Never Forget

The New York Sun, December 22, 2005

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

In the end, perhaps, communism will be remembered not so much for what it left behind as for what it didn't. The decades of totalitarian rule annihilated cultures, brutalized civilizations, and crushed the hopes of generations. These were the plague years, a time of slaughter on a scale never seen before: The authoritative "Black Book of Communism" (1999) puts the death toll at around 100 million, and the tally of those who passed through the Gulag, the Lao Gai, and other lesser-known hells exceeds that.

While these horrors are generally acknowledged, it is grudgingly and tacitly; there has been no Soviet Nuremberg and has never been a proper reckoning. Wander today through the cities of the old communist bloc, and there is an uneasy sense that something is not quite right. It's even there in the architecture, haunting those buildings that have managed to hang on since the time before the red flag flew. Often now beautifully restored, they stand isolated and incongruous amid the stained concrete of communism and the gimcrack glitter of the cut-and-paste capitalism that followed. Elderly, elegant mourners at a slapdash, shabby funeral, these relics are quiet, reproachful reminders of the way of life annihilated by the builders of the radiant future. They are hints of a tragedy that deserves far more explicit commemoration.

In Russia itself, now presided over by a former secret policeman, recognition of the crimes of the past is a sporadic, compromised, and listless affair. Here and there, the determined visitor can certainly find an exhibit, a statue, a tumbledown camp barracks, but these are mere scraps of mourning, an insult to the dead, apallingly compounded by the current government's nostalgia for the communist era. Earlier this fall, a bust of "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky, the mass murderer who founded the Cheka - what became the KGB - was reinstalled in front of the Interior Ministry building in Moscow. He was being honored, one police spokesman said, for his work with orphans and street children. How nice.

Outside Russia, matters are often more straightforward. Communism can be portrayed, sometimes not quite accurately, as something imposed, some thing foreign. Thus newly freed Latvia was among the first to establish an occupation museum, while in Lithuania the cells of the Vilnius KGB were quickly opened up to give their dank, depressing glimpse of atrocity. In many other parts of the fallen empire, too, there are memorials, museums, archives, each designed to extract something, anything, from the wreckage of history.

It's a measure of the Kremlin's reach that one of these museums is located in an old, shabby wooden house, tucked away in a corner of Ulan Bator (Ulaanbataar), the capital of faraway Mongolia.And it's a measure of its nature that what's found inside is a record of cruelty that Genghis himself would have appreciated. The house once belonged to Peljidiin Genden, a Mongolian prime minister executed in Moscow on Stalin's orders in November 1937. (Genden's successor was to meet the same fate in the same city, just four years later.) Russia's Bolsheviks may have played a critical part in bolstering Mongolia's independence from China in the struggles of 1920-21, but within a short time, Mongolian self-determination was reduced to a lethal and contemptuously transparent sham.

In the 1920s and 1930s this nation at the ends of the earth found itself subjected to the prescriptions, psychoses, and millennial fantasies of a gang of revolutionary despots thousands of miles to the west. Class enemies had to be eliminated, the kulak threat dealt with, and agriculture collectivized. In Mongolia at that time, class enemies in the usual sense were few and far between, no capitalists were to be found, kulaks were inconveniently scarce, and collectivization would destroy a pastoral, nomadic culture that had endured for thousands of years. No matter.The plan had to be fulfilled. And it was.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

A large, angry painting on the first floor of Genden's house shows just how. It's a series of vignettes - part Bosch, part Bayeux - painted against a characteristic landscape of high plains and bright blue sky. In each, soldiers in the flat caps and jackboots of another country's revolution are shown, at times in unbearable detail, beating, shooting, interrogating, raping. A monastery is ablaze. A ger (a Mongolian yurt) is ran sacked. Death comes from hatchet, firing squad, or bullet in the back of the head. Bodies are left unburied, a feast for the vultures that wait. It is no surprise to be told that the artist's father perished during those years.The old order had little with which it could defend itself against the rage of the state. Weapons used in uprisings against the authorities are displayed in a glass case: pikes, some swords, a few old rifles and pistols; not much use,really,against machine guns, artillery, and tanks.

Elsewhere, the typical detritus of communist rule is on display: copies of long-forgotten edicts, photographs of long-forgotten trials, and, as always in such exhibits, the images of those who disappeared into the 100 million. Sometimes these are mug shots of the newly arrested - shock, terror, resignation. On other occasions the victims are recorded in earlier life, in a smart suit, at a conference, resplendent in the robes of a Buddhist priest - unaware of what fate had in store.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The centerpiece of the Genden house is a waxwork tableau of an interrogation. An officer in the security forces sits facing a prisoner. The interrogator's face is harsh and unforgiving. The prisoner is slumped in his chair, head bowed. Skulls on display upstairs demonstrate where such interrogations often led. They were uncovered during the excavation of a ravine near Ulan Bator two or three years ago. In all, the remains of around 1,000 people were found, just a small portion of the tens of thousands butchered or imprisoned at this time. Buddhist monks were a particular target. In August 1938 one Soviet "adviser" wrote happily that "the top ecclesiastics had been eliminated" and that most of the country's temples had been reduced to "ash heaps." There are good reasons why Ulan Bator is today a formulaically drab Soviet city.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

The dictatorship fell in 1990, taking with it the statue of Stalin that had, incredibly, remained outside the national library until then (it later reappeared in a disco), but the murderous Georgian's local surrogate, Marshal Choibalsan, still preens on his plinth outside Ulan Bator's university, inspiring the youth of Mongolia to who knows what. Choibalsan's Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party, scrubbed, buffed, and brought tactfully up to date, is prominent in the country's government.

Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution, Ulan Bator, Mongolia, May 2005   © Andrew Stuttaford

Still, Mongolia has made a better job of coming to terms with the realities of communism than most. Even here in the United States, the country that patiently, marvelously, and miraculously wore down the evil empire, the crimes of communism's past are regularly played down in a way that, if it were those of the Third Reich that were under discussion, would rightly be condemned.

And communism was never just a foreign scourge, irrelevant to those fortunate enough to live on this side of the Atlantic.Thousands of Americans died fighting the Cold War's hot wars in Southeast Asia, Korea, or the more shadowy conflicts elsewhere. Millions of others either fled the execution chambers and concentration camps of the Great Utopia or had family members who managed the same feat, if they were lucky, or found themselves trapped, or worse, if they were not.

Defeating this system was an American triumph. That it took so long was an American tragedy.Yet it is a part of the past that many in this country seem oddly unwilling either to acknowledge or, even, to understand. So, for example, the nonprofit Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established by Congress as long ago as 1993, but it's only now that construction has started in Washington, D.C., on the memorial it has commissioned, a 10-foot bronze replica of the statue to democracy that so briefly graced Tiananmen Square. And it's a second-best solution. Plans for a $100 million museum similar to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum have long since been abandoned: The necessary funds could not be raised.

A dollar for each of the dead was, it seems, too much to ask.

