#WTW: The Trial

(at last! it’s #WhatThomWatched XIX)

The Trial

(1962, Orson Welles; Streaming via Netflix)

Orson Welles’s late films often had fragmented and troubled productions, lackluster promotion and reception, stellar performances from international actors and American character actors but no “stars” — and wildly innovative camera and sound work, sometimes unrecognized in the service of “genre” stories or near-experimental forms. (His final unfinished work, The Other Side of the Wind, which has just become the focus of renewed efforts to fund completion, reportedly takes these experiments further still.) After his unprecedented splash with first film Citizen Kane (at 24!), and subsequent fall from favor and exile to Europe, Welles acted and did voiceover and radio work to fund the occasional film, resulting in several relatively low-budget masterpieces. The Trial, set up by French producer Alexander Salkind, was actually an outlier — a return to a high-profile, reasonably budgeted, important property, with a couple of actual stars attached. As a literary adaptation of one of Franz Kafka’s most important works, it is inarguably successful — few adaptations can claim to have captured the essence of their source material so thoroughly. Of course, if the source is literature’s unparalleled depiction of paranoia, absurdity, and fear in a totalitarian state — instantly banned in its home country and still disavowed to this day — the cinematic representation is not crowd-pleasing popcorn material. It is as cold as a concrete apartment facade and as unforgiving as an impenetrable justice system.

Anthony Perkins plays Josef K., a successful mid-level bank manager who is interrogated in his apartment by two government goons in the first scene, told only that he will be facing charges in an upcoming court trial — but that he cannot know the charges against him, when he will be tried, or even who will act as his advocate. Perkins is not without resolve and courage, and so he attempts to meet the situation head on — demanding answers, trying to work his way through the bureaucracy, and so forth (in this way Welles has somewhat altered the K. of the novel, who is more passive; here some elements which were merely internal thoughts of the novel’s milquetoast K. are brought out and shown to us as (futile) actions) — but instead he’s dragged deeper and faster into a maddening series of increasingly confusing scenarios. As he seems to get a handle on one challenge, the rules shift beneath him and he winds up in a worse situation. Along the way he meets several absurd characters, some diabolical but many ostensibly helpful, and has a series of conversations and encounters. It ends as badly as anyone would expect, inevitable from the first frame.

Near the end of the novel, K. meets a priest who tells him a fable called “Before the Law” (which Kafka had previously published as a stand-alone short story). In the film, Welles asked the art animators Alexander Alexeïeff and Claire Parker to create a series of stills illustrating the fable, using their laborious “pinboard” technique (in which images are created by pushing tiny pins set in a grid pattern some distance through a board — like the toys which allow an impression to be made of an object with sliding pins — and photographed by a light source shining from the side, so that a picture is formed by the oblique shadows of the pins). Welles narrates the stills to create a short film of the fable, and this opens the movie; later, at the point in the story where the fable is told to K., the images are shown as projected slides on a screen. Welles in his character as K.’s antagonistic Advocate controls the projector; Perkins as K. is trapped in the beam, arguing for his life as the images bathe his body in light and darkness; this replaces the book’s exegesis of the fable between the Priest and K. Every element of Kafka’s text, every effect he creates through K.’s internal narrative and confusion, has to be transformed by Welles into a cinematic experience of image and sound; he is a translator, just as Willa and Edwin Muir had to render Kafka’s words in English from the original German in 1937, except that Welles knew that he had to escape words themselves, using pure cinema to create an analogue emotional experience for the viewer. Every scene of The Trial is like this; every choice Welles made (some completely successful, others not) is in service of this mission. And in making these choices, Welles left a staggering amount of material to inspire future artists dealing with similarly-minded projects. The possible connections between The Trial and other films seen and as-yet unseen are myriad.

