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Movie Review

The End of Violence (1997)

September 12, 1997

FILM REVIEW; Is It Real, or Just a Bout Of Paralyzing Paranoia?

Published: September 12, 1997

Hollywood-style hubris has rarely been portrayed as indelibly as it is in an early scene of Wim Wenders's brilliant puzzle of a film, ''The End of Violence.'' In it a bullying producer of action-adventure films named Mike Max (Bill Pullman), who intermittently narrates the movie, is shown doing tough business while lounging beside the swimming pool on his opulent estate overlooking the Pacific.

Through a network of computers, telephones and fax machines, all within arm's reach, Max checks out the dailies of his newest movie, ''Seeds of Violence,'' intimidates a Japanese financier and has a face-to-face video conference with his assistant, Claire (Rosalind Chao), who mentions that a mysterious 400-page Government document about surveillance has been dropped into his E-mail.

Amid the hurlyburly, Max's neglected wife, Paige (Andie MacDowell), who is brooding only a few yards away inside the mansion, telephones her husband and calmly informs him she is leaving him. Although Max claims to love Paige, he also admits in a voice-over that he has taken pleasure in putting her through the emotional wringer.

Max's arrogant manipulation of all that gadgetry to bring a semblance of the world to his poolside throne sets the dark, paranoid mood of a film that artfully crunches together more intriguing speculation about technology, communications and the effects of mass media than a hundred science fiction fantasies. In exploring these ideas, ''The End of Violence,'' which has a smart, diagrammatic screenplay by Nicholas Klein, is schematic in the manner of 1960's European art films.

If some viewers are bothered by the movie's sacrifice of realism for the sake of intellectual musing, so be it. The movie, filmed by Pascal Rabaud with a ravishing hallucinatory feel for the soul of Los Angeles, spins out its paranoid fantasies with a free-spirited sense of possibility that the ambiguous final scene, set on the Santa Monica pier, lifts into high cinematic poetry. A gorgeous soundtrack by Ry Cooder featuring Jon Hassell on trumpet deepens the mood of cool, shivery beauty conjured by the cinematography.

That mysterious E-mail dropped into Max's computer turns out to be a secret Government plan for a sophisticated surveillance system to monitor the streets of Los Angeles via satellite and video camera. In fact it is already being tested. The sinister Government agent in charge of the operation (Daniel Benzali) insists that the system, if established, would deter street crime so effectively it could mean ''the end of violence.'' Running the secret operation is a NASA-trained expert in satellite communications named Ray (Gabriel Byrne), who operates this spy system from a grand, lonely observatory overlooking the city.

If Max is a Hollywood-style Master of the Universe, his sense of omnipotence abruptly shatters when he is carjacked by a pair of thugs who plan to shoot him and steal his Mercedes. In the movie's funniest moment, the desperate producer offers the killers ''a million bucks in points'' to set him free.

At this point, the film makes a small but crucial leap forward in time. The carjackers have been found dead, and Max is missing. When he is discovered by a group of Chicano gardeners on the edge of an estate, Max seems to be in shock, and they take him home with them. But once restored to health, Max is a changed man who remains undercover in the uniform of a gardener while the whole world continues to search for him.

Ray's surveillance system naturally has videotaped what happened to Max but not clearly enough for the details to be sorted out. The shots that killed the carjackers might have come from an overpass (echoing the grassy knoll theory of the Kennedy assassination), and they might have been intended for Max.

The scenes in which Ray reruns and enlarges these pictures pointedly recall Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film, ''Blow-Up,'' in which a young fashion photographer discovers that he may have inadvertently photographed a murder. But as Ray frantically develops larger and larger blow-ups of the scene, the images, instead of becoming clearer, become more diffuse and ambiguous.

As much as ''The End of Violence'' echoes ''Blow-Up,'' it is a lot more full-blooded, and ultimately it leaves little doubt as to what happened. It also brings a compelling assortment of subsidiary characters.

One is Cat (Traci Lind), a tough, streetwise stuntwoman whom Max impulsively casts as the lead in his new film just before his disappearance. Another is Doc (Loren Dean), a smart young police investigator who falls in love with Cat and who admits it was Max's action-adventure films that originally inspired him to become a policeman. Finally there is Mathilda (Marisol Padilla Sanchez), a Salvadoran housekeeper whose family was killed by the death squads and who is dispatched to spy on Ray while also working for him and becoming his lover.

In a story whose main characters all express varying levels of paranoia, a chilling chain of personal betrayals bears out their anxieties. Once Max is out of the picture, the vindictive Paige sets about taking over his business. She also embarks on an affair with Six (K. Todd Freeman), a cynical gangsta rapper who was working on a theme for Max's film.

''The End of Violence'' fits these characters together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, or you could say, like local radar transmissions from a satellite network forming an overview of some heavy weather. Further knitting together the film's meditations on violence, media, art, surveillance and paranoia are scenes of various solo readings in a Los Angeles performance space. In the most unsettling, a black poet named Ade (Nicole Parker) escapes into an imaginary alter ego, a white teen-ager in Beverly Hills, while being brutally molested by her father.

Midway through ''The End of Violence,'' one character wonders aloud whether the fact that certain nuclear particles change when they're being observed is applicable to human behavior. A corollary question (and it's a very old one) that drives ''The End of Violence'' is whether art changes things or simply reflects them. Mr. Wenders seems much more confident of art's transformative power than the Antonioni of ''Blow-Up,'' who left his mystery story hanging.

With ''The End of Violence'' Mr. Wenders has made a film as resonant as his most memorable work. His perspective on Hollywood and American mass culture has a wistfulness that feels quintessentially European. From a distance, Hollywood (and all the terrifying power exerted by its violent imagery over the global imagination) is finally just a world of dreams.

''The End of Violence'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations, glimpses of nudity and scattered profanity.


Directed by Wim Wenders; written by Nicholas Klein; director of photography, Pascal Rabaud; edited by Peter Przygodda; music by Ry Cooder; production designer, Patricia Norris; produced by Deepak Nayar, Mr. Wenders and Mr. Klein; released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Running time: 122 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Bill Pullman (Mike Max), Andie MacDowell (Paige), Rosalind Chao (Claire), Gabriel Byrne (Ray), Daniel Benzali (Phelps), Loren Dean (Doc), Traci Lind (Cat), Marisol Padilla Sanchez (Mathilda), K. Todd Freeman (Six) and Nicole Parker (Ade).

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