Eat, Drink, and Wait for the Revolution

Marie Antoinette 

The New York Sun, October 20, 2006

There's a strangely wise conversation in 1971's "Harold and Maude," when ancient, youthful Maude explains her radical past to youthful, ancient Harold: "Big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell.I don't regret the kingdoms, but I miss the kings."

Sofia Coppola, I suspect, feels much the same way. Her bewitching, delirious, pastels-and-candy "Marie Antoinette" combines a sardonic critique of the Versailles system with a wry, understanding portrait of those kings, queens, and courtiers who were supported, ensnared and, ultimately, doomed by it.

We catch our first glimpse of the great palace as Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) arrives from Austria to take up residence as bride to Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the dauphin of France. The architectural wonders (lovingly, lavishly photographed, this movie is a treat for the eyes, and flatters a court that was far grubbier than anything Ms. Coppola permits us to see) are an illusion, however, nothing more than camouflage for a complex instrument of social control, carefully sustained by baroque protocol, ornate coercion, and elaborately manipulated human nature. This idea of the court as a mechanism is one that Ms. Coppola underpins with frequent long distance shots of its massive architecture and immense gardens. They dwarf the few humans visible, reducing them all, even that lovely, bewildered queen, to dots, tiny, insignificant, nothing more than cogs in a machine.

But it's a machine that is unable to adapt. Like the fountains we see dancing their perfect dance in deserted gardens deep into the Versailles dusk, the passing of time has reduced the court's immaculate choreography to a wasteful irrelevance. Louis XIV had designed this system as a way of harnessing the pre-modern appeal of monarchy, an institution as old as the apes, to the construction of a recognizably modern, centralized French state, but after 100 years, modernity itself has become the enemy. In an enormously more developed society l'état could no longer be Louis, any Louis. Louis XVI may have been an awkward, amiable dunderhead (Mr. Schwartzman's performance, channeling Robert Morley from the 1938 version of this tale, is sympathetic, touching, and, ultimately heart-breaking), but even the Sun King would have struggled to shine in the France of the 1780s.

If Ms. Coppola's depiction of the consequences is something of a caricature (it is), there's more than a touch of truth in the way she depicts these ill-fated, oblivious aristocrats as up-market, somewhat bitchy Eloi playing their games amid the relics of a civilization that has long since had its day. Their rituals and rules have descended into self-parody and farce, something beautifully illustrated by a (historically accurate) scene in which a naked Marie Antoinette stands shivering as various ladies-in-waiting work out among themselves who has the right to hand the queen her shift. Likewise, while the director exaggerates the extent to which the queen's set lived apart from the rest of the world, she only does so to emphasize just how dangerously isolated they had become from what was going on outside their self-absorbed, parasitical, magical court.

A sequence filmed at the chateau that played host to Marie Antoinette's rural idylls makes this point perfectly: Surrounded by golden greenery, golden friends, and golden sunlight, the golden queen, gorgeous in white muslin, sits happily reading Rousseau's paeans to the simple life, the glories of nature, and, for all I know, the general niceness of mankind. The idea that the writings of that same Jean-Jacques might inspire the revolutionaries who were later to execute her, her husband, and, for that matter, tear one of those golden friends quite literally apart did not, could not, occur to her.

Of course, it's important to understand that this film is not, as Ms. Dunst has admitted, "a ‘Masterpiece Theatre,' educational Marie Antoinette biopic." It is, the actress said, "kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts," a description which is kind of like nauseating, but is also kind of like right.

If anything, Ms. Dunst is too modest. By Hollywood standards, this movie is well researched, its sins mainly those of omission (although not entirely: Contrary to what's shown in the movie, the real queen drank very little), not that those are trivial. This is a Marie Antoinette without the necklace (that scandal is never mentioned), but who keeps her neck. The last three to four years of her life, years in which she finally achieved a certain tragic dignity, don't feature at all, but perhaps they don't need to.After all, we witness her refusal to abandon Louis as the revolution grew, and we see the bravery with which she faced the mob that had stormed Versailles.The rest is history.

This movie is best seen as a wild, inventive and inspired riff, stylized and stylish, on the life and legend of Marie Antoinette. At times it's playful: There's enough cake in this film to reduce even Monty Python's Mr. Creosote to jelly; but purists should relax — it's made clear that she never said, you know, that. At times it's moving, as Ms. Coppola depicts the plight of a young girl (14 when she married), lost in translation (sound familiar?), wrenched from her home and dumped into a strange and sporadically hostile land, a future queen maybe, but a pawn in Europe's dynastic game, and a queen who would have to wait seven years to mate with a king who just didn't know how (his Habsburg brother-in-law, played by Danny Huston, eventually explains). And at times, often involving appearances by the splendid Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry, that most rococo of royal mistresses, it's very funny indeed.

And yes, Ms. Coppola's maligned decision to add 1980s rock music to the soundtrack works surprisingly well. We remember the 1980s, if not always accurately, as an age of abandon, extravagance, reaction, and revolution, impressions conjured by hearing those old tunes again, impressions that do rather well for the 1780s, too. But for all this film's cleverness, it would have not succeeded without the extraordinary, almost hypnotic, performance by Ms. Dunst (her best since, well, Ms. Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides") as the fabulously indulged, fabulously abused Marie Antoinette of Ms. Coppola's vision, driven quite literally to distraction by the weird predicament in which she found herself.

Oh, don't worry that this film was booed at Cannes earlier this year. It means nothing. The French aren't the French unless they have Marie Antoinette to kick around.

Reign Storm

The Queen

The New York Sun, September, 29, 2006

Within a few weeks, American moviegoers will be given the chance to wallow in the glitz, glamour, and guillotines of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." For now they will have to make do with a dowdier, more discreet queen, the one who has been reigning in England for more than half a century now, a monarch who shows every sign of hanging on to her crown and, thankfully, the head on which it sits.

In all the decades of Elizabeth II's painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) dutiful, conscientious, and, yes, tenacious reign, there has only really been one brief, bizarre period, of just about a week, when there was the slightest danger that the Windsors might, like so many of their less fortunate relatives in so many less fortunate countries, be asked to pack their bags. It's that interlude, the disturbing, absurd and even slightly frightening days that followed the death of Princess Diana that is the focus of "The Queen," a compelling new docudrama by British director Stephen Frears that opens the 44th New York Film Festival on Saturday. It's easily the best film I've seen this year.

From that tunnel in Paris to Earl Spencer in Westminster Abbey, these events are still so familiar that Mr. Frears is left free to concentrate on the most interesting aspect of the story: the plight of a monarch at bay, puzzled, hurt, and confused by the behavior of a nation, her nation, that appeared to have changed, almost overnight, beyond all recognition. The quiet, disciplined, loyal, stoical Brits of the Queen's youth, of the Blitz, of so much more, had vanished, to be replaced by a volatile, hysterical, and vindictive mob caught up in a self-indulgent bacchanalia of grief for a princess they never really knew. Suddenly Elizabeth's virtues — restraint, self-control, that famous sense of duty — had come to be seen as vices by a population baying for her to show that she "cared" by faking tears over the death of the more "genuine" Diana.

The movie itself begins about four months earlier, setting the scene with Tony Blair's 1997 landslide election victory and then the first audience between the novice prime minister (a puppyish Michael Sheen) and the veteran queen (Helen Mirren), coolly charming, intimidating, and on top of her game. It's beautifully observed and very funny (Peter Morgan's script is a consistent delight, meticulously researched and, I suspect, largely accurate), but Dame Helen really comes into her own (Oscar! Oscar!) as events begin to engulf the embattled monarch.

