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January 11, 2006

Best Films of 2005: Part I

Downfall
Director/ Oliver Hirschbiegel

Strange that most of cinema’s Hitlers have been played by Englishmen. Or perhaps not, if you consider the habit an extension of the Allies’ victory—a sort of meta-capture of Hitler; a showy and unusual detention of his image. Either way, what’s more significant about his cinematic portrayals is the consistent reluctance to treat him as, wait for it… a human.
Our usual, victory-embalmed depictions of Hitler have usually been Hitler as Evil—an unambiguous evil-doer; a spit-specked tyrant kinked with strange sexual appetites, encouraged to destroy Europe by an uncanny force of personality and Germany’s weak collective will. No, no, scrap that first part. There hasn’t really ever been a treatment of “personality”—merely unapologetic archetypes of evil which serve to place Hitler on a stage so lofty, or so low, as to render a real and meaningful examination of him useless.
I’m inclined to think that the stage we set for him is so high, or low, as to prevent us from looking at ourselves—Hitler wasn’t human, so we don’t have to ask ourselves any serious questions. We can sleep safe.
Well, we can’t, and this film—a German film—knows it. It’s smart enough, and brave enough, to show Hitler as flawed flesh—a strange, mad and pitiable character, bent with delusion as Berlin and his 1000-year Reich begin to crumble. What’s more, the key figures around him are portrayed as strange, loathsome, human figures also. Goebbels, his cheeks sunken, his eyes small and black, bleats his absurd belief in the Reich’s eventual triumph, keen to catch the ear of his dear Fuhrer. Colouring his speeches is the unmistakable sound of Russian artillery, their advance inexorable, the German army pitifully spent.
Goebbel’s wife, hysterically piqued, makes arrangements to kill her six children—an effort to save them from a world without National Socialism.
We see Speer—calculating, idealistic, self-serving—wishing Hitler farewell before he leaves Berlin and possible death. Goring is strangely absent in this film, but when we see him the lapels are perfectly kept, and his medals hang straight. Around him are mid-level Nazis, drinking themselves stupid to escape it all.
We also see fragments of Hitler’s plan to destroy public infrastructure (an idea secretly, partially thwarted by colleagues)—and as the Germany he destroyed contemplates this latest act of brutality, Hitler marries his girlfriend and retreats with her to his private room—metres beneath the ravaged Berlin streets—and hands her a cyanide capsule. He takes one himself and, just to be sure, places the barrel of a revolver in his mouth.

Millions
Director/ Danny Boyle

I went on my first date when I was twelve. Her name was Collette, and her mum picked me up in an old car and drove us, and two of her friends, to a large suburban Cineplex. It wasn’t the first time I had been in a cinema, but it was the first time that it left a strong impression on my memory.
It would be lazy and untruthful if I told you I remembered the popcorn smell, or the bubble-gum stained carpet. I don’t. Nor can I say that I remember watching trailers for a new Bruce Willis film, or any film.
Nope.
To be honest, I don’t really remember her… our first kiss, which was exceptionally memorable, came a few hours after the completion of the film, so… I just can’t see her in that cinema. I can only see the film—Sleepless in Seattle. Laugh all you will, folks, but I can also see the warm shield of happy-anxiety that consolidated itself around me as I watched adults fall in love and felt that I was doing the same.
Sheesh.
It was something, I tell you. A magical symbiosis—the on-screen love-trials and dreams became my own, although, at the time, I thought they reflected them. So much so that, even today, the wan pairing of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan doesn’t seem that offensive. Nostalgia demand that I still respect the formula, even though Rosie O’Donnell’s inclusion in the film as the loud-mouth-with-a-heart-of-gold does its level best to blow the whole fucking thing out of the water.
But it still stays.
That film is me then—dumb and happy; at one with the flickering lights and still scared to kiss.
And this film, Millions, charmed the frackin’ socks off me, because, in watching the two young leads discover their great bag-o’-loot, I began watching myself fidgeting in that cinema all those years ago. The times when the centre of innocence still held.

