Seven

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 99 of 100

When ‘Seven’ (and I’m not using that ‘Se7en’ spelling, by the way; it only works when you render it in capitals: ‘SE7EN’) was released in 1995, I saw it without reading a single review or having any comprehension of what it was about. It was a Sunday afternoon, I fancied going to the cinema, ‘Seven’ was on and Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman were in it. Good enough for me. I bought a ticket, took my seat and twiddled my fingers through a bunch of asinine adverts and trailers. The film started. The first scene had a sombre, lonely-looking Detective Somerset (Freeman) leaving his prissily neat apartment to go to work. Cut to a murder scene, Somerset asking a humane and well-meaning question only to meet with a contemptuous response from a colleague. Then he’s back in his apartment, throwing a flick knife at a dart board.

I start getting the impression that this isn’t exactly going to be a run-of-the-mill cop thriller.

Somerset, on his last week on the job prior to retirement, meets his new partner/replacement Detective Mills (Pitt). Their relationship gets off to a fractious start. A headfuck opening credits sequence razors across the screen.

Okay, I think to myself, what the fuck’s going on here?

I spend the next hour and a half alternately revisiting that thought and marvelling at how cleverly the film is being constructed. The literary allusions, crucial to the narrative and yet unforced. The darkly satirical tailoring of the seven deadly sins to a contemporary aesthetic. The murder of the lawyer: genius. Occasional bits of cerebral humour (Somerset pointing Mills in the direction of Dante and Chaucer; Mills sending a patrolman out to by Clarkes notes not the actual texts). Occasional bits of wry humour (Somerset good-naturedly berating the security staff at a library for playing cards all night instead of availing themselves of “all these books, a world of knowledge”). A couple of beautifully judged character scenes between Somerset, Mills and Mills’s fragile wife Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow). The deepening of Somerset’s character from slightly snobbish grouch to mentor. The deepening of Mills’s from verbose hothead to man of compromised ideals.

I slowly come to realise how tight Fincher’s control over his material is; how acute his directorial decisions. How starved of natural light every scene is. ‘Seven’: a film of almost continual rain. A film of trash-strewn alleyways, dour tenement blocks, shadowy corridors, dark rooms, glum offices. A film where the sky is barely glimpsed.

Until that last gut-churning half hour. During which I sit in my seat, decidedly uncomfortable as Mills and Somerset ride out into the desert, their prisoner taunting them with intimations of something. Uneasy at not having any inkling, this late in the game, of exactly where the filmmakers are going with this. Squirming as that van comes careening through the desert, kicking up clouds of dust. Agitated, fingers digging into the armrests, as the package is delivered.

I sit in my seat until the end credits have finished. ‘The Heart’s Filthy Lesson’. Then I walk unsteadily out of the Showcase, emerge blinking into the light, and wander across the car park looking for my car. Feeling like the film had come out of nowhere and struck me repeatedly around the head with a concrete block. Feeling that I’d seen something that had crept into my subconscious and wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry. Something I was convinced was a masterpiece and equally convinced I’d reapproach only at significant intervals.

Fifteen years down the line, I watched it this afternoon. Only my fourth viewing. It had pretty much the same impact, but this time left me with a consideration I’d not entertained before: for all that Mills is rash, impulsive and volatile, it’s the calm, methodical and intellectual Somerset who’s the true foil to John Doe. The other side of the coin. The tick of a metronome as opposed to the voice of a higher power.

The reinvention of the bat

Now don’t get me wrong: I like George Clooney. A lot. But it has to be said: ‘Batman and Robin’ is a piece of shit. It was my friend Paul who delivered the most accurate and coruscating verdict on ‘Batman and Robin’: “It says something when a movie’s got Alicia Silverstone, Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox in it – and you still walk out halfway through.”

‘Batman and Robin’ is what it had come to. It made the Adam West incarnation of Batman look like an exercise in documentary realism. It made the lacklustre ‘Batman Forever’, in which the mantle so convincingly worn by Michael Keaton was transmogrified into a mooching slab of banality by Val Kilmer, look like a rediscovered masterpiece by Powell & Pressburger. It made a five year old with a snot nose and scabby knees running through a council estate screaming “nana-nana-nana-nana, nana-nana-nana-nana, BATMAAAAANNN!” at the top of his voice look like Sir Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet at the Old Vic. It made –

*steels himself*

*gnashes teeth*

*types the motherfucker anyway*

– it made ‘Twilight’ look like a proper film.

In short, ‘Batman and Robin’ presented a pretty convincing argument for the end of the franchise. Only a madman or a genius would have attempted a reboot.