A Marvelous Excursion in the Lion's Kingdom

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

The New York Sun, December 8, 2005

If there's one thing that Brits of the old school didn't appreciate, it was a fuss, and if there's one thing we know about the repressed, eccentric, and misogynistic C.S. Lewis, it's that he was a Brit of the old school. Nevertheless, it's easy to imagine that Lewis, a man who relished vigorous debate, would have enjoyed the fuss that has newly enveloped his Narnia in controversy, rancor, and - from the faithful - fresh adulation. As scolds scold, his vision is sexist, Anglocentric, and - fashionably - maybe even Islamophobic. The Narnia stories are, allegedly, cunning and deceitful propaganda for that nasty Jesus, an insidious trap for generations of unwary secularist tots. Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik even cast doubts on Lewis' grasp of Christian theology. Aslan should, he wrote, have been something less glorious, a donkey, perhaps, rather than a lion. Aslan an ass? As if.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the culture wars, great hopes have been pinned on the Disney version of the lion's tale. The film was co-produced by a billionaire Christian entrepreneur (Philip Anschutz and his Walden Media) and even endorsed by the odd but oddly influential Focus on the Family. Sensing that this movie may be a second coming of "The Passion of the Christ," other evangelical groups have discreetly dropped the boycott long imposed on Disney for gay days, the Weinstein brothers, and other offenses. Disney has returned the compliment, enlisting evangelicals and Christian marketing groups to help promote the movie.

But all this is to miss the point. The tales of Narnia were always intended as something subtler than allegory. It's easy for a child to read them and miss the Christian resonance altogether (age 8 or 9, I did). As Lewis recalled, the first inspiration for the stories was visual - not spiritual - a picture that came to him "of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood," and much of the force, and the wonder, of these books comes from the striking images they contain. These images, especially when reinforced by Pauline Baynes's marvelous illustrations, do so much to bring this fictional world to vivid, memorable, and compelling life.

In this, and not only this, this movie version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," directed by Andrew Adamson of "Shrek" fame, is a terrific interpretation of Lewis's vision. An earlier attempt, the BBC's 1988 version (available on DVD in this country, but don't bother), was shipwrecked by puppet level performances, primitive effects, and a budget that cannot have exceeded £5, 2 pence, and a prayer. Stagy and contrived, it had the conviction of a pantomime horse, or, more accurately, lion, and belongs with Ralph Bakshi's atrocious "Lord of the Rings" in that special hell reserved for those movies that turn Inklings' dreams into dross. By contrast, the CGI that underpins Mr. Adamson's film will transport its audiences into a Narnia of witches, fauns, minotaurs, monsters (younger members of the audience will get a fright or two, which will probably do them good), giants, and talking animals as effectively as the train in the movie's early sequences carries the Pevensie children from the London Blitz into the depths of the lush, green English countryside (New Zealand, actually, once again passing itself off as the Shire), the heart of an Albion where landscape, legend, and history merge into myth.

These effects pass their toughest test in the film's climax, which is, if we're honest about it, a battle between two menageries. Handled incorrectly, this could easily descend into absurdity, but instead we're shown a stirring struggle that matches anything witnessed at Helm's Deep, and which does more than justice to that sense of the epic that plays so large a part in the enchantment that is Narnia.

As even the hapless nerds who plowed their weary way through the three most recent "Star Wars" films could tell you, though, special effects by themselves are not enough. The strength of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is that it not only features animals that can talk, it also boasts actors who can act. Almost without exception, the fine cast (even, such as in the case of Rupert Everett's delightful fox, when we only hear their voices) adds to the pleasure of the film, but it is Tilda Swinton's extraordinary Jadis who succeeds in stealing the movie despite failing to hang on to Narnia. With her almost translucent skin and austere, angular Scots features, Ms. Swinton is a natural to portray Lewis's witch:

"Her face was white - not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth. It was a beautiful face in other respects, but proud and cold and stern."

And she is, as Ms. Swinton's commanding performance leaves no doubt, every inch a queen and in every thought and deed a force for bleak, relentless evil.

The young actors and actresses playing the four children who stand between the White Witch and her winter without end are more than up to the challenge, however. In particular, little Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is a beguiling, wide-eyed imp whose anarchic enthusiasm lights up the screen whenever she appears. Meanwhile her oldest brother, grave, responsible Peter (William Moseley), will delight the girls with his classic, slightly old-fashioned good looks and faint aura of the doomed subaltern of the trenches that C.S. Lewis so nearly was. And it would be invidious not to mention James McAvoy's charming, delicately touching Mr. Tumnus, the faun who is white rabbit to Lucy's Alice, and her introduction, and ours, to Narnia and the weird, heroic adventure that Lewis set out to describe.

It's a story to which Mr. Adamson and his writers have remained, quite rightly, almost completely faithful. They have, fortunately, avoided reproducing the feel of those passages in the original novel where Lewis comes across as a rather condescending vicar, but any changes or embellishments to the plot itself are minimal and, if it's not heresy to say so, an improvement. What's more, from the snowy wastes of the witch's domain to the glistening, gathering signs of thaw that signal that Aslan is indeed on the move, this unusually beautiful film also looks right: This is the Narnia that I saw when I read this book as a small boy nearly four decades ago, and there will be, I suspect, many others who will succumb to the same delighted nostalgia.

As for the book's message, such as it is, that's in the movie, as it should be, but why that should offend or upset anyone is beyond me. The film is never explicitly preachy, and the story itself stands on its own merits. Lewis, an inveterate (and, complained Tolkien, somewhat indiscriminate) miner of myth, knew that well-told sagas of quest, comradeship, war, self-sacrifice, and even resurrection have long gripped the human imagination. Under the circumstances, it's no great shock that "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was not to be the only excursion to Narnia, and it's not much more of a surprise that the combined "Chronicles" have now sold around 90 million copies.

Back to work, Mr. Adamson, your audience is waiting.

An Imperfect Enjoyment

The Libertine

The New York Sun, November 23, 2005

"The Libertine" is a fierce, intelligent, and compelling account of John Wilmot, the Second Earl of Rochester (1647-80). It is also infuriating, not so much for what it is, as for what it could have been.

Perhaps this is inevitable. In the course of his brief, brilliant, dark shambles of a life, Rochester was a poet, a satirist, a wit, a lampoonist, a classicist, a thug, a drunk, a bully, a brawler, a hero, a coward, a lecher, a prankster, a kidnapper, a pimp, a penitent, a politician, an atheist, a jailbird, a courtier, an exile, and, curiously, an occasional importer of dildos. To describe - and explain - all that in two hours was never going to be easy, but, sadly, "The Libertine" (based on the 1994 play of the same name by Stephen Jeffreys) only covers the five years leading up to Rochester's death and never really tries to do so.

