Movies again: From Dusk till Dawn

I'm weighing in with this one a little late... about 15 years. Nevertheless, I saw Quintin Tarantino's From Dusk till Dawn yesterday for the first time.

I honestly can't remember the last time a movie raised my expectations so high and crashed them so low so quickly. Not even the soggiest ending has so disappointed me. And it was a new feeling. I wasn't mad, I didn't feel ripped off (particularly since I didn't pay to see it; a friend brought it over)... I felt sad.

Now, when my buddy showed up, he did say something about "vampires". But I quickly forgot that detail when I started watching the movie.

Starts off in a liquor store in the middle of nowhere. The bad guys, Tarantino and George Clooney (as brothers Richie and Seth Gecko, respectively), are introduced in an extremely clever and quite novel way. I was a little let down when the scene descended into over-the-top violence, but I reminded myself that, hey, this is Quintin Tarantino we're talking about. You can't have a scene about a guy going to the bathroom without a five-alarm homicide (see Pulp Fiction). So, okay, accept there's going to be a lot of gratuitous violence and weed the plot out as you go. That usually works with a Tarantino movie.

The goodies are Harvey Keitel, in an admirably low-key job portraying Jake, a recently-widowered preacher undergoing a deep crisis of faith, and his teenage kids, Kate (Juliette Lewis) and Scott (Ernest Liu), all on vacation in an RV. The set-up here is believable, with the blase conversation and arguments nicely underlining the emotional cap Jake has placed on himself.

The baddies and the goodies all wind up at the same motel, where Richie first demonstrates what an especially bad baddie he is by raping and killing their hostage when Seth makes the mistake of trusting him alone with her. Not long after, Richie and Seth break in on Jake and his family, insisting that the family will conduct them all safely across the Mexican border in the RV. Seth assures them that as long as they follow the rules, they'll be set free afterward. Initially, Jake flatly refuses, even offering to go with them alone, but he is forced to include the kids when Seth makes it plain they'll all die then and there otherwise.

On the road to Mexico, Jake and Seth get into a conversation that, while prickly, serves as the first inclination of a bond between the two men. Richie's attentions, meanwhile, are focused on Kate, which pleases neither of the other two men. The scene at the Mexican border is key. Scott urges his father to appeal to the Mexican guards for help, but Jake realizes the likely outcome of that and gambles that playing for time is the better move. When the guards become suspicious, quick thinking on the part of everyone saves the day, and raises the stock of the family with Seth.

Successfully in Mexico, Jake drives the RV to the rendezvous, a biker bar called "Titty Twister" with sign noting it is open from dusk till dawn. When an altercation at the bar between Seth and the bartender threatens to end in violence, Jake is the voice of reason and compromise who defuses the situation. Sitting at the table together, the five begin to drink, reluctantly at first, but then with a budding comradery. When Seth reveals that he intends to drain the whisky bottle and then break it over the head of a man who touched him, Jake takes a fantastic risk by asking Seth if he's a loser. When Seth demands an explanation, Jake points out that Seth must be a loser not to be able to appreciate all he's won. He has robbed and killed, escaped a huge dragnet across Texas, and has made it safe and clear in Mexico. When Seth realizes the wisdom of Jake's words, he insists that Jake, who has refused to drink with him, share a toast. The two men toast one another's families.

At this point, exactly the one hour mark, the movie ends. As far as I'm concerned, anyway. What should have followed hits the virtual cutting room floor, and what is spliced on is... some other movie, where the names and faces of the characters happen to be just the same.

First, there is a long, gratuitous, and surprisingly boring table dancing scene, so long and self-indulgent that it had me wondering which casting chair enjoyed the baloney-pony ride that clearly paid for it. It also made it clear that we had 75 minutes of plot that needed to be Hamburger Helpered over the 100 minute mark. Well, even that's okay; Tarantino's padding is usually interesting for dialog, at least, and quite often character development as well...

But then come the vampires. Turns out the bar is nothing but the vampire equivalent of a spider web. The rest of the movie is nothing more than the typical zombiefest of huge monster body counts, the slow but sure attrition of human characters, and the retreat to ever smaller rooms and ever more meager survival resources. Tarantino allows himself to ignore that he has spent over the first half of this movie creating a handful of intriguing characters we've come to care about, and pretty much turns them into Star Fleet red shirts who've beamed down on The Wrong Freakin' Planet™.

