Good Life, Bad Life, Tricky Cinema
Struts, frets, and sniper scopes: this week in film and triggers
This week we find a lighter, more capricious Sleeveen: some silly thoughts on newish films that haven’t been parsed quite to our satisfaction. But first, a first word from Masshole Corner.
Many years ago, a friend’s 9-year-old sister from Medford, Mass complained of people mispronouncing her hometown’s name. “It’s not ‘MEH-fuh,’” she said, reproducing a common classist, idiocy-imputing pronunciation. “It’s pronounced ‘Med-FID.’”
I must have said this exact thing or something like it a thousand times growing up in Greater Boston, a place you can’t quite see or hear until you’re well outside it. Or when you’re among people from elsewhere who wonder what the hell you’re saying, and more generally you’re your problem is. All of which is by way of giving a quick shout out to Medford’s own International Brotherhood of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who yesterday managed to make a US Senator, Oklahoma Republican Markwayne Mullin — yes, the name’s “Markwayne” — turn a congressional hearing about working families into a junior high cafeteria.
I won’t render the whole scene here, and I’m definitely not siding with either party. I just want to acknowledge how little it takes — in this case, just mick skinhead O’Brien’s taunt — “Eh, tough guy!” — to give me such fight-or-flight contact high that I could almost sympathize with the burly, bearded MAGA Republican who wanted to fistfight him in the chamber. Almost, but not really. Extra shout-out to Bernie Sanders for his abrupt transformation into a homeroom teacher, yelling to his junior colleague: “You are a United States senator!”
Eh, tough guy.
The two streaming films under discussion pass judgment on two lives, one good, one bad, and both suffer in fascinating ways.
Let’s start with the very good life and pretty bad doc, Rob Reiner’s Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, a labor of love that would be utterly harmless if its subject weren’t one of the three or four comic masterminds of the past 70 years. Reiner, Brooks’ lifelong friend and former high-school classmate, frames the narrative of Brooks’ life as a dinner conversation between two septuagenarian nepo babies: Reiner, the son of post-war TV comedy giant Carl Reiner, and Brooks, the son of the more marginal but quirkier and more original Borscht Belt comic Harry Einstein, a comic best known for a Greek character he played named Parkyakarkus (or “park-your-carcass”) and for literally dying onstage at a Friars Club Roast (right after reportedly killing).
Not all biographies of comedians need to be funny, and there’s an argument to be made that this is even truer for man widely reputed to be the funniest man alive. But a film that shows so much palpable affection for the friend, parent, inspiration Albert Brooks makes me feel awful for the actual comic Albert Brooks, who has spent a career sending up this exact kind of Hollywood cuddle session. Reiner cuts from his restaurant chat to living-room interviews with David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Sarah Silverman, and, why not, Steven Spielberg, while interspersing these with a few of the more legendary bits that, crushingly, don’t quite come off in this context.
Which gets to my one real issue with this treatment: it’s so unlikely to attract the unconverted. It’s hard to imagine anyone who’s seen even a fraction of Brooks’ films, even just Lost in America, not recognizing a performing artist whose birth name, Albert Einstein, is just a bit too on-the-nose. The same genius that family friends like Carl Reiner recognized in the teenage Brooks is the one who turned emerging tropes of late-century life — dating egomania, yuppie malaise, reality television — into spaces for his own sui generis performance style, one that, crucially, tends to instrumentalize the context he appears in.
In groundbreaking films like Real Life and Modern Romance he built the context himself, but in his legend-making run on late-night talk shows, Brooks would make the production itself — couch, studio, TV station — crucial elements of his act. Part of his genius was a genius for playing with form and context and the closest Defending My Life gets to presenting this is when Dave Letterman and his guest Rob Reiner place an on-air phone call to Brooks, who turns the supposed impromptu call into an opportunity for his dog to perform one of the Letterman trademark Stupid Pet Tricks, in this case speaking English, through Brooks’ tortured talking-dog impression. (To even describe it like this does some undefinable harm.)
Years ago, I trailed Bob Odenkirk around the set of a film he was making with his HBO’s “Mr Show” partner David Cross, when he passingly mentioned that all good comedy is “performance based.” I think this is what Chris Rock is getting at in the doc when he says that Brooks is so good that you can’t steal from him, and if you did you wouldn’t know what to do with it. The manic inventiveness of his comedy, especially from the ‘70s to ‘80s is rightly legendary, but it’s fused at the core with his abilities as an actor, with the visible, deranged commitment we see in his eyes and hear in his voice to whatever preposterous situation he puts himself in.
So when I see someone this sharp, subversive, and deeply thoughtful about comedy, acting, and performance receive a Lifetime Achievement Award treatment, I see a graduating senior, surrounded by loving, beaming family members, who, with the very best of intentions, give him the ugliest sweater he’s ever seen as a graduation gift. He’ll smile, shrug, and put it on, and figure, ah well, that’s life.
