David Gordon Green

Manglehorn (2014)

André Crous

manglehornUSA
4*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
Paul Logan
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 95 minutes

Angelo J. Manglehorn is a locksmith and a miserable wretch of a man. He lives alone, but not quite. His own real connection to another living, breathing creature is his relationship with his cat, Fanny. But even Fanny seems to have given up on this life, as she refuses to eat and seemingly prepares to shuffle off her mortal coil. Manglehorn himself is not much better, although an early interaction with a woman who accidentally locked her baby in the car makes us realise he is capable of caring, even though his social skills leave much to be desired.

But then come the voice-overs, and the first voice-over is so beautiful I was literally on the verge of tears.

There are few directors in this world whom I want to give a hug to just because I feel so elated that they are contributing to the cinematic art form, but David Gordon Green is certainly one of those. Green’s first two features, George Washington and All the Real Girls, which he made in his 20s, received near-universal critical acclaim. But it was his third film, Undertow, that moved me viscerally through its action yet spoke to me through its unconventionally poetical approach to its story. That film also had some of the most amazing bits of voice-over I had ever heard, and while the comparison to Terrence Malick is easy to make, Green is usually far less sentimental.

Manglehorn is certainly not for everyone. Little of note ever happens, and when it does, we are left puzzled by the meaning of what we just saw. Two scenes everyone will be bound to discuss are the graphical presentation of the operation on Fanny, which easily could have come from an episode of Nip/Tuck, and the multi-car pile-up in which we see not blood but smashed watermelons on the steaming wreckage, which we see Manglehorn pass thanks to the smooth Godard-inspired lateral shot. What do they mean? Nothing obvious, and they don’t look like anything else in the film. And yet, thanks to Green’s capacity to both present naturalistic events in a way that is entirely unrushed and simultaneously astound us with their simple humanity, even these moments don’t feel out of place.

The surprising thing is that Manglehorn is played by Al Pacino, the king of loud-mouth recklessness, and his performance here is utterly compelling despite his character’s absolutely cringe-worthy behaviour towards those who might be his friends if he gave them half a chance or half a sincere smile.

He has the rarest of interaction with his son, a wealthy commodities trader living the high life, but also doing so alone, and much of the second half of the film is devoted to the budding relationship with Dawn (Holly Hunter), the bank teller he sees once a week and whom he has decided to ask for what she presumes is a date. She is also lonely, but they are not on the same wavelength, and the romantic idea of love they witness at the bank, when a man comes in to serenade a woman, is as beautiful as it is the exact opposite of what she is in for with Manglehorn.

The story with his son, competently played, though without a great deal of texture, by Chris Messina, is short but turbulent, and while there is no clear-cut resolution or happy ending, the development is absolutely satisfying from the points of view of both drama and realism.

And finally, there is the infuriatingly garrulous Gary who for all the money in the world would not stop talking. Harmony Korine shows redoubtable virtuosity in his portrayal of this simple man who thinks he has made it big by opening a massage parlour (read, “brothel”) in town, but whose bullying of Manglehorn’s son immediately defines him as a loser.

The metaphor of the locksmith and the big secret he keeps is obvious, but the presentation of the material makes even the mundane rise to the level of the extraordinary. There is a scene with a mime that is comparable to the end of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, and this kind of comparison firmly underlines the magnificent talent of David Gordon Green. The voice-overs do become burdensome, but the film never becomes predictable, and the score by David Wingo and Explosions in the Sky, who also worked on Green’s winning Prince Avalanche, is wholly infectious.

Manglehorn is a challenge, but it is one that is worth taking on, as the experience provides a glimpse of humanity and conveys the feelings of some unusual people, even when they themselves are not even sure what they are.

Joe (2013)

André Crous

joe-2013USA
3*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 115 minutes

David Gordon Green is one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation. Sure, he made the slapstick comedies Your Highness and The Sitter and gone to the well of stoner comedy once too often, but he also made the poetic Prince Avalanche, which enveloped Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch in an ambience reminiscent of both his earlier work and of Hayao Miyazaki’s gorgeous animations. His meditative Undertow, starring Dermot Mulroney and Jamie Bell and produced by Terrence Malick, is easily one of the best films of the 2000s.

