The Aviator

Continuing the aperture of my untimely reminiscence, I recently came upon The Aviator on TV. As I watched it (I had been meaning to do so for years), I tried to imagine it reverse engineered as a book, all the intricacies of Howard Hughes and his obsessive compulsion explained in detail. But I think that The Aviator is perfect as a movie in that it thrives on the lack of information. Consider the opening of the film. Though the viewer realizes that he is much more of a blinding visionary than a wasteful and unorganized fool, the film certainly attempts to blur the lines because he never once explains himself to anybody. There is only an intensity to Howard Hughes, and though nothing is said about the quality of his work or his emotional state, Hughes is presented as a man who will do anything in the fulfillment of his vision and only gets away with it because he is so good at it. As the audience finishes the first screening of Hell's Angels and roars in acceptance, it sets up a common theme: how close triumph skates with disaster.

Within the context of the film his behavior is also never given an awareness of its own. He washes his hands with a cathartic zeal and during movie premieres has to hold himself together through the light of ionized gas and speeding electrons like he holds his plane through the sparks and heat of a bad landing. This is a man who struggles with a darkness that to others seems eccentric unexplained and mentally disturbed when it is known. The movie says a lot about what he does, not why, and I think that these are things that cannot be understood because they are a product of his mind. Sometimes the mind can't be known. What is important is what we understand from watching him, how he designs his planes, and what he does to get what he wants. The subject material governs this. It allows the film to focus on the story of his life while the seedy underbelly beneath it goes unexplained. The brilliance cannot come without the madness, and at some point this simply becomes a movie about a man's life. I also enjoy movies about how the best of us (intellectually, creatively, financially) cope with darkness.

The thing that stays with me the most is that out of one last triumph the movie ends on the eve of his biggest disaster. It remains consistent with the rest of the film and never moves his issues to the forefront, but it also foreshadows his declination with words that are strangely prescient. Howard Hughes continuously banks everything on the future, only to gamble on it again, and yet this is a man who is quickly hurtling into the sun.

A Trek Through Time

Star Trek: The Next Generation had a style that was best nurtured as something eclectic, as scripts were often received in venal mercenary pacts from outside the writing staff. I myself felt like I was once part of this organism, then I fell out it, and then I reintegrated myself back into it. Its values favor those who are apprehended by rich, interconnected worlds, but the best of Star Trek chafes against the very grain of its stereotype. Star Trek is still sci fi and has been pigeonholed for a good reason, but these works are very human, very dramatic, and the stories have plenty of verve. Theory: sci fi writers are introspective, thoughtful, idea oriented, strapped to their own imaginations. A lot of them have trouble writing good characters. Even fewer write good dialog. They are transfixed by the universe but don't necessarily understand people, and so they write about the universe. There are numerous exceptions, but I think that there is some truth to that. And so I want to honor what I feel are the very best and most human episodes of The Next Generation in its long and treasured run.

I seldom see The Offspring crop up on many lists, but it is Patrick Stewart's favorite episode, and I share the sentiment. Jonathan Frakes's directorial debut, written by René Echevarria, finds fertile ground in the opening acts. Data has the ability to create life and yet does not understand the implications of it. The episode has excellent pacing, and there is a nice montage with a voice over from Data that is most impactful in sequence because it shows Lal trying to emulate human behavior. It's quick and orderly, and the impact would be lost if it was unabridged. In fact, the episode features a misdirection, as it spends most of its time debating the qualifications of Data as a parent and ends with Lal's inadvertent death. Admiral Haftel almost becomes the stock villain but is instead expertly used as a Trojan Horse to evoke sympathy at the end - the man who thought that Lal would be better served in a laboratory gives an almost frightening eulogy as he informs Picard that he couldn't follow the speed of Data's hands as he tries to save Lal. In a strange way Data cannot love but instead shows how much he cares, and it is enough to convince Haftel and shake him to his core.

Another underrated episode is the fourth season's The Drumhead (also directed by Frakes, written by Jeri Taylor). This episode works as a triumvirate. In the opening acts we are treated to the threat of a Romulan collaborator (a Klingon no less) linked to a larger conspiracy. Immediately the viewer is set with expectations, and for a time he's obliged; a medical technician, the diffident Simon Tarsus, is questioned in conjunction with the investigation and is revealed to have Romulan blood. The initial cover up binds it all together, never mind the fact that it was necessitated by his approval to Starfleet Academy. Worf takes on the perspective of the audience: he pushes the conspiracy angle hard before his realization that the trial has become a tragedy, then a farce. This is to mirror the emotions of the viewer. Jean Simmons gives an excellent portrayal of Rear Admiral Norah Satie, who initially establishes herself as a rational, eloquent woman. We only know who she is because of what we see of her. She is obviously an inveterate, distinguished person. Is the episode trying to say that a righteous vigilanti can appear rationale and eloquent? Or did she just go too far?