Reminds me of:

So with that in mind: As I was clipping stills for this #WTW, I found myself arrested by composition after composition. I finally made myself stop — arbitrarily — once I’d grabbed a hundred “too good to pass up” frames. After a couple general Reminds me of paragraphs, I’m going to switch into a mode that I haven’t used in past pieces; I’m just going to share a few of these shots and talk about what they evoke for me. But first, here are just a couple of the most obvious connections my mind leapt to during Welles’s film:

If you’ve read #WTW 8 (Svankmajer’s Alice), you know that I’m an Alice in Wonderland freak. I’m not claiming any academic literary connection between Carroll and Kafka, but of course The Trial shares a structural conceit in common with the Alice books and with plenty of other satirical works: It’s episodic, with our identification-figure hero(ine) meeting a series of mad (British-sense-crazy-mad and plain old American-sense-angry-mad) characters, some helping, some hindering, but all frustratingly enigmatic. My limited research would seem to indicate that despite his rehabilitation in 1963 by some Czech scholars, Kafka is not generally recognized in his native Czech Republic* as a major intellectual force; as he wrote exclusively in German and his books were banned for the better part of half a century, he’s better known in Europe and in America via the English translations of the Muirs. But subversives like Svankmajer couldn’t have missed him — he along with all of the Czech New Wave filmmakers came roaring out of the gate in the mid-1960’s just as Kafka gained some regard among the Czech intelligentsia. I have no idea if Svankmajer studied Welles’s film, but in the specific case of Něco z Alenky there are several strong visual connections: repeated doors and passageways, sometimes leading to remote and unexpected spaces (often literally via a cut in Welles’s case); outrageous differences in scale, specifically between a person and a door in the Alice story and in one Trial shot; objects piling up and becoming obstacles (mountains of paper in The Trial; socks and other items in Alice), and many more — just the decayed and decaying look of the spaces in the two films are similar.

Gilliam’s Brazil is also clearly influenced by both Kafka and by the Welles film; again there are direct visual connections, most notably the never-ending office with rows of clerks at desks, and again the pile of paperwork (a bed for the Perkins and Romy Schneider characters to make love in, an instrument of suppression and murder for Robert De Niro). Just as I began work on this piece, I saw Ex Machina in theaters (look for a #WTW Glance someday), and I was struck by its incredible use of an extant location to create an otherworldly atmosphere; it would be impossible to separate Ex Machina in its final form from the amazing Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway, which stands in for the Oscar Isaac character’s remote home and research compound. This in turn reminds me of Brazil’s use of locations such as the empty flour mill that creates the “futuristic” ministry offices and the power station cooling tower in which Jonathan Pryce is tortured; and now of The Trial’s amazing use of the Gare d’Orsay, an abandoned Paris train station, to create most of the film’s interiors: the Advocate’s office, the law courts, the endless rotting corridors, doors, and random rooms.

The exteriors, as well, are simply found spaces in Yugoslavia (the Czech Republic was not a location option for Welles in 1962) and its Brutalist concrete apartment buildings, open fields, and an “industrial fairground” in Zagreb which (along with a truly staggering number of extras) allowed Welles to create the tracking shots of the office where Perkins works. Welles said in interviews that this space was larger than any soundstage then in existence, which means that these images inevitably nag at our brains (pre-CGI, anyway) as impossibly vast, at least in comparison with contemporary films. There are loads of other examples of filmic found-spaces, often used to represent totalitarian cultures, oddly enough; see George Lucas’s first feature THX-1138, for example, and its use of the tunnels and stations of the just-constructed BART subway system in San Francisco. I’m sure someone’s already done their entire film-studies thesis just on the use of transportation tunnels and waiting rooms in these films; in the case of The Trial, Welles lucked into the Gare d’Orsay when other plans fell through, and he immediately connected the train station with the ghosts of all the people who had used it throughout the decades, including prisoner transport to Germany during World War II, “...a place of great sorrow.”**

There are endless other bits of memories and film connections jogged by The Trial. It’s silly, but the little girls who rush up the steps to the painter’s studio made me think of the opening scene of Richard Lester’s The Knack...And How to Get It where an endless stream of swinging-London girls are lined up on the steps waiting for their turn in Ray Brooks’s apartment; there is a similar sense of underlying menace.

I’ve also come to love actor Akim Tamiroff through his repeated appearances in late Welles projects (Touch of Evil, Mr. Arkadin a.k.a. Confidential Report) and, unexpectedly, all over my movie collection (Alphaville, The Great McGinty, even the original Ocean’s 11!) — he’s just one of those actors with so much versatility and who is always a delight to see. Here he is the ruined Bloch, K.’s fellow petitioner of Welles’s Advocate (and, suggested, creepily, a fellow sexual partner of his assistant Leni). Tamiroff is always great — for me he’s like a Slavic version of Michael Redgrave.

