Writing on the Wall (The Killing and Cave of Forgotten Dreams)

After pondering, since last Sunday, how in blazes the premiere of AMC's The Killing ended up being more pleasurable than a grim TV series about the brutal murder of a teenage girl in rainy-day Seattle has any reason to be, it finally hit me that the show is assuaging our frustrations toward a prior hit series of yore. No, I don't mean Twin Peaks: despite the superficial similarities in plot and setting, David Lynch's sideshow struck me as a fraud from the start, contemptuous of its audience, not even remotely interested in solving the mysteries it dangled before us, thereby leaving my emotions happily uninvested. It's The X-Files that comes to mind. That show was a crock too, yet Gillian Anderson's Scully offered some recognizably human behavior that held our attention in the face of some patented absurdities, even if Chris Carter's M.O. was to make her rational worldview look foolish at the end of every hour. Mireille Enos, the star of The Killing, has, with her red hair and unnervingly level gaze, a remarked-upon resemblance to Anderson; and the fact that the opening episode went of its way to make her homicide detective Sarah Lindsen perceptive, intelligent and right felt like a retroactive means of smacking Mulder upside the head.

The Killing was satisfying in and of itself too, its ominous prologue setting the tone: Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay) running desperately ahead of an encroaching flashlight through darkened woods, intercut with a tracking shot of Sarah Lindsen going for a morning jog across a bridge, a murder victim and her subsequent investigator connected across parallel narrative tracks. (There's more than a passing nod in Sarah's introduction to Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.) Twin Peaks began famously with the discovery of Laura Palmer's plasti-wrapped body; nobody remembers Lynch undercutting the pathos by fixing his lens on a young detective wailing uncontrollably by the riverbank. In other words, the moment wasn't about Laura's death; it was about pushing her out of the frame and putting this marginal character and his weird behavior at the center of it. The Killing shows a little more respect for its characters, including Rosie's parents (the wholly believable pairing of Michelle Forbes and Brendon Sexton), with whom we spend much of the first two hours. The premiere takes its time between revealing Rosie first reported missing to the discovery of the car in a lake with her body in the trunk, and Forbes and Sexton expertly take us through the difficult task of feeling what they're feeling -- initial worry, dismissal of fears, relief at false good news, then lacerating shock and guilt.

It's still early in the game, but so far The Killing has a nice mix of comforting cliches and breaking of original ground. For every hoary plot device (Sarah Linden is The Detective About To Leave Before One Last Case), there's a completely unique character like Linden's partner, the goofball gadabout Det. Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman). Holder looks like a scrawny ferret and talks with an ostensibly regional accent that more closely resembles a Cajun with a mouth full of gumbo. (The actor --fittingly for a series adapted from a Scandinavian original -- is Swedish.) Linden and Holder become mismatched partners, to put it mildly; yet there are no overblown disagreements or misunderstandings between them. They circle each other wearily, pulled into a case against their communal will, then pool their respective skill-sets together to crack it.

This pays off for Holder (and the viewers) in the closing minutes of the premiere, as he suckers a pair of Rosie's gal-pals to reveal the location of "the cage," a basement dwelling in their high school where Rosie may have been last spotted on the evening of a Halloween dance. Effective as the payoff was -- images of (menstrual?) blood on the bed and a bloody handprint on the wall -- it makes me uneasy to think that The Killing is going to be another moralistic example of punishing an adolescent girl for her burgeoning sexuality. Nor am I as yet terribly fond of the subplot pertaining to a local politician (TV vet Bill Campbell) and his undetermined role (if any) in Rosie's death. Combining these elements would be very Veronica Mars, and while it worked fine on that show I'm hoping the creators of The Killing try a different tack, one that hasn't been done to death.

Werner Herzog's unwieldy mix of visual grandeur and German existentialism gets a major workout in his 3-D extravaganza Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And while I've often found his personality and approach irksome in efforts like Grizzly Man, here I finally happened on a point-of-entry onto Herzog's wavelength: he's a comedian at heart. How else to explain the sublime comic timing of moments such as Herr Werner interviewing a learned scientist only so he can ask the befuddled poindexter questions like: "Do zee paintings dream at night? Do zay cry?" Even funnier is when the same man confesses that his original job was a circus performer, and Herzog's voice trembles with excitement. "Ver you a lion-tamer?" he asks hopefully.

Sadly not. But the caves of Chauvet in southern France offer the next best thing: ancient paintings of lions, horses, rhinos, and other wildlife; handprints from an anonymous Cro-Magnon whose journey through the cave, another scientist explains, can be traced by his crooked finger; deep, dark internal passageways whose womb-like splendor does not escape Herzog's attention; gorgeous external surroundings threatened (a bizarre postscript tells us) by a nuclear plant altering the habitat enough to render it suitable for albino crocodiles. Herzog likes to condemn modern technology while exploiting it to its fullest capabilities; curiously, James Cameron in Avatar, the last 3-D movie I've seen, took a similar approach. The difference between them is Cameron is disappearing ever further down the CGI rabbit hole, whereas Herzog keeps himself rooted in the real world, even as his ideas drift into the ether.

What is the point of Cave of Forgotten Dreams? On one level, it's a standard Herzogian lyric poem about the ineffable, represented here (like all his other films) as a State Of Nature. He's not out to educate us, quite the opposite in fact: he wants to leave us in a state of awestruck rapture. The use of 3-D, his second agenda, achieves the first fairly well. The tactile detail of the paintings, the contours of the cave formations, the depth of field would simply not be attained by standard filmmaking. Even with his fancy new toy, though, Herzog retains a sense of mischief. When he asks an anthropologist to demonstrate prehistoric spear-chucking, and the pointy edge thrusts out of the frame, it's a nod to the original 1950s-era 3-D films. A good gag. Less successful are the let's-shake-the-camera-while-we-walk scenes, an eyestrain compounded by the extra dimension. (Blair Witch 3-D -- a horrifying thought.)

While I remain a 3-D agnostic, a critic on Facebook recently made a persuasive case that a positive byproduct of the fad could be that it forces directors to hold the image of whatever it is they're shooting -- a futuristic means of returning to classical filmmaking. So far we've had very few major filmmakers take a crack at three-dimensional movies -- only opportunists and hacks. (I want to see what an artist like Scorsese can do with the form in his Hugo Cabret before rushing to judgment.) That Werner Herzog has tried it in a documentary, with mostly success, is laudable. The visuals alone make Cave of Forgotten Dreams well worth seeing, yet the fact that I walked out of it in a surprisingly upbeat mood had less to do with the images themselves than of Herzog's inimitable comedy stylings. At one point, he points to two pairs of ancient footprints on the floor of the cave, one belonging to a wolf, the other to a child. "Vas zee boy chased into zee cave by zee volf?" he wonders aloud. "Or did zay come into zee cave together as friends?" Priceless as that spoof of Herzog reading Curious George is, he may be the ideal filmmaker for the subject after all.