American Grievers, Part One: INCEPTION (2010)

Was INCEPTION--released this week on Netflix--the trippiest film of 2010? Outside of THE BLACK SWAN, TOY STORY 3 and ENTER THE VOID, perhaps. Is it great? Perhaps not. The high-def uber artsy set and lighting make it impossible to hallucinate into; the hallucinating is done for you, by professionals. Jungian resonance glimmers, swirls, and fades away before it can cohere into myth, a sad failure to launch -  the question is, who chickened out at the last minute when it came to laying bare their sad soul?

We know the answer. These same elements occur in SHUTTER ISLAND, therefore it's Leo. It's like he can't see his own elephant in the room, and he's the big star so the movie wears a blindfold while lecturing about the importance of sight. What is it about being a tight-lipped professional man with dark family secrets and a dead wife taunting from beyond that so appeals to Leo that he has to play it over and over? A fine actor and true humanitarian, DiCaprio is certainly a success on many levels, so why is he so obsessed with this narrow-minded 15-year old's idea of masculinity?  Can it be mere dream coincidence that all these ghost wives and beautiful little ghost children and houses by the shore with swing sets are so very dead and far away? He's sorry, Rose, but he has a job to do. That job is looking tortured and behaving with little in the way of self-aware humor as he laments he can't be home with you, Rose. Don't you get it? DON'T YOU GET IT??? (emotion)

Still, if nothing else INCEPTION should illuminate--and make a great double bill with-- Nicholas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW, which always confused me before, but which now I understand and want to see again. Like INCEPTION, Roeg's film deals with a shifting reality (the ancient and ever-crumbling Venice) and involves parental grief and guilt, out-of-sequence narrative, a city sunk knee-deep in water, and little children whose faces you never see as they're always turning corners. Man, it's a trip, if you know what I mean.

I mean I wasn't high while watching INCEPTION, but I could feel the tang of salvia divinorum, the 'ride the snake' dragon teeth face melt with fried time-space onions and trans-dimensional sweetness inside select INCEPTION images and scenes: Leo and Juno staring at each other as slow mo Zabriskie Pointed Parisian cafes explode around them; Ken Watanabe as ancient as Bowman at the end of 2001, his liverspots aglow in perfect unison with the lanterns on the wall behind him like an Alex Gray painting (I couldn't find a screenshot, alas)

But the similarities in Chinese puzzle box construction between INCEPTION and SHUTTER ISLAND are too great to ignore (substitute planes for boats and it's more or less the same movie). In both, Leo is a dour, myopic brooder haunted by images of his dead wife and kids. In both films we must ask, WICKER MANnishly, is Leo actually investigating a crime or is he trapped in an Escher-like maze of the mind engineered by a hostile anima? Is he just paranoid or is everyone really out to get him? Or are they really just figments of his imagination? Or the classic latency test: is he convinced the whole world is a show put on just for him, and nothing exists outside his own realm of experience? To get meta: is he anima-dominated due to emotional dysfunction as a result of a show business childhood (abusive stage mom giving him drugs to allay puberty - hence his eternal baby face)? Can it be that for him love is contingent upon uncrossable absence? No dad is more needy and pain-stricken about not being with his kids than a dad who can NOT get back to them. If the kids are actually there, then why bother even lowering the newspaper to behold their latest construction paper art projects?

That's how that objet petit a keeps you crippled, as the Anima-Kali-Cotillard projection beats you senseless for not wanting to take her out more often, you long to have her back so you can ignore her once again!

Whenever a movie is made about the mind, any evidence of  unresolved inner conflicts in the filmmakers' unconscious will inevitably be made apparent via simple deconstruction, so be careful! We can discern from the text that Leo DiCaprio has never been married or had children. He only dates models. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows-- at least on the surface-- a level of laddish insecurity: his women must be certified gorgeous --so everyone knows he's a man. Playing a humorless widower allows him to be--in theory--a deeply romantic and caring soul yet he doesn't have to unfold even a gram of tenderness... doesn't have to risk ridicule, doesn't have to get all sensitive up close and caring. As said kids and wife are not alive he can both sleep around AND stare moodily at mantle pictures from some happier time beach trip. It's the one kind of emotion that an insecure actor doesn't mind displaying as it's all just him, there's no other performer jockeying for reaction shots. When the wife does show up, she's just a phantom, so he can yell at her without upsetting the feminists. He can, instead, brood.

Opium is the heroin of the masses

In Jungian terms, the dead wives here assume the role of Leo's anima--or the projected feminine ego of his unconscious (ala Ligeia). The anima takes many forms: she can come to you as a hot babe, or as a castrating vagina dentata Katharine Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. When she's just a dead wife fantasia, it's kind of a 16-year old virgin's comic book fantasy of a real conscious-unconscious relationship, or am I just thinking of my own pre-adult fantasias wherein, for example, I pined and longed for Jean Grey to rise again as Phoenix in X-Men, and then Elektra in Daredevil? Or Lindsay Wagner in The Six Million Dollar Man? There's no benefit to falling in love with a living comic book character Of course we were all glad when they came back by our popular demand, we had collectively re-animated them so to speak. But in each case, we knew something was missing, we just didn't have the Lacanian context to understand what.

