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Double Dealing [THE FISHER KING]

From the Chicago Reader (September 27, 1991). — J.R.

THE FISHER KING

Directed by Terry Gilliam

Written by Richard LaGravenese

With Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, Michael Jeter, and Tom Waits.

Terry Gilliam’s elephantine yet breezy The Fisher King is a gripping new-age extravaganza, visually splendid and adroitly paced. But some gross conceptual cheating — presumably the fallout of commercial ambitions — makes the film a little hard to swallow. Gilliam’s fifth feature (he also directed Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) revels in duality — everything comes in twos — so it’s little wonder it indulges in both duplicity and outright doublethink; the film is also littered with internal “rhymes,” both significant and gratuitous. This duality may come partly from the fact that for the first time Gilliam has not written the script himself — it’s by talented newcomer Richard LaGravenese. At any rate the duality echoes Gilliam’s well-advertised desire to make this both an artistic and commercial success — to prove he can turn out a money-maker (after the box-office flop of Baron Munchausen) and yet retain his reputation as an overachiever in the grand style, a director known for his quirky humor and ravishing visual conceits.

The Fisher King certainly succeeds as grand entertainment, offering three of its leads — Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, and Mercedes Ruehl — the juiciest parts I can recall them ever having. And all three take full advantage of their opportunities, surprising and delighting us so often that they help us overlook a good bit of what makes this movie objectionable. But Amanda Plummer, though she’s certainly equal to the demands of her part, is assigned a cartoon character, the sort of role Rita Tushingham played in such 60s British movies as The Knack and A Taste of Honey. Lydia is a caricature, someone who never quite becomes a character the way the other leads do, largely because she’s given few chances to interact with them.

How does this movie’s doubling principle operate? For starters, the film centers on two crushed New Yorkers — a brash former radio talk-show host named Jack (Bridges) and a former medieval-history professor now living as a crazed street bum, Parry (Williams). Their lives are derailed by the same tragedy — a mass murder in a yuppie nightclub triggered by Jack’s idle tirade to a radio listener; Parry’s wife is one of the victims. Though the two men are initially strangers, they wind up saving each other’s souls.

Gilliam’s hallmark as a filmmaker is his wanton mixing of the metaphysical and the perfunctory, the ponderous and the silly, so it’s logical that the “rhymes” in the movie come in these varieties.

Ponderous: Just before Jack learns about the tragedy, he’s rehearsing a part in a TV sitcom whose key line is “Forgive me.” Three years later, when he’s a drunken lout shacked up with a loving video-store owner named Anne (Ruehl), he hears a sitcom actor deliver the same line on TV. Silly: The pretragedy Jack has a girlfriend, whom we briefly see drawing a nude male superimposed over a map of the United States so that Florida seems to be the man’s penis. Nearly two hours into the movie, when Parry has his first date with Lydia — a mousy publishing executive with whom he has long been infatuated — he tells her, “I have a hard-on for you the size of Florida.”

Perfunctory: At two separate times in the movie, Lydia accidentally knocks videos and romance novels off their racks, and twice she’s seen grappling helplessly with Chinese dumplings and chopsticks. Metaphysical: Unless my eyes deceived me, the same actor who plays the millionaire owner of a Fifth Avenue town house — Mel Bourne, who happens to be the film’s production designer — also plays one of Parry’s homeless chums.

This is no way exhausts the list, but finally there are two scenes that manage to be ponderous, silly, perfunctory, and metaphysical all at once. Twice Parry stretches out buck-naked in Central Park at night — the first time Jack looks on aghast, and the second time Jack happily joins him.

Meshes of the profound and the trivial seem especially appropriate to new-age movies; Field of Dreams and Ghost, for example, both seemed to specialize in them. At its worst “new age” might be seen as the streamlined dregs of 60s spirituality and progressive idealism strained through 70s narcissism and 80s narcolepsy; and at best, as the resurgence of a profound discontent with our physical and spiritual environment that promotes curiosity about history, myth, and other cultures. But if we define the thrust of new age as secularized religion and depoliticized counterculture, then Gilliam probably qualifies as our most gifted movie illustrator of that sensibility. He also comes across as the most deliriously confused. What basically puts this movie across, apart from the pacing, performances, and visual rhetoric, is its treatment of the now-popular new-age theme of Male Sensitivity — notions presumably related to those contained in Robert Bly’s best-seller, Iron John. Because Gilliam is so faithful to this theme, other aspects of the plot are left to fend for themselves, and in the process almost strangle on their own contradictions.

Oscillating almost hysterically between a genuine visionary ambition and the cynical determination to give a nonthinking audience every unreasoning wish fulfillment it desires (and then some), Gilliam exploits, inspires, degrades, and exalts the viewer by turn. To his credit, he never ceases to entertain us; to his discredit, he rarely gives us enough breathing space to figure out whether he’s actually enlightening us or merely picking our pockets while pretending to do so. (Readers who’d prefer to get their pockets picked in innocence are advised to check out of this review now.)