Special section: A few visual notes

So first we have the opening pinboard shots created by Alexeïeff and Parker. I was disappointed at first to realize that this section was not fully animated; it’s a set of stills (which of course works well for the projector scene at the end). But then I turned to one of the many “dark” sections of my disc collection — DVDs that I had to have over the past 15 years, purchased, and have not (to date) watched . . . . Some long-ago review (who am I kidding? it’s clearly DVD Savant’s) triggered a purchase of the Facets disc The Animation of Alexeïeff, which contains all of the films created with this technique, including several French commercials. So I wound up watching them all, including a short documentary piece in which the animators demonstrate how the pinboard works for a class of respectful art students. The fact that you can watch the entire output of a unique art form in under a couple of hours is a testament to how difficult and time-consuming pinboard animation is; it took Alexeïeff and Parker years to create animation that lasts mere minutes. The Trial is the only use of a pinboard in a commercial film, and with the history of the form in mind, it looks like another of Welles’s genius moves, bringing an obscure art form from the European avant-garde into service of his storytelling.

When we first see Perkins, it’s immediately apparent that he’s a perfect embodiment of K. — his lanky thinness exudes fussiness, propriety; he’s reminiscent of the line drawings that Kakfa himself did for the manuscript, included in many printed editions of the novel.

In addition to the Brazil connections already mentioned, The Trial naturally features scene after scene of figures watching Perkins from the background, usually the two policemen who are following him but sometimes others (as with this fleeting shot of someone in the apartment block across the way, hard to see in this picture but unmistakably there). Gilliam similarly put several shadowy characters in the background of his film, including himself.

Along with the tremendous found-space sets that Welles employed — the train station, the industrial fairground — he was able to secure huge numbers of extras, whom he choreographs into vast arrays of swiveling heads and staring eyes, and who sometimes exclaim or cheer in concert. Perkins’s first entry into the courtroom, led hand-in-hand by a little boy, is an example, with a huge audience of spectators, blending into the raised dais of advocates and judges — spectators? or are they all functionaries of the court of one kind or another?

The run-down spaces function literally, of course, as uncared-for government offices and corridors, but sometimes they approach the surreal in their configuration; Perkins moves through spaces that evoke Escher’s Relativity and his other engravings of “impossible” buildings, in this case through similar angles.

Among many surprising (and unexplained) visuals in the movie, at one point Perkins wanders through a field of elderly, half-naked people frozen in place, each labeled with a number. Their staring faces are the focus of the scene; it’s like something Bergman would do. It’s hard not to imagine that Welles is thinking specifically of Bergman, and other pitch-black international filmmakers like Tarkovsky or Bresson.



I’ve already mentioned the focus on papers and manuscripts above; the key shot is Romy Schneider and Perkins making love in a pile of abandoned papers, watched over by a judge’s portrait (on its side, as if in a bed, like the Advocate in the other room); papers throughout the film are an obvious impediment to Perkins, never completed, never informative, and the network of informants, policemen, lawyers and judges seem to accomplish nothing beyond endless watching.

Welles created deservedly famous shots around mirrors in Citizen Kane (Kane receding into an infinite mirror corridor) and The Lady from Shanghai (the final confrontation in the funhouse), but The Trial boasts mirror games at an entirely new level of sophistication. In this scene, Perkins is walking down a bank of mirrored panes of glass; one pane is missing, and Schneider is standing there instead — but the bookcases which are mirrored from one room almost match the ones in the adjacent room, so Schneider appears to be an apparition — as if she exists only in a reflection. The effect is disquieting!

And it leads to amazing compositions like this: Perkins and Schneider are just standing and talking to each other; in their world, nothing would seem amiss. But from our perspective, Perkins is forced to talk to Schneider’s back. Once I’d fixated on this shot, I was excited to find variations on it elsewhere; look at the second still, in which, again, two characters are having a perfectly normal face-to-face discussion, but the arrangement of actors and mirrors in the shot means that we see Perkins talking to a person who faces his back. These are masterful uses of film to convey mood and meaning; visual compositions that match Kafka’s literary devices to represent alienation and paranoia (even as we confront our antagonist, he stands ready to stab us in the back).

