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Beyond Bush-Bashing [BOB ROBERTS]

From the Chicago Reader (September 25, 1992). — J.R.

BOB ROBERTS

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Tim Robbins

With Robbins, Giancarlo Esposito, Ray Wise, Gore Vidal, Alan Rickman, Bob Balaban, John Cusack, Susan Sarandon, Peter Gallagher, James Spader, and Fred Ward.

With Unforgiven unexpectedly topping the box office charts and Bush bashing so popular now that even my favorite comic book, USA Today, seems to do it daily, this appears to be the season of demystification. But I wonder how far the public is prepared to take this process. Since it premiered at the Cannes film festival four months ago, I’ve been looking forward to Tim Robbins’s directorial debut, described as an unbridled attack on the Republican glibness and greed of the past dozen years. Clearly the climate is ripe for some good old-fashioned muckraking. But how much of this involves a genuine change in national perception, and how much is it a merely seasonal media construction? As pleased as I am at the media’s apparent recognition of some of Bush’s crimes, it’s hard for me to understand how this squares with the media’s former position that these crimes never took place (as with Iran-contra) or didn’t matter (as with the savings-and-loan scandal) or were heroic deeds showing both restraint and maturity (as with the slaughter in the Persian Gulf). It’s like squaring the public perception of Twin Peaks the miniseries in the spring of 1990 with that of Twin Peaks the movie in the autumn of 1992: the series was the hottest thing on TV, of vital interest to everyone; the movie was the biggest late-summer flop, of almost no interest to anyone. Of course one could argue that the original Twin Peaks pilot was worthy of Luis Bunuel and the new movie isn’t even up to minor Clive Barker — just as one could easily stipulate that Bush went from being Winston Churchill in the spring of 1991 to Gerald Ford five seasons later — but I would argue that the difference between the old and new models in each case is a lot less pronounced than most people claim.

In the final analysis, what we may need the most in such matters is neither rubber stamping nor mechanical dismissal but something in between — understanding, not attitudinizing. Bob Roberts is currently being heralded as a mechanical dismissal of a certain kind of rubber-stamping that helps us all to attitudinize to our heart’s content, but personally, I’d rather celebrate it for what it does for our understanding. Which is a lot.

“Responsible journalism is objective,” declares Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins), a slick, wealthy 35-year-old conservative campaigning across Pennsylvania in the fall of 1990 (shortly before the war in the Persian Gulf) for a seat in the U.S. Senate. “This is a national security state,” remarks Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal), the old-fashioned 66-year-old liberal incumbent Roberts is trying to unseat. “If you want the truth in this country, you have to seek it out,” says Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito), a paranoid but perceptive journalist bent on exposing Roberts’s part in a scam that involved both S and Ls and drug running. But for those who want the truth, objective or otherwise, about the stunning if uneven Bob Roberts, it’s worth recalling F. Scott Fitzgerald’s observation that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind and still be able to function.

As I see it, the real news about this movie is that Robbins as a writer-director has a first-rate intelligence as a satirist, which means that even though Bob Roberts consists of nothing but sound bites, Robbins himself doesn’t think in sound bites. To hear most reviewers tell it, Robbins’s satirical intelligence goes no deeper than the Bush bashing that has become so fashionable recently, and while I wouldn’t want to deny that this movie makes some devastating and hilarious observations about the moral legacies of Reagan, Bush, and Quayle, it differs substantially from the media’s treatment of the current presidential campaign in that it refuses to postulate a substitute hero. And unlike the media it is brutally but more or less accurately describing, it never resorts to being cynical, defeatist, or opportunistic. (Though one of the most comic elements in the movie is the songs sung by Roberts, a folksinging conservative. Robbins has refused to issue a sound track album so the songs can’t be appropriated by the right.)

Bob Roberts takes the form of a documentary being made about Roberts’s campaign in the fall of 1990 by a British filmmaker (Brian Murray), and because the media control such campaigns, the media are essentially the subject of every scene. (The movie is especially impressive for the mastery with which it apes the documentary form.) Not only does the movie lack a hero or a villain in any conventional sense; it can’t be said to have any characters at all — only images and sound bites. Yet it never seems thin or undernourished. On the contrary, the movie’s major flaw — a common one with ambitious first features — is that it tries to cram in far too much. (A visit to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., toward the end provides the only moment that borders on fatuousness.)