The initial premise of The Fisher King recalls the central idea of Talk Radio: the harangues of a vain, nasty-mouthed disc jockey seem not only to uncover but to provoke his listeners’ desperation and hate-filled insanity. But with the introduction of the second hero, Parry, the film broaches the grander and more universal themes of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The death of his wife has so traumatized Parry, we discover, that he’s developed the mad conviction he’s a medieval knight: he quests after the Holy Grail (a chalice he locates in a Fifth Avenue town house), gallantly worships Lydia from afar, and heroically protects the innocent and unprotected (including Jack) from scoundrels. We also discover that he’s currently camping out in the dank basement of the apartment house where he and his wife lived when he was still a history professor at Hunter — an arresting potential visual contrast, but we never see the flat he shared with her. Whenever he begins to recall his former identity, his memories are quickly blocked by infernal visions of a menacing, fire-breathing red knight on horseback — a corny, pretentious conceit that the movie trots out at every opportunity.

The Quixote theme is a beautiful and complex one, and there are brief moments — particularly after Jack seems to fall into the role of Sancho Panza, protecting Parry from danger while humoring his delusions — when the movie seems to have stumbled upon a rich vein of poetic tragicomedy. Some of the movie’s most charming moments seem to stem from Parry’s quixotic illusions, such as the conversion of Grand Central Station at rush hour into a ballroom of waltzing commuters. Unfortunately, the filmmakers lose the Quixote theme by thoroughly muddling the film’s notions of illusion and reality — by the end, it’s made to seem that most of Parry’s delusions may be half-true, hence not delusions. And the Fisher King myth that gives the film its title (a fool accidentally finds the Holy Grail the Fisher King has spent his life searching for) is addressed only briefly — its real purpose is to broach issues of male sensitivity and holy innocence, which the film also does not bother to examine.

In my mind, the extent of Don Quixote’s heroism is apparent only when he comes to his senses on his deathbed and renounces his former visions — a moment of gut-wrenching tragedy that transforms Cervantes’s novel into something far beyond barnyard slapstick and interpolated intrigues. Gilliam and LaGravenese ostensibly honor the concept of a deathbed recognition, but their commercial aims scuttle any possibility of real tragedy. Parry ultimately “comes to his senses,” but only in the sense of recalling his wife’s death. And this occurs only because Jack, to save his friend’s life, fulfills Parry’s quest by stealing the “Holy Grail” from the town house. In fact we fleetingly discover that, by burglarizing the house, Jack has unwittingly saved the life of its owner (”Accidental Suicide Thwarted by Midnight Prowler” reads the implausible New York Post headline). Shamelessly the movie hedges its bets, at once shattering and validating Parry’s delusions with a couple of timely miracles.

The double-dealing of the feel-good conclusion goes even further than this. Jack and Parry both start out as successful yuppies and lose their way through the same tragedy — significantly, a tragedy triggered by Jack’s denunciation of the yuppies who frequent the fancy night spot. Jack snarls that these people are incapable of love, that they can only “negotiate ‘love moments’” — a criticism that clearly applies to Jack himself before and after the tragedy. (Whether or not it applied to Parry is left unclear.)

After Jack finds redemption through caring for Parry, he’s primed to become a yuppie again; he calls his agent, then visits a TV producer to discuss appearing in a sitcom about the homeless called Home Free. “It’s a weekly comedy about the homeless but it’s not depressing in any way,” says the producer — the filmmakers’ clear and ironic acknowledgment of the agenda of The Fisher King itself. On his way into the meeting, Jack refuses to notice or help a street person being dragged away by a hostile guard — the same crazed drag queen (Michael Jeter) who had previously been a comrade to him and Parry. Then, in the middle of the producer’s spiel, Jack rushes back down to the street to find his former friend, who by now has disappeared.

Fleetingly — but significantly — this episode acknowledges that Jack’s “redemption” consists mostly of the opportunity to become once again the public scumbag he used to be (when we also saw him blithely ignoring a street person). But having made this point, the movie quickly encourages us to forget it. A far more important part of Jack’s spiritual agenda is finding the ability to tell his girlfriend that he loves her; this noble task makes the issue of whether or not he’s a public scumbag seem secondary. (A hallmark of new-age morality is that personal development is privileged over social conscience: Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ succinctly expresses this philosophy in terms of Jesus’ life.)

The movie similarly clouds what is entailed by Parry’s “redemption” — in this case, a return to relative sanity by acknowledging his wife’s death. Will he go back to teaching history, continue his crazed street life, or devise some unexplained and unimaginable synthesis of the two? It’s essential to the giddy happy ending that we haven’t a clue how either Jack or Parry is going to negotiate his future “love moments.” By this time, within the confines of an ideally pastoral, nonviolent, and empty nighttime Central Park, the rest of the world has helpfully simplified itself into a nonhuman spectacle existing exclusively for the characters’ consumption — and for ours.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