Welles’s use of light and shadow is often incredible, of course, but some of the compositions go beyond the unexpected; as part of Perkins’s run from the artist’s wood-slatted studio, in one shot he’s suddenly running down a corridor composed of similar slats. For me, the end result actually evokes the pinboard stills, with a similar texture, but in real life:

The recurrence of those stills as slides projected on a screen is very much a Wellesian touch — think of the Citizen Kane opening, with the projected newsreel in the screening room — but the sense of unease is heightened here with lighting choices that read to the eye as impossible: If Perkins is standing between the projector and the screen, he can’t be a shadow; he’d be in the beam. This arrangement also changes between shots. If you’ve read the book (or the source fable) it’s interesting that K’s head is floating in “the radiance that issues from the Law” which the guard by the gate must always keep his back to; here the Advocate in shadow is filling that guard role, as if to indicate that although K. will always remained frustrated by his inability to advance, he does come to some form of enlightenment regarding his own fate — consistent at least with Welles's conception of the character.

But then — the guilt!

Anthony Perkins is a stunning actor. I haven’t personally seen him in many non-Psycho roles, and that’s completely unfair to him — this movie proves that he’s got formidable acting chops, including a great sense of comic timing. I vaguely remember him in Catch-22; I should look for some more of his earlier work.

Having watched this relatively recent restoration (from 2012, I think), I’ve now seen (or own) all of Welles’s twelve completed feature films with the exception of his Shakespeare adaptation Chimes at Midnight (a.k.a. Falstaff). I was hoping for a full Criterion edition one of these days, or maybe a blu-ray like the Macbeth disc from Olive Films. And just a few months ago, in February, Steven Morowitz and Joel Bender of Distribpix Inc. found a pristine print, so I (along with my expert-in-filmed-Shakespeare friend Bardfilm) am on pins and needles awaiting some kind of announcement of a new video version. T'would be wondrous to behold!

I own several Welles films, documentaries, and books, but the treasure of everybody’s collection is Simon Callow’s meticulously researched three-part biography Orson Welles. Except to date we only have part one (The Road to Xanadu) and part two (Hello, Americans), bringing the detailed account of Welles’s life up to 1947. Part three (One Man Band), desperately awaited for 8 years, is supposedly coming in December and will include (one expects) the production story of The Trial. I wish I had it at hand, although truth be told I’m probably lucky that I don’t — Callow’s pages of analysis on Welles’s projects (films, plays, radio productions and other works) covered in the first two parts are definitive. When I (when the world!) finally gets to read Callow on The Trial, I may have to come back here and put some real insights into the comments.

Pitch:

Welles’s visuals — his dramaturgy, actually; his packing of performance, acting rhythm, sound, set design, and the final visuals in any given scene — are wondrous. So many of the episodes are winners, but the one that had me actually agape is the late-act scene with the portrait artist. There are plenty of written and filmed metaphors of man under surveillance by society, but I’ve never imagined one as witty, novel, or — after the laughter — as troubling as the artist who cannot escape the perpetual, probing, prepubescent eyes of his “fans.”

* I offer an apology to anyone who might find my usage of “Czech Republic” for the current nation incorrect or offensive; I recognize that this is not a settled matter for everyone. However, as far as I can tell, in the U.S. this is the correct current nomenclature.

** Huw Weldon BBC interview with Welles from 1962, transcript hosted by Wellesnet.

<< Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (-) The Day the Earth Stood Still >>

#WTW: Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

(#WhatThomWatched the XVIIIth)

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

(2004, Richard Ayoade; Streaming via Hulu)

Right up front, props to Twitter user @JimmyFrohman who noted this gem in Hulu’s deep catalog a couple months ago. There are a passel of BBC comedies old and new on Hulu with little to announce them* — although, tragically, not The Mighty Boosh. Not yet, anyway.

