Reviews

Every time I watch an Abel Ferrara movie, I keep hoping that I will finally begin to understand why he is considered by so many to be an interesting and original independent film-maker. And each time I become more baffled as to how anyone ever got the idea of esteeming him so highly. Admittedly, a SECOND remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" would have been a tough job for even a genuinely brilliant director to pull off successfully, given that both the original and the first remake were both excellent, subtle, complex movies in their own right. But Ferrara and his scriptwriter seem to ruin their own slim chances from the very outset - above all through the almost incomprehensibly dumb and clumsy decision to set this version on a military base, of all places. Both Siegel's original version and Kaufman's first remake had given themselves a chance to draw on that deepest source of terror - ambiguity - by setting their movies in environments that were innocuous and even comforting on the surface: the generic American "small town" of the 1950s and the affluent libertarian paradise of 1970s San Francisco. What a crazy casting-away of this important resource to set the story in an army camp - an environment which is bristling with menace and alienation even when there is NO sinister alien force at work in it! The scenes with glassy-eyed soldiers in Ferrara's film understandably produce absolutely nothing of the unsettling effect of the scenes of glassy-eyed San Franciscan store-clerks and dentists in Kaufman's - for the simple reason that a soldier is MEANT to be glassy-eyed! Even on the "micro"-level, though, the script is a disaster - another cheap and shoddy piece of work from Nicholas St. John which really makes one wonder why Ferrara works so consistently with this hack. The voice-over given to Gabrielle Anwar is embarrassingly lacking in subtlety - "If we had known what was going to happen, we would have run..." - and appears to be intended to try to generate a tension that the action itself fails to generate. But scene after individual scene reeks of psychological implausibility and lazy writing. To choose just one example among many, take the little game of "Never" played by Anwar and the young soldier she is falling in love with. This "truth-or-dare"-type game is clearly a device to accellerate the process of the two characters' becoming intimate with one another. But the staging of the moments of "discovery of the other's secrets" is hopelessly artificial. We are asked to believe, for example, that the young girl played by Anwar would be shocked and moved to discover that the answer to the question "Have you ever shot someone?" is "Yes" - when it is put to a serving member of the US armed forces! This painfully artificial scene is pretty representative of the artificiality and uninspiredness of the whole film. As I say, another reason to ask: what the hell does anyone SEE in Abel Ferrara?

I admit I am also very puzzled by the huge predominance of positive reviews given to this movie on this site. The only possible explanation I can see for this is a sort of "virtue by association", since certain features of the film (the presence of actors like Bridges, Heard and Eichhorn; the setting in a seedy milieu with the Vietnam War and Watergate lurking vaguely but potently in the spiritual background) do draw it, superficially, into proximity with masterpieces of 70s cinema like certain films by Bob Rafelson or Arthur Penn. But the proximity is indeed superficial and misleading. "Cutters Way" displays certain stylistic and thematic points in common with the profound, structured, satisfying masterpieces of 70s cinema - but the sad fact is that it is itself neither profound, nor structured, nor - for just these reasons - in the least bit satisfying as a film. We are - or should be - all aware of the dangers of praising "ambiguity" as a meritorious quality in a work of art. I'm sorry, but I'm just not convinced by the implied contention - and in most of the reviews here this contention is indeed only IMPLIED, not frankly asserted and argued for - that Passer somehow made a conscious artistic decision to break with conventional structures of plot and narrative here. The fact that we are left, in the end, radically uncertain whether the man Bridges and Heard are pursuing - and whom Bridges presumably actually kills - committed the crime or not cannot seriously be presented as a dramaturgical or moral strength of the film. The vague piece of empty existentialist piety that some of the reviewers come out with - "the film is not about the need to do any particular thing but rather the need to TAKE ACTION per se" - is one of the most repellently ridiculous things I have ever heard. Does this film seriously propose to us that, since society is vaguely rotten and the true "culprits" of this rotten-ness cannot be reached or even clearly identified, we are morally required to break into the houses of random rich people, who look suspiciously content and well-situated, and murder them? I think we do the director a favour if we choose to classify the utter inconclusiveness of the final scenes as an example of the same narrative confusion and sloppiness as, say, the unexplained vanishing, two-thirds of the way through the movie, of an apparently central character: the victim's sister. I honestly don't see how anyone can fail to get the impression that - far from conveying some deep "symbolic meaning" - the final sequences of the movie were just cobbled together in an attempt to close with as many dramatic and emotional images as possible. Certainly, any psychological coherence that the Cutter character might at some point have had is jettisoned in the last five minutes. After being portrayed for an hour and a half as being doggedly and single-mindedly determined to carefully coordinate the exposure of the Cobb character as a murderer, Cutter's "plan" to do so turns out in the end to consist in nothing more than to go hobbling wildly around the man's house, run away from his bodyguards, jump on a horse he finds in his stables, and then fling himself randomly through some French windows, promptly breaking his own neck. I have no idea whether this scene was present in the original novel, but I must honestly say that this risible spectacle of the hero careening wildly through the garden party - emotionally "beefed up" by some cheap and predictable "subjective camera" shots intended to positively FORCE the viewer to identify with Cutter in a way that his actions themselves make it pretty much impossible to do - seems to me a textbook example of directorial desperation and the frantic attempt to give direction and conclusion, by the sheer illusory spectacle of velocity, to a film that really wasn't going anywhere at all. Sorry, but to even vaguely imply that a messy, confusedly pretentious movie like this can be mentioned in the same breath with 70s classics like "The King of Marvin Gardens" or "Night Moves" is to do grave disservice to the memory of 1970s US cinema.

