Which word best describes how the film reviewer conceives of Velvet Goldmine's direction?
Warrior Queens
Elizabeth is a lurid
paraphrase of the old Groucho Marx line about Doris Day: "I knew the Virgin
Queen before she was a virgin." As the movie tells it, she was a sylvan,
redheaded princess (Cate Blanchett) given to gamboling with her fella (Joseph
Fiennes) between periods of internment in the Tower of London on charges of
conspiring to overthrow her half-sister, the heatedly Catholic Queen Mary
(Kathy Burke). The daughter of the second wife of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and
therefore dubbed a bastard by the papists, the Protestant Elizabeth ascends the
throne to find the air still thick with smoke from roasted heretics, a team of
skulking Catholics plotting her assassination, and a council of advisers
(lords, bishops, sundry old boys) who snigger openly at the prospect of taking
orders from a woman. Only a strategic marriage to a Spaniard or a Frenchman
will mollify all factions, her advisers insist, but the pickings prove dismal.
(Her French suitor enjoys wearing dresses.) After skulls are smashed, throats
slit, and bosoms skewered in the name of Christ, Elizabeth decides to: a)
"unsex" herself and become a symbol--the Virgin Queen, married only to England;
and b) entertain dissenting opinions exclusively from those whose heads are
affixed to spikes.
You can't
be both a queenly queen and a womanly woman, says the script (by Michael
Hirst)--at least not in 1554. (The director, Shekhar Kapur, made the same point
in his grim 1994 Indian epic The Bandit Queen , against a backdrop of
scrubby plains along the Ganges.) Is this feminist take historically accurate?
Probably, although the evidence suggests that Elizabeth had developed a head
for stratagems earlier in life (her position had been precarious since the
beheading of her mother) and came to the throne with few girlish illusions
about How Things Work in a barbarous state.
That said, the movie's approach makes for juicy melodrama.
The tone of Elizabeth comes nearer to the nihilistic relish of Jacobeans
such as John Ford and John Webster than to the more sorrowful horror of the
Elizabethan dramatists Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. It's even closer to
a Jacobean drama of our own age: The Godfather (1972), which it emulates
by cutting back-and-forth between queen and courtiers in prayer and the roundup
and slaughter of Catholics on their privies, in bed with their mistresses, and
so on. Their severed heads look on, wide-eyed, as Elizabeth directs her hair to
be shorn--images of her girlhood flashing by as her locks rain down--and then
walks weightily to her throne, now a chalk-faced gorgon.
With all
due respect to Blanchett, Bette Davis, and Glenda Jackson, my favorite
Elizabeth I remains Miranda Richardson's capricious, baby-talking psychopath on
the BBC comedy Blackadder II . (Casting about for a new lord high
executioner, she mews to Rowan Atkinson, "There are thousands of Catholics
simply dying to have their heads sneaked off --and there's no one to
organize it.") But Blanchett comes in a close second, pulling off the
transition from hapless young woman to coolly ruthless monarch with uncommon
subtlety. Gradually expunging all empathy from her moist, pink eyes and
permitting her visage to ossify, she gives this carnival of carnage an
awe-inspiring center.
A more subversive sort of queen is on display
in Velvet Goldmine , Todd Haynes' musical fantasia on the early '70s era
of "glam" or "glitter" rock. Here the monarch is a David Bowie-esque singer
called Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) and his spidery, space-age alter ego,
Maxwell Demon. The movie opens with a spaceship depositing an infant Oscar
Wilde on the stoop of a Dublin townhouse. Then it skips ahead to track a jade
pin (it signifies hedonistic liberation) from the custody of a young Wilde to a
swishy fringe creature called Jack Fairy to the regal Slade, a bisexual
superstar who carries the news to all the young dudes. After that, we're in an
Orwellian 1984 that's presided over by a vaguely fascist president and by arena
rockers who serve as propagandists for a repressively conformist state.
Whatever happened to Brian Slade, the glitter kids, the visionary
exhibitionists and gleeful poseurs? Borrowing its framework from Citizen
Kane , the movie follows a reporter (Christian Bale) assigned to reconstruct
Slade's life and solve the mystery of his whereabouts.
Whatever you make of
Velvet Goldmine (opinions have ranged from rapturous to casually
dismissive), it's like no other musical ever made. It's determinedly swirling,
discursive, elliptical. Now the story is told by an omniscient narrator, now a
TV reporter, now a participant. Now it's flashing back, now forward. Every
other line of dialogue is a cue for one of its dazzling numbers, largely covers
of songs by Brian Eno, Bryan Ferry, and T. Rex. The narrative is a challenge to
keep up with, but then, great artists often invent their own syntax. In the
'80s, Haynes employed Barbie dolls to depict the rise and wasting away from
anorexia of the singer Karen Carpenter. Lucky audiences who caught
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (it was shelved when Richard
Carpenter served the producers with an order to cease and desist exhibition)
began by laughing at this elaborately posed, soft-rock femme, only to discover
by the climax that the cultural forces that were eating at her (and that kept
her from eating) had grown heartbreakingly palpable. Poison (1991),
Haynes' Genêt-inspired exploration of transgression, didn't overcome its own
artiness. But Safe (1995), the story of a Reagan-era housewife (Julianne
Moore) convinced that her environment is poisoning her, is an entrancing
meditation on the power of culture to crush the individual. Despite its ironic
detachment, the film draws you into its heroine's sickly state: Breathing
oxygen from a canister inside a high-tech igloo, she dwindles to nearly
nothing, the modern incarnation of the Incredible Shrinking Man.