A parody/satire has to have a target, and the target in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace is deliciously twisty: Show co-creator Matt Holness plays Marenghi, a Stephen King-like prolific and bestselling author of thick horror hardbacks; he and his editor Dean Learner (played by co-creator Richard Ayoade) were given a BBC 4 hospital-set horror series back in the 1980’s, for which (we are told) Marenghi wrote, produced, directed and starred in all fifty episodes. But because the show was so ahead of its time, the BBC ultimately refused to air it. Now, in 2004, Marenghi and Learner have been allowed to release a retrospective six episodes, with their contemporary comments and co-star interviews added in. Of course, the two are sublimely unaware of how awful the show is — Marenghi is a pompous ass as “Dr. Rick Dagless M.D.”; Learner’s hospital administrator “Thornton Reed” is wooden and affectless; co-star Todd Rivers as “Dr. Lucien Sanchez” (Matt Berry) is apparently overdubbed in post-production, badly; and Madeleine Wool as “Dr. Liz Asher” (Alice Lowe) is visibly irritated by both the sexist scripts and Marenghi. (As an example of the clever levels that the show is working on, Alice Lowe’s character has disappeared after the original filming of Darkplace and isn’t available for the contemporary interviews, allowing her male co-stars to misinterpret and misattribute her behavior from the 80’s.)

The joy with a tone parody like this one is in the details. Darkplace features a cheap videotaped look, no-budget special effects, and limited sets that appear repeatedly; taking it further, however, are elements which hint at “choices” that were made during production (like the overdubbing of Berry’s character already noted). These include scenes in a golf cart which the characters are theoretically driving while curtains at the back of the static set are clearly visible, and a shootout in a room of warehouse shelves of boxes (ostensibly water bottles) behind a door helpfully labeled as water-and-mirror storage (on a taped-up cardboard sign). Lines are universally cliché-ridden and melodramatic; extras are ineptly used throughout, like the actor who stands in scenes so that Holness has someone to monologue at, or the pediatric patient who exists only to idolize him.

Holness-as-Marenghi is self-important and clueless, prone to false-modest statements about his writing prowess; Holness-as-Marenghi-as-Dagless is a preening blowhard who ends each show with a reflective voiceover on a roof set. Ayoade-as-Learner and Ayoade-as-Learner-as-Reed are identical; Learner states repeatedly that he’s a terrible actor and his performances are often cut up in ways which hint at required heavy editing. While Holness is a thorough simpleton, there are several hints that Ayoade’s genial character is actually tamping down some kind of horrendous temper; the missing Lowe may have actually been the victim of some sort of foul play at his hands. Ayoade is also directing all of these episodes and so deserves the credit for a lot of these subtle touches.

A critic of this show will note that it’s a one-joke concept, with nothing new or different happening from episode to episode, but it’s also possible to argue that there are subtleties of performance here which are easier to detect with three hours of running time than they would be with 30 or 60 minutes. Six episodes also gives some room for surprising differences, as if to indicate that Marenghi and Learner weren’t sure of their show’s tone over the (supposedly) 50 episodes which were shot; a standout example is a full-on early-MTV-style music video for a song sung by Berry in one episode, which doesn’t have an analogue in any other chapter. There’s also more room for secondary guest characters performed by a stellar set of contemporary comic actors including Julian Barratt as the hospital’s priest and Stephen Merchant as a cook. The show succeeds or fails based on its complete dedication to the premise; ironically, in succeeding completely, the episodes are actually somewhat painful to watch. Rather than attempt a second series, Holness and Ayoade followed up with a sham talk show format two years later (Man to Man with Dean Learner), in which Ayoade’s Learner interviews a different celebrity each week (and each celebrity is a different Holness character). Inevitably, the first episode is an interview with Marenghi.

Reminds me of:

It almost goes without saying: The divine The IT Crowd, also a brainchild of Ayoade along with Chris O’Dowd, Katherine Parkinson, and writer/director Graham Linehan (who himself cameos in Darkplace). IT Crowd has an even better part for Ayoade as Moss, the uber-computer geek, and (in its latter seasons) features Berry as well. Ayoade was already one of my absolutely favorite people based on this series plus his debut feature film as a writer/director, Submarine. To find this earlier work of his was a joy.

Moving backwards just a tick in the universe of English comic actors, my favorite part of Steve Coogan’s mammoth box set of early works (released in 2009) was his one-off series broadcast in 2001, Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible; it is a pitch-perfect parody of television horror anthologies with six outstanding segments, each cast with Coogan and a revolving set of actors but not otherwise connected except for Coogan’s heavily made-up host, Dr. Terrible. Note that these shows are not supposed to be messy or carelessly produced like Darkplace except in very specific instances; instead, each is an exact replica of a different style/type of actual anthology show (Doctor Who, specific Hammer films like Witchfinder General, specific horror tropes like the transplanted-limb-with-a-mind-of-its-own, and so forth.) (On second thought, this is my second-favorite early Coogan show, behind another anthology concept from 1995, Coogan’s Run. I’ll put these in my rewatch list for a future #WTW; they are amazing works although less known in the U.S. than his Saxondale and Alan Partridge vehicles Knowing Me, Knowing You and I’m Alan Partridge.)