Many of the concepts in this movie can be traced to Robert Altman, Robbins’s mentor — particularly to Nashville, Tanner ‘88 (Altman’s HBO miniseries), and The Player. But Robbins’s uses of Altman’s conceptual ideas are so much more analytical that they never come across as potshots. Altman satirizes behavior, while Robbins views it within the larger framework of media discourse. A basic rule of thumb about the three Altman movies cited above, in their uses of songs (Nashville), political campaigns (Nashville and Tanner ‘88), and star cameos (all three), is that practically every character comes across as silly or stupid at one point or another; everyone and everything is fair game. This is plainly not the case in Bob Roberts, where most of the statements made by Brickley Paiste and many of those made by Bugs Raplin clearly carry Robbins’s approval and endorsement.

Why then, one may ask, do Paiste and Raplin fail to come across as heroes? Because Robbins is concerned with discourse — images and media configurations — not with characters. (Even the names of these figures suggest that they’re not to be taken seriously.) The rather pasty Brickley Paiste looks stuffy and his oratory sounds old-fashioned; the somewhat bughouse Bugs Raplin looks slightly mad whenever he’s seen in close-up. This is where Fitzgerald’s definition of a first-rate intelligence comes in. In short, the camera-and-microphone identities of these figures exist independently of the truth of their words, with the disquieting result that nothing either man says ever comes across as completely “believable.” Bob Roberts, on the other hand, because he’s created his own image for the media, can lie as often as he pleases and appear genuine and persuasive. He can even appropriate the rhetoric and trappings of populist folksingers and subvert them for yuppie purposes.

In other words, Bob Roberts is as much a critique of the styles of Bill Clinton and Albert Gore — even though it was written and filmed well before these men became the Democratic front-runners — as it is of the political substance of Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Dan Quayle. Ultimately one could say that the movie is about the degree to which personal style transforms political substance — even effectively eliminates it from public consciousness. Indeed, insofar as the media and their limited repertoire of political themes and concerns dictate the terms of a campaign even more than the candidates do, Bob Roberts is not so much prescient about the current campaign as perceptive about what was already happening in 1990 and 1991.

It might be argued that a right-wing politician who goes around singing ersatz folk songs is not entirely convincing. Maybe not, but it’s close enough to an extrapolation of the present interface between politics and show business to make the film’s treatment of that interfacing extremely suggestive. (Sex scandals and political assassinations as show-biz phenomena are among the subjects considered.)

Robbins started to write his script in 1986, and, significantly, the title character started out as a businessman-singer rather than a political candidate — although, Robbins has said, “the media circus and the emphasis on telegenics were always there.” Later, Robbins made a short film about the character for Saturday Night Live, though interestingly enough one of the deadliest parodies in this movie is of Saturday Night Live itself. Like Roberts’s folk songs and music videos, the show is seen as an antiestablishment envelope packaging conformist goods. The funniest demonstration of this principle is Roberts’s “Wall Street Rap” video, which highlights the key words on title cards — a technique derived from Bob Dylan’s illustration of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in the music documentary Don’t Look Back — while dancing girls wearing ties and hot pants celebrate yuppie pride in an alley behind him. (The jump cuts between the title cards held by Roberts and dancing-girl configurations behind him are a beautiful example of the kind of mental abbreviations that his media style both consists of and engenders.)

Though Gore Vidal’s age and manner suggest Bush rather than Clinton and Tim Robbins’s age and manner suggest Clinton and Gore as well as Quayle, the movie functions nonetheless as a detailed commentary on the presidential campaign; in fact, the crossovers complicate and extend the terms of the analysis. A veritable anthology of various media abuses, the movie can only enhance and sharpen our understanding of what’s going on.

