5/28/14: Your Life, Minus the Bad Parts

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abused children, Brendan Fletcher, child abuse, childhood trauma, cinema, cutter, Dead Poets Society, film reviews, films, Final Cut, Genevieve Buechner, Jim Caviezel, memories, Michael St. John Smith, Mimi Kuzyk, Mira Sorvino, Movies, near future, Omar Naim, Robin Williams, sci-fi, science-fiction, Stephanie Romanov, Tak Fujimoto, tech-thriller, The Final Cut, thriller, Vincent Gale, Where the Buffalo Roam, writer-director

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could edit our own lives, go back through the “footage” of our years and remove all of the embarrassing, sad, shameful and hateful moments? In a perfect world, perhaps, we’d be able to remember just what we wanted: every golden sunset, ever moment of empowerment, every true moment of happiness, would stand in greater relief without all of the “other stuff” to clog it up. We would be able to remember our first kiss forever, while completely forgetting every racist, sexist, despicable or stupid thing we ever did. It sounds pretty great, on the outside, but it’s also pretty foolish. Indeed, it’s often the bad stuff, the moments that we’re most ashamed of, that help us to grow the most, to form our worldviews and personalities. It’s impossible to know love without knowing hate: good doesn’t exist without the presence of evil. We know all of this, of course, but we’re also humans and humans, by default, are pretty foolish creatures. We’re always looking for the perfect, idealized version of ourselves, sometimes to the deficit (or destruction) of those around us. It’s just what we do, really.

Omar Naim’s Final Cut (2004) examines not only this particularly human phenomena but also the tendency to whitewash (or tar, depending on the situation) someone after they’ve died. Dead people have a difficult time defending themselves, after all, so it’s no difficult thing to proclaim someone as either “hero” or “goat” after they’re unable to do anything about it. While it’s always disheartening to see how quickly people will rush to dig up dirt on a newly dead celebrity, it’s no less worrisome to see how willing some folks are to deify undeserving people. After all, if the memories of a person’s bad deeds can be erased from the public conscience, doesn’t that, in some twisted way, absolve them of their actions? It’s an intriguing idea and one that the film examines, at some length, with rather varying degrees of success.

Alan (Robin Williams) is a “cutter” in the near-future, a craftsman charged with editing the lifelong memories of recently deceased people into attractive, bite-sized pieces that are perfectly suitable for hi-tech memorial services/funerals called Rememories. Alan is one of the best cutters in the business, which means that he’s particularly adept at cutting out all of the nasty little bits that would tend to be upsetting in a public setting: for every life accomplishment, Alan cuts out a memory of savagely beating one’s spouse…for every moment of infidelity, child abuse and hatred that Alan removes, he leaves in the moments of charity, love and joy. Essentially, Alan gives families the “gift” that they think they want: an idealized, pain-free memory of their deceased love ones. It’s similar to history books that skip over the ugly parts, in favor of a more homogeneous, white-washed version of events: if we don’t see them, they couldn’t have happened.

While he may be good at his job, Alan doesn’t seem like a particularly happy person. For one thing, he’s constantly tortured by half-lucid, childhood memories of his friend, Louis, dying: from what he can remember, Alan was explicitly responsible for Louis’ death but he just can’t remember enough about the incident to know one way or the other. As such, he walks around bearing the burden of crushing guilt for an incident that may not have even happened…at least the way he remembers it. Talk about a key to a happy life!

Alan’s life is further complicated when his “boss,” Thelma (Mimi Kuzyk) presents him with a new assignment: edit a suitable Rememory for Charles Bannister (Michael St. John Smith), the recently deceased executive who was intrinsically tied to the implant technology that allows people’s memories to be recorded. Charles was an important person, perhaps one of the most important in the “new world,” but he was also a monster, as Alan discovers when he comes across the terrible footage of Bannister molesting his young daughter, Isabel (Genevieve Buechner). Isabel’s mother, Jennifer Bannister (Stephanie Romanov) seems to be well-aware of the abuse, since he’s careful to keep Alan away from Isabel: she doesn’t want her “muddying” the waters, as it were. Bannister was a very important person and they need to ensure that the public remembers him as a technological innovator rather than the monster who routinely raped his own daughter.

