Tits and Gore

From the Everyman-style naming of the characters to the ridiculous soundtrack, The Driver’s attempt at drama lands closer to farce, a wet dream for the TNT network weekend movie scheduling team. Softer cat and mouse parts of the final chase that would be naturally tense without a soundtrack are paired with apparently random jazzy trumpet honks and squeals. There’s never any music during conversation scenes, and this is countered by a strange, “sneaking henchman” score during the robbery sequences.

Ryan O’Neal’s character is smooth and convincing, a subtle performance. Everyone else seems heavy-handed, like they thought they were in a theatrical production instead of a film. The detective calls the driver “the cowboy” the whole movie, since calling him “the driver” clearly wasn’t silly enough. Every conversation with the detective made me think of the boss from the British version of The Office. He was downright uncomfortable to watch, but unfortunately, The Driver offers neither comedy nor social commentary. Along with the cowboy theme, the detective is big on one-liners, like he thinks he’s John Wayne, wishing he were as cool as the driver but knowing he’s not and making up for it with witty banter: “I’m gonna catch the cowboy that’s never been caught. Cowboy desperado!”

Maybe it would have been better as a silent film. That way the distracting soundtrack wouldn’t matter; additionally, “the detective” wouldn’t have been able to speak, so maybe it would have been reasonably enjoyable. As is, I found The Driver boring and annoying, perhaps because action movies have changed a great deal throughout my lifetime, but perhaps because it’s just not a good film. It shouldn’t matter when a movie was made. There are classics that were made before my parents were born that I still find relevant; why should I second-guess myself because an action movie hasn’t stood the test of time?

Hot on the heels of our joint review of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, it’s time to take a look at an early work by another writer-turned-director, Walter Hill. Hill is an icon, writing or co-writing the first three Alien movies and Peckinpah’s excellent heist pic The Getaway, in addition to helming perennial underground favorite The Warriors.

The Driver has developed quite the cult following amongst car-chase aficionados, and it’s easy to see why. There are three first-class chase sequences spaced evenly throughout the picture, and each one has its own stunt set-piece and funky internal logic. The best of the three is definitely the staged chase in which Ryan O’Neal, as the titular unnamed protagonist, shows his skills to a trio of potential clients by systematically destroying their car during a parking-garage psych-out. The chases are very composed and serene by today’s standards: the first is completely silent except for the persistent wailing of police sirens - wordless, no soundtrack - many cuts to O’Neal’s stoic face set in concentration but no glimpses of the pursuing officers, until it starts to seem like he’s being chased through Manhattan by a pack of eerie howling wild animals.

Outside the car, O’Neal does his best Steve McQueen impression and keeps his mouth shut, fitting right in with the film’s stark aesthetic. Hill’s vaguely noirish structural riffing is great fun an even half of the movie, and a little hard to swallow the rest of the time. The dialogue is as hard-boiled as it comes, and not always for the better - some lines clearly read better on paper. Bruce Dern hams it up as the detective bent on bringing O’Neal to justice, but his performance clashes with the overall tone, and I found myself impatient for the police-related interludes to end. The film locks into a tight groove in the last 30 minutes, but by that time the meandering stylistic inconsistencies almost kept me from jumping back in for the ride.

The Driver is an interesting, even charismatic little picture that always keeps a close orbit to its all-important chases. But it’s clear that at this point in Hill’s career he still had one foot in his screenwriting shoes and one in his directing shoes, trying to figure out how to walk a straight line without hopping on one leg.

Mike: I was really surprised by Michael Clayton, I have to admit. I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and instead it’s this very intimate character study.

Maggie: I was expecting a very by-the-numbers legal thriller, and I thought it was. The Firm, The Pelican Brief… These have highly developed characters… Maybe not as developed as Clayton, but still, it doesn’t seem like a big stretch.

Mike: Really? Because I think the character of Michael Clayton doesn’t have the kind of overwhelming moral epiphany like the characters in the Grisham adaptations. I feel like the average legal thriller works off this premise that lawyers are fundamentally despicable people until they experience this true moral outrage or whatever. I don’t think Gilroy spends time apologizing for the fact that Clayton is this cover-up artist, that he’s a compulsive gambler and kind of a cold fish. I think like any gambler, Clayton weighs the odds stacked against him and reacts accordingly, right down to the last scene.

