Man of Steel

Right then, I’ve steeled myself up (pardon the pun) and I’m going to see ‘Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice’ on the big screen later this week. There’s a certain car-crash mentality to this decision. I can’t even call it morbid curiosity, because curiosity suggests an open-mindedness, a spirit of inquiry rather a morbid confirmation of what one knew already. Yes, I know ‘BvS: DoJ’ is going to be downright flawed at best and an abject piece of shit at worst. But after a fortnight of reading reviews brimming with bilious hatred, I need to see it for myself. If only to experience the zeitgeist. The last time the collective critical consensus went against a major tentpole release – Gore Verbinski’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ – I opted out of seeing it theatrically. Two years later, I caught in on DVD and my immediate opinion was “yeah, whatever, not great, not terrible, nice train chase”; then, with a jolt of realisation and complete bewilderment, “wait a minute, the critics hated on it that much?”

So I’m going to tootle along to my local multiplex, lay my money down, invest two and a half hours of my life (three if you count the wanky ads for piss-weak foreign lager and aspirational lifestyle bollocks), and revel in the mangled wreckage and streaks of blood on the side of the highway. We’re talking schadefreude, folks, and you don’t need to speak German to dig it. Because tonight, thank God, it’s Zack Snyder and not me. 

But before I go and see ‘BvS: DoJ’ and before I hammer out my review of it in a Lagavulin induced haze, there is the necessary context of ‘Man of Steel’. So here goes.

Cards on the table: I liked Richard Donner’s ‘Superman’ with Christopher Reeve. The sequels were shabby, and got worse as the franchise lumbered on. Bryan Singer’s ‘Superman Returns’ was one of the dullest big-budget studio films I’ve ever seen, and I’m including the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ sequels in that, so nyah-nyah-naa-nyah-nyah. Innit?

Cards on the table part two: I’m not that keen on Zack Snyder. His ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake was better than it had any right to be, but nothing else in his filmography has lived up to its promise. ‘Sucker Punch’ came closest, and at least had the feel of a work by an auteur, but I still came away from it with a feeling of “meh”.

So I didn’t have much hope for ‘Man of Steel’. And maybe that negative expectation worked in its favour when I finally got round to seeing it. There was the opening sequence with Russell Crowe as Superman’s dad and a nerdishly unholy dose of sci-fi porn – glitzy, borderline incoherent and thunderously unsubtle … but it did the job. There was the montage of Superman-in-waiting, from his childhood as stepson to a couple of all-American farmers (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), to his troubled, peripatetic twenties – a welter of swaying cornfields, tornadoes, schoolkids in peril and oil rig fires … bludgeoningly obvious stuff, but all in context and effective enough. And. Then. Snyder. Went. Fucking. Apeshit. 

No stand-in for tarnished post-Nixon patriotism à la Donner’s classic; no heavy-handed Christ parable à la Singer’s snore-fest (although Snyder sneaks the odd visual metaphor for crucifixion). Nope: what we have in ‘Man of Steel’ is a superhero for a jaded, paranoid and politically compromised age where the entertainment value of superheroes is in stark contrast to the swathes of destruction they’d cause if you rooted them in an even remotely realistic scenario. This is the single greatest achievement of ‘Man of Steel’ and Snyder was given a kicking for it.

Hold that thought while we consider a heavily adumbrated précis of the film’s narrative: the infant Kal-El escapes Krypton in the midst of a putsch orchestrated by General Zod (Michael Shannon); he struggles to be accepted on Earth; the moment he discovers his lineage and truly embraces his powers as a force for good, Zod turns up looking for him and the US military first arrest and then cravenly hand him over to Zod in an attempt to avoid an intergalactic ass-whupping. When it becomes obvious that Zod is going to royally fuck over the planet and use its ruins as the basis of a new Krypton, Superman (Henry Cavill) saves mankind anyway because … well, actually, this is where the film loses me. Maybe because his step-parents were nice. Maybe because he quite fancies investigative reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams). Maybe because he just wants to prove everyone wrong.

