Hugo Movie Nominees: A Year for No Award

For the sake of being an informed Hugo voter, I have watched all five nominees for Best Dramatic Production (Long Form), i. e., Best Movie. Some of them weren’t wretched; I didn’t feel an impulse to hurl rotten vegetables at the screen, though I will never voluntarily see them again. A couple had no redeeming aesthetic value. Overall, 2006 was not a good year for stfnal or fantastic film. I have a slight suspicion as to why, though a reason may not be needed. There are tides in the affairs of Hollywood, and this one was taken at its ebb. Just a few years ago, after all, voters could choose among Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Being John Malkovich.

Least bad of the lot is The Prestige, based on – or, more likely, debased from – a novel by the usually excellent Christopher Priest. Quite fittingly for a tale of the rivalry of two master magicians, it resembles a magic trick itself: as superficial as it is clever. The first two hours are an elaborate set-up for twists at the end. And the twists are deft indeed. If only one came away with the feeling that they had affected real people rather than handsomely dressed mannequins.

Sketchily motivated actions propel the characters into the right places at the right moments. The tragedy that ignites the enmity between Angier and Borden is ridiculously evitable. Borden ensures the breakup of his marriage by refusing to let his beloved wife in on the secret behind his trademark illusion. Angier’s confidence in his mistress’s loyalty is blatantly misplaced. At the same time, her motive for switching sides is obscure. I could go on.

A well-wrought rendering of the demi-monde of popular entertainment and first-rate performances from the principals keep the movie from disaster. One would never guess that its progenitor was a book described thus by Publishers Weekly:

His new novel (the title of which refers to the residue left after a magician’s successful trick) is enthrallingly odd. In a carefully calculated period style that is remarkably akin to that of the late Robertson Davies, Priest writes of a pair of rival magicians in turn-of-the-century London. Each has a winning trick the other craves, but so arcane is the nature of these tricks, so incredibly difficult are they to perform, that they take on a peculiar life of their . . . . The rivalry of the two men is such that in the end, though both are ashamed of the strength of their feelings of spite and envy, it consumes them both, and affects their respective families for generations. This is a complex tale that must have been extremely difficult to tell in exactly the right sequence, while still maintaining a series of shocks to the very end. Priest has brought it off with great imagination and skill.

If only the same could be said about the movie.

A Scanner Darkly is an animated version of one of Philip K. Dick’s late novels, written after he had turned away from the hippie culture. The closing credits include a list of his friends whose lives were ended or wrecked by drug abuse, and both the book and the movie are pleas for personal responsibility in the face of temptation. An aphorism from the book (not included in the film) summarizes the moral: “Drug misuse is not a disease; it is a decision, like the decision to move out in front of a moving car.”

The movie’s rotoscoped animation is astonishing in places, giving a more-than-lifelike effect, though it’s not obvious that this choice of medium was ideal for this particular script. Animation can’t avoid sanitizing its subject, and the world of Bob Arctor (a/k/a “Agent Fred”) needs effluvia, grime and decay to deliver its full impact. “Fred” is a narcotics agent in a near-future dystopia of widespread and rising addiction. The “War on Drugs” is no mere metaphor here: American soldiers fight abroad to destroy fields of the small blue flower that yields the hyper-LSD drug “Substance D”. Meanwhile, police surveillance is omnipresent. Remarkably, and contrary to what one expects from Hollywood, the massive curtailment of civil liberties and privacy is treated as an unfortunate necessity, not as a graver evil than the destruction of innocent lives.

“Bob” is Fred’s alter ego. Narcotics work is so dangerous that all agents have secret identities – secret even from their fellow officers; in Fred/Bob’s case eventually secret from himself (though the movie doesn’t make this entirely clear). Bob, who has left his boring wife and daughters for the excitement of the drug scene, lives with a trio of Substance D users and is in love with a cocaine dealer (not a satisfying relationship, because the narcotic has made her phobic about physical contact). That is a pretty good cover, until he starts popping D himself. The narcs then finger him as a possible lead to higher-ups in the drug sales chain and put him under close surveillance – by Agent Fred.

