davidmvining

This might be the best way for John Frankenheimer to stop making filmed entertainment. Frankenheimer was a huge Kennedy supporter, even being at The Ambassador hotel to drive Bobby Kennedy after the event when the former AG was shot, an event that convinced Frankenheimer to move to Europe and pick up cooking as a hobby. Making a movie about LBJ, his ambitions, and his treatment of war aims in Vietnam feels like a certain level of closure to his career. I don't think the treatment is quite as compelling as his treatment of George Wallace, but Path to War is an accomplished, handsome, and surprisingly tender (if over-tender) look at Johnson, the man who essentially made the Vietnam War a thing.

Lyndon Baynes Johnson (Michael Gambon) wins his first full term as president after assuming the office following John F. Kennedy's assassination, and he has dreams of his Great Society. Vietnam isn't even a topic at the inauguration ball as he dances with Lady Bird (Felicity Huffman) as he waxes poetic about spending for education and health care. However, events will overtake him. Using a large cast of characters to represent a wide range of levels of government, Frankenheimer packs so much detail into the three-hour running time, a running time that really allows the story to breathe.

There are prominent figures who were there through most of the conflict like Robert McNamara (Alec Baldwin), General Earle Wheeler (Frederic Forrest), George Ball (Bruce McGill), and Everett Dirksen (Philip Baker Hall), giving Johnson conflicting advice (Ball is the most common voice on the outside of the argument) mostly about escalating the brewing and then boiling over conflict in Vietnam with General Westmoreland (Tom Skerritt) always demanding more troops (usually from afar). However, it's the intermittent presence of Clark Clifford (Donald Sutherland), advisor to several presidents and McNamara's successor as Secretary of Defense, who gets the most impactful relationship with the president.

Clifford is viewed as something like an elder statesman or a Cincinnatus, someone who was in the halls of power but refuses to rejoin them (at least for a time). He is a calm, collected thinker who tries and helps Ball's efforts to talk Johnson down from escalation near the beginning but becomes more invested in winning the war once it actually escalates to that. He's a recurrent voice and presence trying to refocus Johnson on either his stated priorities (domestic policy around the Great Society) or what it would take to actually win a war in Vietnam (1,000,000 troops on the ground, which was an early consensus) instead of the stalemate strategy advocated by McNamara and Wheeler, a strategy that does no more than extend the conflict years out from the original timeline and ends up including nearly a million soldiers anyway.

Where I think the film ends up faltering slightly is in how obvious it is that Frankenheimer wants people to sympathize with Johnson. He's a man caught up in events that he can't control, essentially just letting his subordinates walk all over him. It's a nice reprieve from the near-hagiography when Clifford calmly tells Johnson that the advisors only advised. Johnson made the decisions. It's a small moment that I wish more of the film had embraced because most of the time Johnson feels like a powerless figurehead in the middle of his advisors, like he's not making decisions himself, like he has no agency.

And that ties into what I think was Frankenheimer's intent. He wanted people to forget Vietnam in favor of Johnson's Great Society legislation (the film ends with text about how Great Society programs are still in effect), like he's trying to post-hoc excuse Johnson for all of his sins on Vietnam because all of his Great Society programs should be praised (...no comment). In doing this, Frankenheimer essentially absolves Johnson of any wrongdoing in Vietnam by making him an observer in his own drama. I think the best part of the film happens early, when Frankenheimer is allowed to focus on Johnson's work towards the passage of the Civil Rights Act which allows for Frankenheimer to build a cinematic universe by bringing in Gary Sinise to play George Wallace in a scene. Their meeting in the Oval Office gives Gambon one of his best, more subtle moments as he talks with Wallace about the Alabama governor's legacy. However, by the end, with Gambon yelling at television sets, I was reminded more of Oliver Stone's and Anthony Hopkins' treatment of Nixon that left him as a crazy person. It seems to be some sort of default approach to someone one doesn't like with a passion but wants to humanize. "Oh, he was just crazy."

And it's why I'm more reserved on this than I was on George Wallace. In his film, Wallace confronted his own, active choices and ended up trying to make amends. In Path to War, Johnson feels caught up in events and then apologizes for...being caught up in events, not for making decisions.

