HopkinsCinemAddicts

Killing in the Name of Boyle

Recently I came across a thought-provoking quote taken from an old interview given by director Danny Boyle (a particular favorite of mine).  In this quote Boyle mentions that he, along with fellow directors Martin Scorsese and John Woo, initially intended to become a priest (a Protestant minister in Woo's case) before directing his career path towards film-making.  Boyle goes on to relate the two seemingly disparate professions by claiming that they both involve heavy drama and the duty of lecturing to an audience.  Honestly, Boyle's comfortable comparison of film-making to preaching didn't immediately resonate with me as a viewer who typically likes to let sleeping dogs lie when it comes to religious symbolism in film.  However, the more familiar I've become with the works of the (almost) priests-cum-directors (having only just seen John Woo's The Killer and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver this year), the more willing I am to explore the remarkably dark violence in their films under the cast of a new, "divine" light.

My experimental attempt to find religion leads me to a reexamination of the first movie from Danny Boyle that I expressly remember falling in love with: 28 Days Later (2002).  Although marketed to the mass public as another gory, zombie apocalypse flick, 28 Days Later instantly impressed me as a film that transcends its narrow genre.  Revisiting this film now allows me to apply my new-found knowledge of director Boyle's strong Irish Catholic background and devotion, and as a result, give a credible explanation of how this zombie film touches upon quality subject matter.  For example, an important distinction can easily be made between 28 Days Later and all other zombie apocalypses filmed to date by explaining that 28 Days Later focuses almost exclusively on the "apocalypse" angle of the genre.  In other words, while most zombie movies prominently feature the mindless flesh-eaters as they munch their way through the remainder of the human population, Boyle's 28 Days Later is a marked departure in its unique emphasis of a post-apocalyptic absence of life, whether it be human, animal, or the animated undead.

 Pushing the suspicious lack of abundant zombie predators and human fodder in 28 Days Later further into the realm of religious allegory, one can even speculate that this movie serves as an updated representation of the Old Testament flood, which supposedly cleansed the world of nearly all its inhabitants.  In the film, a "flood" of disease wipes our modern world clean of civilization, leaving death (constituted by the occasional appearances of the roaming undead) and an all-consuming emptiness, as conveyed to the viewer in the striking opening scenes.  From a high-angle/heavenly standpoint, the viewer experiences a series of extreme long shots that altogether show the progression of a lone survivor (played by Irish actor Cillian Murphy) as he slowly makes his way through the abandoned streets of London.  Instead of being submerged in floodwater, the city is smothered by a blanket of deafening silence that is maintained throughout the duration of these poignant long shots/takes.

Meanwhile, Murphy's lone survivor doesn't amble aimlessly around town for too long before eventually assuming a greater responsibility outside of his own survival.  This responsibility is comparable to that which was bestowed upon Noah by his Holy Father.  Just as Noah was charged with choosing who would survive with him in the Ark, so too does Murphy's character decide who will live alongside him and who will fall prey to the zombie's lethal bite.  More specifically, Murphy's character unleashes a hungry zombie within the bowels of a military compound (functions as the Ark, or the last standing refuge of humanity during the scourge) in order to kill the corrupt men hiding there.  Fast-paced cuts and dim lighting make it practically impossible to distinguish between the wild zombie and Murphy's rampaging young man as they jointly indulge in an unchecked killing spree throughout the compound.  Both the zombie and the young man appear to equally represent executing agents of the cleansing "flood"/disease through their gratuitously bloody slaying of the wicked soldiers.

Interestingly enough, the gruesome crusade of Boyle's blood-splattered Noah is closely matched in terms of its violent display of righteous fury by the actions of Robert DeNiro's Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.  Underneath the surface view of Bickle being nothing more significant than a paranoid vigilante, exists the possibility of Bickle being another divine crusader charged with carrying out tough justice against the "scum" of New York City.  One can potentially suggest that Bickle embodies a New Testament Christ-like figure in his attempted life sacrifice to free the prostitute Iris from her pimp and from her sins.  Evil and sin are once again fought with grotesque violence implemented by a lone purveyor of "divine" justice.  Of course, this "divinity" is ultimately administered by the omnipotent director--especially often by fire and brimstone-minded Catholics like Boyle and Scorsese--as he channels it through the dramatic scenarios he imagines and directs.