Enter Christopher Nolan. (Clue: he ain’t no madman.) Even then, if I’m being perfectly honest, I had my doubts. Taking my seat at Nottingham’s Showcase Cinema back in 2005 (a scant eight years after Joel Schumacher had raped the shit out of my sense of aesthetics in exactly the same cinema with ‘Batman and Robin’), I wondered if Nolan – who had delivered a minor masterpiece with ‘Memento’ and an assured big-name studio picture with ‘Insomnia’ – wasn’t making a mis-step.

Ten minutes in, with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) roughing it up in down and dirty style in some godforsaken prison, and I gave myself a mental rebuke for doubting Mr Nolan’s talent. An hour in, with Liam Neeson, Michael Caine, Tom Wilkinson and Morgan Freeman delivering the goods and Bale himself wiping the slate clean in terms of how you portray Batman onscreen, and I was in hog heaven.

This was a Batman that was dark and nasty. Wilkinson’s Falcone was a proper mob boss, the kind of guy who’d shoot you in the head halfway through a meal and still be on coffee and desserts while his henchmen were dumping you in the harbour. Cillian Murphy’s Dr Crane (a.k.a Scarecrow) was a chilling and nightmarishly-visaged fiend … even before he put the freakin’ mask on! Ra’s Al Ghul and the League of Shadows were terrifying in their implacable certainty that their genocidal plans were the only reasonable option.

And then there was Bale’s Batman. You only need to remind yourself of Bale’s filmography. The man’s intense. His performances eviscerate. You could put him in ‘Teletubbies: the Movie’ and he’d tear the screen apart in an exegesis of method actor ferocity that would have the pre-school audience in therapy for decades. Or, to put it more simply, cast the man in a comic book movie and it stops being a comic book movie pretty damn quick.

Not that Nolan’s take on Batman was ever going to be comic book. There is very little of the gothic iconography that defines the comics. Nolan’s Gotham pays lip service with some shots of a monorail and the quasi-Victorian architecture of Arkham Asylum, but otherwise the film plays out across an unapologetically gritty milieu: the docks, the slums, Falcone’s downtown bar, an authentically grubby police precinct.

Case in point: it’s halfway into the film before Wayne dons the bat-suit. Most directors would mark the moment with a big, iconic close-up of Bruce Wayne as Batman, cape fluttering, zooming down through the night sky to combat villainy. Nolan does things differently. Nolan stages Batman’s first appearance during a drug deal, there various miscreants and heavies darting between containers as something – something shadowy and deadly and preternaturally fast – picks off their numbers one by one.

Context: Bruce Wayne picks his alter ego based on what scares him the most. Reasoning: if he conquers his own fear (pace the teachings of Ra’s Al Ghul), the very thing that scares him will terrify his enemies.

Nolan keeps the bat to the shadows. The effect is so much more devastating.

In a film that has only one weak spot – Katie Holmes’s indifferent performance – Nolan effortlessly portrays both sides of the persona, Bruce Wayne and Batman, as intertwined. Where most of the previous outings (only Burton’s first Batman film comes close to synthesising the two) unambiguously delineate Bruce Wayne the millionaire playboy and Batman the masked avenger, Nolan uses Wayne’s outward appearance of gentleman of leisure to strip away the concealing layers of his psyche and get to grips with the day-to-day hardships and psychological implications of leading what is essentially a double life.

‘Batman Begins’ gave the cinema-going public a credible, obsessively driven and sometimes vulnerable Batman. A gritty, ballsy Batman. A Batman largely free of glib one-liners and casual heroics. A superhero, in other words, for our troubled and ambiguous times.

Then he spent the two and a half hours of its genre-bending, expectation-shattering sequel demolishing every aspect of his anti-hero’s granite-like rectitude, irreversibly compromising Batman’s morality and turning him into a post-Guantanamo Bay one-man Patriot Act, beating the shit out of arrested suspects, clandestinely deporting foreign nationals, fucking over the basic civil liberties of every resident of Gotham (a Gotham, moreover, now free of monorails and Gothic buildings; a Gotham that could easily pass for New York) and basically proving right every naysayer who decries him as a vigilante. ‘The Dark Knight’ is the Ingmar Bergman of summer blockbusters, an unremittingly dark foray into the depths of its supposed hero’s ravaged humanity; a film whose gleefully amoral villain, Heath Ledger’s definitive Joker, remains utterly and perversely true to himself while forcing Batman at every turn to overturn every tenet of justice he stands for.