A good many of these commentaries belong to the actors, Robbins himself most of all. When Fred Ward as a newscaster laughs about being unable to read a statistic about the homeless off a prompt card, this cold-blooded lightheartedness is only one example of a familiar TV stance being etched into our minds with acid. (Other newscasters are played by Susan Sarandon and James Spader, among others, and it’s worth noting that these and other well-known actors are never called upon to play themselves like the stars doing cameo turns in The Player; each has his or her own actorly points to make about what might be called the behavioral ethics of anchorpeople, and these points are made with wonderful wit and intelligence. Much the same could be said for John Cusack and Bob Balaban and their respective roles in the Saturday Night Live parody.)

While the smart-ass attitudes in Altman comedies can sometimes be read as celebrations of stupidity, Bob Roberts is much too angry a satire to lend itself to such complacency. But this doesn’t prevent it from being enormously liberating and insightful — a catalog of not only the worst political abuses and hypocrisies in American politics over the past decade, but some of the worst kinds of behavior in the electorate as well. (The suffering faces of some of Roberts’s fans after their hero is apparently martyred is alone worth the price of admission.) While it’s a given in both campaign rhetoric and TV reporting that anyone can be charged with stupidity except the American people who voted the clowns into office in the first place, Robbins isn’t quite so accommodating about letting us off the hook. After treating us to countless pseudo folk songs, all of them hilarious, he concludes with a genuine folk song — Woody Guthrie’s “I’ve Got to Know” — over the final credits, followed by an injunction in the form of a title: “Vote.” It’s a tribute to this very funny movie that when this word appears at the end its meaning is made to seem complex, not simple.

Mirror on the Moon

A former archaeologist and forger of relics (Barton Fink’s David Warrilow), awaiting the arrival of a former colleague (film critic Berenice Reynaud), revises the story he plans to tell her about the disappearance of a Mayan hieroglyphic tablet from an excavation in the Yucatan many years before. Writer-director Leandro Katz, an Argentinean now based in New York, has been making experimental shorts since the 70s, but this ambitious and daunting first feature represents a fresh and exciting departure. A metaphysical puzzler that suggests at times a novella by Adolfo Bioy-Casares adapted by Alain Resnais, it straddles the space between memory and fantasy, often suggesting a Victorian fever dream. You might find the proceedings a bit heavy and dry in spots, but the verbal and filmic quotes from Dreyer’s Vampyr are far from superfluous–this film too is conceived as a series of teasing question marks. With Stefan Brecht and Andrew Sharp; the haunting score is by David Darling. (Chicago Filmmakers, 1229 W. Belmont, Saturday, September 19, 8:00, 281-8788)

Bob Roberts

A rather brilliant if overloaded pseudodocumentary satire in the mode of Real Life and This Is Spinal Tap, Tim Robbins’s first feature as writer-director is an angry catalog of recent media abuses in the realm of politics. (Properly speaking, there are no real characters here, only types and images, which is part of the point.) Robbins plays a folksinging Pennsylvania conservative running for the U.S. Senate against fuddy-duddy liberal incumbent Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal) shortly before the Persian Gulf war. While it’s certainly true, as most reviewers have been claiming, that this movie does a devastating job on Reagan and Bush’s values and corruption, it offers an equally sharp critique of various liberal politicians. (Robbins may believe everything Paiste says, but even the lampoonish name shows that we’re not supposed to take him entirely straight, and Vidal’s bow ties and improvised oratory add immeasurably to the parody.) The functioning of media itself is Robbins’s true subject, and it’s exciting to see him appropriating some of the ideas of his mentor Robert Altman and giving them more bite than Altman ever did (not only in Tanner ‘88 and The Player, but also in Nashville). Robbins is attempting too much here, but the 70 percent or so that he brings off borders at times on the breathtaking. With Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Rickman, Ray Wise, Brian Murray, and some deadly cameos by John Cusack (in a brutal takeoff on Saturday Night Live), Peter Gallagher, Bob Balaban, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, and James Spader. (Water Tower)

Artful Craft [SNEAKERS]

From the Chicago Reader (September 11, 1992). — J.R.

SNEAKERS

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Phil Alden Robinson

Written by Robinson, Lawrence Lasker, and Walter F. Parkes

With Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, David Strathairn, Timothy Busfield, George Hearn, Eddie Jones, and Stephen Tobolowsky.

