Parental Discretion (The Fighter, Never Let Me Go, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps)

Catching up to the Winter (2010) releases, as I do inevitably every Spring (2011), always yields belated Christmas gifts of confirmations and surprises. In the case of the latter, I had avoided The Fighter because the idea of a go-for-it Oscar-bait true-story boxing movie shot with epileptic camerawork and performed by a hollering Boston-accented cast seemed almost as appealing as a nail drilled through my head -- indeed, the director, David O. Russell, took up the project only after his latest unbankable black comedy on that very subject (Nailed, starring Jessica Alba), was aborted by the studio. I should have had more faith, though. Beantown stepbrothers Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) are indeed followed by a camera crew filming an HBO documentary, but Russell keeps the integrity of his own superb framing, maintains his own humorously-askanced yet emotionally-invested point-of-view.

Russell's approach is beautifully in-synch with his star, Wahlberg, who occupies the still center of a familial storm that includes drug-addled Dicky, emasculated father George (Jack McGee), seven scary sisters and an even more terrifying matriarch Alice (Melissa Leo). Dicky, a former welterweight who once gave Sugar Ray Leonard a run for his money, is the central figure of the HBO doc, and for a while this conceals the predictability of Micky's sports-triumph arc, adds a layer of comedy and complication to what becomes ultimately Micky's story. At 31, Micky, a plowhorse junior welterweight, knows that his days as a contender are nearing an end, and is forced to consider whether his loyalty to what his advising barmaid girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) and encroaching boxing professionals call "the circus" -- his brother-trainer and mother-manager -- is keeping him from fulfilling his potential.

The Fighter is Russell's most commercial movie since Three Kings (1999), and just as that film made compromises to the war genre (including an upbeat ending that the director himself has expressed misgivings about), so too does this one embrace sports movie cliches. The boxing matches, filmed in the same ESPN style in which they were originally telecast, offer little strategy beyond the dubious Rocky notion that getting beaten to a pulp makes you stronger. Fortunately, The Fighter also marks a return to the comedies of family suffocation with which Russell launched his career. Both Spanking the Monkey (1994) and Flirting with Disaster (1996) are about characters trapped in families they are desperate to escape; The Fighter extends this theme into the effect of parents and siblings on one's vocation, with Alice and Dicky depicted as hyper-supportive, well-meaning individuals who don't know when to back off. The histrionics of Bale and Leo in their respective roles have come under some criticism, and while I found the latter's Oscar campaign particularly odious, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed their performances. They play their characters as constantly circling, negatively-charged electrons, no doubt precisely what their director had in mind. David O. Russell may be a thug, a bully, and a maniac, but The Fighter shows, once again, that he's also enough of an artist to examine how he got there.

If nothing else, the over-the-top dynamism of The Fighter makes a refreshing tonic to Never Let Me Go, a drizzly, plinky thing about a trio of nearly-human clones who accept a cruel fate as organ-donors the jolly-old-English way: because to revolt would be rude. Adapting a reportedly hugely popular 2005 novel (I have to take that at its word more and more these days) by Kazuo Ishiguro, Danny Boyle's favorite screenwriter Alex Garland fashions a common love triangle whose uncommon elements are barely emphasized or explored. At the telegraphically-named Hailsham boarding school, young Harry, Ron and Hermione Kathy, Tommy and Ruth become, at various turns, friends, love interests, and romantic rivals; yet not even growing up to be played by well-bred twentysomething movie stars like Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley is enough to deter their destinies as "donors." True love may, possibly, be grounds for a "deferral," a rumored pardon to be granted by the enigmatic school headmaster (an underused Charlotte Rampling). But, alas, Kathy and Tommy are kept apart by Ruth's machinations, until a reunion years later gives them One Last Chance.

Ishiguro also wrote The Remains of the Day, adapted into a fine 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The Merchant/Ivory imprimatur was often misinterpreted as mannered: their best work (including Remains) conveyed the tension between stoic appearances and emotions roiling beneath the surface. Never Let Me Go is too refined to roil. The director, Mark Romanek, has had a long career with the likes of Madonna and The Red Hot Chili Peppers(not to mention a foray into feature films with the terrible Robin Williams stalker-picture One Hour Photo); I never thought I'd use this as a criticism, but he brings nothing that he's learned from directing music videos to the table. Scenes are static; the editing is uninspired; the score, by Rachel Portman, is the same piano-based tuneage she always delivers (Emma, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, et al.). Mulligan and Garfield are pleasant as star-crossed Kathy and Tommy, Knightley effectively unpleasant as the scheming Ruth. Although she could have easily played the lead, Knightley was shrewd to take a smaller part that pays bigger dividends -- a jealous, insecure young woman whose motives are so ambiguous that her final act of manipulation could be taken either way as an act of penance or vengeance. It's the kind of unsympathetic performance in a drearily tasteful movie that would have made Pauline Kael pull her finger out of her throat in admiration.

Kael once quipped that she retired because "The thought of sitting through another Oliver Stone movie was too much to bear." That was during Stone's early-90s age of agitprop, with JFK, Natural Born Killers, and Nixon sending film critics running from early screenings to the nearest CNN panel discussion. Yet modern American cinema's most controversial director has been accused more recently of toothlessness, which Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps does sadly little to dispel. It's a deeply strange movie, with an odd piggy-back structure that keeps Gordon Gekko, its ostensible uber-villain and sole reason for existence, on the sidelines before suddenly vaulting him to the top of the pyramid. (The easily distracted screenplay was co-written, ironically, by former critic and Kael apostle Stephen Schiff.) With Michael Douglas appearing only incrementally to spit his lines and waggle his eyebrows, Shia LaBeouf, as Gekko's latest young pawn and prospective son-in-law, engaged to his lefty-pixie daughter (Carey Mulligan again), is required to hold our interest for the majority of the running-time, an inadvisable strategy no matter how many Hollywood pictures continue to use it.

