JonathanRosenbaum.com

Neither Noir [KISS OF DEATH & THE UNDERNEATH]

From the Chicago Reader (April 28, 1995). I’ve just reseen The Underneath, for the first time in 16 years, and it still looks good — indeed, possibly even better than any other Soderbergh film I’ve seen since then (although reportedly he dislikes it himself). More recently, it seems that cynicism of various kinds tends to engulf  most of his films — perhaps making his filmmaking more appealing to some of my colleagues for this reason, but also making it less appealing to me. — J.R.

Kiss of Death Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed by Barbet Schroeder

Written by Richard Price and Eleazar Lipsky

With David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Stanley Tucci, Michael Rapaport, and Ving Rhames.

The Underneath Rating *** A must see

Directed by Steven Soderbergh Written by Sam Lowry (Soderbergh) and Daniel Fuchs

With Peter Gallagher, Alison Elliott, William Fichtner, Adam Trese, Joe Don Baker, Paul Dooley, and Elisabeth Shue.

Sound-bite explanations are the media’s preferred means for tackling (i.e., buying and selling) the past as well as the present. Growing up on media images of the end of World War II that evoke relief and euphoria as well as exhaustion, I was hardly prepared for the discovery, in the spring issue of the academic journal October, that according to the respected German filmmaker Helke Sander, approximately 1.9 million women were raped in the territories of the former Third Reich between March and November 1945. The absence of this staggering piece of information from most popular accounts of this period points to a certain incapacity in the way our understanding is structured, not merely a missing block of data. And last week, just after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, many Americans seemed convinced that it must have been the work of Middle Eastern terrorists rather than, say, more extreme versions of Rush Limbaugh. Because it seemed impossible to imagine how any American could commit so heartless an act, a blank space was created in the imagination that only recent sound-bite demonology could fill — though only four years ago in Baghdad perhaps 500 times as many innocent victims were bombed by this country, experiencing a state of euphoria because it felt it was winning a just war, a slaughter for which no one has been held accountable. Heartlessness, one might say, is strictly in the eye of the nonbeholder.

A taste for heartless, sociopathic hoods and sultry femme fatales — a desire to laugh at them and appreciate their outrageousness even as we flinch from them — is certainly part of what links several Hollywood crime thrillers of the 40s with many of those being made today, including such recent favorites as Pulp Fiction and The Last Seduction. The two most recent examples, Kiss of Death and The Underneath, are remakes of Henry Hathaway’s Kiss of Death (1947) and Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949). The sound-bite version of this is that both are recycled noirs with contemporary settings. But since “noir” isn’t a term American filmmakers or critics or spectators were using in the 40s — and changes meaning today just about every time an academic or a mainstream merchandiser thinks up a new reason for using it — this doesn’t take us very far, except perhaps to the point of suggesting that the flexible noir label serves to keep alive a few 40s Hollywood standbys, like misogyny, fatalism, paranoia, hard-boiled sadism, lyrical and romantic masochism, and a comedy of cruelty — as well as certain iconographic, lighting, and compositional schemes — within a stylish and socially acceptable contemporary context. Remove the noir context from The Last Seduction and the movie becomes misogynist plain and simple; remove it from Pulp Fiction and the movie becomes barbarically neofascist in its worship of the power accorded by guns. Put the noir context back and the stylish gloss renders the subject matter transcendent — sufficiently removed from reality to seem ironic, comfortably couched between smirking quotation marks.

I’m not trying to say that the term “noir” doesn’t have its legitimate uses. Indeed, I would define Criss Cross as a classic noir reeking of metaphysical doom and murky spiritual disorientation, and the original Kiss of Death as a relatively crisp and prosaic documentary-style thriller shot in natural locations like Hathaway’s The House on 92nd St. (1945) and Call Northside 777 (1948), Elia Kazan’s Boomerang! (1947) and Panic in the Streets (1950), and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948). Yet a few elements of the 1947 Kiss of Death are noirish as well. The maniacal leer, cackle, and baby talk of Richard Widmark (his screen debut, which won him an Oscar nomination) as a dandified psycho killer seems derived more from German expressionism — one of the sources of noir — than from docudramas; a few traces of this tradition persist in Michael Madsen’s character in Reservoir Dogs.

In both the new Kiss of Death and The Underneath the filmmakers seem oddly stranded between their models and their desire to say something more contemporary. (Both movies acknowledge the screenwriters of the 40s movies. The first Kiss of Death was based on an unpublished story by Eleazar Lipsky and scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer; Lipsky retains the story credit in the new version, but Richard Price gets sole credit for the screenplay “based on the 1947 motion picture screenplay” by Hecht and Lederer. Criss Cross was adapted by Daniel Fuchs from a novel of the same title by Don Tracy; the script for The Underneath is credited jointly to Fuchs, who died in 1959, and “Sam Lowry,” actually Steven Soderbergh, the director.) The Underneath — despite its awkward title and some confusion in its focus — is the more impressive of the two films, basically because it succeeds in creating a style of its own, even if it sacrifices part of the meaning of its source to do this. Kiss of Death, which mainly follows the structure of its model while completely transforming the tone, seems too promiscuous and eager to please to have any comparable integrity; it has an absorbing story to tell, but it feels generated more by a committee than by any individual vision. Both versions of Kiss of Death are about a thief who, after being arrested and going to Sing Sing, tries to go straight but keeps getting sucked back into a life of crime by an assistant DA who wants to use him as an informer. The thief initially refuses to cooperate, then changes his mind after his wife dies following her involvement with another gangster. To take revenge the thief fingers other criminals and falsely implicates the gangster as a police informant so that he’ll be wiped out by the mob. Under shifting degrees of police protection for himself and his little girl, and aided by a baby-sitter who becomes his wife — a character who serves oddly as the offscreen narrator in the original version — he moves toward a final confrontation with a psychopathic killer.

Both versions qualify as high-toned hackwork fitfully redeemed by a good story and some incidental pleasures involving the casting and camera work. Perhaps the biggest surprise in the original is how touching Victor Mature is in the lead role. A late D.W. Griffith discovery who languished for most of his career in sword-and-sandal beefcake parts — and was the butt of as many jokes in the 40s and 50s as Schwarzenegger is today — he managed to exceed himself the few times he was cast intelligently, as he was here (and in The Shanghai Gesture).

