Physician, eel thyself

I’d been curious to see A CURE FOR WELLNESS since it came out in the benighted year of 2016 but not curious enough to, you know, see it. But it’s on Netflix now so I finally did.

First impressions from the trailer confirmed: it’s a very handsome film. It was shot by Gore Verbinski’s regular guy, Bojan Bazelli and designed by Eve Stewart, who does Tom Hooper’s films, which I dislike on sight but which undeniably always have “a look.”

It didn’t scare me, but it sometimes repelled me, and I have a fairly strong stomach, being Scottish. There’s some dental abuse, done with ECU CGI relish, but it was nowhere near as disturbing as MARATHON MAN’s famous (drill) bit, which made do purely with terrific performances, creepy pacing, disturbing angles and surprisingly Pinterish dialogue. No magnified teeth were needed.

What’s with the eels? There’s an explanation of sorts, but it’s strangely unimpressive. I find I’m not as disturbed by eels as Verbinski and his team want me to be. They’re good and repellent in THE TIN DRUM, writhing from a horse’s head washed up on a beach. Even when they’re administered orally to the film’s anti-hero (Dane DeHaan, whose character — a shitweasel of the first water — I never liked, but whose performance was rather admirable — I hope his career continues) in a passably revolting moment, they didn’t really bother me. Maybe the CGI effect is to blame: the prosthetic beasts laid out in an alchemist’s lab seemed more upsetting. Things with real textures have more power.

The film is damn long — on the one hand, I appreciated the measured pace for its novelty, on the other hand I found the intrigue at the spa insufficiently intriguing, the revelations not startling enough, so it dragged a bit.

I believe we can trace this one back a long way. Back in 1999, Verbinski was fired from the cannibal romp RAVENOUS. Antonia Bird took his place in a hurry and turned out an entertainingly daft thriller. Maybe my favourite of her films, since I don’t respond too well to social realism, and I always found fault with her camera choices — whirling round an embracing couple with the sun flaring into the lens; close-up on hands clenching together in a sex scene, cliches not wholly redeemed by the novelty of the same-sex relationship portrayed (the film is PRIEST). It’s a shame the film that impressed me most was a relatively impersonal one, and had AB’s life not been cut so tragically short I’m sure she’d have made something I could honestly love.

Verbinski gave some interview somewhere about having wanted to make of RAVENOUS “a modern ROSEMARY’S BABY,” which is baffling, considering that the eventual movie was so essentially just a bit of gory froth. But with WELLNESS (rubbish title: wants to sound sinister but just sounds bland), he’s done his best to fulfill that early ambition. The slow pace; the accretion of details that largely spells out the plot for us but leaves us wondering if it’s all in the mind; the conspiracy and the supernatural history and all that.

[THIS IS ALL WRONG: SEE COMMENTS!]

But the exotic look of it robs it of the quasi-realism that makes Polanski’s film of Ira Levin’s novel so creepy. I just didn’t believe in the film’s world. There’s no credible reason, after all, for the isolation tank, setting for a major eel attack, to be the size of a reactor cooler. The locations are stunning, and their reality does help the film, but it all feels far more like a fairy tale than a psychological thriller, and fairy tales are usually short and speedy rather than prolonged and lugubrious. I can’t prove that Verbinski’s approach couldn’t have worked, I can only attest that for me it didn’t work.

But it’s a gorgeous looking film, and the bigger-than-usual-for-this-sort-of-thing budget lifts it out of the regular categories, even though that’s kind of regrettable because the movie’s underperformance probably cost us Del Toro’s AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS.

They Saved Hitler’s Sperm

Franklin J. Schaffner’s THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is like MARATHON MAN’s brain-damaged clone or something. It’s hard to say which is the tackier take on Nazi war criminal conspiracies. I think at least MM has some kind of realistic point to make and exposes Operation Paperclip to daylight in a way that’s kind of commendable. I watched BOYS in dishonour of the late Bruno Ganz, who appears, and became periodically woken up by odd moments of Schaffnerian panache.

When Larry Olivier first sees a Baby Hitler, the kid is reflected in a double set of mirrors, CITIZEN KANE style, so there are like 95 of him. This is a fine idea — clever but stupid but clever — in a good movie it would be too obvious, i n this movie it is *PERFECT* and I wish Franklin J. Schaffner had come up with another dozen or so visual ideas like it.There’s a double sex murder scene staged to an Elaine Page song. As we wait for the body to be discovered, a Mr. Punch puppet pokes round a corner to irritate Prunella Scales. It’s unsettling, to say the least, but feels really peculiar. Normally, staging the normal scenes of domestic life in a normal way would make more sense than this baroque surrealist madness. It only occurred to me afterwards that Schaffner was keeping the little puppeteer offscreen for a good narrative purpose. At the time it registers as creepy eccentricity, like the whole film has gotten into the wrong hands and may at any moment be invaded by rampaging cowboys or gremlins.

