Changing My Mind (31 page)

My complaint is clarity: it is evident that the sociopolitical contexts of this film have been closely observed, so much so that at times it feels like an overresearched novel, the writer having forgotten that we have not shared in his research. This film treats its audience not merely as adults but as experts. I was frequently thrown into scenes on the back foot; only understanding what had passed when it was almost over. You don’t walk out of
Syriana
outraged and decided, as from
Traffic,
but this is part of its sophistication. It prompts you to begin thinking, not to finish. Ultimately, what is most impressive about
Syriana
is the scrupulousness of its production: the genuinely multicultural casting; the sensitivity and nuance of its use of languages, accents, vocabulary; the clothes people wear in each city; the respectful attention to the smallest cultural details.

Syriana
is an American movie that reaches out beyond itself. Watching it made me feel hopeful—a rare sensation in a multiplex. Of course, no one film or book will make of us a reasonable, decent people, and what we are living through is not simply a war of ideas; but ideas are no small part of our troubles, and the American film industry is, for better or worse, among the largest engines and disseminators of ideas on the planet. Films like
Syriana
are not revolutions, but they are contributions. And if this film reaches the countries of which it speaks—on illegal DVDs or in backroom cinemas—a novel message will be passed to the people who live there: we believe you exist and are human, as we are. “When I grew up the only time you would see Arabs on-screen would be in something like
Sinbad,
where they’re climbing over the side of the ship with a saber in their mouth,” says Alexander Siddig, who plays the character of Prince Nasir, a young, reform-minded emir-in-waiting who has an idea about halting the sale of cheap oil to Americans and getting a better deal for the people of his country. To deal fairly with other humans one must first see them as human. American movies disseminate more images of humans than any other medium. Here Hollywood has something approaching a responsibility;
Syriana
goes some way to honoring that.

The Sunday Telegraph
does not hold with the idea of half stars. I understand the thinking, but it makes it difficult for this reviewer to rate a certain kind of “quirky” American film set in the suburbs, of which half a dozen are released each year and for which two and a half stars is precisely the correct denomination.
The Weather Man
is one of those films; in fact, it might be the ür-quirky film, for it is an exact splicing of two mild giants of the genre:
American Beauty
and
About Schmidt
.

I think I found this film palatable because I read it perversely. As I see it, this film’s central concept is the aversion most right thinking people have to the actor Nicolas Cage. And he accepts this mantle so honorably and humbly in this film that I think maybe now I quite like him. It’s an honest and comic performance and seems filled with all the genuine humiliations that one imagines Cage himself has suffered in the past ten years. I don’t want to tell you any more about it—it’s best stumbled upon without expectations but with my reading kept in mind. One recommendation, though: Nicholas Hoult (the kid from
About a Boy
) is almost grown and is possibly on the cusp of becoming better looking than the original teenage Leo DiCaprio. Oh, and one warning: Michael Caine’s American accent will make your eyes bleed. Again.

As a rule, film critics fondly place themselves at a slight remove from the passive mass of cinema audiences. The fortunate among us have pens with lights on them and, while you let the medium of film simply wash over you, we are making notes on such aesthetic minutiae as the Aryan Band-Aid on the big black head of Marsellus Wallace, or the Damoclean slice of light that falls over Harry Lime in a gloomy alleyway.

Cinema—the most pleasurable of mediums—is made to jump through the same hoops of theme, argument and “imagery” as its more resistant cousin, the novel; necessarily so—otherwise there would be little to critique. No one is asked to review roller coasters. And yet the truth is some films affect you so viscerally and with such fluidity that a pen with a light on it is no match for them. I barely made a note during
V for Vendetta,
unless “Wow!” and “Awesome!” and “This is so fucking cool!” count as notes.

In the face of this film something adolescent in me surged to the surface, and I mean that as a great compliment: adolescence is a state I hold in high regard. After the fact, I saw what other critics have seen—portentousness, absurdity, misogyny, political naïveté—but the truth is during the film I was utterly engaged, somewhat radicalized and very excited. To me, the film, like the original graphic novel from which it comes, is about personal integrity and, more important, about how that notion might be parlayed into our political lives.

It pursues this idea violently, without humor, and with a bald Natalie Portman onboard. It’s easy to ridicule. Personal integrity is always ridiculed by adults and worshipped by adolescents, because principles are the only thing adolescents, unlike adults, really own. I first read
V for Vendetta,
by the writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd, when I was an adolescent myself, back when pieces of its dialogue, rendered faithfully in this film, were of great personal importance to me: “Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we ever have—it is the last inch of us. The only inch that matters!”

It is clear that Moore, who has removed his name from the credits, feels his own integrity has been damaged by the streamlining Andy and Larry Wachowski (of the
Matrix
trilogy) have made to his crowded narrative. The brothers have ditched the supporting cast that tends to proliferate in graphic novels and moved Moore’s English dystopia from its original post-Thatcher, postnuclear era to a world not long after Blair and Bush. Eighty thousand Londoners have died in an act of germ warfare for which terrorists have been blamed. The state has turned from “nanny” to monolithic; the media show a Goebbelsian respect for the truth and a zeal for censorship; homosexuals, “ethnics” and dissidents are mysteriously “vanished”; the people are in the long sleep of fear and lethargy.

