Domino Effects

So, to Tony Scott’s DOMINO (2005). As I recall, the critics loathed this and were very critical of Keira Knightley’s perf. I always felt she started off not being able to act at all, and eventually became pretty good. And yet she’s fine in this. True, there are very few proper scenes where you can assess her performance. People are reduced to fragmentary reaction shots which feel disconnected — it takes a Christopher Walken to really make an impression with odd line readings. Knightley’s character habitually rolls a coin over the backs of her fingers, and such is the cutting you can’t tell if she can really do it, or even if they have ANYONE who can do it.

But that’s the nature of the beast. And what a beast it is. The three most extreme adaptations of the Hollywood action cinema I know of are MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (I know, it’s Australian action cinema), NATURAL BORN KILLERS, and this. All three play like awful anxiety attacks. NBK perhaps isn’t intended to be pleasurable, but the others presumably are. (Scott has a scene switch from day to night in mid-conversation) with a subliminal alibi of a few sunset shots so he can stage a Mexican stand-off in pastiche Robert Richardson toplight.)

Dan Mindel’s lysergic lighting, it has to be said, is deleterious to everybody’s complexion, but Lucy Liu can survive this, and GREEN lighting too. Jackie Bisset deserved compensation though.

When I first heard about the film, I thought, How weird — a film about Laurence Harvey’s daughter. The modern movie audience has no awareness of who LH was. Does a movie about a movie star’s daughter work if the audience has never heard of the movie star? I don’t think it does. Scott tries to cover this with shots of Harvey in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE on TV, relying on Sinatra’s residual fame by association to rub off on the grey shade of LH. It’s unlikely that this would be terribly meaningful for the early noughties cinemagoer.

But let’s ignore all that. Why did I find this film more compelling than Scott’s other films? It’s not the story, which concocts a mess of nonsense that never happened and sutures it to the real-life character of Domino Harvey. Scott apparently taped lots of interviews with Harvey, whom he seems to have really taken to, and then Steve Barancik and Richard Kelly wrote a script, essentially grafting on the climax of TRUE ROMANCE (chaotic shoot-out with various parties including mob) to a heist-gone-wrong/scam-gone-wrong/world-gone-wrong scenario. Kelly was briefly hot after DONNIE DARKO and before SOUTHLAND TALES and Scott presumably felt latching onto him could repeat the TRUE Romance success (But, I repeat, I really hated TR). Richard Kelly is an odd one. He made a genuinely interesting and touching debut, but has failed to follow it up and in interviews/commentary tracks sounds like a dope. But there must be more going on in his head because DD is so good and even his stinkers are at least unusual. And Barancik wrote THE LAST SEDUCTION (also a Bob Rafelson pic, NO GOOD DEED, which sounds at least interesting. Nothing much else — he must have stacks of unproduced scripts, surely.)

It’s not the characters, either. Domino seems potentially interesting, but she’s mostly a set of bad-ass attitudes rather than a rounded character. Her bounty hunter buddies are… not appealing. I have a vague memory of thinking that Mickey Rourke looked messed-up, but I didn’t know what he was going to do to his face later. So he now looks retroactively human. Scott was vocal about wanting to support Rourke, saying he was a great guy and a great actor. Rourke had been accused of being a spousal abuser so Scott’s definition of “great guy” may be different from mine. There’s also Edgar Ramirez, so good in Assayas’ CARLOS. Hollywood has persistently wasted his potential. As a near-mute hunk, he can’t really make a strong impression amid the Cuisinart montage. You need dialogue to survive the death of a thousand cuts, and his is mostly in Spanish. And he’s introduced to us brutalizing a man whose arm he’s recently cut off, so the lovelorn looks he aims at Knightley fall on deaf eyes.

A brief summary of Scott’s techniques: acid colours (gels, filters, grading); near-constantly frenzied cutting; equally fragmented music cues, eccentrically deployed; quick, gratuitous double exposures showing the same thing twice from different angles, superimposed over itself; titles sliding around, sometimes vanishing behind the scenery; accelerated motion, both for the mescaline fuelled driving scene and for random establishing shots; remixing of dialogue so that lines repeat themselves as VO or anyway non-sync dialogue, generally at random. He doesn’t move the camera all that much. It’s mostly a bunch of post-production effects, plus itchy little crash zooms and reframings.

When a filmmaker gets carried away with optical etc it can be a sign of loss of confidence: TOM JONES famously resorted to the optical printer because Tony Richardson was worried he’d made a stinker. I think with Scott it’s more like his metabolism worked in a certain hyper way, and digital editing had made it possible to tinker obsessively and add all kinds of effects. And he saw this film as a suitable case for the full treatment. He wasn’t wrong. The idea seems to be to make something nuts. The script isn’t crazy enough to get you all the way there. So the lysergic colours and disorienting montage and all the cinematic filigree can be justified in away that, to me, they can’t in Scott’s less-crazy genre exercises.

it’s decoration as architecture. There wouldn’t be much to sustain my interest without it, and it’s wacky enough to be interesting by sheer overload. Some fucked-up shit goes down, and there may be some vague satirical intent behind the portrayal of Beverley Hills 90210 and Jerry Springer and reality TV and celebrity offspring mixed with bounty hunters and mobsters, but the satirical point is just Isn’t this nuts? And I feel that Scott basically likes things that are nuts.

