During
an early conversation scene in Killer Joe, there is a clear eyeline mismatch in a shot/reaction shot, a choice I took to be artistic until I realized that it never happened again during
the film and that it served no motivated purpose during its single appearance.
This kind of aesthetic shagginess is arguably suited to
a story that hovers around crooked trailer park denizens in Texas cooking up a murder scheme for insurance money; but for a
film that seems to want to insist on the flavor of its location (the backwaters of Dallas), no sense of place
or milieu is ever really developed. The film’s political allegory
is either incoherent or painfully obvious - I can't decide which - and, in any event, it is at
least five years out of date. And while Matthew McConaughey’s desire to
distance himself from Zellwegerian romantic comedies is commendable, I want to
gently suggest that performing an orgasm with a fried chicken leg inserted into the
mouth of one of your co-stars while keeping your pants on is perhaps going too
far in the other direction. Killer
Joe is a strange, discordant footnote in the actor's recent, and otherwise mostly
entertaining, career re-direction.
***
The Proposition is
about the procedures of emasculated civilization attempting to claim frontiers previously governed by the mysterious laws of hyper-masculine
violence. And this is what makes John Hillcoat interesting as a director; most
filmmakers intrigued by masculinity push it to the forefront, as if mere bloodshed is an insight into the
gruff male’s condition. Hillcoat, by contrast, keeps violent maleness brooding in the
shadows, emerging into light only in quick, startling, blood-curdling flashes
that are over as soon as they begin: a shovel over the head, a knife across the
throat. Lawless is, setting aside, about pretty much the same
thing as The Proposition, the earlier
film’s themes distilled into a simpler scenario and more economical scenes. Now
civilization comes in the form of a flamboyant Chicago fed played by Guy Pearce, and the mysterious, brooding hyper-masculinity is
embodied by Southern-fried bootlegging brothers Tom Hardy and Jason Clarke.
Shia LaBeouf, playing the youngest moonshining brother, is caught in the
middle, lacking both Hardy’s brooding physicality and Clarke’s traumatic Great
War experience. LaBeouf tries his hand at outwitting Pearce and wooing
a local church girl, two incommensurable tasks that give the movie fleeting
tension; his scenes with Mia Wasikowska are the best in the film and give it a momentum it sometimes lacks. Nick Cave’s script develops a
perspective for its violence about halfway through, when an intriguing ellipsis
and, later, a possibly unreliable voice-over suggest that all of this brooding
alpha-male posturing is little more than American mythology without content.
Gary Oldman’s presence falls
somewhere between a cameo and a rumor. He disappears after about an hour. I do not have the space or time to adequately transcribe the glow of Jessica Chastain’s gestures, so I will settle for an appreciative inventory of the objects in Lawless that come alive only after she
touches them: several cigarettes, a misplaced hat, a potato peeler, a coffee pot, a
bed railing, a shawl, Tom Hardy.
***
Spike Lee’s passion was never in doubt. In his best films,
this passion finds vibrant aesthetic correlatives that impact the audience. In
Do the Right Thing, it’s the hot reds of
a set design meant to indicate the hottest of hot New York summer days and the
percolating tensions in a racially divided community; in
Malcolm X it is how the intensity of his camera movements meet Denzel Washington’s stirring turn in an enlightening historical
groove; and in
25th Hour it
is his unflinching look at the wounds of 9/11 at a time when most Hollywood
movies were erasing all reference to the twin towers.
Red Hook Summer is full of passion but, unlike these earlier
films, I do not think it ever finds ways to consistently convey the
feeling to the audience. Its main motifs suggest that it is a transitional work
in Lee’s career, looking back at his origins in independent film but at the
same time wondering where this return to indie filmmaking might go.
Red Hook follows a young character named
Flik (Jules Brown), who arrives in Brooklyn to spend the summer with his grandfather, a
preacher named
Deacon Zee (
Thomas Jefferson Byrd). The generational gap between the two of
them is evident from the beginning: Flik frames the world through his iPad 2,
documenting the world around him through visual means, while the preacher
insists on the Word, using his sermons as a means to draw young Flik into the
religious fold. The preacher’s work makes for an entertaining spectacle, but
Flik is the real story, and his sweet friendship with
a teenager named Chazz (Toni Lysaith) provides
Red Hook with most if its grace notes.
Lee is interested in
exploring the contours of this community circa 2011, and it clearly is in tatters:
where Do the Right Thing saw
divisions in a community through race, in this semi-sequel the divisions are
primarily economic, intra-communal, and religious. A strange and unexpected plot development, about 90 minutes
through, reveals that these communal seams might have their origins in
deep-seeded psychological traumas. However, this narrative turn never quite settles
into the larger narrative context surrounding it, and Lee’s performers, who are mostly
non-professionals, are not quite able to convey the gravity of the situation.
