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Novel Approach [ULEE’S GOLD]

From the Chicago Reader (June 27, 1997). — J.R.

Ulee’s Gold

Rating ** Worth seeing

Directed and written by Victor Nunez

With Peter Fonda, Patricia Richardson, Vanessa Zima, Jessica Biel, Christine Dunford, J. Kenneth Campbell, Steven Flynn, Dewey Weber, and Tom Wood.

The character-driven stories in all four of writer-director Victor Nunez’s features to date — Gal Young ‘Un, A Flash of Green, his masterpiece Ruby in Paradise, and now Ulee’s Gold – are defined by their regionalism: Nunez operates exclusively as a Florida independent. Whether he’s adapting a Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings short story set in the 20s or a John D. MacDonald novel (his first two films) or writing an original script (the second two), Nunez bases his art on a sense of place so solid that the texture of the settings is part of his subject.

The fact that all his films are relatively slow moving also has something to do with the Florida settings. Former residents of that state have told me that his movies capture not only a sense of the place but its rhythms, and judging from the novels with Florida settings I’ve read in recent years — John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest and the three wonderful Hoke Moseley novels of Charles Willeford (Miami Blues, Sideswipe, and New Hope for the Dead) — this isn’t just Nunez’s take on the region.

But in most people’s minds a “slow” movie usually translates into an art film. And there is something about the way Nunez, who works as his own camera operator, lingers over shots and settings that makes his features novelistic in the good sense. When Ulee Jackson (Peter Fonda), the beekeeper hero of Ulee’s Gold, drives down to Orlando to see a couple of hoods, Eddie (Steven Flynn) and Ferris (Dewey Weber), he meets them in a dive called the Orange Blossom, and his slow progress across the room, with the camera closely flanking him in the foreground, is like a paragraph of atmospheric description. Similarly, the interludes in this movie about how to make, process, and store tupelo honey never seem tedious or pointlessly extended; they contribute to the texture of the story Nunez is telling.

If you’re as rattled as I am by the mindless rapidity of such empty junk heaps as Speed 2: Cruise Control and Batman & Robin, leisurely pacing of this kind is likely to register as a form of respect for the viewer’s intelligence and observation. And such a strategy can only pay off when it comes to filming a relatively inexpressive actor like Fonda: he and Nunez both know how to make Ulee an iconographic object of mystery, striking chords in the mythologies suggested by this lone hero. Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, and Fonda’s father, Henry, are all stars who’ve filled this kind of role in the past, inviting viewers to project their own notions of isolation onto the actors’ hardened features. The critics who’ve been declaring that Peter Fonda’s Ulee is the performance of his career are really saying that Nunez and Fonda are smart enough to allow this alchemy to work. Fonda has noted that his father used to keep bees, and we’re clearly being invited to make other connections with Henry Fonda, an association that gives Peter Fonda’s performance its weight; in many cases his acting is not so much a matter of accumulating expressions and gestures as it is keeping them minimal, allowing his lineage to shine through.

This approach helps to explain why Ulee’s Gold works pretty well as a movie; it works as a novelistic movie for similar reasons. The story is basically a tale of redemption — but if you compare American novels about redemption with American movies about redemption, they’re not much the same. Novels such as Saul Bellow’s Herzog and some of Updike’s Rabbit books tend to be meditative studies of inner growth and healing — internal processes that readers are invited to chart over extended periods of time. American movies tend to make inner growth either an unfathomable postulate, as in Raging Bull, or an overt change of heart, like Samuel L. Jackson’s sudden abandonment of his hit-man career in Pulp Fiction — that is, it’s either invisible or it’s in your face. In this respect Ulee’s Gold is a lot closer to Bellow or Updike than it is to Scorsese or Tarantino.

Unfortunately, the story Nunez chooses to tell here is fairly familiar movie material, though it’s decked out with some unnecessary and cumbersome literary trappings. Ulee, a withdrawn man who works and lives in the tupelo marshes of the Florida panhandle, is a Vietnam vet, the only one among his buddies to survive the war. Embittered by the death of his wife Penelope six years earlier (”I practically fell off the planet”), Ulee is also haunted by the collapse of his family, apparently the result of her loss. His son Jimmy (Tom Wood) retreated into a life of crime and was arrested for robbery and imprisoned; subsequently his wife Helen (Christine Dunford) became a drug addict and abandoned their two daughters, Casey (Jessica Biel) and Penny (Vanessa Zima). When the movie opens Ulee is raising his granddaughters — Casey is a teenager, while Penny’s still in grammar school — but has pretty much washed his hands of his son and daughter-in-law. Then events compel him to become involved in their lives again. (If you don’t want to learn any more of the plot, stop here.)