The remake begins with an elaborate, extended crane shot moving through and around an auto junkyard and environs that effectively maps out a good-sized chunk of the film’s physical terrain. The early sketches of the home life of the hero, an ex-con (David Caruso) trying to stay clean, also promise authenticity. But once he’s dragged by his cousin (Michael Rapaport) into a crooked operation transporting stolen cars, and the standard psycho villain (Nicolas Cage) appears, the movie starts banking on cheap, violent flourishes that take the place of character delineation. The original film had a similar problem with the equivalent villain, Widmark, whose effective performance was designed to be noticed by playing against the style of all the other actors. But even the generic type Cage is embodying seems constructed out of spare parts and loose effects: throwing a drunken driver out of a truck, weightlifting with a go-go dancer instead of barbells, threatening a drunk with a lighted cigarette, mouthing dumb epithets about acronyms and his asthma — each detail contrived to produce a hoot or a whistle rather than build any logic of personality, each pointing back to the scriptwriter rather than the character. Thanks to such stray details, the movie winds up feeling like a series of long, dramatic buildups to payoffs that never arrive.

Caruso doesn’t quite manage to negotiate the star power bequeathed to him by his role and his flashy red hair, but he at least manages to suggest a human being. Rapaport, Samuel L. Jackson, Stanley Tucci, and Ving Rhames do even better with simpler character-actor parts. But the movie’s overall coherence depends on a continuity of character and narrative style, and the determination to turn Cage’s character into a series of disconnected set pieces ultimately splinters both. Not even the impersonal craft and kinky personal inflections of director Barbet Schroeder can bring harmony to the scattershot strategies, which suggest several assembly-line teams of filmmakers working in isolation on separate scenes. (The team that assigned supernatural stealth and prescience to Cage as a potential, unseen kidnapper doesn’t even appear to be on a first-name basis with the one that cobbled together the feel-good ending.)

What survives is a caustic feeling for the corruption of the legal system today that occasionally evokes Deep Cover and was only faintly hinted at in the first version. “Your side of the fence is almost as dirty as mine,” Mature said to Brian Donlevy as the assistant DA 48 years ago. “With one big difference,” Donlevy replied. “We hurt bad people, not good ones.” In fact, Mature wound up getting hurt plenty, but there was only a smidgeon of irony intended in that exchange. Today nobody could buy such a line, yet such is our cynicism that the happy ending manufactured here is even phonier. We don’t believe it, but we want to go home with it anyway.

On the level of plot and thematic coherence The Underneath isn’t a more successful thriller than Kiss of Death, even though Criss Cross is certainly superior to the original Kiss of Death; indeed, it might be argued that Soderbergh’s picture isn’t really a thriller at all, though it uses most of the basic thriller machinery. (You’ll be better off if you check out Criss Cross only after you see the remake.) The reason I still rank it much higher than Kiss of Death is that it’s a gorgeous-looking, wonderfully acted, boldly constructed film with a style, vision, and feel all its own. It may not have enough independence from its source, but it sharply distinguishes itself from the empty, impersonal Hollywood movies that now surround it, neo-noir and otherwise. The director is Steven Soderbergh, whose feeling for mise en scène, actors, and dialogue and whose respect for people in general — characters and spectators — is such that he seems incapable of making an indifferent picture. Even when the root premise is as silly as it was in Kafka, he brings something distinctive to it. And when he’s lucky enough to work with his own script — sex, lies, and videotape, King of the Hill, and here — he can do a lot more than redeem a dubious proposition. In this case, however, he appears to be wrestling with a story that fully engages him only in certain particulars. (The reason he doesn’t take script credit is linked to his chagrin over a dispute with the Screenwriters Guild; “Sam Lowry,” incidentally, is the name of the Jonathan Pryce character in Brazil.) As with Kiss of Death, it seems a given nowadays that the way you “make your own picture” in Hollywood is to start with somebody else’s project and then bore from within; it’s equally clear that without some version of the noir label this project would never have gotten off the ground. The only hitch is that Criss Cross, good as it is, was made almost half a century ago, and Soderbergh’s main interest appears to be the instability of contemporary relationships. Somehow a compromise between these agendas had to be struck.

It’s often been noted by critics that Hollywood noir developed in part out of postwar anxieties related to sexual insecurity and economic instability. Soderbergh is as alert to sexual insecurity in The Underneath as he was in sex, lies, and videotape — though as today’s problem. When it comes to economic instability — which his script, with its countless references to lottery tickets, sports betting, and reckless spending sprees, seems equally attentive to — his interest appears to be more theoretical. (Inadvertently or not, he winds up making economic instability seem like a symptom of sexual insecurity.) And when it comes to the terminal romantic obsessions of his hero, a classic noir fall guy (played beautifully by Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross and quite effectively by Peter Gallagher here), he’s handicapped by his rewrite of the ending, which slightly shifts the focus away from the hero to suggest a more general malaise — spiritual as well as economic and sexual — that informs the world he inhabits. This new emphasis gives the film a potency and moral bite that’s missing from Criss Cross, becoming a subtle indictment of hero and heroine alike, but it also entails a loss of concentration. We’re no longer quite sure what the story is about once it’s over.

Proceeding gracefully and without difficulty through three or four time frames at once, The Underneath alternates between an armored-car robbery carried out by the hero as an inside job and various stages in his past leading up to it. Criss Cross tells substantially the same story, but more simply, with a single extended flashback planted in the middle of the movie — a sad tale about a divorced lug who can’t get over his wife two years after they’ve separated, even after leaving town for a spell to work at odd jobs. They meet up again and are still attracted. But his former wife, hankering after money, has latched onto a local hood, whom she eventually marries, and things only get stickier. Criss Cross is set in Los Angeles, The Underneath in Austin, Texas (occasioning a cameo by Richard Linklater as a club doorman). Some of the most important other changes involve collapsing the hero’s brother and policeman friend into a single character and substituting a stepfather for his father. The remake builds on the subtle family dynamics found in the original, making these changes a lot more consequential than one might suppose. (By contrast, the fact that the hero of the original Kiss of Death has two daughters and the hero of the remake has only one counts for practically nothing.)

There’s certainly no question about the beauty and the rigor of the film’s visual design, which extends from the giant colored letters that gradually spell out the film’s title at the beginning (a précis of the movie’s narrative form) to the very last shot. This has the best use of ‘Scope framing of any noir project since James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet (1990) — a movie that’s now virtually lost to film history unless it becomes available again in a ‘Scope format. (Cropped on video, it ceases to exist, and the same will be true of Soderbergh’s movie if it’s cropped — which means that if you don’t see it now you may never get a second chance.)