Ferrara's oeuvre in general, and the praise heaped on this movie in particular, confirms for me yet again the almost boundless gullibility of even that part of the cinemagoing public that considers itself to be more "demanding" than the average multiplex customer. The qualities that Ferrara has going for him, and that he never tires of REMINDING us he has going for him - that he is a "maverick", an "independent film-maker", and that he is cinematographically competent and able to give his movies a certain visual style - would be estimable if they were combined with any intelligence or with the presence in his head of any idea really worth giving visual and narrative expression to. Unfortunately, no film that Ferrara has ever made has given any evidence of either of these. His scriptwriter on this and almost all his other movies, Nicholas St. John, has regularly provided him with material of strikingly low quality, which Ferrara himself, and the generally top-class group of actors and actresses - Walken, Keitel, Sciorra - with whom he works must then labor as best they can to rescue.

Keitel's bravura performance in "Bad Lieutenant", for example, is the only reason I can think of for this film's being constantly praised as a landmark and a masterpiece. As a theological drama, it has about as much depth as "The Song of Bernadette". And "The Addiction" displays the same facile, cheap, and cynically opportunistic relation to philosophical ideas as "Bad Lieutenant" does to religious ones. Anyone who has taken even a serious amateur interest in philosophy will recognize all the "philosophical" paraphernalia of St. John's script as entirely hokey right from the opening scenes on. (It is an indication of the level of Ferrara's intellectual and moral honesty that he is on record as believing, or as pretending to believe, St. John's ridiculous story that he "studied philosophy at Heidelberg", "Heidelberg", I suppose, being the kind of place you claim to have studied philosophy at if you want to sound "really deep" (those Germans, you know)). Nobody on the set appears to have been capable of instructing Lili Taylor in how to pronounce the name "Sartre" or the actor playing her philosophy professor in how to pronounce the name "Nietzsche" and, as Jonathan Rosenbaum and other intelligent reviewers have commented, the dialogue woven around this faulty name-dropping is clearly not based on any actual reading in any of these writers but just on puerile juggling with a few images and phrases gleaned from secondary and tertiary sources (the intendedly effortlessly erudite exchanges about "anthropology" between Lili Taylor and her first student victim about the concept of "anthropology" - "Protagoras", "Feuerbach" etc. - are in fact the nonsensical result of running down a list of the historical occurrences of the term in some concise encyclopedia of philosophy).

"The Addiction", in other words, is as irredeemably dumb as US movies about super-clever people - "Good Will Hunting" etc. - invariably tend to be. Ferrara, "maverick" as he is or claims to be, thinks and feels no differently about the commodity: "intelligence" than the most vulgar mainstream director. To him as to the peddler of Hollywood trash, "intelligence" is something that can be ordered up simply by slapping together whatever ingredients are recommended as being "the right stuff if you're into that sort of thing". (This betting on "heavy reps" in these matters is also the reason why US cinematic portraits of "intellectual life" tend to lag, on average, about thirty years behind the times. The very idea that Satrre and Kierkegaard should be the "burning topics" of intellectual discussion at the philosophy department of a New York university in 1995 - where any student who took him- or herself even halfway seriously would have been at grips rather with Derrida and Foucault and would have laughed at the mere mention of existentialism - betrays the "philosophy" of this movie as "philosophy for tourists".