In Joe, he returns to the Southern Gothic atmosphere many have labelled his early work with, and as with Undertow much of the action takes place deep in a forest. But Green’s latest film just proves how fine the line is between his magic and his mediocrity, especially when the casting process leads to a collaboration, or rather a tribulation, with Nicholas Cage.

Cage did some good work when he was younger, and his Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas is well deserved. But that is where his talent ended because his grimaces ever since and his expressions of pain just don’t take us anywhere. In Joe, the reason his emotional outbursts are painful is that they are so embarrassing to watch.

But luckily the casting also yielded the young Tye Sheridan, who made such an impression with his performance in Mud, another film set in the rural South about a flawed man who redeems himself ever so slightly by the end. In both films, Sheridan hits a range of notes that are all wholly credible and keep us rapt. But whereas Mud had Matthew McConaughey to reinforce Sheridan’s character, Joe only has Cage, who as usual can’t act his way out of a paper bag.

Cage stars as the titular Joe, a loner who spends his time at home lying on the couch, clearly dealing with some past torment or afflicted by a demon, at a brothel, and in the woods, where he runs a business poisoning trees so that the owners would have the right to burn them down and develop the area. As one should expect from Green, the metaphor of poisoning trees (or life) is at once straightforward and opaque.

Joe doesn’t have much in the way of family that we know of (in a throwaway comment toward the end, we find out he has a grandchild he has never seen), but then, we know very little about him. The most obvious part of the film is that Joe is positioned as the father figure to a teenage boy, Gary (Sheridan), whose own father is a worthless drunk who takes his money and beats him senseless whenever he gets the chance. One day, Gary comes upon Joe’s business in the forest and proves himself to be a quick learner and a very capable worker. We like him almost immediately, even when he lets himself get beaten up by his ever-intoxicated biological father.

This part of the film is the most frustrating, as we learn very early on that the deceptively scrawny Gary can stand up for himself, that he is a push-over for no one, except his father, whom he can evidently take down if he wanted to. There is some halfhearted explanation that seeks to justify Gary’s passivity, but it is tough to side with him when all we want is for him to stand up for himself against this unnecessary violence.

Joe doesn’t have the same kind of insight as a film like Evil (Ondskan), in which a young man who easily knocks out his school mates is beaten time after time by his father because he is not living up to his expectations. Evil made us ask “Why?” before ultimately delivering a stunning blow that was both physically and intellectually satisfying and put all that came before in a context that may have been carved out for dramatic purposes but made sense and had a powerful impact on the viewer. By contrast, Joe only posits a situation on repeat that never improves and which we can’t quite line up with the immanently likeable Gary. We feel like we are slowly drowning in a presentation, albeit gritty and very likely true to life (Gary’s father, Wade, was played by a real-life homeless man called Gary Poulter), that simply doesn’t give us the answers we are looking for, despite building to what we would expect to be a climactic event.

It should be obvious to everyone by now that Sheridan will be a big star, and one can only hope that he continues to choose his projects as wisely as he has until now, as the characters have suited his abilities perfectly, even when the films themselves have not been consistently good. Joe could have done with a few more female characters, although a comparison with the nearly woman-free Undertow shows just what he can accomplish when he puts his mind to a project and focus on the interesting characters (usually, the children) instead of the supposedly more complex adults, who in the case of Joe are dull as dishwater.

I sincerely hope Green returns to the heights of Undertow because while Joe is far from bad, his films have always benefited from his eye for the beauty in the ordinary and his ability to add a dash of magic to the everyday.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

André Crous

Prince AvalancheUSA
4.5*

Director:
David Gordon Green
Screenwriter:
David Gordon Green
Director of Photography:
Tim Orr

Running time: 94 minutes

Prince Avalanche marks a triumphant return for David Gordon Green. Rumours had been making the rounds for a while that the director had all but committed artistic hara-kiri when he started making big-budget films, first with Pineapple Express (which was quite enjoyable, but already a far cry from his previous film, Snow Angels). The broad comedy of the latter was in direct contrast with his gentler approach to the human condition in his early films, especially the crown jewel of his career so far, his 2004 film Undertow.