Although Sneakers has plenty of artful craft, the principal pleasure of Phil Alden Robinson’s new feature has less to do with art than it does with old-fashioned entertainment. Robinson, you may recall, wrote and directed In the Mood (1987) and the much more successful and better known Field of Dreams (1989), two movies whose basic appeal was founded in nostalgia. Though everything after the prologue and credits in Sneakers is set in the present, the movie reminds us of what movie entertainment used to be about, especially during the 50s and 60s, before inflated ideas about art and significance took over. (I suspect that many of the movie’s high-tech details come from producers and cowriters Walter F. Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, who together wrote the script of WarGames.)

Sneakers can be described in many ways: as a caper movie, a lightweight thriller, a high-tech fairy tale, a boys’ adventure, or a Hitchcockian jaunt dating back to the period before Hitchcock was regarded as a serious metaphysical artist — that is, either before he left England for Hollywood or up to the time he made North by Northwest, but in any case before the weighty French interpretations of his thrillers became coin of the realm. (There was actually a time, in certain respectable Anglo American circles, when Hitchcock was considered closer to Agatha Christie than to Nietzsche and Kafka.) Sneakers is not as good as Hitchcock at his best, though it certainly works as well with audiences judging by the two previews I attended.

It’s interesting to consider why we associate well-crafted, doggedly unserious entertainment of this kind with the past. In the same year that Hitchcock’s The Birds was released (1963) to a mixture of critical catcalls and respectful murmurs about Greek tragedy, Pauline Kael was declaring Charade “a charming confectionary trifle,” the best American film of the year. And though her defense of unpretentious “fun” over self-conscious “art” has had strong and lasting effects on American movie tastes, it’s The Birds and not Charade — and similarly The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, and E.T. rather than Goldfinger, Bananas, and Car Wash — that has had the longer shelf life and prompted the most critical literature over the past three decades.

Part of what’s delightful about Sneakers is that one can’t imagine it courting a critical literature of any kind. Robinson shows us at the outset just how frivolous it is: the opening credits emerge from nonsensical anagrams — “Universal Pictures,” for example, is “a turnip cures Elvis” unscrambled, and “Robert Redford” proves to be “fort red border” in disguise. Eventually this technique is thematically justified by a decoding session with a Scrabble set in the middle of the picture; but by the time we get to this sequence it’s already been firmly established that giggles, not deep reflection, are the desired response to most of the movie. Even if one takes the film’s liberal biases seriously, it soon becomes apparent that the “code” for taking something seriously here is to treat it like a lark.

Redford plays Martin, a former college radical who amused himself during the 60s by transferring funds via computer from the Republican Party to the Black Panthers. (Election-year gags are plentiful.) Today he heads a high-tech team of security and surveillance specialists — the “sneakers” of the title — who hire themselves out to banks and other organizations to test their security systems by penetrating them. The four other members are Crease (Sidney Poitier), a former CIA agent with a temper; Carl (River Phoenix), a horny teenage computer whiz; Mother (Dan Aykroyd), a gadget man with paranoid conspiracy theories; and Whistler (David Strathairn), a blind audio expert and “phone phreak” with spiritual inclinations (though he reads Playboy in Braille). As Martin’s former girlfriend Liz (Mary McDonnell) points out, they’re basically a boys’ club, and when she finally gets enlisted in a project she automatically becomes den mother, landlady, and Mata Hari combined.

At times the team suggests Snow White and the seven dwarfs, and Robinson foregrounds this fairy-tale aspect in several ways. At matching junctures in the plot, for instance, each of the five men declares a “secret” wish about what he wants to be paid for his services. At other times the “sneakers” recall the symbiotic collectives of misfits in such science fiction novels as Olaf Stapleton’s Odd John and Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, though the film lacks the artistic and moral issues we associate with these works. Two agents reportedly working for the government (Timothy Busfield and Eddie Jones, who resembles J. Edgar Hoover) force the team to participate in a covert operation that leads to the discovery of a little black box that apparently cracks all existing codes. (The notion that information is power, central to the movie’s premise, is also vital to its narrative method: the film adeptly keeps the audience preoccupied with certain matters and unconcerned with others.)

