American Splendor (2003)
Another entry in the genre of “schlub cinema” is the story of Harvey Pekar. This movie could qualify as a comedy, I guess, but I find the humor is buried beneath layers of pain. Harvey’s marriage breaks-up; we laugh because he can’t ask her to stay because of his laryngitis. We laugh whenever Harvey is being curmudgeonly, which is often because, let’s be honest, that what we expected out Pekar. This movie is a portrait of a man who gets by doing what he loves, sharing stories of his life and his philosophies while working a job doing menial task. He truly is “our man.”
There are so many things about Harvey in this movie that I keep close to me as comfort that I’m not the only one like this: the way Harvey describes his obsession with collecting things (especially records), the way he wakes up out of a nightmare to the reassuring realization that he has job (“let’s face it, without a job, I wouldn’t know what to do”), and his troubles with women brought on by his own insecurities (at least I recognize that it’s my insecurities, right?).
Part documentary, part dramatization, part love letter to the guys who punch in/punch out everyday and know there’s more to life than what’s been handed to them.
Terrence Malick (1973, 1978, 1998, 2005)
I won’t lie. I am not able to write about the work of Terrence Malick. It isn’t for lack of want. I can not express in words how his movies move me. It isn’t that they’re particularly enthralling dramatically or exciting. People find him boring and with good reason. His movies are long and quiet. Long shots of wheat fields and the light shining through trees while a voice over talks about “what is the meaning of it all?” or something like that. Not a lot happens and there are very little pyrotechnics, either in the acting or in the action. His movies don’t provide the easy narrative of most genre films. Motives are sometimes cloudy, hard to understand. The characters are not completely themselves: Martin Sheen’s Kit (Badlands) is a psychopath playing the role of a rebel without a cause in a real life lovers-on-the-lamb scenario
Richard Gere spends Days of Heaven pretending to be the brother of his lover. Even after 20 years away from the director’s chair, Malick returned to movies, still frustrating people’s expectations of what was acceptable in a mainstream film. Thin Red Line is a war film more concerned with the effects of war on a man’s soul then a bullet on a man’s skull. What kind of war film is that? Especially given that it was released shortly after Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which definitely provided the audience with everything it needed to have to “enjoy” a war film. Guts, heroes, and a feel good philosophy: one man can make a difference. Thin Red Line instead straight up ask, “What difference can one make in all this madness?” A character is chastised for his unwillingness to sacrifice his men to the meat grinder of battle. Sure, we sympathize with him, because he is human like us and he understands that this is madness even if he can’t fathom it. In the end, though, he was wrong. A charge up the hill and, goddamnit, that hill was taken.
No. I can see why people don’t like Terrence Malick movies.
These things,though (the lack of “proper” storytelling, ambiguous characters, “deep” thoughts (or even just music) paired with images of the incidental beauty of the world just existing. I even like The New World enough to where I own both versions of it.
But, I can’t talk about his movies. I’ve read the books that dig deep into the philosophical aspects of Malick’s work. His interpretations of Kierkegaard and translations of Heidegger. There are better writers who can do a better job of describing what his work does than I can. I wish I could express to you the sights and sounds of a Terrence Malick, but this is what it is for me: It’s like being able to watch the universe expand while Explosions in the Sky plays. That’s the best I can do. Sorry.
Breaking the Waves (1996)
Where Terrence Malick shows the audience beauty in the minutiae of nature (a soft breeze caressing a blade of grass) and vast expanses of nature (giant panoramic views of the yet unspoiled New World), von Trier gets in close to show us the broken spirit that resides in people. Dogville was another great movie about seemingly good people becoming savages. There are no words to properly describe what happens to you while watching a Lar von Trier film. Assault might be a good word. After I saw this in the theater, I walked across the street to the record store I worked at. A coworker named Tim saw me walk in, dropped what he was doing, and rushed over to me. This was the conversation that followed:
Tim: “Oh my God, are you okay?”
Me: “Huh? Uhhhhh….yeah? Why?”
Tim: “I don’t know, man. You look like someone shot your dog. Like you were in an accident or something.”
Me: “Ooooohhhhh, *nervous laugh* nah no no….I just watched Breaking the Waves and, fuck, man, that movie was…like two hours of a fire and brimstone enema.”
Tim: “Whoa. That’s all, just a movie? God, you looked horrified. So it was bad?”
Me: “Oh no, it was great, you should see it.”
This movie is equally beautiful to look at, like something out the ’70s art house/independent era, but the people are grotesques. Emily Watson’s performance here is the benchmark by which I hold most actors in serious roles. It is explosive, tragic, and heartbreaking. The scenes where she talks to God (and God talks back?) are uncomfortable in how they bring to question if this woman (our protagonist, our heroine) is in her right mind or if maybe there is something divine in her. She is Christ-figure: a lamb who must suffer the wrath of the church and the world around her out of love and will suffer ’til death because it is the will of God that it happens to her. This movie is still a gut-wrencher and has the distinct title (privilege?) of being a movie I never want to watch again, but will always love for the experience.
