The Salvation

THE SALVATION                  C                                

Denmark  Great Britain  South Africa  (89 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Kristian Levring

A conventional western with big named stars, shot in South Africa using painted backdrops resembling John Ford’s infamous Monument Valley in the American West, but unfortunately the viewer can’t escape the wretched excess of sadism that is so prevalent throughout this picture, from start to finish, as if similar themes from Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN (1992) were used as a model of success.  In truth, the excessive sadistic streak is a poor substitute for authenticity, as it hides and covers up the human dimension of these outlaws, making them one-dimensional characters that few of us have ever met in real life, as people are simply more complicated than that.  This need to saturate Hollywood films in sadism is an unpleasant phase of the industry at the moment, where once it runs its course, perhaps they’ll get back to making good movies again.  This Danish production is a reminder that immigrants once helped settle the West, building homes, working the land, and trying to survive in America’s unforgiving territory.  Set in the 1870’s, following Danish wars with Germany and Austria in the First Schleswig War (1848–51) and the Second Schleswig War (1864), losing both, resulting in significant loss of land, after which there was a considerable migration of people overseas looking to start a new life, the film stars Mads Mikkelsen as Jon, an ex-soldier, now a peaceful European settler living in the American heartland with his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) in a house they built.  With both coming from Denmark seven years earlier to stake their claim and start a life, the film opens as Jon’s wife Marie (Nanna Øland Fabricius, Danish singer-songwriter and dancer better known by her stage name Oh Land) and 10-year old son arrive on a train to join them.  Hopping on a stagecoach that will take them to their homestead outside of town, two gun-toting outlaws kick out the other couple that was supposed to be riding with them, turning this family reunion into a more ominous journey, where drink eventually gets the best of them, turning the outlaws into beasts, killing the boy, throwing Jon off the stage where he’s left for dead while they have their way with his wife.  Following on foot, he tracks them down where they’ve killed the driver and his wife as well, wallowing in their drunken delirium, and shoots both men dead, a small recompense for what he’s lost. 

After burying his wife and child, when he returns to the town of Black Creek he discovers one of the men he killed is the brother of notorious outlaw Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a former officer of the Confederacy and a man who bleeds the town dry by intimidation, where the sheriff (Douglas Henshall) and mayor, who also doubles as the undertaker (Jonathan Pryce), both do his bidding, bowing down to his every demand.  Delarue rounds up the town and tells the sheriff he has two hours to find the killer of his brother or he’s to pick two people from town that will be killed.  An impossible task, they actually pick an old woman and a mentally challenged boy to be sacrificed, but for Delarue, that’s not good enough, as he continually escalates the stakes, murdering another man in cold blood for starters, claiming there will be more by the hour until they find the killer.  Jon is implicated by a frontierswoman who helped him survive his perilous, near death journey, where his brother is thrown into jail while he is handed over to the outlaws, strung up on a post with both feet off the ground, brutally beaten, and left to rot under the hot sun as he considers his fate.  The Princess (Eva Green), a formidable presence of a woman and the widow of the man he killed, has a large scar across her lips where she had her tongue cut off by Indians, supposedly rescued by that scoundrel of a husband.  She controls the business end of this band of cutthroats with her air of upper class sophistication, wearing only the finest garments money can buy, becoming something of a fashion plate out in the middle of nowhere.  With his brother gone, Delarue takes advantage of the situation by ravishing the Princess, forcing himself upon her with a certain degree of arrogance and relish, where it’s obvious she has nothing but contempt for this man.  One of the problems with the Western convention is the reliance upon cliché’s, where good and evil become moral absolutes, where bad men are such loathsome examples of a depraved humanity that they become caricatures of the psychotically deranged.  Delarue is a direct descendant of Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett deriving such sadistic pleasure in UNFORGIVEN.

