SOMMER ’09 (p2) : ‘Frozen River’ [5/10], plus three by David Cronenberg – all online, MON.3.AUG.

Published on: July 26th, 2009

#4   Frozen River   :    (5/10)
It now seems that Lance Hammer's Ballast - one of the most acclaimed and award-winning examples of recent American independent cinema – is destined never to be released in the UK. That's something of a minor scandal, compounded by the fact that Frozen River, an inferior variant on similar themes, is enjoying distribution among many of the nation's arthouses.
   Both films are debut works by writer-directors, taking us into bleak, out-of-the-way corners of the United States, and into the lives of cash-strapped, marginalised individuals. But whereas Ballast is all about the patient accumulation of detail in relation to characters, their background and environment, Frozen River takes on the trappings of a thriller, with increasingly frustrating, unsatisfying results.
   These scripting issues are such a distracting problem that it's hard to understand how the picture was Oscar-nominated for the Best Original Screenplay. Indeed, with its repeated fall-back on firearms, its string of unlikely coincidences and melodramatic twists, Frozen River has - among its fellow nominees in the screenwriting category – rather more in common with Martin McDonagh's In Bruges than Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, although both Leigh's picture and Hunt's are essentially character-studies of strong female protagonists.
   Indeed, Frozen River's star Melissa Leo may well have edged out Happy-Go-Lucky's Sally Hawkins among the Best Actress nominees - and even those of us baffled by Hunt's presence among the screenwriting nominees can have few quibbles with Leo's nomination. She's by far the best thing about the whole enterprise as hard-bitted fortysomething trailer-dwelling mother-of-two Ray Eddy, a shopworker who stumbles – via various plausibility-testing contrivances – into a lucrative but hazardous sideline involving the trafficking of illegal immigrants across the Canadian border.
   Ray lives very close to a Mohawk reservation that straddles the frontier, a largely autonomous zone where US law-enforcement – and border patrols – seemingly have only very limited jurisdiction. She forms an uneasy partnership with a young Mohawk woman, Lila (Misty Upham), a widow whose mother-in-law has, in effect, kidnapped her baby son to raise as her own. Various plots and subplots come to a critical head over one particularly icy Christmas – including a near-miraculous event involving an infant, the Yuletide setting clearly being no accident. This is unfortunately typical of a plot which occasionally tends towards the sentimental and the manipulative, at odds with Leo's raw, convincingly gritty performance at its centre (few of the other actors come even close to matching Leo's level, and some of them come over as distractingly stiff and amateurish at times.)
   In addition, Hunt's direction is very by-the-numbers – she has an excessive fondness for twangly acoustic guitar on the soundtrack which the movie could easily have done without, and also for unhelpfully close close-ups that, along with some near-inaudible dialogue, makes things tricky to follow at certain points.
   There's the material here for a fine, involving, original drama: Leo, the Mohawk business, the key outdoors location – starkly alluring but lethally dangerous - which provides the movie with its title, the concentration on the lowest economic strata of what remains one of the world's most affluent populations. But Hunt doesn't seem to know how to bring them all together into a coherent whole.
   She should have taken a few pointers from Erick Zonca's Julia: that's another character-based thriller involving cross-border intrigues, children in peril and/or inter-family kidnap situations, and a volatile tough-broad protagonist, but one which transcends its credibility issues to become a gripping, increasingly intense journey into criminal desperation. Frozen River, by contrast, trundles along only so far before those the weight of its scriptwriting and directorial problems combine to pull it under – Leo deserves a much more roadworthy vehicle for her talents.
   2.8.09