Helped by the hairdo that launched a million stamps, her own surprisingly strong facial resemblance to the Queen and, dare I say it, more than a little padding (there goes my knighthood), the former Inspector Tennison turns out to make an uncannily realistic Elizabeth II. More precisely, Dame Helen plays a woman playing the Queen, an approach that goes a long way to explaining why she is so remarkably convincing. Monarchy is a performance. The Queen's tragedy is that it's a role she almost certainly never wanted. The Queen's genius is that she does it so well.

Nevertheless, watch Her Majesty carefully enough (as many of us English tend to do) and it's just possible to detect that the smile, the wave, the small talk, and all the rest of it are acts of will, the work of an actress, a pro, trapped in a role that will last a lifetime. And in her performance, Dame Helen catches this perfectly. Every now and then she lets glimpses of the real Elizabeth, that long-vanished Lilibet, peep through, and then, abruptly, deliberately, the face freezes, the mask is put back on, and safe, comfortable distance returns.

When, in the middle of the crisis, she lets her guard drop just enough to ask her mother (Sylvia Syms, who rather surprisingly chooses to portray the Queen Mum as a sitcom gran) for advice, that advice is, like that of her husband (James Cromwell playing Prince Philip as a caricature of himself, which of course, he really is) absolutely hopeless. An agonized, nervous Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, splendidly twitchy) and her principal adviser have the right instincts, but are too intimidated by her to do much good. The old pro is, she discovers, isolated, alone, adrift. The script no longer works, and the audience is out of control.

Eventually, help, and a new scriptwriter, shows up in the shape of an increasingly assured Tony Blair, a master politician with an instinctive understanding of the new Britain and, critically, what the royals would have to do to win back public favor. He's the self-proclaimed modernizer on a mission to transform what was left of the Queen's old England, but he's also astute enough to want the monarchy to survive, and, despite the gibes of his colleagues and his wife, fair enough to appreciate all that the Queen had done for her realm.

As for the woman whose death triggered the whole crisis, her image flits and flickers through the movie in clip after clip of archive footage, the only one of the film's protagonists not to be played by an actor. It's a clever device: It adds to the sense of authenticity and serves also as a pointed reminder of just how much that lost princess was fantasy, creation, accomplice, and victim. The texture of that footage — faded, grainy, herky-jerky, recognizably different from the rest of the film, almost ghostlike in impact — only serves to underline that Diana had gone, never to return.

In the end, as we all know, the fever broke. The film concludes as it began with Mr. Blair visiting Buckingham Palace. No longer the novice, he is confident, too confident, perhaps, a politician at the peak of his popularity, and angling, maybe, for a word of thanks for all his help. What he gets instead is a warning on the fickleness of our age. "One day," the Queen says, "quite suddenly and without warning, the same thing will happen to you." And now, of course, it has. Meanwhile, the monarchy itself endures and Diana's memory fades. On the fifth anniversary of her death, one writer noted that the gardens of Althorp (the Spencer family home) and Kensington Palace were "deserted."

"The public," he wrote, "had moved on. They were now too busy 'never forgetting' other people."

Burnt Offering

The Wicker Man

National Review Online, September  18, 2006

A remake, yup, another remake: first Miami Vice, now this. To the jeers, hoots, catcalls and snickers of critics across the country, the latest hashed rehash, The Wicker Man, writer-director Neil LaBute’s reworking of a cult British movie from 1973, limped into cinemas over that Hollywood graveyard better known as Labor Day weekend. Clumsy, poorly plotted, and scarred by performances closer to catalepsy than acting, this unintentionally funny film is more Scary Movie than horror pic. The story, such as it is, revolves around Edward Malus (Nicolas Cage), a California highway patrolman left traumatized and tranquilizer-dependent after witnessing a hideous traffic accident. Adding to his gloom, and ours, he’s summoned by Willow (Kate Beahan), his former fiancée, to help find her missing, and equally rustically named, daughter, Rowan. Dutifully enough, Malus shows up at Willow’s home, a beautiful, creepy and very private island somewhere in the Puget Sound. Unfortunately for our haggard hero, this is run by goddess-worshippers with a thing for retro fashion, bee keeping, sinister glances and (it’s hinted) nasty eugenic practices. Poor Malus, things turn out very badly for him indeed, but save your sympathy: It’s even worse for the audience.

It needn’t have been this way. That dismal spot in contemporary culture where feminism, ignorance and superstition collide can always use a little more mockery. In theory, spooky, sanctimonious Summersisle, a place where the likes of Sisters Violet, Thorn, Rose, Beech, Willow, Honey, and Moss preside over mute helot males, might have been the perfect place to do it, and Neil LaBute its ideal chronicler. There’s a bracing streak of misanthropy running through much of his work. As his In The Company of Men did for misogyny what McDonalds does for cattle, his take on matriarchy could have made for an evening of brutal, disturbing fun.

It could have, but it didn’t. Despite an encouragingly irate review in a Seattle (where else?) alternative newspaper describing the movie as “obscene anti-feminist propaganda [in which] the women are mysterious and tricky and beguiling, like evil vaginas [and] Malus is strong and thrusty and straightforward, like a hero-penis,” Mr. LaBute fails, and fails miserably. The script is too crude, and its parable too labored (O.K., Neil, we get the queen bee/drone thing, we really do) to be effective, and with the notable exceptions of Molly Parker (as twin sisters Rose and Thorn) and Diane Delano (Sister Beech), the cast fails to rise to what little challenge there is.

Let’s face it. Neil LaBute doesn’t know how to make a horror movie; the film neither shocks nor thrills nor chills. When the storyline is not chaotic it is cockamamie. Perhaps this was inevitable. An allegory of matriarchal oppression has no place within anything resembling the original The Wicker Man, a film in which the relations between the sexes are, to say the least, amicable. Mr. LaBute would have done better to start afresh, saying what he wanted to say on his own terms rather than trying to squeeze his theme into a new, and unconvincing, reinterpretation of someone else’s idea. What’s more, by taking the remake route, LaBute ensures comparison with what has gone before. When that’s a film good enough to be described by one overexcited critic as “the Citizen Kane of horror”, that’s asking for trouble. If the recent Miami Vice was stalked by the ghost of Crockett past, so LaBute’s Wicker Man is menaced by memories of the original, and its extraordinarily compelling tale of an ardently Christian policeman (Edward Woodward, best known in America as the Equalizer) and his search for a missing girl on a remote Scottish island swept up in pagan enchantment.

It’s true that the troubled circumstances of the first The Wicker Man’s release (there are three different cuts out there) by a cash-strapped, owner-swapping British film company that not only seemed ashamed of what had been shot, but managed to lose much of the original footage (buried, it’s claimed, like some celluloid Hoffa, but under a highway), have added to the mystique of a masterpiece that, if not exactly lost, was certainly abused, neglected and mislaid. However, Robin Hardy’s original (in all senses) The Wicker Man needs neither hype nor its “missing minutes” to be judged a significant work. It comfortably stands on its own merits and deserves a far wider audience (the “long” version has just had its U.S. release on DVD).