Now we know, Leo has taught us. It was the ache of the pine. 

We see it in real life all the time, if you've ever been in a long distance relationship you know the feeling. Sunday afternoon and she's about to get on the bus or train back to wherever and your heart breaks with sadness, already missing her and the joy she brought. But THEN she decides--at the very last second--to stay and leave Monday night instead and you're like oh shit, I should be glad so why do I feel strangely robbed? You lost the pine.

Pining is, above all, a performance... a slow... motion... tantrum... and it can be sweet, but on the basic level, it's absurd, juvenile, something Bella might write in her TWILIGHT diary and, years later, with nostalgic relish, read aloud to her sorority friends for cheap drunk laughs. Should art cater to juvenile minds or should it not also educate, enlighten, and transcend? When you blow the doors of your mind wide open, make sure the floors inside are clean, even if your movie is about dirty floors. Company is coming, and the company is a future self with a clean house that you made possible, defeating your ego at its own game.

But that's never the issue. The wifely anima projection in the unconscious of Leo's character/s is defined by her need for him, her wanting to be with him all the time, and of having no life of her own beyond her stifling adoration of her tortured husband. No true anima is that weak, or that crazy. They do their own thing. Half the time you can't even get them on the phone. The fantasy in these films is that Leo's anima is so needy and doting that she never just sinks into the dark and does something on her own. Just as Bella's animus Edward hovers over her like a clingy stalker, so too hover Leo's dead wives.

Perhaps it would be good if Leo owned up to his romantic streak: he might see that all the stale action sequences and need to embody Scorsese tough guys like Howard Hughes--and soon, Dean help us, Frank Sinatra-- scans as just a fear of looking wimpy to his laddish entourage. Word on the high-def rain-soaked GGI streets is that he's also going to be playing a serial killer in a period film about the 1919 World's Fair! If he doesn't make the character a tortured brooder haunted by his dead wife or lost children, I'll eat my hat! Maybe he'll enrich this killer with twisted joyfulness, ala your Hannibals, Freddies, Nicholsons, and Karloffs... instead of his usual dour tortured cowboy--ala your Jason Patrics and David Boreanzs. I doubt it, but I don't brood about it.

My own psyche is, after all, deeply invested in Leo as he reminds me a lot of my younger brother, Fred - the blonde hair, the baby face, the big bulky frame. God knows I've tried to reach him (Fred, I mean), but he just does his own thing - fixing motorcycles and listening to Metallica out in Phoenix, AZ, with his concealed weapons permit. It's an older brother thing. We have to live with our own frustrating inability to mold our younger siblings. We're America, beating up the world so it won't get hurt.

The Rote High School Persecution of Saint Ellen

There's something definitely original about the scattershot editing collage techniques of THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS (2007), getting a belated US DVD release after a year in Canada and the broken film festival scene. Director Bruce MacDonald delves unashamedly into the trick bags of JULIEN DONKEY BOY and MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, with every little fragment unreservedly depicting sext teen mental illness, teen girl in danger angst, familial breakdown with a father always one step from physical abuse and all that other groovy stuff that's been done before a dozen times... but not this way!

The divine Ellen Page looks here like she's trying to be a mix of Bree from Klute and DeWayne from the homeless kids documentary, STREETWISE (1984). We constantly cut back to a long monologue Page makes to the camera, wrapped in her shower curtain on the bus -all in dreadfully sincere and morose cutter girl poetry prose. The whole film has the feeling of a collage and poetry chapbook one's weird friend might show you, the sort where their sick unconscious screams in your face from behind the morose drawings and symbolism: "I need to see a therapist." But one can't ever get these girls to listen to therapists, they're too downy and cuddled up in their madness.

And if our cutter girl lash-blasting heroines are forced to see a shrink by parents or a judge, said shrinks are all one-note passive-aggressive imbeciles, as is the one here (a passive-aggressive old transvestite).

The problem is TRACEY FRAGMENTS can't let go of the "abused child" cliche lexicon long enough to dwell on Tracey's perverse desire for her own illness. A much more brave and fearless breakdown can be seen in the indie horror film JOSHUA (2007), where Vera Farmiga fondly paints red boots on herself with her own blood. You don't see that sick joy in Page's performance because she's too like a young Jane Fonda, too sincere to see the true glory and godliness that lies in insincerity, the layers revealed when you pull back from your own position. Fonda couldn't pull back, but it was okay because she blazed so insanely upon her own position that layers were revealed in the sheer wattage; she made humorlessness sexy in THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY, and she made her KLUTE prostitute painfully open. Fonda was like that friend who uses their brilliance in the service of self-limiting rationalization. Page hasn't quite made the grade; she basks in indie blankness and it works because her face is so flawless and empty, in fact her face and Fonda's are a lot alike, almost too smooth, doll-like and yet ferociously intelligent to be sexy at all despite being agonizingly pretty. They both seem underage and too old at the same time, all the time, no matter what role or age they actually are in real life, be it 17 or 56.

