Light Sensitive

Southern man

The third feature of the singular Southern independent Jeff Nichols, Mud is an engrossing and sharply made work that inventively combines a boys’ adventure story, mystery and an elegiac portrait of a remembered past.

 Nichols burst on the scene with his stunning debut, Shotgun Stories, made six years ago, that was notoriously and appallingly rejected by Sundance. His follow-up, Take Shelter, of two years ago, was more ambitious and maddeningly uneven, but the parts that worked, the eruptions and hallucinations visited upon its protagonist (superbly played by Michael Shannon) suggested a director eerily and capably moving between realist and irrational mode of expression.

Nichols is a talented storyteller, especially visually. His movies play off the discord and fractious relationships of individuals to meditate on what it means to be alive. Nichols returns to his Arkansas roots with the movie. The movie was shot, by Nichols’ regular cinematographer, the superb Adam Stone, in thirty-five millimeter widescreen. The imagery is pellucid and diamond sharp, summoning a vanished frontier, a mythic South redolent of Mark Twain, Larry Brown and Mark Crews.

The story is a adventure tale, with a contemporary Huck and Tom Sawyer variation, about the avid and colorful sojourn of two fourteen-year old kids whose search for excitement plunges them into devilish and difficult story way over their heads. Shotgun Stories was a Old Testament story of blood lust and bitter rivalries among two warring sets of brothers who had the same father. Take Shelter played off a dialectical tension of a fractured consciousness.

The new movie opens with a startling sight on an island redoubt, in the Mississippi, of the boys discovering a boat held aloft in the trees, the fallout of a massive flood. The enterprising and relentless Ellis (Tye Sherman) and his best friend, Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), undertake one of their reconnaissance missions to seize possession of the boat and transform into a hideout.

Instead, they encounter a mysterious man, Mud (Matthew McConaughey),  living a precarious daily existence. Nichols, who wrote the script, creates a very credible emotional world of the two kids, their solidarity and closeness forged through a shared status as outsiders. Ellis lives with his parents, Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson) and Senior (Ray McKinnon), on a boathouse. His need for adventure and discovery helps mitigate the clear strain of his parents’ tense marriage. Neckbone has never known his parents, and his lives with his uncle, Galen (Shannon).

The boys are shrewd and street-smart enough to realize something amiss about the mysterious man, and they soon discover he is a fugitive wanted for murder. He acted to protect his girlfriend, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), he says. 

Establishing a rapport with mysterious man, Ellis agrees to help him evade the authorities and some nasty bounty hunters dispatched from Texas. The two kids become his couriers, foraging the hard materials, like an outboard motor, Mud requires to outfit the boat to leave the island. Crucially, Ellis becomes the man’s link to the outside world, from the dangerously beautiful and fragile Juniper to the hard-edged loner (Sam Shepard) also connected to Mud’s past.

Nichols intertwines several plots and stories, forming a kind of arabesque, that certainly complicates the action, weaving in the slowly disintegrating marriage of Ellis’ parents and his own confusion of his first crush on an older classmate (Bonnie Sturdivant). The emotional parallel, of Ellis understanding Mud’s attraction and faith in a woman, is nicely echoed in his own infatuation with his classmate.

The first hour is so strong and compelling, to the point I was ready to concede this was at the level of Nichols’ best work. Mud has a great deal plot to digest and weave together; if the rhythm and pace are consistently textured and shaped, the increasingly incident-driven story dangles and splatters rather than take hold.

The film’s theme exerts a haunting and powerful grip on the material, namely the nature of violence, its origins and what it is heir to. Like many Southern stories, the past is superimposed over the present, and the conflict develops out of the need for its characters to create their own moral order.

McConaughey brings a tremendous physical presence to the part, but also a damaged intensity. He has submitted himself to a talented director and let go of some of his more eccentric stylization (like The Paperboy). The two kids are revelatory, imaginative, daring and wholly unafraid. Witherspoon, who’s also a native Southerner, gives a sharp, modulated turn in a small though penetrating part.

At times the ambition and scope sometimes undermine the tender, even volatile story construction. The violent shootout that climaxes the movie feels borrowed from a less rigorous and imaginative mind. Nichols redeems himself with two stunning images of transcendence and freedom. Once more, this is a director going places.

Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

Gun crazy

The movies of Terrence Malick are again front and center, in all of their ravishing, transfixing and maddeningly glorious beauty.