Boldly using color, production design, and diverse camera and lab strategies expressionistically to approximate the hero’s subjective states of mind, The Underneath is far and away the most visually inventive Hollywood picture I’ve seen this year; even In the Mouth of Madness, its nearest competitor, pales in comparison. A couple of sequences where these elements and strategies are combined with ‘Scope framing took my breath away. One features the hero and heroine (Alison Elliott) on opposite sides of the screen, both facing the camera; the hood she’s recently married (William Fichtner) stands between them, his back to the camera, while he kisses and fondles her. One’s eyes dart back and forth like Ping-Pong balls between her hidden responses on screen right and the hero’s improvised lies on screen left, though this is only part of what gives the scene such an unsettling charge. The second, much longer sequence charts the hero’s subjective impressions of floating in and out of consciousness in a hospital bed as various people come to visit him — an extended vamp on a noirish trope that offers a poetic, nightmarish commentary on his own alienation, where the very space of the room seems mutable as each visitor swims into view.

Later in the same setting Soderbergh manages to coax the film’s most interesting performance out of a nonactor named Joe Chrest, playing an ambiguous character named Howard Rodman. (The name comes from the screenwriter who did the uncredited rewrite on Kafka and wrote a segment of Showtime’s Fallen Angel series directed by Soderbergh). Quite apart from all its in-jokes and cross-references, The Underneath is saying plenty about the traps we all dig for ourselves and the swamps that troubled relationships can become. And if the traps and swamps comprising the modus operandi of contemporary Hollywood didn’t keep getting in the way, it would probably say even more. But films are launched and sold (and understood) through sound bites these days, and noir is the generic label that’s selling this movie — even though it has at most an incidental relation to why the film was made or why you should see it. The problem is that without that label there’s little chance people will go — which is why this review has to depend on the same false advertising as the movie.

Master Thief (FEMME FATALE)

This appeared in the Chicago Reader’s November 8, 2002 issue. –J.R.

Femme Fatale

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Brian De Palma

With Antonio Banderas, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Peter Coyote, Gregg Henry, Rie Rasmussen, and Eriq Ebouaney.

By my count, Femme Fatale is Brian De Palma’s 26th feature, and as I watched it the first time two months ago I found myself capitulating to its inspired formalist madness — something I’ve resisted in his films for the past 30-odd years. De Palma’s latest isn’t so much an improvement on his earlier work as a grand synthesis of it — as if he set out to combine every previous thriller he’d made in one hyperbolically frothy cocktail. So we get split-screen framing; bad girls; sweetie-pie male suckers; verbal and physical abuse; lots of blood; a melodramatic story stretched out over many years; slow-motion, lyrically rendered catastrophes; noirish lighting schemes favoring venetian blinds; it-was-all-a-dream plot twists; scrambled and recomposed plot mosaics; obsessional repetitions of sound and image; pastiches of familiar musical pieces (in this case Ravel and Satie); nearly constant camera movements; and ceiling-height camera angles. Best of all, we often get several of these things simultaneously. (One of the few De Palma movies for which he takes sole script credit, Femme Fatale is nothing if not personal.) What I haven’t liked about his work is still there, but I’ve had to readjust how I see it.

I’d always been annoyed by De Palma’s intricate borrowings from Alfred Hitchcock, which I’ve tended to see more as mangled tributes than as perceptive appreciations. My misgivings were only reinforced when his biggest fans, especially Pauline Kael and her most literal followers, implied that Hitchcock was a bit of a hack next to the genius De Palma — suggesting that Hitchcock churned out dross, which his disciple somehow turned into the pure gold of sublime trash. De Palma’s borrowings were all the more irritating when it became clear that much of his supposed fealty to the master came less from his soul than from his big production budgets, which enabled him to hire Bernard Herrmann for Sisters and Obsession – though all he wanted Herrmann to do was imitate his scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Say what you will about Hitchcock’s calculation, his work displays an almost limitless curiosity about human behavior, whereas De Palma’s shows an interest in people (as opposed to types and figures) that approaches zero.

Femme Fatale opens with Laure (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), an American femme fatale who’s posing as a press photographer, watching the climax of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity on TV in her hotel room. Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney), a French-African heist meister, shows up to bark out some final instructions. The picture then moves on to an extremely elaborate heist, carried out to the strains of Bolero, during the opening credits of a film being screened at the 2001 Cannes film festival. With only a minimum of dialogue, we learn from the crosscutting that Laure is seducing an actress in the ladies’ room, and as she drops the detachable gold sections of the actress’s serpent-shaped wraparound halter on the floor, Black Tie, dressed in a tux and hiding just a few feet away, replaces them with fakes. Meanwhile, his partner Racine, dressed in a high-tech rubber suit with goggles that evokes De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, is using a laser to bore into the bowels of the building’s power station so that the electricity and the film can be shut off while Black Tie absconds with the loot.

Subsequent dialogue identifies this loot as diamonds, not gold, so maybe I missed something — but who cares? What matters isn’t plot details, much less character or motivation. It’s the visual rhymes — such as the serpentine halter and the serpentine probe Racine uses — and other kinds of abstract visual patterns that hype up various incidents.

The sequence of events and the heist are much more complicated than I’m making them sound. But since De Palma is interested in the sequence first, the heist second, and the characters last, everything seems to happen like clockwork. The heist is beyond far-fetched — everything hinges on a mere glance from Laure diverting an exhibitionistic actress from her own premiere for the sake of a quickie in a bathroom — yet part of our pleasure in the sequence is predicated on our recognition of its flat-out absurdity. And because we’re persuaded by De Palma’s baroque stylistics, we’re bound to see his characters as somewhat dehumanized. De Palma isn’t so much eliminating motivations as minimizing and mocking them.

The postmodernist assumption behind this whole exercise is that we’re only pretending we believe that these events are taking place and that these bodies are human characters. As a consequence, a certain telegraphic crudeness becomes both desirable and necessary. Black Tie, for instance, has to be hyperbolically abusive toward Laure just to show that he’s even more of a villain than she is. When he’s shot a little later, he has to bleed buckets, and the red stains on his dress shirt have to be just as vivid when he emerges from prison seven years later. (This detail provoked laughter in the audience both times I saw the movie — laughter that suggested affection as well as ridicule.)

