A COMPLETE UNKNOWN directed by James Mangold (USA, 2024)
I went to see this with a long-time Bob Dylan fan. Although he praised Timothee Chamalet’s acting and Edward Norton’s star turn as nerdy Peter Seeger, he hated the movie. I loved it. Why the difference of opinion?
I think for my friend no film can ever do the real Dylan (whoever that may be) justice. In this he is correct but that doesn’t make this a bad film.
‘A Complete Unknown’ is a good title because it is about an artist who, despite all the books, articles, films and documentaries remains a man of mystery. As Todd Hayne’s 2007 film ‘I’m Not There’ illustrates by having six different actors play Dylan, he is many different people at the same time. He is who you want him to be.
BIRDMAN (OR ‘THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE’) directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (USA, 2014)
From the stylish opening credits and free-jazz drumming of Antonio Sanchez’s unorthodox soundtrack, this is a movie that is keen to make an immediate impression.
It is the kind of derring-do which could so easily have backfired and then been dismissed as nothing more than brash arty-fartiness. Yet Birdman postively revels in its showiness and having a excellent supporting cast, that includes Naomi Watts and Edward Norton in prime form, means that all the risks are calculated ones.
The story revolves around Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, one time celluloid superhero who now feels all too human as he approaches the third age. By adapting a Raymond Carver story for a Broadway show he wants revitalise his flagging career and, in the process, demonstrate that 60 is the new 30. Continue reading →
This is the story of an insomniac office worker and a maniacal soap maker. It’s a movie you have to watch more than once but no matter how many times you see it you’ll almost certainly end up confused.
With its overt rejection of religion (“We are God’s unwanted children”) and a moral vision that can only be described as nihilistic, it’s easy to see how this has earned a cult status and won a place in the list of top ‘mindfuck’ movies.
David Fincher directs as if it were a two-hour rock video and it belongs to the genre as the disturbingly (and deliciously) deranged puzzle movies by mavericks like Cronenberg, Aronofsky and Lynch.
In one sense it could be seen as a satire of feminised masculinity, ridiculing reconstructed males who try to be all touchy-feely to get in touch with their sensitive side. The single object of the men’s group the unnamed narrator (Edward Norton) attends seems to be to get the members to cry a river to release their inner pain. This briefly cures his insomnia but makes him unhealthily addicted to support groups, getting ‘support’ for problems he doesn’t even have just to get a fake sense of belonging.
A direct contrast to the narrator is Tyler Durden played with a swagger by Brad Pitt. He has an attitude as hard as his Abs and a core belief that you begin to really live when you face the reality of death and recognise that this could happen at any moment. Tyler explains exactly what he signifies to his weaker-willed alter ego: “I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable and, most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not”.
The fight clubs and mayhem making sub terrorist groups that spring from them represent the ultimate men’s self-help group built on organised violence and based on the premise that you haven’t really lived until you’ve been beaten up and followed your destructive instincts.
By these means male physical strength and heightened competitiveness is not directed towards conventional, materialistic goals like the pursuit of high-flying careers or rampant consumerism.
Tyler argues that buying stuff you don’t need is a slow death of the soul and Brad Pitt says of the message of the movie (and book by Chuck Palahniuk) is that: it “is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain” This quote reminded of the lyrics to Trent Reznor‘s Hurt : “I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/The only thing that’s real” and the self harm issues are very strongly to the fore in this film.
Ultimately,it’s a movie that I find both fascinating and repulsive. It is driven by the full-blooded (and bloody) performance by Brad Pitt. If watched superficially it might be deemed deeply offensive and if watched too reverently you might regard it as having more depth than it merits.
Ryan Gosling’s full-blooded performance as Daniel Balint made me think of two other on-screen neo-nazi skinheads : Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain (1982) and Edward Norton in Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998).
As with those characters he is lean, mean with fierce, but misguided, intelligence.
One of the aims of all these films is to show that to brand all extreme racists as thugs is simplistic and misleading.
In The Believer, Balint’s hatred of Judaism stems from what he regards as the religious abstraction. He believes Jews are too passive when faced with oppression. Having rejected the faith he was raised in, he seeks a more militant doctrine and this bizarrely leads him to anti-Semitism. We see him strutting about proudly wearing a red T-shirt with a swastika symbol and proclaiming an ambition to ‘kill a Jew’.
Balint is articulate and well-read, although in the company he keeps, even if he had scanned through a copy of ‘Fascism For Dummies’ he might have been praised as an intellectual. Continue reading →
Ryan Gosling’s full-blooded performance as Daniel Balint made me think of two other on-screen neo-nazi skinheads : Tim Roth in Alan Clarke’s Made In Britain (1982) and Edward Norton in Tony Kaye’s American History X (1998).
