper essentially denies the very possibility that a person might choose to change their life. Change, in this film, is only ever something that happens to us at someone else's instigation, and as a result of their choices. Joe is who he is because of his mother's abandonment and because Abe took him in. Old Joe changed because his wife, as he puts it, saved him. Cid will either become a crime lord or a good person, depending on whether Sara is in his life. People are changed, they do not change themselves--even old Joe, who insists that he is a more evolved person than his younger self, proves otherwise with his actions; though Joe tells him that the best way to save his wife is to give her up, he is so insistent that he can save her and still have her that he is willing to kill children who might become the Rainmaker, but who might also be completely innocent. The only examples of adults choosing to change their lives take the form of self-abnegation--realizing that he can't stop old Joe from killing Sara, young Joe kills himself in order to cancel out his future self's existence, and former party girl Sara, who initially left Cid with her sister, has only managed to change her life by making it entirely about another person. Looper depicts a world in which our path in life is determined by our parents or the people who act as our parents, and in which people are either children--and thus molded by the choices of their parents--or parents--and thus fully occupied by molding their children--but never individuals who might make their own choices and live to deal with the consequences. Changing your own life and then living that change is hard and, for most of us, impossible, so I wouldn't have objected to this moral if Looper had chosen to face the bleakness of its conclusion head on. But the film, preoccupied as it is with the neatness of Joe's having closed both his loop and Cid's (and with the Western style ending of Lonely Widow Sara riding off into the sunset with her son and Joe's ill-gotten fortune), doesn't entirely acknowledge its own implications, which is part of why, despite being impressed with Johnson's twist on the time travel premise, I found Looper underwhelming.
That a film that is all about limited choices feels, as I said in this review's opening sentences, airless is perhaps to be expected, but Looper's sense of inevitability is never as affecting or as tragic as it needs to be to turn that airlessness into claustrophobia. A lot of this is down to the characters and the fact that they are, as I've said, either children or parents. Young Joe is the former, and he spends large portions of the film in a fug of moral and emotional incomprehension. But his transformation occurs along such familiar lines, straight out of the Western story about the anti-hero turned around by a tough widow and her cute young son, that not even an actor of Gordon-Levitt's caliber can bring it to life. Sara, who actually becomes the film's central character in its second half, is the closest that Looper comes to a compelling, complicated figure, but she's hobbled by the fact of being a female character in a Rian Johnson film, and thus anchored to the axis between savior and seductress. She never quite escapes being a mommy. Old Joe should have been the film's saving grace, since he's the only character who complicates the divide between parents and children. He thinks of himself as an adult, but his unwillingness to make the sacrifice that young Joe finally does at the end of the film belies that claim and shows him to be, fundamentally, as immature and self-absorbed as he accuses his younger self of being. But apart from one scene in which the two Joes meet at a diner (one of the film's highlights) there is hardly any direct interaction between them, and old Joe is seen mostly at a distance. He doesn't have a Sara or a Cid who can bring him out of his shell, so we don't get to know him as well as we do young Joe, and by the end of the film his role is more to move the plot--to kill Abe's goons, and draw closer to Sara's farm--than to shed more light on the questions at Looper's core.
"I remember it after it happens," old Joe tells young Joe, explaining how their shared memory works. Before young Joe makes a choice, old Joe sees his options as if they were in flux, but after it's been made, old Joe sees it as inevitable. That feels like a very accurate description of the experience of watching Looper. It's not a predictable film--there are two many genres at play here, too many references to specific works, and even a twist or two--but once every step of the plot occurs, it feels inevitable and unsurprising. The reference coalesces, our realization of the genre we're in at this moment crystallizes, and the film once again fails to emerge from these as its own entity. While watching Looper, I found myself comparing it to Twelve Monkeys, another film that bravely owns up to the inevitability implied by time travel, but in a way that is even more hopeless--not only does free will not exist, but as a consequence of that, the human race is annihilated. And yet Twelve Monkeys is more lively and more affecting than Looper, and not just because of its humor (a trait that the po-faced Looper lacks entirely--even the seemingly inescapable joke about young Joe realizing that he will one day go bald is absent). Unlike Looper, Twelve Monkeys lets its characters breathe, lets them be people rather than delivery systems for its ideas about inevitability and the cycle of violence. It's a film with a heart, albeit a bleakly cynical one. Well made as it is, and for all its interesting ideas, Looper lacks that heart, which is why it never rises above its component pieces.
