noir – Idlermag.com

My Aussie double-header (insert sex joke here)*

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:01:15 +0000

Watch out, he'll track yo' ass

Australia is not really known as a hub of great film, for the most part. There have been some great ones, though, like Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), in which three aboriginal sisters escape a school training them as domestic staff, intending to return to their mother. They are tracked by another aboriginal named Moodoo, played by David Gulpilil, who also appears as a tracker in another great Aussie film, The Proposition (2005), a film I have mentioned before. He plays a tracker again in the aptly titled, The Tracker (2002), in which he helps some white men locate a native Australian accused of murdering a white woman.

Before you start to think that David Gulpilil plays a tracker in every Australian film, I will move on to the two Aussie films that recently caught my attention: Red Hill (2010) and The Square (2008), not so much for their quality (both films are good, one a bit better than the other), but for their respective approaches to their genres.

Red Hill sounded like the kind of film I am intrinsically drawn to. It is a western, first and foremost, but critics had boasted noir, surreal and even horror film influences as well. Quality genre-mashing is a weakness of mine. Its story involves Officer Shane Cooper (Ryan Kwanten) being assigned to the small town of Red Hill after being shot on duty. The local police department reacts to his presence with equal parts disdain and disinterest. The Sheriff’s name is Old Bill (Steve Bisley), and that tells you as much as you need to know about him.

At the beginning of the film there is a shot of a herd of horses grazing. Their ears perk up at sound of an explosion far off in the distance. It is the sound of murderer Jimmy Conway (Tommy Lewis) escaping the prison Old Bill had put him in years ago. Now, he’s returning to his hometown looking to serve up a dish best served cold.

In traditional, neo-noir fashion we have a small town cop in over his head, working within a system that appears to be corrupt (neither Old Bill nor Jimmy Conway are what they seem) and a mysterious, almost otherworldly villain. The horror element, I suppose, comes from Jimmy’s systematic dispatching of his enemies and seeming invulnerability. If these all sound like fine ideas, it is because they are. The problem is the execution.

Red Hill never really goes all-in with its ideas. It never establishes a consistent tone or mood. It felt like a story crying out for more shadow play and more grit, but it’s just too timid. It even fails its primary villain. Jimmy is introduced as an unstoppable, unflinching force of nature, not unlike No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. But the more we learn of his motives and the more we see him accidentally being bad-ass (Tommy Lewis essentially sleepwalks through the movie, more due to the nature of the role than his acting ability), the less interesting he becomes. When we finally get down to the nitty-gritty,Conway’s resolution is a bit over-the-top and his final line is absolutely cringe-worthy, evoking a laugh at a moment where empathy is most crucial.

The Square is a less ambitious, but far more successful film. It doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Construction foreman Ray Yale (David Roberts) is having an affair with a younger woman who lives on the wrong side of the river that separates their properties. Her husband is a no good thug who has stowed away a fair amount of moolah in his attic and she reckons things might be better for her and Ray if they could get their hands on it. Now, I ain’t sayin’ she’s a gold digger, but you know the rest.

This film’s been made many times and often successfully. Why watch this when I can watch Double Indemnity (1944)? Or Blood Simple (1984)? Or Out of the Past (1947)? (Wow, femmes fatale have been leading men around by their you-know-what’s for generations, haven’t they?) No real reason, I suppose. Except that sometimes it’s nice to see some fresh faces in a well-executed film that reminds you of other well-executed films. The Square just gets the vibe right.

I admire Red Hill swinging for the fences, but I think I was just in need of a well placed grounder that night. Or maybe it was the fact that The Square featured absolutely zero trackers? Did I mention that Jimmy Conway’s character is a tracker as well? Or that Tommy Lewis also shows up in The Proposition? It seems as though Australia’s a pretty small place, eh? So what’s with all the trackers?

*Side note: In case you hadn’t noticed, Insert sex joke here is, in and of itself, a sex joke.

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Those who serve

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 13:00:54 +0000

Somewhere in Paris there is a room, sparsely decorated and populated by one man and his caged bird. The man lies on his bed, cigarette smoke billowing above his head. Later he will rise, don a trench coat and hat and head out into the city to set up alibis for the murder he is going to commit later that evening.

In Sweden, in a heavily forested area there is a snow covered cabin. Inside, a man and woman sit by a fire. The man appears distant. When the two head out for a walk the man notices some tracks in the snow right before they are shot at. He takes out the shooter. Now that will ruin a date.

There may not be a literal correlation between the first moments of Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï (1967) and Anton Corbijn’s The American (2010) but as a whole, despite the slight differences in approach, their thematic similarities are undeniable. Here are two films about men who have become ghosts, who do not know how to make real connections because they have spent so long trying not to, men who, like samurai, are loyal to their masters without question.

Melville’s film explores this concept in a more straightforward manner, which is no surprise given its title. His subject, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), is cold and intelligent. He lives the life of a samurai, lacking any real connections aside from his fierce loyalty to his master, and maintaining a minimalist existence. He feeds his bird in the manner one might rake a Zen garden. His “girlfriend” is frequently used as an alibi. Why she’s so loyal to him we do not know. A police officer interrogates her:

Don’t you love him?

