A study pack for The Dark Knight.

I have been asked to write a study pack for Individuals or Congregations on the Chris Nolan movie The Dark Knight.   I have added this to my previous review, which can be found  on this blog archive for  August 2011.  

There are similar articles on The Life of Pi and Apocalypse Now! Redux dated October 2013, and Zhang Yimou's film Hero also dated Aug 2011.  This last has not yet been recast as group questions, but I will do so when I get time.     Terrence Malik's Tree of Life seems to be a very deep well of meaning and interpretation.   The last time I showed it (the 14th showing, I think)  was to local friends who included a psychologist and another theologian, and yet more aspects were revealed.   Maybe I will pull together my three (or is it four?) articles on this film. 

The Dark Knight is at one level simply a piece of entertainment.   It is the kind of film that costs more than a hundred million dollars to make - and must therefore attract a huge audience to recoup its costs.    These are sometimes called ‘tent pole movies’.   But the British Director,  Chris Nolan, who studied  English Literature at University College London,  has never been content simply to entertain.    

I hope this little study opens a few windows on its serious intent; its concern with private morality and public ethics; individual and corporate responsibility;  the ambiguity of heroism and violence,  good and evil, power and vulnerability, the temptations posed by ends that justify means;  the human and moral cost of ‘collateral damage’;  the role of the scapegoat in society and our own psychology;  the personification of evil;  the nature of ‘Christ-likeness’ and the possibility of human redemption. 

It also illustrates my conviction that ‘tent pole’ movies can have serious artistic, philosophical and even theological intent and content, and that films have a central part in 20^th and 21^st century literature.  

   

How could you use this pack?  Obviously it can be used for individual reflection, but a group discussion is a much richer stew.   Even if group members have already seen the film I suggest it is good to see it again together, maybe a week before the discussion starts.   There may well be enough material here for a number of sessions, particularly around the final question, is The Joker Satanic?   

Has Gravity lost its pull?

Last week I stood in HMV's store looking at the Bluray 3D DVD of Gravity, and wondered what's the point of buying it? 

I was suitably gobsmacked when I saw it last year, having driven over a hundred miles to get to a suitably large screen with 3D,  and that journey was fully justified by the experience of seeing this movie in its proper environment.    The film deserved all it's technical Oscars,   including those of the Director and Cinematographer for their joint massive achievement.    But to see it at home?  

No matter how big a screen you have - or image you can project - nothing could reproduce the immersive experience of  being in space that this film gives in a cinema.     The performance of Sandra Bullock could be admired again of course, and I think this is a more worthy contender for an acting Oscar than hers in the USA crowd pleasing - and politically dishonest - movie  Blindside.    But so much else would be lost.   Movies are made for the big screen, and none less so than this one.   I walked away without the DVD.   Better to remember the initial awesome experience rather than such a diminution.  

American Hustle Bustle

My principle enjoyment while watching the highly praised and multi-Oscar nominated movie American Hustle came from seeing Christian Bale, Amy Adams,  Brandon Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence enjoying themselves so much.  

Christian Bale has played so many dark tormented characters that I expect an on-screen air of gloom or doom to gather around him.  Here, as the hustler Irving Rosenfeld, he is louche and smart and having fun.  Irving knows that he may not be the smartest man in the room,  but he surely isn’t the dumbest or the greediest, and that is important for a con-man who depends on the gullibility and greed of his victims.   

David O. Russell, the Director and co-writer, brings Christopher Bale back together with Amy Adams after their good work in  The Fighter.   Amy,  as Sydney Prosser, Irving’s partner in crime,  is really consolidating her reputation  in these two Russell films after Enchanted and Doubt.  