John Cassavetes’s first crime thriller (Gloria was the second), a post-noir masterpiece, failed miserably at the box office when it was first released in 1976; two years later, he released this recut, shorter, and equally good version, which didn’t fare much better. Actually more a personal and deeply felt character study than a routine action picture, it follows the last days of Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara at his very best), the charismatic owner of an LA strip joint who recklessly gambles his way into such debt with the mob that he has to bump off a Chinese bookie to settle his accounts. In many respects the film serves as a summation of Cassavetes’s view of what life is all about. In fact what makes the tragicomic character of Cosmo so moving is that Cassavetes regarded him as his alter ego–the proud impresario and father figure of a tattered show-biz collective (read Cassavetes’s actors and filmmaking crew) who must compromise his ethics to keep his little family afloat (read Cassavetes’s career as a Hollywood actor). Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn’t catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes’s doom-ridden comedy-drama. With fine performances by Timothy Agoglia Carey, Seymour Cassel, Azizi Johari, Meade Roberts, and Alice Friedland. (Music Box, Friday through Thursday, September 27 through October 3)

Rambling Rose

During the Depression, a sexy orphaned teenager (Laura Dern) from a sharecropper family moves in with a well-to-do southern family (including Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Lukas Haas) to take care of the kids and help with the housework. Adapted by Calder Willingham from his own autobiographical novel and directed by Martha Coolidge (Valley Girl), this is a beautifully realized, finely felt period piece with strong characters and nuanced performances (all four of the leads shine) and an acute sense of the diverse incursions that female sexuality makes on southern gentility. While the film may not be fully achieved in every particular–John Heard is a mite awkward as the grown-up son in the film’s framing story–the ensemble playing and the overall attention to detail are first-rate. (Lincoln Village, Water Tower, Norridge, Old Orchard, Webster Place, Ford City)

Love Films: A Cassavetes Retrospective

From the Chicago Reader (September 20, 1991); reprinted in Placing Movies. — J.R.

I have noticed that people who were loved or felt they were loved seemed to lead fuller, happier lives. All of my own work in theater and film has been concerned with varying themes of this love.

A Woman of Mystery has to do with an unexplored segment of our society, referred to as the homeless, bag ladies, winos, bums — labels that are much easier for the public to deal with than the individual.

It has been difficult to explore this particular woman of mystery. She is not only homeless (if homeless means without the comfort of love) but she is nameless, without the practical application of social security, or any other identity. Alone, she clings to her baggages on the street.

Our heroine enters into a series of encounters that challenge her isolation, her inability to communicate. A young woman passerby seems to feel that this woman with the suitcases is the reincarnation of her dead mother. An emotional dismissal of the younger woman causes the woman’s memory to play tricks on her. A young man seems to touch unexplained dependency in her and a clerk at a travel bureau gets dangerously close to exchanging love.

Change continues as the woman comes forward, attempting sociability. But, in the end, normal feelings of affection are too difficult to return to. The woman has been permanently disabled by the long discontinuance of feelings of love.

These are John Cassavetes’s program notes to his last realized work — an awesome three-act play starring Gena Rowlands and Carol Kane that he wrote and directed, and that I was lucky enough to see. It was performed in a small theater in Beverly Hills for two weeks during the summer of 1987; considering the size of the auditorium, I can’t imagine many people saw it. It was obviously a production done for love rather than money, and its treatment of the homeless couldn’t be described as an act of either condescension or abstract piety. Terrifyingly human, tragic and mysterious, it revolved around both the heroine’s lost identity — literally, her lack of definition — and the difficulty others, including the audience, had making contact with her. Actual street people — including some musicians, a stand-up comic, and a poet–came onstage and performed during the intermissions, and at no point did the actors seem out of step with them.

Basic questions about love, identity, and definition are at the root of all of Cassavetes’s work as a filmmaker, and it somehow seems appropriate that the sharpest, starkest posing of those questions came at the very beginning and at the very end of his career. In his ground-breaking first feature, Shadows (1959), these questions center on two brothers and a sister who live together in Manhattan. The older brother, a dark-skinned black named Hugh (Hugh Hurd), is the only one of the three who has a pretty clear sense of who he is, even though this happens to be a pretty terrible (though serious) nightclub crooner. His lighter-skinned younger siblings, Ben (Ben Carruthers) and Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), are much less centered, in part because they both “pass” for white; Ben “passes” consciously, Lelia apparently unwittingly, and neither can be said to have a fully fixed identity. After Lelia loses her virginity to a young white seducer, he escorts her home, where he’s taken aback when he sees her greet Hugh as her brother. In one fell swoop her sense of self is devastated by her seducer’s shock and discomfort. Virtually none of this is discussed or “explained” in the dialogue; apart from a fleeting reference by Hugh to “a problem of the races,” the entire drama is played out in the faces and behavior of the actors, with a subtlety and sensitivity that still bring me to tears every time I see the film.

Shadows started out as an improvisation on this scene in Cassavetes’s New York acting workshop. Talk-show host Jean Shepherd happened to be visiting and was so impressed that he invited Cassavetes onto his late-night show, Night People, during which Cassavetes brashly proposed that interested listeners send in one dollar apiece to finance a film; $2,500 was collected within a week. After raising additional funds, Cassavetes shot a free-form, hour-long feature that was screened three times at midnight, for no admission, to about 2,000 people, and that was declared a masterpiece of the “New American Cinema” by critic Jonas Mekas. But Cassavetes failed to find a distributor, so he shot eight additional scenes and edited a new 85-minute version that had more conventional continuity and narrative structure; it opened in 1961 and is the only version of Shadows that survives today (though Mekas, for one, regards it as inferior to the original). The two versions cost a total of $40,000, and together they launched a revolution in American independent film that is still going on.