The original Wall Street (1987) is minor Oliver Stone, but it made for entertaining melodrama and served as a warmup for the full-bore multimedia assaults he would come to helm a few years later. Money Never Sleeps features even more intricate split-screen sequences (complete with Stone cameo) and is amazingly smooth on a visual level for a story that narratively makes no sense. Stone's father, of course, was a stockbroker, and this might explain the weird sentimentality of the movie, which transforms Gordon Gekko from the kind of shark who devoured old-school financiers like Stone Senior into, essentially, the patriarch himself. Is Greed Good? is the title of Gekko's fresh-out-of-prison bestseller, an apparently rhetorical question, given our economic climate, belied by an unexpected answer: Yes, when tempered with a pregnancy ultrasound photo.

Grimm Tidings (Hanna and Cutter's Way)

Joe Wright, the director of Hanna, is a couple of tweaks away from being a good filmmaker. From adaptations of Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice) and Ian McEwan (Atonement) to disease-of-the-week actor showcases (The Soloist) and now an arty Euro-thriller, Wright shows he's attuned to both the human elements and technical aspects of cinema. He's eager to prove he's not a hack, and that's precisely his problem: an efficient craftsman would have a keener understanding of how narrative and physical space go together, offer the audience the pleasures inherent in their intersection.

Consider the opening movement of Hanna: in an undisclosed wintry location, an adolescent girl (Saoirse Ronan) shoots a deer with a bow-and-arrow; is ambushed from behind by an older man named Erik (Eric Bana) who appears to be either her father or her mentor or both; expresses a desire to see the world; presses a red button on a device dug out of the snow by Erik that effectively sets the plot in motion. For about fifteen minutes, Wright (working with a script by Seth Lochhead and David Farr) builds things gradually, organically, without fretting over pacing or spelling things out. Then, as though checking his watch and exclaiming, "Oh, shit!", the director shifts into overdrive. His first mistake comes after Hanna hits the button, with an immediate cut to the girl's soon-to-be archnemesis Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett) and a subsequent scene featuring the latter's bevy of intelligence operatives staring at their computer screens, zeroing in on Hanna and Erik's location. It would have been more effective to stick with Hanna's limited point-of-view for a few minutes longer, more terrifying when a team of Wiegler's agents storm the cabin at nightfall. Instead of thinking about where he's cutting and why, Wright forges ahead with the Chemical Brothers blasting on the soundtrack, substituting artificial momentum for the real thing.

Other than cheap effect, this choice of music -- which pounds on the soundtrack over and over again -- means nothing, makes no underlying connection with the main character even though she says, early on, that she's curious about what music sounds like. Hanna's alien-like responses to everyday human behavior and modern technology would seem like easy laughs, but other than a blunt explanation to the question of how her mother died ("With three bullets"), Wright isn't interested in humor. He seems to think that the absurdity of the premise warrants a dreadfully serious approach, rather than pausing to consider that embracing the absurdity might draw the audience into the story.

With overt nods to the Brothers Grimm, Hanna lurches toward myth; but its characters are too banal to engage our emotions on an operatic level. Now seventeen, the feral young Ronan continues to be a strangely affecting screen presence; here, as a teenage assassin, she's plausibly out-of-control of her own physicality. But the filmmakers isolate her too long from Bana and Blanchett, when their dysfunctional "family" (of a sort) should be the connective tissue that holds the movie together. Not that Eric Bana has ever been effective at conveying feeling, and appears to be reprising his character from Munich. As for Blanchett, it should be said that I've always liked her more for who she appears to be off-screen than her performances on-. (Her sheepish "I'm sorry" grimace to the camera following an Oscar clip of her histrionic performance in Elizabeth: The Golden Age was particularly winning.) For Wiegler, she chews on a Texas drawl and, unlike her villain in the last Indiana Jones picture, actually gets to kill a few people. Yet the character, either from Blanchett's choices or problems within the script, is confused, her maternal fixation on Hanna too muted. Following Hanna's bloody escape from a holding cell (which Wiegler witnesses), one would think Wiegler's interest would be piqued. Why, then, does she redirect her energies into tracking down Bana's Erik, leaving Hanna to her fey sidekick Isaacs (Tom Hollander, a Wright favorite, giving the film a few glimmers of comic spark)? Isaacs, toting a crowbar and wearing short-shorts, leads a trio of German killers who resemble The Nihilists from The Big Lebowski, so it's puzzling that Hanna is unable to dispatch them as quickly as she did earlier with fully armored guards. More fatal than lack of internal consistency, however, is the lack of connection between Hanna and Wiegler: without any, their final confrontation means nothing.

Hanna is the latest in a line of mediocre action flicks to receive good reviews, and to be fair, if, like most critics, I had to see all the truly terrible ones, I too might fail to notice how Wright overcrafts each scene, oblivious to their overall impact. He employs his patented Steadicam tracking shot -- the same one he used in Atonement and Pride & Prejudice -- for a scene where Erik is ambushed by some baddies, and while it's nice to see an action sequence play out without cutting, it fails to register with any significance. Additionally, for the entire middle portion of the movie, Wright holds the audience hostage with an annoying British family (led by a wasted Olivia Williams), then doesn't even have the decency to finish them off. A compromise for a PG-13 rating, I suppose, yet one that denies the audience some basic viewing pleasure, a takeaway that serves as Wright's M.O. "I just missed your heart," Hanna says -- as Ed Gonzalez points out -- at the beginning and end of the film. By a mile, sweetie.

