film of the day : Shortbus

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There's a fine book about the making of Robert Altman's masterpiece Nashville (1975), which includes a paragraph about a specific scene between Barbara Baxley and Geraldine Chaplin. Baxley plays Lady Pearl, the fiftyish 'Steel Magnolia' mistress of Country & Western megastar Haven Hamilton; Chaplin is Opal, a frightfully earnest and enthusiastic journalist who claims to be employed by the BBC. At one point Lady Pearl starts talking about how she worked on behalf of John F Kennedy during his election campaigning, and then - following JFK's assassination - did the same for his brother Robert. In the late sixties RFK had become the bright shining hope of America's liberal left... until he, too, was felled by an assassin's bullet.
   There's no mistaking the conviction and sorrow in Lady Pearl's voice - because such thoughts and experiences were very much Baxley's own. In the original script, Opal was supposed to continually interrupt Lady Pearl's emotional flow of words, bringing up - in proper journalistic devil's advocate fashion - the less admirable facets of the Kennedy brothers and their policies. But once filming began, Chaplin was so blown away by Baxley's intensity that she simply couldn't bring herself to speak. And that is how I felt during Bobby [6/10], a film written and directed by Emilio Estevez, but which at every stage feels as though it's the celluloid manifestation of Lady Pearl.
   The film is an over-ambitious ensemble drama taking place in and around a single location over the course of a single day: Los Angeles' ritzy Ambassador Hotel on 5th June, 1968. As an early line of dialogue indicates, Edmund Goulding's pioneering 1932 'crisscrosser' Grand Hotel is one of Estevez's inspirations; Nashville (which also culminates in a political assassination of sorts) is clearly another (there's even an Opal surrogate in the form of a perkily persistent Czechoslovakian radio-reporter) likewise the same director's Short Cuts (which repopularised the 'crisscrossing' subgenre,) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Altman-inspired ensemblers Magnolia and Boogie Nights (the latter's William H Macy and Heather Graham have prominent roles here.)
   Such comparisons - and they're unavoidable - aren't remotely to Estevez's advantage: he's nowhere near Altman or Anderson's league either as a writer or a director - indeed, Bobby feels a bit more like a cheesy 1970s disaster pic, except here the "disaster" doesn't involve fire, tornado or flood. Best known as an actor himself, Estevez is a pretty good handler of performers - and the rather too starry cast (every times a door opens, we expect to see another very familiar face) seem to respond to what he's trying to do. A pity then, that having attracted big names like Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Sharon Stone (who rivals her screen husband Macy in the first-among-equals stakes), Helen Hunt, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan (fresh from Altman's Prairie Home Companion), Elijah Wood - not to mention his own dad, Martin Sheen - Estevez doesn't really give them very much meat to chew on in terms of character development or dialogue.
   His technique is blunt and, after a while, monotonously repetitive. Scenes usually start with a couple of characters exchanging innocuous small talk. They quickly segue into bigger talk, mentioning some issue of contemporary concern, then we notice that Mark Isham's score has gradually become audible, swelling with significance as Major Issues are discussed before the scene comes to an end and then we start all over again. Over the course of a couple of hours, this becomes more than a little wearing - likewise the hagiographic way in which Bobby is so reverently and idealistically discussed by pretty much everyone we see.
   Despite the fact that Steven Culp turned in such a remarkable performance in the role only a few years back in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, no actor portrays RFK in Bobby. Instead, taking a leaf out of George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck playbook, the Senator is shown only via TV footage of his speeches and tours around the country (and every time we see a TV, the channel is tuned to RFK.) Estevez seldom strays from the Ambassador (spooky locus of Pat O'Neill's 2002 avant-garde dream-tour The Decay of Fiction), so we have little idea of where Kennedy is or what he is doing over the course of the day - contributing to the picture's pacelessness and lack of persuasive structure. 
   Likewise, his assassin, Sirhan B Sirhan, is only briefly glimpsed before suddenly producing his pistol in the crowded environment of the Ambassador kitchens as Kennedy passes through en route to his waiting limousine (driven by film-director John Frankenheimer - who, like Rosemary Clooney, another celebrity present at the hotel when Sirhan struck, is not depicted here*)
   Kennedy is thus more of an abstraction than a living human being: and Bobby is infected by a mournful spirit of retrospective liberal defeatism, as if it wasn't just RFK who died in June 1968, but the spirit of the entire American left. The situation was (and is) much more complicated and ambiguous than that, of course, but Estevez - who, it seems safe to assume, was raised by Sheen to idolise the Kennedys in general and RFK in particular - is more concerned with burnishing Robert Kennedy's reputation to that of a modern-day, secular saint than properly engaging with the issues of the time. A million miles away from the stately, grief-stunned restraint and uninflected, unforced, small-d-democratic humanism of Paul Fusco's superb photo-collection RFK Funeral Train**, Bobby is a preaching-to-the-converted exercise on a grandiose scale - with no room for any opposing voice, no mention of Sirhan's motivations. 
   But the final reel, in which we hear a Kennedy speech about the evils or violence, and see the bloody aftermath of his shooting intercut with period newsreel footage, are sufficiently powerful to give pause to even the most ardent Republican naysayer. Bobby is a flawed, often frustrating film, Estevez - who hasn't directed a feature for over a decade - overreaching himself in his attempt to craft a sprawling, important epic. You've got to admire his sheer chutzpah, however - just as, whatever the deficiencies of his technique, you're ultimately swept along by the force of his emotion. Judging by the simplicity and directness of his oratory here, RFK might not have approved - but it's a safe bet that Lady Pearl and Barbara Baxley would be smiling through their tears.