Criterion has published a stunning high-definition edition of Malick’s extraordinary debut, the 1973 Badlands. The director’s new feature, To the Wonder, is also now out in theaters and also available on other platforms. I first caught it at Toronto, and I saw it a second time, on 35mm, just recently. (More about it later.)

Malick’s career is unorthodox though hardly unprecedented. The other night in Chicago, following a screening in 35mm of his 1977 Sorcerer, the director William Friedkin, lamented he did not come of age during the studio-era, where he could have signed four or five films a year. One of the problems when you make six films in forty years is the pressure to constantly top yourself.

Criterion has also just published a deluxe version of Alex Cox’s Repo Man. Like Paul Brickman, who made Risky Business, Cox is a gifted director who had an auspicious start, but then grew disillusioned with the system, because of the money required to make movies, the artistic compromises necessary to sustain a career, and he took his work in a different and more personal direction. He forfeited his audience in the process.

Malick made two startling works, Badlands and Days of Heaven, five years apart and then promptly disappeared. His third feature, The Thin Red Line, is clearly the transitional work between his narrative and the increasingly abstracted, experimental vein his work is now aggressively moving.

Nowadays, films seems to exist in two modes of expression: hand-made or industrial. The hand-made, essayistic, personal, intransigent, unfold almost exclusively in the margins. (By the way, check out the very fine accompanying essay on the Criterion Badlands by the excellent Michael Almereyda, another gifted director whose work is regrettably out of fashion and too often out of view).

Malick put up a lot of his own money to make Badlands, and what’s interesting with the advantage of hindsight is how free and incautious much of the movie is.

With Badlands, Malick announced a particular narrative architecture that would yoke together his thematic and dramatic concerns: period settings, voiceover as narrative contrapuntal, lyrical, tangible sense of physical beauty that meditates on the form and grammar of silent cinema, with an emphasis on landscape, physical gesture and the beauty of the human face.

Thematically, Malick circles on the theme of doomed love, the death of nature, a restrictive social order, or a world marked by a lost or violated Eden.

Malick’s script for Badlands was clearly modeled on the story of Charles Starkweather, the psychopathic spree killer who murdered eleven people in the late fifties, with his frightened teenaged accomplice and girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, in tow. The director’s first two features, shaped by an Old Testament vengeance, are dominated by imagery rooted in fire and water, and colored by a willful innocence violated.

They are also linked by the tremulous voices of its young female narrators, Holly (Sissy Spacek), in Badlands, and Linda Manz, in Days of Heaven. Badlands is also part of a wondrous and cherished movie American past (You Only Live Once, They Live by Night, Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde).

However mythological the movie, it is filled with pain and torment. The filmmaking is exciting, the acting revealing, but the movie is staggering and awful because of what we see and feel. The violence in Badlands is frightening, eruptive and appalling. In the movie, the Starkweather figure is called Kit, a laconic, disturbed psychopath played by Martin Sheen.

Perfectly cast, Sheen laces every move, feeling and action with a stripped down, blank amorality. After the first murder, of Holly’s father (Warren Oates), a sign painter, the young fugitives light out to the outback while retaining as much as possible their childlike accoutrements, a deranged fantasy life of tree-houses, face paint and peculiar make-believe.

As their victims accumulate, the road is desultory, alienating and self-annihilating. The vast stretches of open spaces are not just empty, but withholding, evoking a continual state of dread and nothingness. In the extraordinary tactile and velvety night imagery, Holly says, they exist in an in-between world that goes beyond loneliness. Before he kills, Kit barely exists, a nowhere man hardly anybody would be capable of noticing.

The discontinuous arrangement of shots boldly compresses time and space and creates a hallucinatory visual texture whose effect draws you deeper and deeper into the storytelling rhythm. Watching it again, Badlands reminded me of just how natural and formidably gifted an imagemaker Malick is. How thrilling, as Friedkin said after the Sorcerer screening, to watch films made in the era before the image was consistenly perverted by digital and computer manipulation.

I know for some other writers, critics and observers who have followed Malick since the beginning, they have a different kind of lament, not at how few films he has made since Badlands but a profound and sharp disappointment at the direction his work has taken. Malick has now made as many films (three) in the last  seven or eight years as he made in the previous thirty-two.

I disagree with those ideas but I certainly understand them. I can think of no other director who has inspired such volatile debate. Personally, I just want the films to continue.

The more, the better.

 

Images courtesy of Criterion.