But then — the guilt!

With all the cross-pollination that exists between these actors and writers, there are still so many shows and movies that I haven’t watched: Matt Berry’s Snuff Box and the current Toast of London, Holness and Ayoade’s follow-up show, Ayoade’s second film The Double, Chris O’Dowd’s current Moone Boy, and so on. Some are easy to come by via American streaming services and others might take more time to track down.

I’ve also never read a single Stephen King book. I’m so ashamed!**

Pitch:

The show uses an authentic period BBC 4 logo and comes in and out of commercial breaks with a supremely cheesy video effect featuring a still of Marenghi’s head separating to reveal the show title. If you feel, as I do, that this gets funnier every time you see it, then Darkplace is most definitely for you.

* I myself was motivated to start subscribing to Hulu+ in the first place when I realized it was the only place we could stream The Thick of It in the states and watch the new Doctor, Peter Capaldi, in his cursing-li-est element. It’s just delightful! (Netflix-only folks, you can try the t.v. movie In the Loop to see the same character in action.)

** Oddly enough for someone who’s never read a Stephen King book, I recently read NOS4A2 by his son Joe Hill. It’s great! I hear his dad’s books are okay too.

<< Donnie Darko (-) The Trial >>

#WTW: Donnie Darko

(#WhatThomWatched Chapter Seventeen a.k.a. The Tangent Vortex...?)

Donnie Darko

(2001, Richard Kelly; 20th Century Fox disc)

Donnie Darko boasts strong visuals; excellent early performances from Gyllenhaal siblings Jake and Maggie plus Jena Malone, Daveigh Chase, Ashley Tisdale, Seth Rogen and more; and an intricate puzzle-plot that is sublimely creepy and (at least the first time around) freighted with significance. It’s purposely (and effectively) set in the near-past, in a late-1980’s that allows it to comment mildly on the Bush/Dukakis presidential contest while also evoking a viewer’s own younger days, largely through the soundtrack (which includes songs by Tears for Fears, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen). But it’s also a product of a near-past era of filmmaking, another beneficiary of the post-1990s indie boom that produced such low-budget and imaginative first films as Shane Carruth’s Primer or Christopher Nolan’s Following (and subsequent Memento). Director Richard Kelly’s longer 2004 recut notwithstanding, this is a film that benefits from its rough edges, leaps of logic and general shagginess.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a high school student in suburban Virginia with an unusual problem: he hallucinates a man in a fur-and-metal rabbit costume who demands that he leave his home at night in a sleepwalking trance and break water mains, commit arson, and worse. But this is offset by several points that seem to be deliberately opposing the tropes of similar stories: he’s got a loving family, plenty of friends, a couple of caring teachers, and a genuinely concerned psychiatrist in whom he can confide; he’s caught the eye of the new girl in class and has no problem getting to know her; and most unexpectedly, he sees his terrifying rabbit when he takes his meds, not when he goes off them. Yes, some of the school personnel are awful, and there’s a pair of bullies who menace him, but the villains (particularly a self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze) are all as cartoonishly flat as if they’d been inked into the film by hand. This dearth of stereotypical problems forces the viewer to really focus on Gyllenhaal’s internal state: he’s being told that the world will end unless he intervenes, and he seems to be following a trail of clues that points to time travel as the final answer.

The actors are committed — the new faces, old hands, and ringers alike (for the honor of using their names, stars like Swayze, Noah Wyle, and Katharine Ross (!) are rewarded with two or three Big Scenes apiece; Drew Barrymore also earns an executive producer credit by having believed enough in the early script to get the movie made). Mary McDonnell as Donnie's mother gives a performance that neatly externalizes the pain and difficulty of raising teenagers, and Holmes Osborne is convincing as a loving and defensive father. Sean Smith and Ronald Fisher as Gyllenhaal’s best friends are bewildered by his sudden odd behavior, and Malone is intrigued and intriguing in turn as his love interest. As for Gyllenhaal, he’s in almost every scene.