To further complicate matters, there’s a heavily anti-implant faction in society, a group that fights for a return to the days when memories were personal and couldn’t be manipulated by corporations. One of Alan’s former cutting peers, Fletcher (Jim Caviezel), is deeply embedded with the protesters and wants Alan to break the tenets of his profession and get him Bannister’s uncut footage: if the general public can see the truth, Bannister won’t be deified and his horrible actions will be dragged into the light of day. Alan protests, as dedicated to his job as anyone who truly believes in their work but cracks are forming in his smooth veneer. When Alan finds out a secret about himself, a secret which automatically sets him at odds with his own profession and fellow cutters, he must decided whether to do the right thing or to follow the oath he took, regardless of how unjust it may be.

The Final Cut, first and foremost, is a very serious, somber film: just a few minutes in, it reminded me explicitly of Gattaca (1997), another ultra-serious, portentous science-fiction film. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a serious film, mind you, but The Final Cut ends up slingshoting past serious into a cinematic realm usually reserved for stuffy historical dramas or “big, important” pictures. Unfortunately, the film never becomes quite “big enough” to make these affectations seem anything more than pretentious. It’s kind of like getting Brian Eno to score a Roger Corman boobs-and-aliens-in-space epic: adding gravitas to a pulpy storyline doesn’t make the subject inherently weighty. Likewise, The Final Cut seems focused on big, intellectual issues yet the resolution still hinges on the kind of maudlin, sentimental “feelings” that the film (mostly) avoids for its running time.

The ending, on its own, ends up being a pretty massive problem, since it purports to morph the film into a completely different beast with the movie’s final 10 minutes: never the best place to “flip the script,” as it were, unless you’re going for a “twist ending.” The finale to The Final Cut is no twist: rather, it’s a non-ending that sort of shrugs its shoulders, leaving the audience to pull together any deeper meaning. Worse yet, the ending posits the highly insulting notion that everyone in the film knows what Alan wants more than he does. It’s the equivalent of spending twenty minutes trying to convince the ice cream man that you really do want vanilla and not strawberry before he hands you a double-scoop of strawberry, anyway.

Craftwise, The Final Cut has the exact same look/feel that I tend to associate with most “Dystopia-lite” films, although the presence of veteran cinematographer Tak Fujimoto definitely lends the proceedings some weight. Fujimoto, known for Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) and Silence of the Lambs (1992), among many, many, many others, doesn’t bring a ton of individuality to the film but there’s plenty of nice shots here, including some truly impressive overheads. Again, the whole thing tends to remind me rather overtly of Gattaca, but that could just be a by-product of the whole “independent, intelligent sci-fi” subgenre. The score, as a rule, is always ponderous and somber, as if we need constant reminding that this is a “serious” film with “big issues.” A lighter (or, at least, more subtle) approach might have been more effective but it is what it is.

Robin Williams, as befits his late-career “serious” roles, is completely subdued, almost to the point of blending into the background. It’s definitely not my favorite of his low-key performances but I’ll be honest: I’ll take a hundred “mediocre” performances like this to one of his obnoxiously manic “funny guy” personas. I’ve never been a fan of Williams when he gets truly wound-up and rewatching some of his more “classic” roles, such as Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Dead Poets Society (1989) showed me that he’s been guilty of this for some time. While Williams’ performance in The Final Cut is nowhere near as relevatory as his turns in One Hour Photo (2002), Insomnia (2002) or World’s Greatest Dad (2009), it’s still a nicely low-key performance that maintains a consistent pitch throughout the film. I’m not sure that Alan has much of an arc, to be honest, but it’s nice to get through a Williams’ film without getting “mugged” to death.

Aside from Williams, the rest of the cast ranges from capable to fairly anonymous. Mira Sorvino has a rather thankless role as Alan’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, Delila, and Caviezel ends up being less than convincing as Fletcher, the former philistine who’s had his eyes opened to the evils of modern technology. To be fair, I’m rarely, if ever, blown away by Caviezel, who seems to underact to the point of non-acting. That being said, Fletcher is a rather confounding character and I’m not sure that anyone could have made him distinctive.

While The Final Cut isn’t a bad film (although it has a very bad ending), it’s also not a particularly interesting film. Any of the plot’s intriguing concepts (how would you act if you knew that everything you did would be recorded for the rest of your life?) become mundane by sheer repetition (a fact not helped by the tedious aural flashbacks that remind us of things we may have missed) and the whole thing is too glum and joyless to be much fun. While it’s interesting to think of our lives as one big editing project (like with film editing, Alan separates the footage into various categories, although his categories have names like “Masturbation,” “Personal Hygiene,” “Youth,” and “School”), I can’t really see the concept having much interest to anyone who’s not well-versed with the Final Cut editing program. Ultimately, The Final Cut ends up being so similar to other films that you might begin to wonder if someone hasn’t removed your memory of seeing it before. You probably haven’t but you’re sure gonna think you have.