The film isn’t funny when it tries to be — the attempt to play the arm-lopping for laughs is sick-making, with Tom Jones singing Momma Told Me Not to Come, perhaps ruining that song for eternity. The situations aren’t exciting, and the introduction of a dying baby to give us something to root for is pretty desperate. Making an Afghan suicide bomber a hero and sending ten million bucks back to his homeland plays a little off.

But as a demented thrill-ride, the film is, one has to admit, demented. Just making it seems like a self-destructive act, which is uncomfortable, given Scott’s fate. I guess he thought it might be successful, but none of his choices seem like they’d contribute to its box office. Everything the film is in love with seems deeply negative, toxic, suicidal. Though Harvey’s drug problems are omitted — when she does Mescaline it’s because the water was spiked, but it leads to a redemptive desert shag scene and a Blues Brothers Mission from God brought to you by Tom Waits.

Domino Harvey would die by overdose before the film opened. Scott took his own life by jumping off a bridge seven years later. He’d seemingly been battling cancer, but had just beaten it. He was on mirtazapine and eszopiclone. The latter is a treatment for insomnia which I’ve been prescribed occasionally. The former I take nightly, because apart from being an antidepressant, it is also used off-label for insomnia. I don’t have depression but I find it hard to switch my brain off at night. Mirtazapine is good for racing thoughts.

I always wonder whether either of the Scott brothers really believe in anything. I get no sense of conviction from their work. Ridley maybe believes in something like the triumph of death. Maybe Tony did too. “This is a great day to die!” screams Rourke, riddled with bullets in an elevator plummeting down the shaft of a Vegas casino tower as the St Mathew Passion, ripped bloodily from the credits of CASINO, blasts over the top.

But at the end of DOMINO he does something I’ve never seen before — before the standard credits role, he runs through shots of his cast, captioned with just their first names. In his mind, you assume, this was indeed a film about friendship. And he must have felt some special affection for the people he made it with. The film finally manages to touch something human, just as it’s over.

DOMINO stars Anna Karenina; Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson;  Ilich Ramírez Sánchez ‘Carlos’; Attendant to Claudius; Bo Catlett; Mary; Fin Shepard; David Silver; Mesoamerican Man; Sandman’s Wife; Lafawnduh; McKittrick; Dr. Chris Taub; O-Ren Ishii; Miss Goodthighs; Caeser, the Exterminator; Nicole Brown Simpson; Renfield; and Raymond Shaw (archive footage).

Three-Quarter-Face

THE BOX wasn’t as bad as I’d heard, but it wasn’t exactly great. Richard Kelly’s run-for-cover response to the catastrophic reception to SOUTHLAND TALES sees him repeat the CGI fluids and pointless period setting of DONNIE DARKO, but unfortunately following the over-explained approach of the director’s cut. I *love* DONNIE DARKO, but only the original, more mysterious version.

This one comes from a six-page Richard (INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN) Matheson story, a story with a powerful premise and a lot of mystery. In the DVD extras, Kelly talks about wanting to know the answers to the questions the story raised. Which is fine, you’re supposed to want to know the answers. What you’re NOT supposed to do is make a $30,000,000 Cameron Diaz movie that answers them all.

I say Cameron Diaz movie, but Frank Langella is really the whole show here. His mellifluous voice, easy-going-delivery, and steely eyes make him perfect to play the guy with the improbable facial injuries (his missing cheek looks like an open wound — wouldn’t the surgeons have given him some kind of skin covering for that thing? Never mind, any unanswered questions should be welcome here).

He has a nice, open face.

In the process of complicating Matheson’s yarn up to feature film running time (I haven’t seen the Twiulight Zone episode but I imagine it’s closer to the right length), Kelly does add some intriguing elements which play out in some nice, mildly spooky sequences. The extras are well cast for their staring eyes and uncanny looks. But at the point where the big “but” gets dropped by Langella, and we immediately grasp roughly what’s going to happen to the leading characters, the film seems to slow way down — a subjective feeling, because in fact the whole movie is rather slow. In fact, the slowness becomes more intensely felt because we know approximately where the film’s got to get to now, and instead it’s dawdling around with some NASA stuff that doesn’t seem that relevant.

I might have enjoyed it all more if I hadn’t recently seen KNOWING, which it has too much in common with. And KNOWING has a big problem in feeling very familiar too. The widescreen, glossy cinematography; the monied middle-class interiors (we might sympathise with THE BOX’s central couple more if they seemed genuinely poor); the baffling aliens typed as beneficent yet behaving in abhorrent ways; making a major character a teacher so we can drop in some subtext in the most heavy-handed way possible…

UPU2?

