Ray Pride

Movies take a couple of hours to watch, but almost never less than several years to race from the scratch of a pen to the blank of an eye.

So there's history behind even an unusually rapid-fire production like Steven Spielberg's "Munich," which was in production from June 29 to September 29 of this year, but in development for much, much longer.

"Munich" is just one year-end movie that's set in the past, approaching what lies ahead of us through the ironic frame of the period picture. "Brokeback Mountain," which has emerged as the movie to beat with Best Picture nods from critics' groups nationwide, moves from the 1960s to the 1970s, and is based on a story by E. Annie Proulx that ran in the New Yorker in 1997 and was a movie that Ang Lee wanted to make for at least six years. Lee's standard quiet, observant style in telling a love story for which the lovers have no words, only feelings, also makes "Brokeback Mountain" probably one of the most timeless of the movies being released toward holiday audiences and Oscar consideration, despite almost every picture of note delving into some period of history other than our own. Similarly, Kong's admiration of "Beauty" in the form of wide-eyed Naomi Watts is an impossible love, one that finds its match, for tears, at least, in the inexplicable stirrings felt by "Brokeback"'s 19-year-old cowboys in its early passages.

And yet, at a reported $205 million and three hours and eight minutes, the "Kong" does not remain the same. There are clever acknowledgements of the antediluvian racism of the 1933 "King Kong" in Peter Jackson's remake, to the point of dressing the comic, dancing "natives" of the "Eighth Wonder of the World" stage show when Kong is taken to New York in laughable costumes that are, in fact, very close to the "natives" of the original. Jackson's compulsive detailing of 1933 New York is one of those rare occasions when some audiences may walk out "humming the scenery": the Depression-era streets and Art Deco sets and a vast, hyper-detailed Manhattan seen from the sky transcend CGI and animation to become a miracle far more enthralling than a mere monkey climbing the side of the Empire State Building. (It's nostalgia for an era none of us have known except through movies and photographs.) The 1914 settings of James Cameron's "Titanic" had an etched-on-glass picture-postcard look that held their own charm; Jackson's "Kong" is filled with lovingly detailed dinosaurs, but it's lost New York that is his most memorable creation. And what do you know? 9/11 hardly comes to mind, unlike the disastrous 1976 version that found Kong hopping from one of the Twin Towers to the other while battling incoming jet fighters.

Several movies specifically about 9/11 are in production, ranging from Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" to Paul Greengrass' "Flight 93." The generic titles of both projects demonstrate abiding caution, as do the plotlines, in taking on one of the rawest moments in recent time. Like "Schindler's List" telling the rare tale of Jews who survived the tragedy of Holocaust, both the Stone and Greengrass projects find heroism emerging from the ashes of that bright, clear, deadly day.

An easier way to tackle contemporary wounds is to use history as metaphor. Spielberg's "Munich," a lengthy, Costa-Gavras-like, 1970s-style Euro-thriller about a team of assassins sent to exterminate the killers who slaughtered members of the Israeli team during the 1972 Olympics, is the closest thing to a parable of our times, weighing the pain of terrorism against the beliefs of either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based loosely on a nonfiction book called "Vengeance," "Munich"'s thoughtful yet shamelessly speechy script, co-credited to "Angels in America" playwright Tony Kushner, is filled with moments like Israel's premier, Golda Meir, saying "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." That has painful parallels in the headlines torn from today's events in the War in Iraq and the war against dissent in America, but Spielberg goes a step farther, with a cold, mute final shot that lingers and lingers and does not go away. It lingers long enough that you have to wonder how many more movies will strain for epiphany or even profundity by concluding with a final shot of Manhattan as it looked between 1974 and September 11, 2001?

While a raft of documentaries like "The Protocols of Zion" continue to engage the present tense, controversies over journalistic ethics make a couple of the year's best films incredibly timely: the 1950s setting of George Clooney's chamber drama, "Good Night, and Good Luck," about the role of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in the downfall of demagogic crusader Joseph McCarthy, and the more astringent portrait of the journalist at work in director Bennett Miller, screenwriter Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman's imagining of "Capote." Clooney, who has had notable run-ins with talkfest entertainers like Fox's Bill O'Reilly, worked from multiple historical sources with his co-writer Grant Heslov, presenting a scrupulously plotted, compact allegory for where broadcast journalism had already gone astray, even in the nicotine-stained era that is often romanticized.

"Capote" is a far remove from romance. The film is canny about the powerful attraction between Truman Capote and convicted killer Perry Smith, presenting it as less a matter of irreconcilable feelings between a dangerous convict and the openly gay writer than as Capote recognizing the story of a lifetime, one that would build him up or destroy him. It's a stirring conflict: to create a new way of fashioning history, of transforming the very idea of nonfiction, at the cost of another man's life. The moments of Miller's camera observing Hoffman in the act of watching, Capote's nose twitching slightly as his eyes remain steady, is the coolest of images of what reporters do: in the act of observing, remaining unobserved by the subject, yet watching, as in journalist Janet Malcolm's notorious observation, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." (One could imagine "Capote" being an adaptation of those two sentences, rather than Gerald Clarke's biography.)

