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2010 Was an Epic Year for Crime Dramas

LAW BREAKERS:

It was an epic year for crime dramas

By Steven Rosen

Cincinnati CityBeat, 12-22-10
. . . . . . .

Any short list of Best American Movies would include Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather films from the early 1970s, maybe as a single entry. Using the world of crime for its potential to offer great drama and action through interlocking narrative, they also serve well as knife-sharp metaphor for the political and economic rot underneath the nave American Dream — they are deserved masterpieces. Epics, even.

So maybe it’s not surprising, then, that Hollywood rarely if ever tries to equal that achievement, anymore. Coppola certainly failed with 1990’s Godfather, Part III. The kind of complexity and real-world relevancy is just too hard — and maybe too, well, challenging for today’s American movie audiences.

And yet 2010 was a year filled with attempts to make “crime epics” worthy of the first two Godfathers’ ambitions and acting levels, if not always with the same kind of resources available to realize the vision of Coppola’s classics. But they’ve moved beyond the American dream — these new attempts often come from abroad and play the art-house circuit. And, increasingly, they’re being made for television. Two great American examples — Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire — are on cable channels. The British Red Riding trilogy, while released to theaters and video-on-demand in the U.S., started life as a television project.

French director Olivier Assayas’ Carlos is the fact-based story of the Venezuela-born terrorist/revolutionary Ilich Ramirez Sanchez who committed violent acts on behalf of radical groups the world over, including the brazen 1975 kidnapping of OPEC ministers at a meeting in Vienna. It already has played in the U.S. as a Sundance Channel miniseries. A shortened version that still packs a wallop is now available on video-on-demand and in some theaters, and gives Edgar Ramirez a showcase for acting.

Jacques Mesrine was a notorious, egotistical French criminal who had delusions that his crimes — bank robberies, kidnapping, prison escapes — in some way constituted revolutionary acts. Before French authorities finally ambushed and killed him in 1979, he seemed invincible. In the four-hour biopic Mesrine (divided into two separate films, which played here briefly) directed by Jean-Francois Richet (and based on the criminal’s own autobiography), Vincent Cassel (Black Swan) as Mesrine shows swagger, passion and the sexiness, but also cold-hearted cruelty and volatility.

Ajami, an Israeli film that played here briefly, locks together separate stories about Arab and Jewish residents of Tel Aviv/Jaffa, showing its characters’ interconnectedness. It starts with a drive-by shooting in a gritty Arab neighborhood called Ajami, a payback for another shooting, and from there builds as the various parties become ensnared in both the problems of a criminal underworld and the society at-large.

Set in Melbourne, David Michod’s Animal Kingdom — an almost-hit on the art-house circuit — features a family of low-life criminals ruled by a deceptively cheery matriarch played memorable by Jacki Weaver. Living in a suburban-style home, at war with a corrupt police force but by no means an honorable alternative, they are deromanticized and made ordinary by this film. Their world seems like ours, which makes them all the more relevant. And horrifying.

The British Red Riding trilogy, an adaptation of novels by David Peace, made it to American video-on-demand as well as a few art houses (not here) this year and is now on DVD. Consisting of three separate but interrelated movies by three directors, it’s set in the era of the real-life Yorkshire Ripper serial killer — 1970s to early 1980s. But the trilogy is far more concerned with a corrupt, murderous police force that sees the Ripper as a nuisance at most. The trilogy boils over with the atmospheric rot and bleakness of a crumbling urban society.

Ever since The Sopranos, there’s been recognition that American cable-TV series about gangsters can, given the time to burrow deep into their settings and develop their characters, provide profound commentary on the American experience.

So far, one great post-Sopranos crime series has emerged — AMC’s Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan, which finished its third season this year. But rather than occurring in a Mafia-laden New Jersey, it takes place in the bright, sunny Southwest, the land of growth and promise. An Albuquerque chemistry teacher stricken with lung cancer and distraught over medical bills, resorts to making the best meth possible to support his family. Bryan Cranston has won three Emmys as that teacher, Walter White, and the series has followed as he slowly travels ever deeper into a world of evil he struggles to stay above. It’s a slow, transfixing Dostoyevskian journey.