Cutter's Way, the moody 1981 neo-noir starring Jeff Bridges and John Heard, has had remarkable staying power for a movie left for dead on more than one occasion. No doubt its reappraisal has mainly to do with the steady ascendency of Bridges's career, so those who know the actor solely from his post-Dude period or his early Last Picture Show/Thunderbolt & Lightfoot era ought to check out one of his best performances from the long stretch of years in-between, when his handsomeness as a movie star clashed with his versatility as a character actor. As Richard Bone, a lazy drifter who one night witnesses (or thinks he witnesses) the body of a young woman deposited in a garbage can, Bridges is at his most engagingly self-effacing, seducing women so effortlessly he's almost apologetic about it. Yet he also reveals how Bone's hesitancy becomes a liability, so unreliable as an eyewitness that the police initially finger him as a suspect. Bone is a coward too, a trait that I was going to say didn't jibe with Reagan Era heroics, but which I have to admit is an unusual quality for an actor of any era to portray. Bridges unreluctantly plays reluctance, heroically plays lack of heroics, and it's a key to a large part of his appeal.

He also plays Richard Bone with concentrated attention toward his co-star who, as Alex Cutter, gets the showier role. Anyone familiar with John Heard, the fade-into-the-scenery character actor with an endless stream of film and TV credits (Big, After Hours, The Sopranos, Entourage), may be shocked by his balls-out flamboyance here. A Vietnam veteran with a no-longer-functioning eye, arm and leg down the left side of his body, Cutter spends his days drinking booze and insulting the world around him with bebop, stream-of-consciousness prose. (Gary Sinise clearly based his post-Vietnam version of Lt. Dan in Forrest Gump on Heard's performance.) It's fascinating to watch intelligent characters in milieus far beneath them, revealing themselves to be not as clever as they think they are. Cutter -- possibly out of boredom, possibly something more -- develops a fixation with his friend Bone's case, particularly when the prime suspect takes the shadowy form of local oil baron J. J. Cord (Stephen Elliott, who made a career out of playing rich bastards, which were never in short supply in 1980s).

Cutter's Way was directed by the Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer, who wrote the screenplays to Milos Foreman's 1960s-era The Fireman's Ball and Loves of a Blonde; like so many European directors (including Foreman himself), Passer shows an endless fascination with American culture. From bars to back alleys to beaches, his camera is always alive, ever inquisitive, conjuring an atmosphere that could be called jauntily cynical. (No wonder his career in Hollywood was cut short.) Based on a novel by Newton Thornburg (called Cutter and Bone, the original title of the movie and the title I prefer), the screenplay by Jeffery Alan Fiskin is elegant and literate, with a structure so organic it's practically invisible. At first, a lengthy sequence involving Bone's attempt to seduce Cutter's despondent, alcoholic wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), seems to be keeping us away from the "important action" occurring offscreen (Cutter's attempt, with the murder victim's sister, to blackmail Cord), until it dawns on you that this is the important action. Regrettably, Fiskin and Passer stage, in the closing minutes, a headsmackingly dumb scene with a horse that plays like inexperienced filmmakers using the only means they can think of to move a character from Point A to Point B. But it doesn't shake the power of the climax, or the totality of this extremely fine film.

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.

Choo-Choo Choose Me (Certified Copy and Unstoppable)

(Warning: Spoilers.)

Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami's delicately ambiguous fantasy about what Jonathan Rosenbaum might call "the psychological accommodations of marriage," has prompted some predictably unequivocal interpretations about the nature of the film's central relationship. Do Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell) know each other or not? Are they married? To each other? Or are they engaging in some elaborate role-playing, transforming from strangers to a 15-year married couple over the span of one day? I've read compelling arguments in favor of all of these interpretations and others. Yet the more certain the argument comes across, the less I trust it. Perhaps appropriately, this is how I've come to regard most real-life couples when they talk about themselves.

Certified Copy is something along the lines of Before Sunrise/Sunset: The Whole Bloody Affair, a flowering romance and an attempted rekindling occurring simultaneously onscreen, flowing seamlessly from one to the other. James, like Ethan Hawke's character in Before Sunset, is a semi-celebrated writer touring a book across continental Europe, only here it's Tuscany instead of Paris, only here he's Anglo instead of American. Elle, the owner of an antiques shop, bears a middle-aged resemblance to Julie Delpy's cerebral, insecure young Frenchwoman. The two meet during a slyly staged opening sequence at a book-signing, which starts late -- thanks to the tardy author -- and is subsequently interrupted by an impatient child and a ringing cellphone. The book that James is promoting (titled Certified Copy) posits that replicas of original works of art have their own value. Later (the next day, in the movie's timeframe, which occupies the rest of the film), Elle chauffeurs James to a nearby Italian village to either court him, interview him, or challenge him, possibly all at once. He agrees to go with the caveat that he must return for a train with a 9:00 p.m. departure time.

The 70-year-old Kiarostami has entered an Altman-esque phase of his career that makes the burned-out mutterings of an early retiree like Steven Soderbergh seem foolish. While the latter has become (as quoted by Matt Damon) bored with story and interested only in form, the legendary Iranian filmmaker nimbly brings story and form together. There is plenty of deadpan visual wit in Certified Copy, not least of which the implication that the chasm between men and women is as wide as the commingling of ancient Roman art with 21st-century social media. Like Richard Linklater, Kiarostami plays with our concepts of time; yet he goes even further by undermining our notions of reality. Midway through the movie, a coffee-house barista mistakes Elle and James for being married. Elle encourages the assumption, then James appears to play along. By film's end, after encountering several couples at every conceivable stage of a union (newlyweds, middle-aged, elderly), their shared fantasy has become an apparent reality. The Englishman's remedial French and Italian language skills turn suddenly fluent. The Frenchwoman shares with him a son. Together they arrive at the hotel where they celebrated their honeymoon fifteen years ago. Yet James still has to catch that train.