The Inner Light (which, curiously enough, was filmed almost exclusively on an indoor set) is often cited as the very best of TNG, a national prizefighter if you will. I am more agnostic here; I believe that it could be, but I'm not entirely convinced. The previous two episodes used pacing and structure to provide the dramatic hook and enhance the story. The emotional resonance of The Inner Light hinges almost completely on the premise: an alien probe from a ruined world forces Picard to relive a lifetime of events in only 25 minutes. But the episode is very honest. Picard's life on the Enterprise fades in reflection, and with that existence on the fringe, he becomes something that he would never oblige himself as a starship captain. He becomes a family man. The juxtaposition of these two realities works well. One of the final scenes featured some excellent acting from Stewart as his family and friends, timelessly preserved as their younger selves, tell him that he is burdened with carrying the weight of a long dead civilization.

A lot of reasons are given for why Tapestry succeeds: Picard relives a life he once reviled and becomes something he hates even more, context is given for his famous laugh at the edge of a knife, established in Samaritan Snare, and of course it was written by Ronald D. Moore. Beyond that, however, the first thirty minutes could have been very dry with the outcome already in place. These initial segments work for two reasons: 1) Picard's life is at stake, and at the end of the episode he would rather choose death than a safe, comfortable life, and 2) Picard hates the young man he is forced to live as, and it exacerbates the issue when Q provides commentary. Picard is given the opportunity to live his earlier days as he lives as captain of the Enterprise, which ironically ends his career before it begins. Foresight can be dangerous, and it is only through the spontaneity of life that we learn from our mistakes.

I am not going to delineate much about The Best of Both Worlds, but its strengths provide context as to why much of later Trek failed: it pushed the crew to the brink, forced them to make tough decisions, and was anything but predictable storytelling.

The Road Not Taken

The movie version of No Country for Old Men was my first contact with Cormac McCarthy's work. The last words of the film were powerful, the dream of the love between father and son in a world where such love doesn't seem likely to exist, told in a time where the evil of men was oppressive. This symmetry seemed iron cast for a worthy story, and so I bought The Road, of which was called McCarthy's most accessible work. The Road is a book, in that it cannot be anything else. It jumps between action and thought without seam, containing nothing but the insular projection of father and son. Dialog goes without quotations and recedes into the rest of the text, and time and place seem to be abolished as the reader floats through the world without reason or explanation. It has the sensation of peeling away some one's mind and observing their layers of thought from above, wonderfully random and unhinged. You might be treated to a flashback one moment and an action piece the next.

The vituperative world is relayed through exact and technical descriptions (for instance, stone "flues"), and he delivers evocative metaphors and strings of thought that stand strong amongst the isolation of the world that he has created. His style is unique and transformative, turning docile words into powerful and emotional beasts. Standard rules of grammar are trivial in McCarthy's world. Such things as a comma are intended to shield common clusters of thought so that they are understandable while being conveyed. But McCarthy organizes his thoughts in such a way that there is never any confusion.

With the movie arriving later this year, I think that this will be an interesting experiment to assess what can be culled from the ashes of a book that relies on the strengths of a written medium through and through. Books stylistically diverge from one another in both voice and detail. McCarthy is aware that you will come to know the characters better by the resonance of their nightmares than you will by their names. The Road is such a beautiful piece of literature because the writing is so transportive and the language is so eloquent in the crudeness and the brutality that seeks to emancipate hope from father and son.

But the film will have to rely on visuals and editing, and the hazy vision that McCarthy has presented will ring with a little more clarity. I think that there is strength in ignorance. I'm not sure if I want things to be patched together. Details in The Road pass by at arms length along the panorama, but it is seldom certain. A flashback to some dialog might have happened sometime and somewhere, and it is the uncertainty that makes it so fleeting in a world of lurid despotism on the brink of total despair. It is not up to us to know.

I said that The Road cannot be anything else but a book, and I meant that only in its present form. The movie will of course take the basic form of the story and make a film out of it, relying on all of the conventions of a film, and what will come out on the other side will be a very different take on the same familiar story. I don't think that should be disparaged. Instead, it should be nurtured along and encouraged. McCarthy's work is exhaustive and breathtaking, but it cannot be all things, and the movie will hopefully provide something that the book is not.

Does Nolan Look Like a Man With a Plan?

Christopher Nolan is a quantum filmmaker; each of his movies is an event. Memento established him in the directorial firmament, but Insomnia proved that he was consistent. The first thing I sensed as I watched The Dark Knight was his inveterate approach and his signature fingerprints: rich, complex scene composition. He establishes so many things within a brief span of time.

Batman Begins was raw and visceral. The exploration of Bruce Wayne as a character takes place on open ground that is impossible to miss. It is explained to us, but it is not shouted down in a chorus, and this works perfectly because the dialog is so well written and so larger than life and the characterizations are strong. Bruce's dad is given only a handful of lines (his mother doesn't even speak), but the movie wastes nothing in telling you what kind of man he is, and he is important since he is the harbinger of his son's descent into Batman. Bruce is a man seeking answers. At the beginning of the movie he is in disrepair, and so it is as much a journey for us as it is for him.