One way this picture distinguishes itself from “serious” Hitchcock is by completely avoiding moral issues and ambiguities. We see the cold war seemingly reanimated, the frequent and guilt-free use of surveillance, and Liz used as a sexual decoy, but none of this is made to seem even the slightest bit questionable or disturbing; all of it is simply fun, a means of turning the wheels of the plot. In keeping with the movie’s old-fashioned values, the main villain, Cosmo (Ben Kingsley), who was Martin’s friend and coconspirator in 1969, is made to seem vaguely gay in more or less the same way a gunsel in North by Northwest was.

Compulsive attention to narrative continuity has a lot to do with the fact that such issues are forgotten. Keeping the spectator busy anticipating what comes next is an excellent way of ruling out moral and logistical considerations. At one point, for example, Martin has to make a call to the National Security Agency, the government office that has employed him and his team. To try to prevent the call being traced, Whistler bounces it through eight relay stations around the world and off two satellites; meanwhile Mother sets up a gadget registering “voice stress” to help determine if the person at the other end is lying. Whistler then proceeds to trace the tracing on the call while it’s being made, while Mother ticks off whether the people on the other end are being truthful or not. With this much information (and potential for suspense) afforded through crosscutting, we barely have the time or wherewithal while the call is in progress to judge its verisimilitude and informational value.

Part of the pleasure afforded by such a sequence comes from the careful exposition of intricate teamwork, combined with an adroit attention to the personalities involved; another part has to do with suspense mechanisms themselves, and the control over information flow they give the filmmaker. Perhaps best of all about this sequence, however, is the feeling of complicity with the “sneakers,” whatever they happen to be doing; if they operate like the fingers of one hand, we’re happy to provide the thumb whenever necessary.

Muse Abuse [LIGHT SLEEPER]

From the Chicago Reader (September 4, 1992). — J.R.

LIGHT SLEEPER

** (Worth seeing)

Directed and written by Paul Schrader

With Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany, David Clennon, Mary Beth Hurt, Victor Garber, Jane Adams, Paul Jabara, and Robert Cicchini.

The French New Wave of the 60s offers many examples of film critics of some substance who became filmmakers — among them Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Luc Moullet, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and François Truffaut. But the commercial American cinema of the 70s offers us only one, Paul Schrader (the only other contender, Peter Bogdanovich, was by his own admission more of a reporter and interviewer than critic before he turned to filmmaking). Yet Schrader has not made a wholly satisfactory transition. As a writer he made his mark on several important features — including Taxi Driver, Obsession, Raging Bull, and (in a minor way, not credited) Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But his career as a director, despite some steady improvement in craft, strikes me as one of the depressing phenomena of the New Hollywood: he’s produced a series of tacky, offensive films that have gained some intellectual and critical respectability only because most critics haven’t been willing to examine them closely. (Light of Day, the only one of his nine features I haven’t seen, is said to be atypical, however.)

What do I dislike so much about Schrader’s oeuvre? Part of the reason for my antipathy is suggested in Robin Wood’s seminal essay of the early 80s, “The Incoherent Text”: “The position implicit in Paul Schrader’s work . . . can be quite simply characterized as quasi-Fascist. This may not be immediately obvious when one considers each film individually, but adding them together (including the screenplays directed by others) makes it clear. There is the put-down of unionization (Blue Collar), the put-down of feminism “in the Name of the Father’ (Old Boyfriends), the denunciations of alternatives to the Family by defining them in terms of degeneracy and pornography (Hardcore), the implicit denigration of gays (American Gigolo . . . ), and, crucial in its sinister relation to all this, the glorification of the dehumanized hero as efficient killing-machine (unambiguous in Rolling Thunder, confused — I believe by Scorsese’s presence as director — in Taxi Driver).”