Helped by the remarkable performances of Woodward as the agonized Sergeant Howie and Christopher Lee (he continues to believe that it was the finest performance of his long, long career) as the suavely menacing Lord Summerisle (“A heathen, conceivably, but not, I hope, an unenlightened one.”), possibly the greatest naked dancing sequence ever seen in British cinema (thank you, Britt Ekland, thank you) and, critically, a musical score that brilliantly conjured up that Arcadian idyll of a vanished Albion that is among the most persistent of English myths, The Wicker Man is a dream-like evocation of one man’s destruction and a thought-provoking meditation on the nature, purpose and consequences of religious belief.

The script itself operates at two levels (warning: spoilers ahead). The basic plot is conventional enough. The hunter, Howie, becomes the hunted as he descends deeper and deeper into a labyrinth of deception designed to lure him to the savage rendezvous that earns this (difficult to categorize) film its label as horror. More profoundly, however, The Wicker Man contrasts and compares two very different religious traditions. The first, Christianity, is the very essence of Howie: central both to how he sees himself, and how he believes the world should be. He’s devout, and he’s devout in a killjoy, finger wagging, all too Scottish way. Ordinarily, this could have been expected to pave the way for a clichéd contest between dreary old Christianity and bucolic fun-loving free-loving music-loving pagans (the film was shot, after all, at the tail-end of the hippy era). That it doesn’t is a tribute to the subtlety of this movie’s creators.

For all his narrow-mindedness, the censorious and rather whiny Howie is portrayed as a good man, romantic in his inhibited way (in a test that would have tried St. Anthony, he puts fidelity to his fiancée above succumbing to lovely Britt’s naughty advances), and brave too, as he risks his life to, he thinks, save Rowan. For all his charisma and charm Lord Summerisle, the pagan-in-chief, is altogether different and, ultimately, much less likeable. His ‘love’ for his islanders is, at best, the cold affection of a benevolent despot for his dullard but devoted subjects. The paganism he peddles is, he knows, nonsense, nothing more than an expedient mishmash of old traditions revived by his grandfather as a way to manipulate his workforce. As opiates of the people go, it appears benign on the surface and it’s certainly effective, but from fairly early on in the film, there are hints of a darker undertow.

Before we discover quite how dark it can get (very), director Robin Hardy, and his scriptwriter, Anthony Shaffer, men presumably well-schooled in The Golden Bough, take care to emphasize the strong underlying similarities between Howie’s Christianity and Summerisle’s paganism, as well as the obvious distinctions between them. That’s smart. Mankind appears to have evolved with a need to believe in, and worship, some form of supernatural authority, a need that has found expression in almost every culture. The key question that remains is not as much what we worship, as how. The devil, or God, take your pick, is in the details. Contrary to the claims of ecumenical parsons, all religions are not the same.

The Wicker Man makes it clear that Sergeant Howie’s Christianity is, despite its fervor, house-trained, reasonably civilized and adequately compatible with a modern, humane society. For all its easygoing appeal, Summerisle’s alternative is not. While we see (particularly in the movie’s ‘long’ version) that ritual has a vital role to play in both religions, it is a ritual (specifically a sacrificial ritual) that ultimately exposes the crucial difference between them. Holy Communion (a ceremony pointedly included in the movie) may make some anthropologists shudder, but for practical purposes (I’ll leave the theology to others), it’s a symbolic, life-affirming ceremony, designed to commemorate a single sacrifice intended to suffice for all time. By contrast, Summerisle’s rites reduce a human life to a bribe to be paid to greedy and temperamental gods. Such gods need feeding, and usually more than once (just ask the Aztecs). As Sergeant Howie is dragged off to be sacrificed, he warns Lord Summerisle that, if the crops fail again, it’s he, the laird, who will be the next offering. And we know that he’s right.

The worst of the horrors of this film’s famous final scenes is that none of this will make any difference. A giant wicker effigy has been set ablaze, with Howie imprisoned high up inside it. As the smoke and flames rise, the desperate policeman, pious to the end, shouts out prayers and a psalm, but to no avail. His God is nowhere to be seen. Imprisoned, meanwhile, in the prison that is their creed, the islanders counter the dying man’s cries with an ancient song they dedicate to their sun god. As they sway, and as they sing and as they smile with a joy that looks a lot like desperation, fire consumes the wicker man, and the film ends with a long shot of the setting sun, gorgeous, magnificent, and utterly indifferent to all that has gone on below.

Look but Don't Touch

David Thomson: Nicole Kidman

The New York Sun, September 5, 2006

Right at the beginning of this mad, maddening, provocative, and sometimes beautifully written book, "Nicole Kidman" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95), David Thomson admits that he "loves" Nicole Kidman, a confession that is both essential and superfluous. Skeptical as we all should be about long-distance psychoanalysis, Mr. Thomson's book is more love letter than biography, both a meditation on obsession and a monument to it. He writes:

There she is in profile, her right shoulder raised, her chin lowered … with just a flap of brown cloth covering her breasts and a considerable expanse of white skin … a white that has a streak of icy blue in it, a rare milky hue. ... It is the quality of flesh you find in Ireland still, and in religious paintings of the Renaissance, and it is a mysterious fusion of the spiritual and the erotic — as pale as Cranach.

To read those words is to feel a twinge of sympathy for poor Mrs. Thomson, a frisson of anxiety for pretty Nicole, and a moment of worry for President Bush — 25 years after John Hinckley, we all know that love letters to actresses can sometimes have alarming consequences. But it's too soon to call the FBI or issue a restraining order: Mr. Thomson stresses that his love for Ms. Kidman will endure only so long as they don't meet.

That may be just as well. When eventually they do make contact (mercifully, only by phone), Ms. Kidman comes across as "a languid, superior, but amused prefect who had called a naughty boy to her study to see what he had been up to," an image that conjures up a mixture of repression, guilt, and vaguely masochistic peculiarity that may strike some (if not me — I am, like Mr. Thomson, British-born) as very English. It is an image that is, he supposes, deliberate: "[S]he tries to be what you want her to be."

Mr. Thomson is simply (so to speak) projecting, but in doing so, he nicely illustrates one of his book's wider themes. Movies are collective fantasy, their stars empty vessels into which audiences pour their dreams, longings, and delusions, a role far more demanding than any performed up on that beguiling, gorgeous screen. When Mr. Thomson claims that his love would not survive a face-to-face with his "fragrant," "ripe," "sexy," "elegant," "hot," "glorious," "ravishing" heroine, we almost trust him: He understands the danger of letting reality collide with fantasy, and he believes that cinema celebrity turns its creatures into people incapable of normal interaction.

If you think all this might be way, way too much of a stretch, you may have a point. Sometimes a trip to the cinema is just popcorn and 90 minutes in the dark, sometimes stardom is just a job. Regardless, don't let that you put you off buying this book, which is a wild, berserk ride, swerving here, careering there, and narrowly missing the ditch on more occasions than I can count. But as with "The Whole Equation," Mr. Thomson's garrulous, insistent, and unashamedly eccentric history of Hollywood, it's well worth hanging on until the end. Author of the wonderful, essential, and captivating "Biographical Dictionary of Film," Mr. Thomson has a profound knowledge of the movies and a love for them that exceeds even his adoration of the goddess from Down Under. It's impossible to read " Nicole Kidman" (how he must revel in the fact that the two of them will be linked forever, if only bibliographically) without learning far more about film, and looking at film, than the notion of a work dedicated to the life and times of a "sexy beanpole" with "commas for breasts" would suggest.