The biggest divergences from Batman Begins are illustrated best with this scene. Ducard delivers one cohesive speech that spans several different settings, and despite looking whole on paper, context changes based on the scene. Two separate lines are given in the midst of a scene transition ("We can teach you how to become truly invisible." "Invisible?"). This mirrors a similar occurrence in Citizen Kane where a dramatic jump in time is masked by an otherwise cohesive line ("Merry Christmas...and a happy New Year"). Cuts are employed extensively. Time and space seem to be abolished as the music swells. The movie moves fast, never lingering on any one scene for too long, and it realizes that the presentation of Bruce's psychology and the pacing of it is important in understanding the man behind the mask.

Batman Begins is crafted with perfect atom-point precision for the first fifty minutes. This can't be sustained, of course, since it has to move forward into Gotham and the crime drama that awaits, and so it undergoes a shift in tone and pacing. The Dark Knight I feel is the model of equanimity. To quote Salieri from Amadeus: "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall." Everything in The Dark Knight works in perfect tandem, relaying information about the characters on multiple levels while establishing future events. Though Nolan sometimes bends reality, there is a sense that the movie becomes so rich and detailed that it begins to reflect life itself. For instance, he deftly establishes the Batman copycats and conflates them with the state of the criminal underworld as demonstrated by Scarecrow. That scene also sets up several future storylines (suit upgrades, the mobster and the dogs later in the film), and it's an excellent interlude into the Joker's story: Bruce may think that Batman has no limits as he has the mob on the run, but that ideology will soon be tested. The Dark Knight is like any other great movie. It rewards you for being perceptive.

I only have a working theory that Batman Begins was endemic of a David Goyer approach. The Dark Knight feels more certifiably Nolan brothers. There are some bridging qualities, for instance, the symbolism of the purging fire. But they seem to be two textile approaches to otherwise similar movies.

Juno

There is a moment in Juno when the tall Savannah grass parts and the movie’s wild vision becomes clear. It is a scene in which Juno shares a dance with Mark Loring, the room itself cloistered away with his junk in his otherwise neat and opulent home. As Mark begins to relive his early years, he confides in Juno that he is going to leave his wife Vanessa (Jennifer Garner), a woman with whom he can’t even connect any longer on the level that he has connected with Juno through her unexpected and unwanted pregnancy. Vanessa disrespects Mark’s diverging values throughout the film. The pacing of the movie initially sets Mark up as the stilted and faithful husband, which makes it more poignant as he unwinds before Juno, and the irony is that she rebuffs him as he reveals himself to be yet another flawed man in a flawed marriage.

The scene that follows downstairs between Vanessa and Mark is especially uncomfortable and sweltering, and I think that it was made all the more potent by the warning of Juno’s stepmother Bren about corresponding with an older man alone. The warning didn’t have any other relevance but to enhance the distress throughout that interaction, but the magic here is that it makes the scene absolutely gripping.

Juno reunites Arrested Development alums Jason Bateman and Michael Cera (which coincidentally I had finished that very morning), though neither of them share a scene together. Cera’s Paulie Bleeker, the father of Juno’s child, seems to arise from the same ancestral home as his AD character George Michael. Both are reticent, cautious youth, and Cera himself is skilled at expression while showing little. Ellen Page delivers a grounded performance as Juno, the incontinent, tangy teen, knowledgeable in the ways of the world but lacking seasoned experience.

Most of the beginning acts rely on Juno’s character, who I didn’t necessarily find myself aligned with, as several of her scenes were awkward and socially unacceptable, especially when she is juxtaposed with the tidy, picture perfect couple of Mark and Vanessa for the first time. But I enjoyed watching her character from afar because there are no swathes of truth. She is neither hero nor villain. She is a teen under the umbrella of pregnancy. Bren had obviously taught her how to stand up for herself and speak her mind. Both Paulie and Juno appear as self aware characters that work well together, and as Juno finds herself questioning whether a true relationship can ever work, she eventually comes to realize that it is her odd relationship with Paulie that matters.

Director Jason Reitman made the comment in reference to Juno’s pregnancy that her parents (J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney) were more heartbroken than angry, and I think that this speaks to another flawed but honest relationship. Reitman himself imbues the movie with simple shots. There is some repetition, for instance, the cross country and track teams during each of the four seasons, and three times Juno moves against the heady confluence of a crowd.

I don’t feel that the script is as strong as No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood, but I think that Diablo Cody’s freshman effort deserved Best Original Screenplay. The style is obviously a granitic obstacle for some, but I think that Juno fulfills the style well. I believe that Juno doesn’t understand the implications of creating life. This is a girl for whom walking out of an abortion clinic is as cavalier as walking in. And she displays no sentimentality as she talks about extracting the child through birth with the cold calculations of removing a wart. She understands the world but not its intricacies. Like any teenager she is conflicted between how simple the world should be and how complex and boundary ridden it really is. I think that her development in this regard is subtle, but of course she puts on an abrasive front. I am not necessarily concerned with that because it is how she chooses to present herself. The movie mixes it in with dexterity once the film begins to take flight, and her presentation isn’t as important as how she copes with her surroundings.