Other items could easily be added to Wood’s list. For starters, consider the glamorized depictions of racism in Taxi Driver (which critics Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson have analyzed in commendable detail), the misogyny and hatred of sex in Cat People, the overt celebration of fascist ideas in Mishima, and the capriciously ahistorical trashing of radical politics in Patty Hearst. Some of these ideological positions could be debated, of course — the production of Mishima in Japan, for instance, was under constant threat of attack by right-wing Japanese terrorists, and it might be argued that the brand of fascism the film celebrates is not exactly popular. (Unlike American Gigolo, say, Mishima probably can’t be accused of pandering to an audience’s sick biases — its psychosexual sickness is much too personal for that.)

If one ignores Schrader’s (usually unstated) ideological projects and turns to the aesthetic and formal qualities of his movies, the news actually gets worse. His glossy, lurid uses of color seem designed more to grab attention than to do something with it, he employs programmatic wallpaper music (and otherwise unadventurous sound tracks), and except for Patty Hearst, his compositions are usually boring.

One finds elements of vulgar Freudianism creeping into every crevice of Cat People and Mishima, which I regard as Schrader’s most offensive films. One of the characters in the original, 1942 version of Cat People, a highly poetic and antipsychological masterpiece, is a psychiatrist who treats the heroine’s mysterious frigidity. His glib theories and pawing sexual interest in her totally discredit him, so when he’s found torn to pieces, presumably by the angry, feline heroine, the film almost seems to purr its approval. In Schrader’s remake, 40 years later, the psychiatrist has disappeared — there’s no need for him because his leering attitudes have been adopted wholesale by writer-director Schrader. The Freudian explanation has become the film’s official truth about the heroine, suggestive poetry be damned. Similarly, one comes away from the four-part Mishima and its gaudy Las Vegas décor with the impression that the only sustaining value and meaning of Yukio Mishima’s fiction is its vulgar autobiographical subtext, its status as symptom — an assumption identical to that of Hollywood tripe like Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man.

So much for what I dislike about Schrader’s work. I can only add that the genuine intelligence of his criticism in the late 60s and early 70s makes the intellectual cheapness and laziness of his movies seem even more reprehensible.

But one has to admit that the stylistic polish of his work has steadily improved, at least since Patty Hearst (1988); it was sufficiently noticeable in The Comfort of Strangers (1991) to help me overlook the perversity of Harold Pinter’s adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel, at least until the development of the plot made this impossible. Light Sleeper shows some marked improvement even over these two features, both in its performances and in its dreamlike visuals (cinematography by Ed Lachman). But it still seems embarked on a project so wrongheaded and ridiculous that its successes are limited almost by definition.

The problem with Light Sleeper (and with American Gigolo and Taxi Driver) can be summed up in two words: Robert Bresson. I agree with Schrader that Bresson, now retired and pushing 90, is almost certainly the greatest living filmmaker, and I can sympathize up to a point with any effort to emulate him. Beyond this point, however, Schrader’s relentless efforts to make a Bressonian Hollywood feature — a contradictory ambition even at the outset that becomes more and more ludicrous as one examines the details — are a kind of foolishness ultimately more demented than endearing; they demean and diminish Bresson’s work rather than honor it.

One of the major ironies of contemporary moviegoing is that people know imitations and hommages better than originals: there are probably many more people who know the toppling baby carriages in Bananas and The Untouchables than those who know the one in Eisenstein’s Potemkin. By the same token, very few Americans have seen a film by Robert Bresson, but a good many have seen Schrader’s bad imitations, American Gigolo and Taxi Driver. (Because of the intense physicality of Bresson’s films, the solid presence of both sound and image, and their rigorous editing, there are probably no other great films that lose as much on video as his do. Besides, there are so few of them available here on video they might as well come from Mars as France.)

For these people, Light Sleeper looks more like an imitation of Taxi Driver than of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket — and in a sense they’re right. One of the first lines in the neo-Bressonian offscreen narration of John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), a 40-year-old delivery boy for an upscale Manhattan drug dealer (Susan Sarandon), is “Labor Day weekend. Some time for a garbage strike” — a detail that has a lot more to do with Taxi Driver’s vision of encroaching urban filth than it does with Bresson’s sense of the profane, from which it presumably derives.