Got that? America – and by extension the world – doesn’t give a flying one about Superman. Scenes of a handcuffed Superman and a heavily armed US force handing him over to Zod constitute the bitterest comment on extraordinary rendition that I’ve seen in any mainstream American film, let alone a superhero flick. Snyder ramps up the deconstructive cynicism with Superman’s climactic smackdown with Zod and his forces. Whereas Marvel have given us epic city-wide battles, portals between worlds and all manner of futuristic technology with barely a civilian casualty, ‘Man of Steel’ stages its almost interminably wearying slugfest in a recognisable environment where a downtrodden populace are going through the motions of working, travelling and making ends meet. The carnage that ensues, excessive and CGI-driven though it is, takes on a weight and a brutish aftermath that the Marvel films gloss over. Whether it was intended or not, Snyder and his creative team seem to be holding up a mirror to the audience’s demands for violence and destruction and asking them to judge their own slavering reflections. Michael Powell pulled this stunt with ‘Peeping Tom’ back in 1959 and it all but ended his career. Snyder isn’t exactly standing in line at the labour exchange right now, but he certainly caught hell for it.

‘Man of Steel’ is a flawed but interesting film. Big concepts bubble beneath its surface, but are subjugated in favour of iconography – grim and bloody iconography but iconography nonetheless. Potentially fascinating characters are given glimpses of an interesting narrative arc then unapologetically sidelined, with Adams and Laurence Fishburne (as Lois’s hard-ass editor) coming off the worst in this respect). And it’s all so grungily self-important. But it strives to locate the concept of the superhero in a world that’s so morally, politically and socially compromised that even the offer of unconditional heroism is met with cowardice, fear and an executive order as regards the use of weapons – and the conclusion it arrives at is dark. The original big-screen iteration of Superman was the hero America needed at the time; the one in ‘Man of Steel’ ends up as compromised as the society he protects.

Spotswood

Heard the one about the Anthony Hopkins-Toni Collette-Ben Mendelsohn-Russell Crowe movie about a time and motion expert called in to fuck over the workforce of a small family-run business, directed by the guy who made ‘The Man Who Sued God’, that’s arguably one of the best movies you’ve never seen?

No joke. I saw ‘Spotswood’ at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema – the East Midlands’ beacon for independent and arthouse cinema – on its first release in the early 1990s. Time robbed me of any definitive recollection of the movies, except for an hilarious extended set-piece based an a slot-car race, but I always remembered that I’d enjoyed it.

A couple of decades have passed and I’d got used to mentioning the film to people only to be met with quizzical expressions. Or responses along the lines of “Anthony Hopkins and Russell Crowe in the same movie? Nah, you must have dreamed. I’d have remembered that!” My assertions that, actually, not only did the movie exist but Crowe played a greaser in a hotrod with ambitions to become a corporate sell-out tended to meet with excuses being made and the other party swiftly departing.

I found ‘Spotswood’ for £2.49 on Amazon recently. A panned-and-scanned print that looks like a transfer – albeit an unnaturally good one – from VHS. But what the hell? I got to see it again. And it holds up. It holds up and then some.

Hopkins plays Errol Wallace, an efficiency expert who has just completed an exhaustive study of a major car manufacturer and whose report recommends the lay off of 480 workers. The MD (the film is set the late 1960s, before Managing Directors disappeared up their own rectal passageways and started calling themselves Chief Executive Officers) prevaricates, leading to Wallace’s partner engaging in underhanded practices in order to force the issue.

Meanwhile Wallace takes the reins on the next project, an assessment of Ball’s moccasin factory, a stuck-in-the-50s enterprise whose MD (Alwyn Kurts) is secretly selling off assets in order to keep his full complement of workers employed. Amongst these individuals are up-and-coming salesman Kim Barry (Crowe); good-natured but cringingly naïve despatch boy Carey (Mendelsohn); Wendy (Collette), Carey’s co-worker whose romantic overtures he blindly overlooks; and Cheryl (Rebecca Rigg), Ball’s daughter – temping at the firm prior to embarking on “a full-time modelling career” – for whose affections Kim and Carey find themselves unlikely rivals.

The story arc is predictable: things turn ugly at the auto-plant while Wallace re-engages with the human side of things at Ball’s ailing factory, eventually coming through with the business plan that revitalizes the business and safeguards the workforce’s jobs. I make no apologies for not throwing up a spoiler alert. ‘Spotswood’ is so whimsical and guileless, it’s up there with ‘Local Hero’ as the closest anyone has come to making an Ealing comedy in the last half a century.