A lot of this comes down to the kind of filmmaker Rian Johnson is. Johnson's breakout film Brick was a pastiche that drew its power from a gimmick--that its high school age characters spoke like characters out of classic noir--but it elevated itself above a mere mash-up through its dedication to its style, and with the help of a magnetic, soulful central performance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In his follow-up to Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Johnson seemed to be struggling with the questions of artifice and gimmickry raised by his previous effort. The heroes of that movie were con men whose method was to impose a narrative on their marks' lives. They were men steeped in artifice but desperate for something real, and yet the events of the film were as artificial as anything they might have concocted. Though a flawed film, The Brothers Bloom at least showed that Johnson was aware of the problems inherent to his storytelling approach and looking for a way to defuse them. In that respect, Looper feels like a step backwards. It lacks the raw emotional core of Brick, or the prevailing sense of self-awareness that permeated The Brothers Bloom, and yet it is as much a pastiche as either of these movies, this time of multiple genres. The premise may be SFnal--in 2044, Joe (Gordon-Levitt again, this time buried under distracting facial prostheses) is a looper, an assassin who kills people transported from thirty years in the future--but the setting, with its seedy clubs, hopeless partying and drug use, and kind-hearted but defeated prostitutes, is pure noir, and when Joe's "loop," his older self (Bruce Willis, the reason for those distracting prostheses), shows up from the future and announces his intention to track down and kill the future crime boss known only as the Rainmaker, who will send all the loopers back in time to be killed and in the process kill old Joe's wife, young Joe--whose own survival depends on killing his future self--plants himself at a farm belonging to Sara (Emily Blunt), the mother of one of the possible Rainmakers, and the film becomes a Western. There are even references to specific SF works--when Sara's young son Cid turns out to possess dangerous telekinetic powers that can erupt into murder when he's frightened or angry, the isolated farm with its seemingly endless surrounding fields of rustling cane recalls nothing so much as the classic Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life."
When Joe's boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), himself a traveler from the future, needles him for his old-fashioned (which is to say, contemporary to us) dress sense, he points out that Joe is merely mimicking movies that were, themselves, mimicking other movies, so it can't be said that Johnson isn't aware that he has, once again, created a work that is primarily occupied with referencing other works. And yet that self-awareness doesn't run very deeply through Looper, which for the most part takes itself and its story quite seriously. This is perhaps because Johnson has taken Abe's advice to Joe and tried to "do something original" with his SFnal premise, but unsurprisingly, this bit of invention is where Looper is weakest and least persuasive. That the mechanics of time travel and its implications for the timeline don't hold together was perhaps to be expected--when do they ever?--and it might have been possible to handwave this, as well as the use of time travel as a means of assassination, which just barely hangs together if you don't think about it too much. But Johnson tries to justify such an elaborate method of corpse disposal by having Joe tell us that in the future it's impossible to disappear a body, which hardly tracks with the lawless, poverty-stricken world of 2044, in which most of the non-criminals Joe encounters live on the streets or roam the countryside in vagrant gangs, and law and government appear to be nonexistent; perhaps we're meant to understand that there's going to be a movement towards law and order and greater government oversight in the next thirty years, but this clashes with the film's noir tone in a way that Johnson doesn't acknowledge, so that his attempt to create a coherent future world that includes time travel only calls attention to that world's thinness.
Even if you accept Looper's premise, however, Johnson's attempts to shade in this premise with invented SFnal idiom are awkward and unconvincing. Terms like "gatmen" (the mob's enforcers, named after their gat guns), blunderbuss (the gun loopers use to kill their victims, which, even with an entire scene devoted to justifying the name, doesn't feel like the sort of thing that a 21st century person would call their gun, and is anyway an unattractive mouthful that makes the characters look ridiculous when they say it), and even looper itself are cumbersome. When Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) loses his future self, Joe's ponderous voice-over tells us that "this is called 'letting your loop run'" as if this were a turn of phrase rather than a literal description of what has happened. At no point does any of this language feel like an organic slang that might have emerged from this technology and the criminal lifestyle it had created (I actually found myself wishing for Andrew Niccol's relentless time-based puns from In Time, which were at least a little witty) and the fact that the characters use it dehumanizes them in a way that the noirish language in Brick didn't--it's not believable that people would talk this way, but it's also not artfully unbelievable either, just awkward and distracting.
