caught stealing (d. darren aronofsky, w. charlie huston)

Aronofsky has always been a visceral director, the one constant on his complex, bumpy filmmaking ride. He’s made several movies which are in their way seminal. Pi was a masterclass in low-budget first film making. Requiem for a Dream genuinely pushed at boundaries of taste and cruelty in a way few US movies ever do. Mother! Was one of those authorial ventures (like The Fountain) that few filmmakers are ever given budget to go for, and Black Swan has emerged as a low-key classic and regular touchstone for alt-pysch drama, referenced mucho in industry script development labs. Caught Stealing doesn’t lack for the director’s visceral verve. The recreating of nineties NY, pre-Guiliani, with plenty of CGI images of the twin towers laced in, adds to the vibe. Sadly, around the point where Zoe Kravitz is killed off, the narrative begins to flag. The last half or so is a case of going through the motions, kicking and screaming. Caught Stealing feels like an assemblage, with some lovely cameos (Bad Bunny! Doctor Who!) and plenty of colour, but it can’t quite leap through the hoops of a third act whose denouement feels as though it might have been generated by AI. 

mother (w&d aronofsky)

Aronofsky lets his hair down.

No doubt about it. This is the equivalent of a director rocking out with the longest extended drum solo he can get away with. Well actually, two drum solos, because the film is essentially two hyper-ventilating sequences which belong to no real genre apart from a the excess genre (which doesn’t exist). cf Ken Russell, the closing sequence of Zabriskie Point, Zulawski etc.

Aronofsky goes eco-conscious.

Because, yes, this is an allegory about mother nature and the way that mankind had raped and pillaged the earth in the quest to make his beautiful music. 

Aronofsky goes Sarah Kane.

Well, to be fair, he’s not the only one. It’s just that having recently worked on Blasted, you pick up the way in which violence and shock-value are used, artfully, to provoke a reaction, and that’s exactly what Mother is doing too. It wants you to walk out. It wants you to say, Ya basta, as many of the good citizens of Montevideo did indeed do on Saturday night.

Aronofsky reveals unexpected sense of humour.

Which is connected to this point; you can almost hear the cackling glee of the director behind the camera as he unleashes his next affront on the viewer. Take that, he says, with a big grin, and he’s right, because Mother is hilarious. 

Aronofsky has fun at the studio’s expense.

What a joy it must have been to sit on the first preview screenings. You’ve got Lawrence and Bardem and Harris and Pfeiffer this is what you’re doing with them?

Aronofsky the provocateur (again)

Mother might be his closest film to Requiem for a Dream; only this is a project which lacks the po-faced quality of the earlier film. Requiem took itself so seriously it was painful, for all concerned, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Mother doesn’t appear to take itself seriously at all, but somewhere lurking in both films is the need to activate the spectator, to make them less passive than they’d normally expect to be during the cinema experience. So much so that you could just about get away with calling it Brechtian.

black swan (aronofsky; w. heyman, heinz, mclaughlin)

I feel more normal today.
Yesterday, walking back solo through Notting Hill, I felt less so.
There may have been many reasons for this, but one of them was Black Swan. Which I had just been to see.
Many years ago, I remember coming out of Venn Street Clapham Picture House having just seen Naked. The only Mike Leigh film that's ever touched a nerve. I felt edgy, watchful. The world that the film had conjured (as much Thewlis' performance as anything else) seemed all around me. In truth it was. I was young. I lived in London. Life seemed transient and precarious.
The circumstances under which one watches a film affect one's reaction to it.
Less than a day later it's easy to look back on Aronofsky's film and laugh at its gaucheness and cliche, and sheer over-the-topness.
Which should not be to forget that I also found myself laughing within the cinema, at Cassel's splendidly seedy manipulator, at the film's exaggerated Apollo/ Dionysis schtik, at a director pushing boundaries with glee.
But the laughter a day later is that of the critics who see the film as at best infantile, at worst, abusive. And it's not hard to see why.
A thick skin and you're insulated against the ridiculous.
Or some feathers, perhaps.
Because this is, in spite of its various absurdities, a visceral film. About things that in the moment seem real but from outside can look ridiculous. Creativity, neurosis, desire.
I don't live in New York and I've never liked ballet. I'm no gamine waif. But somehow, the film, with its remarkable camera work and its shrewd use of music and all the other tricks that it employs, succeeded in bowling me over.
I came out of the cinema and the world, this plush world I walked through, felt borderline repulsive; borderline homicidal.
It's a reaction. I almost used the word over-reaction. But that would be wrong. It was a reaction. To the director's cinematic will.
Art, as this most metaphysical of films (no reason metaphysicm should not also be visceral) relates, is more than the sum of its parts, and should not be afraid of crossing the line unto what might be perceived as ridiculousness.
The ridiculous is out there, and it doesn't do us any harm to touch it every now and again, to lose control, to strive to, or perhaps to actually achieve, the going-beyond the line. Drawn by ourselves or society or god or the universe or physics.
I feel normal now. But for a while last night I didn't. Which is almost entirely to the film's credit.

the wrestler (d. aronofsky, w. robert d siegel)

The Wrestler is a skilful piece of film making. This deduction is possible because when you look at the narrative, at what’s going on in the film, it’s all fairly silly. (Said without wanting to sound too English). The Ram basically commits hari-kiri, using his sizeable heart by-pass wound and a fat old man who goes under the stage name of The Ayatollah to carry out the deed. This because he went out and got ‘fucked-up’ when he should have been making amends with his estranged daughter, who as a result becomes even more estranged. The lap dancer who doesn’t fancy him suddenly does and quits it all to convince him not to commit hari-kari, but because he's such a complete and total fuck-up he goes ahead and does it anyway.

Maybe this is supposed to be a warped commentary on the American dream. It makes for a lot of potential schmaltz and vaguely preposterous narrative turns, but, in spite of all this, the film kind of works.

There’s doesn’t seem to be too much doubt where the credit for this lies. Firstly Aronofsky, who shows he can pull off the multi-faceted Soderburgh trick. The grainy, restless hand-held photography successfully conveys the bleakness of some of the colder, duller parts of the US. It also adds a pseudo-documentary feel to the investigation of the wrestling sub-culture the film is set in. The participants don’t feel like Hollywood actors faking it – they feel like the real, unadorned thing. In addition to this, no one does screen violence better than Aronofsky. It’s often wince-making, and again, even when it’s clearly fake, (as in the meat-slicer scene), he pulls it off. There’s a kind of meta-text at work here: the fakeness of the wrestling violence is reflected in the fakeness of movie violence, and as a result the audience really doesn’t know what hurts and what just look like it hurts. Consequently, when it doesn’t just look like it hurts, but looks like it really looks like it hurts, the violence is hyper-effective, and we feel Rourke/ Ram’s pain all the more.

Rourke is the second reason the film works. It’s a performance which succeeds as much for its under-statement as its over-statement, and this is what separates it from other renowned macho performances. The moments of reflection which suggest that all the pain he’s endured (or faked) has taught him something, that something in part being the uselessness of a macho approach. The performance is a sly commentary on North American values; emphasising both the abrasive charm of a macho posture, but also its suicidal boneheadedness. In this regard The Wrestler might well be the full stop at the end of eight years of neo-con government.