Hang Up Your Guns and Drive All Night: Finding Unlikely Connections Between "Drive" and "Shane"

After a solid month of making due with TV movies and Netflix, I felt compelled to treat myself to the true movie theater experience. I'm certainly glad that I decided to go when I did, otherwise I would have missed out on seeing Drive, an unexpectedly neat film (not surprisingly directed by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn). Drive definitely has a European feel to it, characterized largely by its emphasis of atmosphere over complex dialogue and plot, as well as featuring an infectious soundtrack comprised of hypnotic techno beats. In addition to the contribution of a strong European influence, the dark and urban nature of the permeating atmosphere combined with a disenchanted and disenfranchised loner for a main character, lead some reviewers to liken Drive to Scorcese's Taxi Driver.

While I am aware of the similarities between these two films, I actually see more fundamental and ultimately more interesting links connecting Drive to George Stevens' Shane. This connection may initially seem odd and a little off, considering that one is a 1950's Western, while the other is a current-day heist flick. Even so, I found myself surprised at how the two films almost mirror each other in the form of a few key elements.

One key element is the particular plot structure that ties together Drive and Shane across a daunting sixty-year time span. Both films present a basic storyline built around the involvement of a mysterious loner in the affairs of a family besieged by some sort of trouble. More specifically, this storyline is fleshed out in Shane to include a wandering gunman (the title character) coming to stay with a family of peaceful farmers that is in the middle of a bitter territorial dispute with a raucous group of cattle ranchers. Drive adapts this same premise in its depiction of The Driver, a movie stuntman by day, getaway driver by night, who finds himself drawn into the legal problems of the family living next door to him. This simple storyline propels the expositional and building action in these films and culminates in a violent climax that leads to an open-ended, interpretive finale; both Shane and The Driver must engage in a final showdown with the bad guys in defense of the dependent family before they ride/drive away in a wounded condition, presumably never to return again.

As previously mentioned, the fate of Shane and The Driver once they leave their respective dependents behind is left unexplained in keeping with the already ambiguous characterization of both men. Of course, in order for the storyline adapted by both Drive and Shane to work to its best advantage, a certain type of lead character is required. This required character is expected to not only possess distinguishing personality traits, but also embody larger themes that give the film its extra shades of depth beyond a bare-bones plot.

Shane and The Driver can once again be matched together in that both leading men fit the above qualifications down to the letter. These men are kept shrouded in mystery from their first appearance on screen to their last. Nothing is ever revealed to their fellow characters or to the audience regarding a pre-movie background; each man is devoid of a history as he appears before the viewers in his present state. Instead, these men are meant to be defined solely by their occupations: Shane is a gunfighter and The Driver is a driver for hire (as further emphasized by his identification being his occupation in place of an actual name). These two men are highly specialized in their respective areas of work, both of whom exist on the fringe of acceptable society. It is only after they attempt to engage in normal human relationships that their characters are allowed to grow.

This growth in the originally one-dimensional characters of Shane and The Driver coincide with the development of two important themes: the price of protection and inescapable isolation. Character transformation is especially related to a growing need felt by these solitary men to protect the people who have brought warmth and human companionship into their lives. For example, Shane discovers a desire within himself to discard his former life as a rootless gunman and live peacefully with the farmers that he has grown close to, particularly to a mother and her son. However, the need for his protection as a gunfighter against the hired guns of the cattle ranchers quickly outweighs his own personal desire. Similarly, The Driver must become the bigger man and help the criminal husband of the young mother and son he has grown to care for shake off his ties to ruthless mafia bosses. The Driver then becomes further embroiled in underground activity (despite his good intentions towards the family he wishes to protect), which creates a heartbreakingly irrevocable separation between him and the innocent people he loves. In both situations, the lonely lives of these two men are enriched by compassionate contact with others only to be forced to later revert back to their former isolation in the wake of their helpful efforts.

Cops and Robbers: Playing the Game on the Big Screen

As a longtime fan of gangster movies, I find it odd that I just saw White Heat (1949, dir. Raoul Walsh) barely a week ago for the first time. Admittedly, I was never in any rush to see this film because I felt that I already had a solid handle on the genre, particularly in terms of its 30's/40's form. After all, if you've seen one James Cagney gangster film, then you've seen 'em all. However, I can honestly say that I was wrong about this one. I profess that I was cleansed of any preconceived notions I had retained from previous experience as White Heat delivered a ripe plot built around a deceivingly simple premise: "coppers" versus robbers.

Instead of being the typical gangster picture that focuses on the rise and fall of a charismatic gangster, White Heat offers the viewer the opportunity to witness an intelligent cat and mouse game that shows an even distribution of strategic game plays between the police force and the gangsters. In fact, through its characters and carefully laid plot devices, White Heat seems to resemble a more recent gangster movie, Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) -- my apologies to those who prefer the original 2002 version from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs -- rather than its own fun yet predictable contemporaries. Both White Heat and The Departed appear to be unique in that they forego the strict chronicling of one gangster's trajectory in favor of featuring the intricacies of the struggle between both sides of the law.

