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Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
A comparison of vampire flicks and actors in
dual roles
The films this month, in addition to being recent releases,
are connected partly by themes and partly by actors. Two of the
films deal with vampires, two of them star Samantha Morton, and
two of them use Diego Luna in a lead or supporting role.
Twilight and Let the Right One In
Two new vampire films were released on DVD within a short time
of each other, one based on a successful series of novels and
eagerly awaited by thousands of young girls; the other a small
Swedish independent film that few people had heard of.
Twilight is predictable, slow, pretty and immensely successful;
Let the Right One In is original, truly frightening, bleak and
only semi-successful, especially outside Sweden, even after winning
international prizes. First, the two films have several similarities.
Each film has a male and a female, as leads, seventeen-year-olds
in one case, twelve-year-olds in the other. Each has a pseudo-family
to support the vampire that has to change locations on a regular
basis to avoid discovery and vampirism is a burden. Both films
have critical scenes in local high schools, and both directors
successfully use the settings—the cloudy forests of the Northwest
and the snowcovered lower class Swedish suburbs—to advance
the story.
Twilight modifies the vampire mythos in significant ways. The
vampire family chooses to subsist on the blood of animals, seeing
themselves as vampire “vegetarians” (their phrase) and
consequently leaving themselves unsatisfied most of the time (restraint
and self-denial are the major themes of this movie). Instead of
burning in the sunlight, their pale skin reveals a diamond patina,
and even that quality doesn’t show up on cloudy days. In
traditional vampire ways, they have superhuman speed and strength,
and they remain at the age at which they became vampires.
Let the Right One In is more traditional in its vampire characteristics.
The title refers to the idea that a vampire cannot enter a house
without being invited, a belief that goes back to Bram Stoker’s
Dracula and other stories of the last half of the eighteenth century.
What happens if the vampire does enter without being invited is
illustrated dramatically in the film.
The vampire in the Swedish film also is incredibly fast and strong,
but she needs human blood on a regular basis. When the man who
cares for her is eliminated (his relationship is never made clear,
but he loves her enough to die for her), she has to hunt blood
on her own, and she is ruthless. Snarling like an animal, spattered
with blood, she exemplifies the “evil one” that the
Twilight vampire claims to be.
When the sun hits the skin of a vampire in this movie, the skin
begins to smolder and then bursts into flame. A nice addition
is the idea that cats sense and attack vampires (a quality appropriated
from Val Lewton’s Cat People), and one of the most memorable
scenes of the film is a woman fleeing an apartment with hissing
and clawing cats clinging to her.
The sheer burden of the vampire’s need for blood is demonstrated
in the Swedish film by the man who takes care of the girl-vampire.
Each night he sets out with a plastic jug, a knife and a funnel
to kill someone, hang him upside down and drain his blood into
the jug to take home for the “daughter.” When something
interferes with his plan, he goes home to find a ravenous animal
waiting for him. It gives new meaning to the word “dependent.”
Twilight’s plot is not complicated. Seventeen-year-old Bella
Swan (Kristen Stewart) lives with her mother and stepfather in
Phoenix, but goes to visit her father Charlie (Billy Burke), who
is chief of police in Forks (Washington), a small town with an
almost-constant cloud cover.
At her new high school, she is assigned a lab partner unlike any
she has ever seen before, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a
pale, moody teen who has a James Dean hairdo and a leather jacket
to show he’s tough, although everyone is so frightened of
him he doesn’t need to show off.
Despite their better judgments, the two become obsessed with each
other, and the rest of the film follows their adventures as she
discovers he is a vampire, and he introduces her to his undead
family, takes her leaping through trees and protects her from
nasty vampires who think Bella would be a tasty dish, in a literal
sense.
The focus of the film is that he wants to bite her so badly he
can almost taste it, but doesn’t dare because he might not
be able to stop once he starts; on the other hand, she is willing
to be bitten, no matter what the cost, and doesn’t help him
fight his darkest desires. (Does this sound like a sexual metaphor
and “Just say no?”) While the logic dawdles at times,
the emotional context is clearly teenage sex and the potential
consequences thereof.
On the positive side, the film’s photography has a nice pallor
that fits the mood, and the CGI effects are adequate as he takes
her leaping through the trees (echoes of Crouching Tiger and other
samurai fantasy films), holds a van back from crushing her and
fights the bad guys.
On the negative side, the film is cluttered with inane dialogue,
meaningful stares and teen humor; the speed picks up when the
bad vampires appear. However, don’t expect to be frightened
by the Cullen vampires—they’re really quite nice, and
their claims to be bad are worse than their bites—at least
in this installment.
Let the Right One In, however, has some genuinely shuddery moments.
Some reviewers compared it to George Romero’s Martin, a teen
vampire film set in Pittsburgh, and there are some similarities,
especially of alienation, loneliness and bare cityscape. Twelve-year-old
Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), a skinny blond boy with pale, pale skin,
lives in a cheap apartment building in the Stockholm suburb of
Blackeberg in the ’80s with his mother, where he often wanders
around the apartment in his underwear. Oskar’s parents are
separated, and he visits his father sometimes on weekends, but
the father has little more interest in his son than the boy’s
mother does. At school, three boys torment him until he fights
back in desperation and seriously injures one of them.