Boardwalk Empire, an HBO series that just completed its first season, is set in the wide-open Atlantic City of the Prohibition Era and is modeled on the life of a historical figure, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, who got rich making sure booze stayed plentiful in that resort town. As played by Steve Buscemi with estimable range and subtlety, the somewhat-fictionalized “Nucky” is the city’s treasurer and undisputed political boss.

Created by Sopranos writer Terence Winter, Boardwalk’s ambition is to place crime (and greed) front and center as a shaping force of the 20th-century American character, and to show how politics, urban development, personal relationships, entertainment — wealth — depend on it. With a sizeable production budget and a Ragtime-like sensibility for mixing real-life figures (Warren Harding, Sophie Tucker, Al Capone, the Chicago Black Sox) with literary creations, it aims to be a genuine crime epic.

So while we wait for more mainstream American movies to pick up the Godfathers’ mantle and carry it, just look elsewhere. You’ll see it’s been a good year for these kinds of filmed stories. They’re just not often at the multiplex.

(Film still from Carlos)

Lebanon: Claustrophobic Israeli Film About War

By Steven Rosen
(From Cincinnati CityBeat, 9-24-10)

LEBANON
Grade: B+

Today’s war movies — like today’s wars — are a long way from The Longest Day. The Hurt Locker, Restrepo (a documentary) and now the Israeli Lebanon are claustrophobic and involved with the almost existential day-to-day survival of their soldiers, mired in tight quarters in Mideast wars where the impossibility of decisive victory seems a foregone conclusion.

Lebanon, from director Samuel Maoz and based on his own experiences during Israel’s 1982 incursion into Lebanon, ups the ante. Virtually all the action occurs either within the tight confines of an Israeli tank alone in a hostile town, or as seen from the gun sight of it. The four young soldiers are grimy, sweaty, nervous, scared, sometimes profane, sometimes philosophical, sometimes heroic and sometimes not. In this, they seem very human — which is the film’s main draw after one tires of the limited setting.

The four are Shmuel the gunner, commander Assi, ammunition loader Herzl and driver Yigal. Comparisons to Das Boot are inevitable, but the spaces here are tighter (and the action is less dynamic). Because they are played by actors working from Maoz’s script, the characters are more dramatically satisfying to watch than the real American soldiers in Restrepo, whose macho-obsessed lack of introspection wore this viewer out.

Israel is clearly haunted by that war — there’s a tough, embittered melancholy to this as well as 2008’s animated Waltz With Bashir that’s overall much more mature and weary than American movies about Iraq and Afghanistan, which still are full of posturing. But, sadly, it looks like there will be all too many opportunities for our current war films to improve.

Vincere: Mussolini's Shortcomings as a Lover

Vincere (Review)
Italian director Marco Bellocchio looks at Mussolini's ugly treatment of a secret lover and their child

By Steven Rosen
. . . . . . .

Marco Bellocchio is one of Italy’s great directors. At age 70, he’s a subject of European film-festival tributes and his new films still get treated as the important works of a seasoned auteur. Yet he’s never made an impact in the U.S. to rival his early and controversial Fist in His Pocket (1965), in which an epileptic young man decides to kill his dysfunctional family.

He probably didn’t mind that neglect much — he’s had an active filmmaking career at home and has also long been involved in radical politics. Given those politics, as well as his considerable experience and talent as a filmmaker, it’s right to expect great things from Vincere, his latest film, about Benito Mussolini’s ugly treatment of a secret lover and their child. It’s a chance to show how fascism works on a personal level.

