A Streetcar Named Desire

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE              A-              
USA  (122 mi)  1951  d:  Elia Kazan 

While Marlon Brando introduces theatrical realism with his intense, in-your-face demeanor, Vivien Leigh, in contrast, seems rather pathetic in her exaggerated, near silent era performance.  The character of Blanche DuBois is supposedly based on Tennessee Williams’s sister Rose who had lifelong mental health problems until a lobotomy left her completely unreachable.  While the story is steamy and sensual, featuring the physicality of Brando’s Stanley Kowalski, and his adoring, yet physically and emotionally abused wife Stella (Kim Hunter), their lives are interrupted by a mysterious visit from Blanche, Stella’s sister, who moves into their tawdry flat in New Orleans but immediately finds Stanley “a survivor from the Stone Age.”  While she thinks she’s got him all figured out and immediately urges her sister to come away with her, Stella reminds her that she’s wildly in love with the man.  While Brando exhibits an ease and naturalness in front of the camera, where his every gesture suggests a sexual swagger, Blanche is a repressed grand dame from the old South who is used to being waited on hand and foot, who’s mind is forever focused on herself, and who embellishes everything about herself to make herself more attractive to the people around her, never believing any of it is a lie, but that it’s all part of female guile.  When Stanley soon discovers a friend from her past that reveals she’s a fraud, Blanche begins her retreat into the safe world of her memories.  When a gentleman caller, one of Stanley’s card playing friends, Mitch (Karl Malden), sees through her, she’s fully on her descent of losing all contact with the present, which is made complete by a suggested (not shown) rape scene from Stanley. 

Brando is so interesting with his low class accent and his swagger that he’s a motivation all by himself to take up the craft of acting, as movies had never seen anything like this before, ravishingly good looking, completely masculine, yet also troubled, tender, even fragile, a guy who wears his vulnerability on his sleeve.  But he’s also a bully, pitifully inept at expressing himself, yet stridently confident, so he tends to throw things against the wall and yell at high registers to intimidate Stella, always apologizing afterwards and burying his head in her chest.  In contrast, Vivien Leigh’s character is pretending all the time, and her fall from grace is immediate and decisive, as without the façade of deception, she can’t fool anyone anymore, leaving her helplessly isolated and alone.  Her face is filmed in shadows, where she always darkens the room to better make her retreat, while taking several steaming hot baths every day.  Unfortunately, Blanche has become somewhat laughable in her fragility, a woman caught in the cobwebs of time, a bundle of nerves where it’s as if she continues to use Southern Gothic dialogue written by Truman Capote, the kind that bears no resemblance to real conversation, but instead floats into the air with a kind of ancient poetic resonance.  She is at her most manipulative best in a scene with an innocent young boy who knocks on the door to ask for charitable contributions, but ends up being the victim of a pathetic, older woman who wants to relive her youth with a kiss, leaving the poor kid wondering what the hell has happened.  Blanche was fired from her job as a schoolteacher for sleeping with a 17-year old student, but her real travesty was her marriage, where her descent from reality began when she discovered her husband having homosexual sex with another man (conveniently left out of the film) before committing suicide.  That kind of trauma never disappears, and Blanche has been building walls to hide behind ever since.  But Stanley crudely smashes all of the walls of resistance, exposing her for the helpless creature she is, expressed in her final words, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”    

The film began the casting of leads as anti-heroes, as Stanley is hardly a gentleman or a noble character, instead he’s a brute that Blanche compares to the animal kingdom.  Also the sound design feels configured by Alfred Hitchcock, as the loud noise of a passing train leaves Blanche emotionally shattered, where she completely loses her sanity, growing near hysterical each time while crumbling to the floor.  Overall, as a movie or a play, the problem is Blanche has more screen time than Stanley and she simply can’t hold her own against his physical presence, forcing the audience to endure the rhapsodic overtures of a weak and feeble mind spouting off on another rambling alcoholic soliloquy.  More than 50 years post production, audiences will tend to laugh at her utter ridiculousness, where every outfit she wears looks like it’s been stored in mothballs for decades while everyone else around her wears casual, comfortable clothing.  The play itself, while earth shattering to the senses, one that easily qualifies as a landmark, dwells in the minds of just a few central characters, and despite having a raw, sexual presence, censors cut out much of this subject matter from the film.  But it certainly features peak moments of intensity, not to mention a brawling spontaneity, before Blanche goes off on another one of her all-too descriptive recollections from her past that just takes all the air out of the room.  The balance of power shifts with Blanche’s arrival, where Stella may eventually develop new understandings in how to deal with a man like Stanley, but in this play, in this era, he’s calling all the shots. 

