COLLATERAL ***
DIRECTED BY Michael Mann
STARRING Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, Mark Ruffalo
US 2004 120 mins.
RAISING HELEN **
DIRECTED BY Garry Marshall
STARRING Kate Hudson, John Corbett, Joan Cusack
US 2004 119 mins.
By Preston Wilder
MORALS are fuzzy in Collateral, so the visuals are fuzzy too. If you’ve ever wondered why a director’s job is so important, you could do worse than check out this new film by Michael Mann (who made Heat, The Insider and Ali, among others). Mann’s specialty are male protagonists in existential crisis – his films could be subtitled ‘What Does It Mean to be a Man?’ – and ‘pregnant’ moments, where style is used to express stillness, dislocation and urban alienation. Without the style he brings to it, and especially the way style reinforces content, Collateral would be nothing at all, just a flimsy genre piece; because the plot is unfortunately very stupid.
Let’s not waste time on the stupid plot, except to say it concerns a hitman in the cab of an LA taxi driver. The cabbie is played by Jamie Foxx (hotly tipped for an Oscar in the upcoming Ray Charles biography Ray), the hitman by a silver-haired Tom Cruise, whose character is the one behaving stupidly. The foolishness hurts, because Mann’s films are founded on professionalism; his characters are alienated because they’re pros, and have sacrificed emotion in the pursuit of gleaming, risk-averse perfection. Think of Robert De Niro as the ultra-cautious master thief in Heat, whose motto was: “Never get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”. He’d have looked at Cruise’s methods in Collateral, shaken his head and dismissed him as a lightweight.
Yet Cruise has the coldness of a true pro: he kills people, and calls it his job. He’s bypassed morality, and is totally honest about it. For him, LA is the epitome of the “disconnected” urban sprawl – a place where a man can die on the subway and no-one even notices he’s dead. For Foxx, on the other hand, LA is “my home”. He’s a good man, and tries to be humble – yet his moral life is just as fuzzy as Cruise’s. He lies to his sick mother, telling her he’s a big success when he’s really just a cabbie. He deludes himself about his future, and keeps a photo of a beach in the Maldives to gaze at when things get tense, escaping his problems rather than confront them. His life is built on little white lies. Is it really any better than Cruise’s arrogant self-sufficiency?
The visuals are Michael Mann’s way of saying ‘yes’, siding with the poor deluded cabbie against the cynical hitman. Collateral is his first film shot on Digital Video, which is cheaper than celluloid but also very different. Video doesn’t capture contrast very well; if you shot on video in Cyprus in the summer, the contrast between bright light and shadow would flare out your image, leaving it flat and ugly. Many directors have been flummoxed by video; Mann, however, uses it like a master.
Collateral is among the year’s best-looking films, but its look is unique: the light doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere – it’s diffuse, imbuing the images with a cloudy beauty. Mann turns video’s lack of contrast into an advantage. Most of the film is shot at night, with warm orange light amid the blackness (unlike the harsh neon lights in Heat); LA feels like a great womb. Seen from a distance, its streets full of cars, the city has the teeming, bunched-together life of a murky fishbowl full of headlight-sprouting fish.
The fuzzy, cosy look is Collateral’s trump card. At a stroke, Mann makes LA feel like home; the cabbie’s view, and implicitly worldview, are vindicated. This is more than just style. It’s directorial vision, making the images answer the plot. It’s just a shame the plot is so stupid.
Of course most people will go to Collateral because of Tom Cruise – though he never looks comfortable when he tries to play the strong-and-silent type (puppyish charm has always been his strong suit, if he’d only admit it). It’s strange to think that people might go to Raising Helen because of Kate Hudson, yet Ms Hudson – Goldie Hawn’s daughter, for the uninitiated – is turning into quite a box-office draw in Cyprus. This is her third comedy to hit the multiplex, after How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Alex & Emma, though none of the three was a hit in her native US.
You’d think Helen would’ve clicked with the pious clean-living families in so-called Republican ‘red states’ – but maybe pious clean-living families no longer go to the movies (unless it’s The Passion of the Christ), preferring to stay home watching their Christian channels. In any case, the film is startlingly – even shockingly – conservative.