No.

Really? I’d have said you did. Laying yourself on the line for him like that, I thought you must love him.

You’re not the psychologist you imagined.

Early in Le Samouraï Costello commits a sin amongst his kind; he gets noticed. The witness, a young pianist at a club where Costello has just completed a job, gets a good long look at his face. Surely he is doomed to a life in prison? It turns out that that’s not how things work. She does not identify him in the line up. Later, Costello asks her why, but only as a formality. An assassin with a face is no good to anyone and in this business they like to handle things internally.

The American‘s Edward (or Jack, or Mr. Butterfly. We never really find out) is similarly undone, right from the start. After all, someone did manage to track him down at that cabin. His employer kindly reminds him:

Above all, don’t make friends. You used to know that.

It is implied that the woman he was with may have had something to do with his slipup, and both films handle women differently. In Le Samouraï the only female presence comes in the form of Costello’s “girlfriend,” serving almost exclusively as an alibi for him, and the pianist, serving as the instrument of his undoing. Their relationship to Costello is purely surface, only representing a device without any real emotional investment.

For Jack (I think I’ll stick with Jack) there is a woman who represents a potential escape to normalcy. The fact that she is a prostitute notwithstanding, she appears to genuinely enjoy his company. Jack probably makes frequent visits to prostitutes. They are conducive to his way of life and, after all, we all have needs. The thing is, Jack’s way of life is not conducive to trust.

Samurai code: Never let 'em see you sweat

Both men are ice cold and methodical, performing their jobs with the kind of meticulous attention one pays when there is no separation between one’s work and the rest of one’s life. But there is something in Jack’s eyes, a certain sadness that Costello does not appear to have. Perhaps he hasn’t been on the job long enough to feel the same weight as his counterpart? Or, perhaps it’s quite the opposite?

A great deal of that appearance may be due to the fact that Jean Pierre Melville seems more interested in the procedure of Costello rather than the man himself. His approach to his film is similar to Costello’s approach to his work—cold, calculated and distant. When one of Costello’s targets asks him why he’s doing this he simply replies, “I’ve been paid to.” Melville merely watches what he does without judgment, the eye of god.

Like I said, samurai code.

Anton Corbijn seems more focused on his samurai’s psyche. Jack is on edge, keenly aware of all that surrounds him, always waiting for someone to jump out of somewhere with ill intent. The world around him is often soft, slightly out of focus, as though he knows it’s there but cannot fathom being a part of it. We only see Jack kill in self defense, but I’m sure that isn’t always the case.

The mistake that leads to the attempt on Jack’s life at that cabin is never fully explained, but from his employer’s exhausted reaction we can infer that it’s been happening a lot lately. Or that once is enough. And while Costello’s mistake and subsequent struggle to survive seems like protocol, Jack appears to be making mistakes of the heart, seeking some real connection, some way out.

The way out, it seems, is the same for all men of the profession. There’s no retirement plan for assassins. Both of these men have outlived their usefulness in the eyes of their masters, and it’s interesting how the two of them arrive at the same end, but for different reasons. Costello eventually opts to commit a kind of symbolic hara kiri. It is in keeping with the film’s tone and Costello’s code of ethics; a samurai must die with honor rather than be captured. Jack, however, meets his fate due to a panicked attempt to get out. After discovering that his master has ordered a hit on him, Jack decides to run away with his new found love. The only thing standing in his way is his past, creeping around the corner with a gun.

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The badges behind the bat

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 13:00:08 +0000

One of the best things to come out of Batman: The Animated Series—and there were a number of great things that came out of Batman: The Animated Series—was the character of Renee Montoya. As a uniformed patrolwoman, Montoya starts off as the smart, straight-laced junior foil to the self-serving, corner-cutting, Batman-hating Detective Harvey Bullock. They’re both good cops in the end, but while Bullock will lie to cover his own ass and resents Batman for making him look ineffective, Montoya is honest, honorable, and knows that Batman is the same. When the series got a redesign, Montoya got a promotion to detective, and was partnered with Bullock. The comics, on the other hand, didn’t have much use for Montoya as a uniform, so DC made her a detective and partnered her with Bullock in her very first appearance. She’s put to great use in the extended “No Man’s Land” storyline, but really comes into her own when the Gotham City Police Department is given its chance to shine in the short-lived but absolutely wonderful Gotham Central.

Gotham Central ran from 2003 to 2006, and Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka traded off storylines for the entirety of that run. While Gotham Central‘s fan base was (and is) avid, it was never large, which is something of a crime. The writing and art in Gotham Central are pitch-perfect. The characters are put-upon, overworked, and worst of all in a city like Gotham, honest. Brubaker and Rucka did a difficult thing in an extraordinary way by telling stories that seem exactly the right size in a normally hyper-colored, overexcited universe. (Check out the Teen Titans cameo in the “Dead Robin” storyline. It’s perfectly done.) If you’re the sort of person who claims to love Batman stories because of the human dimension—where Batman is just a man pushed to do incredible things at the edge of human (and not superhuman) ability—then Gotham Central will either give you what you never realized you had always been looking for, or it will call you out as a liar. The Batman is the superhuman presence in these pages, always a force for good, but not always on the cops’ side, as they are well aware.