What sets Green’s filmmaking apart from that of all of his peers, especially when he behaves like a serious filmmaker, is the quality of the writing, and in particular the beauty of his dialogue. While Green has ditched the voiceover that aligned some of his films very closely with those of Terrence Malick (who served as executive producer on Undertow), he still very clearly demonstrates his skill as a writer and a fine observer of human emotion and thinking with some beautifully wrought lines about love and loss.

In an early scene with an old woman who has lost her house to a wildfire and is digging through the white ash of her former possessions, we share road worker Alvin’s (Paul Rudd) astonishment as she says, “Sometimes, I feel like I’m digging through my own ashes.” The woman’s words are expressed with a combination of truth and sincerity, yet they also have a powerful aftertaste that we cannot ignore. This comes after she relates a story of such simplicity and pride we cannot help but well up with tears at her predicament, and yet she is by no means presented as any kind of a victim.

Prince Avalanche is a remake of the Icelandic Either Way (Á annan veg) but has fleshed out some of the characters a bit more than the original, including that of the lady mentioned above, making her more human without taking away any of the mystery she had in the earlier film.

The two main characters of the film, in whose company we spend most of the running time, Alvin and Lance (Emile Hirsch), are out in the Texas countryside in 1987 repainting the yellow traffic lines on the road that leads through a forest, devastated by a wildfire a few months earlier (there was no such fire in Texas in 1987) and now reduced to a wasteland of charcoal.

Lance, who is Alvin’s sister’s boyfriend, got Alvin the job in part because he wanted the young man to make something with his life instead of wasting away at home. Alvin is not focused much, and Lance, who himself is on prescription medication, opines that Alvin ought to be, too. Alvin spends his time reading Lance’s comic books and only half-heartedly participates in the task of repairing the road cutting through the forest. Recently out of school, he is exceptionally horny and spends his nights masturbating in his tent.

Although Green no longer has the lush backdrop of Georgia to work with, as he did in Undertow, he and his DP, fellow University of North Carolina School of the Arts graduate Tim Orr, nevertheless present us with rich visuals that radiate with the green of the fresh foliage, the sparkle of water drops, the yellow of the lines, the orange of the sunsets, the red of the pickup truck and the blue of the boys’ jumpsuits. Despite there only being two characters, the vibrant colours and equally colourful dialogue produce a broad tableau to draw us in and keep us interested.

With multiple shots showing us the forest and its smaller inhabitants, Green emphasizes the peace of the space regardless of the burned pieces of wood that never let us forget a more brutal past. We can understand both of the young men’s desire, at various points, to have the silence to think, to pick up the pieces and reassess the direction of their lives.

Prince Avalanche, whose title fits in very well with the comic-book / superhero element, heavily depends on dialogue, and the back-and-forth between Alvin and Lance is perfectly suited to the talents and facial expressions of Rudd and Hirsch. But Green also adds some excellent visual gimmicks along the way that alternate between gag and poetry. At one point, the lines painted on trees suddenly serve as a line for writing, and Green proceeds to write. It is a gorgeous and unexpected moment that seems not at all like showing off but rather affirms the courage and the skill of the filmmaker, whose Undertow also benefited from several moments of visual experimentation.

In the end, it seems like Green wants to show us dynamic life is possible even amid apparent destruction. Although he never really puts much despair onscreen, his characters certainly have their fair share of difficulties to confront, and they rise to the task — even if it means they have to chug the vodka an old truck driver has given them and dance around in slow motion like fools in the wilderness.

Green shows again why he was called one of the most promising directors of his generation when his début feature, George Washington, was released in 2000. While his worst films make us shake our heads in dismay, his finest films enrich our lives like very few others out there.

This is a slightly modified version of the writer’s review that first appeared in The Prague Post.