It doesn’t take much effort to figure out that the two brothers will ultimately have to stand up to this gang of killers before a cowering town of weaklings, following in the footsteps of Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON (1952), but before the day is done, blood will line the streets of Black Creek which will come to resemble a town of corpses.  Because of the exaggerated way it complies with western expectations, much of this is inadvertently humorous, where some of the dialogue is so over-the-top that it comes across as overly stereotypical.  Using plenty of CGI digitally altered images, there are majestic desert landscapes that suggest an endless frontier, but the Delarue ranch lies in the middle of a bleak and barren desert where nothing grows, where they actually have buzzards circling overhead as Jon has another near death encounter.  Rescued by his brother however, who makes his own clever escape, it’s clear these two have their work cut out for them.  Because of Jon’s weakened condition, Peter hides him in the mountains while he sets off in another direction, hoping to confuse the tracking killers, but in no time at all Jon realizes he must face the end of the journey alone.  Meanwhile, the Princess takes advantage of the confusion surrounding the prisoner’s escape to make her own run for it, taking the money from the vault and heading for the train out of town.  While there’s some degree of suspense to her efforts, especially after she believes the train has safely begun to move, but the approach of men on horses seals her fate as she is captured and led back to the ranch.  Rounding up some kid from town whose father was murdered right before his eyes, Jon sets out to singlehandedly accomplish what no one else has dared by standing up to these killers.  It has the look of a military operation, where each attack comes in phases, but there’s nothing here that we haven’t seen before.  Mikkelsen, as always, is simply outstanding, as is Jeffrey Dean Morgan as his ruthless counterpart, but no one else in the cast distinguishes themselves in this rote version of a classic western standoff, where the outcome is all but determined before the first frame is shown.  Even the music by Kasper Winding is a conventional Hollywood score, where despite Levring’s best efforts, there’s nothing particularly surprising or inventive that he brings to the genre.    

Calvary

Benbulbin

Benbulbin

CALVARY                  A-          
Ireland  Great Britain  (100 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  John Michael McDonagh     Official Facebook

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong.
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

—Second stanza, Under Ben Bulben by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a poem addressing his own mortality, from Last Poems, 1939

I’ve always felt there's something inherently psychopathic about joining the army in peace time, as far as I’m concerned people join the army to find out what its like to kill someone.  I hardly think that’s an inclination that should be encouraged in modern society, do you?          —Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson) 

This is a film unlike anything else seen in awhile, perhaps ever, as one needs to be psychically prepared for the metaphysical seriousness of tone, a modern morality play where despite the religious subject matter wrapped in Catholic doctrine, this plays out like a bleak existential western, a morbid take on HIGH NOON (1952), where one man alone takes on the forces of evil, unable to use the powers of the church or God to stop the inevitable doom from happening.  Named after the site where Christ was crucified, the film opens in the confession booth as a priest, Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson), hears a man threaten to kill him in one week’s time, naming the date and place of his murder.  The film then recounts the events of the week, day by day, leading up to that fateful hour.  This is as far from an action film as one gets, taking the audience completely off-guard, as the film relies instead upon the expository writing of the author, the writer/director of the hilariously offbeat The Guard (2011), also featuring a magnificent performance by Gleeson, but this is about as hushed and toned down as films can be, as the priest makes his usual rounds visiting various people in the community unannounced, where the entire film is a character study that consists of these intensely personal conversations, becoming a slowly unraveling philosophical treatise on man’s fate.  The Catholic church is as much the target as Father James, as the wounded parishioner was sexually abused by a priest from the ages of seven to twelve, recalling the horrendous pain he was forced to endure that has never left him, carrying the hurt and anguish around with him where his only consolation, since the offending priest is dead, is to target a good priest.  Father James, by all accounts, is well-liked and respected by all, where he has a worldly intelligence, as he came late to the calling, only after overcoming a drinking problem and ending in the death of his wife.  Adding to his own personal shame, his troubled daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) has been the victim of failed romances, the most recent resulting in a suicide attempt.  While the priest is the film’s centerpiece, she’s his able assistant, where the two make a remarkably astute pair, going on long walks together, recovering what they can from their own damaged lives.   