Kate is Helen, a high-flying type at a modelling agency who gets saddled with her sister’s three kids after said sister’s death. Her other sister (Joan Cusack), an uptight suburbanite with kids of her own, thinks Helen is too immature to handle parenthood, and she has a point: our heroine is little more than a kid herself, sleeping four-in-a-bed and sneaking an illicit cigarette from her new charges. During the course of the film she grows up, learns to work an honest nine-to-five instead of her glitzy modelling job, and also learns the valuable lesson that “kids need boundaries”. The film culminates in a scene where she confiscates her new daughter’s fake ID, ignoring the teenager’s protests – at which point Cusack presents her with a gift-wrapped rubber baseball bat (!) and announces, “Welcome to the mamahood!”.
I knew Raising Helen was going to be weird when our heroine goes looking for a school for the children. Having checked out the public schools – where the teenage daughter gets surrounded by dodgy ethnic-looking boys – she finds a Lutheran church school, where the first things we see are a line of docile kids in uniform and a teacher saying “Lisa, stop dragging your sweater”. In most Hollywood films, these would be obvious indicators for ‘Repressive Authoritarian Place! Avoid!’. Yet in this one the school turns out to be a great place, also allowing Helen to meet Pastor Dan (John Corbett, from My Big Fat Greek Wedding), a priest who’s also the romantic interest. Pastor Dan is firm and a little self-righteous, but also fun and hunky. “I’m a sexy Man of God!” he declares, and by God he is.
One watches Raising Helen with rising disbelief, yet it’s quite a sweet movie: the modelling-agency crowd aren’t mocked – there’s a nice scene where Helen takes the kids to one of her old haunts, and an ex-colleague buys them a round of Shirley Temples – and it’s one of those films where there really aren’t any villains. Except perhaps ‘BZ’, the teenage punk who lusts after the daughter; we know he’s bad news because he’s a DJ – oh no! – and besides the fun-but-firm Pastor Dan says so.
Not much fuzzy morality in Raising Helen. Not much directorial vision, either, though veteran director Garry Marshall – best-known for Pretty Woman – does at least offer every parent’s idea of ‘good wholesome fun’. Whether the multiplex crowd will be impressed is another matter. Morals be damned: when it comes to instant coolness, family values can never compare with a silver-haired hitman.
EUROPEAN FILM FESTIVAL
Tomorrow marks the start of the month-long European Film Festival – probably the year’s biggest event for local cinephiles, especially this year when there’s no World Horizons Festival. Nine films coming up, each from a different European country, including the portmanteau Visions of Europe for which 25 filmmakers – one from each of the 25 EU nations – made 25 five-minute shorts.
Such compilations tend to be a bad idea, but participants in this one do include such luminaries as Aki Kaurismaki (Finland), Bela Tarr (Hungary), Peter Greenaway (UK) and the late Theo Van Gogh (Holland), who was murdered over his allegedly ‘anti-Islamic’ short Submission a few days ago. (His contribution to Visions of Europe is another short, called Euroquiz.)
The Cypriot contribution to Visions of Europe comes from Christos Georgiou, whose film Under the Stars (shown in local cinemas over a year ago) also gets a screening. Other Festival highlights include the German coming-of-age drama The Miracle of Bern – already shown in Limassol – and Bernardo Bertolucci’s English-language The Dreamers, much hyped over its graphic (but tasteful) sex scenes.
Of the nine films in the Festival, only two could really be described as ‘difficult’. Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf is a stark, opaque depiction of a post-apocalyptic world, and often excellent though it bogs down in the middle. And there’s also the new Theodoros Angelopoulos, The Weeping Meadow, which I haven’t seen but plan to; Angelopoulos is an acquired taste, but his rigorous films invariably contain stunning images.
Elsewhere, Irish romantic comedy InterMission has been described as an edgier Love, Actually, while The Mother is also in English, made by Roger Michell of Notting Hill fame (though this one is notably grimmer). Finally, there’s also the Spanish comedy Chill Out, about which I know exactly nothing. But hey – it’s a Spanish comedy…
Here’s the programme in full. All screenings at 9 p.m. at the Cine Studio in Nicosia; other screenings to follow in Limassol and Paphos. (Check the Cyprus Mail for details.)
THE WEEPING MEADOW – Nov. 8, 9, 10, 29
THE DREAMERS – Nov. 11, 12, 14, 30
INTERMISSION – Nov. 15, 16, 17
THE MOTHER – Nov. 18, 19, 21
TIME OF THE WOLF – Nov. 22, 23, 24
CHILL OUT – Nov. 25, 26, 28, Dec. 12
THE MIRACLE OF BERN – Dec. 2, 3, 5
UNDER THE STARS – Dec. 7, 9
VISIONS OF EUROPE – Dec. 10, 11