Jimmy calls Ulee from prison to report that Helen is staying with his two former partners in crime, Eddie and Ferris, in Orlando and that they want Ulee to take her off their hands. Ulee grudgingly complies, but when he sees Eddie and Ferris he discovers they have another reason for summoning him: having extracted a confession from Helen in her drug-addled state that Jimmy hid an additional $100,000 before his arrest, they want Ulee to recover the loot and fork it over, and they threaten his daughter-in-law and granddaughters if he fails to cooperate.

Ulee’s given name is Ulysses, his wife was Penelope, and he saves a woman named Helen, but the reference to Homer’s Odyssey is far-fetched given what we know about the characters. Perhaps Ulee’s past as a Vietnam vet is supposed to stand in for Ulysses’ war experiences, and his “rescue” of Helen somehow alludes to Helen of Troy, but the parallels with Homer are really forced when it comes to Ulysses’ homecoming. Is the reconstitution of Ulee’s family supposed to correspond to Ulysses’ return to his still living wife, when he rids their house of her suitors? Whatever correspondences Nunez had in mind, none carries any conviction.

Moreover, Nunez’s screenwriting imagination seems stunted by Hollywood genre films when it comes to the family members who need to be brought back into the fold, Helen and Jimmy, and to Jimmy’s former partners, Eddie and Ferris. Helen’s transformation from hysterical addict strapped to her bed to born-again mother baking cookies a few days later is merely assumed, not charted, and Jimmy’s conversion is comparably sketchy; Eddie and Ferris are simply standard-issue hoods.

But when it comes to all the other characters, Nunez’s film is novelistic in the best sense; he’s as good a director of actors as you’re likely to find in American movies right now. Patricia Richardson (who stars in the popular TV series Home Improvement) plays Ulee’s neighbor and tenant Connie Hope, a twice-divorced nurse who helps with Helen’s drug cure; even if she is saddled with a symbolic last name, it’s hard to think of a more lifelike character in any movie I’ve seen this year. Nine-year-old Vanessa Zima as Penny — another professional — has a wonderful way of handling reactions in emotionally charged scenes, and most of her costars aren’t far behind. The attentive way Nunez films his entire cast is as resourceful and evocative as the way he films his locations; even the less realized characters and the more familiar parts of the plot spring to life under his quiet and patient gaze.

Men In Black

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith play secret agents who take care of immigrant extraterrestrials in this amiable 1997 SF satire directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (Addams Family Values) and loosely adapted by Ed Solomon (a veteran of both Bill & Ted movies) from a comic book series. At times the ambience evokes the work of Gremlins director Joe Dante; don’t expect any psychological depth here, but the cool wit and fun (derived partly from the premise that the cheap tabloids are the only newspapers telling the truth) are deftly maintained, and Sonnenfeld provides a bountiful supply of both fanciful beasties and ingenious visuals. With Linda Fiorentino, Vincent D’Onofrio, Rip Torn, and Tony Shalhoub. 98 min. (JR)

Temptress Moon

I’ve never been a big fan of Chinese director Chen Kaige’s work, but this opium dream about incestuous longings is clearly his best piece of direction, stylistically voluptuous and pictorial in the best sense. Shot by the remarkable Christopher Doyle, perhaps the most talented cinematographer working in Asia, and starring Gong Li and Leslie Cheung, it’s full of ravishing poetry, even though it isn’t very involving on a narrative level. Since its Cannes premiere it’s been cut by ten minutes or so and decked out with titles intended mainly to clarify the story line and distinguish characters (the usual aim of Miramax’s compulsive meddling), but this has done damage to the film’s hypnotic and hallucinatory rhythms, especially in the early sections. Once one gets past this choppiness, Chen’s use of offscreen sounds as emotional and atmospheric punctuation and his exquisite uses of color, lighting, framing, and camera movement conspire to make this a beautifully overripe example of Baudelairean cinema. Shu Kei wrote the elliptical script, based on a story by the director and Wang Anyi, set in and around Shanghai from 1911 to sometime in the 1920s. Water Tower. (JR)

Fresh Clues to an Old Mystery [THE BIG SLEEP]

From the Chicago Reader, June 20, 1997. — J.R.