Lured to Hollywood by a studio contract, Cassavetes directed two more pictures with mixed results, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963); the second of these was so altered by producer Stanley Kramer that Cassavetes virtually disowned it. Returning to maverick independence with a vengeance, he next made Faces (1968), the success of which led to two more studio deals (Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz) over which he had full control and final cut. They were followed by three features he distributed himself: A Woman Under the Influence (1975), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, rereleased in a shorter version in 1978), and Opening Night (1978); only the first of these was a commercial success — the other two were resounding commercial failures and barely circulated. Then came two features done for other companies, Gloria (1980) and Love Streams (1984), which did somewhat better, but not well enough to finance any more pictures. (An abortive experience taking over the direction of Big Trouble [1986], a comedy that was already in production and was subsequently recut by the producer, doesn’t really qualify as part of the Cassavetes oeuvre.) The remainder of Cassavetes’s “independent” activity was his small-scale theater work in Los Angeles: East/West Game, which he wrote and directed in 1980; three more plays in 1981, two of which were written by Ted Allan (including Love Streams, the basis of Cassavetes’s last film); and A Woman of Mystery in 1987.

Tragically but predictably, now that John Cassavetes is dead it’s become possible, even fashionable, to like his movies again. Indeed, I suspect that the Music Box’s five-week retrospective that starts this week –encompassing all the features Cassavetes owned — will be much better attended than was the Film Center’s retrospective five years ago. With the exception of Love Streams, all of his major works are being shown, and there are no finer works in the American independent narrative cinema.

That this sort of recognition can take place only after Cassavetes’s death means that his work is only a fraction of the size it would have been if critics and audiences had been more attuned to what he was up to. Speaking for myself as well as for most of my colleagues, we were usually wrong about Cassavetes –even when we wrote in support of his work, which was seldom often enough. Admittedly, he didn’t help us out all that much, being one of the least articulate major filmmakers when it came to describing the methodology and meanings of his work; his lack of clarity or eloquence often made him resemble one of his characters. But the task of verbalizing essentially nonverbal film experiences generally defeated us.

We assumed, quite wrongly, that Cassavetes was a primitive realist who depended mainly on improvisation from his actors, but he was neither primitive nor a realist in any usual sense, and most of the dialogue in his movies after Shadows was written by him. We often assumed that the dialogue was improvised because it sounded spontaneous, and we often assumed that the stories and characters were supposed to be “realistic” because the shooting style gave the films a documentary look. These false impressions were undoubtedly furthered by the fact that Shadows declared itself to be an “improvisation” in its final credits (mainly, it seems, because the actors generated most of the dialogue) and aimed for a kind of verisimilitude in relation to its milieu (not always successfully, as an awkwardly conceived “literary” party reveals). In addition, Faces, by concentrating on certain forms of middle-class behavior that had been overlooked by Hollywood — particularly the compulsive laughter that grew out of sexual embarrassment  – made it seem realistic to many people when it came out in 1968. Comparable elements cropped up in Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and A Woman Under the Influence, but it can be argued that by the mid-70s Cassavetes had shifted almost entirely into a mythological universe controlled more by notions about genre (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Gloria) and personality (Opening Night and Love Streams) than by superficial concerns with social accuracy. Most critics, still stuck in their earlier formulations, tended to be baffled by this development, though a closer look at some of the earlier works might have revealed what was in store.

The central location of Faces – the home of a middle-class couple in a state of crisis — was the house that Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, and their children lived in; it was used again as the central location in Love Streams. No effort seems to have been made to redecorate or refurnish it to suit the tastes of the middle-class couple in Faces, and nothing about it — neither the art and signed photographs framed on the walls nor the books on the shelves — rings true for these characters. Such indifference to setting is not a virtue, but given the film’s concentration on the actors’ faces, it can’t really be considered a serious flaw; Cassavetes clearly regarded it as irrelevant or at least secondary.

Faces opens with a private screening of a film in the office of the hero (John Marley), an insurance executive, who is surrounded by business associates. The lights in the screening room fade and the credits for Faces appear, implying that these people are watching the movie that follows, a movie about themselves. But the remainder of the film never alludes to this screening, and if we don’t emerge from the film totally confused, we probably conclude that the film the business associates saw wasn’t Faces but an industrial short or some commercial relating to insurance.

The title heroine in the galvanizing A Woman Under the Influence, a working-class housewife and mother played by Gena Rowlands, has a serious nervous breakdown and is committed to an institution for six months. There’s a large party at her house to welcome her back when she’s released, but not once is it suggested that her devoted husband (Peter Falk), their kids, or any of her friends or other relatives has been to visit her during her half year away.

Comparable distractions and irrelevancies crop up in most of the other movies, and they can’t be wished away. But in order to understand what Cassavetes is doing, one has to get beyond them. His cinema is centered almost exclusively on actors and scenes; questions about settings, events and durations between scenes, and most of the other forms of narrative glue and “filling” (or “stuffing”) that we expect from fiction films to establish the characters and their milieus are generally given short shrift. Disdaining exposition, Cassavetes’s movies generally plunge us into the world of their characters without the usual signposts and road maps, forcing us to flounder for a while along with the characters. Existentially speaking, his movies are about what they show and what we see and hear, not about theoretical or actual “background” material that takes place between or beyond the shots. But to accept this principle, we have to adjust the expectations we bring to most films.

