Four Serious Films

As film-goers, we may be entertained, and even moved by tales of bamboo forests full of flying daggers, hapless wine enthusiasts on vacation, and eccentric aeronautical engineers, but there is also something to be said for films that ply us with images that make us squirm in our seats. Such films are horrible to look at, yet we know they're real. You may reply that we see plenty of that on the news, and it's true enough, but in films—really good films, I mean—such images aren't merely lurid sidebars to a monotonous and never-ending litany of human folly and misdirection, intersperced with commercials, but components of a well-wrought and satisfying entity—a work of art.

Hotel Rwanda was one such film. It was the best film of 2004, I think. Set in that tiny country at the start of one of its several murderous civil wars, it focuses on the life of a hotel executive who is drawn into the action in spite of himself. This is, in part, because there's no way to avoid it, but it also happens that he is a Hutu, while his wife is a Tutsi. Our hero, played by Don Cheadle, has been catering to the whims of powerful military and political leaders for years as part of his job at the hotel. He knows how to pull strings and call in favors. But as the streets around the hotel compound become mired in corpses, the civility and intelligence he continues to display stands increasingly at odds with the irrational and violent tenor of the bloody war he finds himself embroiled in.

Hotel Rwanda has been called an African Shindler's List . Both are true stories highlighting the heroism that drives individuals in dark times to help others survive. But the comparison is misleading. Shindler's List is a highly polished and dramatic narrative of a somewhat unlikeable individual who saved many lives, though his motives were always mixed. Part of the interest in that film lies in watching the gradual development of Mr. Shindler's conscience. Meanwhile, the milieu itself has been presented to us so many times that although the details are masterfully rendered, there is an awful lot of cinematic whiz-bang involved too.

On the other hand, the hero of Hotel Rwanda exhibits nothing but decency throughout the film. He has no real desire to be a hero, in fact--his immediate concern, when things get rough, is for the welfare of his immediate family. But he finds it impossible to give up the standards of conduct that he has developed during his career at the civilized, Dutch-owned hotel. It is not that he has learned to be “Western” (After all, the U.N. workers who are ostensibly defending the hotel are found wanting a crucial points in the narrative.) Rather, he has simply remained in touch with the personal dignity and natural fellow-feeling that is the birthright of human beings everywhere.

Hotel Rwanda is not an easy film to watch. The sense of imminent danger, of violent passions on the verge of running amuk, remains palpable from beginning to end. Yet the film also has more than enough shady and malevolent characters, plot twists, harrowing escapes and moments of emotional rapprochement to satisfy any viewer. It fleshes out the realities of African civil war more fully than any other film I've seen, and sustains an atmosphere of floating chaos that's extremely unnerving. Although there are several well-known actors in the cast--Cheadle himself, Nick Nolte, and Joaquin Phoenix among others—they heighten the dramatic urgency of the tale, rather than drawing attention to themselves. If, to these components, we add the ironies provided by the differing fates of the white and black populations involved, and the unwavering, yet convincing, decency of the hotel manager himself, the result is a film of remarkable vigor.

2

The German film Downfall chronicles the last days of Adolf Hitler. It is first and foremost a war film, and the production values are surprisingly high for a European work. Unlike most American war films, however, the ride is downhill all the way. Among the protagonists we find plenty of belligerent SS types, though as the city collapses, one or two individuals within the mix exhibit glimmers of conscience and common sense. Hitler himself, played by Bruno Ganz with remarkable aplomb, comes across as a gruesomely charismatic dreamer whom many of his subordinates have come to distrust profoundly. Within the depths of the bunker where Hitler is formulating his final set of plans for world conquest, (as the Russians approach the city from several directions), there are also quite a few secretaries, cooks, and orderlies, many of them quite agreeable people who nevertheless seem to believe sincerely in the future of their nation and the nobility of their Fuhrer.

I have never been much interested in the gossipy details of Hitler's inner circle. Goebbels, Goering, Himmler, Speer, Hess—they're all the same to me. No doubt those who know the history will get more out the film than I did. In fact, I was surprised to learn how much is actually known about the last days of Hitler, and how many of those present in the bunker were alive until very recently. Downfall is not a documentary, but the final segment, which provides brief biographies of those characters who survived the collapse of the Reich, provides an almost shocking rundown of individuals who were present at all these goings-on, yet might later have become your next door neighbors!