However, the portrayal of those events are really top-notch. Almost entirely filmed on sets of the Oval Office and a few other meeting rooms, like the office of the Secretary of Defense, the spiraling events of the conflict in Vietnam are well-laid out with a clear eye towards escalation until things just blow up with the compounding events of the Tet Offensive and Eugene McCarthy's near win in the New Hampshire primary, fueled by hatred of "Johnson's War". It's really just three-hours of people talking in rooms, but it feels like an accomplished thriller in how it handles the off-screen conflict that defines every interaction.

So, on the whole, it's mostly an accomplished document of the large events of the Vietnam War through the eyes of the Johnson White House. Johnson himself feels disserviced despite Gambon's dedicated performance, and that creates a certain emotional hole at the center of the film. However, it's actually quite entertaining despite that.

I made an extra effort to get to the Director's Cut of Reindeer Games, John Frankenheimer's final theatrical feature film. He went back to the cutting room after the initial release and for the DVD release to add in 20 minutes, and I have to say...it probably didn't help the film much. There's character work throughout, but it's never that interesting or compelling. In addition, it's supposed to be a thriller (something Frankenheimer had shown extreme aptitude at for decades), but the infection of trying to be up to date comes to bite the production because it's trying, and not understanding anything about, Tarantino films.

Rudy Duncan (Ben Affleck) and Nick Cassidy (James Frain) are cellmates in a prison in upstate Michigan around Christmas. They're both due to be released in a couple of days (Rudy's been in for six years and Nick has been in for two), but only Nick has someone who's going to wait for him on the outside. That's Ashley (Charlize Theron), a girl he's only met through their pen pal relationship started through the mail while he's been inside. Things go wrong when an inmate sent to solitary and blaming Rudy attacks him at lunch, killing Nick instead. Walking out alone a couple of days later, Rudy has a choice: to talk to the pretty girl waiting for the man who's dead or walking past her. He, of course, chooses to talk to her and tell her that...he's Nick. Because sex with Charlize Theron.

Anyway, that decision leads to Ashley's ex-boyfriend, Gabriel (Gary Sinise), tracking them down, forcing Rudy to help them rob a casino that Nick used to work at, and the interminably slow rollout of distrust that makes almost no sense.

Rudy goes along with the idea that he's Nick...until someone punches him in the face. And then he admits that he's not Nick, and no one believes him. On a certain level, I get it. Dude is getting threatened with his life, so he'll say anything, these people assume. But he keeps saying it and never feels like he really knows what's going on with the casino. The whole thing relies on Ben Affleck acting like he's bluffing by the skin of his teeth, which kind of works sometimes. But we spend so much time with Affleck going back and forth on the same question of who he is over and over again that it just becomes...boring.

I think the problem is that the heist itself, stealing money from a rinky-dink casino with few guests and an outside consultant, Jack Bangs (Dennis Farina), trying to make something out of nothing for the Native American ownership, is pushed to the very back of the film. It's more than an hour of buildup like it's Ocean's Eleven or something, but it's not a complex plot or plan. It doesn't need much buildup, not that the film gives it too much. Placing the heist in the middle of the film and having the backend be a pressure cooker of post-heist anxiety and distrust would help.

I see the problem as one of a misapplication of character-based storytelling. There's a good amount of little scenes of people explaining who they are, what they want, and why they're doing what they're doing. However, they're not structured in a way that they build on each other or even feel that integrated into the story around them. I don't think just throwing the heist to the middle of the film would fix everything, this character stuff is just too detached and takes up too much time as it is, so a rewrite would need to integrate the character better as well. Gabriel, in the middle of beating Rudy, explaining how life as a truck driver is terrible, just feels off. The dialogue itself isn't compelling enough, it's placed really far into the film, and we have this distraction of the beating going on. It's like someone (Ehren Kruger, the writer), didn't understand how Tarantino wrote his movies but just took a shot at it anyway.

So, when double-crosses and reveals start piling up towards the end, it's not compelling or interesting. It's exhausting. Spacing things out better would have helped (which would have negated the need for Rudy to constantly go back and forth about who he was for more than an hour), and finding someone who can actually write interesting dialogue would have helped as well.

Frankenheimer brought his professionalism to the production, doing the most he could with a script very far from shooting worthy, letting Sinise be outrageous to some effect and coaxing a halfway decent performance out of Affleck, but all of that effort goes nowhere when the screenplay is such a mess. That there seemed to have been no attempt to restructure the film in editing (it might have been impossible with the footage shot, but they did do some reshoots after a bad preview screening) strikes me as odd, because the overdrawn and dull first hour and twenty minutes or so just kill the film. Once it's over and the heist starts, things pick up in some thin, genre-appealing ways, but the double crosses and reveals are all dead on arrival because the first big bulk of the film was dull instead of engaging when highlighting our central characters.