McDonagh, along with his brother Martin, one of the best known living Irish playwrights who wrote and directed In Bruges (2008), intends this to be the second installment of a Suicide Trilogy, all starring Brendon Gleeson, beginning with The Guard featuring Gleeson as a policeman schooling an American FBI agent (Don Cheadle) on local Irish police procedures while tracking down a drug smuggling ring, while in the third, THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST, Gleeson will play a paraplegic ex-policeman attempting to solve the murder of a friend whose death has been overlooked by the carelessness of the police.  As an older, bearded man in a wheelchair, expect Gleeson’s character to spew vitriol at every “able-bodied” human being.  So while the first and third appear to be laced with acerbic black comedy, CALVARY is one of the more profoundly contemplative films of the year, yet also feels like a mournful death march, similar to the atmospheric mood of Jim Jarmusch’s DEAD MAN (1995), complete with similar philosophical examinations.  The film is a full frontal attack on the Catholic church, who turned a blind eye to the Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Ireland, an epidemic of sexual abuse cases by Catholic priests in Ireland (Republic), where more than 35,000 Irish teenagers and children from Catholic-run orphanages or reformatories were abused by priests from the 1930’s until their discovery in the early 1990’s, not to mention priests from prominently renowned churches to the Magdalene asylum.  Despite thousands of witnesses coming forward, including a 9-year government commission to investigate the allegations, few offenders have been prosecuted, but this hasn’t in any way altered the Church’s practice of accepting money.  Because of the public notoriety of the church sex scandal around the world, it is almost universally accepted that no female nuns come from Ireland, Western Europe, or even North America anymore.  While the ramifications of this detestable scandal, almost invisible within the church itself, is a central theme of the film, where the suggestion seems to be life goes on, so let’s get on with our lives.  But some scars never heal, where they fester and only grow worse over time, with the act of revenge becoming the only viable response that matters, that gives meaning to every last breath, as all else has already died long ago.  It is in this anguishing spiritual abyss that CALVARY resides, a deeply introspective film that attempts to examine the meaning of faith in a faithless world, or find value in hope only after all hope is lost.     

As much as any Western country, Ireland has certainly had its faith tested in recent years, crawling out from under the absolutism of the Catholic Church, where money and modernity have been equally elusive.  Shot by Larry Smith, the film makes exquisite use of the rugged Irish coastline with seemingly endless rolling waves and the picturesque rural locale of County Sligo, including the looming omnipresence of Benbulben lurking off in the distance, a large rock formation in the Dartry Mountains, an area sometimes called “Yeats Country,” as the poet spent part of his youth there and is buried nearby.  The stunning beauty of these exterior geographical locations only heightens an interior examination of the characters, where this is a sin and redemption movie with Father James spending what could potentially be his final week making unannounced visits to any number of damaged individuals as he consoles a grief-stricken widow (Marie-Josée Croze) whose husband dies senselessly in a car crash while touring the region, an aging writer (M. Emmett Walsh) with a love for Hoagy Carmichael and American jazz of the 20’s and 30’s who begins to have contemplations about his impending death, an attractive butcher’s wife Veronica (Orla O’Rourke) who recently left her husband Jack (Chris O’Dowd) after sporting a black eye, though he blames it on an African boyfriend (Isaach de Bankolé) who takes offense to the priest’s prying insinuations.  Perhaps most pathetic is a retired stock trader Michael (Dylan Moran) who has earned a fortune, recently purchasing a fabulously expensive mansion without his wife and child who left him, leaving him to stew in his own self-imposed existential emptiness where life has lost all meaning, while the creepiest is a visit to the prison seeing a former student, Freddie Joyce (Gleeson’s own son Domhnall Gleeson), a convicted serial killer sentenced to life, as Ireland has no death penalty, who reminds the priest that he’s also one of God’s creations, wondering if God could understand him, to which Father James judiciously responds, “If God can’t understand you, no one can.” 