Nothing brings out the drearily literal-minded faster than a dash of mystery, especially when that mystery delves into a topic everybody thinks he or she knows with absolute certainty. Close-Up (1990), one of Kiarostami's most famous films, chronicled the elaborate fraud of an unemployed Iranian man pretending to be a celebrated director: the actual participants reenacted their own roles in the drama, yet Kiarostami depicted them with such respect and empathy (not least of which the troubled con-artist himself) that the movie registers far above the facile is-it-real-or-isn't-it trickery that passes for documentary filmmaking today. Similarly, in Certified Copy, I don't get the impression that the director is out to play games with us; I think he's suggesting just how thoroughly romantic couples play games with themselves. (Steven Santos has similar thoughts about this.) Taken in this light, Kiarostami's film becomes a critique of Rosenbaum's subjective view of shared reality, albeit a critique filled with compassion for individuals like Elle and James, when external forces inevitability intrude on their internal designs. "Time is a lie," Ethan Hawke says near the start of Before Sunset. Certified Copy takes that wondrous, troubling evocation even further: Time is a lie agreed upon.

Sometimes a hack reaches a point in his career -- mainly due to the fact that he still has one -- where critical contempt melts away, replaced by a sudden rise in esteem. Occasionally this about-face is warranted: Samuel Fuller is one example; John Carpenter another. And then there's Tony Scott, whose runaway train opus Unstoppable has been hailed as "an action symphony," not to mention "a hymn to stylish, unpretentious competence," one made with "old-school professionalism." I'm not sure which notion is funnier -- that the director of Days of Thunder and The Fan is mounting symphonies and hymnals, or that the man every bit as responsible as Michael Bay for bringing eyesore lighting and incoherent staging to contemporary action cinema is now kicking it old school.

There are a couple of reasons for this laughable turn of events. First, Tony the Younger's long-standing and wholly earned rep as the less-talented of two filmmaking brothers has gradually dissipated with Ridley the Elder's disappearance into Hollywood's wilderness. (Last stop: Sherwood Forest.) Second, there's something quaintly appealing and faux-topical about making a movie about a locomotive wreaking havoc through the crucial swing-state corridor of rural PA, to the point where critics are tea-leaving bold statements about the decline of the American middle class. (I eagerly await the scholarly revisionism on Scott's body of work -- The Duality of Domino, et al.) All of this rather seems to be blinding folks to the fact that Scott shoots Unstoppable with the same cheapjack gimmickry with which he's made every other movie: zero flair for narrative momentum; utter indifference to establishing rhythm through editing; random jump-cuts, speed-ups and slow-downs; enough harsh exposure to make you wonder if the reels were turned on a shish-kabob.

Unstoppable is Tony Scott's fourth collaboration with Denzel Washington, and it may be the worst of a competitive bunch. In other movies, Spike Lee has sussed out Washington's star-power charisma (Malcolm X, Mo' Better Blues, He Got Game, Inside Man), Carl Franklin his debonair sex appeal (Devil in a Blue Dress, Out of Time), Jonathan Demme his coiled anxiety (The Manchurian Candidate), Norman Jewison and Edward Zwick his wounded dignity (The Hurricane, Glory), Antoine Fuqua his explosive rage (Training Day). Tony Scott takes one of the most beautiful people in show business, frames him in the same unflattering light every time, puts him through the same predictable motions -- and inexplicably Denzel keeps coming back for more. (Scorsese and De Niro they ain't.) In Unstoppable, Denzel is paired with the younger, whiter Chris Pine, who played Kirk in J.J. Abrams' even uglier Star Trek, so while his acting range is questionable, perhaps Hollywood is giving Pine bonus points for managing to appear even remotely handsome against heavy odds. Unstoppable is the young thespian's Training Day; he's even given a half-assed backstory with a renowned father and an estranged wife. Yet his total lack of charm or technique or interest may make one pine long for the bland eccentricity of Ethan Hawke.

Between Pine's ineptitude and Washington's laziness, there's not much by way of human qualities for the viewer to latch onto. Out of desperation, one may look to the toxic-chemical-carrying train (who goes by the ominous moniker "Triple-Seven") for anthropomorphic villainy. Somehow Scott screws this up too, unable to rouse himself for even the most elemental killer instinct that exploitation filmmakers once had down pat. (There's only one major fatality in the film, and while for Washington it's supposed to be Personal, the tragedy fizzles instantly.) As Unstoppable wends on, Scott cuts increasingly away from the action on the track to television newscasts that helpfully bring the audience up to speed (They're trying to stop the train), in case Rosario Dawson's exposition as the least-plausible railroad controller in America wasn't enough. And in case we needed prompting, all the supporting characters (Pine's wife, Washington's Hooters-employed daughters), stop what they're doing and glue their eyes to the nearest TV screens as though gawking at a Charlie Sheen special, pumping their fists and whooping it up while our heroes try to prevent a trainwreck of only slightly more significance. Christopher Nolan got rightly ridiculed for the unwieldy exposition in Inception; why does Tony Scott get a pass? No, wait: Scott is now an elder statesman, a classicist, an auteur; surely he's got something more profound up his sleeve. Could Unstoppable be entirely Chris Pine's dream? Or has Pine entered Denzel Washington's dream? Maybe they've both entered Rosario Dawson's dream, or -- even better -- she's entered theirs: Chugga chugga woot woot!

Schraderfest 2011: Taxi Driver at the IU Cinema

Many moons ago, when Roger Ebert's review of Taxi Driver first came to my impressionable attention (in one of his earliest anthologies, possibly the 1984 or 1985 edition), little did I imagine that one day I'd have the opportunity to speak in person with one of that movie's key creators. Two nights ago, I had the honor of leading a Question-and-Answer session with Paul Schrader following a screening of the newly restored 35th-anniversary Taxi Driver that's been making the rounds, from Berlin to New York to Bloomington, IN. I'm not employed at the IU Cinema (I work nearby), but Jon Vickers, the Cinema's intrepid director, kindly offered me the opportunity to introduce Schrader before the film and do the Q&A after. It was an exhilarating experience that's left my brain abuzz. Here, in an attempt at reflection, were some of the highlights:

1. During a reception before the introduction before the movie before the Q&A, I told Schrader that my research for possible questions to ask him led me to conclude that there probably are no questions about this movie that he's never answered. He laughed and said, "That's okay. I often make up a question in my head and answer that one instead."