Bradley Cooper is Richie Dimaso,  an (over) ambitious FBI agent.   Richie is like a Labrador, full of energy and bounce, and not too bright.   He recruits Irving and Sydney in a sting based on the actual Abscam operation that brought down a number of corrupt politicians in the 1970’s and 80’s.   I like it when Bradley shows the panic behind his character’s eyes.  Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence  complete the coming together of the leads from  The Fighter and Russell’s Silver Linings.   Jennifer Lawrence plays Irvin’s wife, Rosalyn.   Jennifer has previously displayed stolid determination (Winter’s Bone) and the kind of toughness that never diminished her femininity (The Hunger Games).   She stepped up in Silver Linings to be smart and sexy and also a little bit crazy.   Here her character is flaky and silly – though not to be underestimated.   

Seeing Bale and Adams, Lawrence and Cooper working so well together again is a joy.   Robert De Niro, also in Silver Linings, plays an (uncredited) cameo here, as a mafia boss, and the most frightening scene in the movie  is when he faces the sting team across a table, weighing them up.   Jeremy Renner, as Carmine Pollito, a Mayor who maybe serves  his people too well,   is charismatic – I  never thought I would say that.   I was also struck by Elizabeth Roem in a small part as Carmine’s wife, Dolly.   

So this movie is funny, smart, engaging – and we are told that some of the things in it actually happened, but who cares?     It is set in the 1970’s and is utterly true to the times in its tone, design and zeitgeist.   The costume and hairstyling departments obviously had a lot of fun, but again, this is not a parody of the time.    So….

American Hustle, can I compare thee to a 70’s movie?  

In 1972 Sam Peckinpah/Walter Hill’s The Getaway was showing in our cinemas.     It was hip and cool and good looking, like Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, it’s criminal romantic leads.   American Hustle is certainly as commercial as that film, but not in any way as cynical.  

In American Hustle  everyone is trying to cheat everyone else, a common trope from the 70’s, as in Walter Hill/Bud Yorkin’s 1973  The Thief Who Came to Dinner.  In such  movies  the most attractive couple  usually win.  But here Irving is undeniably unattractive, at least physically, Bale having either ballooned for the role or donned a fat suit, or a fat belly.

Hoard Zieff gave us Slither  in 1972,  a comedy thriller perhaps closest to American Hustle.    Peter Boyle’s character in that movie had,  as Pauline Kael said,  a glint of indefatigable greed in his eye.   But Irving is not avaricious in such a ruthless way, he is simply doing the best he can with his limited gifts and unlimited confidence.  He is also,  like Boyle character, happy and lucky with the women he loves.   

Don Siegal’s 1973 Charley  Varrik was entertaining enough, but we had no idea why Charley, played by Walter Mattau as a Walter Mattau tribute act, would go robbing banks for a living.    He was essentially the same character we saw as a retired spook in Hopscotch seven years later.   But in American Hustle we do understand exactly why Irving  and Sydney go agrifting.

The Sting (1973) was built on its conmen star’s charisma, but American Hustle is much better plotted and the characters much more sympathetic and alive.

Steelyard Blues (1972)  employed the charms (and anti-establishment reputations) of Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, but the plot was scrawny and what was meant to be amusing turned out to demean the very people it was meant to  be applauding.  American Hustle never does that.   

Bradley Cooper does not exploit his cuteness as say, Ryan O’Neal used to in the 70’s,  and Amy Adams fleshes out the kind of ballsy female we saw in the 1950’s and 60’s but who were too often coarsened or exploited in the 70’s.

The whole tone of American Hustle is different to these movies.   It is not a look back in anger, or even in indulgence.    It is not even a look back in  parody.     I am reminded of  the way Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973)  transplanted the 1950’s of Raymond Chandler’s noir into the brash Hollywood of the 1970’s,  without ever betraying it’s heart.     Noir is essentially romantic,  as it’s bruised but hopeful Private Eye Galahads  show us as they turn up their collars and walk the mean streets.    Altman  underlined this by placing the harsh spotlight of 70’s Tinsel Town’s  heartless chic on his forlorn knight.   Marlowe and all he stood for was now out of time, an anachronism.   It must be said that many critics and  Marlowe fans  hated the movie.  Could it be that it revealed too clearly the saintly sleuth’s essential ineptitude?    Raymond Chandler said of his script for the original  Long Goodbye ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious,   but I cared about the people.’     It feels as Russell and Singer also care about the people in this, much less obvious,  mystery. 