With its odd mix of biography, sharp cultural commentary, acute film criticism, and not so concealed longing, " Nicole Kidman," as should be evident by now, is neither conventional showbiz bio, nor tabloid exposé. With the exception of one deliciously prurient detail about the filming of "Eyes Wide Shut," gossip-hounds will be disappointed. If its writer is occasionally pretentious (he is), immodest (all those pages where he suggests how scripts could have been improved), and too prone to drool over Nicole's "very lovely, supple body," it only adds to this book's ramshackle, discursive, opinionated, and besotted charm. Besides, even when spouting nonsense, Mr. Thomson is more informative and entertaining than most writers. Far removed from the arid monotony of film-school Bauhaus, the sparkling rococo of his prose is a joy to read.

Above all, don't miss his sly, clever summaries of Ms. Kidman's oeuvre, particularly of those shockers he believes to be unworthy of his muse's talents, such as "Malice," a fiasco he describes as ending up shipwrecked "on the wilder shores of denouement." That's a phrase so neat that I can even forgive Mr. Thomson for disclosing his dream of Nicole as Belle de Jour being toyed with by a Gestapo officer and an "elderly Chinaman."

But can Mrs. Thomson?

Something in the Air

Miami Vice

National Review Online, August 15, 2006

Michael Mann’s somewhat disappointing new movie may be called Miami Vice and the names of some of its characters may trigger recollections of explosions, pastel, linen suits, stubble, wisecracks, gunplay, and music-video brio, but it has little to do with the ground-breaking television series of 20 years ago. And no, the tawdry remake of Phil Collins’s Michelob anthem that accompanies the film’s closing credits won’t fool anyone that using the old title is anything other than an attempt to cash in on a legendary brand. This movie is Miami Vice in name only. Accept no imitations.

For the real thing, there’s the DVD player (the first two seasons of the original are available), the random enchantment of reruns or, for those of us who were around back in the day, fond memories of the evening we first saw those speedboats dance to Jan Hammer and two cops escape from the monotone restraints of conventional detective drama into the bright sun and subtropical colors of a city that didn’t quite seem to be part of America, not back then, and was like nothing else we had ever seen on television, not back then.

Quite where the idea sprung from is lost in time and competing reminiscence. Most credit the TV executive who had the idea about “MTV cops,” but Anthony Yerkovich, the show’s creator, has reportedly said that the inspiration was a magazine article on how law-enforcement agencies could use booty confiscated from the bad guys in other, unrelated, investigations. That would explain, just, the Ferraris, the powerboat, and the yacht: the threads always remained something of a mystery. What is clear is that Miami Vice would never have made the impact it did without the highly stylized vision of Michael Mann, something that was already taking shape way before (check out his 1981 movie, Thief) Ricardo Tubbs agreed to take up a “career in southern law enforcement.” As to where it came from, well, maybe there really was something in the air.

Even amid the wastelands of taste that were the 1970s there were sporadic signs of a sleeker aesthetic struggling to be born, and with the end of that decade, the end of Carter, the end of earth tones, and the beginning of better times, the country was finally ready for designer hedonism, Bright Lights, Big City, and the profound pleasures of a materialism without shame, guilt, or hair-shirt carping. The ersatz Appalachian sanctimony of the Walton clan was replaced by the glitz, bitches, and riches of those big feuding, big-spending Carringtons, and TV was all the better for it: Good riddance Mary-Ellen. Well, hi there, Fallon. Alex P. Keaton became a national icon and everyone went to the mall. The Eighties, thank God, had arrived. It was the perfect moment for Crockett’s Armani to replace Colombo’s raincoat, and thanks to Michael Mann it did. With its flash, dash, and images of consumer delight, music that was part of the script, and wildly eclectic celebrity guest stars (Lee Iacocca! G. Gordon Liddy! Little Richard! Ted Nugent!), Miami Vice reflected, shaped, and, ultimately helped define the best of all decades (oh yes, it was), and, while it was at it, transformed notions of what television could do.

But for all its innovation, the show also drew its strength and, I suspect, much of its success, from older traditions. Its hard-edged, gleeful, glittering, and sardonic portrait of a city of hoods, hoodlums, hookers and not quite hookers, crooks, cops, dames, sleaze, death, graft, and excess marked a triumphant reworking of classic film noir, the genre that, perhaps more than any other, reminds us that this country has traditions far darker than apple pie and white picket fence. For all its pastel shades, blue skies and architectural splendor, Miami Vice had much of the look, feel, and, sometimes, dialogue of a show from the gat, gal, and gumshoe days.

Crockett: “What a mess…and for what?”

Tubbs: “It’s just a job man. You’re telling me you’d rather be pushing papers in some white-collar cubicle?

Crockett: “This stuff keeps rolling in. We’re just a tollbooth on the highway.”

Tubbs: “Singing the vice cop blues again.”

Philip Marlowe would have understood.

But for all the tough talk, it was never just a job. Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) and Crockett (Don Johnson) may have inhabited noir’s corrupt, morally ambiguous, fallen world, but, like that world’s occasionally upstanding heroes, the two detectives were ultimately on the side of the angels, knights in designer armor, with, needless to say, hints too of the old west about them: Crockett’s white suit, the cowboy’s white hat.

And then there was the buddy thing, another American staple, Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch, Turner and Hooch … well, you know what I mean. True to the conventions of that amiable tradition, Ricardo and Sonny were often defined by the differences between them: Tubbs, for example, seemed so much happier than the perennially haunted Crockett (Vietnam, Sheena Easton, amnesia, there were plenty of traumas for the poor fellow to choose from), but there was never any question about the bond they shared. In Michael Mann’s new take, by contrast, Farrell and Foxx are chillier than Charles and Diana and more distant than a pair of Garbos. There’s no hint of Johnson and Thomas’s sly, affectionate joshing, and the movie’s the poorer for it.

But if Miami Vice reflected and helped shape its times, it also foreshadowed what was to come. There will be some schlubs in Sears suits who still curse them for it, but there’s no doubt that, heterosexuality pointedly buttressed by guns, girls, and macho banter, Miami-Dade PD’s two clotheshorses both anticipated the metrosexual moment and did their bit to pave the way for it. Even more interestingly, their show was an early primetime acknowledgement that America’s ethnic kaleidoscope, so long usually reduced (however inaccurately) to stark, simplistic black and white, was again being changed. From the night clubs, to the streets, to the drug lord’s high-walled mansion, Crockett and Tubbs found themselves strangers in an increasingly strange land, lawmen operating in a disconcertingly alien territory, the country’s latest frontier, where old, familiar ideas of American identity were melting, shifting, and disappearing into Miami’s new mix, the exception that became a precedent.

Good times never last. Perhaps it was inevitable in so distinctive a show, but it wasn’t too long before Miami Vice began to succumb just a little too often to its own clichés, and it wasn’t much longer before Johnson and Thomas got a bad case of the Shatners and decided to record Heartbeat and Living The Book of My Life respectively, a couple of clunkers that gave early warning of hubris and trouble to come. Budgets began to be cut, fashion sense started to fall apart. A mullet was spotted. Michael Mann reduced his involvement. By then he’d already started work on the sadly underrated Crime Story, and served up a first helping of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter. Miami Vice itself lingered on until July 1989, and not without some grace notes, but the Eighties were petering out, the Gipper had gone, George H. W. Bush was mumbling about a kinder, gentler America, and, since February of that year Columbo’s shabby raincoat, rumpled harbinger of a more earnest era, had again been disgracing network TV.