Among the basic elements of Bresson’s style of filmmaking are three Schrader has never attempted. First, Bresson studiously avoided using professional actors, and carefully trained his nonprofessionals to recite their lines as tonelessly as possible. (The materialist aim is to use people for what they are, not what they and theatrical tradition pretend they are.) Second, he focused on people’s hands and feet at least as often as on their faces and torsos. Third, he minimized the expressive potential of individual shots in order to maximize, through editing, the expressive potential of their combinations and juxtapositions.

What Schrader mainly borrows from Bresson, specifically from Diary of a Country Priest and Pickpocket, are shots of the alienated and tormented hero writing in his diary while reading the entries aloud offscreen, merely alluding to a spiritual crisis by focusing on everyday matters relatively devoid of emotional content. Schrader also makes another stab — the first was in American Gigolo – at reproducing the ending of Pickpocket, when the hero, behind bars, finally discovers his freedom through the love of a good woman. In American Gigolo, the effect is simply laughable; in Light Sleeper, Schrader makes the moment sufficiently independent of its source to render it halfway plausible.

To some extent, Schrader also borrows from Bresson’s own sources — Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest and Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment (the loose inspiration for Pickpocket) — and, superficially, from Bresson’s means of adapting them. But Schrader operates on the naive assumption that the extreme rigor and purity of Bresson’s style can be meaningfully imitated using the usual glitzy Hollywood means: professional actors, slick and jazzy cinematography, high-contrast lighting, and conventional framing and editing — in short, all the formal and technical devices that Bresson took enormous pains to avoid.

Although it’s seldom remarked upon, Bresson’s greatest films are shot through with flashes of mordant wit and humor, not a trace of which can be discovered in Schrader’s work. (Significantly, Bresson’s very first film — rediscovered in France a few years back — is a wonderfully zany and highly physical surrealist featurette of 1939, Les affaires publiques; it suggests a cross between Vigo’s Zéro de conduite and Million Dollar Legs. I went all the way to the San Francisco film festival in 1988 in order to see this rare gem — which still hasn’t shown in either Chicago or New York. When Schrader introduced the screening, he talked about the spiritual quest of Bresson’s heroes as if he were describing one of the later features.)

Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing — the best-advertised and probably most commercial aspect of his background (apart from his fondness for guns) — yields an obsession with various mixtures of the sacred and the profane that passes for “transcendental” in the Entertainment Tonight school of criticism, though it strikes me as an expedient pumping of the audience’s Calvinist desires and guilt feelings, which have nothing to do with Bresson but plenty to do with box office (see Taxi Driver). The same humorlessness that inspired Schrader to write “No artist or style has cornered the transcendental market” in his ponderous 1972 Transcendental Style in Film has also prompted him in Light Sleeper to dream up the New York Post headline “Fall From Grace” to describe the plummeting to her death from “Grace Towers” of Marianne (Dana Delany), LeTour’s former girlfriend, whom he desperately regards for a time as the vehicle of his salvation. If Schrader ever abandoned this transcendental nonsense to explore Bresson’s materialism, he might be on to something serious; but then, of course, he’d have to give up Hollywood forever.

Apart from Lachman’s cinematography, what does Light Sleeper — probably Schrader’s best film to date — have going for it?

A literate script, for one thing. John LeTour may not seem much like a writer, but it must be conceded that Schrader has given the narration and dialogue a certain snap and crackle. Wasn’t it Dizzy Gillespie who noted that he created his style by trying and failing to imitate Roy Eldridge? By the same token, William Faulkner once explained that his prose style grew out of his failure to write lyric poetry. Schrader is no Faulkner and no Gillespie, but in his third silly attempt to appropriate Bresson’s form of story telling and his second misguided effort to remake Pickpocket, he has arrived at a pretty good offscreen narration.

Susan Sarandon, who gets better as an actress every year, is simply breathtaking. I’m not sure what it is that has made her talent blossom so richly, but there is scarcely a gesture or line reading of hers in this movie that comes across as familiar or clichéd, despite the relative thinness of her part as scripted. If Schrader had anything to do with this performance he should be applauded, especially since this shows a talent that has nothing whatsoever to do with Robert Bresson. If he takes this fact to heart, he might eventually learn enough to outgrow father figures altogether.