American Hustle does not transpose the 1970 into the 21st century.   But it benefits from the long, affectionate but not over indulgent  perspective that time – and perceptive scriptwriting  and directing can bring.   Russell co-wrote the script with  Eric Warren Singer, who also wrote The International.

 American Hustle  is as deep as a puddle, and made simply to have fun and splash about in.   I think I enjoyed it more than any of the 1970’s films I have mentioned above, and I am glad it has been recognized as a piece of superior entertainment.     But it has done it’s job and I have no reason to see it again.    I simply look forward eagerly to whatever David O. Russell and his friends do next time.

PS. The excellent soundtrack contains a new recording of Grace Slick’s White Rabbit,   commissioned by Russell and sung by the Lebanese American singer Mayssa Karaa in Arabic.    I have loved Slick’s chromium plated voice for forty years, and  this was a huge hit in 1967, from Jefferson Airplane’s second album Surrealistic Pillow.   This radical new reading only adds to the pleasure.   Well done Russell.  I cannot wait to find Mayssa’s  recordings of the poems of the 13^th century Persian mystic/philosopher/poet Rumi.    

An Officer and Spy.

An Officer and Spy – and a good movie in the making?

Robert Harris has written a number of good novels exploring history and alternative history.   Some have been turned into films;  Fatherland, set in a modern Germany after the Nazis won WWII (the USA did not join in), Enigma, set in Bletchley Park,  Archangel  in Soviet Russia (Stalin had a secret son and some want him to take over), and The Ghost,  in which it seems that a 21^st century British Prime Minster may have played – or have been played – into the hands of the CIA.   He has also written about classical Rome, in the voice of Cicero in Imperium and Lustrum, and also Pompeii.    Harris has also written non-fiction biographies and books of political analysis.

Harris has the skills of a forensic journalist, sifting through masses of information  in order to provide a reliable – or deliberately unreliable – narrative.   And now he has written a book about a man who had similar skills,  plus considerable determination and physical and  moral courage.   This is the real life Georges Picquard, a French Army Officer and Intelligencer,   who for ten years pursued the truth about the guilt or innocence of Captain Alfred Dreyfuss, the man found guilty of treason in 1895 and sent to Devil’s Island.    In order to conduct this investigation – which he believed was simply his job and a matter of honour – Picquard faced treachery, threats, persecution and imprisonment.    Harris tells the story in his protagonist’s  voice and paints a deeply convincing portrait of the man and his times.   

So I wonder,  could this be the next Harris film?    Sadly I hope it wont be, because the tale he tells, though admittedly simplified, may still be too complex to reduce to a film script.    I remember the recent attempt to turn  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy into a movie.

I thoroughly enjoyed the film, but that was because I know the original novel’s plot from the book and the famous BBC six part adaptation.     That meant that I knew what was missing.    This was principally the back-ground and character of the MI6 officers, one of whom was the mole, the traitor.   But as this was about treachery the character and motives of the suspects was crucial.

But Tinker, Tailor was a novel.    Harris’ book is a retelling of a true story, and a hugely important one at that.   The Dreyfuss Affair (as it is often called, as if this diminishes it as  a matter of limited importance)  is still relevant today,  involving – as the book cover says – ‘an intelligence agency gone rogue, justice corrupted in the name of national security, a newspaper witch-hunt of a persecuted minority, and the age-old instinct of those in power to cover up their crimes’.   We only have to consider the British Government’s current refusal to inquire into the death of Alexander Litvinenko,  or the evidence gathered – and revealed – that profoundly questions the Lockerbie conviction,  to admit the scale of GCHQ and NSA’s searches of web archives and their hacking of mobile phones and emails, or to release terrorist ‘suspects’ who have never been charged,  in order to see parallels.

An Officer and A Spy  is an important book about an important event.    If it is filmed I hope it can be done with integrity, and if it is not I highly recommend the novel.