Films, A — Z, February 12, 2017: D
A year-long series of essays about my favorite films from A — Z
Do the Right Thing
1989, Color, Universal
Written, Produced and Directed by Spike Lee
Starring Danny Aiello, Ossie Davis, John Turturro, Rosie Perez and Lee
Drugstore Cowboy
1989, Color, Avenue Pictures
Directed by Gus Van Sant, Jr.
Screenplay by Daniel Yost and Van Sant, Jr
Adapted from the novel by James Fogle
Starring Matt Dillon, Kelly Lynch, James LeGros and Heather Graham
1989.
1–9–8–9 are just four digits put together to form a number that signifies a year, AD 1989. In that year, the Berlin Wall opened, American Independent film came into its own, Amy Adams looked like this and Jennifer Lawrence like this. So 1989 was a pivotal year in recent history for everyone, but for me it’s even more than that.
1989 is tattooed on my insides, and since “1989” is the first word Chuck D and Flav shout out at the top of “Fight The Power,” the song that opens Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, it’s also a call to which I instinctively respond.
In the summer of 1989 I was between seventh and eighth grades, at the doorstep of puberty. I did not adjust well. At school I was an undersized, ragged-on misfit with a special gift for pinpointing the worst possible moment to run my mouth and then taking it from 0 to 60 in 2.8. At home things were not much better. For instance, it would take me hours to finish washing the dinner dishes because I couldn’t focus long enough to get them done in a reasonable amount of time.
Home was hard, school was hard, and because school was hard there were no extracurriculars. I was adrift. Nothing could get through to me, not the bad grades, not the punishments that ensued, not the teasing or the loneliness. If I had bothered to read Catcher In the Rye, I might have had a little more self-awareness, and maybe some ideas of how to cope.
In June my mother gave birth to a girl after a difficult pregnancy. She was named Jacqueline. We had her for 52 days before she died of SIDS. Her passing was not violent — she just fell asleep one afternoon and never woke up. However, that afternoon was the first time my mother had ever left the house without her new daughter, and so it was her four older kids who first noticed Jacqueline not moving in her basinet, discovered that she wasn’t breathing, and had to react when it was clear something was terribly wrong. It was a Monday afternoon in late July. By Thursday afternoon it was August and she was under the ground.
Later on in life, at the prodding of a therapist, I recreated this memory by writing down as much as I could remember, and though it was painful to render in words the awful sights and sounds, the odd but evocative smells and the random words overheard from police and doctors, from family and neighbors, the exercise helped me to own that part of my childhood instead of hiding it away.
At the time, however, my family and I never spoke about what happened. Of course we dealt with the grief of losing Jacqueline, but we never dealt with the shock of losing her with no warning or sign of trouble, and the feelings of helplessness and terror that came with that. We just limped on. It was a taboo subject, something unpleasant that’s always present but can be successfully ignored by treated its persistence as an annoyance. The cries faded into the white noise that made up of the rest of our daily struggles.
Once I lived in a third-floor apartment in Chicago right up against the El. I could open my window and step on the elevated tracks. Every few minutes a passing train would rattle the walls and the screech of wheels would shake you to attention, but I learned over time to sleep through even that havoc.
Given enough time, every disturbance, no matter how terrible, becomes just more white noise to block out. When we refuse to talk about race issues in this country, when we stigmatize drug addiction and insist on privacy even when lives are at stake, all we’re doing is giving those issues the white noise treatment.
And so we have these two films released within a couple of months of each other in 1989 that tell inside stories of our most persistent national issues: the wars we wage on those of different races and on our drug users. I saw both films as soon as I could, partly because Siskel & Ebert insisted there were no two better films to be seen that year. Perhaps those declarations influenced my thinking too much, but I loved both films from the start: eventually I noticed that both turn decisively on a single, sudden and senseless death that demand reflection on what came before, and require new choices to be made in the future.