Hitchcock was interested in the psychology and behavior of his audience as well as of his characters. De Palma, a formalist, is interested in having his audience be impressed, horrified, amused, or titillated, but not engaged morally or ethically in the Hitchcockian sense. This makes him seem cheap and synthetic when he’s compared with Hitchcock (as he most commonly is) or with the Italian neorealists and other humanist filmmakers (as he was by Kael for his Casualties of War). But away from such company he blossoms.

It was Kael’s aesthetic that got in the way of my appreciating De Palma for what he is instead of disliking him for what he isn’t. Her embrace of what she called De Palma’s trashiness was central to her celebration of youthfulness in both movie art and movie audiences — especially the kind that regarded leftist humanism as square and choked with noble intentions.

De Palma’s visceral kicks, which occupy a place halfway between Hitchcock and Quentin Tarantino, offered a liberation from stodgy sentiment. In principle, this idea was seductive for someone like me with a formalist bent, but the anti-intellectualism of Kael’s trash aesthetic struck me as a form of confinement rather than liberation. What she viewed as antipuritanical I viewed as a puritanical taboo against intellectual pleasure — which I believed ought to enhance visceral kicks rather than deny or dilute them.

I realize that De Palma’s thrillers are commonly regarded as emotional rather than cerebral, but I’d question how emotional one can be about characters one only halfheartedly (quarter-heartedly?) believes in. Laure finds herself mistaken for a woman who looks exactly like her, a woman named Lily (also played by Romijn-Stamos) seen playing Russian roulette as she hysterically grieves the loss of her children — a hysteria that’s stylized in such a way that it becomes a parody of extreme emotion. This is a cerebral take on the way hundreds of other movies have defined hysteria rather than any form of observation, a semaphoric set of signals designed to represent hysteria rather than embody it. De Palma intends to steer us through the thriller mechanics and conventions, not let us get bogged down in emotions.

If you can accept that this is his game plan, it immediately becomes apparent that he can move easily through these conventions, playing and experimenting with his materials like the freest of formalists. The pleasures to be had for the audience are akin to those that come from assembling or disassembling a jigsaw puzzle — cerebral delights that have only a glancing relationship to human behavior, though they can have an allegorical relationship to our grasp of life and destiny.

However ludicrous the opening heist sequence of Femme Fatale might seem, it proposes a kind of willful symmetry. The movie’s climactic slow-motion catastrophe — which we actually see assembled and disassembled like a jigsaw puzzle in two separate versions — is an equally implausible form of symmetry that’s governed by chance and fate. Both sequences are of course conceived and constructed by De Palma, and the metaphysical distinctions between how and why they unfold add up to a philosophical position, if not a moral or ethical one.

The first time Laure sees Lily playing Russian roulette in a Paris flat, there’s a leaking aquarium in a corner of the room. Since we see the leak before any bullet is fired, we may be puzzled by this detail — which arguably gets explained, after a fashion, when we return to the same scene much later in the film. I was surprised to be reminded of the unexplained rainfall glimpsed inside a house in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, but it occurred to me later that this parallel might not be as implausible as I supposed — and not just because De Palma is a compulsive moviegoer who sees a lot more than Hollywood product. (He has often noted that he’s virtually the only mainstream filmmaker who regularly attends foreign film festivals as a spectator.)

Tarkovsky — a formalist who’s often been misidentified as a humanist, perhaps because of his mysticism — sometimes showed a similar indifference to his characters, such as the family of the hero who burns his house down in the final sequence of his last film, The Sacrifice. Formalism and an absence of humanism don’t necessarily entail a lack of artistic seriousness. Indeed, looking for symmetry and coherence in a universe that seems to consist only of chaotic fragments from other movies — a very contemporary and very real dilemma — might constitute a genuine quest for transcendence.

In a World of His Own [on RUSHMORE]

This appeared in the February 12, 1999 issue of the Chicago Reader. –J.R.

Rushmore

Rating *** A must see

Directed by Wes Anderson

Written by Anderson and Owen Wilson

With Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, Seymour Cassel, Brian Cox, Mason Gamble, Sara Tanaka, Stephen McCole, Connie Nielsen, and Luke Wilson.

Rushmore has a good deal of content and human qualities to spare, but what makes it such a charming and satisfying experience is its style. Its segments are introduced by parting curtains, each labeled with the name of the appropriate month, which serves as a chapter heading — a neat way of calling attention to the broad and attractively composed ‘Scope frames and of parceling out the story in bite-size seasonal units. Less obvious and functional but unmistakably style-driven is the fact that the curtains come in different colors, giving another kind of lift to the proceedings. All the scenes are short (at least until the film moves into its homestretch), and director Wes Anderson also films these scenes in long and medium shots; in general he indulges in long scenes and close-ups only after he’s earned them. Because this is a studio effort that knows what it’s doing — a rare breed these days — it makes you wonder how many close-ups and long scenes are squandered in other studio releases.

The film is a comedy about Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a 15-year-old student at Rushmore Academy, a private school in a small town, who’s too wrapped up in a bevy of extracurricular activities — hilariously cataloged in one extended montage sequence — to finish his schoolwork. Max develops a crush on a young, widowed grammar school teacher named Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), befriends a local millionaire and Rushmore graduate named Herman Blume, gets expelled, enrolls in public school at Grover Cleveland High, and writes and stages elaborate plays at both schools. (The first one we see him staging is derived from the 1973 movie Serpico.) He’s always a bit ridiculous, and so is Blume, but everyone in the movie is accorded a certain dignity that keeps him lovable. Significantly, the character initially introduced as Blume — played by Bill Murray at his most inspired, with a characteristic mix of quizzical distraction and terminal world-weariness — eventually becomes known to us as Herman, and even Max’s father, played with amiable sweetness by Seymour Cassel, finally registers as just plain Bert.

This dignity is often revealed in small but precious details. (To give examples, I need to recount portions of the plot, so readers may want to skip the rest of this review until they’ve seen the picture.) The bond that develops between Max and the millionaire degenerates into a protracted feud when Herman also falls in love with Rosemary after serving as go-between for his teenage pal. One of the comic grace notes in this feud involves Max’s friendship with Dirk Calloway (Mason Gamble), a much younger classmate at Rushmore, who spies Herman emerging from Rosemary’s house, blocks his car when he’s leaving, announces, “I know about you and the teacher,” and spits with fury on the hood of Herman’s car. Another comes soon afterward, after Dirk reports his findings to Max and Max arranges a meeting with Mrs. Blume to report on her husband’s infidelity; before they get down to business, Max offers her a sandwich and she accepts, choosing tuna over peanut butter. Dirk’s loyalty in spitting on Herman’s car and Max’s civility in offering the tuna sandwich are two good examples of the kind of gifts offered by this movie to both its characters and its viewers — an act of piety toward passion in the first case, a respect for simple courtesy in the second.