One night as he stabs a knife into a tree in frustration, he realizes
he is being watched by a young girl whose name turns out to be
Eli (Lina Leandersson). She and her “father” have just
moved into the apartment next door, and gradually the two pre-teens
become friends, although she does not attend school or come out
during the day. During this time, the audience witnesses the attempts
of the older man who lives with her collect blood for her, and
also her attacks to get blood when he fails. It’s not pretty,
especially when he has to dispose of the bodies she has drained.
One of the interesting differences between the two films is that
the Twilight vampires live in a mansion just outside of town and
have all the accumulations the rich and prosperous would expect
to have, even though they supposedly move frequently. In contrast,
Eli and her father arrive in a taxi one night with their belongings
in two garbage bags—just what you would expect of people
who move as soon as the rising body count implicates them.
Like Twilight, the Swedish film climaxes with the vampire protecting
her human, but when this little girl turns her strength loose,
blood and limbs fly, and it will take more than just a filter
to clean up the carnage and strain the red stuff out of the pool.
Both films end on a positive but tentative note, and while Twilight
Moon undoubtedly will provide the next chapter of the adventures
of Bella and Edward, the future of Eli and Oskar is much more
ambiguous. Will he, as he gets older, replace the man who served
as her blood provider? Will the vampire turn the human into a
vampire—a subject not discussed at all here, in contrast
to being a constant question in the background of Twilight?
The bottom line is that Let the Right One In is the best vampire
film of the last several years, a prize-winning film so good that
Hollywood has already started a remake for American audiences.
But watch the “right” one now, before Hollywood messes
it up. Right One is in Swedish with subtitles, or English dubbing
on DVD.
Twilight was better than I expected it to be, and some say better
than the novel on which it was based, but it clearly was aimed
for a teenage female audience, so you know what to expect.
Synecdoche, New York
Synechdoche, New York is the first film Charlie Kaufman has directed,
but he already has established himself as the screenwriter of
offbeat works Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind. Just as these films deal with identity,
so does Synechdoche, but Kaufman gives the subject a big nudge
forward in his directorial debut. The film is about how people
not only come to an assessment of who they are through what they
do, but about how they inevitably fail in what they set out to
do, no matter how successful they are.
Opening with scenes from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman,
one of the landmark works about lost dreams, and ending with the
ruined set of the protagonist’s unfinished masterpiece, the
film plays with the intersections of dreams, aspirations and reality.
It requires some thought and attention, and it has some depressing
aspects, like dying at the end.
Nonetheless, like most serious art, parts of it are funny and
exhilarating, and, like Samuel Beckett at his nihilistic best,
it offers insights into how to deal with, or at least to consider,
this strange predicament called “life” in which we find
ourselves.
Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) directs plays, and his production
of Death of a Salesman just opened to critical adulation. His
wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is a painter. They live in Schenectady
(New York) and have a four-year-old daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein).
Because their marriage is floundering, they are seeing a therapist,
Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis), who seems more interested in selling
her books than in bringing closure to their problems. Adele has
an exhibition opening in Berlin, and she and Olive leave for Europe.
Caden gets a MacArthur “genius” award, and decides he
will use it to create a play that is “big and true and tough.
You know, finally put my real self into something.”
The rest of the film traces how Caden spends the remaining forty
years of his life trying to create a play about his life. Adele
calls from Berlin, says, “I’m famous!” and hangs
up; they separate; Caden remarries and has various affairs, illnesses
and misadventures. In his production of Miller’s play, Caden
cast young people so the audience would realize that these actors
would some day be old and perhaps failures, and that was part
of the tragedy of the play. In the film, we see the tragedy played
out.
To create his masterpiece, Caden rents a huge warehouse in New
York City and begins to create a set that represents the major
locations of his current life; the set gradually expands to represent
much of the city, and, since it includes the city, it also must
include a warehouse that has a set of the city in it, and in that
set must be a warehouse that includes a set, etc., hence the title.
To portray his life, Caden hires people to play the people in
his life, including himself, and the scenes in which he interviews
these people are some of the more interesting ones, as the “real”
people stand by watching (Fellini does something similar in 8
1/2). Of course, the real people are not happy with the people
hired to play them, and the man hired to play Caden eventually
begins doing things in the play that Caden wouldn’t do.
Just as Adele’s paintings keep getting smaller until viewers
need special multi-prism glasses to study them, so Caden’s
play keeps getting larger, spilling into warehouse two and warehouse
three. Each new event in his life requires multiple parallel sets
as he attempts to create something authentic. Adele is totally
confident in what she does, selfish and successful; Caden is insecure
despite the “genius” grant, unhappy and finally a failure.
The acting is excellent throughout. Hoffman at the center ages
forty years and makes it believable. Around him is one of the
most impressive casts of women ever assembled—Morton, Michelle
Williams, Keener, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh,
and Davis. Tom Noonan plays the alternate Caden named Sammy Barnathan,
who is first seen on the morning Caden receives the MacArthur
award, before he even begins the play, and shows up in television
commercials that Caden imagines he sees.
I could go on about parallels with Arthur Miller and Fellini,
comments on Caden syndrome, parallels with Kaufman’s previous
screenplays, the spin-offs of the title, the significance of both
his being mistaken for a woman and his hiring of a female character
(Dianne Wiest) near the end to play him and the earphone at the
end in which this new director tells him to “die.”
Synechdoche, NewYork is one of those seminal works that people
will discuss and analyze for years, and the DVD’s supplementary
material presents a roomful of critics, most of whom are woefully
off base in their interpretations.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or
VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited may be found
at www.mmnow.com
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