Adding to the sense of an opportunity missed, the movie makes little or no effort to show how the wicked earl was the perfect symbol of his torn, troubled age. Yes, with its startling juxtapositions of splendor and squalor, "The Libertine" skillfully portrays the uneven, unsettling, and treacherous surface of Restoration England, but it does too little to show the turmoil that lay beneath, turmoil that played no small part in making Rochester the man he became.

England in the 1670s was febrile, discontented, and restless, scarred by the recent civil war and unsure about what would come next. The monarchy may have returned after the collapse of a short-lived republic, but the old certainties had not. When the English revolutionaries decapitated the first King Charles, they also finally destroyed the idea that a king derived his authority solely from God. And if God's representative was no longer God's, what could hold society together? To the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (like Rochester, an atheist), the only feasible solution was an all-powerful state. To Rochester, the only possible response was "Who cares?"

His indifference extended far beyond political theory. With God a dead myth and the afterlife a shattered illusion, all that remained was to eke what enjoyment he could from an existence that was temporary, random, and pointless. Life was a joke, the punch line was savage, and the laughter hollow. Mr. Jeffreys's play hinted at all this, but the movie adaptation (on which he also collaborated) opts for disconcerting spectacle over troubling speculation, and the real inspiration of Rochester's wild ride is left in shadow.

Where the film does succeed, magnificently, is in its depiction of a man trapped in the obsessive pursuit of pleasures that only reinforced his self-loathing, rage, and despair and left him dead of syphilis at the age of 33. In the movie's deeply disturbing, hypnotic prologue, Johnny Depp's saturnine Rochester (another remarkable performance by this most remarkable of actors) warns the audience that we "will not like" him. It is just as clear that he does not like us. Nor, indeed, does he think very much of himself. His is a baleful vision, and it oozes the weary disgust that saturates the uncomfortable imagery of this bleak, demanding film. Rochester's circle of wits is made up of the corpulent, the malicious, and the grotesque, and his London is a primitive, merciless city, shot in drab, bleached, wan colors, where even the fittest are sick, and few survive for long.

These ideas descend into nightmare during the course of a scene inspired by Rochester's "A Ramble in St. James's Park," a poem of impressive obscenity that begins with the funniest two lines ever written on the subject of gossip - this is a family newspaper, so you will have to look them up yourself - and culminates in sour, desperate fury. A revolted Rochester is filmed stumbling through the mists, miasmas, and degradation of what was then London's naughtiest rendezvous (hopeful tourists should note that the park, these days, is not what it was). The frantic, rococo writhing, coupling, and who knows what is to Rochester yet another brutal reminder that you don't need God to make a hell.

But it's not all gloom, disease, and debauchery. "The Libertine" also offers a romanticized version of the liaison between Rochester and his teenage mistress, the actress Elizabeth Barry (Samantha Morton, in a rather earnest performance), that is part "Pygmalion," part feminist fable, and which conveniently manages to overlook its more, uh, mercenary aspects. To their credit, however, the movie's creators resist the temptation to apply today's dreary orthodoxies to the poet's relationship with the other Elizabeth, his wife, the Countess of Rochester (played to heartbreaking and aristocratic perfection by Rosamund Pike, a lovely actress so poised that she even brought a touch of class to last month's catastrophic "Doom"). While Rochester's girlfriends, boyfriends (oh yes, that too), mistresses, whores, and bastards put their strains on the marriage, the movie correctly leaves little doubt that the earl and his countess shared a real - and loving - affection.

This makes the cruelty of a critical scene in which Rochester humiliates his wife by refusing to stand alongside her for a formal portrait, posing instead with a monkey, all the more puzzling. So far as we know, Elizabeth never attended those sittings, and, typically for Rochester, the painting (it now hangs in London's National Portrait Gallery and shows him crowning a rather dissolute-looking monkey with a poet's wreath) was, primarily, a joke at his own expense. In Mr. Jeffreys's play, if not the movie, the artist understands: "Of all those bewigged men that I painted, bothering posterity with their long faces, he [was] the only one aware of his own absurdity."

On the whole, however, in terms of historical accuracy, "The Libertine's" sins are, unlike those of the earl, minor, mainly of omission, and usually excusable. Even if the idea that Rochester's farce "Sodom" was actually performed in front of an appalled King Charles II (a fine, louche, and cynical cameo by John Malkovich) is a fiction, it's a useful device to help illustrate the way in which the always complicated (and who does complicated better than Mr. Depp?) Rochester relished taunting the man who was his friend, patron, surrogate father, and, much more dangerously, monarch. It also gives "The Libertine's" director, Laurence Dunmore, an entertaining opportunity to demonstrate that there's more to British cinema's barnyard baroque than Ken Russell.

More seriously, the movie is too quick to pass over the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional drama of the poet's once-famous deathbed repentance. Right to his life's wretched, agonizing conclusion, Rochester remained trapped between the past and the future, teetering uneasily between the fear that there was a God and the terror that there was none, before finally toppling back into the faith of his fathers and the arms of his wife. Smug divines all over England were to celebrate the reprobate's return for decades to come.

And somewhere a monkey began to laugh.

Mad, Bad & Too Dangerous To Show

Byron

The New York Sun, October 21, 2005

There is something a little peculiar about the BBC's advance publicity for "Byron," a half-hidden hint of embarrassment, a discreet cough of discomfort, which suggests it's a touch worried that this glossy, entertaining new biopic might, like the unfortunate Lady Byron, be taken the wrong way.

Could it be that "Byron," which airs at 9 p.m. this Saturday on BBC America, is an unsuitably aristocratic topic for the obligatory, if strained, New Labour egalitarianism of the British broadcaster? Just in case it could, the BBC takes pains to quote earnest claims by "Byron" star Jonny Lee Miller ("Trainspotting" and Angelina Jolie), that the wicked Lord B. - a man who spent a lifetime milking his aristocratic status for all it was worth, and who was ready to use the poetry of social disdain against those who crossed him (such as his wife's governess, "born in the garret, in the kitchen bred") - "wasn't a snob."

Or was the relentlessly preachy and tiresomely progressive BBC worried that this largely sympathetic drama could be seen as condoning the sexism, and worse, of a man all too often capable of the epic cruelty of the incurably selfish? To name just a few of the women left wailing and wrecked in the Byronic wake, his wife was driven to leave him; his daughter Allegra (the mother, alas, was not poor Lady Byron) was neglected; and when naughty Susan Vaughan, one of his servants (and the mother of yet another Byron bastard) was impudent, and tactless, enough to enjoy a quick fling with Robert Rushton, Byron's, ahem, page (Byron, needless to say, had already done the same thing), she was fired.

None of this is likely to endear Byron to a modern audience; it didn't play too well even back then. Once again, the trusty Lee Miller tries to come up with the necessary unguent, but I'm not sure that it does the trick: "I certainly don't like the way he treated some people, but the lighthearted side of him surprised me." Oh well, so long as he was "lighthearted."