There’s a brief iteration of Schaffner’s signature shot: the planimetric flat-on full stop, but it’s an undistinguished example. But Uta Hagen’s big scene has a nicely awkward moment where her hushed confab with her lawyer strains for attention against a blankly staring, static Olivier on the lower right of frame, creating an electric tension partly because you don’t know where to look.The very weird plot has Dr. Mengele producing 95 baby Hitlers, and then, since he’s undecided re nature v. nurture, planting them with foster families similar to the original Adolf’s. Since Hitler’s dad died aged 65 when the future Führer was still a lad, 95 future Führer foster fathers have to be assassinated, an almost biblical arrangement which serves to tip off aging Nazi hunter Larry Olivier, who starts to investigate. It’s one of those plots that starts bonkers and just gets crazier, has no choice in fact but to get crazier. Like one of those things that begins “Jack the Ripper steals HG Wells’ time machine… Do you believe me so far?”

Ira Levin’s narrative unfolds quasi-grippingly. Like his Rosemary’s  Baby, it somehow works despite everybody knowing the clever twist going in. We’re watching the gradual exposure of an absurd plot, and the pleasure seems to derive from how kinda-credibly it can be packaged, and the suspense of seeing a character we like stumbling closer to the awful truth.Gregory Peckory, of course, is the worst casting for Dr. Mengele you could get, outside of maybe Chuck Connors or Alfonso Bedoya, and he has the task of playing most of his scenes with James Mason and Laurence Olivier, either of whom you can imagine doing it brilliantly — and Olivier had just done so, of course, in all but name. I can see why they might not want Larry to repeat himself exactly, and his increasing frailty works better with him in the hero role. But why Peck? I guess THE OMEN had given him a slight boost, and this is the same kind of vulgar high-concept all-star malarkey, so I’m sure he was good B.O.

But Jesus.

Granted the dyed black hair is an interesting touch — makes him hard to look at, one thing you’d never normally say about the guy. He becomes a waxy mannequin — even more than normal.

Then there’s the claustrophobic effect produced by nearly everyone in it having to do a phony German accent: Lilli Palmer’s real one is a blessed relief. Bruno Ganz is Swiss but he was celebrated for his German-speaking, and rightly so as far as I can tell. His English here is rather lovely and he wisely kicks back and lets Olivier act for two.
The cat they’ve got to play Baby Hitler doesn’t look like Hitler, and is stretched (painfully: think Procrustes) by the demands of having to play him as German, Brit and American. A tall (new) order for any small boy. There must have been a big casting search, and they must’ve convinced themselves they had the answer — “THAT’S OUR HITLER!” — but Dick Shawn would not have been a markedly inferior choice. It’s not that the kid’s a bad actor, though I think he’s been encouraged to lay it on too thick. His dialogue as the English brat is so awkwardly written (“My mother is not receiving today. Don’t you understand English, you arse? We are not at home.” that he might as well have been dubbed, preferably by Paul Frees.Speaking of dialogue, to hear Olivier say, in a mounting falsetto, “He operated, mainly on tvins, VISS-out anaesthetic but VISS ze strains of Wagner providing an obbli-GAT-o to ze screams of the MU-tants he was cre-AT-ink!” is to hear a great deal, and to be unable to un-hear any of it.

John Rubinstein gets to share Olivier’s best scene (his final one in the film), but best perf is John Dehner, a former Disney animator, as the main American baby Hitler’s future Führer foster father — it’s like a real person walked into this bloodthirsty comic opera by mistake. You inhale deeply at the sudden infusion of oxygen.THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL stars Atticus Finch; Richard III; Erwin Rommel; Zarah Valeska; Carey Mahoney; Marcus Brody; Dr. Brodsky; Dr. Mabuse; Adolf Hitler; Henry Luce; General Gogol; Colonel Dankopf; Colonel Kurt von Strohm; Emeric Belasco; Sandor Szavost; Angel Blake; Sybill Fawlty; Mr. Slugworth; Prince of Tübingen; and the voice of VALIS. (It’s a Lew Grade production so it’s ridiculously stuffed with stars. I put it about even with the very enjoyable MEDUSA TOUCH and way ahead of RAISE THE TITANIC! which nevertheless I’m starting to feel I ought to see again even though I remember it being really boring. The plot in that one is that they’ve found out how to make an anti-nuke force field, but they need a rare mineral and the entire supply of it went down with the Titanic. Really! I’m not making this up.)