Some have asked why such enormous effort should be lavished on so devilish a story, yet Downfall is worth watching simply for the vivid picture it draws of the demise of a wretched ideal. But beyond that, the film reminds us that Hitler was a human being who put his pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. It fleshes out the curious and ungodly mix of bravery, dedication, religious fervor, misplaced loyalty, and bad thinking that led to the deaths of 50 million people. Although the Nazis cultivated that mix with a fervor that may never be surpassed, they didn't invent it and they didn't exhaust its potential either.

Downfall reminds us that ideas can be very powerful, even when they're extremely wrongheaded. As a war film it is unique, and it will undoubtedly become a classic.

3

Whatever else may be said about him, it remains true that Jen-Luc Godard loves cinema with both passion and naivete. The “magic” of the big screen is something that he has clearly never outgrown. Notre Musique is the latest in a series of film essays that explore a particular concept—war, in this case—and as we watch it we become engrossed in the unfolding of an exposition that is both thought-provoking and visually intriguing, while remaining logically oblique.

The film is patterned on the Divine Comedy —Hell, Purgatory, Heaven—but the structure is convenient rather than meaningful. Hell, which lasts only ten minutes, consists of a barrage of war images drawn from both documentary footage and old Hollywood movies. It's a fascinating and beautiful montage, which may get us to thinking about both the senselessness of such destruction, and its deep-seated allure.

The bulk of the film—Purgatory—focuses on a conference being held in Sarejevo devoted to the role of the "text". As the participants assemble, we listen to the opinions of several intellectuals and artists who are attending, including the Spanish-exile novelist Juan Gotysolo and the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. We also become acquainted with a few other attendees, one or two Native Americans, and Godard himself, who delivers a lecture on the uses of shot-countershot both in film and in foreign policy. There is scattered talk about Israel and Palestine, Iraq, Kosovo and other flash-points of violence; as well as a discussion about suicide, and the role of image, word, and artist, in making sense of our world. Some of the pronouncements are gnomic, others are trite, yet Godard layers the ideas and images in such a way as to create a meditative web of feeling that has the flavor and impact of a meloncholy meditation rather than a political manifesto.

Godard has been with us for half a century, yet I think it can still besaid that no one makes film like Godard, no one thinks with images in quite the same way; and those who make the attempt are likely to be rewarded with indifference by audiences hungering for a tidy story, a dramatic climax, and a satisfying resolution. In Notre Musique Godard is exploring, among other things, the relations between the type of art that satisfies this desire for a tidy narrative “arc” and the ways we actually relate to our neighbors, but he is exploring it as poet, not a political scientist, and much of the appeal of his presentation is drawn from the rather cryptic nature of his theories. As E. M.Cioran, another grim and appealing French artist, once put the matter, “ We undermine any idea by entertaining it exhaustively; we rob it of charm, even of life....”

Is there meaning to be got from the fact that Godard's Heaven is a bucolic lake guarded by U.S. Marines? I don't know, but the touch reminds us of earlier Godard films that made far more strident use of such bizarre and pointed imagery. The overall effect of Notre Musique is one of elegiac brooding—thoughtful, fragmented, and distinctly French. It may be that such techniques are better suited to the themes of Godard's recent, and somewhat richer film, In Praise of Love , than to this very serious subject. All the same, we leave the theater feeling that we've been stirred on a subliminal level by images that both fascinate and appall, by ideas we find intriguing, and by others we know are wrong.

4

In this Medusa's Raft of dark features, I Heart Huckabees stands out as a odd-ball, but it isn't entirely out of place. The film is a mad-cap romp, and it would be difficult to detail the twists and turns of the plot without making it sound ridiculous, but at the heart of the film is a battle between two views of life, as represented by the psychoanalyst of “darkness” Isabelle Hubbert, and the team of cheerier existential therapists played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin. A young and idealistic environmentalist enlists the services of Hoffman and Tomlin, in an effort to come to grips with a series of seeming coincidences he's been experiencing. Meanwhile, his attempts to save a pasture from development are being co-opted by a PR man (Jude Law) from the company (Huckabees) that wants to build a mall there. Throw in a confused firefighter (Mark Wallberg) who's been reading the works of our princess of darkness, though he's a patient of the other two therapists, and a model (Naomi Watts) who has been groomed to become the voice and face of Huckabees—she also happens to be Law's live-in girl-friend—and you have all the elements of a pretentious film disaster.

The remarkable thing about I Heart Huckabees is that everything works. The film is fast-moving, smart, funny, unpredictable....and also philosophically sound. It stands head and shoulders above such well-meaning but half-baked New Age films as What the Bleep Do We Know in terms of content, and it thoroughly outstrips the droll and vacuous recent films of Wes Anderson in entertainment appeal.