to lose a war (jon lee anderson)

Anderson’s prose is elegant and efficient. Unlike TV journalists, he’s always after the story that hides behind the headlines. It’s old school reporting. He finds people whose voices would never normally be heard. He also hangs in there. This book is a compilation of nearly thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan, from the departure of the Russians to the departure of the North Americans. He recognises the patterns, not least because the Afghanis themselves repeatedly spell this out to him. This isn’t a territory that can be conquered. It still consists of warring tribes and factions whose loyalties are willing to shift to whoever will best serve them, be that Russia, NATO, the US or the Taliban. Out of all this emerges the hubris of empirical overreach. Even as the US and NATO are installing themselves in Kabul, ‘modernising’ the city, Anderson is aware that out there in the plains, deserts and mountains, there are local people biding their time, waiting for the moment when the imperial mission will crumble. Part of the reason he’s so aware is that, unlike most reporters, he has actually gone beyond the capital and spoken to ordinary people. With the current flirtation with the idea of invading Iran, there is no more timely book for the decision-makers in Washington to be reading, even if one questions whether many of them would have the intellectual capacity to read and engage with Anderson’s book. 

magnolia (w&d pt anderson)

Cine Universitario has a healthy, youthful turnout on a Friday night. I guess I’m the oldest member of the audience. They seem to drink it all in, PTA’s grandiose, operatic epic, which swoons through the course of a single night. There’s more than one reference to opera in the film - Stanley even sings opera at one point. The whole film is underscored to an extreme degree, as though the director is suggesting he is not so much writing a film as composing one. I read a Wikipedia quote of Anderson’s saying that looking back on the film he would have cut twenty minutes, which isn’t such a ridiculous suggestion but also seems irrelevant. The movie could be an hour shorter or twelve hours longer. Certainly some storylines could have been teased out more - Donny’s and Phil’s to name but two. But this isn’t so much the film of an LA night as the symphony: the characters are instruments who have their solos, but are part of a wider whole, one that can mess with the logic of time; (whilst Claudia cleans her apartment waiting to open up for the cop, half a dozen storylines are running ahead, but it doesn’t matter, within the geometry of action, all that matters is that she will open the door); with the logic of chance, as the bookending narrator declares, laying cards on the table; all of this without in any way jeopardising the coherence of the music of the film. Anderson even does this with the score, willing to lay music over music, music over dialogue, noise on noise, the parts constantly subsumed to the whole. It is indeed operatic, exhausting, but also moving, portentously moving, perhaps, Yankee style, but moving nonetheless. And as the credits rolled and the final Mann song played, the youthful audience, as though in an opera house, burst into spontaneous applause. 

one battle after another (w&d pt anderson)

Thomas Pynchon. Vineland. Let’s start there. Let’s start with what was happening in the late sixties, the seventies, the eighties. Watergate. Kent State. Iran Contra. Etcetera. Pynchon is a dividing line. A lot of literary types are not that keen. His writing skirts around the shibboleths of standard lit crit. You can’t really teach someone to write like Pynchon. There’s not much  point analysing character or narrative development in his novels. They’re skittish, maverick, and exude a kind of brilliance which is hard to pin down, which might not move you to tears but will have you going - did I really just read that? It’s been a long time since I read Vineland and, guess what, I’ve been thinking about it a lot as we enter this phase of high-USA-fascism. It was all there, in Vineland, I recall, albeit rendered playfully, tucked away in a corner of California, private battles between the state and those who seek to live at the edge of that state. (Many of whom might be rednecks, or would-be Unabombers, but also including those who seek a kinder version of society than late capitalism permits.) Clearly I wasn’t the only one. PTA is a fan, he’s adapted Pynchon before, you can see something of Pynchon in the grandiose, meandering narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

So the association does not feel casual. One of the talents of an artist is to be on the pulse of where society/ humanity is headed. (“The unacknowledged legislators”.) I am not sure when PTA would have started adapting Vineland, but one imagines it was in the days of the Migra, rather than ICE. Before the full Pynchonesque civil war truly blew up last year. He, like Pynchon, must have sensed what was out there. The sociopathic values given flesh in Sean Penn’s brilliant performance as Lockjaw, the desperation of DiCaprio’s Bob, a desperation that so many who might have coasted through the Obama and the Biden years must be feeling now. (Including PTA himself?). Whilst paying homage to the radicals of yesteryear, the Weathermen and the Panthers, the film locates the punctum of the present conflict in the war on immigration, and specifically Latinos. The Latinos who have occupied California and the southern USA since before the Anglos, (albeit they were colonisers too), against whom the forces of WASP USA are now turning their guns. Benicio del Toro makes amends for his part in Sicario with a beautiful turn as a laconic radical, protecting his people from the state’s grasp. This is where the war is being waged within the USA’s borders, even if other wars are being waged on behalf of this would-be turbo capitalism in other territories in other, more horrific ways.