2. Paul Schrader is relatively short (though not as short as Scorsese) and stocky, highly verbose and articulate. From interviews I'd seen on YouTube, I was under the impression that he was a mellow, low-key guy. That's sort of true, if one goes in preconceptions about the man who created Travis Bickle. In an academic way, though, he has major backbone, bridles at questions he doesn't like and likes to argue. I can imagine that experiences with cultural lightning-rods like Taxi Driver and The Last Temptation of Christ would tend to rid one of fear, if one had any to begin with.

3. I wrote my own introduction of Schrader, calling him "a unique and significant voice in American cinema for more than 40 years." I meant that, too. How many people have contributed important work in film criticism, screenwriting, and directing? I also gently kidded him about having to choose between becoming a Calvinist minister and becoming a film critic, with his mentor Pauline Kael steering him in the direction you can guess.

4. I was nervous about introducing him (especially when the podium, which was on wheels, suddenly lurched forward when I started talking), and deeply relieved that he seemed moved by what I said. He came up to the stage with his head bowed, shook my hand, held it for a second, then spoke for a couple of minutes about how the idea for Taxi Driver came into being. Veteran movie fans have probably heard parts of that story before: Schrader lost his wife, lost his job, checked into the hospital with a bleeding ulcer, was lonely, depressed, and squatting at his ex-girlfriend's apartment in Los Angeles when a vision of the homicidal New York cabbie first appeared to him. I suspect, though, that for much of the sell-out audience (which leaned toward a younger demographic than other movies I've attended there), they had never heard the background of the story before, and that may have helped their understanding of the movie.

5. The restoration looks great, by the way. My first encounter with Taxi Driver was on shitty VHS tape shortly after reading Ebert's review. (I was only a toddler in 1976, when it was originally released.) More recently, I saw an edited-for-TV version on AMC and a decent 25th or 30th anniversary DVD. Needless to say, none of these experiences compare to finally seeing in on the big screen. The damn thing envelopes you.

6. Paul Schrader went to dinner during the showing and came back for the Q&A. Amazingly, he hasn't viewed Taxi Driver in its entirety in 35 years; neither has Scorsese. But he knows the movie by heart and was up to speed on all the issues involved in the new restoration, though not involved in them directly.

7. Surprisingly, I didn't feel nervous at all onstage during the Q&A. The only glitch was that my microphone had been attached to the left lapel of my sport jacket while I was facing Schrader on my right. During our preliminary remarks, my voice faded in and out with every turn of my head, like Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain. Quickly I switched the mike to my right lapel; things went smoothly after that.

8. For my first question (which I had struggled with all week), I quoted Jonathan Rosenbaum's review that Taxi Driver was "the work of four auteurs: Schrader, Scorsese, De Niro, and Bernard Herrmann," and asked Paul to talk about how they each came to collaborate on the film. "I don't care much for Jonathan Rosenbaum," he growled amusingly, which got the first of many laughs from the audience. "We're off to a good start, then," I replied.

9. Schrader spent more time than I expected talking about Herrmann. Perhaps he'd talked about Scorsese and De Niro so often that he was happy to talk about something else; it's also significant that the last two movies that Herrmann scored (Taxi Driver and Brian De Palma's Obsession) were both scripted by Schrader. Later on, I mentioned that Herrmann's score was the only thing Pauline Kael didn't like about the movie. "She was wrong about that," he said.

10. When the discussion turned to De Niro, I asked Schrader if he felt that the actor's presence "subtly altered the concept of the character" from a fish-out-of-water Midwesterner shocked by what he sees to a born and bred New Yorker who's been living with "filth and scum" all his life and finally snaps. I don't recall his answer (beyond "Bob tried to do a Midwestern accent"), but it seemed like he'd never been asked before. That may have been my best question.

11. My worst question was a long-winded comparison between Taxi Driver and Nashville -- the latter of which, we immediately learned, is a film for which Schrader has nothing but contempt. "Why would somebody who hates country music want to make a movie about country music?" he asked. Actually, I wasn't implying that the films were similar in form or content; I was trying a different tack to bring in the John Hinckley, Jr./Jodie Foster/President Reagan issue that he's had to endure a million times, and that Taxi Driver -- like Nashville only three months earlier, when John Lennon was killed -- had been accused in some quarters of influencing the assassin. I could have asked the question more succinctly, though.

(11a. This is pure conjecture, but I wonder if Schrader's aborted 70s-era project on Hank Williams, Jr. - whom he has hilariously called a "Travis Bickle who can sing" -- colors his opinion of Altman and Nashville?)

12. That said, Schrader did come around to addressing the topic. He recounted the story (which he's told before) that when he heard on the radio that Reagan had been shot, his first thought was, "It was one of those Taxi Driver kids." He also admitted again that he'd initially told the FBI that he'd never heard from Hinckley, when actually he'd been bombarded with requests for Foster's contact info.

13. Questions from the audience were far-ranging and excellent. I'd held off on the race issue in the movie and was glad that a perceptive student broached the subject. For time's sake, I also hadn't asked a question I'd written about Taxi Driver's relationship to film noir, and Schrader seemed happy to answer that one from the audience too. (In sum, he believes there isn't one.) It was also an endearing moment when another student raised his hand to tell Schrader how much he liked the scene in the porno theater when Travis, spurned by the black cashier (played by De Niro's at-the-time real-life special-lady-friend Diahnne Abbott), "asks for Chuckles." I know what he means; I like the Chuckles scene too.