These films tackle serious subjects, so you might get the impression that watching them would be a miserable experience. Roger Ebert wrote, “In thinking about ‘depressing movies,’ many people don’t realize that all bad movies are depressing, and no good movies are.”
Both Do The Right Thing and Drugstore Cowboy are joyously alive, as funny and light-hearted as they are earnest. They have warmth and humor, bold storytelling choices, purposeful color, music, sharp editing, and performances full of dynamic energy. Watch Buggin’ Out react when a yuppie’s ten-speed scuffs up his brand new Jordans; his outrage here approaches the level he brings to the issue of Sal’s Wall of Fame.
And don’t get Bob Hughes started on how just the word “dog” can bring a hex down on a crew of petty dope fiends.
The comic moments in these films are not just strategies to shift the tone, or examples of great storytellers doing their thing, but a reflection of how complicated the issues they take on really are. Racism and drug addiction are no doubt serious issues that infuriate people, that break hearts, that makes lives sad and worthless. But there are things about these issues that are also funny. How absurd is it to hate and distrust an entire race of people except for those members of it whose music you like, movies you watch, and athletic accomplishments you celebrate? How crazy to observe a guy who at any given moment can’t tell you what month it is but who is also a genius at stealing, stashing, trading and trafficking narcotics, not to menttion setting up the cops who are itching to bust him? These films are serious, and because of that they are also seriously funny.
Both films are also serious about sex. There are no easy lays in these films, because all the characters are too busy living — ain’t that just how it is so often in our own lives? In Drugstore Cowboy, Diane struggles to get Bob excited about their alone time, but Bob can’t be bothered; he’s too busy fantasizing about the next score with “all those little bottles of pills waiting for me.” Diane bemoans the reality of their marriage: “You never fuck me and I always have to drive!”
Mookie is another man too focused on his career to settle down with his young family. Among its many achievements, Do The Right Thing introduced Rosie Perez. To some audiences she may be a familiar type, but in Hollywood Rosie Perez is one of a kind screen presence: harsh, loud, frank, tough, topful of energy and as much sexy as several grown women. Perez plays a Puerto Rican girl, Tina, who has a son with Mookie and not much else. His idea of love is dedicating a song to her on Señor Love Daddy’s show. When he makes his weekly visit for some nasty, she can’t decide if she’s too upset with him or if it’s just too hot to make love. But Mookie can’t let that go unresolved; if you’ve never seen Mookie cool off Tina by running ice cubes all over her, well, it might expand your definition of what sex is.
Do The Right Thing covers a single burning hot summer day in Brooklyn, on a street in Bed-Stuy where the population is made up almost entirely of African Americans and Puerto Ricans, and where the only two businesses are a pizzeria run by an Italian family and a corner grocery owned by a Korean couple.
We meet a gallery of characters who live and work on the street, among them Mookie, the young man who delivers pizzas; Sal, the owner of the pizzeria; his boys, the fuming Pino and the gentle Vito; Buggin’ Out, the determined activist; and Radio Raheem, the solitary young man whose boom box seizes everyone’s attention.
So the players run the gamut of racial profiles in the city, and throughout the film we observe how these different groups deal with each other: what African Americans think about getting all their food and drink from Italians and Asians, what Italians think about having only black customers, how whites view blacks and Puerto Ricans, what Puerto Ricans think of Asians, and on and on and on, until at one point a member of each group spouts hate right at the camera, right at us.
When the film was released in the high summer of 1989, critics and pundits debated whether Mookie’s (and by extension, Spike Lee’s) climactic gesture was an incitement to riot or something more nuanced; watching the film again, consider Mookie. Yes, he only delivers pizzas for a living, but he’s a very sharp guy: observant, forceful, a little suspicious of everyone, always ready to express his intelligence without any intellectual posturing. In the final scene he consoles Sal that ultimately he didn’t lose anything the insurance company can’t replace; better that Sal lose his pizzeria than lose his life in a community driven insane with rage.