There’s a moment in the film where Bob is watching The Battle of Algiers. In theory it’s a very knowing, on-the-nose reference, except for the fact that the vast majority of Anderson’s public will never have heard of the film, just as they will never have heard of Pynchon. Hollywood and PTA could not produce a film like The Battle of Algiers. There’s a need for humour, glamour, car chases. PTA supplies this need. It’s a relentlessly enjoyable watch and in this way it gets past the unacknowledged financial censors. It could, were one a radical radical, be accused of extracting humour and profit from the culture war it depicts. But PTA’s sympathies are never in doubt. He knows which side he wants his bread buttered. And he recognises, in a finale which in many ways is the least Pynchonesque moment in the whole film, that there are battles to come, just as the battles being waged are a product of those that were fought (and lost?) before, in the time that Pynchon wrote Vineland. We are on the verge of times that we had hoped we could avoid, but history tells us will always return. My generation, the same as PTA’s and DiCaprio’s and Penn’s, will not be on the front line. It will be a younger generation which will have to choose which side they are on, and who will have to fight to defend their beliefs. 

licorice pizza (w&d pt anderson)

3 things about LP

Running. LP reminded me of early Godard. I think it’s Bande a Part where the characters seem to spend half the film running around Paris. In a similar way to Godard’s characters, LP’s star crossed lovers’ energy cannot be contained, and boils over into several running sequences. This ardent youthful energy drives the film forwards, even when they and the film lose their way. Because this is a film that meanders, (PTA has rarely been a fan of the succinct), it tries to cram more in than it really can get away with, sometimes seeming to throw in sequences just for the hell of it, or to see Sean Penn fall of a bike. In this sense it’s a wonderful adolescent mess and the best way to get out of a mess is to run away from it.

Fellini. There was one moment, I think when Gary is arrested, where the ubiquitous Johny Greenwood score kicked in and it felt like pure Fellini. The whole movie is bathed in a kind of Fellini-esque nostalgia. It has the feel of what they call a passion piece, a homage to the director’s youth, also akin to Cuaron’s Roma. Not many directors get to make their passion pieces, so fair play to PTA, even if…

Politics. As regular readers will be aware, I went to see Boogie Nights not that long ago. Quite apart from its PTA-esque flair, Boogie Nights felt as though it contained a subversive commentary on the American dream. A commentary wrapped up in a tremendously entertaining movie, but one whose punch corresponded to the force of its sly message. The same could be said about Magnolia. LP has much of the flair but little of the commentary and less of the subversion. You could make an argument that the Nixon/ oil crisis reference is doing this, but it feels shoe-horned. People will love LP and part of the reason they will love it is precisely because it doesn’t ask its audience to think too hard. They can bask in its meandering flow. (In this sense if feels like a sister piece to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another film that ranges the hills without dying on any of them.) Many will be delighted by Anderson letting them off the hook, but to this cussed commentator it sometimes left the sensation of a beer with too much froth. 

boogie nights (w&d paul thomas anderson)

Another film I saw once upon a time, a long time ago, and have not seen since. It struck me that if there’s a cultural point of reference for Boogie Nights it’s probably Angels in America. (One of the films within a film is called Brock Landers: Angels Live In My Town.) The kaleidoscopic presentation of US history and decline which Anderson presents is no doubt softer in its impact than Kushner’s play, in spite of all the sex. Nevertheless, the film represents an incredibly bold statement by the youthful director, one which took the porn industry and used it as a metaphor for the evolution of US capitalism in a similar way to which Coppola used the Mafia to the same end. Boogie Nights is rangy, overly-ambitious and brilliant. It’s the chronicle of hubris, as Wahlberg’s character rises and falls. What might have been tacky, isn’t. If the film’s ambition sometimes outruns itself, with the last half hour in the eighties lacking the narrative coherence of the rest of the film, this is still a reminder that with strong enough characters, you can get away with overreaching. Creating cinema on the scale of a novel is something few manage to achieve, for all kinds of reasons, many of them to do with the relative costs of producing a minute of cinema compared to a page of a novel, but when a director comes along who can pull off the trick the result is something delirious.

