What to See This Weekend: The Struggle

“Malcolm X” (Spike Lee, 1992)

Available on iTunes; on DVD.

Spike Lee’s biopic of the civil rights activist and Muslim minister Malcolm X is based in large part on his autobiography. I noted on this blog that James Baldwin had written an earlier treatment of Malcolm X’s life for film, which was developed into the screenplay for Lee’s film. Having never read the autobiography nor Baldwin’s treatment (nor the versions in between that and the final script), I couldn’t say how much of the film comes from either source. Nor could I say, now having seen the film, how much of the stuff of the film itself comes from Spike Lee and his actual thoughts, feelings, and artistic impulses, and how much comes from what Spike Lee thought ought to be one’s thoughts, feelings, and heavily wrought artistic representations of these. Malcolm X displays an undeniable cinematic artistry, but only in flashes; although the film may seem like it’s set out like a textbook, or pseudo-testimony, and made not out of a drive for artistic creation but an assertive, unambiguous, even peremptory account of Malcolm X’s life and work, Lee’s distinctive style works to keep his film falling into the deadening craters of other Oscarisable biopics (think of Gandhi, Shine, Out of Africa, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, and the rest).

Lee seems determined to include as much of Malcolm X’s life as his distributors would allow in the film; many episodes are enacted in what feels like their real-time full length. The comparison between this and another, far greater recent biopic is striking: in his movie about Emily Dickinson, A Quiet Passion, Terence Davies keeps his telling elliptical, choosing a few distinctive moments — some of them even partly or mostly fictional — in Dickinson’s life in the foreground to suggest a rich and multiplicitous background. Of course, Lee couldn’t have done the same here, because of the very real cultural and political risks in leaving too much of Malcolm X’s story to interpretation, or even of refracting it too sharply through one’s own interpretation. Unfortunately, however, this ostensibly faithful account occludes a probing, questioning, curious, ambivalent, ambiguous, or polysemous attitude to the content, and so precludes a highly nuanced or inflected filming of it. And, in an oblique way, it works against Lee’s intentions: when an artist resorts to hard assertions, especially in an apparent effort to set the record straight, and especially in a form derived from and assimilating to fiction, it’s particularly difficult to trust in its veracity, even (or, perhaps, especially) when it’s demonstrated that the narrative is mostly fact-based. The facts don’t speak for themselves, and an artist is in store for deep pitfalls when he presumes that they might.

Live in Fragments No Longer

DVD Notes: “Howards End”

In brief commemoration of the 25^th anniversary of the theatrical release of the film adaptation of one of my favourite novels, I read Anne Thompson’s blog post from last August listing five lessons that contemporary Hollywood can learn from “the classic” Merchant Ivory film Howards End. Thompson posted her piece to coincide with the release of the first of many Merchant Ivory restorations, and characterises the films as “period dramas adapted from literature (often E.M. Forster or Henry James) and graced with top actors and gorgeously detailed sets and costumes.” She comments that their “remarkable collection of low-budget indie dramas … were so instantly recognisable that ‘Merchant Ivory’ became not only a brand but also a description of an art film genre often identified in ads with ivy trellises.”

So far so good. Thompson’s judgements of the film as a “classic” and of the oeuvre as “remarkable” are value judgements, and she’s welcome to them. I’m not particularly fond of any Merchant Ivory film and have written as much on this blog; the two iconic out (they were romantic as well as production partners) filmmakers more or less began the middlebrow tradition of selling nothing more than literary tone and faux-élite literary credentials with their many literary adaptations cobbled together by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an esteemed novelist in her own right. As with the contemporary work that continues this tradition – perhaps most prominently Downton Abbey – the films invite viewers to relax into the affluence they depict, as well as to look on the setting through a cheap halcyon gauze of crude nostalgia, with virtually no cause for reflection or examination. With carefully considered storylines and meretricious intellectual and cultural value, the work of Ismail Merchant, James Ivory, and Jhabvala can be regarded as important precursors to today’s esteemed television fare.

Where Thompson goes wrong is in prescribing a set of rules – her five lessons – that she skims from the patterns used by Ivory in making Howards End for the movies that Hollywood makes today. She’s decided that Howards End is better than the current industry average, and that that average could well be lifted if more production teams could just start acting like the one that created Howards End.

The Psyche of Gotham

DVD Notes: “Batman Returns”

In Batman Returns, Tim Burton’s 1992 sequel to the initial instalment in the Warner Bros.’ Batman series, starring Michael Keaton as Gotham City’s chiropteran custodian, Burton and his writers give us three separate villains: the domineering and greedy tycoon Max Shreck (Christopher Walken); the trust-fund miscreant, penguinly-constituted to an indeterminate degree, Oswald Cobblepot (Danny DeVito); and the wily vixen, posing as the diffident secretary Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer). But this is not the unwieldy overcrowding of Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (with the unsavoury threesome of Electro, The Green Goblin, and Rhino); rather, when Batman is added to the mix, it’s the staging of an eerie fantasy, a ménage à quatre, complete with leather and psychosis. Imagine, if Emma Stone, as Gwen Stacy, had swathed herself in skin-tight red latex, contorting and unfolding in all imaginable directions, how much good it would have done for the morale of the endangered citizens of New York, not to mention the stamina of Peter Parker.

Each of these unambiguously nasty pieces of work shares with Batman/Bruce Wayne the trait of a dual personality. Shreck’s case is simple and miserably common: he has the businessman's smiling and charming public persona for the people of Gotham, but ruthlessly plots capitalist thievery from them in his board room meetings. Meanwhile, in the less genteel parlours of Gotham City, Cobblepot prefers to travel under a mononym: Penguin. Where Cobblepot (a scam) is an unfortunately misshapen, yet tender and benevolent man, Penguin is a coarse, lecherous, avaricious crime boss, more fiendish fowl than foul human. And Selina Kyle, when she finds herself hors de combat due to a forceful act of Shreck’s (not the usual one you’d expect a CEO to foist upon his secretary), instead of taking a sick day, assumes a feline alter ego, endowed with eight lives to spare. She calls her doppelgänger Catwoman, fixes sharp nails on to the gloves of her new, shimmering black leather suit, and prowls the night in brilliant red lipstick, condescending with equal disdain upon greasy male criminals and their helpless female victims.