The Big Sleep

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed by Howard Hawks

Written by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman

With Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Ridgely, Martha Vickers, Dorothy Malone, Pat Clark, Regis Toomey, Charles Waldron, Sonia Darrin, and Elisha Cook Jr.

For all its reputation as a classic, and despite the greatness of Howard Hawks as a filmmaker, The Big Sleep has never quite belonged in the front rank of his work — at least not to the same degree as Scarface, Twentieth Century, Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, Red River, The Big Sky, Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Rio Bravo, to cite my own list of favorites. Unlike To Have and Have Not (1944) — Hawks’s previous collaboration with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, writers Jules Furthman and William Faulkner, cinematographer Sid Hickox, and composer Max Steiner — it qualifies as neither a personal manifesto on social and sexual behavior nor an abstract meditation on jivey style and braggadocio set within a confined space, though it periodically reminds one that exercises of this kind are what Hawks did best. Most of the time, the film’s energy and aplomb are devoted to getting through its labyrinthine gumshoe plot without stumbling — a notable feat in itself, but more a triumph of accommodation than of unbridled self-expression.

Ever since Hawks was discovered as an auteur by a couple of eccentric critics in the 50s — Manny Farber in the United States and Jacques Rivette in France — critical approaches to his work have been hamstrung by his own notion of himself as nothing more than a gentleman jock and journeyman hipster. His main idea of self-expression was figuring out who to hire, how to mold and coddle his employees, and how to have a certain amount of fun with them while holding his own with studio management. Resembling a bandleader-pianist like Basie or Ellington, he understood how to show his personnel to best advantage. Sometimes this was a matter of setting one player off against another, and sometimes it was simply knowing when to lay out, when to solo, and when to feed chords to another player. As Todd McCarthy confirms in his new 756-page biography Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, Hawks didn’t even bother to direct the musical numbers in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But that no more diminishes his stature (or the movie’s) than the recent revelation that Billy Strayhorn actually wrote a lot of Ellington’s best tunes reduces the composer’s greatness (or that of “Take the ‘A’ Train”). Ellington’s best music and Hawks’s best movies are both supremely about the joy of people living and working together, and our knowledge of the trade-offs — even in some cases rip-offs — involved in these subtle transactions only enhances our sense of the artist’s style and taste. As Farber once put it, Hawks’s “whole moviemaking system seems a secret preoccupation with linking, a connections business involving people, plots, and eight-inch hat brims,” and it stands to reason that plenty of these connections took place offscreen as well as on.

To demonstrate this idea, take a good look at the two versions of The Big Sleep that history has left us with — the first released to U.S. troops overseas in August 1945, and the other, much better known one shown domestically a year later. The recently restored first version — playing this week at Facets Multimedia, along with a fascinating documentary postscript in which film archivist Robert Gitt shows why and how most of the changes were made — reveals not how a terrific movie got better or worse but how, for commercial reasons, it got transformed into another kind of terrific movie. It also helps show us how the second movie has been read or misread in terms of the self-expression of various artists: Hawks, Bogart, Bacall, Faulkner, Furthman, and Brackett.

For years it was widely assumed that the celebrated delicious dialogue of double entendres about racehorses between Bogart and Bacall in a plush bar — a scene found only in the second version — was written by Faulkner, although a few commentators opted for Furthman. Now we know it was written by the relatively unsung (and completely uncredited) Philip Epstein, who coscripted Casablanca. Long after the other three writers had left the project, Jack Warner hired Epstein to beef up the interplay between Bogart and Bacall and thereby improve Bacall’s image, which had been tarnished by her miscast appearance in the poorly received Confidential Agent, which appeared before The Big Sleep and after To Have and Have Not. Her highly influential agent, Charles Feldman, urged Warner to revise The Big Sleep in order to repair the damage, and most of the reshooting and reediting — and, in at least one instance, redubbing — was carried out in strict accordance with his suggestions.