At the end of the punishingly hot day, the people who live on that street give in to their mutual distrust and tear up the community of which, ironically, none of them feel like a real member. By avoiding the primary fact of their lives and community, they make a home from which all will eventually flee. And that truth is the enduring message of Do The Right Thing, that our ongoing refusal to deal with issues of race has a created an America where no one thinks of himself as a real American.
Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy follows the enterprising, determined and highly superstitious Bob Hughes (Matt Dillon), a dope fiend who runs a crew of thieves with his wife, Diane (Kelly Lynch). Looking back as a survivor, he narrates, “I carried the whole outfit on my back like it was my newborn son.” Bob and his crew rip off drug stores to feed their junk addictions, and their MO reflects the simplicity that comes from years of practice: create a big diversion in a drug store that empties the back counter of personnel, steal as many drugs as you can in 30 seconds, and disappear along with the diversion. When they score the crew (Bob, Diane, Rick and Nadine), indulge their habits until there are no drugs left and they have to steal again.
Most of the film’s scenes deal with the fragile domesticity these characters have constructed for the sole purpose of keeping themselves hooked to the gills. Occasionally the police pay a surprise visit, armed with strong suspicions and little else, but Bob meets the forces that threaten his existence head on; it might cost him his prized Ben Hogan clubs, but he outwits them nearly every time. When he pulls off an elaborate set-up that humiliates two overeager detectives, he jumps up and down like a kid at Christmas.
Bob believes in all kinds of hexes, curses, and bad omens: don’t mention dogs around him, because he and Diane had one once and it ended real bad for everyone (especially the dog); don’t ever turn a mirror around because it can alter your future for reasons not even he understands; most of all, never place a hat upon a bed — that hex is the granddaddy of them all.
Bob also has a sweet mother who refuses to let him into her house, not because she doesn’t love him, but because she knows too much about him, knows he would clean her out in a minute, that there’s nothing he wouldn’t stoop to in order to score. Bob is not a bad man, or even a bad son. He’s a junkie who has applied all his considerable talents and skills into remaining a junkie for as long as he has left.
One night Bob and his crew hit a drug store and score their favorite junk: Dilaudid, a powerful opiate, “the best pharmaceutical dope money can buy.” But in Bob’s world, every good turn brings the inevitable bad turn a step closer, and being alert to the signs — a hat on a bed, a casual word about dogs — is the only way to stay a step ahead of disaster. One night Nadine forces Bob into an impossible situation; how he saves himself demonstrates his resourcefulness but also reveals his utter exhaustion. He’ll have to forge a new path lest the old one lead him to destruction.
In most other years, Matt Dillon would have won an Academy Award for his performance, but that was the year Daniel Day-Lewis and Tom Cruise did battle in dueling wheelchairs for the top acting prize. Watching Matt Dillon as Bob Hughes offers the delight of seeing the right actor getting the right role at the exact right time in his life. As Bob Hughes, Dillon is an urban outlaw with a greasy pompadour, ratty jacket, snaky sideburns, checkered pants and pointy shoes. He exudes street smarts, a relaxed and shabby cunning that springs to life at the moment of opportunity and immediately returns to indolence whether the moment has been seized or missed. Bob steals drugs the way a cheetah hunts.
And yet Bob is also principled, disciplined, reflective and decent. He doesn’t hate or hurt anyone. He loves drugs so much he puts his life on the line for them. Near the end of the film he explains to a counselor that using drugs is just one way people cope with the pressures of their lives; it could be glue, or gasoline, or a gun to the head, but 0nly drugs are scapegoated and treated as a crime, and so he’s a criminal.
Eventually Bob decides this reality is not sufficient to justify his life style, so he leaves his crew behind, gets into a methadone program, gets a job drilling holes and sets out to live a virtuous life. Bob pursues redemption with the same steady rigor as he pursued drugs, but even his redemption won’t suffice to satisfy the hex; he abandons the paranoid superstitions fueled by drugs for the older, much deeper superstitions of Catholicism. Ultimately the only hope the film extends is that Bob is still alive at the end, and because he still has his wits there’s a chance he might one day figure things out.