The performances are pitch perfect, Mark Joffe’s direction is commendably underplayed (there’s barely a scene in this film that you can’t immediately imagine being utterly ruined and drowned in schmaltz by a Hollywood director), Ellery Ryan’s cinematography effortlessly evokes a time and a place, and there are some inspired and yet unforced musical cues on the soundtrack. Subject of which, the (deliberately) awful garage band cover of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ over the opening credits is toe-curlingly hilarious.

If you’ve never seen ‘Spotswood’ before – or, as seems to be the cultural denominator, even heard of it – I guarantee you’ll benefit from seeking it out. Not only do you get Hopkins and Crowe sharing the screen, but it’s the only movie that features a slot-car race as tense, gripping and imbued with everything-to-play-for desperation as the final bout in ‘Rocky’ or any of the green baize duels in ‘The Hustler’.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Insider

Following on from his sumptuous, critically acclaimed adaptation ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, Michael Mann’s epic 1995 drama ‘Heat’ cemented his position as one of America’s finest directors. A visceral, moody existential re-examination of the crime movie, it teamed him with Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and a who’s who of dynamic actors. It was a hard act to follow.

Four years later, re-teaming with Pacino – and harnessing the talents of a post-‘L.A. Confidential’, pre-global-stardom Russell Crowe – Mann didn’t just follow it. He surpassed it. ‘The Insider’, one of the most intelligent and precisely directed mainstream films of the ’90s, boasts the gripping, compelling narrative and powerhouse acting performances of its iconic predecessor, as well as the same slow-burn intensity played out across a two-and-a-half hour running time, but does so without recourse to heists, shoot-outs and chases.

‘Heat’ is cerebral, suspenseful and packs in a goodly number of shit-hot action scenes. ‘The Insider’ is quite simply cerebral. It’s about corporate power, freedom of speech, the strictures of the law, the necessity of conscience, the pull of family, and the integrity of the serious journalist vs the machinations of big business. And that’s just for starters. On a human level, it’s also about one man trying to keep his word and another man coming to a decision about the wrongdoings of his employer and the public’s right to know, even though the imperatives for keeping his mouth shut are very real and freighted with heavy consequences.

Big, dramatic stuff. Now factor in the factual basis of the story, and ‘The Insider’ really takes off. The starting point was Marie Brenner’s 1996 article for Vanity Fair, ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’. A suitably Hitchcockian title for the story of an inside man, a corporate whistle-blower, a man whose family life disintegrates under the weight of potential financial desuetude, pervasive media scrutiny and death threats. Apposite, then, that it was expanded and adapted into a movie whose most tense scenes – an unspoken threat at a golf range, a piranha-like lawyer trying to silence a key witness even as he attempts to give a deposition – achieve a level of cinematic frisson that Hitch himself would have been proud of.

Brenner’s article focuses almost exclusively on former Brown & Williamson employee (that’s employee as in high-ranking senior management type on six-figures and a fuckload of benefits a year, as opposed to how the rest of us understand it) Jeffrey Wigand, and how he went public with information pertaining to the deliberate manipulation of tobacco products for maximum addiction potential. His story was featured on the influential and high-rating public affairs show ‘60 Minutes’, produced by Lowell Bergman for the CBS network.

Mann’s film expands on Brenner’s article and counterpoints Wigand’s struggle against the legal shenanigans of his former employers with Bergman’s internal stand-off against the corporate and legal departments of CBS who balk at the possibility of litigation from Brown & Williamson, particularly with a buy-out in the offing that would net big dividends for the top brass. It’s in a lot of people’s interest to keep Bergman’s section, if not off the screen entirely, then certainly edited and self-censored.

The screenplay – co-written by Mann and Eric Roth, whose then still-unproduced script ‘The Good Shepherd’ Mann had admired – finds a tense through-line and ties together what could easily have been discursive, digressive and rambling. It gives a high-quality cast – Pacino and Crowe are supported by Christopher Plummer, Diane Venora, Bruce McGill, Colm Feore, Gina Gershon, Stephen Toblowsky, Lindsay Crouse and Michael Gambon – the opportunity to engage in the dialogue equivalent of swordplay which intermittently erupts into some of the most verbally volcanic explosions this side of ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’.

