Eureka (1983, Dir. Nicholas Roeg)
Synopsis:
Gold prospector, Jack McCann (Gene Hackman) finally finds gold after 15 years of fruitless searching. As an old man, he’s convinced that everyone is out to betray him, even his own daughter, Tracy, (Theresa Russell) whose husband, Claude, (Rutger Hauer) Jack openly quarrels with. When Jack is brutally murdered, Claude is the prime suspect.
In what is fast becoming a tradition, I’ve chosen to begin the year with a film that in some way or another conjures up a feeling of winter to me. In this case, it’s mostly the film’s startling opening sequence, of Gene Hackman’s character as a gold prospector that really gives me that feeling but there’s also another sort of chill at work here, for this post marks the start of a series of posts on “disturbing films”.
Obviously, “disturbing ” is both a fairly broad and also subjective banner. Ultimately, it refers to films that have lingered in my mind long after the film has finished. The sort of film whose imagery pops into your head at nights when you can’t get to sleep or that you find in your nightmares. It may be that they disturbed me because of their themes as much as their images or may have to do with how old I was when I first watched them.
In this case, it’s not so much this particular film but almost the entire career of director Nicholas Roeg, whose films, when I first encountered them in my mid to late teens, changed my view of cinema altogether with their frank and uncompromising takes on both sex and violence. Even here, in what to my mind was Roeg’s last truly great film from a period when both studios and audiences weren’t afraid of visionary directors creating movies that didn’t fit into the mainstream, there are several extremely visceral set pieces: particularly the man blowing his out brains out at the beginning and the incredibly brutal murder of Gene Hackman’s character 2/3rds of the way through the film.
After this movie, Roeg’s films could either be divided into cult films or bizarre attempts to shoehorn his talents into more conventional projects, with little success in either case. With this in mind it might be tempting to view this film, with its much more minimal use of Roeg’s trademark jump cuts, flashbacks and flash forwards as the transition between his earlier, more experimental films and his later, more traditional work. I think this is actually a rather unfair criticism of a work that deals many of the same themes of Roeg’s more critically acclaimed films. There’s a definite parallel between Eureka and The Man Who Fell To Earth for example (and for which Paul Mayersberg also wrote the screenplay). In both, there’s a sense of long periods of time being compressed and of the main characters losing their way after they have achieved their initial aim. Interestingly, Mayersberg himself also makes connections between the two films in the interview included on the DVD/Blu-Ray release. However, there’s no denying the strangeness of this film’s narrative structure. In many ways it feels more like a novel with its distinct sections: Jack’s search for the gold, Jack in old age surrounded by enemies and then the aftermath of his death, with each section having it’s own narrative style – from the slightly abstract and surreal nature of the opening, to the more traditional and straight forward courtroom scenes in the final part. There aren’t many movies that tell their stories this way, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is the only one that springs to mind, but that feels far more traditional in its narrative arc than this. “Aimless” seems too critical an adjective to use and yet, it seems appropriate for a film that often throws curveballs at the viewers expectations. After all, there are few movies where the main protagonist is brutally murdered a little over halfway through the film and who ultimately killed him is left ambiguous.
If these seem like negatives, they’re actually not. Like all of Roeg’s greatest films, this repays repeat viewings, with new details there to be discovered every time you watch it. There’s also a number of great performances, not least from Gene Hackman who, as I’ve mentioned before on this blog, is one of my all time favorite actors. His performance here one of his best, yet it’s rarely mentioned in lists of his best screen roles, perhaps because the film itself is so often overlooked. Here, as with many of his roles, he’s not afraid play characters who aren’t sympathetic. However, there’s also superb work from Roeg’s muse and then wife, Theresa Russell, who never gets enough credit for her daring screen roles, the late, great Rutger Hauer (in one of his best screen roles alongside his work in Blade Runner and The Hitcher), as well as Ed Lauter and Joe Pesci (who hadn’t yet become typecast a psychopathic gangster). Only Mickey Rourke seems slightly miscast in his role as D’Amato. Fans of British film and tv will spot a number of familiar faces, from Sexy Beast’s Cavan Kendall, Bridget Jones and Game Of Thrones actor James Faulkner and even Desmond’s Norman Beaton. There’s also stunning editing from Roeg’s regular collaborator Tony Lawson and some nice cinematography from Alex Thomson (Excalibur, Alien 3). Eureka also marked the beginning of Roeg’s collaboration with composer Stanley Myers (a vastly underrated composer who is still best known for his score for The Deer Hunter) which would continue through all of Roeg’s subsequent films until Myers’ death. He creates a number of beautiful themes here, but the music over the film’s opening sequence and then the excerpts of Wagner when Jack discovers the gold are particularly strong. Incidentally, Myers’(uncredited) assistant on this and many of his other scores from this period, was a young German electronic musician called Hans Zimmer – I wonder what happened to him?
All in all, this a superb and vastly underrated film, by one of the greatest visionary British film directors, possibly the last truly great one in a filmography that influenced countless filmmakers, including myself. Now thanks to a superb newly remastered release on both DVD and Blu-Ray from Masters Of Cinema everyone can have a “eureka moment”. If you’ve yet to experience it, then it’s high time you did.