As it happens, the page and the maid had finished their frolics before the period covered by "Byron," the last 12 years of the poet's life, a time in which he found celebrity, scandal, exile, and, finally, redemption and an odd sort of martyrdom. Confining the story to Byron's most eventful years makes narrative sense, but it also comes with another advantage: It allows this drama's creators to sidestep the inconvenient fact that a good number of Byron's earlier lovers were too young, and too male, to be altogether seemly in a romantic idol.

The BBC may be intent on selling the idea of "a poet who lived fast and died young," a James Dean with quill pen and social conscience, but the real Byron ignored convention in ways that made Dean seem like a bishop. He also had a predatory side difficult to reconcile with current notions of what a liberal hero should be. Fully told, Byron's exploits would make very uncomfortable viewing indeed - which is probably why the writers of this production don't try to do so.

What we get instead is a glittering, fast-paced, well-written, wonderfully acted, beautifully scored, and entertaining historical drama; classic BBC, in other words. As usual with such productions, its audience of diligent and studious viewers is, as it should be, rewarded with gratuitous sex, landscape, nudity, architecture, and gossip. Yes, yes, with the exception of some coy looks, dark remarks, and a make-out session on a Greek beach, Byron's boys are banned, but that still leaves a lush, pouting parade of noblewomen, prostitutes, bluestockings, and groupies to lift their skirts for the smoldering poet.

Then there are the three women who defined Byron's final years in England. These were the two (principal) mistresses: Augusta (Natasha Little), his (half) sister, who was, awkwardly, related to him and married to someone else (their first cousin, confusingly), and his "wild antelope," brilliant, crazy Lady Caroline Lamb (Camilla Power), a cross-dressing, vengeful psychotic who makes "Fatal Attraction's" Alexis seem like Sandra Dee. And, oh dear, oh dear, there was the Unsuitable Wife, the pious and mathematically gifted Annabella (Julie Cox), who wandered out of Jane Austen's orderly England into the mayhem of Byron's psyche and found herself seduced, sodomized, scandalized, and spurned by the man she so foolishly married.

Natasha Little and Camilla Power both turn in strong performances, but it is the delicately attractive Julie Cox's touching portrayal of the heartbroken Annabella that lingers. Finally, we should not, could not, forget Lady Melbourne, Caroline Lamb's cynical but entertaining mother-in-law, and, typically for this story, Annabella's aunt. Lady Melbourne was never Byron's lover (she was 60-something, and even he drew the line somewhere), but as his confidante, meddler, and provocateuse she is interpreted with brio and malice by an on-form Vanessa Redgrave inspired, quite clearly, by the badly behaved granny she plays on "Nip/Tuck."

As for the sun around which all those pretty planets revolved, old Rhyming Byron himself, Jonny Lee Miller does a terrific job in conveying the charm, neuroses, poses and danger of this extraordinary man. Sick Boy, it turns out, makes a remarkably convincing peer of the realm. If there are any weaknesses, they belong to the script. There are, sadly, few signs of the wit that could flash from those "fluent lips" (check out his letters to see just how funny Byron could be), and we are left with too little sense either of his poetry or of quite why he became the icon that he did. What's more, his brave, significant, and ultimately fatal intervention in Greece's war of independence is downplayed into a muddy, soggy fiasco.

Nevertheless, despite these (and other) historical lapses and all the Bowdlerizing, this enjoyable production is an excellent introduction to Lord Byron, and, as he might have said, that's not a bad way to spend an evening.

Prime-Time Space Invaders

Invasion

Threshold

Surface

The New York Sun, September 20, 2005

Be afraid, very afraid. Someone somewhere, probably in a French newspaper, is soon going to make a big deal out of the fact that all three U.S. television networks are debuting series about extraterrestrial invasions of Earth. Much as the enjoyable, and perfectly straightforward, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has long been reinterpreted as a parable of Cold War paranoia (it was nothing of the sort, of course), so "Invasion" (ABC), "Threshold" (CBS), and "Surface" (NBC) will undoubtedly be viewed as an expression of American unease at the threat posed by the alien civilization of Islamic extremism, and, yes, this too will be nonsense.

The coincidence that ABC, NBC, and CBS are offering viewers little green men - or eerie white lights ("Invasion"), or nasty spinning things ("Threshold"), or savage sea monsters ("Surface"), or whatever - owes a great deal to the success of "Lost" and has nothing at all to do with a malevolent and murderous crank firing off fatwas from a cave somewhere in Central Asia. That said, it's also true that since the days that all our species lived in caves, we have enjoyed frightening ourselves with tales of gods, monsters, ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The evil menace from beyond the stars is just an old bogeyman in a new spacesuit, and as ABC, NBC, and CBS know well, he can still be a good source of chills, thrills, and ratings success.

"Threshold" boasts a hipster hip high dwarf (Peter Dinklage), a beauty who has appeared in both "Sin City" and "Spin City" (Carla Gugino), the return of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), and movie-standard production values. Despite all that, the storyline - involving aliens, secret government agencies, and offbeat protagonists - brought back too many memories of the much-missed Mulder and Scully, and it suffered by comparison. I'll give it another episode, but I'm unconvinced that this threshold is worth crossing. Turning to the next of these three shows, I should confess that I haven't actually seen "Surface," but as, by all accounts, it needs to sink very quickly, that's probably just as well.

That leaves ABC's "Invasion." Its creator, Shaun Cassidy, was responsible for the Mayberry-gone-bad of television's disgracefully underrated "American Gothic," one of the spookier shows of recent years and, as a former teenybopper idol (and the half-brother of another), he's someone who knows a thing or two about the dark side. "Invasion," sadly, does not live up to this promising pedigree, but does have, instead, a certain simple-minded charm. So pull out the popcorn, crack open a beer, and switch off your brain.

"Invasion" is not just cliched, it embraces cliche, and it does so with panache, verve, enthusiastically awful acting, and the hokiest use of sinister background music that I have heard in quite a while. We have the iconically-named American small town (Homestead, Fla.) under threat, we have the "typically" fractured American family (children shuttling between rancorous ex-spouses, new significant others on the scene, and so on), and we have the idiot American conspiracy theorist (played, confusingly, by someone trying to impersonate Jack Black) who is likely to be proved right in the end.

The sense that I had seen this all before didn't stop there. By the end of the first episode, there were dark "Body Snatcher"-style hints that neither the hero's ex-wife nor her current husband may be who she or he seems; the Jack Black impersonator had discovered that it's a bad idea to reach down into the swamp for a mysterious underwater light in the course of a scifi show; and a young child had searched the woods for her missing cat in the middle of a raging, lethal storm to, predictably, the wails - between recriminations - of those estranged parents of hers.

Awkwardly for ABC, that raging, lethal storm was a hurricane. As the devastation caused by Katrina became clear, the network pulled commercials for "Invasion," but ultimately decided that the show must go on. That was fair enough, although, ironically, the devastation portrayed in "Invasion" seems feeble when compared with the real horrors inflicted on the Gulf, and loses much of its power as a result. Equally, any Katrina survivors who see this depiction of a prompt, smooth recovery effort in the aftermath of a hurricane will be under no illusion that what they are watching is anything but fiction.