Another potential obstacle needs to be brought up. In spite of — or should I say because of? — their radical humanism, Cassavetes’s films are not “politically correct.” According to David E. James in Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, the casting of a white actress in the part of Lelia in Shadows constitutes an ethical and aesthetic cop-out that invalidates the drama; given the beauty and power of Lelia Goldoni’s performance, I must confess this argument made me want to throw James’s book against the wall. However, the brutality with which women are often treated in Husbands — which the film’s bullying macho ambience often seems to endorse (or at least tolerate) more than criticize — turned me against Cassavetes for a number of years, and I still haven’t resolved whether this description of the film qualifies as a misreading. (Peter Bogdanovich, for one, has defended Husbands as “the first, and in many ways still the most trenchant and honest, American look at the overwhelming alienation and homelessness which the hypocritical sexual revolution was by then [1970] leaving in its wake.”) Conversely, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which I’ve always cherished as Cassavetes’s testament –an ironic self-portrait starring Ben Gazzara as Cosmo Vitelli, the pathetic, lamebrained, and defeated (yet indefatigably stylish, courageous, and noble) owner of a Los Angeles strip joint — has been denounced by a feminist friend of mine as the worst kind of patriarchal and sexist sentimental slop. And from the point of view of political correctness, I suppose she could be right. I doubt, however, that she could make the same argument about Gloria — a joyously subversive reworking of the gangster film that is arguably as feminist as Thelma and Louise (only Gloria and Love Streams are available on video).

If, however, we consider the stranglehold that “political correctness” of various persuasions currently has on the media — fostering attitudes that would probably make a movie like Shadows impossible to finance today — I think Cassavetes’s work warrants a closer look. The complete absence of villains and the touching celebration of various kinds of human sweetness and affection — exemplified by such wonderful characters as Hugh’s manager (Rupert Crosse) in Shadows, a disco hustler (Seymour Cassel) in Faces, and even Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – has a great deal to do with what keeps his films vital and powerful. If Cassavetes’s radical humanism challenges some of our cherished notions about appropriate role models, perhaps that challenge makes it even more valuable in the long run. For all their hectoring anti-intellectualism, his movies are frequently object lessons in how we might behave more decently and caringly toward one another. (I first discovered Shadows when I was a high school senior who had been reading J.D. Salinger’s Glass family stories, and it struck me then — as it does today, having seen Shadows perhaps a dozen times since — that the interactions between the siblings in Cassavetes’s story are far warmer than those between Salinger’s family of elitists, whose love always seemed predicated on principles of snobbish exclusion.)

While Cassavetes has been one of the most influential of all American independents — having marked the works of directors as different as Bogdanovich, Jean Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard (who has dedicated two works to him), Henry Jaglom, Elaine May, Rob Nilsson, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette, and Martin Scorsese, among many others — I can think of only one other American independent writer-director-actor who is conceptually comparable to him: Orson Welles. Considering the extreme disparity between these directors in terms of visual and cultural style, a connection may seem unlikely, but it actually runs quite deep. And it isn’t surprising to hear that Welles and Cassavetes were great admirers of each other’s work.

Having just completed the editing for publication of a book-length interview with Welles, I’ve been struck by the degree to which Welles considered the actor rather than the director to be the key figure in filmmaking — an attitude Cassavetes clearly shared. It might even be said that “acting” was the subject of all of their films — not merely because of their passionate interest in actors, but also because their view of human nature and behavior had a lot to do with performance and the notion that everyone is an actor. (Both directors often recruited their actors from highly unlikely places. The extraordinary Lynn Carlin, for example, was working as a secretary for the then-unknown Robert Altman — and had been hired briefly to type the original script of Faces — when Cassavetes recruited her to be the film’s lead.)

For Cassavetes, acting is merely a heightened form of the social activity we all pursue in our various transactions with the world. This idea is the literal concern of Opening Night, which focuses on the crises experienced by a troubled stage actress (Gena Rowlands) and the other actors (including Cassavetes) she performs with; but it’s no less important in the role-playing highlighted in his other films. Consider the carefully manufactured facades of most of the leading characters in Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence (especially the title heroine), and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie – and the confusions and clarifications about their identities that arise when those facades are chipped away–and you have the essential subjects of all four films.

The martyrdom of Cassavetes — like that of Welles before him — seems to be the obligatory price exacted in this country for working outside the methods and assumptions of the industry. (Both directors, significantly, have received much more recognition for their independent efforts abroad than in this country.) This martyrdom also has something to do with the “scandal” of caring more about the work itself than about the financial reward to be gained from it. What probably elicited the most scorn in Hollywood, where both men lived, was their willingness to subsidize their own low-budget productions with the money made from their more routine work as actors–something both were usually forced to do in order to make movies at all.