14. Paul Schrader is more technologically-savvy than one might expect. He's a connoisseur of social media, loves i-Phone, and eagerly downloads movies (like his own Rolling Thunder) from BitTorrent. My question about whether he'd be willing to shoot a movie on digital prompted an unqualified "Absolutely."

15. Schrader is also grim about contemporary cinema and what it bodes for the medium's future. "How many good movies came out of Hollywood this year?" he asked. (Answering his own question, he named one: The Social Network.) "There was time when a good movie came out every week." While I'm getting tired of apocalyptic pronouncements (everything is always dying, in a sense), it's hard to dispute his point. Especially when he supported it by dryly referring to a trio of projects he's currently working on not by their titles but rather "Mexican money, Indian money, and Colombian money." What Schrader meant was that Hollywood no longer finances the kind of movies he's interested in making; he (and other filmmakers) have to find other sources of revenue.

16. Funniest Q&A moment: Schrader describing Pauline Kael's reaction the first time she read his script (which we had discussed earlier at the reception). So disturbed was Kael by what she had read that she tossed the screenplay into her closet, threw clothes over it and shut the door. Runner-up funniest moment: At the end of the Q&A, a cute perky blonde girl in the back excitedly raised her hand for the final question, prompting Schrader to address her as "Reese Witherspoon!"

(16a. Actually, he called her "Renee Witherspoon." He'd knocked back a few that evening.)

17. My favorite moment may have been the revelation about how much Schrader dreaded Scorsese's casting of himself (filling in for another actor who had dropped out) as the jealous husband in that crucial scene where the seed is planted in Travis's head that he should take up a colleague's offer to buy a gun. "I know that I'd hate seeing myself act onscreen," Schrader said, adding that he told Scorsese that he would hate his own performance and would want to cut the scene. Turns out, "He loved himself!"

Thus concluded my experience with Paul Schrader. It's a thrill to be able to talk with someone whose work you have genuinely admired over the years.

The Chameleon Kid (Rango)

Why, you ask, would a self-promoted animation agnostic opt to see Rango? Needing a light-hearted and colorful palette-cleanser between Netflix viewings of Taxi Driver and The Warriors compels a man to resort to desperate measures, though in truth Gore Verbinski's foray into Pixar territory has more in common with that kind of adult fare than one might expect. An oddball Polanski-Leone mashup, Rango chronicles a journey of self-actualization for a day-dreaming lizard protagonist (voiced by Johnny Depp, but you already knew that) who becomes the sheriff of a Western town occupied by assorted creepy-crawlies in the midst of a deadly drought. It's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly meets Chinatown, with a menagerie of desert critters (possums, bats, armadillos) less engagingly repulsive than the likes of Tuco or Noah Cross, yet generally amusing enough to hold your attention.

Or, at least, the attention-span of adults. Rango is a good illustration of how disaster-proof Hollywood fare has become: the last time an alleged kiddie movie ended up being so kid-unfriendly, it went by the name of Babe: Pig in the City and was a megaton bomb. Movie marketing is too savvy to allow that sort of thing to happen anymore. Rango's been hyped as a "Johnny Depp movie" (to the point where reviewers are giving the impression that he's actually in the film), with trailers suggesting quite the bouncy entertainment. The bounce is there, all right, but it just barely propels the narrative over a surprising amount of visual grotesqueries (talking road-kill) and out-of-place scatological humor (a mammogram joke in an animated movie is, I think, a first). A disgusted mother taking her young son out of the theater afterward said, "Thank God we didn't pay full price for that!" Still, they'd been enticed enough to come.

The second-half of the movie was more involving than the first -- maybe because its free-associative spirit settles into something more substantial, or maybe because I finally moved a few rows down from the teenage couple necking in the disabled section directly behind me. (From the looks of it, they were fully mobile.) Rango doesn't have the dizzying highs of Babe: Pig in the City; Verbinski's not a crackpot visionary like George Miller. At his best, he's an able showman with a flair for viual slapstick: the action set-piece halfway into the picture echoes Apocalypse Now (with a banjo cover of Ride of the Valkyries), the truck chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark and the climactic pursuit from Miller's The Road Warrior. Verbinski also brings in a dash of emotional heft when Rango encounters The Spirit of the West, a.k.a. Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name (well-voiced by Timothy Olyphant). The scene is a standard movie trope -- the hero's encounter with a sage during a point of crisis -- yet The Spirit's suggestion that we are what we do is fairly profound. So is his alluring description of heaven, which apparently has something to do with Kim Novak and Pop-Tarts.

Rango occupies a welcome middle-ground between Pixar's manic blandness and David Lynch's strenuous eccentricity. If you're going to reference pop-culture, the references in Rango are just unexpected enough to work. (The only missed opportunity was a Polanski-voiced cameo for a knife-wielding midget: "You're a nosy fella, ain't ya?" could have been easily included without breaking the mood.) All the same, I am growing weary of movies that flatter our knowledge of other movies; it's moved to the opposite extreme of American cinema from a generation ago, where film characters usually spoke about films they'd seen in vague generalities. ("I liked that character." "Well, I liked the other character"....) I'm not asking for a return to hermetically-sealed cinema. An original idea or two, though, might be a nice change of pace.

Write It Again, Sam (Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart)

A few notes on Stefan Kanfer's Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart (2011):

1. I've no reason to doubt Kanfer's assertion that Bogie's straight-shooter persona cloaked bottomless contradictions. Yet his biography made me wish -- just once, for the sake of variety -- to read about an individual whose complex facade disguises a deep, profound simplicity.

2. Kanfer is a good writer with a prose style so clean it's practically ironed. If that's not exactly compelling or sexy, it's enough of a rarity to keep you turning the page.

