George Clooney’s directing career is following a depressing downward trajectory. After the early promise of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s produced a steady stream of mildly entertaining but ultimately disappointing movies (The Ides of March being the most notable example). But with Surburbicon he produces his first outright dud.
Based on a Coen brothers script, this ill-conceived, mean-spirited, nonsensical movie doesn’t really work on any level. It looks great, but the characters are universally repugnant and stupid, and the storytelling is atrocious. Most of the movie makes very little sense.
It’s probably the character’s overwhelming stupidity that bothered me the most (much more so than how despicable everyone is). The central character, Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon), hires a bunch of criminals to murder his wife so that he can cash in her life insurance. However, he seems completely ill-prepared for the investigation that is bound to follow. You’d think, given the nature of the crime, that he’d have his story worked out. And seeing as he also has a partner in crime, you’d think that person would be prepared as well. But no, they act like imbeciles and immediately rouse suspicion. Someone might know, or think they know, that you’ve done something, but being able to prove it is everything.
In one scene the insurance investigator says that he knows that Gardner murdered his wife. Now the investigator might think he knows this or he might simply be fishing. A stupid person will fall for this tactic and immediately give themselves away, which is what Gardner does. Amazingly, he admits to the murder. You’ve immediately painted yourself into a corner. You’re either going to jail or you’ve got to kill someone else. Gardner decides on the latter. Again, the stupidity here is too much. You’re now going to kill an insurance investigator? You’ve immediately made sure you’re going to jail.
The murder of Oscar Isaac’s insurance investigator tries to straddle that familiar funny/disturbing Coen brothers line, but Clooney is incapable of performing this high wire act. The yowling from Isaac as he realises he’s been poisoned is ridiculous in the extreme - it’s like it’s from a Looney Tunes cartoon. And then the sound effects as Garnder tries to remove a poker from the investigator’s head - there’s lots of crunching and swishing - are just confusing. Is this supposed to be a funny moment? A disturbing moment? I get the grim detail of having the poker get stuck in the guy’s head - in the world of movies, deaths are usually very clean - but I just don’t get the swishing noise. It suggests to me that Clooney is trying to make this darkly funny, when instead it should have been the moment when the gravity of events finally hits home.
Oh, did I mention that the murder of the insurance investigator happens in the middle of the street? Yes, it’s at night, but still. Lots of running and yelling and yowling and bashing and swishing in the middle of the street? I don’t know about you, but my mother would have sniffed that out like a rat and shot to the window like a dart. And what about all the blood that would have been all over the road? Ah, whatever.
I guess one of the reasons that a heinous crime like this can go undetected is because a large portion of the town is distracted by racially abusing a black family in the house next to Matt Damon’s character. The narrative worth of this side story is non-existent because the family is given no screen time and hardly any lines. It’s one of the weirdest frames for a movie I’ve seen. If you’re not going to invest anything in these characters, what’s the point? What, you’re trying to make a point that suburbia is rotten to the core? That behind the civilised exterior lies greed and barbarity? Yeah, you’re already illustrating that with the main story.
Or do you have this frame because you want to indulge in some cute bookending? At the start of the movie there’s a town meeting where incensed locals say that they don’t want a black family in their community. They’re not ready to integrate, they argue, and it’ll lead to the ruin of the town. And then at the end an old lady, talking to some reporters, says that everything used to be normal before the black family moved in.
I can feel the poker hitting me in the head. ‘You see what I’m saying?’ Clooney yells. ‘It wasn’t the family. Everything has been screwed up from the beginning.’ Yes, yes, George. I get it.
On one side we have Willem Dafoe who thinks it’s no crime to be a great lay. On the other we have Joe Mantegna who thinks that Madonna herself is a deadly weapon – she’s no different to a knife or a gun. So according to him, the second the old man impaled Madonna, she impaled him with her magnificent screwing abilities – she didn’t stab him in the heart with a knife, she stabbed him in the heart with her vagina.
With this death by pussy theory voiced by the cops, Madonna is taken to trial. She’s either an innocent widow or she’s a lethal shagging machine.
It’s pretty obvious from the start that Madonna is a guilty-as-fuck black widow. But in time-honoured movie tradition, Willem Dafoe falls for her.
Body of Evidence tries to differentiate itself from other fuck happy erotic thrillers by introducing some kinky sex. We have nipple clamps, hot candle wax and oral sex on the bonnet of a car. But because the filmmakers have no interest in character or psychology, these sex scenes end up being empty attempts to titillate.