Nevertheless, while "Invasion" is certainly very far from being the best new sci-fi series now on television (that honor is reserved for the reworked "Battlestar Galactica"), those sparkling lights were intriguing enough to me to merit hanging on for at least one more episode. But be warned: Two weeks ago I took time out of a vacation to visit a UFO watchtower in Colorado, so my standards may be less demanding than yours.

Siren Song of the South

The Dukes of Hazzard

The New  York Sun, August 5, 2005

If, in 2005, a movie about two rednecks, one hottie, and a Dodge Charger emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag turns out to be a hit, it will say a lot for the appeal of nostalgia, the power of marketing, and the prospect of seeing Jessica Simpson in Daisy Dukes. It may even say something about the way this nation has finally come to terms with its bottom right-hand corner. And if it has, just a little of the credit must go to Bo, Luke, and Daisy and a show once described (in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) as the "worst thing to happen to the South since Appomattox."

Ah, yes, Appomattox. For a long, long, long time, America didn't quite know what to do about the South. Abraham Lincoln tried tough love. William Tecumseh Sherman burned it down. The land of the free may have owed its creation, at least in part, to Virginia aristocrats, but the way America evolved - more Horatio Alger than Ashley Wilkes - left the South in the role of an awkward, ornery, and embarrassing old relative, complete with nasty habits, eccentric behavior, and mossy, decaying real estate.

But if this country's politicians didn't know what to do with Dixie, its entertainment industry had no such problems. Confronted by a difficult, disconcerting Other that had no easy part to play in America's optimistic notion of itself, Hollywood preferred to either look the other way or, better still, make something up. In "Birth of a Nation" the dolts of the Klan were portrayed as latter-day Lancelots, rescuing white civilization in general, and Lillian Gish in particular, from barbarism. A quarter of a century later, the more decorous "Gone With the Wind" offered up moonlight, magnolias, and a Confederacy fought for by men in gray so noble it seemed rude to mention what, exactly, they were defending.

Times changed. During the years of civil rights protests and, eventually, legislation, Hollywood's South became the site of achingly earnest, eat-your greens dramas about race relations (none better - or more achingly earnest - than "To Kill a Mockingbird") as well as the preferred location for vicious prisons ("Cool Hand Luke"), dubious preachers ("Night of the Hunter"), all-around creepiness ("Hush ... Hush Sweet Charlotte"), or somewhat unsatisfactory vacations ("Deliverance").

Bracing material, but too bracing for the programmers of prime-time television, who took a very different tack. Beginning with "The Real McCoys" (1957-63), the adventures of a family of hicks from West Virginia transplanted to California, Southerness was played for laughs - and by hillbillies. Tara had been replaced by a beat-up shack, a banjo, and cornpone.

People have always laughed at yokels, bumpkins, and hayseeds, but there was something else about the McCoys, the Clampetts, and the heehawing, straw-chewin' rabble that followed them. Treating the South as a source of low, rustic comedy was a way of defusing and avoiding the troubling images coming up from Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery. At the same time, it was a way for the rest of the country to congratulate itself on being better, and smarter, than those relics, racists, and reactionaries living below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Then something unexpected happened. The rube tube was a smash, but audiences were laughing as much with as at the country folk. Stranger still, no one enjoyed these series more than the hicks who were their supposed target. And, no, it wasn't because they were funny - the leaden, ponderous, and preachy "Andy Griffith Show" (1960-68) has all the humor, pacing, and excitement of a funeral in Fargo. Their real appeal came from the subtext that, however hokey they may have been, the Mayberrys, Hootervilles, and Petticoat Junctions were the last repositories of the values of decent, traditional America.

This subtext became explicit with the arrival of the strait-laced and saccharine "Waltons" (1972-81), a simpering but weirdly compelling drama in which the only laughs were by accident. Compared with the staid, relentlessly moralizing Waltons, the ragtag roustabout Dukes - who burst onto the small screen in 1979, at about the time Olivia Walton mercifully left for the sanatorium - were the Manson Family. Dig a little deeper, however, and the two shows had a surprising amount in common, from a grandfatherly authority figure (Grandpa Walton, Uncle Jesse Duke) to the way that Southern culture was portrayed as blue collar, and, in its essence, Appalachian. The plantation was dead. Hazzard County may have been nominally in Georgia, but its soul was somewhere in Kentucky. The music was bluegrass, the moonlight was moonshine, and the magnolias were, well, Daisies.

Above all, as their names suggest, both shows were about family. In an interview recorded on a "Dukes of Hazzard" DVD (yes, dear reader, I own some), former Rep. Ben Jones ("Cooter") explained how in Hazzard County there was "law" (of a sort), but more importantly there was "order." It was the latter that Uncle Jesse represented, with his insistence on fair play, tradition, and kin. That the law, even when not administered by Sheriff  Rosco P. Coltrane, could be deeply flawed was an idea that ran through Hazzard County but could never be found anywhere on the squeaky-clean Waltons' mountain.

In this, the Dukes were tapping into the disdain for "gummint" that was, understandably enough, an increasingly prominent feature of Carter-era America, and for which CB-toting good ol' boys were a handy, lovable, proxy. The libertarian trucker epic "Convoy" and the more specifically Southern "Smokey and the Bandit" (a clear source of inspiration for "The Dukes of Hazzard") were just two movies that showed the way politics were going.

None of this would have counted for much if the Dukes, in their amiable, ramshackle way, weren't good television. True, the writers didn't bother to vary the story too much from episode to episode - plot by Boss Hogg to frame the Duke boys; car chase; pileup; rural metaphor-strewn conversation; gratuitous Bo and Luke skinny-dipping scene; hopelessly confused Coltrane; explosion; plenty, plenty, plenty of Daisy; failure of Hogg plot - and, yes, we should pass over the unfortunate business of Coy and Vance Duke, the anti-popes of Hazzard. But who's complaining? This was a show, after all, for which more than half the fan letters were addressed to the General Lee, a car.

Hazzard County was a fantasy, an inviting, sunny, bucolic farce, nicely filmed, skillfully played, beautifully embellished by a redneck Farrah and given some vague, very vague, structure by the dry, deadpan narration of Waylon Jennings. And did I mention that the music was great? No wonder so many tuned in each Friday to "visit." In the South, where the Dukes found their most enthusiastic audiences, some still do. The show's on CMT, Dukes Fests featuring a platoon of General Lees and an army of hollering fans (an estimated 40,000 of them this year) are a regular event, and the truly dedicated can travel to Cooter's Place in Gatlinburg, Tenn., for souvenirs and a glimpse of the legendary grease monkey's tow truck.

Back in the real world, sadly, Waylon is gone, Uncle Jesse has passed on, and the Boar's Nest has been turned into a church. But Hazzard County will never change.

Should You See It?