A key tool that aids the otherwise under-represented cops in this fight is the important means by which they gather vital information on Cagney's Cody Jarrett and his gang. In this case, the "means" comes in the form of an undercover agent named Hank Fallon, played by Edmond O'Brien. Going deep undercover as convicted criminal Vic Pardo, Fallon is tasked with becoming close friends with the mentally unstable Cody Jarrett in order to discover how Jarrett gets his stolen cash laundered. Getting close to Jarrett requires Fallon/Pardo to not only earn his trust, but to keep it as well. While trust is initially gained through the single act of Fallon/Pardo thwarting a hit on Jarrett's life in the prison workroom, the maintenance of that trust involves greater commitment. Fallon's commitment undergoes particularly hard testing as he later goes on the run with Jarrett and becomes a witness/accessory to many of Jarrett's crimes, up to and including murder.

Just as Fallon is powerless to prevent himself from being thrust into incriminating situations while working as a mole, Leonardo DiCaprio's undercover policeman in The Departed, Billy Costigan, faces a nearly identical ordeal (for the sake of a direct comparison, Matt Damon's gangster mole in the police force will be excluded from this discussion). Both Fallon and Costigan find it necessary to fully immerse themselves in the shady business of the head gangsters they eventually hope to take down, showing that they are not above using deception and morally questionable behavior to achieve their desired ends. The unorthodox methods exhibited by these undercover cops creates close competition on a more equal playing field between the cops and the gangsters; Fallon and Costigan constitute a larger refusal on the part of the cops to be pigeon-holed as one-dimensional representations of law and order. A noteworthy difference between the two moles is how their final fates are decided according to the acceptable dictates of movie story-telling of their respective time periods: Costigan never returns to being a cop and is killed before he can see himself restored to his rightful identity, while Fallon rejoins the police just in time to shoot Jarrett before the movie ends. Despite this wide disparity between the years 1949 and 2006 regarding the moral ambiguity of cops (1949 allows for no question of police morality, while 2006 keeps the issue open-ended and ambiguous), both films display the cops relying heavily on an undercover agent to drive much of the action against the gangsters.

Perhaps even more impressive than the employment of Hank Fallon as a mole is the general use of stealth and deceit in the careful plans executed throughout White Heat by both Cody Jarrett and the police, led by Philip Evans. Schemes are concocted regularly on both sides; some attempts are successful, while others are foiled. Success rates notwithstanding, all of the schemes managed to maintain my interest in the film in the absence of straightforward violence. For me, Cody Jarrett's most impressive moment comes early in the film when he willingly goes to jail for another man's crime with a light sentence, because it gives him an alibi for his own crime that would surely earn him a seat in the gas chamber. Jarrett's clever evasion of the law through his false surrender is one of two intellectual peaks for him, the other high involving a "Trojan Horse" gas truck (an overused yet consistently effective ruse) near the very end of the film.

As for the cops, I found their various techniques to be more entertaining as they are responsible for creating a majority of the tension. One particularly simple tactic involves a tracking system that allows Evans and his cops to tail Cody's mother, Ma Jarrett, as she drives back to Cody's motel room. The police start by splitting up into three cars, A, B and C, that spread out onto different streets while continuing to drive parallel to each other and communicating over the radio. This parallel driving and communication system creates a dragnet that prevents Ma Jarrett from losing the three-pronged tail by turning onto an adjacent street. The entire scene consists of cuts between shots of Ma looking over her shoulder and shots of each of the pursuing police cars. Tension builds as faster cuts show the cops closing in until Ma finally escapes by pulling a reckless maneuver.

After this initial defeat, Evans devises a more sophisticated tracking system that relies on the intersection of oscillating waves coming from modified radios to pinpoint the route and final destination of Cody Jarrett. In another interesting departure from most gangster films, I didn't experience the trip solely from Jarrett's point of view, but rather I also watched the police chart the progress of his "Trojan Horse" based on the wave readings back at headquarters. This time the tension that comes with the fateful movement of the gangster towards his end is felt on both sides as the police once again compete with the gangster in clever design and for recognizable screen time. A similar sting operation scene is rigged in The Departed, which features obviously more advanced camera surveillance and cell phone communication. Even though the gadgets may always be at the mercy of the next upgrade, the game remains the same: the cops chase and the robbers run.