All that said, once the scenario of an escaped future self roaming free in his past, and the challenges facing both him and his younger self, are established, Looper does some very interesting things with the concept of time travel and the questions it raises that, even if they don't quite elevate the film to a complete and satisfying work, certainly justify its existence and make it worth discussing. There is, for example, a horrifying but extremely inventive scene in which old Seth is forced to report back to be executed by lopping off limbs and appendages from young Seth, keeping him alive to prevent a paradox even as old Seth's body parts disappear (that this represents as much of a paradox as killing young Seth would have--if his legs were chopped off, for example, how could old Seth have arrived in the past whole?--is yet another one of the points on which Looper's construction of time travel doesn't hold together). More high-minded, and more interesting, is Looper's handing of predestination. Time travel inevitably raises the question of free will vs. predestination--if the future is a place that exists and that we can travel to, doesn't that mean that our choices are set in stone in order to lead us to that future? Hollywood filmmaking, with its emphasis on the individual as not just a hero but the prime mover and shaker of their story, can't quite accommodate this notion, so films dealing with time travel, like Back to the Future 3 or Terminator 2, will often plump for the crowdpleasing but intellectually bankrupt conclusion that yes, time travel exists, yes, we've seen the future, but no, our characters are not bound to that future for reasons that can't be articulated.
Looper rejects not only this simplistic take on time travel, but also the stark division between free will and having your entire life laid out for you. The question, the film seems to be saying, isn't whether we have free choice or no choice at all, but how much free choice we have, how limited the options before us are, and how few of the choices available to us are good ones. Joe, we learn, was abandoned by his drug-addicted mother and taken in by Abe as a child. Technically, he has free will, but in reality, his becoming an assassin was inevitable, and the choice to get out of that life all but impossible--emotionally and practically--to make. When they discover Cid's powers, both old Joe and young Joe insist that his becoming the Rainmaker is inevitable, but Sara believes that with her influence he can grow up a good person. But as young Joe realizes (and mirroring Abe's description of looking at Joe as a child and seeing the path of criminality he was set on if he weren't saved--by which Abe means, turned into a looper), it's old Joe's murder of Sara that will set Cid on the path that makes him the Rainmaker. So the inevitability of time travel is folded into the cycle of violence and of victims becoming victimizers, both a metaphor for it and a literal extension of it.
This is a very clever and original use of time travel, but it has darker implications that I'm not sure Johnson has fully appreciated. By paralleling the limited options of people born into poverty and crime with the predestination implied by time travel, Looper essentially denies the very possibility that a person might choose to change their life. Change, in this film, is only ever something that happens to us at someone else's instigation, and as a result of their choices. Joe is who he is because of his mother's abandonment and because Abe took him in. Old Joe changed because his wife, as he puts it, saved him. Cid will either become a crime lord or a good person, depending on whether Sara is in his life. People are changed, they do not change themselves--even old Joe, who insists that he is a more evolved person than his younger self, proves otherwise with his actions; though Joe tells him that the best way to save his wife is to give her up, he is so insistent that he can save her and still have her that he is willing to kill children who might become the Rainmaker, but who might also be completely innocent. The only examples of adults choosing to change their lives take the form of self-abnegation--realizing that he can't stop old Joe from killing Sara, young Joe kills himself in order to cancel out his future self's existence, and former party girl Sara, who initially left Cid with her sister, has only managed to change her life by making it entirely about another person. Looper depicts a world in which our path in life is determined by our parents or the people who act as our parents, and in which people are either children--and thus molded by the choices of their parents--or parents--and thus fully occupied by molding their children--but never individuals who might make their own choices and live to deal with the consequences. Changing your own life and then living that change is hard and, for most of us, impossible, so I wouldn't have objected to this moral if Looper had chosen to face the bleakness of its conclusion head on. But the film, preoccupied as it is with the neatness of Joe's having closed both his loop and Cid's (and with the Western style ending of Lonely Widow Sara riding off into the sunset with her son and Joe's ill-gotten fortune), doesn't entirely acknowledge its own implications, which is part of why, despite being impressed with Johnson's twist on the time travel premise, I found Looper underwhelming.