Given the subject, you’d think maybe Bellocchio would make a grand statement about the tides of Italian history, like Visconti’s The Leopard or Bertolucci’s 1900. And for a while, you feel like you’re getting it. There’s the thrill of excitingly poetic — even operatic — self-assured filmmaking. But then the story starts to sputter and grow narrow and confined rather than epic, and the film’s attempt at grandeur grows hyperbolic and shrill.

As depicted in the film, the love affair between a young Mussolini and a smitten woman, Ida Dalser, is seen as rapturously erotic romance … until it isn’t. As Mussolini chooses another lover — and another mother of his child — to be his wife, he forsakes Dalser. And as he becomes Il Duce, Italy’s fascist leader, in the 1920s, he uses the power of the state to suppress and confine her and her son.

Historically, Dalser maintained she had married Mussolini first and before his other lover, making their son Benito Albino Mussolini a legal heir. The film hedges on that. Both she and her son, who was taken from her, ended up in asylums.

If this isn't a well-known story internationally, it's been the subject of recent Italian scholarship. There has been an Italian documentary and, later, books on it. Bellocchio, working with Daniela Ceselli, wrote this screenplay.

The director, with cinematographer Daniele Cipri and editor Francesca Cavelli, attacks the story with a ferociously energetic, emotional approach that for a stretch is transfixing to watch. Although Vincere is in color, much of that has been drained in the film’s early sections, highlighting an older Italy of contrasting blacks and whites and lurking shadows. When color emerges — on a flag, for instance — it’s so vivid it appears hand-painted.

At the film’s start, set in the town of Trent, Mussolini (Filippo Timi) is an idealistic anticlerical socialist union organizer who turns a public meeting into a shoving match by asserting there is no God. His courage and defiance bewitch beauty-salon owner Dalser (Giovanna Mezzogiorno in a focused, disciplined performance) who finds his passion irresistible. And Timi’s Mussolini is indeed that: trim, athletic, handsome and sexy in an alpha way.

Vincere does some wild and weird things to show that passion. In a lovemaking scene, it concentrates on the beyond-steely, animalistic glow in his eyes as Dalser is lost in ecstasy. He seems eerie.

In the early going, as Mussolini moves on to Milan and Dalser supports his ambitions, Bellocchio uses what appear to be archival clips to frame the story. They're presented as movie-theater newsreels with titles and show how Mussolini was shaped and influenced by the coming of World War I in 1914. He turned right-wing and pro-war.

At a movie theater, when Mussolini and his hawks take on an antiwar element on the other side of an aisle, their bodies block the theater’s screen as they shout as if singing to the score. It comes off as both dreamlike and realistic, almost Fellini-esque.

So what goes wrong? I can put my finger on the moment the spell is broken. Historically, Mussolini emerged after World War I as a political force who eventually assumed power in 1922. At that point, Timi disappears from the film as the character Mussolini and instead we see true archival footage of … a balding, glowering, truly ugly middle-aged man.

In Vincere, the character Dalser — who has lost touch with Mussolini but is rearing young Benito — sees that same footage and renews her infatuation. That’s a stretch — most people would probably go, “Egad, thank God I’m not with him any longer; he’s really aged!” This creates a retroactive rupture in our suspension of disbelief. We can’t believe the character that Timi was playing could have turned into this so quickly.

From that point on, Mussolini isn’t really an active character in Vincere. Instead, it becomes a luridly tragic melodrama about Dalser’s fate. She's separated from her son and put in an insane asylum, where naked women run around taunting and being chased by exasperated staff. The scenes are overwrought and corny (except for Mezzogiorno’s performance); even the weather is excessively melodramatic.

Meanwhile, her son grows into a young man — played by Timi — who flips out while imitating one of dad’s speeches and does a bizarre meltdown. It’s showcase acting, but you respond, “Huh? Where did that come from?” By now, Bellocchio has lost touch with whatever he originally had in mind and is just rushing toward an end.

(This first appeared in Cincinnati CityBeat 5-19-10

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