One such scene is the one where Madonna pours hot candle wax on Willem Dafoe. I guess someone could argue that the scene is about power games, or the link between pleasure and pain, or Dafoe’s self-destructive urges, but instead it’s a scarily earnest attempt to be sexy. We have lingering close-ups of the actors, we have candlelight and in the end we have the orgasmic pay-off. But the scene fails on even the most basic level (to at least give you a boner) because you have to watch the weasel-faced Dafoe gurn like mad as the smug, gap-toothed Madonna pours hot wax all over his knob. Sure this may be the best sex he’s ever had, but all I can see is the horrifying sexual gratification of the Green Goblin, something that’s enough to pour cold water on anyone’s lap (if the dead eyes of Madonna hadn’t already done that for you).
Another scene has Madonna squatting on Dafoe’s face as he lies on shards of broken glass. I’m sure a lot of people would be thinking, ‘Hey, that must smart a bit!’ But no, everything is explained in an earlier scene. You see, as a kid, Madonna liked to crawl through thorns to get her claw-like hands on strawberries. According to her, because of the effort it took to get them, they tasted even sweeter. And so it is for Dafoe. Writhing on broken glass makes Madonna’s cunt taste even nicer.
The pussy-eating scene is again rendered somewhat horrific by the gurning that occurs. However, this time the culprit is Madonna. Her gap-toothed throes of ecstasy leave much to be desired. (A special note for trivia buffs: in this scene Madonna does a Sharon Stone and shows her minge. Good for her.)
But while the cunnilingus scene features some pretty unappealing facial gymnastics, the scene that precedes it features Madonna’s one good bit of acting. You see, Madge is pleased with the work that Dafoe has been doing. Her lawyer has been acting like a little terrier. And so then in a crowded elevator Madonna rewards him with some clandestine wanky-wanky. I say it’s Madonna’s one good bit of acting because as she’s secretly tossing Dafoe off someone says goodnight to her and she cheekily says goodnight, too. It’s the one time that Madonna’s dead eyes have a sparkle in them.
Examples of Madonna’s incompetence as an actress are legion, but the example that springs to mind is when she talks to Dafoe about animal sex. ‘Have you ever seen animals make love, Frank? It’s violent. It’s intense.’ She’s obviously trying to make this bit of dialogue sound steamy, but she sounds like a simpleton who’s watched a little National Geographic. The line delivery is just so flat – badgers fucking are sexier.
I also like the way that Madonna blandly asks Dafoe is he’s scared right before she fucks him – she has him tied up. The only way she could scare me was if she sang the theme song for Die Another Day.
But of course, Dafoe is anything but scared. This is his wildest fantasy come true. I mean, his wife is played by Julianne Moore, and although she has an amazing body, she has a silly poodle-like haircut. Therefore it’s totally okay to cheat on her.
The first sex scene is preceded by one of my favourite pieces of symbolism. Dafoe sits in his car, spying on Madonna, possibly wrestling with his conscience (if he has one). He then sees a curtain billowing in the wind. The way it’s filmed, the curtain looks exactly like a vagina opening. Yes it’s this sight that gives Dafoe the courage to ditch his staid life full of cardigans and missionary position sex and embrace a new one full of hot candles and subterranean fuck fests.
But before Dafoe gets carried away with this amazing new lifestyle, he should have perhaps listened to the hilarious testimony of Frank Langella. He’s another rich old man that was involved with Madonna and he was another rich old man that had a bad heart. And in court he tells the story of how she tried to fuck him to death. He says that she would shag him a little and then before he could come, she would stop. And then she would fuck him some more and stop again. Over and over she did this until he was feeling ill. Now you might feel sorry for this guy. Oh, how Madonna took advantage of me. But he should have just mentally manned up. He should have thought unsexy thoughts in order to lose his erection – hell, he’s pretty old, I’m sure it couldn’t be that difficult to say hello to Mr Floppy. He should have just thought about football scores or rotting corpses or Madonna’s performance in Dick Tracy. Hey presto, boner gone!
Alas nothing will get rid of Dafoe’s erection. He even resorts to rape. Yep, this ordinary family man is so enraptured with his gap-toothed lover that he assaults her when she begins wanking in front of him. And to make the scene even more ridiculous, Enya-style music plays on the soundtrack as he prepares to bugger her. There’s lots of ‘Ooooh, ooh, ooooooh, oh’ Celtic-style nonsense.
However, even more hilariously, the music changes to ominous choral chants once the forced bum fucking begins. Suddenly the soundtrack sounds like something out of The Omen. It’s all very strange.
The strangeness doesn’t last long, though, and the film has a very conventional ending – Madonna gets shot and killed. This isn’t as awesome as it sounds and is something of an anti-climax. Indeed, the only good thing about the ending is when Madonna gets barged into a massive terracotta pot. It’s something I never knew I wanted to see until I saw it.