#2 and #3   Stereo (4/10) and Crimes of the Future  (6?/10)
   Well, we all have to start somewhere. And David Cronenberg, after a couple of shorts, enjoyed his first proper exposure with these two "featurettes." Pretentious and amateurish to varying degrees – Stereo is near-unwatchable at times – they primarily function as showcases for the enticingly offbeat persona, and voice, of Ron Mlodzik, the archly epicene, willowy protagonist of both films.
   In Stereo, which is more of an ensemble piece, we see him wandering the interior of a huge modern building – supposedly the 'Center for Erotic Enquiry' along with various other subjects of an investigation into telepathic powers. We hear about this study – in great detail, and with exhausting verbosity – via the narration, which is handled by several voices. The voiceover is a deadpan parody of academic language, one much better suited to the page than the screen. Indeed, the picture might actually be improved by watching it with the sound muted, so irritating does the endless blather quickly become.
   It's also nearly impossible to follow or make much sense of, and shows that Cronenberg at this early stage was more interested in exploring ideas verbally than "cinematically." That said, he does achieve some striking effects as his very mobile camera – shooting 35mm monochrome – hurtles down long corridors or through the internal expanses of a construction with which he's evidently fascinated.
   Shot in colour, and, crucially, displaying more of Cronenberg's mordant wit, Crimes of the Future (great title!) is also much more the "Ron Mlodzik Show" - and is all the better for that. As the ascetic, sneering Adrian Tripod (pronounced Tripod), the actor a deliciously, hilariously sinister focus, guiding us through his character's bizarre career at a series of outre institutes and organisations, following in the footsteps of his vanished mentor, Antoine Rouge. 
   Rouge remains a tantalising absence from Crimes of the Future - though the climax sees Tripod coming face to face with what may or may not be Rouge's reincarnation in the form of a prepubescent girl. A prepubescent girl with whom, for various complex reasons, Tripod intends to have sexual intercourse. In dubious taste? Undoubtedly so – but Cronenberg's teasing predilection for shock-tactics is present here, along with numerous hints of the directions his career would take once he graduated to full-length features. In terms of the Cronenberg corpus, Stereo and Crimes of the Future are somewhat deformed embryos – the latter rather more "viable" than the former – suitable for inspection in a "cabinet of curiosities" ante-room adjoining the director's later, less confrontationally avant-garde creations.
   2.8.09

#1   Dead Ringers  :  6/10
   Cronenberg update! Having last week mentioned on these pages - in the review of eXistenZ – the fact that the next project from 'D.C.' was going to be an adaptation of Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Circle, with Cronenberg set to write and direct, the latest news is that Matarese is on indefinite hold and that the Canadian auteur will instead bring Don DeLillo's generally ill-received 2003 novel Cosmopolis to the screen. The latter is the story of a pampered 28-year-old billionaire cruising around Manhattan in a stretch limo that doubles as his office.
   Spool back 21 years, and the new Cronenberg release was a rather different exploration of self-imposed isolation among the urban wealthy: Dead Ringers, loosely based on actual events surrounding the life and death of high-profile, identical-twin Manhattan gynaecologists. In the film, the Marcus brothers become the Mantles – Elliot and Beverly (both played by Jeremy Irons), impeccably English-accented Torontonians who work and live together, their private lives complicated by the fact that no-one, not even their lovers, can confidently tell them apart.
   Their hermetic, solipsistic symbiosis trundles along quite happily - and profitably – until Beverly falls in love with one of his/their patients: neurotic film star, Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold), who happens to have a particularly rare, "trifurcated" uterus. When Claire uncovers the brothers' deception and realises the extent of their psychological connection – they're in effect 'Siamese' twins who aren't physically conjoined – this triggers a drug-hastened breakdown on the part of the fragile Beverly. Usually the callous and hard-headed brother, Elliot tries to help his sibiling through his problems, only to find himself sucked into a downward spiral of professional, physical and mental collapse…
   As exhaustively detailed in the 1993 Faber & Faber interview-compendium Cronenberg on Cronenberg, edited by Chris Rodley, Dead Ringers had an unusually protracted and complicated gestation-period even by Cronenberg's usual standards. During an especially lengthy gap in the pre-production process, Cronenberg parted ways with his usual cinematographer Mark Irwin – who had shot Fast Company and The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Videodrome (1982), The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly (1986), and was replaced by Peter Suschitzky.
   In Rodley's phrase, Irwin's departure was "a break in the family chain [which] Cronenberg remains somewhat bitter about and disappointed by" - and it's perhaps not too fanciful to detect some of that "familial" rancor seeping into the atmosphere of what is a very arch, cerebral and disquietingly clinical piece of work, notable throughout for the very "eighties" details of costuming, decor, furnishing and production-design – a deliberate kind of sophisticated banality which now looks distractingly dated.
   But whereas such "chilliness" is a trademark element of Cronenberg's work, most of them time it functions as a positive factor, a distancing that allows us to access his intellectual processes while simultaneously being moved by the characters' plight and also revulsed by the visceral extremities on show.
   In Dead Ringers, however, something has gone amiss: there's more of an air of an academic exercise, as if the story had been worked over and over in the scriptwriting process to the detriment of a cohesive narrative spine. After a pair of rather stiff prologues glimpsing into the brothers' childhood and student years (which incidentally serve to establish the consistent Anglo plumminess of their accents), the story proper begins with the arrival of Claire Niveau into their lives – and by far the strongest scenes are the ones involving Bujold, a reliably vivid, empathetic performer who here combines volatility and sensuality with a brittle, touching vulnerability. 
   But after the half-way mark Niveau is largely absent from the movie, which journeys further and further into the Mantles' closed-circuit of imitation, dualism and dependency - towards a grimly inevitable tragic finale. These scenes foreground Irons' terrific double performance – one in which we always know which twin is which, and also which twin is playing which, on the instances where such dissimulation occurs – and which goes quite some way towards compensating for the a script which seems to run out of ideas and momentum a long way before the actual finish.
   Cronenberg's films often suffer from these pesky third-act problems – in Danny Peary's phrase, Videodrome "loses its mind" at a certain crucial late juncture - and it's surely no accident that two of his least satisfactory enterprises, Dead Ringers and the 1991 follow-up Naked Lunch (during which this review somehow contrived to fall asleep) are by far his longest features at 115 minutes apiece: the next longest are Scanners (103), M.Butterfly (102), The Dead Zone (100) and Eastern Promises (100), and more than half of his 16 features to date clock in at between 87 and 99 minutes. 
   As it is, the pacing of Dead Ringers feels distinctly "off": this is a project that should either have been much shorter or considerably longer. Perhaps a pair of movies, identical in certain regards but with crucial differences, would have been most appropriate - maybe a two-parter for Canadian TV, the kind of "mini-series" which Claire Niveau is described as appearing in. Of course, even an "unsatisfactory" Cronenberg is more intriguing, stimulating and distinctive than the usual run of movies, in 1988 as in 2009 – and Dead Ringers, for all its faults, remains a key element of what was already a unique, ever-mutating corpus of work.
    27.7.09