hard eight (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I can still recall the posters for Hard Eight going up in the tube and a certain buzz about the film which put it on my radar although I never got round to watching it. No-one knew at the time that this was the first offering of one of the modern masters of the art. There’s something quite affecting about watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s cameo appearance, which is so distinctive and at the same time so unlike Hoffman, because of the youthfulness, the cockiness of his performance, which looking back retrospectively almost makes it look as though he was cast against type. The film is full of future stars, not the least of them Gwyneth Paltrow who gives a performance which suggests the potential of a greater actress than the media personality she has subsequently become, capable of portraying an erratic emotional instability. Not to mention Samuel L Jackson, even if he had already broken through with Pulp Fiction. Hard Eight revealed Anderson to be a director who knew how to get the best out of his actors, also including Philip Baker Hall and John C Reilly, how to make the most of their tics and mannerisms. The film is essentially a character study, with the narrative rather less consequential than it initially purports to be. A sub-Mamet movie which in the end out-Mameted Mamet, by somehow ignoring the intricacies of the gambling world, using it as a backdrop rather than a focal point. The film hinges on a just about credible sequence of events which feel, nevertheless, contrived. As though the writer-director is giving a nod in the direction of narrative, but is more interested in tone and ‘clima’, the mood of a man walking through a Vegas gambling parlour of more importance than anything he actually does there. There’s already something stately about Anderson’s filmmaking, hinting at the more operatic path he would soon follow. 

phantom thread (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I thought about The Servant quite a lot whilst watching Anderson’s latest this afternoon. Which tells you several things. One is that the film has its longeurs, which offer plenty of time for reflection, which may or may not be a good thing. Another is that the issue of the British class system is still alive and kicking and generating box office. It will be forever thus. 

Phantom Thread, which I confess I had confused for a long time with the latest instalment of the Star Wars franchise, is a curate’s egg of a movie. I kept on thinking that there must have been something I was missing. Who was Alma? How come this young woman with a German accent had landed on the South Coast of Britain in the fifties? At one point in the film there’s a reference to a Dominican man selling visas to Jews in the war and the camera cuts to Alma’s face, and I thought, a-ha, there’s a meatier storyline which is about to unravel, but I was wrong, there isn’t. There’s plenty of unravelling and meaty mushrooms, but not much in the way of a storyline. It feels at times like this must be a slightly clumsy adaptation of a novel, with the above unfulfilled strands and random moments like the Swiss honeymoon which serve no real purpose. (It isn’t, as far as I know). At other points it seemed likely that this could be a highly personal project for Anderson, which is perhaps dedicated to his wife, a slightly self-indulgent way of explaining the insufferable nature of artistic genius, something PTA does indeed possess, but which it might have been cheaper and more useful to explore in therapy. Finally, earlier in the film, I thought it might be making a timely commentary on the way in which women are used (in movies and in life) as decorative adornments, and that Alma’s story would challenge that seemingly irresistible trend. But Phantom Thread didn’t really do that either; the marriage of Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps is a hardly a great leap forward for the feminist cause, especially when she has to poison her husband in order to obtain parity within their marriage.

All of which suggests a film containing a fragrant bouquet of ideas, but not that much staying power, either in the development of these ideas or the trama of the plot. In the end, the film seems to trip over itself in a bid to get to the end, hammering home the point about the sub-S&M relationship through the recycling of its slightly clunky poison mushroom trope. At the same time, there are some great moments and some great scenes. Day-Lewis is an actor with tremendous cerebral vigour, which he’s never afraid to employ. At times it feels as though his Reynolds Woodcock is an Irons/ Nighy pastiche, the distracted posh Brit per excellence, but then he puts his foot on the gas and produces moments of spectacular, excruciating insight, where the monstrous nature of the man he plays is stripped bare. No-one wrinkles an eyebrow quite like Day-Lewis.