The character Bob Hughes stands in for James Fogle, who never overcame his addictions and died in prison, but who wrote Drugstore Cowboy at a time when he could still have made something else of his life. Looking back, I’m not sure he would have made a different choice. Bob Hughes performs admirably under his particular circumstances.
Both these films venture way out to explore honestly the issues that touch all of us, and neither returns with a clear set of answers. But their explorations lead the audience to experience so many of life’s emotions in such a short period; we feel we’ve been put through the ringer along with the characters, and that experience alone can surely expand our understanding of ourselves and of each other. No work of art is not about self-improvement or self-discovery, just as no experience, no matter how painful or formative, makes you a deeper, more self-aware person. But if we engage with an open mind and heart the thoughts and feelings these films provoke, the experience cannot help but make us more human than we were before.
OTHER GREAT D FILMS
Day of Wrath (Vredens Dag)
1943, Black & White
Written, Produced and Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer
Why does the title sequence of this 1943 Danish film leave me abandoning all hope for those who enter? The shadow of the cross splits the Danish title Vredens Dag down the middle before a hard cut to the scrolling text of a Medieval hymnal, describing a grim and turbulent Judgment Day, unleashes a blast of trumpets and drums, shocking us into awareness that the filmmaker, Carl T. Dreyer, he of the agonizingly deliberate pace, is not messing around; a final judgment is coming and that right soon.
The scroll fades out and up to an anonymous hand signing the arrest warrant of a harmless old woman, Marthe, whose only crime involves using the soil under the gallows to sell homemade remedies. In the 17th century that was enough to warrant an accusation of witchcraft, and in the 17th century an accusation was enough to get you burned at the stake. The bells that toll for Marthe linger in the memory, and whenever I revisit this film it’s the sound of those bells that fills me with dread for these characters.
From this shocking beginning Dreyer begins his story of a 17th century Danish century community in the thrall of a witch hunt. The first act, the brutal torture and burning of Marthe, initiates an ever-growing tangle of associations that implicates everyone, including the inquisitors themselves. One step at a time Dreyer plays out this game in a series of hushed set pieces sick with intensity.
The story settles on the house of Absalom, one of the town’s most respected elders. In his home lives his all-seeing, all-knowing, black-souled mother, and his young, restless wife Anne. Martin, Absalom’s handsome son from an earlier marriage, returns home for a visit. Anne’s gaze falls squarely on him, and he reciprocates. Martin is at that age when he is both educated and completely untutored in life, when he looks like a man but doesn’t act like one. Eventually temptation and opportunity lead them to believe they too could be in the service of the Devil. The implications of the story, and the trap they fall into, make clear that the Devil’s true home is within the inflexible heart.
Distant Voices, Still Lives
1988, Color, Avenue Pictures
Written and Directed by Terrence Davies
Starring Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh and Dean Williams
Terrence Davies’ 1988 memoir of life in Liverpool, England in the years during and after World War II is an 85-minute tour of memories painful and precious, and feelings that flow so deep only song can bring them to surface. You might call it a musical, but it’s not a musical in any conventional way, and yet the characters are constantly singing. The songs they sing aren’t original, but rather the favorites of their day: romantic ballads, pop tunes, show tunes and pub anthems, the songs flow out in a parallel stream with conversation, familiar expresses, firm assurances and gentle remonstrance. You can recall scenes, but there are few conventional scenes; memories and moments surge and roll one into the other, and all the time the story of a family’s endurance of a furious and brutal patriarch, and the ways they stay together after he’s gone, remains clear and ever present.