Reminds me of:

It’s a lot for one character to carry. Donnie is, annoyingly, that exceptional kid who is too smart for his teachers, who stands up to the bullies and wins the arguments, who confounds adults with his depth, and in the end is the unthanked savior of the universe — all with little to no evident irony. He’s like Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield if Holden were 100% right and everyone else was a “goddam” phony. A key scene has Donnie confront his hallucination with the question “Why do you wear that stupid bunny suit?” To which the rabbit — his name is Frank — replies “Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?” It sounds profound, or at least meaningful, on first viewing, but diminishes the more you think about it. As an example of what troubled teen Donnie might think is profound, it’s gangbusters, but the movie seems to expect us to honestly be wowed.

There are strong echoes of other films. For example, towards the end students in Halloween costumes strike out on bikes for an urgent ride through town; it’s so reminiscent of E.T.: The Extraterrestrial that it can’t be an accident. Scenes of Samantha Darko’s dance troupe Sparkle Motion — serious and earnest, unaware that they are oversexualized for 4th graders — make a similar satirical point as Happy, Texas or the later Little Miss Sunshine, though there’s not much development of the idea here. Closeups of the elderly Roberta Sparrow (suffering from dementia, her neighbors think, but she might be a time traveller!) as her younger self in a group photo are zoomed into like the final photo closeup of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

Some of these may not be conscious homages to films or genres, but these examples hint at a flaw with Donnie Darko: It wants to be too much —a horror movie, a science-fiction puzzle, a coming-of-age story, but also social commentary, a gloss on the 1980’s, and even a comedy — and it never finds a tone which supports all of these elements at once. For some, myself included, the story works fine (even given the tone shifts) without a full explanation of how the science-fantasy mechanics operate. But Kelly did not create his movie in this form; infamously, he was forced to cut 20-30 minutes from his original festival version. When Donnie was a massive seller on DVD, purchased and watched by a far larger audience than it had in its theatrical run (opening a film about a plane that falls out of the sky a few weeks after 9/11 didn’t help), Kelly was invited to cut a completely new version for another theatrical release in 2004. That version added chapter delineations with interstitial imagery and explanatory text purportedly taken from the book The Philosophy of Time Travel (an imaginary textbook written by the Sparrow character); these snippets make many of the events in the film logical — “logical” in that they support a giant backstory in which beings from the future can implant suggestions in someone’s mind to guide events, and in which a tangled set of physical rules governs the fabric of the universe. The additions, taken at face value, explain the plot; but without the mystery of inexplicable events, the movie can only be as good as its mythos — which does not rise far above that which high-school Donnie might cook up with his buddies between conversations about Smurfs. In the original version, the lack of explanation for the same vaguely fanfic-y rules creates a true tension — how much of what transpires is only happening in Donnie’s mind, whether fueled by madness, drugs, placebos, or reality?

This is arguable, superficial and a little mean, but in my opinion Donnie Darko shares a trait with Forman’s Amadeus: in each case, its director released an extended version which doesn’t play as well as the original. (But there are many, many fans of the director’s cut of Donnie. If you’re one, educate us in the comments for this post, won’t you?)

But then — the guilt!

I loved this film so much when I first watched it; it’s rare for something to fall so far for me on a second viewing. That’s not how rewatching usually works. I remember being very excited for Kelly’s second big feature as writer-director, Southland Tales in 2006. But as the movie’s release approached, the early critical response soured quickly. I never did wind up seeing it and it tanked equally with critics and audiences; his 2009 The Box never even appeared on my radar (though it was slightly better received). I feel bad about it all; maybe I’ll give one of them a spin someday, but I’m booked through 2018 at this point. He’s got a new one in the works too. Maybe I can start fresh. (Defenders of Southland Tales, feel free to join the Donnie director’s cut fans in the comments.)

Pitch:

Donnie’s utterly creepy mirror-stare both at himself and, later, at Frank . . . . Between this and Svankmajer’s Alice, it’s a wonder that anyone can keep a pet rabbit in the house and still sleep at night.