But the editing is really the star and in its way this film is the anorexic poetess chapbook version of MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA. The dialogue and monologues are terrible though - the dreams of academics slumming in the teenage squalor, jotting down ideas for wrong decisions they never had or made. Tracey's narration (her last name is Berkowitz, like the serial killer!) includes lines like: '"Tracey Berkowitz... Tracey Zero-itz... Tracey Forty Below-itz...", and then there's the cover version of Patti Smith's "Horses," wherein the singer imitates every inflection from Smith's recording to a montage of Tracey running and split screened in with real horses-- and a laughing black man in a bowler hat on the bus to signify alienation and urban hostility, TAXI DRIVER-style.. and a cracked-out dude who hangs on her all skeevy-like named Lance from Toronto. And the colored girls sing "Doo de doo de doo..."


FRAGMENTS is one of those films where the chips are stacked so much against the heroine that you suspect the contest is rigged; if we're supposed to see all this social persecution as Tracy's own twisted fantasy, then don't keep rubbing it in our faces like we're supposed to have these insane AND JUSTICE FOR ALL/CUCKOO'S NEST knee-jerks about the man keeping us down. It's unfair to ask for it both ways, and our director and writer and actress can't see the humor in the fantasizing about high school tauntings ("No tits" is the student's cry, which doesn't seem quite realistic). We see her led by a creepy crackhead who promises to find her brother, and when he gets in a barfight instead of fleeing while she has the chance she waves her agape mouth and horrified eyes around like she's waiting for the director's signal on when to exeunt, and the director's gone to the bathroom. There's some nice shots of a crane machine in the bar though, for all the crane machine fans out there!

You can tell this is directed by the Canuck who did HIGHWAY 61, because it's got the same outdated dress sense (Her heart's desire dresses like he's Desperately Seeking Susan) and aimless mood-building. There's a zero point progression of story here, which is the sort of thing that happens when a director spends the first thirty minutes working to rivet your attention, then runs out of idea and hopes you'll just coast along revisiting the same footage from different perspectives.

I usually try not to write long negative diatribes here, but Page deserves better than all the idle wankery she's been enduring since HARD CANDY, films made by geeky privileged film people who have no experience of the tawdry lives they long to depict. Just as JUNO-scribe Seniorita Diablo Cody slums her way through a year as a stripper and expects the world to applaud, the hyper-stylization at play here masks a very tragic inability to connect with the material beyond the mundane open mic night surface. We only get cliches of stupid parents, abusive sleazeballs, gibbering black folks, none of the frothy depth you see today from maestros who've actually clocked time with the skate set: Spike Jonez, Guz Van Sant and Larry Clark, for example. We see Tracey being persecuted in high school and it feels as if director Bruce MacDonald has--rather than felt the sting of it himself--merely seen too many high school persecution films. Tracey passes through the gauntlet of tampon-hurling cheerleaders that's been persecuting heroines of teen movies right up from CARRIE through Ringwald and Ryder and Lohan. It doesn't seem 'right' - there's no build-up or attempt to understand the 'other.'


Maureen Medved wrote the script based on her novel, and it's perhaps not totally her fault the film is as messed up as it is, but like JUNO, it leaves a weird taste of some Amateur Mendicant Society newsletter. Medved's an academic (assistant professor at British Columbia University, with a long string of plays and publications) which--in and of itself--speaks to a lack of familiarity with the nitty gritty of street life, a lack masked by a theoretical indignation that's near fascistic in its anti-fascist oomph. I'm not trying to bash her, just bemoan the ever-dwindling indie spirit of originality and writers daring to have an actual immersion in the worlds they long to depict as opposed to immersion in screenwriting workshops. It's cool to me if Tarantino bases films on the reality of other films, since that's part of the appeal, but he's not passing it off as 'real' kitchen sink drama... he gets the mythic power like no other, better even than the films he loves themselves.

Maybe I'm still mad at McDonald for all the phony quirkiness and self-awarded hipster cred in HIGHWAY 61. Here he longs to make a movie about a confused girl, but is undone by his fear of getting too close to her. So she's naked but behind a shower curtain, yet mentally as sealed up as if loaded to the gills on Xanax and texting from her cell phone...and alone... almost all the time alone - that easiest of ways to film an actress. The whole film seems to have been shot in a week, then edited for three years, ala something by George Lucas. What's up with these crazy-deficient Canadians? Being sane can be a terrible curse, if you decide to make a movie that's not.

Karina Longworth writes a good bit about the release/distribution problems hitting the FRAGMENTS here.

On the plus side, FRAGMENTS offers a good score from the Broken Social Scene, and Tracey reads Ed the Happy Clown comics!

For a real, genuinely bizarre film about a fucked up chick in Canada, can I steer you towards the under appreciated and flat-out weird tale of incest and topless boxing PUNCH? (that link is to a review I wrote in 2004).

Read another of my diatribes about Page, this one on HARD CANDY, here.