Throughout these visits, he continues to interact with his daughter Fiona, who felt doubly betrayed both by the death of her mother and then the absence of her father when he left to join the priesthood, where this visit is an attempt to heal their wounds.  This is a dark and somber drama, thoughtful and quietly moving throughout, showcasing an acerbic wit and black humor, especially since an ugly nature permeates throughout this country town, with scorn and resentment filling the air, where any one of them could be guilty.  They are a sorry bunch filled with the devil’s mischief, deserving of the Father’s pity, yet they hold him in utter contempt, as nobody believes in anything anymore.  A brooding study of human nature where Father James is thwarted at every turn, the film slowly and deliberately moves towards that inevitable confrontation between the forces of good and evil, resulting in a vividly unsparing climax that leaves nothing to the imagination.  “I was one of the lucky ones!  There’s bodies buried back there,” where the tortuous pain of the afflicted parishioner bares its ugly soul with the volcanic fury of insufferable pain, as the film revisits the same places over the end credits without the presence of people, losing all sense of humanity, where the stark emptiness is a jolt to the system, especially accompanied by hauntingly transcendent Guaraní harp music from Paraguay, Los Chiriguanos - Subo - YouTube (“Subo” I Climb, 3:01), where Los Chiriguanos are two men from the tribe of Chirigua that have existed in central South America since long before the Spaniards came in 1527, who themselves have suffered their own indignities, yet produce such heavenly music.  The common thread throughout is carried by the good intentions of mortal men, much like the country priest in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne) (1951), whose persistent effort to help build a better understanding in the world brings the eternal into ordinary day to day experiences, which may as well be the grace of God.   

A Long and Happy Life (Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn)

A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE (Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn)      B                 

Russia  (77 mi)  2013  d:  Boris Khlebnikov

Much like Russian director Aleksei Popogrebsky’s 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 How I Ended This Summer, which takes place in a remote science station on the Arctic ocean, where the ruggedness of the barren location was a silent character to the film, Khlebnikov shot this film in the Kola Peninsula located in the far northwest of Russia, constituting the bulk of the territory of the Murmansk Oblast, lying almost completely above the arctic circle, where the natural beauty of the location almost takes one’s breath away.  It should be pointed out that these two filmmakers, Khlebnikov and Popogrebsky, collaborated on an earlier film, the award winning ROADS TO KOKTEBEL (2003), another Russian film with minimal dialogue and stark cinematography.  Using the stunning backdrop of a small village clinging to the banks of a rapidly moving river, we are introduced to Sasha (Alexander Yatsenko), a potato farmer who also raises chickens, who is getting the business by a couple of mafia style businessmen who are offering to compensate him for his land, claiming a single owner is buying up all the farmland in the region.  This kind of high pressure business tactic is not really a choice, as it’s a deal that’s being rammed down his throat.  As we see him walking out the door afterwards, he’s joined by Anya (Anna Kotova), the sexy blond secretary working in the office that sat silently upstairs just a minute ago, where they embrace with a kiss, both smiling at the prospects of quick cash money where they can return to the city and buy a home together, seen later sleeping together in his bedroom with windows overlooking the river, where the sound of the rapids is everpresent.     

