mickey one (d. arthur penn, w. alan surgal)

Penn’s maverick film is all Beatty, jazz score, close-ups. Giant faces loom up out of the screen in black and white, like mountain ranges. The film uses dissolves, fast edits, foregoing regular dramatic scenes for something with shaper edges. The audience is asked to play catch-up as it tries to keep up with the story of Beatty’s paranoia, a comedian who’s got on the wrong side of the mob. It’s filmmaking which is dazzling and exerts a modernism not just stylistically but also in the way it presents its leading man, a lothario who’s gone off the rails, stepbrother to James Caan’s Sonny. Beatty is all wired tension, constantly on the brink of overacting, just as everything in this remarkable film is in danger of going over the brink. Like the weird Yves Tinguely sculpture whose destruction is given an entire sequence with no narrative significance, it’s a machine with so many bells and whistles that you lose count of them all. And yet in this excess, in the intricacies of the edit, the jazz score, featuring Stan Getz, in the machinations of the plot, there lurks a film which feels unique, a high point in the transition from stylised black and white to the lurid colour schemes of the seventies. 

bonnie and clyde (d. arthur penn, w. david newman, robert benton, robert towne)

1. Acting. Dunaway and Beatty offer one of those rare masterclasses in how to elevate a role through the use of innate charisma onto an epic level. In some ways Penn’s movie is reminiscent of The Getaway, with McQueen and MacGraw, where the sexual tension between the two leads offers the story an extra dimension. Only in this film, the brave choice is made to explore Clyde Barrow’s impotence and push this as far as they can, showing how their love affair flowered in spite of this. It feels like a very modern choice, foregrounding the relationship problem, which helps both actors give such nuanced performances.

2. History. The story of Bonnie and Clyde takes place against the backdrop of the recession. The first bank they plan to rob is actually bankrupt, there’s nothing there. The film carefully locates the story within this social milieu. It’s nothing extraordinary but at the same time it feels different. Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself become part of the counter-culture. Nowhere more so than in a scene that might have come out of a Midwest Vineland, when they arrive, bloodied and wounded, at a small lakeside community of people who appear to have been made destitute, but who offer the mythical criminals what little they have, recognising and confirming them as folk heroes. This chapter of the American dream tends to be glossed over, the Mice and Men moment, by the narrative of post-war prosperity, but the US has always had an underclass, looking for champions, and the film engages with its characters’ stories on a mythic level.

3. Myth. Nowadays, Hollywood myths are constructed around comic book characters. Big budget films run shy of humans. The division between the real and the idealised imaginary has rarely been greater and every new offering from the popcorn stable reinforces it. The sixties and early seventies, for some reason, bucked this trend. It is not fanciful to think that the drift towards an ahuman politics, a turbo-charged mechanistic vision of capitalist nirvana, embodied by the current US president and the by the country’s role within the world, has been facilitated by this abstention on the imaginary scale by the country’s most powerful myth makers. 

into the wild (dir. Sean Penn)

A lot happens in the final few minutes of Into The Wild. The hero, Christopher McCandless dies an excrutiating death and communes with his parents. Most of the characters he's met along the way are shown in flashes, having some kind of positive experience. A helicopter shot pulls away from the Magic Bus, last resting place of McCandless, and spins off into the sky. Finally, a still of the real McCandless is shown, looking uncannily like the one we've been watching for the past two hours and twenty minutes, played by Emile Hirsch.

For a slow moving film, it's a busy ending, and in many ways it seems to undercut the pathos of McCandless' sad demise. It's practically screaming at its audience: He Didn't Die in Vain!

Which brings us on to the God question. Rainey, the hippie who befriends the hero early on, asks him playfully if he's not Jesus - and suggests he might like to walk on water. At this point we know he's just a mixed up kid who's got the wandering bug, so the remark's a joke. But it's a joke which seems to take over the film. McCandless wanders like a saint through the city, rejecting the way it corrupts the soul. He displays a strong asexuality, refusing the advances of a beautiful soul mate either because she's only sixteen (an unlikely prohibition for this free spirit) or because he's truly so unworldly that he doesn't do sex. He preaches on the mount, talking to the old timer who's befriended him about how God is in everything. And, the final sequence seems to be suggesting, in the end he comes face to face with God, and his quest, which has now become spiritual, has blessed the lives of all he's touched.

The God undercurrents running through Into The Wild lend Penn's story a portentousness which obscures its charm. (The scene where McCandless climbs a mountain and screams in unison with nature is oddly reminiscent of DeCaprio's King of the World moment). The story is interesting enough without the need for the syrup.

In another way, Into The Wild is Penn doing a Herzog movie. McCandless is stepbrother to Timothy Tredwell. At one point a bear saunters past him, perhaps on its way to devouring Tim, passing up the tramp's skin and bones. At another, McCandless drags a boat, in this case a canoe, up a mountain, a la Fitzcarraldo. Penn appears to be aspiring to the purism of a Herzog epic. The film has the same scale, the same episodic narrative structure as a grand Herzog opus. And yet - it never has the roughness. It looks pretty. Hirsch is no Kinski. He's a puppy of a saint, all gentle love and good vibes. Even in his death throes he looks like he could have been the Ralph Lauren model that his alter-ego, spotted in an LA bar, might be.

These contradictions swim around Penn's enjoyable movie. In spite of the film and its hero's love of solitude, expressed through a rousing soundtrack and some sweeping Alaskan cinematography by Eric Gautier, it's Alexander Supertramp's encounters with the William Carlos William's underbelly of American society that bring the film to life and lend meaning to his experiences, something the narrative suggests he belatedly came to understand. For all its inclinations to be a serious investigation (in the shadow of Tolstoy and Thoreau), of the meaning of man in modern society, the tension between nature and civilisation - in the end Into The Wild works most effectively as a gently comedic character piece, in the vein of Fielding or Cervantes. Penn has an actor's eye for characterisation, from the crazy Danes to the police ranger on the phone who tells the hero he can't paddle his canoe.

The final sequence pays homage to these characters, acknowledging their importance within the hero's life but also within the narrative. The dilemma between the societal impulse and the quest to find the natural man is apparent in both film and character. Is it appropriate to end a film which has been exploring the values of nature and solitude with a gargantuan helicopter shot, redolent of the extremes of societal technology? Whilst one's instinct might be to say - no way - in practice it has a peculiar effectiveness. The film wants to have its cake and eat it, and maybe that works. Like McCandless, it critiques American society for its venal divisions and destructive urge to wealth; but also praises it for its family values and can-do freedoms. Perhaps this is the true contradiction at the heart of McCandless's twin journeys to Alaska and death. In which case Penn has done a fine job in rendering its authenticity: helicopter shots, god complex and all.