The Comedy of Fear

Jesus is Magic (2005; s. Sarah Silverman) . Comedy is violence. At least, that was my take-home message from Stranger in a Strange Land. In that novel, the hero raised on Mars doesn't understand what is funny until he sees what is cruel. And that lesson is written all over Jesus is Magic. Language drops like a bomb. You can actually feel the tension coil around you with every punchline, because you know whatever you're about to laugh at will be very funny, and very shaming all at once. Even knowing the cruelty is coming, you still feel ambushed, and exposed. I actually apologized to my friends before the movie started about the types of things I expected to be laughing at. And I was glad I did.

In the middle of all the bits about race and dead and raped grandmothers, Silverman does a small bit about the relationships between jokes and fear, and how she edited a punchline because she was afraid of offending audience members in the front because she felt threatened by them. It's a special moment in the movie, especially for someone as arch and sarcastic as Silverman--nobody's going after her the way that we went after Andrew Dice Clay, in part because Dice Clay was a hack, and in part because Silverman goes so much farther and is so much someone we identify with that we can't go after her without going after ourselves. Andrew Dice Clay exposed a cliche about the dumb white guy, but cartooned him up to get away with it.

When Silverman discusses being intimidated by her own anxiety into changing the punchline, she tips her hand. It ain't just jokes--it's revelatory. Silverman dresses like us, talks like us, seduces us--she has an indelible wink in her delivery, but the reason we want to give her the benefit of the doubt is because we give ourselves the same benefit of the doubt with regards to the nastiness that lurks behind our eyes. And in being courageous enough to expose it, it gets exorcised, just a little. Because instead of being scary/psycho, it's funny.

Or, more accurately, in addition to being scary/psycho, it's funny.

Next Time: Crossroads (Compare and Contrast: Ralph Macchio vs. Britney Spears)

WWCD?

Capote (2005; d. Bennett Miller; s. Phillip Seymour Hoffman; Catherine Keener). You have to talk about the performances first in Capote. This film, along with The 40-Year-Old Virgin will hopefully break Keener out of her bitch goddess ghetto. In both films, Keener jobs like Shawn Michaels (ask Frank who this is), gaining audience sympathies with the misfit men, not through unconditional positive regard for Capote and Carrell, but instead via her honest recognition of their liabilities in concert with brave and thoughtful exhibition of her own character's raw edges. Keener reminds me of that quote about Ginger Roberts did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. At least half the reason Hoffman and Carrell give such great performances is she lets these two actors crawl so far out on the limb, and remains a lighthouse for our continued interest in how things will turn out for them.

Still and all, it's Hoffman's show. Hoffman transforms for Capote, moreso than Flawless. I've always thought of Hoffman in part in terms of his physicality--his heft and his height (although I don't know if he's actually a tall man at all--could be more related to our usual stereotypes about actors). In Capote, he manages to look downright tiny, while still commanding our attention in ever scene through his seductive insinuation and preening narcissism. He is, in short, a star.

Capote has its mind on the classics; it's all about hubris and self-destruction. It's also one of the best movies about writing ever made. Capote's intricate, honest portraitures of the people in his life relies on two qualities: his immense empathy for them, and his scathing anger for the way in which they keep him at a distance. In destroying Perry Smith, Capote seeks to destroy that outsider part of himself; however, his disconnection and subsequent murder of that outsider destroys one of the fundamental qualities he needs to write.

The movie itself shares many of Capote's qualities. I winced my way through every scene, dying a little everytime Capote made another choice to kill himself by inches. What makes it worse is that the movie makes us aware that Capote knows what he's doing all the way down, and is suffering for it. At the same time, the film has such empathy for those choices, it's hard to turn our backs on him (as with Harper Lee--thanks Cath). How many times have we nodded along with the movie scenario where a character sacrifices his life for a greater cause. And how much has In Cold Blood changed the way we read and write?

Next Time: The Lil Bow Wow Ouevre

This Title Will Include No Puns on Sucking

Jarhead (2005, d. Sam Mendes, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx). Jarhead is a document of the same kind of soldier in a new kind of war. The movie is infused with images from other war films (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and most notably Full Metal Jacket), which has led to more than a few reviews that suggest that Jarhead is ripping off these films...espeically Full Metal Jacket.

Most reviews have made much of the fact that Jarhead features homages/ripoffs of these earlier films, with the exception that nothing actually happens in Jarhead...there are no battle scenes. Even the movie calls its shot, so to speak. As the Marines finally cross the border into Iraq and prepare for action, Sarsgaard watches the planes flying overhead. He comments on the fact that this is a new war, and that it is outrunning them. Meanwhile, the men are trapped in talking about war in its old form, and via the popular media experiences that guided them to it in the first place.

Movies, particularly the Vietnam movies (at least currently), have created our sense of what war is, and how much the new media access to war is tearing those myths down. In a sense, Jarhead poses a variation on the guiding question from High Fidelity--did love create pop music, or was it the other way around?

For Jarhead, the answer is both. Jarhead talks about how these men, particularly Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard's characters, are extremely ordinary men with no real prospects, who have come to war in search of personal meaning on this visceral level. They are looking for the mythic power of the movies in their lives, almost like a life and death version of the NBA. Watch the almost desperate look in their eyes as they celebrate the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now.

The desperation in the Marines' eyes in that scene mirrors the later desperation we see in Gyllenhaal's eyes when watching a surprise porn film, only the second time, it's tempered with a new sense of reality and sadness because there is actual loss--of relationships, and the last remaining vestiges of fantasies about what the war would contribute to a sense of meaning and self. As the boredom sets in, as the realization that they may never see the action they seek, that they may never confront death and defeat it, that they may never be heroes, the men begin to fall apart.

That said, the movie itself is only very good, not great. It is limned with a certain artifice, much like this sentence. Except for Swofford's name, all the characters are more types than people, and I can't be bothered to look up their names on imdb. Also, as my friend Jon put it, the movie goes on for exactly five minutes too long. Finally, the film is art directed to within an inch of its life, which takes away some of the urgency of the movie. Still, I think Jarhead represents a shift in the war movie; as we are exposed to actual footage (well, "actual" edited footage) on CNN and Fox News, and documentaries like Gunner Palace, we too are coming to terms with a different kind of war movie, rooted with one foot in the mythologies of Band of Brothers and the Vietnam movies, and the other in the down and dirty disappointments of what it truly means to go to war--boredom, spiked with intermittent moments of sheer unfettered terror.

Kinda like life.

Next Time: Honey