<< Big Hero 6 (Glance) (-) Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace >>

#WTW Glance: Big Hero 6

Glance*: Big Hero 6

(2014, Don Hall/Chris Williams; Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment disc and streaming)

Big Hero 6 performed well with both audiences and the Academy (winning Best Animated Feature for 2014). There’s a lot about it to like: the focus on Asian-American main characters; the use of the great Scott Adsit (late of 30 Rock) as the voice of Baymax; some wonderful animation, especially of the microbots that furnish the primary plot device (their tidal wave-like motions recall The Lego Movie in that each film animates block-like parts into complex structures at high speeds); and a surprisingly heavy story about making a new family when you’ve lost your own. But a non-fankid viewer can’t help but see some liabilities as well, many centered around story tropes and beats that are less than original. As an origin tale for a to-be crime-fighting collective (the titular 6), the innovations of hero Hiro and lovable robot Baymax are undercut by the rest of the team’s stock juveniles from Central Casting (at times uncomfortably reminiscent of a 1970’s Hanna-Barbera cartoon series): There’s Fred, the funny one; he’s a comic book fan, the college mascot, and turns out (in the post-credits) to be the son of a costumed superhero; GoGo, who is tough, Asian, and “modelled on a bike messenger” per director Don Hall (a tough Asian bike messenger like Y.T. from Neal Stephenson’s seminal Snow Crash from 1982, perhaps?**); Honey Lemon, the chemist, described (of course) as a “mad scientist,” and the team’s quirky member; and Wasabi, who’s black, cautious, and neurotic — each one feels like a cliché, at least in the tiny bit of screen time they’re allotted, and less time still is allowed for Hiro’s guardian Aunt Cass (voiced by Maya Rudolph). The film winds up feeling as if it’s missing more elements than it provides. For parents in the audience, some of the thinness of characterization is mitigated — or, for the cynical, papered over — by early plot points that are highly emotional and difficult, like the deaths that kick off both Finding Nemo and Up.

With all that said, pro and con, the movie’s breakout relationship is between Hiro and the medical robot Baymax, who proves to be an excellent foil. As his older brother Tadashi’s invention and dream project, Baymax represents a lost relationship for Hiro, but not as a simple brother substitute — instead Hiro respects and emulates Tadashi’s passion while adding his own innovations to his brother’s (literally; the gentle medical robot purposely given a balloon body to protect human patients becomes a fearsome combatant when he’s outfitted with Hiro’s battle skin and software). These scenes of exploration, discovery, and an actual friendship are what make the movie worthwhile; it's just a shame that 100 minutes doesn't have room for similarly detailed development of the flesh and blood friendships as well.

Reminds me of:

Hmm, other than Hanna-Barbera from the "limited animation" era? I do like the university research lab as an originating source for Tadashi and his friends; that has a bit of a Dead Poet’s Society or latter Harry Potter-ish vibe. Actually, there should be more stories set in graduate school research labs; as a team using pure brains and invention to fight crime, the Big Hero 6 team members could contribute to a STEM revolution.

But then — the guilt!

In terms of guilt, the overinflated and elephantine Baymax in the room is my lack of enthusiasm for this strong performer. I'm at odds with my spouse, who saw it in the theater with our youngest and was enchanted by it. She and I were in theaters together 11 years ago for The Incredibles (the kids were too young then); our mutual love for that work was not repeated here. There's a family focus in both movies (coming together in Incredibles; reacting to loss and building your own community in 6) which she may have responded to; for me, the intricate superheroes-among-us backstory of Incredibles was fascinating in 2004, like a Watchmen specifically designed for kids and in some ways superior for it.*** So I wish I liked Big Hero 6 more, but I certainly will watch a sequel or try out a series version if either appears in the future, and will especially be hoping that the four remaining members of the six get an equal focus.

Pitch:

This is unquestionably a handsomely animated film with an appealing lead and an innovative main relationship; it's more than worth a spin with young fans.

* For movies and shows which are current — in theaters or streaming — I'm posting a short, less-spoilery take on #WhatThomWatched (and generally only when something really strikes me as worth passing on). These shorter essays are labeled Glance.

** Not only is Honey Lemon a riff on Stephenson’s Y.T., but the lead character of Snow Crash is also named Hiro. (His full name is Hiro Protagonist, proving that Stephenson has some Thomas Pynchon level of breezy sarcasm.)

*** I'm comparing Incredibles the film to Watchmen the book; I have no desire to watch the 2009 film version of Watchmen. I can practically re-read my copy of the graphic novel instead in the same 160+ minutes, with “Tales of the Black Freighter” intact.

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