When Sasha tells his farmhands the news, that they will end this harvest season and then close up the farm before the first snow falls, the farm workers have other ideas, as they don’t like being pushed off their land and urge Sasha to stand up to the fat cat bureaucrats and put up a fight, suggesting they’re willing to take up arms to protect their livelihood.  This inspirational communal spirit catches Sasha by surprise, as he’s a city kid that moved specifically to an agrarian community to head up a collective farming project convinced his experimental ideas would work.  Touched by the outpouring of support, he decides to stay on his land and refuses to sign for the money, despite the implicit threats that this will only bring him harm, even losing Anya in the process.  Initially, however, spirits are high, as this little collective is driven by their own ideals and passions, as they’re working the land.  But one by one, individuals pull out, as some want a share of Sasha’s compensation money, even though he’s refused to accept a penny, or need personal loans, while others go on hunting trips, or claim they have other job opportunities they can’t pass up.  Perhaps the most suspicious and damning evidence is a giant fire that burns down the house next door—certainly an ominous sign.  The spirit of camaraderie soon unravels and the farm hands are actually blaming him for listening to them, suggesting all the signs favor the money interests, as they always get their way.  The unseen implication is that each one has been individually threatened and coerced to change their minds, with an underlying threat of violence lying behind every act of persuasion. 

Despite the break in the ranks, Sasha silently goes about his business building chicken coops for chickens that may never come, refusing to be bullied, where this recalls Gary Cooper as the noble sheriff, a man alone standing up to a group of outlaw killers in HIGH NOON (1952), where the entire town abandons him out of fear.  Sasha is a similar likeable but doomed hero, where the mood veers to what horrors could befall this man, where we wait for the inevitable, as his protection has completely dried up and disappeared.  It’s interesting to see this kind of portrayal of an idealistic hero in a post-communist Russia, suggesting the old ideals of collectivism and working in solidarity for the social good have lost all credibility, as Russia’s current leadership hoards money and power and rules by intimidation and fear, where everyone’s looking out for their own self-interests.  There’s an interesting scene where Sasha is driving his car at ever increasing speeds, with the camera fixed on his face, and as the motor grows louder his expression grows in anger and disgust, where the audience is surely waiting for the inevitable crash that never comes.  Sasha grew up after the collapse of the USSR and imagined he’d be part of the new era, only to discover former friends are behind the move to drive farmers off their lands.  Khlebnikov’s film suggests being a farmer is no longer an option in Russia, that in land grabs, investors have driven all the farmers off their lands.  The film similarly recalls the finale of Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), which expresses an anti-western fatalism atypical of the western genre, where a reluctant protagonist and his enemies have their own “high noon” sequence completely out of sight of the rest of the community, and unaware of the gravity taking place in their midst.  Khlebnikov uses an ironic title about a socially committed ordinary man who, despite his best intentions, winds up a criminal, where rather than a utopian dream, he’s forced to live in a Hell on earth.    

Terror in a Texas Town

 
Sterling Hayden testifying before the Un-American Activities Committee. “Joining the Communist Party,” he said, “was the stupidest, most ignorant thing I’ve ever done in my life.”







TERROR  IN A TEXAS TOWN         B                    

USA  (80 mi)  1958  d:  Joseph H. Lewis  

Something of a morality tale written under the alias Ben Perry by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, in what could be considered a dry run before he became the first blacklisted writer to use his own name when he wrote the screenplay for SPARTACUS (1960), adapted from a novel by another blacklisted writer, Howard Fast, where the Romans defeat a slave rebellion, and when the captured slaves refuse to identify the leader, Spartacus, all are crucified, a reference to the actions of the House of Un-American Activities Committee.  Interestingly, the lead actor of the film, Sterling Hayden, was forced to testify before the same committee after parachuting behind enemy lines during WWII to join Tito’s Yugoslavian partisans fight against European fascism, when he briefly joined the Communist Party, eventually forced to name names before the committee, something he later disavowed.  The interest in TERROR IN A TEXAS TOWN comes from the gripping performance by Hayden, who plays an immigrant Swede who has been working whaling ships for thirty years sending what little money he could to his father in Texas to help buy land and a farmhouse, returning home, finally, to join his father after being away nearly 20 years.  Shot in just 10 days on a B-movie budget, using a renowned innovator from the 20’s  in developing the three-strip Technicolor process, Ray Rennahan, who received an Academy Award, along with Ernest Haller, for his outstanding color photography in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), though this film remains Black and White.  What’s particularly memorable about this film is the infamous use of a harpoon in a street gunfight, a near surrealist image that defies Western lore. 