Later, the gorgeous disillusionment of Miami Vice was extended into the darkness and depth of Mann’s three neon-flecked neo-noir epics, the elegiac Heat, the preachy The Insider and the almost faultless Collateral, three reminders that moral murk still plays well in a country that, beneath the prosperous veneer, is as restless, uneasy and uncertain as the nation to which the troops returned six decades ago. As for the rest of the old crew, only Edward James Olmos, the dauntingly dour Lieutenant Castillo, has, after a depressing run of inspirational movies, found himself the perfect role as Battlestar Galactica’s dauntingly dour Admiral Adama. Perhaps he could find a berth somewhere in his rag-tag armada for the man who was Tubbs, the highlight of whose later career was, take your pick, either acting as spokesman for the Philip Michael Thomas Psychic Connection or supplying the voice for Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don Johnson did a little better, gamely returning to police work in Nash Bridges, a pleasure, but no Vice. Nevertheless, proving that you take the boy out of the Eighties but not the Eighties out of the boy, he did manage to marry a Getty. Well done, pal.

Satisfactory though that is, it’s somehow even better that, for all Miami Vice’s impact on television in general, and the cop show in particular, its most obvious successor on our screens today is located not in a police precinct, but in a plastic surgeon’s office, somewhere they really know that it’s surface beauty that counts. With its photogenic cast (headed by the love/hate buddy duo of McNamara and Troy), high production values, inspired use of music, and seductive mix of sex, scenery, cynicism, and scalpel, Nip/Tuck is an elegant, compelling, and thoroughly trashy tribute to the myth that Mann built.

And of course it’s set in Miami.

The Descent

The New York Sun, August 4, 2006

If you're taking a horror buff, psychopath, or someone who is too sedated to care, "The Descent" is an ideal date movie. The work of Neil Marshall, a British director best known for 2002's "Dog Soldiers," "The Descent" (a UK hit last year) is a cut, slash, and a gouge above Mr. Marshall's earlier effort — a dank, dreadful, and weirdly popular werewolf movie that, tellingly, seems to have a found a regular berth on the Sci-Fi channel. A savage drama of spelunking gone awry, Mr. Marshall's new film covers some of the same underground as 2005's "The Cave," but with far more style, chills, thrills, panache, and gore. Admittedly that's no great challenge, but there are times, notably in its tense and claustrophobic first half, when "The Descent" ascends to the level of classic horror.

There's nothing particularly unusual about the story line. Six yuppie women — spunky but too headstrong to learn very much from "Deliverance," "Wrong Turn," "Pumpkinhead," or any number of other cautionary tales set in Appalachia — decide to bond with a caving trip to that peculiarly dangerous part of the world. Making matters worse, the not-so divine Juno (nicely played by Natalie Mendoza), the rather problematic leader of the group, secretly decides to change the destination to a remote cave complex that has never been explored before. Or so she thinks.

The descent itself, deep into the caves and deeper into trouble, is brilliantly and grippingly filmed. You'll feel that you're there. You'll wish you didn't. Then it gets even worse for our six luckless ladies as they discover that uncooperative geology and one really nastily broken leg are the least of their problems. They have company down there, bad company, a tribe of feral Golems, descendants of cavemen too idle to leave the cave, who have evolved in a thoroughly violent direction.

Eventually so does the movie, as it swaps suspense for splatter, slaughter, cannibal snacking, and some of the most satisfying images of human-on-monster combat since that bus ride in the remake of "Dawn of the Dead." Adding to the merriment, Mr. Marshall throws in a few film geek moments with references to "Aliens," "Pitch Black," and, less predictably, "Carrie." For my part, I couldn't help thinking of the cave-dwelling Morlocks preying on the Eloi in George Pal's version of "The Time Machine." On this occasion, however, the Eloi are smart, in great shape, and have clearly studied "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." They know how to fight back.

Dark Comedy

National Review Online, July 31, 2006

Sometimes there can be nothing more telling than contrast. The boat sailing in the sunshine of a July 4th weekend was filled with anticipation, exhilaration, tourists, New Yorkers, the yellow t-shirts of the Jones family reunion, and the pointing and squinting of countless digital Kodak moments. Ahead lay Ellis Island, its museum of immigration, and, tucked away in a corner of that museum’s third floor, an exhibition (Gulag: Soviet Forced Labor Camps and the Struggle for Freedom) dedicated to a monstrosity that had its origins on some very different islands, islands scattered in the White Sea, islands that became (in Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s words) the “mother tumor” of a cancer that eventually metastasized into an archipelago of terror, slavery and murder all across the Soviets’ gargoyle “union.”

It stretched so far, in fact, that to reach some of its most dismal, desolate, and destructive outposts, the camps at Kolyma, took a boat trip too. There was no exhilaration on these ferries to an underworld darker than Hades, just death, hunger, squalor, rape and disease. The only anticipation was of worse to come.

Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia .

Annotated illustrations by one former prisoner, Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia, displayed in this exhibition showed what awaited the guests of her particular corner of the Gulag. They were glimpses of a drained, pitiless world, populated by predators and their hopeless, helpless victims, illuminated only by the surviving shreds of Kersnovskaia’s humanity and the bleak poetry of her furious prose. Here she recalls her own arrival at a “corrective labor camp”:

“First we were made to strip naked and were shoved into some roofless enclosures made out of planks. Above our heads the stars twinkled; below our bare feet lay frozen excrement. An enclosure measured 3 square feet. Each held three to four naked, shivering, and frightened men and women. Then these ‘kennel cages’ were opened one after the other and the naked people were led across a courtyard …into a special building where our documents were ‘formulated’ and our things were ‘searched.’ The goal of the search was to leave us with rags, and to take the good things, sweaters, mittens, socks, scarves, vests, and good shoes, for themselves. Ten thieves shamelessly fleeced these destitute and barely alive people. ‘Corrective’ is something that should make you better, and ‘labor’ ennobles you. But ‘camp’? A camp wasn’t a jail. So then what on earth was going on? ”

This exhibition never quite told us. What it did do was give a sense of what life, death, and the condition somewhere in between (they even had a word for that) in the Gulag was like. Sometimes this was achieved by the display of a few simple objects, such as a crude handmade spoon; a luxury in the camps (prisoners were expected to eat with their hands). Sometimes it was just the stories of the victims themselves.

Take Maria Tchebotareva, for example. The regime did. Her photograph was on display. She was sad-eyed, broad-faced, head-scarfed, an icon of the Slavic heartlands. In happier times she might have been imagined as backdrop to some Tolstoyan pastoral idyll, but she found herself trapped instead inside a real, far darker script. Her ‘crime’ was to steal three pounds of rye from the field the state had stolen from her. She had four hungry children to feed, and in the famine years of 1932-33 (oddly no mention was made of the fact that that famine, known to Ukrainians as the holodomor, was man-made, and left millions of deaths in its wake) and nothing to feed them with. She served twelve years in the Gulag for those three pounds, followed by another eleven in Arctic exile. She never saw her children again. For the Tchebotarevs there was to be no family reunion.

In 1949 they took Ivan Burylov too, a middle-aged beekeeper stung beyond endurance by the hypocrisy of it all. His offense? To write the word “comedy” on his supposedly secret ballot paper (there was, naturally, only one candidate). They tracked him down. Of course they did. They gave him eight years. Of course they did. We’re never told whether he survived, but his ballot endured (it was included in the display), and in its acerbic, laconic way, it was as effective a monument to the USSR as any I’ve seen.