Into this bleak world comes V, a man in a white clown mask who takes as his model a long-forgotten English terrorist: Guy Fawkes. The original novel’s respect for Fawkes is one of its sillier aspects—Fawkes was no truth-loving anarchist destroying in order to create, but a Catholic with a grudge against the Protestant majority. And Che Guevara was no prince among men either, but then, adolescents aren’t sticklers for history.

What they are, however, is impassioned. They believe, like V, that “everything is connected,” that “a revolution without dancing isn’t worth having” and that “truth, freedom and justice are more than mere words—they are perspectives.” They find it quite reasonable that V should alight upon tiny, porcelain beauty Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), lock her up, torture her and allow her to believe she will be executed if she doesn’t give the state a piece of information—all in order to set her (existentially speaking) free.

Without spoiling anything, I think I can tell you that during her incarceration, Evey is sent pieces of a story, pushed through a hole in the prison wall, and this story gives her the strength to resist her torture, to find an integrity she didn’t know she had, and radicalizes her in a manner that you either believe or you don’t. The story she reads is a gift (the person who wrote it is about to die and can expect nothing in exchange) and therefore also an act of love. Acts of love, because they are unattached to the world of commodities, are radical propositions. The complaint that a girl is put through a sadomasochistic experience by a man in a mask misses a key element of the story that is in both book and film: the man in the mask was radicalized in the exact same way. The gender is irrelevant; the gift is everything.

And that’s not even factoring in the pleasure of the massive explosions, Buffyesque fight scenes, a sharp cast of British talent (John Hurt, Sinéad Cusack, Stephen Rea) and the pleasantly subversive fact that the adolescent son of our present prime minister, Euan Blair, was a runner for a film that takes great pleasure in blowing up the Houses of Parliament. The letdown—and I am sad to say it—is Portman herself, who continues to suffer under the weight of a beauty so great it makes Audrey Hepburn look dowdy. Even her bald-headed mug shot looks like a
Vogue
shoot. Compounding the problem is the kind of English accent only ever found in Swiss finishing schools and the offices of dialect coaches in Hollywood—and Long Island lingers in it still. There is a film for this beautiful girl out there somewhere. I’m just not sure what it is.

In the meantime, she throws a wrench in the works of
V for Vendetta
by being both too feminine and too mild for a story that in book form was an act of fury and lit a fire under the Thatcher-era kids who read it. Its message was not “Blow up the Houses of Parliament” or “Wear a white mask and knife people,” for kids are not morons and understand what an allegory is. The message of
V for Vendetta
is “Change is possible.” In its film form this is a truly radical notion to be filed in the adolescent brain right next to the message of the first
Matrix
movie: the world is other than it seems. If this film makes kids think that way again, that’ll be, like, totally awesome.

The premise of
Tsotsi
is terrific. A young thug from a South African township shoots a middle-class black woman in the stomach and drives off in her car. A mile down the road he hears a baby crying in the backseat. The audience gasps in that odd mixture of surprise and recognition that great storytelling affords. Everything flows from this point with the inevitability and moral didacticism of the Moses story. But the setting is fascinating; everything is news: the township shacks, the glamorous black middle class, the tube station, the concrete rings in which orphaned children sleep out in the open air. At the center is Tsotsi himself (Presley Chweneyagae), who needs no mask to commit his acts of terror—his face is a mask. In a scene so menacing it outpaces the deadliest moments of
Scarface
itself, he stalks a crippled man through a train station, a beast on the hunt. Frantic local hip-hop,
kwaito
, choreographs his frenetic impulse to violence; gospel swells as we glimpse the possibility of redemption in a boy who seemed lost to all pity. I wept throughout the last fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, unlike the woeful 50 Cent movie, this film—from which young black men could genuinely profit—will be seen by Ekow Eshun and nobody else. It will not sell for five quid on the Kilburn High Road, and no one will pass it around a playground.

Sometimes it’s the little things that matter. Just before Humbert Humbert meets Mrs. Haze, the mother of the girl who will go on to obsess and destroy him, his gaze falls on “an old gray tennis ball that lay on an oak chest.” This tennis ball has nothing whatsoever to do with the grand themes of
Lolita
—it “just is,” and in this is beautiful. Many films attempt to master the art of the little moment, the unnecessary aside, the “just is” that makes the work human, and not merely a contrivance of art.

Transamerica
is almost entirely contrived, desperately panting after the Oscars it did not, in the end, win—but hidden within its improbable plot and grotesqueries dressed up as humans, there is a policeman looking at the duty roster of the previous night and finding the crime for which a seventeen-year-old drug-using hustler has been locked up overnight: “This is a new one: apparently he shoplifted a frog.” Neither the frog nor the incident is mentioned again, but I gift a whole extra star to this film for that line alone: it is a piece of human business that will stay with me long after many of the season’s films have passed from my mind.