Maggie: Okay, so you make a good point. I still feel like the format is so similar: there’s a big bad guy out there that’s trying to cover up wrongdoings and one little lawyer guy finds out about it and has to go after the big bad guy, and he wins.

Mike: I can dig that, but when you’re talking about any genre film, a lot of times it’s about how that film excels within the structure of the genre. Would it be any more interesting if Clayton didn’t win? For me it was more interesting that he rushes towards that inevitable climax not because he thought it was his moral obligation but because, I think, he wants revenge.

Maggie: Interesting. Okay, well do you think that character development is essential for all the characters or just Clayton? The insights into Swinton’s character—all the unflattering shots of her in her pantyhose in front of her mirror fumbling her upcoming speeches—just kind of got on my nerves and seemed extraneous. I guess they helped the viewer understand her character and how panicky she is and what leads her to her decisions, but in the end, she still orders Wilkinson and Clayton’s murders. Milton was very successful in making Lucifer more admirable by showing his “humanity,” but what could be Gilroy’s purpose in employing this method?

Mike: I actually agree with you here. So, Tilda Swinton has just won the Oscar and though I thought the performance was solid I wasn’t wild about the characterization. The only thing I would say about those preparatory sequences is that I’m not certain that Gilroy’s going so much for the humanization of evil as he is the banality of evil. Y’know? How the picture’s overlying atrocity, the mass poisoning, is perpetuated by this petty bureaucracy, but that same insular culture can create a murderer.

Maggie: Yeah, okay, that’s pretty brilliant, and a big problem for Americans generally. It’s a truly relevant idea right now too, considering our current political environment. It seems like Americans have been sitting idly by, re-electing an embarrassing president that we can blame our country’s fouls on. We elected him; we’re responsible. If “America” is at war, you and I are at war. It’s not just Bush; it’s Mike and Maggie. I think people are just now starting to take up arms against “the banality of evil” as you put it, and I hope that this election year will begin real change. You’re really pointing out some things I didn’t notice at all. Interesting.

Mike: Hooray! Come to the dark side! We have better pie! Alright, now I know you wanted to talk about the horses?

Maggie: Yeah, I mean, sure, they get him out of his car so that he doesn’t explode, therefore moving the plot forward, but why does he stop? Then? And why is he entranced by the horses? Sometimes horses represent freedom or similar ideas, but these horses were in bridles, tamed by someone, not free.

Mike: Okay, I think it’s a beautiful image just in the abstract, and all the connotations of freedom, especially when he’s just been to that cocksucker’s house, who hit a guy in his car and now Clayton has to cover it up. But further back chronologically we find out about this book that his kid’s reading, “Realm & Conquest”, which is like the overt political metaphor in the film; not just the name, but when the kid is talking about the plot with Tom Wilkinson and everyone is experiencing a communal dream, but no one says anything so no one realizes it’s all this shared experience, this delusional experience or whatever. I think this is clever. Anyway, Clayton’s flipping through his kid’s book and sees this drawing of horses and that’s the moment that the U-North memo falls out of the book. So I think in both cases, the horses represent this break from the communal dream…

Maggie: Thanks for explaining the movie! G’night!

Mike: Ramble ramble ramble, I know. So let’s sum up, baby!

Maggie: Well, I enjoyed the movie, but I apparently didn’t notice any of the totally interesting stuff that you did. I thought all the acting was stellar and it was visually impressive, but I didn’t have the emotional, visceral reaction that I had with similarly huge releases from 2007. With There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men and Once, I felt like seeing those films affected my life, changed my point of view in some way. This movie just didn’t have that sort of impact on me, but from all that you’ve pointed out that I didn’t notice, maybe I should give it a second viewing.

Maggie’s Rating:

Mike: As you might have guessed, I was definitely impressed with this movie, and although we didn’t mention it in our discussion I loved George Clooney’s performance, which I would say is the best of his career. For a first feature, it’s remarkably self-assured; I have no doubt that we’ll be seeing more excellent pictures from Tony Gilroy (maybe they’ll let him take a crack at the Bourne series, for which he’s written all the screenplays). For me, maybe the biggest surprise of 2007.

Mike’s Rating:

Precious few exploitation films retain the power to shock and disturb as decades pass and audience tolerance evolves, making Meir Zarchi’s I Spit On Your Grave, the great-grandma of the rape/revenge genre, all the more impressive. By turns reviled or sheepishly apologized-for, the time is well-past due for a reevaluation of this picture.