Earlier in this blogathon, Bryce linked to a thought-provoking and elegantly constructed essay at The Movie Blog which weighs the evidence of ‘Batman Begins’ as a deconstructionist or reconstructionist film and finds it reconstructionist. It’s an argument I’m entirely convinced by. But there’s no doubt that Nolan’s two Batman films are also reinventions.

Million Dollar Baby

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: films with numbers in the title / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 38 of 100


Following his Oscar-winning masterwork ‘Unforgiven’ in 1992, Clint Eastwood spent the next decade alternating between by-the-numbers mainstream fare (‘Absolute Power’, ‘True Crime’, the fun for forgettable ‘Space Cowboys’) and more interesting projects (‘A Perfect World’, the uncharacteristic ‘Bridge of Madison County’, the uneven ‘Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil’). None of them, however, quite hit the heights of ‘Unforgiven’, and by the time ‘Blood Work’ seeped onto cinema screens in 2002 it seemed like Eastwood was running out of steam.

Then, already in his 70s, Eastwood went hell for leather and produced, over the next eight years, an incredibly accomplished and impressive body of work: the unflinching Dennis Lehane adaption ‘Mystic River’, his first feature length documentary ‘Piano Blues’, the quadruple Oscar-winning ‘Million Dollar Baby’, the remarkably even-handed pair of war movies ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’, the somewhat over-amibitious ‘Changeling’ (perhaps the only Eastwood movie this decade that’s simply okay rather than anywhere between pretty goddamn good and freakin’ excellent), the powerhouse acting swansong ‘Gran Torino’ and the commendably old-school ‘Invictus’.

‘Million Dollar Baby’ is adapted from ‘Rope Burns’, a collection of short stories by F.X. Toole (the pen name of boxing trainer Jerry Boyd). It’s the story of people with broken lives trying to hold some semblance of dignity together while vying for a chance at the brass ring. Two of these people are old-timers: Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), a boxing manager and gym owner, and Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), manager of said gym and a one-time prize fighter whose career went south.

Entering their lives like a whirlwind is Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), scion of a white trash family, who waitresses in a greasy diner by day and pounds the bag by night. She wants to be a fighter; wants a title shot. And she wants Frankie to train her. Frankie’s not struck on the idea. When Maggie originally approaches him, Frankie’s first two questions are, “Do I owe you money?” and “Did I know your momma?” It’s not long before he quits asking questions and just takes to grunting that he doesn’t train girls.

Long story short, Frankie ends up training Maggie. He gets her a title shot. Paul Haggis’s script doesn’t contain any real surprises, but avoids cliché by focusing on Frankie and Eddie’s relationship (which seems to be founded on semi-good-natured bickering) as much as on the developing kinship between Frankie and Maggie. It’s established early on that Frankie’s estranged from his daughter. Maggie, scorned by her ungrateful family, is without a father figure (her dad died). It’s to Eastwood’s credit as director that none of the thuddingly obvious parallels that Haggis draws – or his thuddingly obvious lurch into tragedy for the final act – swamp the film with mawkish sentiment. It’s as if Eastwood took the script outside and set about it with a carpet beater (or maybe a baseball bat) until every bit of schmaltz had been knocked out of it.

That’s what I love about Eastwood as a filmmaker: there’s no false sentiment. Nothing phoney. His films – particularly in the latter stages of his directorial career – are shot through with wisdom and hard-won insight. They are stamped with the mark of experience.

‘Million Dollar Baby’ is a low-key and, by its final stretch, resolutely downbeat film. It is mostly a film of interiors: Frankie’s gym, Maggie’s dingy apartment, run-down diners, the backrooms of boxing halls, the boxing ring itself. Eastwood’s style is observational. The truest insights are in the smallest details. A ruefully amusing scene has Eddie, shoeless feet propped on the desk, earn Frankie’s disapprobation for having holes in his socks. Frankie offers him some cash up front to buy a new pair. Eddie pragmatically declines the offer: “I couldn’t swear it wouldn’t find its way to the track.” It’s a great moment: it tells you all you need to know about Eddie. Likewise, Frankie’s beat up old car and too-neat house tell you all you need to know about him.

Indeed, the only time the film slips into the obvious is the portrayal of Maggie’s family. Haggis’s script takes the easy option, painting them in one shade. But that’s the only quibble I have with ‘Million Dollar Baby’. For a film that won Eastwood Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, a Best Actress gong for Hilary Swank and Best Supporting Actor for Morgan Freeman, it’s perhaps the least Oscar-baity film you’ll ever see.