Messages & Cinema

"They call me the lord of war, but I think that may be you."

It was a good weekend cinematically speaking. I was transported to Africa and placed into the thick of the western assumption of what Western Africa is like: a genocidal soup where life has been cheapend to the point of guinnea pigs and or rendered like the parts of animal stock.

My first trip to Africa was friday night int he form of The Constant Gardner based on the John Le Carre novel by the same name. This is a gorgeous film, a treat for the eyes, a study in chiaroscuro, a balance and harmony between the shakiness of the hand held camera shot to the longer contemplative sweep of smooth ariel shots over the sometimes barren and moon-like terrain of Kenya & Sudan.

As for plot, well its a bit threadbare in places, predictable is a better way to think of it. The bad guys are bad and you can tell from he git go which ones will have the ultimate crisis of conscience that will turn the tide of the film a la deus ex machina. Where this film seems to stumble plot wise it slams splash down homeruns through Meirelles' direction and ability to convey emotion through blur. I enjoy a blurred shot now and again, a bit of abstraction, a study in the way that light, like water, penetrates nearly everything that isn't hermetically sealed. Meirelle obscures the detail in his chosen blur shots just enough as to create a mask of the mood or emtion on the face of Fiennes, he's at once that character and the actor playing the character wearing a mask and creating the mask. The subltle moods and gloomy darkness of the Eruopean scenes are balanced with the striking color and eary heat waves that rise from the very earth as if its been super heated to the point of an oven. I loved "watching" this movie. I was at the edge of my seat but not due to suspense, but because I knew what was going to happen and I wanted to see more of Meirelle's Africa. If you go to see this film, don't expect a 'Name of the Rose' mystery but rather a well done film for the eyes. There's nothing to be had, nothing that you haven't seen or known and the bad guy is once again the big corporation. The redemption is the quality of the film and not the script.

But on the flip side of this African coin is Lord of War starring Nicolas Cade and Jared Leto as a couple arms dealing brothers. Cage is wonderful and seems to meld the best of previous roles and having an odd kind of Cusak quirk to a character that finds ways of rationolizing a demonic job. "Lets put it this way, if you find me on your front door step, then you probably did something to bring me there." says Martin Blanc as his ultimate afirmation of righteousness and reason to be a killer for hire. Ian Holme's character, a competing arms dealer reminds the morally depraved Cage that "one has to choose sides." What does become vividly clear from the film is that no matter what side you choose, you're ultimately going to loose. The race is to be the last looser rather than the first.

In many ways, this film is a copy of Blow starring Johnny Depp. Here you have the underdog choosing a path that is somewhat left of middle, becoming rather good at it, and then branching out to near global domination only to suffer a biblical fall. It shows how one can't quite leave in that sense of "everytime I think I'm out they pull me back in." No, there's no escape from global arms dealing. Beyond the bad Russian accents when Cage & Leto recite their creed "Bratya v aruzhya" (Brothers in Arms), this isn't a bad film for most of the two some odd hour course. Nichols has a sense of irony about his direction and his characters. He crafts his shots and even the openning scene. His previous effort, Gattaca, had the same sense of somber atmosphere that one could amost step into. There were enough details omitted, and a sense of style to that world, that helped suspend one's disbelief and in the sense of theatre, create that invisble fourth wall where the audience forgets its sitting in a precenium based viewing house and is a part of the action. This film too had the choicest details of the 80's, the suits, the moods, music, color and hair styles to convince one that we were witnessing a near Oliver North reenactment and that Reagan had just decalred the Soviet Union and anounced that the bombings would commence in five minutes.

But the bombs do fall and the Kalashnikov is the bright shinning star that sometimes outshadows Cage in the form of a Gold Plated model carried by Baptiste's son and heir. If Alexander Kalashnikov hadn't been wounded in WWII this world might have been a vastly different place. Its the prince of all assault rifles, heir-aparent to the sword of gabriel, it is judge jurry and executioner cloaked in wood and steel. This film is as much about its identity and mtyhology as it is about the rampant sales of weapons to every faction in the world by a man that literally believes his own kool-aid when he says "we don't kill, we just sell the guns."

The film begins like a bildungsroman that runs the gamut of black comedy but somewhere about 3/4 of the way through it turns into a little too much off a diatribe for me. The comedy seems to end, and what is left of comedy seems to be a bit dull. The message had been hammered through the satire and then the film feels like it has to try and put those finishing nails in with a serious mallet. No, this is the problem with these kinds of films, they begin well enough as humorous satirical pieces and then become melo-dramas. Why is it that directors feel the need to become dramatists when they were doing such a fine job as comedic tragedians?! This is something Nietzsche would've abhored as he hated the new comedy of Euripedes and exalted in the tragedies of Aeschylus. In much the same way this film borrows from the latter playwright and casts it in the tone of the newer more light hearted comedian. This was a good formual from the beginning of the film to the point where Nichols shifts gears.

I don't have a good answer as to how a film maker can avoid this especially when you consider that our friend cage is disowned by his family, his wife leaves him taking his son, he's jailed and his brother is killed, how do you keep the black humor aspect strong in the face of all that drama?! I don't know, but somewhere before that the film lost me and I lost interest in this character that was doing a fine job of satarizing a grim world that is viewed in the reflection of a brass casing.