Grizzly Man
Director/ William Herzog

“What a piece of work is man,” lamented Hamlet, and Christ knows if the figure of this film doesn’t inspire the same weariness…
I suppose Hamlet’s words concerned man’s capacity for cupidity and blood, whereas Treadwell’s foibles are less Shakespearian than they are… terribly pathetic. A failed actor, surfer, and drug dealer, it seemed Treadwell’s watershed moment came when he was turned down for a role in the sitcom Cheers—a young Woody Harrelson would later fill the position. So Treadwell, his ego unreasonably kinked, loitered in the vacuums of Los Angeles, selling drugs and surfing a little, still careful to tend to his classic surfer-boy locks. 15 years later, when parts of his body were found in the stomach of a grizzly, far, far away in remote Alaska, the perfectly kempt, golden hair still sat atop his disfigured face.
But let’s get back to California. Things didn’t work out so well for Treadwell here. He considered his skills cruelly unappreciated by the city of angels, and he played his beach life out with great sighs, experimenting with violence and drugs and self-martyrdom. Despite these signatures of banality, it seems Treadwell had enough force of personality to attract friends and sycophants. I doubt if he had anything to sell other than his unusual energy, but it all came to an end anyway when Treadwell hit on the idea to reinvent himself as a Wildman of Alaska—as noble guardian of the bears. He headed north, the actor still not dead within him….

Treadwell moved to the remote plains of Alaska, ostensibly as roaming, independent caretaker of the grizzly bears—a self-appointed role, unrecognized by state officials; his attempt at a heroic realization of Indiana Jones and Dian Fossey.
Nothing, except his own hubris, could have prepared Treadwell for this role, but for 13 years he spent the summers camping in some of the most pristine wilderness in the world—a wilderness co-habited with packs of grizzly bears, foxes and salmon.
“Everything about them [bears] is perfect,” he says, and we know this because Treadwell’s 13-year stretch yielded over 100 hours of footage, ranging from gorgeous panoramic shots, to frightening, pathological monologues cursing the government, say, or the lack of rain.
This is a man whose hubris and self myth-making assumed such grandiose proportions that he stared death in the face every day—but the captured footage, as a result, is breathtaking. Apparently it was the part of Treadwell’s legacy that piqued Herzog so much—in a voice over Herzog congratulates Treadwell for bequeathing him such a fine body of shots—a bear snatching a salmon from a stream; a baby fox running clumsily over a lush field. And it is a remarkable legacy; as Treadwell is too keen to point out, very few humans have experienced (and captured) what he has.

The thing is, Treadwell’s philosophy is corrupt from the beginning. Ostensibly, he is protecting the grizzlies—from indifferent government rangers, and rabid poachers, but the experts say that poaching is beneath negligible, and the rangers work at preserving a vast nature reserve, prohibited to humans. So, yes, not only is Treadwell’s adventuring illegal, it also serves no purpose—there really is nothing to protect the bears from. Treadwell’s manic gibbering, his anti-establishment polemics, contain nothing of substance, but point to a man destroyed by his own vanity and desperate search for redemption. This film is so sad because his own actions implore you to consider that there just may be nothing redeemable within him.

So Treadwell runs and rants through the wilderness, still failing after 13 years to arrive at any meaningful biological, ecological or spiritual wisdom. His position was a unique one, but shy of great pictures, his environment seems to have yielded nothing to him other than fuel for a deranged ego. And so, inevitably, he is eaten by a member of the ones he loves, the tragedy ten-fold for a mysterious girlfriend (Treadwell did not allow others to appear on film) is also eaten—their rib-cages, devoid of flesh, visible from the skies. Clearly, Treadwell’s naïve, hippie-arrogance was child’s play, and could never protect him from these beasts. A bear is a bear is a bear, and man is a very funny creature indeed.

Posted by Marty at January 11, 2006 9:54 PM

Comments

Posted by: clance at August 2, 2006 12:53 PM