Former Rep. Ben Jones, the original Cooter, has denounced the new "Dukes of Hazzard" for its "profanity laced script" and "blatant sexual situations." But he hasn't seen it. I have. And having sat through this dreary and joyless mess, I can tell old Cooter that in a production this dull, a few more blatant sexual situations would have been very welcome indeed. As for the profanity in the script, it was nothing compared with the expletives really needed to describe a film so dreadful that, by the end, I was hoping the General Lee would be crushed by a Sherman tank - shipped in, perhaps, from a nearby war movie.

The problem is not that this film is dumb (although it is), but that it is mean-spirited, graceless, and lacking in any charm whatsoever. The television series was not exactly egghead fare, but its witless, cheerful joie de vivre and the easy rapport between its characters made it, at its best, a lot of fun.

The movie, by contrast, is oddly harsh (both Rosco and Hogg are far nastier than in the original), and painfully contrived. There's no chemistry at all between Bo and Luke, though they can barely get into a car without hollerin'; poor Daisy is reduced to a rent-a-siren, and even the inevitable brawl at the Boar's Nest comes across as an over-choreographed effort to go one broken bottle further than every other movie bar fight.

On the bright side, there are a few good jokes, some decent car chases, and a delightful performance by Kevin Heffernan as bait salesman, conspiracy theorist, and weirdo. The rest of the cast (including Burt Reynolds, who should have known better) appear to do as little as they can get away with, possibly to avoid embarrassing Jessica Simpson, who is a feast for the eyes but a famine for the brain. Poor dear, she cannot act at all. Nevertheless, she's probably the only reason to see this film.

Sorry, Congressman.

A Package of Spare Parts

The Island

the  New York Sun, July 22, 2005

As we all know from the movies, if you're going to clone something, clone something worthwhile: So, for example, don't clone dangerous dinosaurs, and don't clone Adolf Hitler. That's good advice. Unfortunately, Michael Bay, the director of "The Island," hasn't taken it. His new film may not exactly be a clone, but it certainly appears to have borrowed (there's some controversy about this) its central conceit from "Parts: The Clonus Horror," a low-budget, high concept fiasco from 1979 best known these days as a victim of the sarcastic nerds at "Mystery Science Theater 3000." That's a shame. An intelligent film about clones and cloning is long overdue. "The Island" is not it.

What we get instead are parts, so to speak, of "Clonus" minus the Herb Tarlek jackets and pleasantly gratuitous nudity, together with a fairly standard futuristic fleeing couple drama with more than a touch of "Logan's Run" about it, all wrapped up in the flash, dash and pizzazz of a film by Michael Bay, the creator of "Armageddon," "Pearl Harbor," and "The Rock." But while "Clonus" had a desperate, ramshackle charm, "The Island" is too commercial and too slickly packaged for that, something that is only reinforced by shameless product placement, intrusive even by the debased standards of contemporary Hollywood.

It's difficult to say too much about "The Island's" plot without giving the game away, but, for all the film's many faults, there's no doubt that Mr. Bay knows how to put together an entertaining summer movie (full disclosure: I enjoyed "Armageddon"). From the hallucinatory opening sequences, to the virtuoso fast cutting, to the rococo chases and baroque gunplay, to the feeble, and usually unsuccessful, lapses into humor, this is classic Bay, as evanescent, entertaining, and dumb as a day at the beach.

Oh yes, Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson do their best to portray the runaway clones, and Steve Buscemi is convincing as a louse with a heart of gold, but it's not the actors that count in a movie like this.

Hollywood's Hideous Progeny

The New York Sun, July 22, 2005

In this time of Dolly, stem cells, and decoded genomes, it should be no surprise that Hollywood has sent in the clones. "The Island," the new genes-and-screams blockbuster that opens this week, may be trite, slight, and none too bright, but the appearance of a big-budget movie premised, however feebly, on the medical promise and moral contradictions of human cloning, is yet another reminder that Xeroxed people are now icons of social, scientific, and cultural unease.

In just the last few months, Kazuo Ishiguro has published the clammy and claustrophobic "Never Let Me Go," a novel that covers very similar ground to "The Island," and Joyce Carol Oates has done pretty much the same in the latest Atlantic Monthly, with "BD 11 1 86," a short story so unsubtle that Dick and Jane, by comparison, look profound: "But you, Danny, your body will survive for decades. As a body donor, you're one of the elite." Poor Danny. Poor readers.

The only real surprise has been how little Hollywood has done with cloning so far. To be sure, clones have played parts in movies, but films that concern their, um, issues are few and far between. That's strange. It's been more than 70 years since Universal Pictures' "Frankenstein" tapped so effectively, and lucratively, into humanity's fear of its own ingenuity, a fear that has since fueled countless films of science gone bad, mad, or both, and made more than a few moviemakers very, very rich. Horror stories about cloning ought to fit nicely into this genre, and what's more, given the fascination of the subject matter, raise its collective IQ.

That hasn't happened. To be fair, "Blade Runner" was an intelligent examination of what cloning could mean, but that's a movie more than two decades old. Mostly we've been given low-budget disasters, such as 1979's "Parts: The Clonus Horror" or big-budget disasters like Schwarzenegger's forgettable "The Sixth Day," and now "The Island." With politicians busy stoking up anxiety over this topic, it's only a matter of time before "The Island" becomes an archipelago. To discover what future movies about cloning will be like, just take a look at what has gone before.

To start with, to boost their scientific credibility, there will almost certainly be a microscope moment when human cells are shown dividing, or forming, or whatever it is they do after the cloning process has begun (see the recent "Godsend," for one) and, to the same end, expect to hear so much meaningless medico-technical babble that the only reasonable assumption is that the late "Bones" McCoy (or, presumably, his clone) is somewhere in the vicinity.

It goes without saying that at least one character will be accused of playing God (as one does in "The Island") and, just to ram home the message that we're talking serious stuff here, there's a good chance that the plot will include someone called Adam (as it does in both "Godsend" and "The Sixth Day") and that Adam will turn out to be a clone (ditto). Likewise, the movie's title may well refer to either the deity ("Godsend") or to His big book ("The Sixth Day"). Those able to sit through "Embryo" (an honorary cloning movie which merits inclusion in this survey - or, indeed any survey - on a number of grounds, not least a naked Barbara Carrera and a surreally entertaining dogfight) can see the religious imagery crowned by shots of Michelangelo's depiction of the Creation.

God matters, because the central conceit of such movies has been, and will be, that, in artificially creating life, man is trespassing on God's domain. At the moment that Victor Frankenstein brings life to his creation, he shouts (this is in the movie; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein would never have been so gauche) that he knows "how it feels to be God." And the moment he says that, we know that he's finished. Frankenstein's saga derives much of its tragic force from the way it follows the rules of an ancient taboo, a taboo that Shelley's book, her "hideous progeny," did much to reinforce: There are some things that are not for man to discover. Ignore that fact and disaster will follow. Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, Icarus fell from the sky, and Frankenstein caused the destruction of those he loved.