The progressive effects of D finally bring Fred/Bob’s double life to an end. He is sent off for rehabilitation, at which point a plot twist throws a completely different light on much of what has gone before and resolves a number of apparent inconsistencies, such as his superiors’ tardy recognition of his mental and emotional deterioration. The ending would be more satisfactory, though, if the identity of the villains behind the propagation of Mors ontologica weren’t plain to the audience from about scene two.

This is, in many ways, a thought-provoking film. Its weakness is that the method of presentation undercuts serious reflection. From a druggie’s hallucinated ants in the opening scene through the prostitute whom Bob picks up to relieve his frustration at his girl friend’s frigidity through the draconian rehabilitation regime, everything that should be immediate and frightening is distant, abstract and prettified, as if the auteurs were afraid of their own material. The medium makes the message illegible.

V for Vendetta is an odd amalgam of superhero derring-do and old-fashioned New Left politics. The source is a 20-year-old comic book graphic novel that seems, from what little I know of it, to have been an intelligently told tale with an ambiguous moral. The mysterious “V”, outfitted in a Guy Fawkes mask, brings down Britain’s fascist regime (installed after a Labour government’s blundering response to a limited nuclear war), but at the cost of destroying all authority. Dying, he bequeaths his mask to his accidental disciple Evey, who looks ahead to restoring the sanity that fascists and anarchists have combined to obliterate.

The movie has no such ambivalence about the hero’s actions and goals. “V”, while a bit mad, is straightforwardly on the side of Good, blending the Count of Monte Cristo, Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel. His modus operandi is less terrorism than guerilla theater. The movie is bracketed by two huge fireworks displays: the blowing up of the Old Bailey at the beginning and the Houses of Parliament at the end. In some not quite explicable fashion, these grandiloquent symbolic gestures topple the dictatorship; citizens and soldiers join hands to restore peace, justice and freedom. It’s as easy as the protestors back in the Sixties imagined it would be. Evey can wax nostalgic about the liberator instead of undertaking a lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of his work.

But if symbolic gestures are at the heart of the Revolution, shouldn’t one pay attention to what the symbols connote? To pick Guy Fawkes and the destruction of Parliament as emblems of liberty is amazingly tone-deaf. Fawkes’ coup, if successful, would have introduced the Inquisition into England, and the history of Parliament is practically synonymous with the history of English freedom. The only worse choice on the filmmakers’ part would have been to have V shred the Magna Carta.

Well, The Scarlet Pimpernel is no monument of intellectual sophistication either. With all its bone-headedness, V for Vendetta could be a rousing adventure tale, if it just had rousing adventure. Alas, the fascist toadies are too stupid to present much of a challenge. V has no trouble infiltrating heavily guarded installations, killing the regime’s officials in their beds and dispatching hordes of heavily armed policemen to their deaths. There’s nothing especially striking, original or ingenious about his feats. Zorro did it all better, even in the Disney version.

The three preceding movies, while not deserving of Hugo Awards, are at least watchable accompaniments to good popcorn. About the last two, I’m reminded of a quote that the great drama critic Walter Kerr attributed to an anonymous playgoer, “Some shows are so bad that when you get home afterward, you don’t even want a drink.” As he elaborated [Pieces at Eight (1957), p. 92],

By the time our ravaged victim is home his first fuming outrage has settled into a fine, steady, low-tension hum, the ironic, abstracted, lovingly nursed resentment of an experienced man who knows that the universe is after him and that its treachery can be met only by a grim-lipped disillusion that mocks at the very thought of hope. He doesn’t raid the icebox, because he knows perfectly well there’s nothing in it that wasn’t there last night – and wouldn’t you think that somewhere in the world there’d be a woman who’d do some shopping? He doesn’t let himself consider a bourbon-and-soda because it would take three of the blasted things to make him feel any better and besides he doesn’t want to feel better. What he wants, as he stomps up the stairs to lose the cap on the toothpaste and pull one of the rings off the shower curtain, is to make somebody pay. If the somebody who pays has to be himself – well, there’s a kind of occult justice in that. The score is evened, the spite expelled.