Comparable gifts crop up in almost every scene. Some involve Max’s father, whose doting and nonjudgmental affection is undiminished by either Max’s horrible grades or his defensive claims to Herman and his wealthier Rushmore classmates that his barber father is a neurosurgeon. Some involve Rosemary’s gentle negotiation of Max’s infatuation and her own guarded affection for him; some involve the fluctuating friendship between Max and Herman; and still others relate to Max’s shifting relationships with Dirk, with his worst enemy at Rushmore — a Scottish bully named Magnus who’s much older, played by Stephen McCole — and with Margaret Yang (Sara Tanaka), a classmate at Grover Cleveland who likes him in spite of everything.

Adolescence is a big comic subject in American movies, but it’s usually squandered — along with close-ups and longer scenes — with strident acting and other telegraphed effects. But Anderson, who wrote Rushmore with Owen Wilson, never allows the audience to lose its dignity either; the coolness of the comedy — like that of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and Albert Brooks — respects us and characters alike. The pain and cruelty of adolescence aren’t avoided, but the short-scene construction and gliding tempo prevent us from dwelling on them; the calm objectivity of a Keaton, Tati, or Brooks gazing at the world qualifies as a kind of measured wisdom, and Rushmore emulates this sane equipoise throughout.

Treating quirky adolescents with affection was already central in Bottle Rocket, Anderson and Wilson’s only previous feature (in which Wilson played one of the leading parts), but for all that movie’s style and grace, it bears the same relationship to Rushmore that a watercolor bears to an oil painting. This movie goes further by creating something more than a milieu and a circle of friends, widening its span to encompass a little world to contain them. It also dissolves the usual distances between characters of various ages (including not only Dirk and Magnus in relation to Max, but also Herman and to some extent Rosemary), creating a utopian democracy of concerns that purposefully rejects the automatic and often unconvincing generational solidarity that underlies most movies about teenagers. This is perhaps the movie’s most inspired wild card, though it also means that the world of the film begins at times to become infused with magical realism. Even if we accept Max’s becoming best friends with Herman, the disaffected father of two of Max’s classmates, we may balk when Max subsequently persuades Herman to spend eight of his ten million dollars on an aquarium designed to win Rosemary’s admiration. At this stage the film’s comic invention gets stuck in a groove; the adolescent grandiosity of both Max and Herman expands only because it has nowhere else to go, warping the world that contains them in the process.

These occasions aren’t the movie’s finest moments; they indicate that the filmmakers became so smitten with their characters that they got carried away, much as the characters themselves get carried away with their infatuations. Yet even this flaw is seductive — as it is in the fiction of J.D. Salinger, another sympathetic chronicler of adolescent overreaching whose eagerness and attentiveness can lead his fiction into equivalent forms of fantasy projection and hyperbole. To their credit, Anderson and Wilson share none of the class snobbery that subtly infuses much of Salinger’s work, and though they don’t harp on it, they seem to understand some of the less articulate forms of adolescent anguish that arguably make Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen an even better evocation of teenage nightmare than The Catcher in the Rye. But like Salinger they harbor a protective gallantry toward their characters that becomes the film’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

For all its lightheartedness, Rushmore reeks of mortality and historical trauma — a paradox made possible by its stylistic fleetness, pumped along by snatches of nearly a dozen British pop tunes of the 60s. (Anderson’s nostalgic and lyrical employments of this music often recall the more extended uses of Simon and Garfunkel in The Graduate, a quintessential pop expression of the 60s.) Max’s dead mother, Rosemary’s dead husband (another Rushmore graduate), and Herman’s stint in Vietnam may not be equivalent points of reference for these characters, but the movie gently treats them as if they were. (The movie never really furnishes an explanation for Herman’s boredom and alienation, apart from his wealth and his conventional jock sons; Vietnam is Max’s hypothesis for the root of Herman’s problems, and by default it becomes the movie’s as well.) Max’s climactic and hilarious play about Vietnam — staged at Grover Cleveland with elaborate special effects in the movie’s final and longest sequence — is dedicated to his mother and to Rosemary’s late husband (”the friend of a friend”), pointedly bringing all three together. It’s Anderson’s way of hinting that all three characters have suffered irreparable losses without hitting us over the head with them, and it seals the past’s ongoing claims on the present that locate the entire movie in some kind of temporal netherworld that is neither. (The traditionalism of the school itself, so central to Max’s sense of his own identity, is clearly part of this period ambiguity, along with the importance of Watergate, Serpico, and Vietnam to Max’s career as a playwright.)

The play itself is about reconciliation; it ends with Max, playing an American grunt, proposing to a Vietcong guerrilla played by Margaret Yang, his new girlfriend. It also leads to other reconciliations: between Max and Magnus, Rosemary and Herman, Max and Rosemary. There’s even a reconciliation between Max and Rosemary’s friend from Harvard, a young man whom Max drunkenly castigated as an interloper at a dinner after the premiere of his previous play. Unlike the madder schemes of Max and Herman, this optimistic ending bears some recognizable relation to the real world: not only has the past become integrated with the present, but the invented world of Rushmore has become wide enough to encompass our own.

How to Capture an Artist [SYLVIA & IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN]

From the Chicago Reader (October 31, 2003). — J.R.

Sylvia

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Christine Jeffs

Written by John Brownlow

With Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Amira Casar, Andrew Havill, Lucy Davenport, Blythe Danner, and Michael Gambon.

In the Mirror of Maya Deren

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed by Martina Kudlacek

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.

The sin. The sin.

– Sylvia Plath, “Fever 103 °“

In film, I can make the world dance.

– Maya Deren

In college it always seemed like the guys who were poets got more girls than the prose writers. The assumption was that poets had all the romance and sensuality associated with their medium working for them. Poetry, after all, isn’t just a block of printed material; it’s an activity, and one that can turn people on sexually as well as spiritually.