These moments threaten to carry the film, but they don’t quite. To return to The Servant: the Pinter/ Losey film explored the class/ power dynamic far more surgically, aided not just by the performances of Fox and Bogarde, but also by the concision of Pinter’s script. The neat topsy-turvy nature of their relationship was always kept in check by the writing, maintaining the tension and the feeling that something was as stake, something Phantom Thread allows to slip in the last half hour. Perhaps Anderson is trying to do too much, or perhaps he was never entirely sure what he was trying to do. Or perhaps, as mooted, there’s actually a subtext to the story which has very little to do with the viewer, and everything to do with the artist’s struggle. The artist in this case being Paul Thomas Anderson, rather than Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock.

grand budapest hotel (w&d wes anderson)

By the end the desired effect is inverted. Instead of a frothy, innocuous piece of fluff lulling you into a pleasing stupor, which would be appear to be the director’s goal, you find yourself on the point of screaming at the screen. Grand Budapest might kick off as a promisingly leftfield foray into Mitteleuropa (based on the works of Stefan Zweig, we are told) but it ends up becoming a flimsical, whimsical jazz-profaned, Benny Profaned, noodle into Mitteleuropa. This is a Mitteleuropa for people who don’t want to have to think about Freud or Musil or Kafka or even Zweig. It’s a Mitteleuropa for banal Manhattanites who assume a Mitteleuropa is a brand of designer coffee they have yet to come across and will be Pleasantly Surprised to discover it’s actually just a playground for heplish indie-nish US actors to hang out and Do Their Thing. In short, the director succeeds in taking the very thing he claims to be celebrating and bastardising it to such an extent that already execs are drawing up plans to rebuild the Grand Budapest Hotel, supposedly demolished, and turn it into the Must-Go venue for any aspiring uber-tech firm's 2016 bonding weekend. There will be Ustase themed nights, with obligatory schnapps chasers and post-prandial machine gun sessions. There will be the Communist themed nights, muted colours only, where no-one is allowed to laugh and that’s the biggest joke of all. They will invite Zizek to give by-invite-only seminars that will end with naked wrestling sessions in the candlelit mountain snow. 

Which part of the world will be the next to get the Anderson makeover? Where can he parachute in as many feckless, gilt-edged cameos for his mates? The post-war Left Bank? A romcom inspired by the Battle of Algiers? The Cultural Revolution with Phillip Seymour Hoff guesting as Mao? (Note to ed/ Wes - nice idea but the horse has bolted from that particular stable.) Why is this man allowed to splurge so much talent to such little effect? Why is he given such luxurious budgets to churn out this nonsense? Why does anyone ever give him the critical time of day? 

Answers on a postcard. 

The prettiest picture will be forwarded to the appropriate scouting team.

there will be blood (d. paul thomas anderson)

In the opening, hypnotic, dialogue-free minutes I was reminded of Cerro Rico, the Potosi mine, where people still work like that today, chewing coca to keep themselves awake. It seemed unlikely that anyone still mines with a pick and a shovel in the US. The restraint of this opening section, capturing the hardship of the solitary miner's life, was so simply done it was reminiscent of the silent movies (emerging somewhere across them there hills). A tale told through edits and action. Where were the promised thespian pyrotechnics?

The script is adapted from a book by a writer steeped in social realism. Back in the York days with the sinking lake, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle was on the syllabus. Through Sinclair's eyes it was possible to discern the lost history of the United States. Real class struggle. A society that might have taken a different turn, if the capitalist instinct hadn't been so avaricious, so insatiable. Sinclair's sinuous take on the american struggle is the kind of voice that's been drowned out by the maudling sages of malcontented capitalism. The Updikes and the Roths, even the Bellows.

Which is part of the reason Anderson's decision to make a film of his novel seems so unlikely, and so exciting. Anderson the kittenish genius, the spinner of Carverian tales. Perhaps the greatest storyteller in contemporary US cinema. Choosing to go right back and explore some kind of root - the very soil itself. The scene where Plainview catches his first glimpse of the Pacific comes from that most potent of 19th century US tropes - its westernisation, its inevitable consumption of itself, but also its journey of discovery and self revelation.

On the beach, Plainview learns about his fallibility, something he's succeeded in avoiding ever since he fell down a mineshaft. One would imagine that the discovery of his supposed brother's treachery would be the cue for his fall from grace, love of family becoming his Achilles heel. When he's woken by the wily homesteader who's aware of his crime, it seems he's about to receive his come-uppance. But There Will Be Blood doesn't operate like that. The narrative arc never quite kicks in. Plainview just keeps on going, laughing off every enemy and obstacle he faces. Like capitalism, perhaps.