In short, an unforgivably awful movie - and another reason to shake one's head in wonder at how a relentlessly self-promoting quarter-educated New York hipster like Ferrara has succeeded in hoodwinking such a huge proportion of the cinematic establishment.

Well, as Goethe once said, there really isn't any point in trying to pass a negative judgement that aspires to be objective on "something that has had a great effect". "La Maman et La Putain" has surely passed into history as an influence on much of what's been done in France and elsewhere in the past thirty years and no one interested in the history of film, certainly, should be dissuaded from watching it. To express a purely subjective judgement, however, I feel compelled to disagree with almost every other review posted here and say to people: "Don't watch it; it's a waste of hours of your time that will just leave you feeling rather sick and angry." And by that I don't mean "sick and angry" about "the human condition" or anything so general and profound as that, because that is exactly the line that most critics have adopted in their fulsome praise of the film - "an ordeal to watch in its ruthless dissection of our emotional cowardice and cruelty" and so on - and, if it really managed to put across a universally or even broadly relevant message of this sort, then the director would have good reason to be satisfied with himself, however pessimistic his conclusions may be. My beef with the film is rather that I don't see this hours-long record of empty vanity and petty treachery as being justified or excused by any GENERALLY relevant message at all. All three main characters are deeply morally unattractive individuals: Alexandre to the greatest degree, of course, because we see by far the most of him and because he seldom shuts up for more than thirty seconds; Marie perhaps to the least degree, because we see the least of her. Alexandre's affected and pretentious monologues have a kind of amusement value, of course, but the amusement wears thin as one comes more and more clearly to realize that Jean-Pierre Léaud is most likely not even acting and that, with absurd remarks like "un homme beau comme un film de Nicholas Ray", he really was just reproducing word-for-word opinions that were accepted as authentic and profound by the milieu in which he, along with the director Eustache, had been living for about ten years by the time of the making of the film. I suppose if the tone of relentless superficiality and triviality had been sustained throughout 100% of the film, it might have worked as a long sardonic comedy about a particularly shallow, worthless and despicable post-'68 milieu. What made, however, this viewer at least extremely angry with the director was his granting of at least one lengthy scene each to Alexandre and Veronika in which we are clearly expected to empathize with and feel for them as if they shared a moral universe with us. If a man can get away with living in the flat of and professing to love one woman, sleeping (mostly in this very flat) with another, and running around Paris proposing marriage to yet a third, well, I suppose I can wish him the best of luck in the dog-eat-dog world he's chosen to create for himself. What I can't, however, in all conscience do is listen even for a moment to maudlin monologues from him in which he speaks about his "anxiety" and his "despair". The same goes double for the even more despicable Veronika, whom we are shown barging drunk into the apartment and even the bed shared by Marie and Alexandre and behaving there with an infantile inconsistency tantamount to the most savage and heartless cruelty. As I say, if "La Maman et La Putain" is intended to be nothing more nor other than a portrait of Alexandre, Veronika and Marie, three individuals whom any even halfway decent person would never admit into their company let alone their home, then I suppose there is a kind of legitimacy in praising the director for being "unflinching" (though why one should even feel like "flinching" once one had consciously opted to create such thoroughly repellent characters to filmically observe I can't imagine). The problem, however, is that the director is clearly convinced - and appears to have succeeded in convincing generations of critics - that Alexander, Veronika and Marie are somehow representative of human beings in general and of the limits of human beings' emotional capabilities. This latter idea, however, is arrant and offensive nonsense. There may indeed be an inherent fallibility and tendency to tragedy in human relations in general and sexual relations in particular. But the nature and degree of this fallibility and tendency to tragedy can only possibly be determined by people who make a sincere and serious effort to make such relations work. It surely needs no cinematic or authorial genius to convey to us the information that a man who behaves like Alexandre is going to end up hated, miserable, and alone, or that women who insist on expecting love from a man like Alexandre are going to end up disappointed and bitter. Watch "La Maman et La Putain" if you're historically interested in what passed for culture and human interaction in a certain post-'68 Parisian milieu which was probably, unfortunately, not restricted to just a few particularly anti-social types like these. But please don't make the mistake of believing that what is recorded here has any general relevance for humanity in the way that a film by Jean Renoir or Martin Scorsese might be argued to have.