We’re still living with the legacy of that martyrdom, and it’s difficult to calculate the size of our loss. (What kind of film culture would we have today if we had as many movies by Welles and Cassavetes as we have by Woody Allen? The very notion staggers the imagination.) Fortunately, the size and power of what we have is still enormous. And now that we have the evidence of Cassavetes’s genius again before us — films that have far too long been unavailable and neglected — we owe it to ourselves to discover what his art and vision were all about.

The Family That Preys Together (THE GODATHER PART III)

From the Chicago Reader (January 18, 1991). — J.R.

THE GODFATHER PART III

*** (A must-see)

Directed By Francis Ford Coppola

Written by Mario Puzo and Coppola

With Al Pacino, Andy Garcia, Sofia Coppola, Eli Wallach, Talia Shire, Diane Keaton, and Joe Mantegna.

Let’s agree from the outset that the conclusion of the Godfather trilogy is not giving audiences everything that they expected based on the two previous installments. Shorter at 160 minutes than either of the first two parts, it proceeds in fits and starts, without the sustained narrative sweep of the first or the comprehensive historical spread of the second. Overall, there is less of a continuous story line (and less lucidity, coherence, and conviction regarding what plot there is), less violence, and less dramatic conflict; the quality of the performances is more variable; the settings are less memorable. There are even moments of risible implausibility. (Suffering insulin shock while visiting Cardinal Lamberto in a garden, Michael Corleone requests something sweet, and a pitcher of orange juice appears within seconds; and the virtuoso climactic sequence at the opera ultimately strains credibility by drawing together too many events at once.)

But conceptually and morally, one can argue that The Godfather Part III is superior to the two films in the Corleone family saga that preceded it. If it’s a failure, it’s a failure of a particularly noble kind.

Both earlier parts are grand entertainments predicated for the most part on two conflicting emotions — a savoring of violence, crime, and duplicity and remorse about the same three things. These attitudes are played off against each other not as a dialectic but as two possible ways of responding to the material, a contradiction that Coppola’s style exalts to epic proportions. It’s a method that can be traced all the way back to the script Coppola coauthored for Patton (1970), a film that allows one to feel either respectfully awed or simply appalled by its title character — or both things in tandem. The same sort of double-dealing can be discerned in other ambitious Coppola films as well — Apocalypse Now, which managed to pitch its passionate arguments about the U.S. military presence in Vietnam to hawks as well as doves, catering to the biases of both factions without alienating many people on either side (a sleight of hand that probably deserved a special Oscar all its own), and The Conversation, a thriller about surveillance that successfully made its audience feel simultaneously complicitous, guilty, and morally disapproving about the hero’s snooping.

All of these films are undeniably powerful, even in their overreaching, but part of what makes them so dramatically effective is their capacity to wallow in their own ambivalence and persuade us to wallow along with them. Enhancing this process is a notion they present of America itself as a morally ambiguous entity — dark and monumental, brooding and bloody, exalted and tainted — which makes these films seem like even larger and more ambitious statements about their respective subjects. By glamorizing both moral offenses and the guilt that follows them, these movies encourage us to feel narcissistic at the same time that they qualify as genuine moral inquiries. Considering the degree of breast-beating, soul-searching, and teeth gnashing in these movies — which is what they exhibit, encourage, and, in the final analysis, glorify — they’re epics tailor-made for the most blinkered and self-righteous among us. (Is it any wonder that Patton is Richard Nixon’s favorite movie?)

Even more guilt is present in The Godfather Part III than in its two predecessors, but this time it is merely acknowledged, not celebrated, and the crimes that occasion it are only memories — crimes that are recalled and discussed but not recapitulated in flashbacks. Emotionally speaking, these crimes boil down to one above all — Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) having ordered his own brother Fredo (John Cazale) killed for participating in a plot against him near the end of part two. In most respects the new film is devoted to playing out the full implications of that remembered act.

Part three, set in 1979-’80 (and featuring some fanciful anachronisms in relation to the death of Pope Paul VI), has its own eruptions of violence, but none of them is directly instigated by Michael. More important, with the exception of a few killings committed by Michael’s illegitimate nephew Vincent (Andy Garcia) — carried out partially in response to attempts on his own life — it doesn’t seem like the film is offering any of them as spectacles to be savored.

The first two parts charted the price of success — the moral cost of the Corleone family’s amassing its fortune and power through crimes and vendettas — while the third part documents a series of failures. There is the failure of Michael to erase or make up for his former sins, including the murder of Fredo, or to become legitimate through charity and new business investments. His former gambling and drug interests are now controlled by a thug named Joey Zasa, played with caustic brilliance by Joe Mantegna; the fact that Zasa is Vincent’s employer at the beginning of the film and goes to Michael for help in a dispute with the unruly nephew shows us at the outset that Michael’s break with his criminal past is less complete than he would like to imagine. Beyond that is the failure of America itself to maintain its dominance in the world market, a subtext of the film as a whole. Finally, there is Michael’s failure to protect and nurture his own family and to steer Vincent along a less violent path than his own; and because family itself remains the highest value in the Godfather saga — the ultimate justification for Michael’s past crimes — this crowning failure marks the trilogy as a whole as a tragedy.