Pacino’s performance recalls the glory days of the ’70s, when he appeared in one masterpiece after another. Crowe’s is quite simply the best work he’s done onscreen, more than confirming the promise inherent in ‘L.A. Confidential’. It’s a crying bloody shame that he went on to become so famous so quickly and has essentially not been called upon to deliver acting of this calibre since.

Mann’s direction, too, represents his highest professional achievement thus far. Subsequently, ‘Ali’ proved incredibly well-made but perhaps a shade too reverent; ‘Collateral’ fell foul of an occasionally clichéd script and a stilted performance from Tom Cruise, while ‘Miami Vice’ was an exercise in the visual potential of digital film-making which offered a jargon-heavy script and zero chemistry between its leads. (Having said all that, the forthcoming ‘Public Enemies’ with Johnny Depp and Christian Bale has got me authentically excited.)

‘The Insider’ is a gem … and that’s not a lapse into cliché. Like a gem, it’s multi-faceted. It reflects and refracts and dazzles. It provides essays on the quality of light. In terms of recent American films, I can only think of Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ that infuses the screen with the quality of light so effectively. Mann conjures images that are haunting, sometimes surreal (the sequence of images that open the golf range sequence are astounding), and effortlessly poetic.

‘The Last of the Mohicans’ is more romantic and audience friendly, ‘Heat’ more exciting, and I have no doubt that ‘Public Enemies’ will positively ooze cool from its every frame. But ‘The Insider’ is peerless. I am convinced it is the film Michael Mann will be remembered for.

PERSONAL FAVES: L.A. Confidential

James Ellroy's peerless crime fiction has found a very haphazard reflection on the big screen. James B Harris's 'Cop', starring James Woods, was a fair-to-middling take on 'Blood on the Moon'. Jason Freeland's 'Brown's Requiem' was a reasonably faithful but curiously characterless adaption of Ellroy's frenzied first novel. 'The Black Dahlia', the first book in the L.A. Quartet and Ellroy's breakthrough, was originally slated as a David Fincher project, and with the 'Seven' and 'Fight Club' helmer calling the shots could well have been a masterpiece; after much prevarication, though, Brian de Palma took up the reins and the result was a miscast, muddled, histrionic mess.

On the small screen, Ellroy's short story 'Since I Don't Have You' was effectively realised as part of the 'Fallen Angels' series, whilst a pilot was shot for a projected 'L.A. Confidential' mini-series starring Kiefer Sutherland and Melissa George but was never developed further. Ellroy has written directly for the screen with 'Dark Blue' and 'Street Kings', though in both cases other scribes were brought in for re-writes - to such a degree on the former that Ellroy has disowned it.

Of the much discussed and delayed 'White Jazz' - due to go before the cameras first with John Cusack and Nick Nolte in the lead roles, then with George Clooney, and at time of writing still trawling the lower the circles, Dante-like, of development hell - I'll believe it when I'm standing in the foyer at Cineworld clutching a ticket for it and I'm not holding my breath till then.

Which just leaves Curtis Hanson's 'L.A. Confidential'.* Two things demand to be pointed out from the start - and the one shouldn't retract from the other:

(1) 'L.A. Confidential' is merely a palimpsest of Ellroy's novel, incorporating incident from roughly the first third and even then diverging crucially in several respects (matters pertaining to Dudley Smith, matters pertaining to Buzz Meeks, and all that "Rollo Tomasi" business).

(2) 'L.A. Confidential' is one of the best mainstream American films of the 90s.

In respect of (1), it's impossible to compress a tautly written 500 page novel into a two and a quarter hour movie. As truncated from its source material as Hanson and Brian Helgeland's script is, even the briefest synopsis runs something like this:

Following the beating of some Mexicans arrested in connection with an assault on two police officers, the Chief of Police (John Mahon), Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) and District Attorney Ellis Lowe (Ron Rifkin) undertake an official investigation. Implicated are Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe), his partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) and Sgt Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), a cop who enjoys celebrity status through his work as technical advisor on a TV cop show. Ambitious Sgt Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) rats out all concerned in return for swift promotion, pushing particularly for White's indictment. When White refuses to testify against Stensland to take the heat off himself, he is suspended. Smith promptly re-appoints White to work directly under him, strongarming organised crime suspects in a series of interrogations that pretty much define the term "police brutality".