In cultures such as those of Russia and Iran sexual and spiritual qualities tend to run neck and neck: the great Persian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-’67), a fan of Sylvia Plath, retains a mythic allure that combines the auras of Joan of Arc, Billie Holiday, and Marilyn Monroe. And an erotic charge is one of the first things that Sylvia, a biopic about Sylvia Plath (1932-’63), gets right. It pervades the initial encounters between the title heroine and Ted Hughes in Cambridge, England, in 1956. The film arrives at these meetings with exemplary dispatch, after opening with Plath’s excruciating declaration in “Lady Lazarus”: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else, / I do it exceptionally well.” The brisk action that follows and the lack of fuss over exposition gave me some assurance that director Christine Jeffs and screenwriter John Brownlow knew what they were up to.

Todd McCarthy writes in Variety, “There’s a big piece missing from the picture’s center: The                         all-encompassing connection that brought the couple together in the first place is never made palpable.” I disagree. The couple’s shared passion for poetry, depicted mainly in small but telling details, is certainly an all-encompassing connection, though I can’t swear those details are made palpable for everyone.

I object more strenuously to McCarthy’s opening gambit — “As grim as much of Sylvia Plath’s life may have been, it wasn’t as relentlessly bleak as the movie Sylvia” — which I’d probably find presumptuous even if it came from one of her friends. Of course presumed knowledge about her life has been a central aspect of the Plath myth ever since her suicide at 30, which helped to bring that myth into being — especially for those who’ve fetishized her as a prefeminist martyr. I find nothing bleaker about the life of Plath and Hughes than something this movie pointedly, if understandably, omits: Assia Gutmann Wevill (played in the film by Amira Casar) — with whom Hughes lived after he separated from Plath and with whom he had a daughter, Shura — killed herself and Shura six years after Plath’s suicide, when she was 34 and Shura 2. She turned on the gas in her kitchen stove, just as Plath did. It’s worth adding that Wevill was a poet, and that, according to Paul Alexander’s biography Rough Magic, the “burden of living in the shadow of Plath” played a significant role in motivating her act.

The terrible thing about Plath “dying exceptionally well” is that her suicide appeared to clinch her fame — as if the poetry she wrote wasn’t quite enough. I remember how angry I was when one of my professors argued that her suicide “proved” many of the assertions of her poems, giving them a legitimacy they wouldn’t have had otherwise. Whether one buys this theory or not, it points to the factor that dooms most literary biopics, including serious ones — the all but obligatory tendency to privilege the life over the work. In this case the filmmakers had legal restrictions on how much they could quote from Plath, guaranteeing that the space for her poetry would be small. (As partial compensation, we get a fair sampling of other people’s poetry, including Chaucer’s.)

Considering the myth making that has surrounded Plath’s reputation from the outset, a dispassionate view of her life has never been easy, and the film’s most admirable achievement is its refusal to take sides in the dispute between her and her late husband, viewing both with sympathy and compassion. One of the best aspects of Gwyneth Paltrow’s finely tuned performance is her capacity to convey Plath’s chronic depression without making us recoil from it, and Daniel Craig takes on the task of representing Hughes’s womanizing with a comparable feeling for complexity and nuance. Making this couple’s relationship more important than their poetry surely wasn’t the movie’s intention, but it becomes the central program nonetheless. And this locks the movie into an imposture, because without their poetry we wouldn’t know or care about their relationship.

One reason it’s an imposture is that cinema and poetry aren’t merely disparate art forms but largely incompatible ones. (Farrokhzad’s only film, The House Is Black, is the only successful fusion that comes to mind.) Poetry has to be read slowly — one of the things that makes it sexy — and even though some great films move slowly, commercially minded biopics do so at their peril. Consider the three short lines from Plath’s “Fever 103°” quoted above or any five-line stanza from “Daddy,” another desperate late poem, written a week before “Fever”: the poetry must be allowed to reverberate — to drift and spread, line by line and word by word. And how many movies that star Paltrow have the time for that? Indeed, as I’ve suggested, one of the nicest things about Sylvia, at least in the beginning, is its unusual speed. Yet speed is ultimately relevant only to storytelling; it has almost nothing to do with composing or reading poetry, except when it’s recited as quickly as possible for laughs, as happens in one early scene here.

The problem is, people’s lives aren’t stories. They have to be turned into stories to become fodder for biopics, and the interpretations that shape them are likely to be determined by the needs of dramaturgy. I’m no expert on Plath’s life, but even a superficial skimming of Rough Magic reveals that her mother played a much larger role in her life than the film’s mother (Blythe Danner, the real-life mother of Paltrow). The film uses her character mainly to offer exposition about Plath’s past during her sole appearance, when Sylvia brings Hughes home to meet her; once that task is gracefully accomplished by Danner, she’s not allowed to interfere with the story again.

I can’t imagine what a biopic about Maya Deren (1917-’61) — the person who did the most to create American experimental film as we know it — would be like, and I hope I never have to find out. One of the best things about In the Mirror of Maya Deren — a feature-length documentary in English by Austrian director Martina Kudlacek, playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center a dozen times this week — is that it does such a terrific job of showing us what Deren was like that it makes even the notion of a biopic about her seem unnecessary, if not ridiculous.

For one thing, Deren so assiduously chronicled and recorded her filmmaking activities and lectures that Kudlacek had a lot to work with. She makes wonderful use of the material, though lamentably a private recording of Deren singing the standard tune “Mean to Me” has been cut since I first saw the film in early 2002. Deren’s version doesn’t threaten Sarah Vaughan’s, but it’s a collector’s item to cherish. I suspect it had to go because the cost of paying the song’s copyright holders was too high. The song is still mentioned in the final credits; maybe it was too expensive to redo them. Fortunately the film has a wonderful original score by John Zorn, which makes dramatic use of suspended chords, as well as other samples of Deren singing and several pieces of music she recorded during her four trips to Haiti between 1947 and 1955.

Money was always something of a problem for Deren, at least as an adult, though she was the first filmmaker to ever win a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. She died of a brain hemorrhage at 44, and one of her friends suggests that malnutrition may have been a contributing factor — along with amphetamine shots and a legal dispute involving the inheritance of her 26-year-old Japanese lover that evidently exercised her fiery temper.

Born Eleanora Derenkovskaya in Kiev the year of the Russian Revolution, she had a privileged upbringing as the daughter of Russian Jews, a psychiatrist father and a mother who studied music. When she was still a child the family moved to Syracuse, New York, and in her early teens she attended a Swiss boarding school. But by the time she finished her formal education, in 1939, she was a bohemian poet and working as a secretary. “I was a very poor poet,” we hear her say in the film, “because I thought in terms of images…[and] poetry is an effort to put [visual experience] into verbal terms. When I got a camera in my hands, it was like coming home.”