That a film that is all about limited choices feels, as I said in this review's opening sentences, airless is perhaps to be expected, but Looper's sense of inevitability is never as affecting or as tragic as it needs to be to turn that airlessness into claustrophobia. A lot of this is down to the characters and the fact that they are, as I've said, either children or parents. Young Joe is the former, and he spends large portions of the film in a fug of moral and emotional incomprehension. But his transformation occurs along such familiar lines, straight out of the Western story about the anti-hero turned around by a tough widow and her cute young son, that not even an actor of Gordon-Levitt's caliber can bring it to life. Sara, who actually becomes the film's central character in its second half, is the closest that Looper comes to a compelling, complicated figure, but she's hobbled by the fact of being a female character in a Rian Johnson film, and thus anchored to the axis between savior and seductress. She never quite escapes being a mommy. Old Joe should have been the film's saving grace, since he's the only character who complicates the divide between parents and children. He thinks of himself as an adult, but his unwillingness to make the sacrifice that young Joe finally does at the end of the film belies that claim and shows him to be, fundamentally, as immature and self-absorbed as he accuses his younger self of being. But apart from one scene in which the two Joes meet at a diner (one of the film's highlights) there is hardly any direct interaction between them, and old Joe is seen mostly at a distance. He doesn't have a Sara or a Cid who can bring him out of his shell, so we don't get to know him as well as we do young Joe, and by the end of the film his role is more to move the plot--to kill Abe's goons, and draw closer to Sara's farm--than to shed more light on the questions at Looper's core.
"I remember it after it happens," old Joe tells young Joe, explaining how their shared memory works. Before young Joe makes a choice, old Joe sees his options as if they were in flux, but after it's been made, old Joe sees it as inevitable. That feels like a very accurate description of the experience of watching Looper. It's not a predictable film--there are two many genres at play here, too many references to specific works, and even a twist or two--but once every step of the plot occurs, it feels inevitable and unsurprising. The reference coalesces, our realization of the genre we're in at this moment crystallizes, and the film once again fails to emerge from these as its own entity. While watching Looper, I found myself comparing it to Twelve Monkeys, another film that bravely owns up to the inevitability implied by time travel, but in a way that is even more hopeless--not only does free will not exist, but as a consequence of that, the human race is annihilated. And yet Twelve Monkeys is more lively and more affecting than Looper, and not just because of its humor (a trait that the po-faced Looper lacks entirely--even the seemingly inescapable joke about young Joe realizing that he will one day go bald is absent). Unlike Looper, Twelve Monkeys lets its characters breathe, lets them be people rather than delivery systems for its ideas about inevitability and the cycle of violence. It's a film with a heart, albeit a bleakly cynical one. Well made as it is, and for all its interesting ideas, Looper lacks that heart, which is why it never rises above its component pieces.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Weekend's Films
Isn't it just the way: months can go by without me seeing the inside of a movie theater, and then two films I want to see open on the same weekend. Here are my thoughts on both of them.
- Terminator Salvation: As everyone has said, this is better than Terminator 3. It's not, however, so much better as to matter. Christian Bale is a plank of wood as John Connor, which allegedly shouldn't matter as he's not really the star of the film. That would be Sam Worthington (who is decent enough even if he can't seem to keep his Aussie accent in check) as Marcus, the secret Cylon, and of a secondary importance is Anton Yelchin (the best of the three, but also the one who's been given the worst lines) as Kyle Reese. The problem is that despite all the post-Judgement Day window dressing which suggests that Salvation is about the war with the machines, what the film actually does is regurgitate the previous two films' plots: a temporal threat to John Connor's existence--in this case, to the teenage Kyle, whom Skynet now knows to be John's father (probably because John mentions it at the drop of a hat)--which is forestalled by a friendly cyborg who also becomes a mentor, in this case to Kyle (and thus down the line to Sarah and John himself).