I didn't mean to write quite so much about Bobby - I'll be much briefer when it comes to Shortbus [8/10], John Cameron Mitchell's follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This shouldn't be taken as any comment about the relative merits of the two films, however: Shortbus is Bobby's superior in pretty much every conceivable way. It's more entertaining, more thought-provoking, more original, funnier, sadder, more surprising - not to mention more political.
   To paraphrase Woody Allen, it's also probably the most fun you'll have this year with your clothes on: a deliriously uninhibited celebration of love, sex, life and liberation, mostly set in a fictional Manhattan nightclub-cum-arts-centre-cum-cabaret-cum-disco: with the emphasis very much on the cum. The story is relatively straightforward: two couples, one gay and one straight, are encountering a tricky phase in their respective relationships.
   They find most of the answers to their problems in the welcoming, anything-goes environs of 'Shortbus' - emceed by the irrepressible, deliciously acerbic Justin Bonds (playing himself and shamelessly stealing every scene he's in.) I never quite saw what the fuss was about with Hedwig, and Mitchell will never be the smoothest or most technically accomplished of directors. But the visual rough edges are all part of the unapologetically boisterous fun here: likewise the fact that you almost certainly won't recognise any of the actors (some are professional, some not) on view. All of the performers get what Mitchell is aiming for, however, bringing emotion and depth to a script that's by no means 'just' a compendium of zinging one-liners, and which skilfully combines outrageous comedy with its more serious concerns. 
   Readers of a sensitive disposition should note that Shortbus is nothing if not sexually explicit: the first reel alone features more penetrations, erections and ejaculations than the entire output of mainstream Hollywood over the past decade. But these "sensational" aspects aren't by any means what makes Shortbus so special, noteworthy or unusual: this is a boundlessly warm-hearted, embracingly inclusive experience of a movie - one which is especially welcome and timely given America's current political climate of aggression, reaction, regression and repression.

   Accessible experimentalism is the order of the day in James Benning's One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later [7/10], a conceptual sequel to (or rather expansion of) his second feature, 1977's One Way Boogie Woogie. The first hour of this "new" film is the original, hour-long film in its entirely: sixty shots, each lasting a little less than a minute, with the camera fixed in place, showing various out-of-the-way corners of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Benning mainly trains his lens on industrial locales: factories, offices, indeterminate brick buildings, shacks, piles of rubble or metal.
   27 years later, he returned to each of the sixty locations and repeated the exercise. As the title suggests, the second half of One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later shows these new shots - but accompanied by the soundtrack from the original film. Some of the locations have barely changed; some are unrecognisable - in the latter, our memory is jogged primarily by what we hear rather than what we see.
   As is often the case with Benning, much sly humour is deployed to leaven what might otherwise seem an arid academic exercise - but there's no mistaking the political elements of his approach (are we seeing evidence of Milwaukee's decline, or signs of its economic revival?) The result is a quirky kind of time-travel: an exploration of how memory functions, specifically in terms of how it relates to our external environment.
   Though falling some way short of the focus and tightness that marks Benning's finest recent work (such as Los, El Valley Centro and the sublime 13 Lakes), where the passage of time within shots, rather than between shots, is the crucial factor, One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later is clearly unlike anything else that's out there at the moment, a playful contribution to the American avant-garde that forms a handy introduction to one of its most consistently fascinating exponents. We can only hope he'll still be around in 2031 to provide the third of what could eventually make Michael Apted's 7 Up series look like a trifling affair of decidedly limited ambition.

Neil Young
27th/28th October 2006

BOBBY : [6/10] : USA 2006 : Emilio ESTEVEZ : 120 mins (approx)
SHORTBUS : [8/10] : USA 2006 : John Cameron MITCHELL : 100m (timed)
ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE / 27 YEARS LATER : [7/10] : USA 2005 (1977/2005) : James BENNING : 116m (timed)

seen 26th October 2006
Bobby (press show) and Shortbus (public show - paid £11.00) at Odeon West End
One Way Boogie Woogie / 27 Years Later (public show - paid £8.50) at ICA

index to Jigsaw Lounge's coverage of LFF 2006                 LFF official site


* Clooney and Frankenheimer died within weeks of each other in 2004; if memory serves, around the same time, a third celebrity passed away around the same time who was also in our around the Ambassador on the fateful night. Frankenheimer directed The Manchurian Candidate. RFK's death was the inspiration for the opening of The Parallax View.