Precisely how I felt after enduring Children of Men and, worse, Pan’s Labyrinth.The former reduces a P. D. James novel to a macguffin hunt. The latter must be the ugliest fantasy ever conceived. If there’s a more revolting one, I don’t want to know about it.

The premise of Children of Men is that no children have been born for the past 18 years. Suddenly, a girl becomes pregnant. For undisclosed reasons, Bad Guys want to grab her, and Good Guys want to sneak her out of England into the hands of a mysterious foundation that operates on ships in international waters. (Britain’s – ho, hum – fascist government commits casual atrocities but evidently would not dare to violate international law by sinking the group’s vessels.) There are chases, explosions, gunfights, betrayals and so on, all of them generic sequences that would have fit just as well if the baby had been a cache of diamonds or the secret formula for curing cancer or the Maltese Falcon. I was grateful for the explosions; they kept me awake.

El Laberinto del fauno (Englished as Pan’s Labyrinth) reportedly won a 20 minute ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. For those who think that the modern intelligentsia cannot distinguish between the beautiful and the grotesque, that fact is prime evidence. The film’s otherworld is devoid of enchantment. The misuse of CGI is on a par with the logo of the London Olympic Games. The faun of the title looks like a cross between a preying mantis and an Ent. The fairies are razor-edged moths. Also present are a slimy giant toad and a corpse that might have come from a National Inquirer exposé of Area 51.

As for the story, it divides into two: young Ofelia’s quests in the Labyrinth and her wicked stepfather’s clashes with anti-Franco guerillas in northern Spain five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War. The latter takes up about three times as much footage as the former and is simply a mediocre war story, pitting the brutal Captain Vidal against noble young communists.

As for the fantasy quarter, we are told at the outset that Ofelia incarnates the spirit of the Labyrinth king’s daughter. In the mortal world, her father is a tailor, recently deceased. Her mother has married, and become pregnant by, Vidal, leading to the family’s displacement to his army base. There one of the moth-fairies leads Ofelia to the faun, who informs her that she may return to her real father if she can pass three tests.

The tests are arbitrary. That can be forgiven. What isn’t forgivable is that they are dull and perfunctory. What’s more, after Ofelia fails the second one (by eating otherworld food after being warned not to – ever see that before?), the only consequence is that she gets to move on to test three, as in a school that advances all pupils to the next grade no matter what their performance.

On the final examination, she gets full marks by not murdering her baby brother, despite having been told that his blood is essential to opening the door to her true home inside the Labyrinth. Given that all that she has so far seen of the Labyrinth’s inhabitants is a convocation of monstrosities, how much moral fiber did that decision take? Enough to satisfy the faun. As the movie ends, she dies and is reborn in an unattractive palace. Meanwhile, the guerillas shoot her stepfather and take her half-brother away to a red-diaper future.

What do the two stories have to do with one another? So far as I can tell, nothing. If there is a resonance between them, it is inaudible to ordinary hearing. Either could be cut out without affecting the other. In fact, their only common characters are the baby and, to a very limited extent, the housekeeper. Ofelia plays no role in the war story; her mother, her stepfather and the guerillas are absent from the fantasy. No doubt one can, with sufficient effort, spin out a moral along the lines of “Spain under Franco was worse than a turning a toad inside-out”. I’m not going to bother looking for the connection.

Comments

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[Joseph T Major]

But recall, the fascists were RELIGIOUS fascists . . . making V creepily akin to Timothy McVeigh.