Day-Lewis' leonine performance as the craggy misanthrope is remarkable. Towards the end he draws comparison with Welles as Kane. Whether this is to the benefit of Anderson's film or not is debatable. Day-Lewis' turn is immensely enjoyable (when he praises Paul Dano's rather less convincing performance as a possessed preacher with the line 'great show' one can't help thinking that it takes a virtuoso ham to recognise another), but there is little danger to his demeanour. For all his ability to slap a kid around, he remains a somewhat cuddly, avuncular figure, like some renegade uncle in an Irish boozer. The greed and avariciousness are always overpowered by Day-Lewis' hard-working charm. When he finally wipes out his nemesis with a ten pin bowling skittle, it feels neither psychotic nor disturbing. Perhaps this is Anderson's (or Sinclair's) point - the violence within the man has reached such a point of saturation that killing in cold blood is no more serious than killing in theory - but one wonders how much more powerful the film might have been with a more restrained performance from its protagonist.

Nevertheless, Plainview's ambiguities keep us hooked. As ever, the scale of Anderson's ambition possesses an americanity that almost beseeches admiration. Plainview is a retrospective forefather to other robber-barons of US cinematic folklore. Corleone, Kane, Kurtz. It is more than likely that Anderson's oilman will find himself striding in their company. Thinking big worked for all of them, in artistic terms at least. PT Anderson's film celebrates that most american of qualities: size. Day-Lewis' performance is entirely in keeping with this, for better or for worse.

the darjeeling limited (dir Wes Anderson)

The camerawork in Anderson's mordant railway road trip ranges from the frenetic to the measured. Robert Yeoman, the DOP, is not scared to use his zoom, and the camera frequently chases a scene around, veering from one point of interest to the next. On the other hand, the film sets up stately set pieces, such as the sequence where the 'mythical' Darjeeling Express, carrying all the movie's characters, trundles past the camera; or within the opening short, where the camera glides around Jason Schwartzman's suite in the Hotel Chevalier in an uninterrupted take; or finally when the three brothers leave a hut in slow motion during the funeral and make their way to a rickshaw.

These variations in style can be interpreted in two closely connected ways. On the one hand as evidence of a playful willingness to experiment. On the other as 'kid in the sweet shop' syndrome.

Anderson's film is dealing with the notion of adults still trying to grow up. The three brothers at the heart of his film live in the shadow of their late father, whose funeral is alluded to in a flashback. Their quest is to find their mother, which they do. She is living in the tiger-infested foothills of the Himalayas, and tells her children that the people there need her more than they do. The children come to some kind of acceptance of this, and end their trip having gained some kind of collective understanding of each other's peculiarities.

The script includes a moment where Owen Wilson's brother responds to an Indian man's question: What are you doing here? With the line - We came on a spiritual journey but it hasn't quite worked out. Anderson and Co are conscious of the issues that their movie generates: the wealthy westerners frolicking in search of their karma in the impoverished backwoods. It's possible that the juxtaposition with the opening short's opulent Paris hotel room is a kind of nose-thumbing to the whole notion of political correctness. In the quest for the self, all rules, including those of cinematography, are there to be broken. The boys get thrown off the train for breaking the rules, but the journey keeps going and in the end they find themselves catching...another train. There will always be more trains.

It is tempting to say that there's something Fitzgeraldian about Anderson. The creation of idealised, flawed icons of americana, with their jazzy clothes, outrageous manners and idiosyncratic wit. But in the end, The Darjeeling Limited feels more like a Waugh novel without the narrative tautness. The self-indulgent emissaries of the latest great power using the exoticism of an alien background to explore their foibles.

In the film's final sequence, the brothers run to catch another train. In their rush to make it, they fling their baggage away in wonderful slow motion. This literal metaphor suggests that they will proceed on their journey lighter in soul and possessions. The scene is a mirror image to the opening sequence of the film, where Bill Murray's hapless businessman runs for the train and is overtaken by the more athletic Adrien Brody, who leaves him standing. In that opening sequence, which uses the slow motion trick for the first time, I felt exhilarated. It felt as though we were about to be taken on a remarkable, revelatory journey. By the time of the closing sequence, my engagement had dwindled. That baggage should have been ditched weeks ago. The slow-motion running still looks pretty, but like a kid in a sweet shop, I'd had one too many liquorice allsorts and the sweetness was starting to pale.