Coppola has represented this tragedy in highly personal and even quasi-autobiographical terms. Theoretically, this is an approach that could have made the conclusion even more pretentious than its predecessors, but in fact it winds up doing the reverse. Because The Godfather Part III is conceived more in relation to Greek tragedy than in relation to the imponderables of Shakespearean melodrama, its scale is relatively life-size. (As a friend points out, the film is about the “fall of the House of Corleone.”) Shakespeare often suggests intimidating, heavy-duty culture; perhaps the relative simplicity and starkness of Greek tragedy and its relative unfamiliarity to contemporary movie audiences is what yields part three’s smaller scale.

To my mind, the single most impressive aspect of the new film is Pacino’s performance. In order to describe what makes it so different from his previous performances as Michael Corleone, it’s necessary to refer to Manny Farber’s 1962 essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.”

Farber’s essay, which deals with contemporary painting as well as movies, is a polemic against self- importance and monumentality, which he calls “white elephant art,” and for a less self-conscious and more low-key approach to creativity, which he calls “termite art”: “Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators (Laurel and Hardy, the team of Howard Hawks and William Faulkner operating on the first half of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep) seem to have no ambition towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

From most points of view, the Godfather saga as a whole is a prime example of white elephant art (what Farber calls “the idea of art as an expensive hunk of well-regulated area, both logical and magical”) — a work of posturing self-importance that reached its apogee in part two. The white elephant aspect was epitomized in the first extended scene — Nino Rota’s ubiquitous waltz theme is played on a church organ during a communion, implying that the Catholic church is the exclusive property of Coppola, Paramount, and Gulf & Western — but it was more generally present in Pacino’s grandstanding performance as a figure of decaying royalty a la Shakespeare’s Richard III. Pauline Kael accurately described “the dramatic charge” of that opening shot as “Shakespearean,” and there was reason to wonder whether such a characterization — which was clearly already present in the film’s overall conception — might have gone to Pacino’s head. Not long afterward, I had the misfortune to see Pacino actually play Richard III in costume on Broadway, with a Bronx accent, in a performance of such misguided pomposity that I left during the intermission.

But something important and interesting has happened to Pacino as an actor in the interim. For me, the difference was first signaled by his comeback as a shambling police detective in the otherwise routine Sea of Love, a performance that seemed so much the reverse of his former putting-on-of-airs in The Godfather, Part Two (and Richard III) that one could read it as a bruising critique of the earlier film, just as Marlon Brando’s part in The Freshman was a critique of his former showing-off as Vito Corleone in the original Godfather. Kael praised Pacino in The Godfather, Part Two for giving “an almost immobile performance,” but the remarkable thing about his acting in Sea of Love was that it was both small-scale and in continual busy motion, as if he were offering an unending string of “termite” annotations on his character — little commentaries and sidelong observations — without ever trying to overwhelm either the audience or the story with any of them. What’s so wonderful about his performance in The Godfather Part III is that it brings the same sort of termite intelligence to the white elephant subject of Michael Corleone in his 60s — a panoply of local observations about a defeated patriarch that has the effect of scaling down both the character and the film that surrounds him.

Admittedly, various production stories about part three inform us that Coppola and/or Pacino read a lot of Shakespeare (King Lear, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet) and Greek tragedy while preparing the film, and Jack Kroll noted recently in Newsweek that Michael’s diabetic seizures were inspired by the “mad” scenes of Lear and Hamlet. But Kroll also quotes Pacino as saying, “As much as I love Shakespeare, I couldn’t really connect it to my role. I was [too] busy figuring out how to get from one side of the room to another” — a succinct definition of termite acting that the film admirably illustrates.

As noted above, the performances in the film are extremely variable; they run all the way from Pacino’s termite performance in a white elephant part to Andy Garcia’s charismatic white elephant performance in a white elephant part to Eli Wallach’s white elephant performance in a termite part. (As Don Altobello, a rival godfather and apparent friend of the Corleones, Wallach brings out an arsenal of show-off Method mannerisms designed to illustrate the wily machinations of a crafty old Sicilian codger.)

There’s also the much-contested nonperformance of Coppola’s daughter Sofia in a central role as Michael’s daughter Mary, which winds up serving a function in the film that’s almost as crucial as Pacino’s in scaling the work down to human (from superhuman) dimensions. Pacino expends all of his considerable talent in suggesting the behavior and presence of a real person; Sofia Coppola, by contrast, simply is a real person. Consequently all the scenes between these two actors have a particular poignancy and charge; the two disparate versions of normalcy are allowed to interact and commingle, learning from one another as they proceed. By helping keep the film within hailing distance of reality, Sofia Coppola becomes the focus of the film’s conscience in more ways than one. She also becomes the focal point of every scene in which she figures; she lacks obvious movie-star glamour but she offers a presence, which is the key to both Coppola’s personal approach to the material and — perhaps another version of the same thing — our sense of a real world persisting beyond the borders of the film’s. (By contrast, Diane Keaton’s awkward performance as Michael’s estranged wife Kay is a flaw with fewer compensations; the scenes of Michael and Kay’s semireconciliation tend to fall flat because the two actors seem stranded in separate movies.)