When I first watched The Silence of the Lambs, I thought how crazy it would be to have Hannibal Lecter out in the open. The mad fucker would be eating people left, right and centre. He’d be chowing down every day on entrails, brains and flabby buttocks (maybe even titties and testes). No one would be safe. You’d be walking down the street and the next thing you’d know a camp Welshman would be chewing your ear.
Alas the fantasy is a lot better than what’s presented in Hannibal. What we have here is a fat snob with a pinky ring who kills the odd person here or there. You’d hardly think that the FBI would give a shit about the guy. All the people that he kills or nibbles on are lowlifes and scumbags. This isn’t a psycho so much as someone doing a public service. So what if the odd dirty cop gets hung and gutted? And so what if a scummy FBI agent is made to eat his own brains? It’s not like Lecter is kidnapping children and feeding them to their grannies. He’s far too decent for that.
And I guess it’s the positioning of Hannibal as an anti-hero that I find hardest to swallow (pun intended). Since when was I supposed to revel in his antics? Last time I saw him he was biting the face off of some poor EMT. I don’t want to root for this tossbag. Ideally I’d like to see him get fed to some sharks.
Now here’s something that Mason Verger, the film’s main villain, gets wrong. Instead of feeding Hannibal to some sharks or to some lions, he decides to feed him to, er, pigs. Now fair enough they’re wild boars and would certainly be shit-your-pants scary in real life, but in a cinematic context, they don’t really do it. In fact, they hardly seem bothered about eating human flesh. Ferocious they ain’t.
Not that Ridley Scott doesn’t pull every trick to try and make them seem intimidating – close-ups, quick cuts and loud squeals. But try as he might, they just don’t really seem that bothered. Maybe ravenous squirrels would have been better.
But what a clot Mason Verger is. Here we have a villain who spends all of his time collecting Lecter paraphernalia (he buys Lecter’s mask for a quarter of a million dollars) and planning to capture him. But then when he has his foe in his clutches, Hannibal gets loose. But rather than get taken out by Lecter, Verger dies an infinitely more pathetic death. As he sees Lecter getting away, he decides to bully his poor assistant – the guy who does everything for him. Now if ever a time for restraint is asked for, it’s when a serial killer has just gotten loose and you’re overlooking a pit full of hungry pigs. But no, Verger decides to mouth off and the assistant pushes the hapless, deformed, kiddie-fiddling spastic over the edge so that the boars can feast on him. And as he goes over the edge, he hilariously cries the assistant’s name over and over again. ‘Cordell! Cordell!’ It’s absolutely pathetic.
But then most of the film is pathetic. For instance, the beginning titles end with a bunch of pigeons making a pattern that resembles Hannibal Lecter’s face. Ooh, ominous. Maybe they could even make Lecter’s face out of pigeon excrement.
Then you have Lecter’s annoying use of words like ‘goody-goody’ and ‘ta ta’. No wonder the FBI think that Hannibal is more bent than a nine bob note. But what are these words supposed to mean? Are they supposed to hint at refinement? Are they meant to make him sound educated? Are they meant to show how playful and humorous he is? Oh look, it’s a serial killer who talks like a Frasier Crane. Tres amusement, non?
Even more exasperating is the idea that Lecter is supposed to prefer to eat the rude. Again, what happened to the psycho in Silence of the Lambs who ate the face of a poor EMT? A cannibal who eats people for society? Don’t make me laugh. And apparently he didn’t eat his guard because his guard was civil to him. Well isn’t that doodily dandily? He does his best to only eat bastards. So does that mean that if he lived in a Utopian society he wouldn’t eat human flesh? Does he only ever get the itch to munch on someone if they’re playing their ipod too loud or if someone doesn’t open the door for a lady?
I was also disappointed at Lecter’s gaff. It’s far too ornate. It looks like Liberace’s residence. I was kind of hoping for human munchables left everywhere and for Hannibal to be marinating human skulls with his jizz while howling at the moon because he can’t take his freedom. But no, he adjusts to his freedom with ease and lives an opulent lifestyle. (Quite how he maintains this lifestyle, I don’t know. His place is too large for him to be able to look after it himself. Does that mean that he has servants? And if so, does he eat them when they leave the toilet seat up? And if that’s the case, does he sit there eating a leg while interviewing the latest candidate? ‘Don’t worry, this is rhino leg I’m consuming. They’re rather large, don’t you know and I have one hell of an appetite. Would you like to try some? Goody-goody.’)
However, the most absurd thing is the ending. Lecter drugs Ray Liotta’s scummy FBI agent and then feeds him his own brain. Yes, it’s as silly as it sounds. But because of Liotta’s glorious overacting, it actually ends up being the highlight of the film. I kind of hope that Liotta realised the ending was stupid and he decided to send the whole movie up, because his utter lack of restraint is glorious. ‘That smells great!’