SOUTHLAND TALES felt like just the kind of film I should be defending here, before I watched it. I fairly loved DONNIE DARKO, Richard Kelly’s debut feature, and although DOMINO, which he scripted, gave me a bad vibe and I didn’t see it, SOUTHLAND sounded weird and funny and crammed with STUFF, which is often the way I like my movies. Plus it’s had a chequered history and a lot of critical savaging, much of it fairly crass.

TV’s Mark Kermode, in particular, should be struck off the critic’s list for mindlessly panning the thing on The Culture Show. “It’s terrible,” he said, “Really terrible. Look, here’s a clip. See how terrible it is?” A twenty second clip aired, and charming but light-weight co-presenter Lauren Laverne nodded. “I see what you mean.” Absolutely no critical analysis was offered whatsoever. And it’s a film which certainly warrants a bit of analysis.

The task is complicated by the fact that the version of SOUTHLAND TALES released is not the original director’s cut — Kelly was forced to alter his vision in order to get it screened at all, after the initial very bad response. What I mainly found myself wondering as I watched was what was part of the original conception and what had been added or subtracted to try and streamline the film and make it, what? Commercial, appealing, comprehensible?

The re-edit certainly fails on all three scores, at least on first viewing. The confusing narrative is surprising because there’s so much exposition — for the first third the movie is ALL EXPOSITION. Most of it is provided by a voice-over, and that’s part of the problem. Without a dramatic situation to engage us, the V.O. seems to wash over, bypassing comprehension. It’s telling us exactly what’s going on, but it’s hard to focus, in part because it’s impossible to see how the narrator, a character in the “story”, knows what he’s telling us. Since he’s not involved in most of the action, his narration blurs the story rather than clarifying it.

I was reminded of David Lynch’s DUNE, with it’s many internal monologues by many characters, seemingly pasted in out of a desperate urge to make us understand. My favourite is when the hero’s mum comes in a door, sees that her son is alive, looks relieved, and then her V.O. helpfully states, “My son — lives!” The redundancy is sort of comical and almost Lynchian. Kelly’s narration-stream isn’t as goofy as that, probably because it’s been added in an attempt to normalise a very weird film.

While Justin Timberlake delivers the verbal afterhthoughts with more gusto than Harrison Ford did in BLADE RUNNER, the result is more like the plot-summary that comes towards the end of LADY FROM SHANGHAI. As Orson Welles wanders the Crazy House, he muses on What Has Gone Before, and we pretty much miss everything he’s saying because it has nothing much to do with the imagery, which is far more interesting. Only when the words “…and I was the fall guy!” land on the image of Welles falling over are we able to register what’s being said at all. It’s not Welles’ fault, it’s the bone-heads at Columbia who forced him to add explanations at inapposite moments, just as R. Kelly has had to do.

Once the SOUTHLAND V.O. thins out and the plot, whatever it is, actually gets in motion, it starts to feel like we’re getting somewhere. Generally the bits with music feel like a movie, rather than a tape-slide presentation or a very long “Previously on Lost” montage, and I started to feel like the film could be an enjoyable experience even without my fully understanding it. I like lots of films I don’t understand. As the proceedings got more fun, I started to yearn for the original version. All the attempts at clarification seemed to make for a more boring experience.

The casting is the high point for me. I always rejoice in the gurning visage of Wallace Shawn, and it was cool to see POLTERGEIST’s Zelda Rubinstein, still looking like she’s been compressed in a car crusher. Bai Ling attempts to inject sultriness into every line reading or movement, Sarah Michelle Gellar does some good porn star acting, the Rock makes his eyes go beady and does weird nervous finger movements, and Justin Timberlake is rather good. Miranda Richardson seems to have been cast for her face rather than her acting, which is quaint as she’s a magnificent actress, one of the real power-houses. But since her costume screams “Villainess!” and that’s all her character is, she really has very little she can add.

The levitating ice-cream van at the end made me think of the flying car in Alex Cox’s REPO MAN, and it seemed clear at that point that the earlier visionary punk sci-fi masterpiece (which anticipates everything from THE X FILES to Grant Morrison’s comic book The Invisibles) was a definite influence. Interestingly, Repo Man now has a comic book sequel, just like SOUTHLAND TALES.

I also thought of the movie Guido’s making in Fellini’s EIGHT AND A HALF. “Do you like movies in which nothing happens?” The idea of a film which tries to include EVERYTHING is a perversely appealing one, even if it’s doomed to fail. In a way, all films fail — they always disappoint their makers. Kelly seems to have gone into this one believing he might never be given another job, so he had to make this film stand in for an entire filmography. Ironically, it’s such a high-profile catastrophe he’s almost certain to be offered more work by the kind of producers who like to present themselves as taming unruly talents.

“The name’s Rock. Rock Rock.”