2/14/14: A Little Quiet Dignity

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African-American history, Alan Rickman, all-star cast, Andrew Dunn, butlers, Cecil Gaines, cinema, Cuba Gooding Jr., David Oyelowo, Eugene Allen, Film, film reviews, Forest Whitaker, historical drama, James Marsden, Jane Fonda, John Cusack, Lee Daniels, Lenny Kravitz, Liev Schrieber, Movies, Oprah Winfrey, passive resistance, Precious, racial equality, Robin Williams, Terrence Howard, the Black Panthers, The Butler, the Civil Rights Movement, the White House, U.S. presidents

Sometimes, a film can do everything right, yet not quite move me in the way that (I’m assuming) it meant to. I’m not necessarily thinking about tragic romances or tear-jerkers when I say this, since those types of film tend to be manipulative by their very nature (a manipulation which I’ve managed to avoid for most of my life with the exception of animal stories, which tend to reduce me to a blubbering man-baby in no-time flat). Rather, I’m thinking about certain particularly earnest dramas, dramatic films which tend to have important ideas and themes yet are diluted to the point of banality due to their pressing need to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

These are not bad films, necessarily, but they are safe films and tend to have as much real resonance and staying power as similarly sincere “made-for-TV” films: the “After-School Special” syndrome, as it were. Although Lee Daniels’ historical drama The Butler is extremely well-made and filled with some very solid performances, the film has an unfortunate tendency to carve out a middle-of-the-road path that makes it feel technically adept, yet unfortunately disposable. In a year where Steve McQueen released the painful open-wound that was 12 Years a Slave, Daniels’ The Butler doesn’t seem quite as weighty.

Loosely-based on the life of Eugene Allen, who served as White House butler over the course of 34 years and eight different presidential administrations, The Butler features Forrest Whitaker as the fictionalized Cecil Gaines. Together with his wife, Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) and sons Louis (David Oyelowo) and Charlie (Elijah Kelley), Cecil watches the U.S. go through many social changes and struggles, from the Civil Rights movement to the Vietnam War, from the rise of the Black Panthers to the assassination of JFK. Through it all, Cecil tries to hold on to the same quiet sense of dignity that he’s maintained since he first watched his father get murdered on a sharecropper’s farm, even as his eldest son, Louis, becomes more and more involved in “radical” politics. Father and son eventually wind up at odds with each other, as one continues to throw himself into a life of service, while the other comes to realize the importance of fighting for your own human rights.

One of the biggest problems with The Butler, as strange as it may seem, is that the film is really too short to fully develop all of its ideas and themes. Even though Daniels’ film clocks in at a little over two hours, it has an awful lot of history and time to wade through: 34+ years, to be exact. As such, much of the film takes on the feel of a “Cliff-Notes” version of the events. I’m not asking that we spend an inordinate amount of time on any particular era: I fully understand that this was not meant to be an exhaustive history of the United States, only a fictionalized account of one man’s life. Nonetheless, the film has a tendency to speed through decades (and eras) that can give short-shrift to not only characters and story elements but to actual themes, as well.

This problem becomes exacerbated by the numerous sub-plots that begin to crop up everywhere: Gloria’s affair with Howard (Terrence Howard); Charlie’s military service; Louis’ increasing radicalization. In and of themselves, any of these subplots would be enough to give added meat to the core story of Cecil and the White House. Taken altogether, however, the effect becomes not only rather overwhelming but of decidedly questionable intent: what, exactly, is the point of Gloria’s affair with Howard? Other than an offhand mention once or twice, the situation seems to have no bearing on the story whatsoever. It felt like a rather misguided attempt to add depth to Winfrey’s character, as well as providing more of a role for Howard. In reality, however, it just ends up bloating the story unnecessarily and led me to focus more energy/attention on Howard’s character than was needed. It almost seemed as if the subplot existed simply to pad out Terrence Howard’s role.