But then Liotta is wheeled off and we have to deal with some Hannibal/Starling nonsense. Do I really care whether he wants to pork her? Do I really care whether she wants his meat? No. Whatever fascination they have with one another isn’t shared by me. They’re just another ‘will they or wont they?’ Ross and Rachel – just quit with the annoying foreplay, bone each other, and then get the hell off my screen.
Blindness is a film that was reviled by the majority of critics. Everyone seemed to agree that it was worthless. And because of this, I ended up avoiding the movie when it was released in cinemas. My reasoning was that surely this many people couldn’t be wrong.
Well, they were. Fernando Meirelles’ film is tough and uncompromising, but it isn’t the cinematic atrocity that people have tarred it as.
The story revolves around a mass outbreak of sightlessness. Person after person becomes afflicted until eventually the government has to declare a state of emergency and herd the blind people into a few hospital wards in order to try and contain the unknown disease.
One of the first people to be quarantined is a doctor (Mark Ruffalo). Joining him is his wife (Julianne Moore), who actually feigns blindness in order to be with her husband. And even though the disease/infection/outbreak spreads throughout the whole of society, she seems immune.
We never know why she doesn’t succumb; we’re never given an explanation. But being the one person that can still see, she gets to witness the breakdown of society.
Some people have claimed that the depiction of blind people in this film is offensive. This is ridiculous. The film has nothing to do with the sightlessness that afflicts people in the real world. This film is about the chaos that ensues when people can no longer share another person’s point of view. In this film that is taken literally, but in Blindness you can see echoes of real life. One example that springs to mind is the craziness that happened in Germany during World War Two. Not everyone who committed atrocities was a monster. Many of them were perfectly ordinary people, but because they were caught up in this wave and because they could no longer see someone else’s point of view (or were allowed to), they performed heinous acts. So therefore Moore’s character might represent the person/country/society that is faced with an overwhelming social crisis – how they respond will define them.
As you’d expect, when two hospital wards begin squabbling over food, Moore tries to negotiate. But when this proves to be pointless, Moore buries her head in the sand. Again I’m inclined to drawl parallels with World War Two. The British tried negotiating with the Nazis and then later they curled up into a little ball. Well, until the Nazis invaded Poland...
Moore snaps during the film’s most brutal scene. You see, you have one ward that is run by the doctor and his wife and another that is run by a genuine blind person (someone who was blind prior to the outbreak) and a ‘King’. The ward run by the King takes the food that the government occasionally sends their way and then makes the rival ward pay for the grub. At first the people in the doctor’s ward pay with valuable possessions (again, like in a concentration camp, people are stripped of their belongings – they’re stripped of their individuality), but then the king ups the stakes by making them pay with their women.
Initially, Moore goes along with the plan. After all, they need food, so they should just go along with it, right? But when one of the women is killed, something inside her snaps.
This brutal act draws a line in the sand. Moore can take blackmail and she can suffer personal humiliation, but the casual violence that is inflicted upon a defenceless woman is too much. She intervenes with ruthless efficiency.
Moore waits until the next mass rape and then kills the King, saying that things are different now. From now on, she’s collecting food from Ward 3. If they don’t pay, she’ll keep on killing their men. It’s a vicious response, but it’s pretty much the only course of action available to her if she wants to survive.
As the only sighted person, Moore has a heavy weight on her shoulders. She’s almost a godlike figure, able to pass judgement on those around her and smite them with relative ease if she so chooses. But with her husband, we see what happens when you’re in a position of power and everything is taken away from you. He resents having to be treated like a baby and hates losing his independence. He even cheats on his wife because he feels so inferior to her. The natural instinct, when the world is turned on its head, is to fight and thrash and lash out. It takes a lot of strength to keep things together.
And despite the film’s supposed ugliness, I found it to be quite an uplifting movie. A small group leaves the hospital (the guards who control the outside of the building abandons it, presumably after having gone blind themselves) and makes its way back to the doctor’s house. There they live together and look after one another. This is the sort of response that one would hope would develop in a mass crisis. You’d hope that people would pull together and look out for one another. And the fact that these people do this ends the film with a note of optimism. There’s no need for us to live in a manmade hell.
However, the ending does raise a question. At the end, a man mysteriously regains his sight. Does this mean that everyone else will, too? The way that we see Moore gazing upon the city from her balcony would indicate this. But does that mean that everything will return to normal? That people will go back to their normal ways; that this happy group will separate? Does it mean that after temporarily gaining some form of clarity, laziness and neglect will return to this society? Does it mean that we’ll return to our more regular form of blindness? Most probably, yes.