Grave’s dirty secret, of course, is that it is neither as bad as one would expect from the genre in terms of artistry, nor as unrelentingly horrifying as the sensationalistic title or poster would suggest. Zarchi is no genius, but he’s smart enough to build tension slowly and let more innocuous scenes linger unnervingly long, keeping the viewer off balance by interrupting any natural cadence. The lengthy spaces surrounding the film’s more acute atrocities ramp up the panic-inducing quotient considerably.

The gang rape is truly distasteful, and in a genre practically devised to portray rape as titillating, Grave is notable for being deliberately and monumentally uncomfortable. I find it interesting that none of the scenes of sexual violence are as protracted as what Maggie has coined the “foreplay rape” scenes, those scenes of harassment and dehumanization that precede the act of physical violation. The short, sharp shocks never last long enough to blunt their edges; this is mettle-testing material.

Despite an enjoyably epic castration scene (complete with operatic score), the revenge portion of the picture is more uneven and sports an utterly weird aquatic denouement. Part of my ambivalence towards this second act stems no doubt from my fundamental problem with the rape/revenge genre’s structure. The murderous retribution of the survivor, The Revenge, has always struck me as a particularly male-oriented brand of feminist wish-fulfillment. Are the emotions of any survivor as simple as homicidal rage? An eye for an eye can make for a superficially satisfied audience, but can this ultimately reductive view truly satisfy after such a harrowing and thought-provoking first act?

Within minutes of the start of the film our lady is skinny dipping in the river behind her newly rented summer house. There’s a very voyeuristic shot of her from across the lake, which feels even more so, since we’ve already seen her naked in close-up; the distance isn’t to spare her nudity, even in this early stage—it’s to show that someone is already watching.

Time and again, this film suggests there is much more to rape than the actual act. There is an interesting sort of foreplay rape that begins soon after the woman arrives in the small town. All of the times that the woman is victimized, in various ways, and forced to participate in the games of the men, form this foreplay rape. The foreplay is in the catcalling, in the interruption of her writing with constant childish speedboat antics, and perhaps most obviously, in the theft of her boat while she is still in it. While none of these acts are overtly sexual, it is clear that the rape has already begun. The woman is not in control of the story of her life—a theme that she runs with later as the second half of the movie unfolds.

For a subject that seems fairly commonly addressed, at least on CSI and similar shows, rape is still polarizing. Some people just can’t watch it. While the CSI view of rape is generally very clinical and filled with medical jargon and a clear victim and bad guy, watching a rape scene is entirely different and usually not done very well. I think this film does it amazingly well, which for me means convincingly, without seeming unnecessary.

The idea of the individual viewer’s threshold for any disturbing subject comes up again and again at our house. It seems like we’re always having people over and attempting to coax them into watching something that’s just a bit beyond the pale for them. One of the things that is difficult for some people to watch is rape. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to watch rape scenes if I had been raped, so in a way I feel a bit guilty for the strange brand of catharsis I feel when I watch a convincing rape scene. Every time the subject arises I recall statistics from my undergrad days, stating that 1 in 4 women are raped at some point, and while watching I feel both fear and relief that it hasn’t happened to me. I think this film really establishes the concept of rape as a change in a person’s master status. Instead of thinking of oneself as “white” or “female” or “a writer,” the first thing that a rape victim identifies herself as is “rape victim,” —a point that is driven home when our protagonist’s master status changes once more from “rape victim” to “murderer.”

The viewer or voyeur question is relevant for the entirety of the film. As she’s being chased through the forest, there’s a shot of an “innocent” bystander, who doesn’t even flinch as the pursuit continues. In each individual instance of rape, there are three voyeurs, whether holding down our victim or simply watching as her broken body is beaten down further. Are we also accomplices?

I am Mike, and my wife she is called Maggie. We are here to review films and make lists and burn a trail of utter destruction across your internets!

We possess Master’s degrees in Cinema Studies from New York University and this public declaration of our credentials is intended to suggest to you that we do not fuck around, no. If, hypothetically, you were to catch us fucking around, rest assured that it is all part of our plan to draw you ever closer, lulling you into a false sense of security before we pounce and totally fucking destroy you like an ant-lion or some shit.

Our goal is to create Top Ten lists for every year and we’ll be starting with 1978, giving us 30 years to work forward before retreating into the past! Our screenings start now, with reviews soon to follow!

Ladies first…