At the end, everyone's dead but Kate and Seth, and despite the fact that they've lost everyone else in their lives, and everything they've been through together, they basically just take off in different directions after Seth hands Kate a stack of money, as if that would mean anything to a teenage girl who's just lost her brother and surviving parent. I watched it to the end, just to see how disappointed I'd be. You can probably tell: palpably.

I can identify the movie I wish Tarantino had made; the movie I thought he was making around the time Seth and Jake were having their passive-aggressive conversation and I was starting to perk up thinking, "Damn! This is gonna be good! How did I miss this all these years?" That was the movie where they end up at the rendezvous in Mexico, Seth and Jake have learned to trust and even grudgingly admire a few things about one another, and either something goes wrong with the deal Seth's trying to make, or else Richie's intentions towards Kate clash with Seth's promise to let them go if they follow the rules, and in either case Seth has to make a choice between his principles and his love for his maladjusted brother. There's a scene in the movie where Seth has to kill vampire Richie, and he says he hopes he can give Richie the peace in death he couldn't find in life. Why couldn't Tarantino have given us that scene as the conclusion of a taut, razor's edge thriller where the fates of characters we've come to care about really matters? Where was the scene where Jake recovers his faith (and is it necessarily in God when he does get it back)? What was the point of having Jake in a crisis of faith at all, if all the movie needed was some joker who could turn tap water into holy water? Honestly, I have never seen such promising cinematic potential so gratuitously wasted. I suppose you could call Tarantino a genius for being able to build something that impressive and then burn it down himself, but don't ask me to applaud it.

This could have been something the calibre of Reservoir Dogs. Instead, when Mr. Blonde says, "Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?", Mr. White turns into a werewolf.

Yeah, exactly.

Good Night, and Good Luck

Last night, P-Doug called me up and spoke in the most glowing terms of the movie Good Night, and Good Luck. Set in the early 1950s, filmed unself-consciously in black and white, it's the story of Edward R. Murrow taking on the Orwellian excesses of the day in the form of the irresponsible Senator Joe McCarthy. While this film is largely George Clooney's baby (directed and co-written by him), he himself takes a supporting role in the movie, and leaves the plum assignment to David Strathairn. I must confess to being largely unaware of Strathairn's work, with the notable exception of his role as Pierce Patchet in L.A. Confidential, among my favourite movies.

Murrow is played by Strathairn with acid dryness, which gives an edge to what is a clear underlying humanity, and counterpoints what might even be called a certain sentimentality. One of the delights of the movie is the quick wit, which never seems forced or unbelievable. Early on, when discussing the potential loss of $3000 worth of ad revenue with a management figure played by (I believe) Jeff Daniels, Murrow offers to pay the loss himself, splitting it with Fred Friendly (Clooney's character). Murrow lays it on a bit thick, saying something to the effect that "Fred's kids will just have to do without Christmas presents this year." This is met with the rejoinder, "He's a Jew...", which Murrow instantly counters with, "Well, don't tell Fred; he loves Christmas." The audience I was in appreciated this rapid-fire give-and-take, all at once arid but good-natured, as the best comedy is.

Not that the movie is a comedy. Anything but. It's a deadly serious examination of a moment in history chracterized by a paranoia all too familar to us in the post-9/11 world. Back then, it was taking shortcuts with civil liberties in the name of rooting out communism at home; today, the bogeyman is terrorism, but the methods, the means, and the slogans have a chillingly familiarity, the same absolutism of schoolyard persecution. The movie is filmed in black and white, but it is really concerned with the shades of grey that democracy is supposed to be all about.

Putting aside the metaphoric aspect of chosing monochrome, the practical upshot of filming in black and white is to lend a strange, anachronistic immediacy to the film. Senator McCarthy, who appears in the movie only in film bites (including a slimy 'rebuttal' to a piece by Murrow that he uses not to address the points raised but to cast aspersions on Murrow and his colleagues), suddenly becomes a visceral presence, rather than monster dead nearly fifty years.

The movie, though following events from 1953 to 1954, is enveloped by an occasion in October, 1958, in which Murrow is being honoured for his work. In addressing the audience, he happens to remark that how television takes its responsibilities will be noted by historians in "fifty or a hundred years", making the viewer acutely aware of being at the middle point of that gulf. In 1954, civil liberties under attack in the name of national security had Murrow as their champion. One is left with the distinct feeling that the recent slide has gone even further, with no similarly daring quixotic defender in sight. The insertion of a televised quote of President Eisenhower near the end of the movie is subtle, but its message is clear; its application seemingly far more timely now than it was at the time it was made:

"Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend or his enemy; and he does not feel that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it."