(It was
partly my passion for Haynes' films that led me to accept a job offer from his
indefatigable producer Christine Vachon last year to collaborate on a
nuts-and-bolts book about producing, Shooting To Kill . So my review of
Velvet Goldmine --like my review of
Vachon's other recent release, Happiness --should be read as the work of
a partisan. But not a blind partisan.)
In Velvet Goldmine , Haynes sets out to demonstrate
the power of popular music to change people's lives--to tell them it's OK to
fashion themselves into anything they please. The core of the movie turns out
not to be the Bowie figure but the journalist, Arthur Stuart, who was a witness
to the events he's now reconstructing. Bale is such an expressive performer
that Stuart's remembrance of things past attains a Proustian intensity. To him,
Slade was a sexual messiah. I've never seen a more vivid distillation of rock's
allure than the scene in which he reverently opens the new Brian Slade
album--its centerfold image is a lithe, naked, green-tinged Maxwell
Demon--slips the vinyl out of its paper jacket and, after gingerly setting the
LP on the turntable, props a chair under the doorknob to keep the
uncomprehending world at bay.
But if Haynes wants Velvet
Goldmine to be an anthem to the principles Bowie once embodied--the embrace
of artifice and the smashing of conventional sexual roles--he also wants to
portray the rocker as a hollow opportunist who abandoned glam and bisexuality
for the life of a corporate superstar, throwing in his lot with the forces of
repression. That's a lot to cover. An actor of stature might have bridged these
two impulses, but the beautiful, brazenly slim-hipped Rhys-Meyers doesn't make
his lines sound as if he's thinking them up on the spot, and Slade's
self-destructive passion for Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), the film's fuzzy, sweet
Iggy Pop figure, seems less an emotional imperative than a thematic one.
A case can
be made that Velvet Goldmine isn't fully filled in, and that Haynes, who
has never shaken off his background as a semiotics major, has made a movie
that's all signifiers. I sometimes found myself wishing he would let the
picture catch its breath, that the performers would stop coming at me in
stroboscopic flashes. But then I'd be swept up in the sinuous motion of his
filmmaking, in the elation of watching point of view passed like a baton from
hand to hand, in the liberating force of his language and soundtrack. Velvet
Goldmine might seem like a collection of baubles, but those baubles are
strung.
Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case
could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A. Pitt plays
two roles in this seven course schlockfest. He's (briefly) a slick but
wholesome yuppie and then (interminably) Death, who takes over the young man's
body when he's thumped by a couple of cars in the movie's most promising
moment. Bleached so blond that he looks like an irradiated android, Pitt expels
all expression from his face and all tone from his voice. He speaks very, very
slowly. The stunt half-works, at least until he's supposed to undergo an inner
transformation and acquire human emotions--whereupon his face remains just as
blank. Pitt's conception of the role is an idée fixe by someone who
doesn't appear to have an idée in his head.
Martin
Brest, the director, is known for shooting a ton of footage and then "finding"
his films in the editing room. What do you suppose he "found" when he
scrutinized these miles of celluloid with Pitt doing nothing and taking his
sweet time doing it? The first adaptation of this story (originally a play) was
the 1934 Death Takes a Holiday , which came in at a perky 78 minutes. A
conceit this fragile needs to whiz along to keep our disbelief in suspension,
but Meet Joe Black grinds on for three hours (longer than either
Beloved or Saving Private Ryan ), and Pitt acts as if he has
leased the screen by the year.
Anthony Hopkins plays the zillionaire communications baron
whom Death enlists in the hope of understanding the human condition--an odd
choice for a tour guide, since most people's condition doesn't involve personal
helicopters, sprawling mansions on Long Island Sound, or Manhattan apartments
that sport Olympic-size swimming pools. Four screenwriters, among them the
great Bo Goldman ( Melvin and Howard , 1980; Shoot the Moon , 1982),
labored on this moldy script, which features characters who ask questions that
begin "Am I to understand that ...?" and a corporate villain who directs
another character to "wake up and smell the thorns." It apparently never
occurred to even one of these overpaid scribes to eliminate Hopkins' rueful
realization that he'd "never write the great American novel"--no kidding, given
his flagrantly Welsh accent.
Actually, Hopkins gives this
humanistic magnate considerable weight, so that whether or not Death takes him
before he can stop to smell the roses and make amends to his neglected children
becomes a matter of some suspense. The rest of the cast works with equal
fortitude, especially Jeffrey Tambor (Hank "Hey now!" Kingsley on The Larry
Sanders Show ) as Hopkins' milksop son-in-law and Marcia Gay Harden as his
party planning, perpetually wilting elder daughter. As the younger daughter,
the dark eyed, spaghetti thin Claire Forlani has to carry the picture's bathos
on her exquisite shoulders. Her tremulous thoroughbred act wears thin, but it's
hardly her fault: She has to emote like mad opposite a black pit of death--or
is that the Black Death of Pitt?
luxurious circuitous incoherent graphic