I only mention this notion of “padding” since there are an awful lot of characters moving in, out and around the perimeter of the story and many of them seem to exist only to offer a little screen-time to some very familiar faces. We get the various presidents that Gaines works for, of course, played by a virtual cornucopia of actors:  Robin Williams as Eisenhower; James Marsden as Kennedy; Liev Schreiber as LBJ; John Cusack as Richard Nixon and Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan. Of these, only Schreiber, Cusack and Rickman get much time, with Williams putting in more of a glorified cameo and Marsden not making much impression as Kennedy at all. Schreiber is quite magnificent as Johnson, bringing a real sense of grit and a bit of a lunatic edge to the 36th President: the bit where he barks orders while seated on the toilet is both inspired and a little scary. Cusack is admirably sleazy as Nixon and inhabits the role quite nicely: I’ve really come to appreciate his acting over the last several years, even if his taste in roles (The Butler notwithstanding) has been a bit questionable of late. Rickman’s portrayal of Reagan is a bit odd, to be honest: at first, I thought this was Ciaran Hinds reprising his role from Political Animals. It was only during the credits that I realized I’d been watching Alan Rickman all along. Recognizable or not, Rickman’s performance also reminded me the least of the various represented presidents, with Marsden’s generic JFK coming in a close second.

Along with these famous presidential portrayers, we also get Mariah Carey as Cecil’s young mother; Terrence Howard as Cecil’s friend/Gloria’s lover; Vanessa Redgrave as the aged matriarch of a plantation; Clarence Williams III (aka Linc from the Mod Squad) as Cecil’s mentor; Cuba Gooding, Jr. as Carter, a White House butler who becomes like a brother to Cecil; Lenny Kravitz as another White House Butler; Minka Kelly as Jackie Kennedy and Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan. Many of these performances, such as Carey and Redgrave, amount to little more than brief cameos, sometimes giving the proceedings the feel of one of those epic, star-studded Herman Wouk mini-series’ from a bygone era of television.

Despite the occasional celebrity overkill, there are plenty of good performances filling The Butler. Whitaker is a consistently gentle and dignified presence, the very definition of perseverance. Oprah isn’t amazing in her role as Gloria but she gets steadily better as the film progresses and she has some genuinely powerful moments in the film’s back half. Cuba Gooding Jr. is charmingly rakish as Carter, managing to make the character both filthy and boyishly innocent: it’s the kind of role that makes me wish Cuba did these kind of roles more often. Kelly and Fonda give two very different types of performances but both actresses manage to nail their respective First Ladies to a tee. The very idea of Jane Fonda playing the uber-conservative Reagan is good for a laugh but Fonda really sinks her teeth into the role, portraying Nancy as quick, smart and strangely fashionable, in her own way. Kelly, by contrast, gets a stunning scene where she sits wailing in the Oval Office, covered in her dead husband’s blood. It would be a powerful scene in any film but becomes particularly resonant when paralleled with the Gaines’ own loss later on.

From a film-making perspective, The Butler has a nice, gritty look, partly thanks to cinematographer Andrew Dunn (who also shot Daniels’ Precious). This results in some nice period pieces, a look which is deflated a bit by the film’s over-reliance on its obvious and, to be honest, schmaltzy score. The script is good, too, although it featured far too many disparate threads and subplots for my liking. I was also a bit curious as to why Daniels’ chose to gloss over Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter almost completely: whereas Presidents 34-37 and 40 get their own scenes and representations, Presidents 38-39 are only seen via stock footage. I’m pretty sure that this is due to the film’s tendency to try and cram too much info into too small a space but I’m only guessing. Regardless of the reason, I thought it a little odd and certainly part of “Cliff-Notes” issue I had with the film, as a whole.

In truth, I liked The Butler enough to want more but found myself consistently frustrated by the film’s tendency to skim the surface of so many issues. I was also nagged by the feeling that the film seemed to lose its interest in Cecil halfway through, choosing to switch the focus to Louis. In some ways, I think this has to do with the vast difference in their philosophies: Louis’ immersion in the Civil Rights Movement makes for a much more kinetic film experience than Cecil’s stoic acceptance of his circumstances. This still has the effect of making Cecil the second-banana in his own story, however, which seems like just one more slight to heap on the guy.

Ultimately, The Butler stands as a good film that strives to be much more: it strives to be an enduring classic. While there’s much to laud here, the film just doesn’t do much new with its subject matter, even if it does do it well. In a year that was filmed with absolute masterpieces, The Butler stands proudly but doesn’t stand out quite as much as it might have hoped. Ironically enough, this seems to be strangely fitting for a film about a man who proudly (and quietly) went about his job for 34 years.