Another such monument, but this time specifically to the cruelty and futility of Soviet rule is the “Belomor” canal. Carved through the roughly 140 miles of granite that divide the White and Baltic seas, it was a typically pharaonic scheme of the early Stalin era involving well over 100,000 prisoners with primitive tools (pickaxes, shovels and makeshift wheelbarrows) and a lack of precision that would have shocked the ancient Egyptians: it proved too shallow and too narrow to ever be of much use.

As a killing machine, however, the Belomor project worked very well. In her history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum cites an estimate of 25,000 dead (there are others, far higher), but no number was given in this exhibition, just the bland adjective “many.” That was fairly typical of an exhibition that too often shied away from specifics. That was a mistake: the statistics and the details count, if only as a warning for the future, a warning that, judging by one statistic that was included, has yet to be properly heeded. Polls in Russia show that “approval” (whatever that might mean) of Stalin’s leadership has risen from 7 percent to 53 percent over the last ten years.

That’s not to say an attempt was made to minimize the horror that was the Belomor. Far from it. Most striking was a continuous loop of old propaganda newsreel purporting to show the enthusiasm of the prisoners, drones of the anthill state, as they clawed, dug, and hacked their way to reform, rehabilitation, and socialist reconstruction through the rock, swamp, and snow; and, yes, just like in Hitler’s camps, there was an orchestra.

A few feet further down the corridor (somehow the immigration museum’s still visibly institutional character added to the force of an exhibit dedicated to a state run amok) was yet more footage: those familiar parades of the weapons of Armageddon, syncopated gymnasts and marching ranks of regimented enthusiasm, but also, more revealingly, film of a young factory worker shouting her praises of great Comrade Stalin, the edge to her voice betraying the collective hysteria that always lurks somewhere within the order, discipline and control of a totalitarian system.

Much of the rest of the exhibition was dedicated to Perm 36, a logging camp set up in the wake of World War Two, that, after the end of Khrushchev’s brief “thaw,” was used to imprison, torment and sometimes kill the Kremlin’s most determined opponents, the bravest of the brave, who persisted in their political work even after serving earlier sentences, men like the Lithuanian Balis Gayauskas. Undaunted by two years in Nazi custody, 35 years in the Gulag, and a further three years in exile, this extraordinary individual had the last laugh — he was elected to the parliament of a Lithuania that had itself won back its freedom.

That happy ending is a satisfying reminder of the USSR’s ignominious collapse, but before reaching the inevitable pictures of a tumbling Berlin Wall, the exhibit took time to pay tribute to the tiny band of dissidents, who for long, lonely years did what they could to preserve the idea of freedom in lands that had known too little of liberty. Naturally, the giants were featured, Solzhenitsyn, the great chronicler, Old Testament in his wrath and grandeur, the gentle-souled, iron-willed Sakharov and, of course, Sakharov’s wife, the spiky, indomitable Bonner, but so were others too, lesser-known, but no less courageous: Sergei Kovalev, Ivan Kovalev (father and son), Tatiana Khodorovich, Tatiana Veilikanova, Grigorii Pod’iapolskii, Anatolii Krasnov-Levitin, Valerij Senderov, Tatiana Osipova (Ivan Kovalev’s wife), Levko Lukjanenko, Leonid Borodin, and Vasyl Stus. Remember their names. Remember their sacrifices.

It would have been unreasonable to think that this relatively small exhibition could ever have illustrated the full scope of decades of Soviet tyranny, but it was disappointing that it never really managed to answer Evfrosiniia Kersnovskaia’s haunting question: “What on earth was going on?” It wasn’t just a question of the exhibition’s missing statistics. The bigger problem was the failure to put the Gulag into its wider context. The impression was somehow left that the camps were primarily a means (albeit brutal) of providing the manpower for “Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power,” something that sounds if not exactly benign then at least more reasonable than the description that this murderous system actually deserved. Certainly, forced industrialization was part of the story, but it’s an explanation that obscures the camps’ significance within a far more ambitious plan.

Why Soviet Communism, a poisonous blend of millennial fantasy, imperial dream, paranoia, and psychosis, to name but a few of its sources and symptoms, evolved in the way it did is the subject of potentially endless debate, but in understanding the way that the dictatorship managed to maintain its grip for so long, it’s necessary to realize that the Gulag was just one part of a network of terror, mass murder, and oppression intended, by eliminating all inconvenient traces of the past, to remake man into a cog in the new, perfect and all-encompassing Soviet machine. That is what was going on, something that this exhibition never truly managed to convey.

Despite this, its joint organizers, Perm’s Gulag Museum and the National Park Service, should be congratulated for doing something to bring the often overlooked horrors (and lessons) of the Gulag to wider attention over here (after closing at Ellis Island on July 4th, the exhibition travels to Boston, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Independence, California). The fact, controversial to some, that space was found to note that many other countries (including the United States) have, like today’s Russia, found it difficult to come to terms with brutal systems that have defaced their histories, should be seen as a statement of the obvious, not some underhand attempt to play down the extraordinary evils of the Soviet past.

But if you want to consider how much more remains to be done in this respect in Russia itself, remember the disturbing poll I mentioned earlier, and, while you are at it, reflect on the fact that according to Memorial (an organization dedicated to keeping alive the history of Soviet repression) between 2002 and 2005 30 monuments to Stalin were erected in the territories of the former USSR, There are, reportedly, plans for another 20 more.

Now ask yourself what the reaction would be if Germans began putting up new statues to Adolf Hitler.

Mann Overboard

Miami Vice

The New York Sun, July 28, 2006

It would be nice to believe that someone, somewhere, someday is going to do a good job translating a much-missed, much-loved television series of my youth onto the big screen, but it's proving a long, long wait. "Bewitched" failed to enchant, "Charlie's Angels" was the work of the devil, "Lost in Space" was adrift in self-importance, "Starsky and Hutch" turned a decent drama into a bad farce, and "The Dukes of Hazzard" transformed a likable hayseed comedy into, well, words fail me.

Despite this dispiriting track record of mediocrity, junk, and exhausted imaginations, it was impossible not be intrigued by the news that Michael Mann, the executive producer of the original "Miami Vice" and the man most responsible for that show's extraordinary panache, was teaming up again with Anthony Yerkovich, the series' creator, to bring Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett to the movies.With its groundbreaking visual imagery, use of music, and sheer sense of style, "Miami Vice" was television as it had never been seen before: It transformed the notions of what the medium could achieve, and, while it was at it, triggered a fashion revolution and helped define an era's idea of itself.

As if that wasn't enough, Mr. Mann has repeatedly demonstrated that there is more than one clip to his Uzi. "Miami Vice" was followed by the underappreciated "Crime Story,"and, with his effective and unsettling "Manhunter," he gave moviegoers their first taste, so to speak, of Hannibal Lecter.While not all the films he has directed have worked (the last of "The Last of the Mohicans" couldn't come too quickly for me), "Heat," "Collateral," and (despite its preachiness) "The Insider"all confirmed that Mr. Mann's distinctive aesthetic vision and narrative flair have made him one of the most interesting presences in contemporary American cinema.

Maybe it's yet another sign of Mr. Mann's willingness to innovate that this new "Miami Vice" bears so little resemblance to the original show. On the other hand, he may simply have felt that he had no choice: A retro movie set in the 1980s would have been pointless (what more was there to say?), while too literal an updating would have run the risk of turning Sonny Crockett into an Austin Powers in linen, pastel, and stubble. But why stick with the "Miami Vice" name at all? Sadly, that, at least, must have been an easy decision: It remains, deservedly, a powerful brand, and the entertainment industry is nothing if not a greedy business. Mr. Mann's new movie is thus being marketed as the "contemporization" of an old favorite, an ugly word for a worse idea, and something that will give audiences an utterly misleading impression of what they are about to see. It may, of course, make commercial sense, but reviving the old name distracts from what Mr. Mann has done (and detracts from what he could have done) with this film and is, artistically at least, a mistake.