So it is that, in the movies, human cloning is generally portrayed as a bad thing, and its consequences usually malign, even if the clones themselves may not be (hate the cloning, love the clone). But what is it about cloning that is so sinful? In an age when many no longer have any religious beliefs, simply asserting that the creation of life is the monopoly of a god is not enough. Shelley, an atheist, faced this problem by making her Victor realize that his experiment was so unnatural that he came to reject its results. Even so, Frankenstein's repudiation of his creature at the moment of its creation ("the beauty of the dream vanished ... and disgust filled my heart") seems as much aesthetic as moral, and is not entirely convincing. The problems for the modern filmmaker are even trickier: In an age of IVF, who is to say what is, or what is not, natural?

Hollywood has dealt with this intellectual challenge the old-fashioned way: by avoiding it. Usually ("The Sixth Day," "The Island") the people responsible for the cloning are portrayed as so vile, and their methods so vicious, or otherwise flawed ("Godsend"), that deeper questions can be dropped in favor of facile controversy, easy indignation, and junk science jabbering, and don't even get me started on the "Boys From Brazil." Can we all agree now that cloning Adolf Hitler is a really, really, bad idea?

But look carefully behind the ridiculous premises and flimsy plots of some of these movies, and it is possible to get a sense of why human cloning causes quite so much alarm. Narcissistic creatures that we are, it's all about us. Despite the fact that we share our planet with 6 billion others, the notion that homo sapiens generally, and ourselves individually, could be mass-produced appears to be an affront to our sense of self and species. Predictably enough, therefore, a number of movies (even the light-hearted "Multiplicity") include scenes in which clones confront their "parents," or vice versa, and either party (or both) ends up wondering who he or she "really" is - which, if anyone actually stopped to think about it, is something completely unaffected by the existence of a genetic duplicate.

More realistic, perhaps, is another fear that can be discerned beneath the surface of these movies, the fear that the clones aren't monsters, but that we, however, may be. "Blade Runner" is preoccupied by the question of whether clones are truly human (it concludes that they are), but most other movies seem to regard this as beyond dispute. Clones are like you and me (and you and me, and you and me). And they should be treated accordingly. Our dread is that we cannot be trusted to do so. In film after film, clones are abused, exploited, and treated as disposable objects by mankind. The real issue then becomes not their humanity, but ours.

And that's an entirely different question.

The Return of Novelty Boy

The New York Sun, July 8, 2005

Once, on a gray hangover Sunday morning quite a few years ago now, I saw Johnny Depp. He was stumbling along Sixth Avenue on the way to that flea market in the 20s, and so was I. He was a wan, disheveled wreck, and so was I. But he had Kate Moss in tow, and I, well ... I did not. Even back then Johnny Depp was a star, a Cary Grant for our ragamuffin times, a tatterdemalion Tom Cruise, James Dean without the car crash, a charmer, an enigma, a talent to watch - even if, judging by the box office of most of his movies, not many people did.

That began to change with "Sleepy Hollow" and "Pirates of the Caribbean," and could change even more with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which opens next week. But there's an excellent opportunity to assess his work right now at "In Deppth" (sigh), a retrospective opening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today. Over the course of three weeks, BAM will show a selection of movies that convey a real sense of Mr. Depp's range, quality, and charm. Above all, filmgoers will be left with an impression of the extraordinary presence that he brings to even the most mediocre movies ("The Ninth Gate," I'm talking about you), a presence that owes something to Mr. Depp's good looks, but much more to his talent.

The idea that Mr. Depp has achieved what he has while defying Hollywood convention, however, is not quite correct. While he's too smart for red string and Kabbalah gibberish, Mr. Depp has in many other respects stuck to the standard script for a rising star: idiot preachiness ("America is dumb; it's like a dumb puppy that has big teeth that can bite and hurt you, aggressive ... my daughter is four and my boy is one. I'd like them to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out."), tabloid scandals, the usual substances, jail time, tragedy (poor River Phoenix twitched his last outside Mr. Depp's Viper Room), an awe-inspiring sequence of girlfriends, and displays of petulance that reached an early peak at the moment when (eat your heart out, Russell Crowe) he set his underpants ablaze on the set of "21 Jump Street": Apparently his motor home hadn't been cleaned for a while. Oh well.

It was on "Jump Street," though, that Mr. Depp's career began to veer in an unexpected direction. The hairstyle, acne, and just-say-no police drama had made his name and bank balance, but the actor felt "lost, shoved down the gullets of America as a young Republican. TV Boy, heartthrob, teen idol, teen hunk ... bound for ... lunch box antiquity. Novelty boy, franchise boy." Fair enough, but it took a truly perverse imagination to believe that Mr. Depp could lose his unwanted teen-idol tag by escaping to the big screen and playing, yes, a teen idol.

Yet in John Waters's delirious, delightful, and ridiculous "Cry-Baby" (screening July 10), he did. As the absurd, delinquent, but strangely appealing Wade "Cry-Baby" Walker, Mr. Depp is a beautiful, low-rent Elvis, shaking, sneering, and seducing his way through a performance that parodies both the heroes of our rockabilly past and the sort of stardom that Mr. Depp himself had been meant to aspire to. After "Cry-Baby," Mr. Depp's face may still have graced People, but his mind, it was clear, was elsewhere.

That movie pointed the way that Mr. Depp's career would go. It showed his endearing willingness to forgo other more commercial projects in exchange for the opportunity to work in films that he found intriguing, even if their directors - like Mr. Waters himself, or Jim Jarmusch ("Dead Man") or, in a sense, Tim Burton ("Edward Scissorhands," "Sleepy Hollow," and "Charlie") were outside the Hollywood mainstream. Also, it's notable (even if it's somewhat obscured by the carnival cast of grotesques, misfits, and oddities with whom, typically, John Waters peoples "Cry-Baby") that Wade Walker was the first of the oddball roles with which Johnny Depp, the boy who didn't want to be "novelty boy," was to make his name.

Until then, Mr. Depp's roles had been routine fare for a star on the make. He appeared without his trousers - or anything else - in a lowbrow sex comedy ("Private Resort"), he was shot at by the Viet Cong in "Platoon," and butchered by Freddie Krueger in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." In Wade's wake, however, he replaced the generic with the exotic, becoming something of a showcase for the peculiar, most notably with his two special Eds, Scissorhands and Wood, and, in "Pirates of the Caribbean," with Jack Sparrow, the weirdest scoundrel ever to sail the Spanish Main.

To Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Mr. Depp in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," a film in which the actor shone in a more normal role, Mr. Depp's preference for offbeat characters was a way of hiding in plain sight, concealed behind the eccentricities of those he portrayed. Perhaps, but it's more likely that Mr. Depp, a man who once bought the house which was (reputedly) the site of Munchkin orgies during the filming of "The Wizard of Oz," gravitated naturally toward roles that appealed to his well-developed sense of the bizarre, something that he often exploits but never abuses. The strangeness of the characters he plays is not an excuse to descend into pastiche, caricature or ham. Mr. Depp takes them seriously, and so, therefore, should we.