One can trace an increasing effort in the trilogy to mete out retribution for the Corleones’ past violent acts. In his recent trivia book The Godfather Companion, Peter Biskind reports that the tendency of audiences to “root for” the Corleones in part one (at the screening I attended during the film’s initial run in New York, cheers and applause greeted Michael’s lie to his wife in the closing scene about his murderous activities) drove Coppola to adopt a somewhat different strategy in part two. Coppola says, “A realistic movie on the Mafia could not be made out of [Mario] Puzo’s book. It’s fairy tale. What I tried to do in Part II is at least turn it around to a very harsh ending. This time I really set out to punish Michael. At the end, he’s prematurely old, almost syphilitic, like Dorian Gray. I don’t think anyone in the theater can envy him.”

It’s debatable whether this strategy worked. If the initial Godfather made crime so alluring that the box office of the New York theater where it opened was robbed during its premiere run — ticket prices had just been raised, and the robbers made off with $13,000 after shooting the manager in the arm — the identification of Michael with Richard III in The Godfather, Part Two didn’t help matters much. It made him enviable in the sense of seeming mythically omnipotent — tragically flawed, perhaps, and undeniably long in the tooth, but still a figure of such superhuman grandeur that he couldn’t easily be pitied, much less scorned. In the final analysis, the Godfather myth may have been too seductive and too potent to allow any revisionist measures on Coppola’s part to demystify it. (Violent crime also greeted the premiere of part three in a suburban New York theater, in the form of a shoot-out between two rival gangs that wounded many innocent bystanders. One could hypothesize that the relative absence of violence in part three might have been the operative factor here — frustrated expectations perhaps provoking the outburst — in which case no solution Coppola might have come up with would have been adequate to the task.)

One way of dealing with this problem, of course, is to view Michael as a stand-in for Coppola himself — sick about the violence that led to his fame and power and eager to rid himself of it, but finally unable to, just as Coppola himself finally capitulated when he agreed to make the film at all. Certainly much of Michael’s dialogue throughout the film suggests this close identification: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” “I feel like I’m getting wiser now. When I’m dead, I’m gonna be really smart.” And finally, in a self-conscious capper that prepares us for the final sequence: “We’re in Sicily, it’s opera.” (The opera in question, attended by the Corleones in Palermo because it features the debut of Michael’s son Anthony, is Pietro Mascagni’s celebrated one-act Cavalleria rusticana, which premiered exactly a century ago. The opera’s ear-biting scene, echoed in an incident early in part three, is perhaps its only direct thematic relevance; while what we see of the opera resembles a rural passion play, it’s actually a romantic melodrama. A much closer thematic parallel to the film’s plot is offered in a Sicilian puppet show Vincent and Mary watch earlier in the movie.)

The dramatic centerpiece of expression for Michael’s guilt is the extraordinary scene where he confesses his sins to Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone), and the fact that Lamberto grants him absolution only underlines the fact that the film itself refuses to. (One of the more remarkable aspects of the film is that the corruption of the Catholic church becomes incidental rather than central to its concerns — merely one facet of the criminality of international and multinational capitalism that Michael’s new business investments force him to confront.) The tragic stalemate Michael faces is that his desire to protect his family eventually and necessarily entails murder, either by himself or by someone else; and once he relinquishes his own role as godfather to Vincent — who, along with Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), still believes in bloody vendettas for their own sake — the murder expands in all directions until it ultimately swallows up his only reasons for staying alive. Whether his choice of Vincent as his successor becomes a reversion to crime by proxy or a relinquishment of responsibility is an academic question, because the end result is the same. According to the film’s metaphysics, the Family ultimately has more staying power than the family; but because the Family is itself modeled on the family, and has to perpetuate violence in order to keep itself going, its survival can paradoxically be bought only through self-annihilation.

At the other end of the social scale from the Godfather trilogy in terms of cultural prestige is George Romero’s Dead trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead). As implausible as it may seem, the parallels between these two trilogies by Italian American Catholic filmmakers are too striking to pass over.

Both trilogies started out as relatively straightforward genre pieces — gangster film and horror film. But the overwhelming critical and popular responses that greeted the first parts made the filmmakers strive for something bigger in the second parts: self-conscious allegorical diagnoses of the American soul. (Romero went further in the direction of satire about consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, while Coppola went deeper into modalities of Shakespearean guilt and Rembrandtian gloom in The Godfather, Part Two.) Both trilogies are centrally concerned with family units under siege (although in Day of the Dead, the literal family is supplanted by a handful of nonzombie human survivors — a makeshift family at best), with increasingly apocalyptic implications, and both are concerned with the darker implications of capitalism as it corrodes familial safety and stability, from within as well as from without.

Both trilogies, moreover, conclude with films that are philosophical and metaphysical in their implications. Yet the ironic message that’s an important subtext of the Godfather trilogy — the family that preys together stays together — has bearing on the Dead trilogy as well, although there it relates more to the preying zombies than to the putative heroes who attempt to hold the zombies at bay. In the Godfather films, the family that both preys and stays together ultimately self-destructs. But the less heroic scavengers and predators — Vincent and Connie in The Godfather Part III, the zombies in Day of the Dead — remain. Whether they prevail is another matter, because the bounty that they finally win is in ruins and ashes.