Two modern urban fantasies
[City of Angels and Dark City]
One of the great shames of the world is that most film reviewers appear to look down on film as a medium. Many seem to have been dragooned from other media. They're theatre or book reviewers, as if, the thinking of those commissioning them must go, their talents honed in more sophisticated fields must be transferable to the discussion of the success or failure of cinema efforts. This has been a problem for many decades, as the snobbish film reviewers of the "Golden Age" of cinema demonstrated.
It is an increasingly large concern in the film review field in Australia right now. The reviewers in the broadsheet newspapers and on the national broadcasters disdain the "Hollywood film", whatever that might be, and are all for the continental film makers and, occasionally, an independent American or Australian director. And they cannot help but compare unfavourably the latest mass market movie with its literary precursor or the continental movie on which it is based.
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You will recognise this genre of movie review. It damns with faint praise while noting that, of course, the movie could never expect to be of the standard of the book or of the independent production from which it is derived. Such were the reviews for the recent City of Angels, an adaptation of Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. It was de rigueur among the cognoscenti to note that the later movie was not a patch on the Wenders' film.
(Please note, by the way, if you want to employ this trope in your own conversations the director's name is properly pronounced "Vim Venders". It's like that old joke my father used to tell: a man arrives in Honolulu and asks a local how the state's name is pronounced - "It is Hawaii or Havaii?" he asks. "Havaii", responds the other. "Thank you", says the stranger, to which the local responds, "You're velcome".)
Cath tells me we saw Wings of Desire. You could not prove it by me. If I did see it, it made so little impression that I have no memory of it. This does not surprise. I find Wenders' films - those that I can recall, at least - turgid and over-blown. A director praised more for his reputation than his achievements. But whatever its roots, I judge City of Angels on its own merits. To me, reading the reviews, the worshippers-at-the-shrine-of-Wim-and-co missed a very good movie in trying to see how it compared with their master's work.
City of Angels is another in the line of strong modern urban fantasies. It requires the active suspension of disbelief that is endemic to the fantasy genre. You don't have to believe in an afterlife to enjoy Field of Dreams nor in angels to enjoy Michael or City of Angels. The film assumes that there are angels who, unseen, observe the lives of people, helping when they can and assisting in the transition from life to death. Seth (Nicholas Cage) is one such and, in the performance of his duty, meets Maggie (Meg Ryan), a heart surgeon distraught at losing a patient. She at first fascinates Seth and then attracts him. Through her he meets Messinger (Dennis Franz) and learns how angels can become mortal.
The three main characters offer interesting contrasts. Cage gives a very other-worldly quality to Seth. His performance raises the question: when did this formerly very annoying actor suddenly transform, as he has in the last year or two, into one of the best actors in movies? Perforce his performance is largely achieved by nuances of gesture and look. It is an effective portrayal of desire and yearning for the unknown and unknowable.
Franz is by contrast very human, even stereotypically so, for very good reasons. His Andy Sipowicz is, to my mind, the television character of the 90s. He has turned a largely unsympathetic and neurotic racist into one of the genuinely interesting and attractive people on television. It is often easy to overlook the impact that repetitive gesture can have in the creation of a character in an on-going series, but Franz has built up Sipowicz on the basis of such small things: the nervous cough, the hand rubbing the balding pate, the shuffling gait, the defensive aggressiveness. He builds Messinger in the same way, without the luxury of several seasons in which to lay the foundation. Nonetheless he builds him effectively.
Ryan is somewhere in the middle. Her performance is a relief from the recent spate of doctors (of medicine and philosophy) essayed by the leading actrines of the screen. Recall if you will the parts played by Kelly McGillis in Top Gun, Nicole Kidman in Days of Thunder and The Peacemaker, Daryl Hannah in Roxanne, Meg Ryan herself in IQ, Anne Heche in Volcano. Embarrassing and unconvincing hardly covers this cavalcade of inept attempts to pretend that the actors involved have any concept of the life of the intellectuals they are meant to be portraying. But Maggie is believable and intriguing enough to warrant Seth's attention.
The most successful part of the movie though is not the acting or the script. It is the setting: the staging, editing and music. The word that occurred to me during the movie, inspired by its pace and, especially the music, is elegiac. The director, Brad Silberling, comes to the movie from NYPD Blues and employs the same tricks of angle and cutting that have made that show the best of the modern police procedurals. The angels are seen from below or above, rarely on the level. The shots in the library or on the building scaffolding or at the beach evoke the isolation of the watchers and the sadness of their fate. The music reflects the mood ideally and reinforces the melancholic feeling. Elegy is an evocation rarely attempted, and even less frequently achieved, by modern movie makers.
Dark City
Alex Proyas is an Australian director with a vision. That vision is dark and dystopian in essence. His Dark City makes the labyrinths of Ridley Scott's city in Blade Runner seem sunny by comparison.
The movie rests somewhere on the edge of the divide between urban fantasy and science fiction but the fantasy elements predominate.
I loved the city itself: its morphing midnight alterations, the sense of enclosure and pain, the utter sterility of the life led by its inhabitants and the decay evident in all the characters.
I also liked the aliens who ran the city. Each, unaccountably and unexplained, giving himself - they appear all to be male - a surname derived from a common English noun and calling each other "Mr Book", "Mr Sleep" etc.
I even liked the "McGuffin", as Hitchcock used to call the central conceit of his movies. In this case it is the awakening of a man with the power to combat the aliens and himself transform the city. Yet for all these pluses the movie remains less than a success. It may be the utter unlikeability of most of the characters, particular Keifer Sutherland's quisling doctor, or just that the plot never quite hangs together, remaining something less than the sum of its many original and striking parts.
This is by no means a failure. It is a brave and commendable attempt to evoke a Kafkaesque feeling, a dystopian vision, against which the all too human characters play. Rufus Sewell appears to sleep-walk through the protagonist's role but Jennifer Connolly, as the woman who may be his wife (doesn't she get sick of being typecast in labyrinth movies?), and William Hurt, as the puzzled detective, make good fists of their roles. And Colin Friels' demented cameo almost steals the acting honours from the malevolent Ian Richardson, a sort of intergalactic Francis Urquhart.
The best thing about the movie is that it is stimulating visually, and thought-provoking in its contemplation of life under the stress of the ultimate test of human endurance. There are far too many fluff movies - all style and action, with no bottom. Dark City is a movie with genuine rigour beneath the surface. Someone has thought clearly about every aspect of it and, fail though it might on certain levels, the extension of its reach well beyond its grasp is a "failure" to be applauded.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]