Source Code

SOURCE CODE                     B                     

USA  France  (93 mi)  2011  d:  Duncan Jones 

“The source code is a gift.  Don't squander it by thinking.” 
—Dr. Walter Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright)

An efficiently directed film about disorientation, one that keeps the characters in the film as well as the audience in the dark for as long as possible before small bits and pieces of well placed reality creep in, like clues in the dark.  Directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son, whose previous sci-fi film MOON (2009) lingered in theaters well beyond the entire summer.  This is something of a mind-bender as well, like an expanded version of a Twilight Zone episode where a character has to re-live the exact same experience that leads up to the precise moment of their death, only for it to happen again and again.  The twist here is that the subject, Jake Gyllenhaall as Captain Colter Stevens, is being programmed by some high risk military experiment where his brain has somehow been implanted into another man’s body, but only for the last 8 minutes of his life, where his mission is to find an explosive device on a fast moving commuter train to downtown Chicago within 8 minutes of detonation when all the passengers die.  What’s especially amusing is that the subject knows no more about this experiment than the audience does, so we learn as he does, and in this case, the Captain is a quick learner, as he’s a well-trained helicopter pilot used to carrying out combat missions in Afghanistan.  The set up always begins as he’s sitting on the train across from an especially attractive woman, Michelle Monaghan as Christine, who engages him in the same conversation.  The intrigue is he is sent on multiple missions, each time his only means of contact afterwards is with the face of Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) projected on a computer screen, who asks him to remember pertinent details, like where is the bomb, who is the bomber, before sending him back in again to figure it all out in another 8 minutes before the train explodes. 

Despite the déjà vu repetition, each sequence is slightly altered based on his knowledge learned in the previous incident, but it’s always the same faces, the same seating arrangement, and the same activity on the train except for his actions and words which are subject to his own instincts.  Stevens easily holds the audience’s rapt attention as he’s a study in intensity and military precision, but his instincts are amazingly human, where he wants to speak to his father on the phone, and he asks about the men on his last combat mission, where his curiosity is exactly what the audience relates to, but Goodwin’s mission instructions continually remind him that his personal inquiries are unnecessary, as he’s wasting time, because this one terrorist act is just the first of several in succession, where the military is pinning their hopes that if they can catch the first guy, the world will be spared the subsequent terror.  This extra pressure of fate only adds to the tension Stevens is facing, as he’s always under the clock, eventually becoming more and more frustrated with the same inevitable outcome.  The other is his interest in Christine, who is positively aglow with an intoxicating charm, where the idea of losing her each time just as he is initially introduced to her is rattling his desperate-minded soul, growing ever more weary at the mounting losses of lives that he can’t seem to be able to save, where everyone at some point comes under suspicion, yet all but one remain cloaked in innocence. 

The interplay between Gyllenhaal and Monaghan seals the deal, as the sincerity of their flirtatious romanticism is reminiscent of the opening moments in Powell and Pressburger’s A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1946), where David Niven is a British WWII air force pilot whose plane has been hit, who deliriously utters what he thinks are his last words to an American WAC air traffic controller, Kim Hunter, instantly declaring his love before he leaps without a parachute to certain death.  There are moments of poignancy in this film that seem to come out of nowhere, especially in an explosives film, but Gyllenhaal’s performance generates plenty of hard earned sympathy, as he’s genuinely a man on a mission, apparently stuck alone inside a time traveling capsule of some kind, where his inability to escape his hellish fate feels like Sartre’s No Exit, a punishing world where man’s existence is doomed, like being locked in a room together for eternity with no escape.  But Stevens is certain he holds the key to a way out, even as his superiors on the outside keep reminding him of the limits of his mission, urging him not to reach too far, not to expect too much, that his role is like an apparition, where the source code is like a shadow life that allows scientists to re-enter existence before it dies, where only his ingenuity, if he sticks to the mission at hand, can possibly save future lives.  Of course, in heroic fashion, he can’t expect to save his own, as his fate is sealed, which is why he was chosen for such a delicate mission.  He is only living on borrowed time, never exceeding 8 minutes, like reliving the same dream, always with the same outcome, hoping to spare others from ever having to endure the same experience.  This film is smart, well acted, tautly suspenseful and surprisingly inventive, with a kind of sci-fi twist that keeps the action moving, with a lightness of touch that actually engages the audience.