More adult films (and I guess they sort of are of that kind, come to think of it...)

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Sweden, 2009
Directed by Niels Arden Oplev

This is an effective package.  The mystery is mysterious, has some heft, resolves in a satisfying way.  It raises bigger issues which, though (over) familiar—villainous patriarchy as the root of villainous capitalism, or vice versa—are fair enough.  The double-barrel detecting is also effective, what with two insufficient methods and two incomplete (circumstantially, dispositionally) characters combining to lick the platter clean.  The character part of this equation is a bit strained, but movies seek symmetry, so that’s okay.  There’s some effective cinema here as well.  The photo sections evoke Antonioni's Blow-Up, and aren’t too disadvantaged in the comparison. 

The rape sequence?  Very unpleasant, and not just for the obvious reasons.  Part of it is due to the social worker’s contrived, hyperbolic wickedness.  Yes, it makes Lisbeth’s vengeance satisfying.  It also justifies the monstrousness of that vengeance—he only got what he had coming.  And when you think of it, the punishment that she inflicts is not only infernally imaginative, but purgatorially (Dante) apt; the punishment not only corresponds with the offence, it equals the offence.  The episode is grotesque, but it isn’t just gratuitous.  It’s a cynical, probably defensible statement about the nature of power and its exercise.  It is also a dire antidote to that exercise; here and subsequently this woman is refusing to be a victim.  This episode is also structurally important, constituting a challenge to the main character, the surmounting of which prefigures her intervention at the film’s climax.  This is the first step away from rootless and wasteful inertia, her first step on the road to a form of selfhood. 

The thing is that like a lot of screen violence and sexuality, this whole thing works better, is more standable and palatable, as an idea, and not as an idea visualized.  And maybe, in the end, the idea isn’t that great either.  The eventual culprit here is a more privileged, powerful, pathological version of the social worker.  He is monstrous, and of course we feel justified when he is brutally dispatched.  After helping to solve this mystery the journalist is vindicated, because it turns out that the guy he was trying to expose at the beginning of the film, the which effort led to his temporary downfall, is guilty after all.  By this we learn that Capitalists are also monstrous rapists.  Mark Achbar’s The Corporation agrees, and there’s sure a lot of supporting evidence.  But even if that extreme thesis were true—it’s not, always—then it could only have hate-generating, desensitizing consequences.  Hard films should sometimes be made so we can talk about hard things.  But in the end they probably just harden us.  

Rooney Mara, who is connected to this property, invokes an unseemly forebear:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kai7tS3vcmY

Bridesmaids

US, 2011
Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumalo
Directed by Paul Feig

This is too much, objectively speaking.  From the perspective of this particular, partly representative, quite spectacularly talented writer/star, too much may be just right.  At least that’s how she feels, and her perspective deserves some consideration.  When talking to kids about sex, aren’t you supposed to call things by their names?  Since this is Juvenalian satire, and since scorching outrage lies so close to the comic surface, then it seems appropriate that we would be in for a bumpy ride.  Whether or not the viewer wants to get on is a whole different question.

Juvenalian, which is to say that humour is an objective—met, often quite spectacularly—but it’s not necessarily the point.  We have a dispiriting theme here, really, and it shows up so often (from Repulsion forward, or maybe since people started blaming Eve for everything) that it must be the truth.  Sexuality tends to be discussed and enacted on male terms, the which are almost always self-serving for the male, and degrading for the female.  This is true even when the exchange or setting is not sexual, even when the male isn’t even present.  This film's pretty comic, pretty awful opening sequence makes the point pretty effectively.  From here on, for all the occasional appearances of the various male characters, Bridesmaids actually proceeds a lot like Claire Luce Booth’s The Women.  The men are a structuring absence, conspicuous in their sparseness, and altogether having a disproportionate and generally disastrous effect on our various female subjects.

Meant that way?  Not completely, probably, especially in the way the anomalous Chris O’Dowd character (aren’t actual Irish cops usually limited to New York City, and about eighty years ago?) shows up to provide some contrast and respite.  It’s not exactly that this character doesn’t work.  Rather, he’s kind of like the Charles Vanel character in Clouzot’s Diabolique, or maybe Claire Danes in The Hours.  These three personages suggest that there’s something outside all of this misanthropy, or savagery, or self-destructiveness.  They just don’t seem to belong, or have any chance of affecting the particular, hermetic worlds that they wander in to. (Also reminiscent, positively, of Adrienne Shelley’s Waitress.  Alas, in that instance the point got further proven, though this time by fatal extracinematic events.)

Thelma Todd, Patsy Kelly, misc.

This dire and demonstrable theme really registers, and remains with you, for all the apparently happy consummations at the film’s conclusion.  But this is also just as much an SNL movie, if a cut above the often fragmented and scattered SNL norm.  The norm, as well as the transcending thereof, makes Bridesmaids into a kind of comic equivalent of the Saboteur-type Alfred Hitchcock film.  You know—the ones where the cinema, or the set pieces, rise above and stay with you more than the plot, or the theme, or the whole.  As far as comic set pieces go there are some real humdingers here: the dueling dedications between Wiig’s best buddy and Rose Byrne’s insufferable climber, the obligatorily scatological, heroically staged food poisoning sequences, the entire, practically epic airplane incident (Wiig!).  Melissa McCarthy develops from potential stock figure into bawdy force of nature, with even a few pretty effective sentimental and didactical detours along the way.  The big event melt-downs that draw us to the conclusion are effective, but the emblematic sequence may be the one in which Wiig tries to get O’Dowd’s disaffected cop to help her again.  The comic variations on a very little situation—she drives by, and drives by, and then keeps driving by—practically combine Jane Austen, infinitely embroidering until that little piece of lace contains the whole world, and Jeff Beck.  She can do anything!

JB: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv4RuGP2GEk

Black Swan

US, 2010
Directed by Darren Aronofsky

They’ve been up-front about their inspirations, and the precedents are profound.  It’s The Red Shoes, of course, by way of Repulsion.  There’s some archaeological value there, I guess, a sense of artistic and cultural evolution.  Some of dance stuff is pretty great, too, and in a way that owes nothing to Michael Powell.  We get some of the infrastructure and hierarchy, and we get a lot of the preparation and rehearsal and the hard work, some by plain, direct documentary means.  Interestingly, that’s not the only method applying here.  And operatic or expressionistic approaches are okay sometimes, aren’t they? 

The prototype

Plus, what a rotten movie.  Add a bit of The Phantom of the Paradise (cool feather imagery!) to The Red Shoes and Repulsion ingredients, or a lot of Brian De Palma generally.  What do you get?  Dave Kehr wrote admiringly about Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, but paused to note that the film couldn’t seem to imagine a middle ground between oppression and chaos.  True, and as Kehr would acknowledge there is some historical and political truth to that terrible binary.  I guess Aronofsky’s Black Swan binary exists too, but there’s not much to be said for a vision that gives us nothing to choose between infantilization (Barbara Hershey’s bunker) and degradation.  Put this in the Leaving Las Vegas category of humilio-Oscars: submit to whoppingly demeaning requirements and we’ll applaud most moistly at the Shrine auditorium.  Ms. Portman is brave indeed, and apart from a bit of one-note, pretty good.  But with regard to self-sacrificing performance we should be looking to Falconetti and Dreyer, not to Lars von Trier.  Let's be fair: superb conclusion!