Even more damagingly, Mr. Mann seems to have used the brand's revival as an excuse to revert to the original series' emphasis of style over content.Within the time constraints of an under-an-hour television show, that didn't matter: Style alone could be content enough. But during the course of more than two hours of movie, the absence of a compelling story line might be enough to drive some of the film's audience to the drugs that its heroes are trying so hard to impound.To be sure, when it comes to images of startling loveliness, this movie (helped by the inspired and, that word again — groundbreaking — use of high-definition cameras), does, typically for Mr. Mann, not disappoint, even if his highly romanticized paean to Havana (actually filmed in Uruguay) will probably jar with anyone familiar with the realities of life under Castro. But images, however gorgeous, are not enough, even when punctuated by the spectacularly choreographed gunplay that has long been another Mann trademark, to sustain a full-length film. And in "Miami Vice," they don't.

As for what plot there is, Mr. Mann doesn't go into details and nor will I, but suffice to say it involves drug smuggling, the Aryan Brotherhood, undercover sleuthing, corrupt governments, international criminals, portentous dialogue, speedboats, and a doomed affair. It's also painted on a far broader canvas than the Miami 'n Medellin of the old series, a gesture apparently intended to show that crime, like so much else, is globalizing rapidly, something that should be a revelation to only the slowest among us.

But the key theme of this movie, supposedly, is what going undercover can mean to the cops who choose to do so."You can go too deep," Mr. Mann has explained,"and you have to rely on your partner to pull you back from the edge. As Tubbs says to Crockett,‘There's undercover, and then there's which way is up?"' This could be an interesting enough, if not exactly novel, topic (it featured, incidentally, in the original TV series), but Mr. Mann never gives it the attention it deserves. Compared with the subtle examination of the personalities of the principal characters in "Heat" and "Collateral," Crockett's supposedly existential angst is treated cursorily and comes across as little more than a moment or two of indecision, irritation, and sadness.

Much of the fault for this lies with Colin Farrell's leaden Crockett (an impression reinforced both by his somewhat Neanderthal appearance and a most unfortunate moustache) and his amazing lack of chemistry with his love interest, the strikingly attractive Gong Li (the Chinese actress so remarkable in "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), who herself appears forlorn and confused throughout this film. For that matter, there's not much of a bond either between Crockett and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), that much-vaunted partner of his, who is, remember, meant to care enough about his pal to be "pulling him back from the edge," despite the fact that a more natural response to some of Crockett's behavior would be to shove him over the nearest convenient precipice.

Equally — and it's an example of the way that memories of the old show detract from the new movie — Jamie Foxx, so good as the cabbie in "Collateral," essentially reprises much of that role in a fine performance as a straight-arrow detective that will still leave the nostalgic pining for Philip Michael Thomas and his quirky, more oddball Ricardo. Fans of the TV series will have to make do instead with another "Collateral" graduate, Barry Shabaka Henley, whose impressive (if underused) Lieutenant Castillo hints at the memorably daunting Edward James Olmos of two decades ago.

But if they are to make the most of this movie, those fans would do better to leave nostalgia to re-runs and DVD collections and just try to accept Mr. Mann's movie on its own merits — as a lesser, flawed, but reasonably entertaining and occasionally intriguing police procedural by a director who has shown that he can do far, far better than this.

And next time he probably will.

Blinded by the Light

A Scanner Darkly

The New York Sun, July 7, 2006

Philip K. Dick (1928-82), the reliably legendary, always eccentric, and occasionally brilliant science fiction writer whose "A Scanner Darkly" is the basis of Richard Linklater's dreadful new movie,is often described as a philosopher, a shaman, and a seer. But that's being kind, the man was bonkers, a nutcase, a lunatic, crazier than a street-corner shouter or attic-roosting aunt. Unfair? Maybe,but then unlike Dick I have never been fortunate enough to be "seized" by a light beam that lifted me "from the limitations of the space-time matrix"and released me "from every thrall, inner and outer."

And if that doesn't sound deranged to you, try popping the meds your doctor keeps talking about. Please. Just do it now.

But Dick's madness (no small part of which was drug-fueled) defined his genius.The best of his novels play with reality, perception, time, and identity in a fun house, madhouse, crack house jumble that can inspire, infuriate, bore, and enchant. And so it's no surprise that, after never really making the major leagues during a lifetime dominated by Asimov, Clarke, and other bards of the rocket men, Philip K. Dick has come into vogue in our own epoch of junkyard mysticism and gimcrack thought, an era where the idea of objective truth finds itself dismissed as mirage at best, deliberate deception at worst. A madman ahead of his time, Daffy Dick too was convinced that he had been "lied to." His light beam had "denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying, ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist'" — asylum jabber that sounds a lot like today's conventional, if idiotic, wisdom (and even more like a screenplay).

In the nearly quarter century since his death, eight movies (including this one) have been made from Dick's work, generating hundreds of millions of dollars and, it sometimes seems, a similar number of bad reviews. I'll admit to not having seen either 1995's "Screamers" (remorseless killer machines on a distant planet) or the unpromising-sounding "Confessions of A Crap Artist" (1992), but, with the glistening, rain-streaked exception of Ridley Scott's eerily prescient and remarkably influential "Blade Runner" (loosely based on Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"), films such as "Impostor," "Minority Report," and "Paycheck" have plundered the author's reputation but enriched his estate. As for "Total Recall," even the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a young Sharon Stone, and the most excitingly irradiated mutants this side of "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" could not stop Paul Verhoeven's account of Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" from degenerating into kitsch, ham, and fiasco.

Frankly, I doubt if even the lissome Ms. Stone, the mighty Arnold, and the mutated human flotsam could have done much to salvage the wreck that is "A Scanner Darkly." Talky, talky, talky, and with a plot "twist" so telegraphed that it could have been a Capitol Hill secret, this dreary stoner sci-fi police procedural sort-of-comedy cautionary tale (oh, call it what you want: I give up) has little future other than as an alternative for insomniacs too timid to deal with Ambien's regrettably feeble high.

But if "A Scanner Darkly" has a redeeming feature, it is the remarkable use that Mr. Linklater has made of "rotoscoping," something he first tried in 2001's "Waking Life" (a beautiful movie, but more or less unwatchable, life is just a dream, whatever). Put very crudely, this is a technique by which "real action" film is overlaid with animation. Basically, the animators use the live footage as the foundation (in a sense, they trace their designs on top of it) of their own work. In "A Scanner Darkly," the result is images that are both reassuringly realistic, yet disconcertingly skewed, a perfect way of conveying the drug-saturated milieu in which this movie's addled protagonists stumble about their confusing, confused business (a central theme is that of a cop, Keanu Reeves, knowingly and unknowingly spying on himself). It also allows the director to portray the shifting, bewildering "scramble suits" with which the film's undercover policemen disguise themselves, camouflage of such startling, hallucinatory loveliness that it will linger in the mind long after the rest of this wretched, interminable hundred minutes has vanished into merciful forgetfulness.