So, once again, the film is about saving John Connor, which seems like a less worthy goal when John Connor has all the charisma of day-old bread and seems to have bought into his own myth so completely that he only challenges the order to destroy a Skynet base in which hundreds of prisoners are being held (orders from his evil superiors, of course) when he realizes that Kyle is one of them. Other than that, the plot is so dumb and contrived as to make Star Trek seem coherent in comparison, and the action scenes are frankly dull, completely lacking the excitement and terror of similar scenes in Terminator 2--perhaps because we're never in any doubt as to which of the three leads will live and which will die. The women are completely perfunctory--Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Brewster has so little to do that she makes the character's role in Terminator 3 seem nuanced and rich, and Moon Bloodgood, though allegedly the tough action chick, is really just a love interest for Marcus. The only bright spot is Helena Bonham Carter as the deliciously twisted Skynet designer and later the face of Skynet, who sinks her teeth so readily into her small role that you don't even care what a huge retcon this is. If number 5 happens, count me out. - The Brothers Bloom: It was hard not to feel nervous about Rian Johnson's follow-up to Brick, not simply because the bar had been set so high but because Brick was such a precarious masterpiece, constantly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the seriousness with which it took its central gimmick--a danger from which it was spared mainly through Joseph Gordon-Levitt's searing performance. The Brother Bloom doesn't scale Brick's heights, but it does at least give the impression that Johnson is aware of his predicament, as he's chosen to tell a story about artifice, and the attempt to transform it into something more than a clever performance. The titular brothers, Stephen and Bloom, are not simply con-men but storytellers, criminal therapists who identify in their marks a need for narrative--revenge on an abandoning spouse, adventure after long years as a shut-in--and enact it, as melodramatically as possible ("Have at you, you fiend!" Stephen exclaims at one point). Despite its deliberate recalling of heist films such as Ocean's 11 or The Sting, the double crosses and reveals in The Brothers Bloom have less to do with money and more to do with whether or not the characters are actually feeling what they pretend to be feeling, and whether they can pretend their way into something real.
The Brothers Bloom is therefore a film that draws attention to its over the top storyness as a way of defusing it, with only partial success--when the depressed, perpetually one con away from retirement Bloom says of Penelope, an heiress with a hidden talent for grifting, that she feels like a character, he is only partially successful at getting us to ignore the fact that Penelope is far too precocious and adventurous to be true (and at time too much the perfect girlfriend). There's also the fact that Johnson's total commitment to style works less well in a comedy than it did in the grim Brick--or at least, it makes him seem like nothing more than a Wes Anderson imitator (an impression which is not dispelled by Adrien Brody playing a very similar character to the one he played in The Darjeeling Limited). Still, for all its conscious artificiality it's hard not to be won over by The Brothers Bloom--it is, for one thing, an extremely funny movie, with several clever visual or verbal gags, and the characters are very winning. For all her precociousness, Penelope is a hell of a fun character, but it's Rinko Kikuchi as the brothers' demolition expert sidekick Bang Bang who steals the show. The silent Asian sidekick sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but Bang Bang is so clearly her own person, and has such a huge personality, that she completely tramples the stereotype, and to top that she and Penelope forge a friendship that transcends their roles as, respectively, Stephen's accomplice and Bloom's love interest, which is enormously gratifying. The Brothers Bloom is by no means a perfect film, but it does demonstrate that Johnson has more in him than clever gimmicks, and makes me very curious to see what he does next.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
That Other High-School-Set Noir Mystery
So, here's the best compliment I can pay Rian Johnson's debut film, Brick: my friend Hagay and I drove to Jerusalem (an hour's drive), where the film was playing as part of the Jerusalem film festival, battled the city's unfamiliar streets and mid-day traffic, paid an exorbitant amount of money for a parking place that turned out to be a ten minute walk away from the cinematheque, and missed the film's first few minutes. And it was all worth it. Brick is smart, and exciting, and fantastically well-acted. It's also gimmicky, of course--high-school students whose lives are steeped in drugs and violence, who never see the inside of a classroom, whose parents are absent or downright insane, and who speak like characters out of a Dashiel Hammet novel. But the true marvel of the film is that it sustains this gimmick all the way to the finish line. Brick is a two hour long tightrope act, where any misstep would mean an immediate and irretrievable plunge into absurdity, but in spite of one or two shaky steps (both, interestingly enough, involving our hero interacting with adult characters), the film carries itself across the abyss.