By the time George Hansen (Hayden) arrives in town, his father has already been shot in cold blood on his own land by Johnny Crale (Ned Young, also blacklisted, and an uncredited screenwriter), a notorious gunman dressed all in black doing the bidding of capitalist moneyman Ed McNeil (Sebastian Cabot), a land speculator who is driving everyone off their land as he’s secretly discovered the presence of oil.  Anyone refusing to budge, once threatened, must face the consequences of Johnny Crale, where the town sheriff is on McNeil’s payroll as well, looking the other way, supposedly covering all tracks.  For Crale, murder is a business opportunity, where he sees himself as something of a partner to McNeil, though it’s clear only one of them, behind the scenes, is handling all the business affairs, collecting all the land deeds for what is otherwise seen as barely marketable farmland.  Hansen’s unexpected presence changes the playing field, as the town population has already disappeared in fear, where all that’s seen is an empty ghost town, with an immense saloon/hotel that features a long bar with no customers and an empty room except for a lone table with Crale playing cards with the saloon girl Molly (Carol Kelly), a woman who seems to be held against her will, suffering continual insults by the man with the gun.  It’s Crale that explains what happened to Hansen’s father, leaving out the identity of the gunman, while the sheriff warns Hansen that the land is off limits while an on-going investigation is in effect, forcing him to stay at the hotel under the watchful eyes of McNeil and his henchmen, who beat him up and throw him on the night train out of town.  In an astonishing sequence, Hansen is seen the next morning walking alone along the train tracks through a vast and empty desert landscape that initially appears to be an excellent matte painting, but as the camera holds the shot, it looks like he keeps walking into infinity.

From the outset, the music by Gerald Fried is uniquely heroic, featuring plenty of tympani drumbeats during the initial stand-off, shown as a tease before the opening credits, Terror in a Texas Town. Opening Credits - YouTube (2:58), along with an acoustic guitar and trumpet, where the boldly pronounced trumpet theme is synonymous with Hayden’s character, who quickly figures out the lay of the land, urging people to stand up for themselves instead of cowering like weaklings, as eventually their turn will come to be run off their land and who will offer help?  Hayden is surprisingly persistent, showing a flair for honesty and hard truths, a stubborn man who refuses to back down, though in a memorable turn, he speaks with a Swedish accent throughout, where in Trumbo’s story, the poor immigrants are minorities being forced off their land by the ruthless interests of big business, who is the real villain in the developing West.  When Crale tries to evict a Mexican neighbor of Hansen’s father, Jose Mirada (Victor Millan), emboldened by Hansen’s heroics, he decides to stand up to him, even if that means dying with dignity like a man instead of a cowardly dog.  This changes the psychological reign of terror, as bullies are not used to having people stand up to them.  Even Molly, seen in the role as a subservient fallen woman, warns the silent voices of the men in her town to start standing up for themselves.  In a riff on the theme of HIGH NOON (1952), where a lone man must act alone against the forces of evil, Hansen grabs his father’s harpoon, the only thing he brought with him from Sweden, to exact justice.  In what is truly a bizarre scene, a stand-off with a harpoon and a six-shooter, with the townspeople standing passively in back, it plays out like a samurai swordfight movie, where quick reflexes take their opponent by surprise, shown this time using different angles, followed to its rightful conclusion:  Terror in a Texas Town (1958), final confrontation - YouTube (2:07).  This was the director’s final film before finishing his career in television, certainly one of the strangest westerns in recollection, using plenty of overt symbolism (apparently in the 50’s moral clarity is found at the tip of a harpoon!) in an otherwise low key film that continually accentuates the frame’s noticeable emptiness, a town seething under the surface with cowardice and fear, until finally in a burst of action the tables are turned.