Inevitably, there are omissions at BAM, mainly recent offerings such as "Pirates," "Blow," and, mercifully, the overrated "Finding Neverland" (Ian Holm was a far more convincing Barrie in a BBC version of the same story). Fans of film fiasco will be disappointed that there's no opportunity to judge "The Brave," the only movie that Mr. Depp has ever directed, a project probably doomed from the moment that he decided to bless the beginning of filming with a Native American ritual.

No time to see all that BAM has to offer? Well, for a sense of Mr. Depp's range, try his subtle, sensitive portrayal of the conflicted undercover cop in "Donnie Brasco" (July 15), a character far removed from his usual madcap menagerie. Then there's the hypnotic "Dead Man" (July 30), an extraordinary, slow, slow, slow Western, teetering uneasily between a dream and a joke, with Mr. Depp compelling as he drifts helplessly toward his fate. But if there's only one film you can catch, it has to be "Edward Scissorhands" (July 9), Mr. Burton's masterpiece, and Mr. Depp's, too. A gorgeous fairy tale, this kinder, gentler "Frankenstein" has an almost mute Mr. Depp strapped into a leather bodysuit, those legendary looks lost under stark white makeup and a tangled black wig. Despite these handicaps, Mr. Depp somehow uses minimal dialogue, marvelously expressive eyes, and the tricks of an accomplished mime to convey the very essence of the being he portrays.

It's a performance that he hasn't topped, and there are some signs from his latest work that he may never do so. His Jack Sparrow was a wild, wonderful and inspired comic creation. Sparrow transformed "Pirates of the Caribbean" from dross into gold, but plans for a sequel and the imminent release of "Charlie" may be a harbinger of something altogether less welcome: the return of novelty boy, this time as a licensed, lovable eccentric, good box office certainly but entirely lacking the edge that has made Mr. Depp so great for so long.

Let's hope not.

Potter's Field

Charlie Higson: Silverfin

The New York Sun, May 20, 2015

With Clint Eastwood reduced to making films about ladies who box, Bond, James Bond, is the last true man's man. He blows smoke in the face of surgeons-general, adds no fruit juice to his martinis, and gives the pieties of feminism a pass. He has survived knives, a wife, bullets, nasty mechanical pincers, beatings, grenades, piranhas, and tortures too beastly to describe in a family newspaper. He's seen off Blofeld, Goldfinger, Scaramanga, No, Drax, and even that impertinent oaf, Austin Powers. He has weathered the challenges of SMERSH, Rosa Klebb's shoes, Roger Moore's safari suits, and the notion that M can be Dame Judi Dench. Now 007 faces his greatest, and potentially most humiliating, threat yet. James Bond - sophisticate, seducer, secret agent - has just been reimagined as a 13-year-old boy.

Charlie Higson's "SilverFin" (Miramax Books, 335 pages, $16.95), the first of five planned "Young James Bond" novels, was published in Britain earlier this year to dark mutterings from the veteran spy's fans, critical approval, and impressively strong sales. Now (don't tell Felix Leiter) it has been released over here. A comic book is also in the works. There is, predictably enough, also talk of a movie, although widespread (and now denied) rumors that the film would star Orlando Bloom as Bond Jr. seemed to ignore the fact that, fresh-faced though he may be, the former elf is well past puberty.

If all this sounds like there is someone somewhere trying to milk an old franchise for all it's worth, that's because it's true. Ian Fleming came from a distinguished, and famously shrewd, Scottish banking family that has never, in all its long history, been known to overlook the chance of making a pound or two. Fleming sold a controlling stake in his literary estate to the publishers, Booker plc, before his death, but the Fleming family bought it back in the late 1990s, and (the London Guardian reports) "a wave of new projects, including Bond merchandising and games, is being prepared."

The early chapters of "SilverFin" show the fine-tuned commercial instincts of those canny Scots at work. Its opening chapters set the scene in a manner that cannot fail to lure in all those potential buyers bored of waiting, waiting, waiting for their next fix of J.K. Rowling. Like Harry Potter, young Bond is an orphan, although mountaineering, not magic, is to blame for his parents' unfortunate demise. Like Potter, Bond is sent off to boarding school. An unconvincingly described Eton stands in for Hogwarts.

Needless to say, poor James has to contend with his very own Draco Malfoy, a villainous fellow pupil with, like Draco, a powerful father behind him. Trapped by the decidedly unsupernatural nature of his hero, Mr. Higson is unable to add the additional excitement of a brutal contact sport played on flying broomsticks: There's no Quidditch at Eton. Bond triumphs, instead, in cross-country running.

Mr. Higson's decision to cast as Bond's best chums two Indian and Chinese boys, rare birds indeed in a "public" school in 1930s England, is probably no less calculated. Pritpal Nandra and Tommy Chong will delight the diversity police always so busy patrolling the world of children's literature, and probably be good boxoffice, too. The same is true of "Red" Kelly, Bond's handily proletarian sidekick, useful in a punch-up and essential for giving young James the street cred that today's market calls for. We are told early on that Kelly thinks the privileged Etonian is "all right" despite being a "toff," and thus a member, we are supposed to understand, of a hated enemy caste.

That such touches are hopelessly anachronistic does not seem to worry the author too much. With the exception of a few pieces of carefully inserted period detail, there is little about this book that gives any real sense of the time in which it is supposedly set. Or, for that matter, the place: The Scotland in which James's adventure comes to its pleasantly savage conclusion is as bogus as "Brigadoon," utterly lacking the beguiling tweedy tartan authenticity that John Buchan brought to his "Thirty-Nine Steps."

Despite these - considerable - flaws, the second half of "SilverFin" gallops splendidly along with a fabulously nutty plot that involves sinister German scientists, carnivorous eels, man-eating pigs, daring escapes, grotesque deaths, a megalomaniac American businessman, and enough steroid abuse to launch a baseball team. Once he gets going, Mr. Higson displays a fine sense of pace, and a genuine ability to write the enjoyably un pleasant descriptions that will delight the small ghouls who will make up so much of his audience:

"James recoiled, but then forced himself to look at what had once been a man. ... The face was wrecked: it looked as if it had been split down the middle and forced apart, so that the nose was flattened and stretched, the teeth had separated and the eyes had curved around almost to the sides of his head. The eyes were the worst part. They were dark and wet, and James saw in them, not murder, but sadness and pain."

That's splendid stuff, but not quite good enough to buy forgiveness for what "SilverFin" (not to mention the annoying anti-smoking infomercials that pop up periodically throughout the book in an attempt, presumably, to dispel the fatal allure of a certain special agent's Balkan- and Turkish-blend cigarettes) could do to the commander's image. Those of his fans brave enough to read it will need to take appropriate steps afterward to banish the idea of 007 as a retro Cody Banks from their heads.

May I suggest a couple of vodka martinis? Shaken, not stirred.