Complicating and occasionally enhancing these revisions was the fluctuating relationship between Bacall and Bogart, who’d fallen in love while shooting To Have and Have Not. During the initial shoot on The Big Sleep, Bogart was still married to someone else and fitfully trying to make that marriage work, and Hawks, who may have had designs of his own on Bacall, was mainly interested in keeping his two stars apart when they weren’t working together. By the time the three of them regrouped to shoot the new scenes for the second version, Bogart and Bacall had become inseparable, and as a consequence Hawks’s relationship with both had cooled.

Though many of the changes in the movie, like the racehorse dialogue, were clear improvements, much of the plot exposition was excised in the process, leading to a good deal of speculation over the next half-century about who actually killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor. Out of this grew the tall tale, spread by Hawks, that no one working on the picture knew the answer and that when Hawks wired Chandler to ask him, Chandler replied that he didn’t know either. But in fact Faulkner and Brackett’s script fully answered this question in the prerelease version, and when their explanation was removed, an already intricate mystery plot became impossible to follow in a few particulars.

Biographer McCarthy builds an interesting thesis out of a comparison of the two versions, which he says “reveals The Big Sleep as the indisputable turning point in its director’s career. The first cut represents the culmination of Hawks’s dedication to narrative, to classical storytelling principles, to the kind of logic that depends upon the intricate interweaving of dramatic threads. The revised, less linear cut sees him abandoning these long-held virtues for the sake of ’scenes,’ scenes of often electrifying individual effect, but scenes that were weighted heavily in favor of character over plot and dramatic complexity. When Hawks saw that he could get away with this, it emboldened him to proceed further down this path for the remainder of his career, with results that were variable in terms of the intent and quality of his work.”

McCarthy’s hypothesis — arrived at after seeing Gitt’s restoration of the prerelease version and during the final stages of writing his book, when the impulse to cry “Eureka!” must have been irresistible — is seductive but far from indisputable. After all, Hawks’s next picture after The Big Sleep was the linear (if somewhat episodic) Red River, and a lot more classical storytelling was to come in pictures like I Was a Male War Bride, The Thing From Another World, The Big Sky, and Land of the Pharaohs. Eventually he arrived at a looser, less linear kind of moviemaking in pictures like Rio Bravo and Hatari — unless one concludes that he was already concentrating on “scenes” rather than story line in a comedy like the 1934 Twentieth Century, or that the relatively abrupt ending of Red River conforms to Hawks’s second manner. But McCarthy certainly has a point in singling out the two versions of The Big Sleep as emblems of dialectical strands in Hawks’s artistic personality — warring impulses that inform most of his career.

During the 60s, when Hawks’s personality as well as his artistic credentials were still a matter of dispute, a lot of ink was wasted on the relative merits of his version of Chandler’s The Big Sleep and John Huston’s version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon — surely a case of apples and oranges. Back then I was inclined to come down on Hawks’s side, but today, when the battle lines are drawn differently, I find too many supplementary factors at play to necessarily draw such a conclusion. Obviously Hammett’s writing is superior to both Chandler’s and Huston’s script based on Hammett — not to mention a good deal of “classic” Hemingway. It’s less obvious but still defensible that Hawks’s The Big Sleep is superior to Chandler’s novel (at least if one prefers adolescent stoicism to adolescent self-pity and overlooks Chandler’s more extensive grasp of corruption). And clearly Huston is more faithful to his source than Hawks and his writers are to theirs. But I have to admit that I find the macho fatalism of both directors lacking in terms of a comprehensive moral vision. Huston’s Sam Spade may be more of a misogynist than Hammett’s, and Hawks’s Philip Marlowe may be more of a moral elitist than Chandler’s, but in each case the change marks a trait in the director that’s the flip side of what makes him shine.

In The Big Sleep, one has to weigh Bogart’s sexual gallantry and attractiveness to Lauren Bacall’s character and the various flirty ingenues he encounters on his rounds — most notably Dorothy Malone’s bookseller and Joy Barlowe’s taxi driver — against the contempt he and the movie express toward Vivian’s sister Carmen (Martha Vickers) and a schemer named Agnes (Sonia Darrin), both dismissed as irredeemable, inhuman rodents packed with sex appeal. The cozy clubhouse atmosphere Hawks conjures up with such allure and panache is always predicated on such nonnegotiable exclusions.