Perhaps her most consequential secretarial job was for dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, one of the many fascinating talking heads here; it took her to Los Angeles, where she met the Czech experimental filmmaker Alexander Hammid (another talking head). Collaborating with Hammid, she made her first film, the groundbreaking Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) — a series of metaphorical and metaphysical self-portraits as rich in Freudian content as any of Plath’s late poems, though made mainly in celebration and without any of Plath’s self-loathing. (This film and most of Deren’s others, which are all liberally sampled in Kudlacek’s film, will be showing at the Film Center on Monday and Wednesday, making it possible to catch them just before or after the documentary.)

Deren saw female self-portraiture as a process of perpetual metamorphosis — an explicitly feminist undertaking that’s in some ways the opposite of Plath’s petrified notions of identity. Clearly the world wasn’t quite ready for that sensibility; neither of the best American film reviewers at the time, James Agee and Manny Farber, was any sort of fan, though the larger art community she was part of — including dancers, choreographers, musicians, composers, and other filmmakers — encouraged and supported her.

This milieu is brought to life so vividly in the documentary one can almost smell the kitty litter in Deren’s Greenwich Village flat. Better yet, the film performs the nearly miraculous feat of allowing us to know her as a person as well as understand her as an artist, and it does this better than any of the excellent books about her, including the two volumes to date of The Legend of Maya Deren – a massive, collectively authored biography and compilation that’s been in the works since the 80s — and the recent collection Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde.

A high-strung narcissist and sensualist who anticipated hippie dress codes as well as New Age babble, Deren might seem to gather all the cliches of bohemian Manhattan in the 40s and 50s in one Jungian jumble. Yet the robust power of her charisma is conveyed so affectionately by her friends, even when they recall her with exasperation, that something all her own arises out of the overlapping archetypes she adopted.

If Plath’s myth is the creation of her writing — magnified by her suicide and the depths of depression her writing explored — Deren’s myth is the product of a steady rush of evolving self-definitions. Those definitions can’t be restricted to her films, though the films provide the ideal settings for them. The late Stan Brakhage, who knew her well and provides the most sensitive and provocative appreciation of her films in the documentary, offers a startling view of her as a kind of demiurge when he describes watching her lift and hurl a full-size refrigerator across a kitchen in a moment of rage.

Even if we balk at believing him, we may conclude that the force of her personality was such that it could inspire this sort of belief. In Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde Jane Brakhage Wodening, who recounts the same story, suggests as much when she writes about Deren, the words spilling out as if she were in a trance: “In Haiti, she was fulfilled. She learned about voodoo, a religion of shamanic power, and this religion was based on dance. And when she danced in Haiti, she was possessed of the voodoo gods and she had power over men. And so she became a priestess and her red hair stuck out all over her head like sparks and she wore her hair that way the rest of her life.” This may sound like it belongs in a Cecil B. De Mille opus or in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, but it does suggest the effect Deren had on others. It’s sad that Plath could exert that kind of power only posthumously, which puts it beyond the reach of any biopic.

Around the World in 1,085 Pages

From the Chicago Reader (December 1, 2006). — J.R.

Against the Day | Thomas Pynchon (Penguin Press)

Thomas Pynchon’s 1,085-page Against the Day does a lot of things. Some it does well, some it does badly — and some are impossible to judge this early, though scores of people are trying, in the press and on the Internet. And it may still be beyond the capacity of most of us to judge a year from now. In some respects Pynchon remains as difficult to evaluate as globalization with all its facets and ambiguities.

This passionately anticapitalist book, which most likely took a decade or more to write, follows dozens of characters over more than two decades, starting at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and ending, more or less, in Paris in the early 1920s. Meanwhile it skips across the planet several times, stopping in, among other places, the Balkans, central Asia, Cambridge, Gottingen, London, New York, Paris, Telluride, Venice, and Vienna. Pynchon includes labor history, mathematical equations, ambiguously overlapping stories about alchemy and early photography, and the tale of an anarchist coal miner named Webb Traverse — who specializes in dynamiting railroads and who’s tortured to death by hired guns working for a robber baron — and the lives of his children. Floating above everything — literally, inside a dirigible — is a crew of young adventurers called the Chums of Chance, who gallivant across the globe doing surveillance work for bosses they don’t know. They’re pop icons whose dashing exploits the other characters read about in hokey novels: “Think of them as America,” writes John Leonard in the Nation, the most helpful review of the book I’ve read so far. Their mascot, a dog named Pugnax, appears to be reading The Princess Casamassima, Henry James’s novel about anarchists.

Against the Day’s view of the late 19th century and early 20th evokes the vision of historian Eric Hobsbawm — an irreversible slide from civilization into barbarism as capitalists duke it out with anarchists, culminating though hardly ending in the apocalypse of World War I. “All history after that will belong properly to the history of hell,” one character predicts — or remembers. One reason this book is so difficult is that we can’t always distinguish between memory and prediction, between history and science fiction.

Pynchon depicts an era of technological advancement that encompasses light, air, water, sand, coal, dirt, electricity, photography, explosions, and even time travel — inhabitants of the future, including us readers, turn up in that earlier era, searching for refuge. The mix of science and pseudoscience can be bewildering, but it stopped seeming frivolous as soon as I conceded that all eras are stuck somewhere between these realms, even if it’s often hard to say exactly where. And though all the math and physics can be difficult, it’s edifying to track down Pynchon’s references — just as tracking down the sources of T.S. Eliot’s footnotes to The Waste Land once was. I’m happy, for example, that Pynchon led me to E.T. Bell’s classic Men of Mathematics.

Against the Day is also difficult because of the stray cultural information assumed on almost every page. Pynchon’s online blurb promises “cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.” Tesla turns up early, and his spirit — including his anarchist dream of free electricity for everyone — hovers over much of the action. But I completely missed Groucho until someone pointed out the 15-year-old Julius, a vaudevillian Frank Traverse briefly meets at a hotel in Cripple Creek, Colorado, rolling his eyes and “working his eyebrows.” And I’m still hunting for Lugosi. (I haven’t even managed to trace him in the more than 100 pages of entries on the book that have already accumulated on the anarchistic Wikipedia.)

Pynchon has lots of things to say about the world a century ago and a few things to say about the radical 30s, the countercultural 60s and 70s, and the present. There are plenty of references to drugs and the counterculture, but his strongest point about the 60s and 70s involves an extraordinary ménage à trois near the book’s end: terms such as gay, heterosexual, bisexual, sadomasochistic, and perverse are inadequate to describe the complex and tender dynamics between Cyprian Latewood, Yashmeen Halfcourt, and Reef Traverse. Like some of the impromptu alliances and makeshift families in the films of Jean Vigo (another anarchist), their miraculous bond becomes a declaration that people need to design their own relationships, not contort themselves to fit the conceptions of others.