3. Tough Without a Gun raises an intriguing question: How has Humphrey Bogart, an actor very much of his time, managed to stay relevant for more than fifty years after his death? The book's mistake is delaying the answer until the final thirty pages, rather than giving the "Afterlife" portion of the title more weight.

4. Without that, Tough Without a Gun becomes a by-the-numbers biography, rehashing colorful anecdotes that have been written and told before. Kanfer peaks early, pointing out that contemporary actors, while "well-trained, skilled in their craft, buff, (and) manipulated by powerhouse publicists," are devoid of distinctive personalities. "Impersonators don't 'do' Tobey Maguire or Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale et al. because these actors don't have imitable voices or faces," he notes, whereas 'Golden Age' actors "like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Humphrey Bogart" were fodder for comedians and impressionists.

5. The above statement isn't entirely true. For years, director Tom DeCillo was dogged by the accusation that James LeGros's performance in DeCillo's 1995 comedy Living in Oblivion was a devastating parody of Brad Pitt (with whom the director had previously worked). (Recently, DeCillo revealed that LeGros was mimicking Patrick Swayze.) And both Bale's husky-voiced Batman and his notorious on-set tirade were prominently spoofed across the late-night airwaves. But, yes, any stand-up comic doing impressions of Leo DiCaprio or Josh Hartnett or Channing Tatum won't get very far.

6. I've always heard the comparison that Humphrey Bogart, who specialized in low-lifes, was actually an Ivy League sophisticate; whereas Cary Grant, who played blue-bloods, was the son of a coal-miner. Bogart's case, at least, is a little more complicated: His family had money, but his father (a physician and graduate of Columbia University and Yale medical school) would lose much of it over time in unsound investments. His parents' marriage was also falling apart. Unsurprisingly, Bogart was a troublemaker, involved in gangs, disinterested in school, sports and everything else other than the vaudeville stage, silent-movie houses, and playing chess. Enlisting in the Navy during World War I, while offering an opportunity to see the world, did not instill discipline: he was tossed in the brig for drunkenness and insubordination many times.

7. After the war, Bogart tried various behind-the-scenes jobs in show business before making his stage debut in the 1922 melodrama Swifty. Bogart's portrayal of a "young sprig of the aristocracy" typecast him into playing rich twits for years to come.

8. His (first) big break came in 1935, when theater director Arthur Hopkins cast him as the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest. The distinguished stage and screen veteran Leslie Howard had the lead role, but Bogart stole the show. His entrance drew "audible gasps (from the audience), in part because he was so dark and menacing, in part because John Dillinger...had recently escaped from jail. Thanks to Bogart's diction, gait, attitude, and prison pallor, Kanfer writes, "the real-life gangster seemed...to have materialized onstage." Both Bogie and the play won rave reviews.

9. This didn't stop Warner Brothers from casting Edward G. Robinson as Duke Mantee in the movie adaptation, along with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. Bogart, who had appeared in random screen parts before with no distinction (such as 1931's The Bad Sister, also featuring Davis), was devastated. Fortunately for him, Robinson was pressing for equal billing with Howard and Davis, and the ever-magnanimous Jack Warner, eager to put Edward G. in his place, replaced him with the less-expensive Bogie. "In the film version, Humphrey conveyed the same weary authority that had been so effective on Broadway," Kanfer states. "But the close-ups gave him something more...His unshaven face was a map of distress." Bogart was thirty-seven years old.

10. One of the book's strongest sections is a brief yet revealing description of the old studio system: "MGM specialized in elegance and high production values, as in Gone with the Wind...Paramount concentrated on sophisticated comedies, RKO on the sparkling Astaire-Rogers musicals...Columbia showcased Frank Capra's directorial touch, and Twentieth Century Fox made a mint with Shirley Temple vehicles." Warners, on the other hand, portrayed the sordid underbelly of American society: Scarface, with Paul Muni; The Public Enemy with James Cagney; and Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson among the most prominent examples. Kanfer makes a good case that the brothers' hardscrabble roots (from the Polish ghetto) had much to do with their creative output and nothing to do with how they treated their employees. "Actors chafed under restrictive, long-term contracts; writers, in Jack's view, were 'schmucks with Underwoods" (i.e., typists). This is the environment Bogart entered following the success of The Petrified Forest.

11. The weakest sections in Tough Without a Gun deal with Bogart's personal life -- his three failed marriages and, finally, his fourth, successful one with Lauren Bacall. We should count ourselves lucky that we were spared the drooling, gossipy Peter Biskind writing about the 44-year-old actor's love affair with a 19-year-old actress. Kanfer's heart isn't really in it, and that's part of the problem. All the romantic interludes throughout the book reek of creative compromise -- of editorial insistence that the author include something "for the lay-dees." Ditto the weird anecdote about Bacall's crush on Adlai Stevenson, and the vague allusion to her possible affair with Frank Sinatra either shortly before or shortly after Bogie's death...too depressing to be coy.

12. Kanfer compounds the problem, however, by confusing the role of author with enabler. He's always quick to justify his subject's less-than-glamorous behavior with wives or colleagues (the gist being, Well, you see, what Humphrey really meant to say was....) or file it under either rough childhood or macho bonhomie. (I know I'm supposed to slap my knee and giggle like Kate Hepburn whenever there's an anecdote about Bogie or John Huston or some other hunk-a-man behaving falling-down drunk and cruel to friends or colleagues, but all I envision is a bunch of towel-snapping frat-boy assholes with too much time on their hands.) I've also been reading Simon Callow's superb two-part biography on Orson Welles (part one right before the Bogie bio, part two right after), and Callow shows it's possible to convey a person's failings without denigration. (For example, how Welles's decision to handle post-production by remote-control allowed RKO's hatchet-job on The Magnificent Ambersons.)