If these exclusions seem more problematic here than they do in To Have and Have Not and Rio Bravo, it’s largely because The Big Sleep has less affection and compassion overall (apart from a certain tenderness toward the aforementioned ladies and a few stranded patsies, mainly General Sternwood and Elisha Cook Jr.’s unforgettable Harry Jones) and very little of the same esprit de corps, apart from Bacall’s song at a casino. For me, this is the major limitation of both versions of The Big Sleep — the impulse to turn some people into objects and expel them from the human race, which seems more a failure of imagination than an enlightened moral position. (A similar but far uglier position dominates Hawks’s last film, Rio Lobo, and related forms of callousness in Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday prevent me from including them in my list of Hawks favorites.)

I never met Hawks exactly, but 25 summers ago, when the San Sebastian film festival, where he was serving as president of the jury, offered its guests a day trip to Pamplona to attend a bullfight, I spent portions of an afternoon as part of his entourage. (It was during the Franco period, when perks of this kind were common.) Like others in the group, I asked Hawks a couple of standard film-buff questions (”Is it true that Andy Williams dubbed part of Bacall’s singing voice in To Have and Have Not?”) and got the standard answers (”Yes, he did, and so did Hoagy Carmichael and several others, but it was Bacall’s own voice in The Big Sleep“–a half-truth at best, because Bacall’s own voice was eventually used in the final cut of To Have and Have Not as well.) The main impression I had of him was that he was what my older brother in Alabama would have called a good ol’ boy — the sort of cocky, amiable jock who hung around locker rooms and spent his time recounting anecdotes of one-upmanship in which he was always right and everyone else was always wrong.

The threads of desperation laced through such a pose are of course endemic to such a personality. McCarthy reports in his introduction that Hawks “felt so insecure as a director on his first few pictures that he regularly had to pull his car over on his way to work in order to vomit.” Yet if it weren’t for such desperation, I doubt he’d be remembered as the great director he was: it’s the darker, more nihilistic side of his cockiness — his perception of the void — that gives his best work its metaphysical weight. (Is there any filmmaker who conveys a sharper sense of naked fear?) We know from various sources that Hawks was contemptuous of people who committed suicide — Andrew Sarris has some very suggestive things to say on this subject in The American Cinema – but surely this was the kind of self-protective cover assumed by someone for whom suicide was at times a genuine temptation.

Indeed, both versions of The Big Sleep – a noir whose almost pervasive blackness and coldness is broken fitfully by little warm nests of camaraderie and friendly lust — conjure up an unstable universe where playfulness and profound uncertainty are kissing cousins. The release version makes better sport of the playfulness and some of the nests even cozier. And the earlier version more lucidly pursues a deductive train of thought through this uncertain world — not only when it comes to explaining the chauffeur’s death, but also when Marlowe snoops around a cottage where a murder has just taken place (a wordless piece of pure moviemaking, lamentably trimmed in the release version, that’s good enough to recall the opening of Rio Bravo). In fact, the prerelease version offers a much better example of Hollywood enchantment than any current release you’re likely to find.

The Bridegroom, The Comedienne and The Pimp and other short films

“The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp” and other short films

This may be the most exciting and revealing program in the Film Center’s entire Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective. It includes Fassbinder’s two earliest surviving shorts, City Tramp (1966) and Little Chaos (1967), to be shown without subtitles, and a subtitled 1977 interview with the filmmaker–none of which I’ve seen. But I can’t recommend highly enough the selections I have seen: Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet’s 23-minute The Bridegroom, the Comedienne and the Pimp (1968) is a multifaceted poetic provocation (starring Fassbinder as the pimp) that consists of only a dozen shots, one of them an 11-minute condensation of a 1926 play by Ferdinand Bruckner staged by Straub. Also a startling eye-opener is Fassbinder’s searingly and touchingly confessional episode from the 1978 sketch film Germany in Autumn, which shows him with his lover and his mother and is probably the most candid of all his self-portraits. Film Center, Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson, Sunday, June 22, 4:00, 312-443-3737. –Jonathan Rosenbaum

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.