Neil Young
July 2009

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE : [6?/10] : Canada 1979 : David CRONENBERG : 65m approx
seen at The Star and Shadow cinema, Newcastle : 29th July (16mm projection of a film shot on 35mm; paid  £4 for double-bill including Stereo)

DEAD RINGERS : [6/10] : Canada (/USA) 1988 : David CRONENBERG : 116m (BBFC)
seen at The Star and Shadow cinema, Newcastle : 26th July (35mm; paid  £4)

FROZEN RIVER : [5/10] : USA 2008 : Courtney HUNT : 97m (BBFC)
seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle : 2nd August (35mm;  £6.70)

STEREO : [4/10] : Canada 1969 : David CRONENBERG : 65m approx
seen at The Star and Shadow cinema, Newcastle : 26th July (16mm projection of a film shot on 35mm; paid  £4 for double-bill including Crimes of the Future)

DAVID CRONENBERG

year title rating length editor cinematographer

1969 Stereo : [4/10] : 65m : Cronenberg : Cronenberg
1970 Crimes of the Future : [6?/10] : 65m : Cronenberg : Cronenberg

1975 Shivers : [7/10] : 87m : Dodd : Saad
1976 Rabid : [7/10?] : 91m : Lafleur : Verzier

1979 The Brood : [8/10] : 91m : Collins : Irwin
1979 Fast Company : [?/10 NS] : 91m : Sanders : Irwin
1980 Scanners : [8/10] : 103m : Sanders : Irwin
1982 Videodrome : [7/10?] : 87m : Sanders : Irwin
1983 The Dead Zone : [9/10] : 100m : Sanders : Irwin
1986 The Fly : [8/10?] : 92m : Sanders : Irwin

                   all films below - Sanders / Suschitzky
1988 Dead Ringers : [6/10] : 115m
1991 Naked Lunch : [5/10?] : 115m
1993 M Butterfly : [?/10 NS] : 102m
1996 Crash : [7/10?] : 100m

1999 eXistenZ : [10/10] : 97m
2002 Spider : [?/10 NS] : 98m
2005 A History of Violence : [10/10] : 96m

2007 Eastern Promises : [6/10] : 100m