Now to the bad life: that of the unnamed title character of David Fincher’s new The Killer.
To me, the most fascinating thing about this film has been watching top critics write around its poverty of ideas, plot, tension, emotional logic, and satisfying action in order to give one of Hollywood’s last bankable auteurs a decent grade. I completely sympathize.
There’s something gravely impressive about an artist whose fealty to his own muse would, in today’s Hollywood, lead him to a box office-flouting project like 2020s’ Mank, in which Fincher which took his screenwriter dad’s script about screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, and his torturous path to producing the screenplay of Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane. Following through on the conceit to the very bitter end, Mank narrates the behind-the-scenes David-and-Goliath tale— busted alcoholic scribe vs. Hollywood golden boy, mogul William Hearst vs. socialist gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair — with the black-and-white tonal palette, focal depth, and epic sweep of Welles’ 1941 masterpiece. To a casual film goer, this isn’t inside baseball but inside inside baseball and, though the chronology doesn’t quite work, I could see this art film about the art of cinema as the pied piper that led Damien Chazelle to ruin with Babylon.
So it feels unwise to write off this consummate craftman’s latest as mere blunder or phoning it in. The Killer has its pleasures, just fewer than you’d expect, and deployed to no clear end. Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt creates lovely compositions, like that opening camera drift past the windows of an abandoned WeWork site as dawn Parisian rooftops rearrange themselves with perspective shifts. Editor Kirk Baxter provides a stately pacing that contrasts with the close-quarter chaos; Michael Fassbender has a rangy walk and does a solid deadpan American accent. Some nice diegetic Smiths tracks. But I’m damned if I can find a point to any of it.
After botching a hit at the beginning, our killer suffers blowback — or rather his Dominican Republic-residing girlfriend suffers it for him — and so, with no discernible change of affect, he seeks to terminate the terminators, seemingly less out of revenge than pure anal-retentiveness. Thus: a dangerous man on the run, jetting from city to international city, fake passports, gun silencers, key-copying gizmos, a cinegenic workout regime. You know, a bit of revenge, a bit of whodunit, Paul Schrader does Jason Bourne, Michael Mann’s Collateral meets Fight Club meets American Psycho meets a Four Seasons hotel-room video on luxury accommodations for business travelers. Sleek surfaces, moral emptiness, ‘80s bands: it’s all a bizarrely retro, excavating Reagan-era fiction tropes to install them among late-capitalist fixtures like Starbucks and abandoned WeWork suites.
Our killer, who’s clearly an allegory for something — I buy Max Read’s contention that he’s a sigma male as much as anything else — works his way tiresomely up the corporate food chain, dressed in German-tourist drag and going from one airless interior to the next, his voiceover flipping through that sub-genre of men’s self-help that’s also society-hurt — “empathy is a weakness,” “trust no one” — until, when he finally gets to the head of the snake, he makes a decision that’s so incomprehensible within the film’s reality that it must fit some meta-filmic critique about late-capitalist machismo that I’d probably rather read in essay form. Unless, the whole film is an attempt to kill the sexy-assassin genre, in which case, fair play.
Some call the film a procedural, which it is in the sense of watching the procedure whereby paint dries. Some critics praise the script’s “humor,” by which they must mean the title character’s shit-posting voiceovers from the manosphere — “skepticism is often mistaken for cynicism,” “he couldn’t spell ‘CAT if you spotted him the A and the T.” — which are about as third as funny as Morrissey lyrics and, rather than expressing some fascinating neuroatypicality sound like bog-standard misanthropy. One critic nods to the “phenomenal running bit about the assassin’s fake names” - said running bit being that they’re characters from ‘70s sitcoms. As in, “Glad to have you with us, Mr. Unger,” cut to: name tag, Felix Unger. Personally, I’d downgrade this bit from “phenomenal” to “cute,” and it’s unfathomable in a character ostensibly striving to be forgotten.
Throughout his voiceover monologues, Mr. Personality misquotes Dylan Thomas and Alistair Crowley, shows a Sorkinesque weakness for wiki stats (“140 million human beings are born every second, the worldwide population is approximately 7.8 billion…”), and generally suffer a lethal shortage of what screenwriting gurus would call “stakes.” Why does he do what he does, other than pure misanthropy. If we’re looking for what makes an assassin tick, we can’t improve on what Max Von Sydow’s hitman Joubert tells Robert Redford 50-odd years ago in Three Days of the Condor: “It’s quite restful,” he says of life as a hired gun. “It's almost peaceful. No need to believe in either side, or any side. There is no cause. There's only yourself. The belief is in your own precision.”
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve used some version of this line to live with my own participation in late-capitalism — well, I’d participate in the game a whole lot less.
Bye now!