Pynchon may be one of the few artists alive who knows and understands enough disparate data to make some sense of the past century and to connect dots all the way to the present. In his online blurb for Against the Day (curiously revised and unsigned on the jacket flap, suggesting capitalist intervention) he coyly notes, “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

Against the Day is easier to read as narrative than V., Gravity’s Rainbow, or Mason & Dixon, though the technical data are harder to process. It has less of a sense of urgency than The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland, and it’s more given to generic conventions, especially those of late westerns and early SF novels. And it’s the first Pynchon novel without a central figure or figures — apart from the well-named Traverses, who seem to spill randomly across the globe. The plot sprawls with a 19th-century roominess, directing us toward such apparently disconnected events as the collapse of Saint Mark’s campanile in Venice (1902), the Tunguska Event (or great Siberian explosion, 1908), and World War I — even if the war functions mainly as a structuring absence.

A formal shape gives meaning to each of Pynchon’s five preceding novels — two plot strands converging in a V, an oedipal quest, a single plot strand rising and falling like a rocket, a vinelike entanglement of destinies, a sandwich with a tangled ampersand between its two slices. I can’t yet discern such a shape in this book, but it probably has something to do with the capacity to be in two places at once, mirrors, and opposite sides of the globe.

Some reviewers and bloggers are clearly looking for another Gravity’s Rainbow (which is a bit like asking Shakespeare for a second Hamlet), but isn’t one enough? If anything, I was somewhat let down by Pynchon’s replays of familiar themes and motifs. A brief appearance by Pig Bodine on an Austrian ship, for instance, might have been better if Pynchon had bothered to make it funny. Other echoes, however compelling, suggest fixations more than preoccupations. In Gravity’s Rainbow the hero’s destiny is controlled by a corporation, which funds his Harvard education; in Against the Day Scarsdale Vibe, the corporate villain who gets Webb Traverse bumped off, sends Webb’s son Kit to Yale. Similarly, the strong sense of political and familial betrayal in Vineland when the hippie Frenesi becomes an informer for the feds is more than echoed in Against the Day when Lake Traverse marries one of her father’s killers — Frenesi’s father is Webb’s grandson, which makes this look like some sort of perverse family tradition.

It is, however, refreshing that Pynchon has finally replaced kazoos with ukuleles as his whimsical musical instrument of choice; his appreciation of kazoos achieved an apogee in his 1994 liner notes to Spiked! The Music of Spike Jones, Pynchon’s second-best piece of prose in the 90s, after Vineland. He’s also allowed more women characters to hang out with other women than in all his other books combined, and he’s included some interesting feminist critiques of macho anarchists.

People who can’t abide Pynchon often complain of a lack of three-dimensional characters. Yet many of the experiences he describes are as rich as the characters having them are thin. Some of the best passages in Gravity’s Rainbow have nothing to do with the plot, such as the gorgeous nine-page stretch when two relatively minor characters stop off one evening at a church and someone — we don’t know who — speaks for them and for the crowd inside: “It’s a long walk home tonight. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one — something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are.”

That sort of intensity is missing from most of Against the Day. Yet on my first trip through Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 I was also often stumped and frustrated. Many insights were slow in coming — I still don’t quite grasp the novel’s enigmatic references to the Kenosha Kid. Today I can compare notes with a community of fellow explicators, though sometimes the surfeit of information they offer threatens clarity.

There’s always been something disconcerting about the way quests in Pynchon’s novels dribble off into inconsequentiality, get diverted, or are simply forgotten. I think he uses these digressions to escape the tyranny of narrative and ideology — and to mirror and celebrate the way many people live their lives.

The momentary pleasures of reading Against the Day often come close to seeming random, and reconciling the book’s larger aims with all the jazzy improvs is no easy matter  — though that’s what Pynchon’s game is all about. In this novel one character can turn into a jelly doughnut — or at least he or somebody else can think he does. But it’s also true that an aside about European imperialism can suddenly turn into an arresting take on the lure of military life and that the novel’s preoccupation with light is used to describe two kinds of alienation, which can be seen as both American and contemporary: “At first glance, there might seem little to choose between the French Foreign Legion and the Belgian Force Publique. In both cases one ran away from one’s troubles to soldier in Africa. But where the one outfit envisaged desert penance in a surfeit of light, in radiant absolution, the other sought, in the gloom of the fetid forest, to embrace the opposite of atonement — to proclaim that the sum of one’s European sins, however disruptive, had been but facile apprenticeship to a brotherhood of the willfully lost. Whose faces, afterward, would prove as unrecallable as those of the natives.” Is Pynchon an expert on the differences between Foreign Legion and Force Publique fuckups? Probably not. More likely, this is the sort of wisdom that comes from having dropped out of college to serve in the navy, and the sadness of the concluding sentence fragment is emblematic of the sense of resignation that permeates this book.

For all his carefully guarded privacy, Pynchon’s introduction to his collection of early stories, Slow Learner (1984), imparts as much information about his quirks and working methods as any Paris Review interview. Crediting the 1899 Baedeker guidebook to Egypt as his main source for “Under the Rose,” he suggests that he’s relied on such crutches ever since, that reading spy fiction created in his young mind “a peculiar shadowy vision of the history preceding the two world wars,” and that “reading many Victorians” led to his sense of World War I as an “apocalyptic showdown.”

He also refers to his “perennial Bad Ear” when it comes to drafting dialogue, and in his own blurb for Against the Day he writes, “Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically.” That’s true even if you count English as obscure — or at least as obscure as Pynchon can make it. The dialogue shifts between the slang and idioms of two or three centuries, as if unable to make up its mind where it’s being spoken. But this confusion is partly the point: why else float a gag about an early-20th-century Viennese opera called The Burgher King?

It’s characteristic of some of our greatest as well as most obsessive writers, from Melville to Faulkner to Ginsberg, that the lines separating self-indulgence from generosity and eloquence from delirium aren’t always clear-cut. Excess is part of vision, and for better and for worse, Pynchon is given to it. But reading him slowly and carefully, thoughtfully and respectfully, has usually paid rich dividends, and a careful read of his longest and busiest novel will surely be worth the trouble.