Ironically, the problem is not that Mr. Linklater has made a mess of Dick's novel, but that he has remained too true to it. The director had already shown himself to be familiar with Dick's thinking in "Waking Life" (which contains a number of references to the writer's ideas), but in this movie he reveals himself to be too much a fan to tamper with a text that, if it was to make an entertaining film, needed a great deal of tampering. It may have the narrative (of sorts) and structure (of sorts) of more traditional science fiction, but Dick primarily intended "A Scanner Darkly" as a demonstration of where narcotic frolics could lead:

... this has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. … we really all were very happy for a while … but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it.

With its sense of dissolving identities (reinforced by the way the rotoscoping is used to turn the film's performers into illusions, visions, and caricatures of themselves), rambling stoner monologues, paranoia, overacting (Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., I'm talking about you two), insect visions, and insanity, this movie judders, crumbles, and ultimately tips over into being little more than a hip "Reefer Madness" hopped up with a sinister conspiracy. This is a shame, because somewhere beneath the murkily obsessive doper remorse, "A Scanner Darkly" has something important to say about the way the "war on drugs," technological advance, and the needs of the surveillance state feed upon each other.

But that too-neglected topic will, clearly, have to wait for another movie, and the long-suffering, patient, and faithful fans of Philip K. Dick will have to return once again to "Blade Runner," nearly 25 years old now, but possibly the greatest sci-fi movie of all time, and an extraordinary demonstration of how to translate this quirkiest of writers onto the big screen.

A Superhero To Cheer About

Superman Returns

The New York Sun, June 26, 2006

To explain the ultimate source, and the lasting popularity, of Superman would take Carl Jung, "The Golden Bough," and, quite possibly, Zane Grey. What we do know is that, since the Man of Steel's initial appearance in June 1938's "Action Comics," he, like all the gods, devils, and myths of mankind's collective unconsciousness, has changed along with the times in which he finds himself imagined. With "Superman Returns," directed by Bryan Singer, he is still evolving.

If we start, as we should, at the very beginning, 1938's man from Krypton was a "champion of the oppressed," the New Deal in a red cape, tearing down slums, taking out irresponsible mine owners, and, for all I know, campaigning for higher tax rates. By the time of Max Fleischer's glorious animations of the early 1940s, at their best still the finest representations of the Superman who fell to Earth, the plot-lines looked more like conventional science fiction, with our hero fending off the machines, monsters, and cackling villains we have all come to expect. There was a clear subtext too. Memories of the 1939 World Fair's re assuring "world of tomorrow" had been displaced by wartime's Frankenstein technology, and Superman became our ally against science gone mad, bad, or otherwise abused, a role he still plays.

In the 1950s, George Reeves was a Superman for the Eisenhower years, an extraterrestrial Ward Cleaver, invincible even beyond the confines of a fortress of domesticity. His mysterious death (suicide, with added murder rumors) at the end of that decade was, somehow, a suitable way to usher in a more disenchanted era, a time when the Man of Steel ran the risk of being seen as the Man of Corn, as square as the last boy scout, Clark Kent himself.

This must explain why when Superman returned to the big screen in 1978, the director, Richard Donner, felt that this was no longer a story that could be told with a straight face. Fortunately the leaden camp, heavy irony, and witless buffoonery that weighed down both that movie and its immediate successor were thoroughly subverted by the decency, kindness, and strength conveyed by Christopher Reeve in a remarkable performance that, despite a good try by Brandon Routh in "Superman Returns," remains definitive.

Even Reeve could do little to save the slapstick-scarred "Superman III" and the motheaten "Superman IV," the latter a movie that appeared to see Superman return to his lefty roots with an attack on nuclear weapons, not just the bad ones belonging to those pesky communists. Those films have, mercifully, been written out of history. Instead, "Superman Returns" is a sequel of sorts, a "spiritual descendant," to "Superman: The Movie" (to which Mr. Singer's plot owes a great debt) and "Superman II."

But while the final decade or so of the last century saw enough twists and turns in the comic-book version of the saga to drive a continuity nerd to drool, it took the feelings of melancholy and danger that enveloped this nation in the wake of September 11, 2001, to create an audience for a sweet, straightforward, and oddly moving account of the young Clark's life in television's "Smallville." At least in its early seasons, this series played on that nostalgic American heartland ideal that has always had so important a part in the appeal of the Superman story (and was one of the few redeeming features of "Superman III"). In a way, the sense of an imperiled Arcadia conveyed by "Smallville" was as emblematic of those troubled, troubling times as the flags then on sad, proud display on homes all across the country, including, naturally, that of Jonathan and Martha Kent.

With the exception of Eva Marie Saint's touching performance as Ma Kent in "Superman Returns," Mr. Singer makes little effort to play to this aspect of the saga, but the tone of "Smallville" must have had some influence on the director's decision to take his subject matter more seriously than his predecessors. While Kevin Spacey's Luthor is partly (and regrettably) played for laughs, his typically sly performance is an immense improvement on the imbecile clowning that defined Gene Hackman's Lex. For the rest, with the disastrous exception of Parker Posey's almost unwatchable Kitty Kowalski, the comedy is, thankfully, played down.

And then there's Lois Lane. In the five years that Superman has been away searching for what's left of his home planet (not a lot), Lois has acquired a fiance, a Pulitzer for her article on, oh dear, "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman," and, hmmm, a 5-year-old son. Adding to her difficulties, she's played by Kate Bosworth, who is both too young and, despite a brunette hairdo, too blonde to be believable as spiky, dark Lois: Her inner Sandra Dee just keeps shining through. For a far more convincing Lane, try Teri Hatcher (Lois before Wisteria) in the counterfeit "Moonlighting" better known as "Lois & Clark" (1993-97), a wisp of a show for a frivolous time, where Dean Cain's Superman was notable mainly as the Man of Snark.

Needless to say, when Superman returns so does his complicated relationship with Lois: there's nothing new about that. What is different about Mr. Singer's movie is the way in which it is a spiritual descendant of the earlier movies, in more ways than one. When, in "Superman III," Clark dances with Lana Lang to the dulcet doo-wop of "Earth Angel," it's a clever joke. It's an indication of the way in which "Superman Returns" reflects today's more religious age that, in this latest chapter of the epic, the title of that old tune could be an almost literal description of who or what Mr. Singer's version of Superman is meant to be.

As Superman's real father (played by recycled footage of Marlon Brando from the first movie) explains, humans "only lack the light to show the way. ... I have sent them you ... my only son," a clear reference to You Know Who, a recurrent theme of Mr. Singer's film that is underpinned, in one instance, by a lovely sequence of Superman ascending into the heavens (the special effects in "Superman Returns" are first-rate) and looking protectively, and a little sadly, down upon our discordant planet, a gorgeous guardian angel carved not out of cathedral stone, but the filmmaker's skill and the power of our own dreams. In her disloyal Pulitzer essay, Lois wrote that mankind has no need for a savior. By the end of "Superman Returns," she has, needless to say, discovered how wrong she was.

But even if this movie sometimes seems to have the length of a sermon (it goes on a little too long), its borrowings from myth and religion are never preachy - they merely throw additional allegory into what is already a potent, much loved legend. And when, at the end of the screening, the audience began to cheer, they were not just cheering Mr. Singer's fine film, but the legend itself, made up of their memories, their nostalgia, the stories they grew up with, the well-thumbed comic books, the courage of Reeve, that heartland ideal, and so, so much more, not least the fact that, at the conclusion of this movie, Superman promises that he'll "always" be around.

And, as Clark Kent would say, that's just swell.