Best of all, there is more to Brick than the dissonance between its setting and its style. The mystery at the film's heart is clever, and even more cleverly laid out. There are several pulse-pounding fight and chase scenes, and others of great intensity--I can't remember the last time a film left me feeling so wrung out and overwhelmed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as our protagonist and detective Brendan Frye, gives a stunning performance that keeps the character's heart well under wraps while still giving us a hook to hang our affections on--in this case, Brendan's fierce intelligence and determination. As the classic noir detective must be, Brendan is burned out and disillusioned by life, incapable of love or trust, and it is to both Johnson's (who also wrote the script) and Gordon-Levitt's credit that we nonetheless come to like the character a great deal.
Looking through reviews of the film, I was struck and saddened by the fact that so very few of them--and of those almost none in major venues--compared the film to Veronica Mars, if only to note the nearly diametrically opposed approaches that Johnson and Rob Thomas took to a very similar concept. Veronica Mars is unquestionably a noir detective story, but it eschews the genre's trappings, to the point that, more than once, we've seen characters lampoon the trademark hard-bitten dialogue style that Brick revels in. Veronica Mars asks us to be surprised at the darkness that lurks behind the clean, candy-colored exterior that Neptune, California, presents. Brick asks us to take it for granted. Both works are at their core an indictment of the American dream--as all noir ultimately is--but Brick posits that corruption and indecency are ubiquitous, whereas Veronica Mars usually makes wealth and power a prerequisite to both.
Apart from being a fantastic way to spend two hours, watching Brick also brings into focus two aspects in which Mars deviates from the standard noir tropes. The first is, obviously, the fact that its protagonist is a woman. If Brick has a flaw, it is its treatment of its female characters, which, in accordance with the conventions of the genre, are all either manipulators or victims of manipulations. Brendan's girlfriend Emily, whose panicked cry for help sets the film's plot in motion, has clung to the coattails of those more popular and wealthy than she is, and gotten herself addicted to drugs and murdered for her troubles. The other two female characters--a heartless man-eater and a winsome femme fatale who may or may not harbor genuine feelings for our hero--are too slathered in (mostly offensive) stereotypes to ever develop a believable personality or, indeed, discernible motivations. There seems to be a fear of women, coupled with a disdain towards them, that permeates most noir writing. Veronica Mars neatly sidesteps this attitude, primarily because of the detective's gender but mostly because the writing simply avoids blatant clichés. I've complained before about the paucity of positive female characters on the show, but even at their worst, Thomas' bad girls are recognizably human, and their badness is not blatantly derived from their gender.
A second way in which Mars deviates from the conventions of noir is that Veronica very rarely encounters violence directed at herself. Within half an hour of Brick, Brendan is beaten to a bloody pulp. By the time the film ends, he is throwing up his own swallowed blood and having trouble standing up (by most standards, the violence in the film is fairly mild, but there is a visceral quality to the beatings inflicted on Brendan--right down to the meaty thwaps as the blows hit his body--that makes Brick's violent scenes very difficult to endure). It is Brendan's nonchalant reaction to this violence that particularly distinguishes the film from the television show--clearly, the physically unimposing Veronica couldn't withstand the punishment that he endures (on those occasions when she is physically threatened, Veronica almost always needs to be rescued), but when faced with violence she usually breaks with the noir detective tradition and reacts with fear and horror (the same, by the way, is true for Keith, who on at least one occasion has begged for his life). It is to the Mars writers' credit that they have managed to so consistently, and almost invisibly, stack the deck for two seasons so that Veronica is only rarely faced with situations that can only be resolved with physical violence. They accomplish this largely by making the show's villains smart and educated--as opposed to the street-smart thugs who populate Brick's rogues' gallery (again, we bump up against Thomas' class prejudices)--and therefore less likely to solve problems with a punch.
I'm not entirely certain that I can recommend Brick to Veronica Mars fans. It's a film that probably elicits only extreme reactions. Those viewers capable of suspending their disbelief in the concept of stylistically accurate noir in a high school setting--and it is by no means obvious to me that Veronica Mars fans will all fall in that group--will probably enjoy it immensely. Those who don't buy into the central concept will walk away in disgust. For my part, I am for the first time in a long time genuinely excited by a cinematic work, and can't wait to see what Rian Johnson thinks up next.