13. Anyway, the Golden Age studio system seemed to demand that an actor marry three or four times per lifetime and make three or four movies per year. While the latter would today help get Nicolas Cage out of hock, back then it threatened to stymie Bogart's growth as an actor. It would be another five years and nearly thirty movies (many of them stock bad-guy supporting parts) before his next major step up the latter: Roy Earle in High Sierra (1941). Another gangster part, yes, but one sympathetic enough to rile the Production Code censors. Ida Lupino got top-billing, but Bogart got the accolades and attention.

14. Bogart continued to make a couple of pictures each year, with at least one of them each year a hit. Later in 1941, John Huston, who co-wrote the screenplay for Raoul Walsh's High Sierra, cast Bogie as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, and we all know what happened there. Ditto 1942, when an unproduced play called Everybody Comes to Rick's became adapted as Casablanca. Kanfer quotes the appraisal of the play by a low-level underling at Warners (named Stephen Karnot): "Excellent melodrama. Colorful, timely background., tense mood, suspense, psychological and physical conflict, tight plotting, sophisticated hokum. A box office natural, for Bogart, or Cagney, or Raft..."

15. Kanfer does some welcome appraising of his own regarding The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. He challenges Louisa Brooks' opinion that Bogart ruined Sam Spade's climactic exposition scene. "Just the opposite is true. There was no other actor in the Warners studio...who could have so effectively brought off the finale, with its crowded words and thoughts." (Additionally, Bogart thought up the final line, a spin on Shakespeare's The Tempest: We are such stuff/as dreams are made on...") He also argues that Casablanca transcends its standard plot outline through a mix of distinctive elements (compelling subplots, witty dialogue, fresh locale) and happy accidents (Joseph Breen's insistence that a key confrontation scene between Rick and Ilsa end with a dissolve, making it more sexually suggestive, not less). Auteurists may turn up their noses at Casablanca, but for me no auteur has ever made a more perfect film.

16. Through the years, Bogart alternated between forgettable films and huge hits. 1944: Passage to Marseille and To Have and Have Not. 1946: Two Guys from Milwaukee and The Big Sleep. 1948 was a high-watermark year for Bogie: a popular success (Key Largo) and a towering artistic achievement (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with, in my opinion Bogart's greatest, ballsiest performance). Still, what should be the heart of the book -- Humphrey's experience filming 1951's The African Queen, ultimately winning the Best Actor Oscar -- ends up being rather rote. (Hepburn liked manly men, Huston was obsessed with shooting an elephant, blah blah).

17. The waning years of Bogart's life and career are depicted as a sad slog, with one bizarre, lively exception: the homophobic Bogie's admiration for flamboyant screenwriter Truman Capote during the otherwise miserable shoot of 1954's Beat the Devil.

18. That same year, Bogart was miscast in Billy Wilder's Sabrina. He was also evidently ostracized: Wilder, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden forming a nudgy inner circle. (As an aside, Bogart's fine 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place was overshadowed by Wilder's thematically similar yet far slicker Sunset Boulevard, which, of course, starred Holden). He finished his career with good roles in The Caine Mutiny (also 1954) and The Harder They Fall (his final film, 1956), but even before his health failed him, Bogart was already lamenting the dearth of good roles for an aging actor. It's difficult to imagine where he would have fit in in 60s cinema.

19. Nevertheless, his iconography has endured. It's here that Kanfer's book becomes particularly disappointing, an overlong buildup to what amounts to a laundry list: Godard includes a scene in Breathless where Jean-Paul Belmondo spies a photograph of Bogart; college students admired Bogie's no-bullshit honesty; his name became a verb for refusing to share a marijuana joint. Woody Allen conjured him as a dispenser of romantic wisdom in Play It Again, Sam; Bogart-themed film festivals, bars, and even furniture stores popped up across the country. But, wait: Umberto Eco, Kenneth Tynan, and John Berryman all made references to Bogart or Bogart's movies, so he appealed to high-culture as well!

20. Well, great. And so what? Before concluding with the kind of swoony romanticism he thinks he's taking pains to avoid (the hat in the author photo is also a mistake), Kanfer comes closest with "the larger theme of American masculinity," taking issue with the claim made by others that Bogart stands out due to the emasculation of the American male (via gay rights, women's rights, etc.) "The male ego...that has been fragile for generations," Kanfer notes, an astute observation. But his subsequent claim that Bogart actually stands out due to the infantalization of cinema seems self-contradictory: Okay, there may never be another Bogart onscreen; but that doesn't explain the innumerable attempts to emulate his style. (Asserting that "the Bogart style" may now be found offscreen "in the principled action of individuals uncomfortable with compromise and conformity" is even more overreaching.)

21. Tough Without a Gun ends by claiming "sociologists and historians" frequently cite "Humphrey's rough-hewn persona and barroom misbehavior as early signs of the disintegration to follow." (Really? Who?) Kanfer counters this by pointing out Bogart's nobler aspects: "He helped Fatty Arbuckle and Peter Lorre when they were in extreme need, defiantly hired people on the studio blacklist, aided Joan Bennett and Gene Tierney when they were in distress, and quietly donated to a long list of charities. He was courteous to women and straightforward to men, and when he made a promise he kept it." He also liked puppy dogs, apple pie, and long walks on the beach, though Kanfer doesn't mention that.

22. More persuasive, to me, is a near-throwaway passage halfway through the book, recounting that during the making of 1997's L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson screened the period-relevant In a Lonely Place for Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce. "'I wanted them to see the reality of that period and to see that emotion,'" Hanson is quoted. "'When I first saw In a Lonely Place as a teenager, it frightened me and yet attracted me with an almost hypnotic power.'" However deeply Humphrey Bogart may have entered the cultural fabric, the lexicon, or the finer virtues of Man, it's the work onscreen that is the reason for why he has endured.