So, I don't think it's quite a disaster. The ending has some charms and there are decent performances while Frankenheimer films things well. It's bad, though. It's mostly dull and lifeless with no energy to propel characters forward. It mostly just spins its wheels and feels like it's a few drafts away from being a shootable script. This was not a good way for Frankenheimer to stop making feature films.

John Frankenheimer makes a Michael Mann movie, and he does it very well. And in Europe because Frankenheimer loved living in Europe. It's a conspiracy thriller, man on a mission film, and revenge film all twisted up into one terse package. We're never in the dark too much, never feeling lied to by the script by J. D. Zeik (with massive rewrites by David Mamet). Frankenheimer keeps the tension up expertly throughout. And it's just a really fun thrill ride through some European locales.

Sam (Robert de Niro) has been hired by a gang to steal a large briefcase in Paris. The gang is led by Deirdre (Natascha McElhone), an Irish woman who is insistent that she's the top of the stack, though she reports to the shadowy Seamus O'Rourke (Jonathan Pryce), an IRA rogue operative. Within the gang are men like Spence (Sean Bean), an Englishman, Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), a German, and Vincent (Jean Reno), a Frenchman. There's distrust everywhere, like an entertaining scene where Sam gets Spence to reveal that he doesn't have the background he says he has, leading him to leave the gang, and things spiral out when their attempt to steal the case goes wrong.

What I admire about the film is the combination of terse, directed writing, especially the dialogue that's never as flashy as Mamet can be that gives de Niro these precise things to deliver in short bursts while Frankenheimer uses his propensity for deep focus and interesting framing to help create contrasts between characters delivering the dialogue. So, while the story is actually really spare and there's extremely little actually digging into characters and their backgrounds, the specificity of the characters still manages to come through with this combination of precise writing, exacting framing, and strong performances.

The actual plot develops with Gregor stealing the case and going rogue, trying to sell it himself to a group of Russians led by Mikhi (Feodor Atkine) with Seamus trying to exert control over Deirdre to get things back in control, and Sam and Vincent essentially caught in the crossfire, getting screwed over by both sides.

Which changes the film from a man on a mission heist and chase thriller into a personal vengeance one, and I think it works really well. Sam's entire history is shrouded in mystery. There are implications that he's a former (or maybe even current?) CIA agent, but really he's a man given a job who wants to do that job well and gets obstacles thrown in front of him until he's even shot for good measure. The implied connections built between Sam and Deirdre (romantic) and Sam and Vincent (buddy friendship) are just established enough to give the film the right kind of weight towards the end as well. As everyone chases down Gregor, trying to get the case from him, we know the players and stakes and emotional connections clearly enough so that there's some emotional catharsis as Sam takes his final moves around an ice-skating performance.

It's a large series of events with a rather hefty cast of characters, all no-nonsense and intertwined into a singular motive: get a briefcase with...something inside it. What's inside doesn't matter, and the poking at the fact that no one knows towards the end feels like a knowing nod to the how of the story being more important than the what. Perhaps there isn't great pathos at how the romantic subplot between Sam and Deirdre plays out, but it's enough so that when Deirdre kind of just disappears from the film, there is an absence. This disappearance is a result of reshoots and test screenings that intentionally made her fate more opaque and obscure than originally intended, proving that while test screenings may not know affirmatively what they want, they can have good insight into what's not quite working and allow for creatives to find something else.

Of course, the main draw is the car chases, and they're so good. They use all of the lessons that Frankenheimer learned decades earlier in making Grand Prix but in a thriller setting. Expertly placing cameras on real cars going through real streets with real actors driving them creates a very grounded reality as characters pursue their very clear goals against very clear antagonists and overcoming obstacles. It's a twisting and turning plot, driven by actors in real cars, that never feels confusing except in the moments when the characters themselves may be confused and need a moment to sit down and figure out next steps in a café.

So, it's one of Frankenheimer's best films, putting him in a very good spot after his high quality, actor-focused work on George Wallace, and he surely won't bungle it by speeding into another production without properly laying the groundwork he needs to ensure a smooth process.