Batman in action

In the pages of Gotham Central, Batman is almost a wraith, only occasionally present, and even then wrapped in constant darkness. You almost never see him in action, and even when you do, you don’t really see him so much as see the effect of what he just did.

On a side note, the series really do a good job of portraying that darkness as something the Batman himself does. There’s a scene in a later issue where a detective accidentally shoots Batman, and when he’s laying unconscious on the floor, he’s just a man in a belt and a cape. As you can see, he gets better.

Death is a troublesome thing in mainstream comic books, and Gotham Central‘s treatment of death is one of the best measures of the title’s success. As much as comic books would like to tell you that they’ve grown up, mortality is usually dealt with in a manner that is at best adolescent: Major characters survive against incredible odds while minor characters and extras, in the worst hands, are used as cannon fodder—a way to titilate the reader and pretend to raise the dramatic stakes by splashing the page with day-glo red. The Batman comics are not immune from this, and a particularly awful recent example can be found in the 3-issue Batman/Darkest Night tie-in miniseries. Darkest Night was a DC-wide crossover event where, um, you know Green Lantern? It turns out there are “lanterns” for every color in the spectrum. Just go with it. In Darkest Night you find out there are Black Lanterns, too. Who raise the dead to kill people. And stuff. Anyway, it’s a very un-Batman, cosmic story, but they did a Batman tie-in anyway. It starts with dead Batman villains raised as Black Lanterns who attack the police department and kill a bunch of cops. Jim and Barbara Gordon get away, because they’re the only people who really matter, but dozens of nameless uniforms are slaughtered. In all honesty, it’s offensive. Not because it’s excessive violence, but because it’s stupid violence. Every uniformed officer in those pages may as well be wearing a red uniform on an old episode of Star Trek. They exist only to be killed, and in my mind, that’s lazy, sadistic writing. It makes me feel worse about humanity for reading it, and not in a Gulliver’s Travels/Houyhnhnm kind of way, but in an I’m-not-sure-why-I-bother-to-read-comics-anyway kind of way.

The death of Charlie Fields. That's right. Page four.

There are several significant deaths in Gotham Central, and Commisioner Atkins (you read that right) is criticized at one point for having a far higher fatality rate in the Major Crimes Unit than Gordon did. (Gordon, at the time, was retired. He’s since returned to the job.) Every fatality in Gotham Central, however, matters. They affect the entire unit, and they’re painful to read because in every case they happen to a character who is made to feel like a person, and not just a plot point. Detective Charlie Fields is murdered by Mr. Freeze on the fourth page of the first issue—and he’s killed hard, by the way. Freeze knocks apart Fields’ frozen body in front of his partner—meaning that Fields isn’t given much time to become a character on his own, but his death haunts not just the next few issues, but the rest of the series.

Renee Montoya and Crispus Allen

The heart of the series, at least for me, is Renee Montoya, her relationship with her partner, Crispus Allen, and the way it all falls apart. By the time Gotham Central takes place, Renee Montoya has survived No Man’s Land, in which Gotham City was abandoned to anarchy after an earthquake destroyed most of the city, but she’s a character on the edge, watching good people get hurt and die around her, and ostracized by the department and her family when she’s outed by a lesbian. (By Two-Face, who still has a thing for her after No Man’s Land. Just go read it.) Everything comes to a head when Allen is murdered by a corrupt cop, Jim Corrigan, who gets away with it. Montoya, who has been less and less in control of her anger over the course of the series, bursts into Corrigan’s apartment in a drunken rage, beats his girlfriend (who is also a cop) unconscious, and puts a gun to Corrigan’s head. In itself, it’s a rather clichéd officer-on-the-edge revenge scene, but the muted artwork and the relationship between Montoya, Allen, and the reader that Brubaker and Rucka have built over the course of the previous thirty-some issues really raise the scene a level above your average mainstream comic book.

Of course, Gotham Central wasn’t perfect, and wasn’t a great fit for the DC universe, as a rather awkward Infinite Crisis tie-in issue demonstrates. Overworked detectives make for great noir/procedural stories, but not as much for cosmic/mystical/end-of-the-world stuff. (Interestingly, or painfully, both Montoya and Allen have taken big superhero turns since the end of Gotham Central. Montoya worked on her martial arts and meditation skills to become The Question, and Allen became the new superviolent mystical incarnation of The Spectre. Rucka still writes Montoya admirably as The Question, but Allen was such a great cop character, it’s a bit sad to see him miscast and largely ignored as The Spectre.) It is however, a great demonstration (along with work like Sam and Twitch), that the police noir-procedural is an amazingly underutilized genre in the comic book world. We need more of it.

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Gavin Craig is co-editor of The Idler. You can follow him on Twitter at @craiggav.

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