Vincennes, buckling to departmental pressure rather than be kicked off the TV show, begrudgingly rats out "a few old-timers" and accepts a temporary transfer to Vice. A pornography cases puts him onto an exclusive club called Fleur le Lys, operated by the ultra-wealthy, ultra-well-connected Piers Morhouse Patchett (David Strathairn), who has the goods on various city officials courtesy of a stable of call girls "cut [ie. had plastic surgery] to look like movie stars".

Meanwhile, Vincennes' main source of information, tabloid writer Sid Hudgens (Danny de Vito) intimates that a sexual scandal involving Lowe and a pretty-boy B-movie actor is on the cards. Still, the big news in Hudgens's scandal sheet is the systematic (and still unsolved) hits on former associates of the now-incarcerated mob boss Mickey Cohen (Paul Guilfoyle).

Exley and White are brought into conflict (White is already harbouring a grudge at Stensland's dismissal) after Stensland is found dead, one of several victims in a coffee shop massacre. Another victim, Sue Lefferts (Amber Smith), was one of Patchett's girls. Smith pulls rank on Exley to take charge of the case, but when the arrest of a number of black suspects leads to more questions - and their subsequent escape explodes into violence - Exley almost unintentionally steals the glory. The suspects dead, the case is closed. But something still bothers White. His own investigation leads him to Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), the Veronica Lake lookalike in Patchett's little stable.

With Smith suspicious at White's increasingly erratic behaviour, and with Exley instructing Vincennes to keep tabs on him, White finds himself in deeper than he expected, particularly when revelations about his former partner come to the fore ...

In other words, there's quite a lot going on! (The novel's about twenty times more complex, btw.)

Regarding (2), these are just a few reasons why 'L.A. Confidential' came out of nowhere ten years ago and completely blew me away, and why it's been on the personal faves list ever since:

There was nothing in Hanson's filmography ('The Bedroom Window', 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle') to indicate that he'd make the quantum leap to a film as stylish, gripping, intriguing, multi-layered and downright well-directed as 'L.A. Confidential'. And with the exception of his excellent Michael Chabon adaptation 'Wonder Boys', he's done nothing to touch it since.

It made a major player of Russell Crowe and put Guy Pearce on the map (ironic that Ellroy's fiction is so quintessentially American and the lead roles in 'L.A. Confidential' went to Australian actors). James Cromwell is absolutely spot-on perfect as Dudley Smith. Kim Basinger has never been better; her Oscar was well-deserved. As for Kevin Spacey, well ... the man basically spent the 90s on a roll: 'Glengarry Glen Ross', 'Swimming with Sharks', 'The Usual Suspects', 'Seven'. With 'L.A. Confidential', it was easy to be glib: hey, it's another great Kevin Spacey performance.

Dante Spinotti's cinematography and Jeannine Oppewall's production design create a stylish evocation of 50s L.A. The period soundtrack is terrific, kicking off with 'Accentuate the Positive' and including Kay Starr's evergreen 'Wheel of Fortune'.

The pace never flags despite the large amounts of exposition necessary to clarify the various plot details. The action scenes are particularly well edited, and the climactic shoot-out - although wildly divergent from the novel - is tense and exciting.

Maybe one day someone will mine the rich vein of McCarthy-era witch hunts, Hollywood B-movies, corrupt ambition and ambiguous sexuality rife in Ellroy's jaw-dropping 'Black Dahlia' follow-up 'The Big Nowhere' - done properly, it could be another film of the calibre of 'L.A. Confidential'. But until then, Hanson and co. still carry the badge and gun on behalf of Ellroy's dark staccato prose.

*I'm not taking into account here films about James Ellroy - such as 'Feast of Death' and 'James Ellroy: Demon Dog of American Crime Fiction'. These are different beasts entirely, and quite possibly the subject of future posts.