Three Films Make A Post: Something has put the fear of death in the living and sent the dead running for their lives

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013): It seems somewhat obvious to compare Jean-Pierre Jeunet to Tim Burton: both directors have very distinctive styles, both have aesthetics deeply rooted in the grotesque and the strange. But unlike Burton on his bad days, Jeunet seems to be easily able to find the volume knob for the grotesque and the weird and fit it to the necessities of the narrative he’s telling. T.S. Spivet is a case in point, for it shows the director mellowing the grotesque into the whimsically strange while keeping his ability to create a world not really like our own that still feels perfectly logical and following its own rules and which is rooted in recognizable human feelings. So this is not just a film that’s great to look – and sometimes to gawk excitedly – at but also an example of that mythical “heart-warming” quality, a quality Jeunet – as is his wont – reaches without ever seeming to stretch for it, and that never feels in conflict with the film’s stranger elements but rather a part of them.

Christine (2016): Antonio Campos’s 70s period piece about a reporter for a local TV station who ends her own life in front of a running camera thanks to a toxic cocktail of clinical depression, rejection, male chauvinism, her frustration at the state of the world (which always looks even worse when you’re suffering from depression), stupidity, and the tragic inability of the people who do love her to actually enable her to seek help (not that this would have been easy at this point in time). You might say it is a bit of a downer, but it is also a film that stretches to let Christine be more than just a freak we gawk at and watch die inside and outside, that attempts to understand Christine not just as that thing we know as “a depressed woman” but as a living breathing person who is/was more than just a mentally ill woman with a sensationalist exploitable end. Rebecca Hall’s central performance is highly nuanced, insightful and utterly humane.

U Turn (1997): In comparison, Oliver Stone’s neo noir is not much of a film, even though it is one of the director’s best – and certainly least annoying – ones. Stone’s direction is expectedly showy and nervous, the characters are absurd caricatures utterly divorced from actual human beings or even what we usually accept in movies as human beings, and the plot is a series of tonally wildly wavering episodes about how horrible everything and everyone is. I’d call it a nihilistic film, but for that, I’d have to take Stone’s habitual posing seriously. As it stands, I’m more reminded of The Big Lebowski’s “Autobahn”.


The thing is, I also find the combination of the overblown direction, the great actors (and Jennifer Lopez) playing cardboard cut-outs as loudly as possible, the noir clichés and the badly digested philosophy highly entertaining, running on an energy that might be Stone’s typical screeching about how awesome and deep he is (which he isn’t) or just the result of a group of people having a wild time making a really silly film.

In short: Cold in July (2014)

The life of peaceful Texan family man Richard Dane (Michael C. Hall) is turned upside down when he shoots an unarmed burglar in a moment of panic. This being Texas and all, the law doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with that – in fact, much less of a problem than Richard’s conscience has – but the burglar’s ex-con father Russell (Sam Shepard) is a bit of a different case.

Russell performs the expected threatening postures, and he’s clearly out for revenge but the situation will turn out to be quite a bit different from the semi-remake of Cape Fear one might now expect.

And that’s pretty much the point where Jim Mickle’s film turns out to be much more interesting and worthwhile than the extremely competent but unsurprising film it seems to set itself up as initially. It’s also just the first time the plot takes a turn into an unexpected and more interesting direction, always executed without the carnival huckster gestures of the twist-based movie but with a naturalness and matter-of-factness that can’t be easy to pull off, particularly not when played for a genre-savvy audience. It’s not as if each single element of the plot were terribly original in itself – in fact we’ve seen all these elements before in different films – but the way Mickle’s and his usual writing partner’s Nick Damici’s script (and I suppose the Joe R. Lansdale novel the script is based on) put these well-worn elements together feels new and fresh, and Mickle’s direction (working inside the 80s influenced not really retro style that’s popular right now, I suspect in part as a reaction against all movies being yellow and washed out) provides an unshowy and flawless drive to the proceedings. 

At the same time, the film is highly character-based with even the plot’s more dubious moments, as well as the characters’ many ethically questionable decisions, developed as natural results of what these characters here are, or are in the process of becoming. While this is a vigilante movie of a kind, it is, pleasantly, not one that wants or does preach the beauty of taking the law into one’s own hand; as a matter of fact, the film isn’t interested in asking ethical questions in an abstract way but rather in showing what these particular characters do when confronted with their specific ethical problems; and what these characters do isn’t meant to be a manual for the audience’s own lives.

The actors involved here are of course a huge part of this effect, with Hall (who to my eyes is one of the greats right now) and Shepard going the more naturalistic route they’re so damn good at, while Don Johnson uses the larger than life approach that has served him quite well in the last few years. Somehow, these very different acting approaches gel excellently too.

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