But movies are more than language, more than text, and ideally, more than sociology written in pixels. New Line has two of the more evocative titles of 2005 with their scrappy marvels, "A History of Violence," set in an idealized Indiana small town that is as much 1950s as 2000s, and the seventeenth-century-set "The New World," both of which demonstrate a rich mastery of the ironic uses of history.

David Cronenberg's masterpiece, on one hand, is an adept action movie, filled with fleet explosions of violence that follow the contours expected of the man-with-a-past-with-a-gun genre. But Cronenberg's intelligence is brought out in a parallel satire of the form, where his elegantly composed frames and spare storytelling offer both the satisfactions and lingering questions about the morality on view. Is this bit of work-for-hire by a Canadian director about America in Iraq? Yes, but not only. As the German journalist (and satirist) Karl Kraus observed in the teens, "Satires which can be understood by the censor are justly forbidden."

That's the power of metaphor in movies: Terrence Malick's "The New World" is about the great filmmaker's absorption in the primal, the primeval, the green and the innocent, but its staggeringly beautiful images resonate. This "new" world is an old one dying the first time the natives meet the English in the tall green grasses near shore. We know that the "naturals" will lose their "old world" so that ours might come, but that is story and not storytelling. Colin Farrell's beautiful features have never been put to better use--bearded and his liquid brown eyes always agleam, he is an explorer, filled with curiosity and longing for the nameless Indian princess we call "Pocahontas," yet his eyes are sad, watchful, even hesitant. While the last shot of "The New World" resembles that of "Munich"--how far do our actions fall from the tree?--the movie's most narcotic beauty is in the face of Q'Orianka Kilcher, whose part-Peruvian features are caught in so many different ways by Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki that she is innocence, and woman and The New World, a twenty-first century embodiment of a forgotten seventeenth-century. Her beauty is so otherworldly, she could be from the moon, and the settlers could as well be moon explorers. Here are the first small steps, small for a man, irreversible for mankind.

The history of the movies is a history of the heart. And isn't every tragic love story a mirror of every doomed romance? "Brokeback Mountain"'s core audience, admits its eloquent producer James Schamus, who is also head of Focus Features, which made the film and is already in profit from foreign sales alone, is women. This is the reason the movie's poster barefacedly evokes the iconic form of "Titanic"'s one-sheet, one cowboy's shoulder standing in for the prow of the doomed ship. "Brokeback Mountain," yes, is "the gay cowboy movie," but that is not the emotion evoked from the picture. The line in the trailer that seems risible out of context--"I wish I knew how to quit you"--is earned in the movie, as it is in Annie Proulx' original short story: "You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you." The rawness of the pain exists outside of history, outside of embarrassment, outside of language.

Sometimes the reasons for choosing an era are capricious, such as Chris Columbus choosing to place his adaptation of "Rent" in 1989, during the time he himself was young, broke and living in an unheated loft, despite the movie having anachronistic references, like 1992's "Thelma and Louise." Mel Brooks' 1967 "The Producers," the comedy classic-turned-stage musical, is now set in the 1950s, which seems an allusion to the kind of stage-bound, CinemaScope musicals of that era, beyond any logic in the script. The glamorous catfights of "Memoirs of a Geisha," set in the first half of the twentieth century in Japan, are also a remembrance of runways past, more fashion fever than authentic memoir. For historical authenticity, you'd be better off consulting Neil Jordan's "Breakfast on Pluto," which posits too-pretty-to-live Cillian Murphy as a glam hero(ine) channeling his own inner Irish granny against the "serious, serious, too serious" Troubles of 1970s Ireland.

Yet it's the present that's most capricious, and why some filmmakers, like the Coen brothers, in "Fargo," for instance, are attracted to the "near-period piece." To draw an example from 2005, fewer missteps are likely if a movie like "Jarhead" is set during the first Gulf War rather than the ongoing conflict in Iraq. A notable exception to the protection of period, the distance of history, is Steven Gaghan's hyper-intelligent, cynical downer about how oil begets corruption that coldly suggests the eventual, onrushing demise of the West. "Syriana" is one of the few movies bold enough to take on the modern world, and while muted in the telling of its interwoven narratives, it is as in-your-face as the most caffeinated of blogs.

(2005-12-13)

Also by Ray Pride

What does it mean?
Marc Levin's a notably combative figure, but it took some convincing to get him on camera for "The Protocols of Zion," in which the veteran filmmaker of "Slam" takes to the streets of New York to confront and question purveyors of various and sundry anti-Semitic beliefs
(2005-12-06)

Tip of the Week
The title and the animated bird in its ads: "39 Pounds of Love"? The dread began
(2005-12-06)

It's a blunder-filled life
Harold Ramis' "The Ice Harvest," an exquisitely sleazy twenty-first century proto-noir, is deadpan, implacable, inexorable and downright cruel, a marvel of moviemaking, tautly paced, immaculately crafted
(2005-11-29)

Tip of the Week
Although Miramax sat on this one for almost half a decade, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 2001 horror opus is one of the most dread-steeped, agonizing horrors of the past ten years
(2005-11-29)

Born to Rent
(2005-11-21)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-21)

The one you're looking for
(2005-11-15)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-15)

Splash Panel
(2005-11-08)

Catching a Buzz
(2005-11-08)

Tip of the Week
(2005-11-08)

Through the past, darkly
(2005-11-01)

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