This film introduced the world at large to Pete Postlethwaite, who brings wiry ferocity and beady-eyed sadness to the role of Father. In the film we don’t know his name, and that is fitting because he’s a stranger within his family. An early memory of Christmas shows Father arranging a tiny Christmas tree for his family as a choir sings “Hymn To The Virgin.” Later he watches his three children asleep in their shared bed with a look of complete happiness. As the choir reaches a final swell, we see the family seated for dinner, observing a terrible silence, until Father shatters it by tearing away the cloth from the table and clearing it of every dish and glass. This deeply personal synthesis of expressionist narrative and music is a one-of-a-kind experience of cinematic storytelling.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1964, Black & White, Columbia Pictures
Produced and Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay by Kubrick, Terry Southern & Peter George
adapted from the novel Red Alert by George
Starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden and Slim Pickens
It was Spring, junior year in high school. I had already read a couple of books on Kubrick’s films, but there still gaps in his filmography I needed to fill. So my friend Steve and I dined out on a dozen Dunkin Donuts and hit a Stanley Kubrick retrospective at the Music Box.
I’ve watched this film at least 20 times since then, on big screens and small, in theaters and living rooms and classrooms. There are films you can see in your memory as clearly as the rooms of childhood, and two of the three primary locations in Dr. Strangelove — the cavernous underground War Room and the B-52 piloted by Major Kong — evoke such a familiarity within me that the distinction between memories and moviegoing experiences loses all meaning. Which is all to say that I’ve probably have seen this film too many times since I was 16.
At that time I had no notion of what audacious idea Kubrick might be advancing in this or any of his films. I was aware, however, of the laser like focus of the story, how uncannily Kubrick conveys the necessary information for us to understand this nightmare scenario and then, perversely, gets his audience to root for Major Kong to deliver his payload. Released at a time when the United States still assumed it could remain united on things vital to our future, Kubrick hurled a Molotov cocktail at the bi-partisan complacency that ruled the day: our entire way of life is, and has been, designed specifically for Armageddon, and not seeing this project to its logical conclusion keeps us in a horrible tension we all seek to be free from, no matter the cost.
Du Rififi chez les femmes (Rififi)
1955, Black & White, Pathè
Directed by Jules Dassin
Written by Dassin, Auguste Le Breton and René Wheeler
Starring Jean Servais, Robert Hossein, Carl Möhner and Robert Manuel
Wow, there’s a lot of B&W on this list. No matter. This week’s theme seems to be films that are bleak when described in a capsule, but so brimming with life in every details that you could fill a book describing them. I’ll repeat what Ebert wrote: there is nothing depressing about a great film.
The first shot of Du rififi chez les femmes (or just Rififi), for example, shows the hands in a card game from a single, locked-down, high-angle shot. Watch as each player places his bet, takes new cards, shuffles, bets, and ups the ante; the speed with which the main character hesitates, bets, and then loses all his chips is breathtaking. There are a dozen more examples of this expert orchestration of actors and camera in Rififi, and each time is a new marvel. This is as close to the perfection of the silent cinema as I’ve seen.
Every great crime picture (hell, every great crime story, period) seeks to achieve the same thing: make the audience the accessory to the crime.
The heart of Dassin’s French caper is ameticulously executed jewel heist the criminals perpetrate in complete silence. For nearly a third of the film’s running time we see the characters anticipate each obstacle with an elegant solution. Throughout this sequence the soundtrack carries only incidental noise. When I first saw the film during its reissue in 2000, the audience at the Music Box Theater mimicked the silence of the characters onscreen. For 34 minutes no one made a peep. This went beyond making the audience accessories to the crime. In Rififi, Dassin makes the audience his willing participants. Me makes us his lookouts!
Duck Soup
1933, Black & White, Paramount
Directed by Leo McCarey
Written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin
Starring, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo Marx and Margaret Dumont
If you’ve never seen the mirror scene, or the lemonade stand fight, or the shenanigans with Louis Calhern’s cigar, or Groucho playing jacks at a meeting with his cabinet, or any of the goings on when the Marx Brothers move to Freedonia and take over the place, please, please, please: do not watch this film when you’re recovering from oral surgery.