Best of all, there is more to Brick than the dissonance between its setting and its style. The mystery at the film's heart is clever, and even more cleverly laid out. There are several pulse-pounding fight and chase scenes, and others of great intensity--I can't remember the last time a film left me feeling so wrung out and overwhelmed. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as our protagonist and detective Brendan Frye, gives a stunning performance that keeps the character's heart well under wraps while still giving us a hook to hang our affections on--in this case, Brendan's fierce intelligence and determination. As the classic noir detective must be, Brendan is burned out and disillusioned by life, incapable of love or trust, and it is to both Johnson's (who also wrote the script) and Gordon-Levitt's credit that we nonetheless come to like the character a great deal.
Looking through reviews of the film, I was struck and saddened by the fact that so very few of them--and of those almost none in major venues--compared the film to Veronica Mars, if only to note the nearly diametrically opposed approaches that Johnson and Rob Thomas took to a very similar concept. Veronica Mars is unquestionably a noir detective story, but it eschews the genre's trappings, to the point that, more than once, we've seen characters lampoon the trademark hard-bitten dialogue style that Brick revels in. Veronica Mars asks us to be surprised at the darkness that lurks behind the clean, candy-colored exterior that Neptune, California, presents. Brick asks us to take it for granted. Both works are at their core an indictment of the American dream--as all noir ultimately is--but Brick posits that corruption and indecency are ubiquitous, whereas Veronica Mars usually makes wealth and power a prerequisite to both.
Apart from being a fantastic way to spend two hours, watching Brick also brings into focus two aspects in which Mars deviates from the standard noir tropes. The first is, obviously, the fact that its protagonist is a woman. If Brick has a flaw, it is its treatment of its female characters, which, in accordance with the conventions of the genre, are all either manipulators or victims of manipulations. Brendan's girlfriend Emily, whose panicked cry for help sets the film's plot in motion, has clung to the coattails of those more popular and wealthy than she is, and gotten herself addicted to drugs and murdered for her troubles. The other two female characters--a heartless man-eater and a winsome femme fatale who may or may not harbor genuine feelings for our hero--are too slathered in (mostly offensive) stereotypes to ever develop a believable personality or, indeed, discernible motivations. There seems to be a fear of women, coupled with a disdain towards them, that permeates most noir writing. Veronica Mars neatly sidesteps this attitude, primarily because of the detective's gender but mostly because the writing simply avoids blatant clichés. I've complained before about the paucity of positive female characters on the show, but even at their worst, Thomas' bad girls are recognizably human, and their badness is not blatantly derived from their gender.
A second way in which Mars deviates from the conventions of noir is that Veronica very rarely encounters violence directed at herself. Within half an hour of Brick, Brendan is beaten to a bloody pulp. By the time the film ends, he is throwing up his own swallowed blood and having trouble standing up (by most standards, the violence in the film is fairly mild, but there is a visceral quality to the beatings inflicted on Brendan--right down to the meaty thwaps as the blows hit his body--that makes Brick's violent scenes very difficult to endure). It is Brendan's nonchalant reaction to this violence that particularly distinguishes the film from the television show--clearly, the physically unimposing Veronica couldn't withstand the punishment that he endures (on those occasions when she is physically threatened, Veronica almost always needs to be rescued), but when faced with violence she usually breaks with the noir detective tradition and reacts with fear and horror (the same, by the way, is true for Keith, who on at least one occasion has begged for his life). It is to the Mars writers' credit that they have managed to so consistently, and almost invisibly, stack the deck for two seasons so that Veronica is only rarely faced with situations that can only be resolved with physical violence. They accomplish this largely by making the show's villains smart and educated--as opposed to the street-smart thugs who populate Brick's rogues' gallery (again, we bump up against Thomas' class prejudices)--and therefore less likely to solve problems with a punch.
I'm not entirely certain that I can recommend Brick to Veronica Mars fans. It's a film that probably elicits only extreme reactions. Those viewers capable of suspending their disbelief in the concept of stylistically accurate noir in a high school setting--and it is by no means obvious to me that Veronica Mars fans will all fall in that group--will probably enjoy it immensely. Those who don't buy into the central concept will walk away in disgust. For my part, I am for the first time in a long time genuinely excited by a cinematic work, and can't wait to see what Rian Johnson thinks up next.
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