I made that mistake when I was eight, laid up for the day after having an occluded tooth pulled. My mother loved renting videotapes because the seats at the movie theater made her knees ache, so she went round to the local mom and pop video store (That’s Entertainment Video!), rented a stack of films — back when videotapes had roughly the same dimensions as a cinder block — and set me up on the sofa for the day. She could not have known how much that day meant to me.
What can I say about Duck Soup? No, that’s not a rhetorical question. I sit here and I’m really buffaloed. I think the Marx Brothers (Groucho, in particular) would be amused how scholars have rubbed their hijinks raw with academic analysis; Harpo would surely set his blowtorch on them. Reclining on the sofa when I was eight, I recall laughing out loud at the mirror gag (when Groucho spins and Harpo does not) and causing such pain to my stitched-up gums that I started to cry. That is all the exquisite pain of movie-going in a single instant: a moment so full of sudden and surprising delight you forget where you are and what you’re doing there. Then reality shocks you back into your place, and you feel a little chastened until you’re ready to depart again.
Dumbo
1941, Color, Walt Disney Productions & RKO Radio Pictures
Produced by Walt Disney
Supervising director: Ben Sharpsteen
Sequence directors: Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Bill Roberts,
Jack Kinney and Samuel Armstrong
Story by Otto Englander, Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
In the 1980s Disney re-issued all their classic films (including this one before quickly and quietly removing it from circulation) on retail VHS. And this is how I saw it, crowded together with all my cousins around a large TV set stationed, as they all were back then, on the floor like every other piece of furniture.
However, after my cousins and siblings had moved on to the next Disney confection, I lingered on this film for a long time. I would watch it alone, moved by the tenderness Mrs. Jumbo showed to her Jumbo, Jr. (Dumbo was the moniker slapped on him by his mother’s gossipy cohort), and especially by Jeremy’s passionate defense of his friend. I imagined one day I’d have the sand to stand up to a pride of nasty adults, or a crew of jive-talkin’ cool kids, the way Jeremy Mouse stands up for Dumbo, to show that much heart with no regard for style or nuance. He makes Dumbo’s fight for respect his own, and by extension, ours.
During my first year at UCLA I met Abe Sylvia, a television producer on shows like Nurse Jackie and The Affair, who came to speak to our class. A student asked him something about studio politics, how to know which battles to pick and fight. Abe thought for a moment before declaring: “Don’t pick your battles. Pick every battle.” In other words, decide who you are and defend that position to the utmost, and never mind the politics.
Black crows notwithstanding, Dumbo is the simplest, purest expression of Disney’s brand of family entertainment I’ve ever seen, and in the character of Jeremy Mouse I sense something deeper going on. At the climax of the story he demand Dumbo open his “wings” and fly. He shrieks it loud enough to be heard in heaven. He needs Dumbo to succeed even more than Dumbo needs it. His expression might be taken for simplicity, or even expediency, but I think it reflects an investment so complete it demands a return. It’s easy enough to tell a person, “believe in yourself,” but when someone else believes in you enough for you and themselves, that’s when you see a peanut stand, hear a rubber band, see a polka-dot railroad tie, and all the rest.
More Favorite D Films
Dance With a Stranger (1985), Dark Star (1974), Dawn Patrol (1931),
Days of Heaven (1978), Dazed and Confused (1993), Dead Man (1996),
Dead Man Walking (1995), Death Race 2000 (1975), The Decameron (1970)
The Deep Blue Sea (2011), The Deep End (2001), Defending Your Life (1991)
Dekalog: Five (1988), Deliverance (1972), The Dentist (1932), Detour (1945)
Devil In a Blue Dress (1995), Diabolique (1955), Dick Tracy (1990),
The Dinner Game (1998), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), La Dolce Vita (1960),
Donnie Brasco (1997), El Dorado (1967), Drunken Master (1978)
