Monthly Archives: December 2015
The Weight of Water (2000)
Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Weight of Water, based on the book by Anita Shreve, was released in 2000. The movie had been held back by the studio for over a year, and when it finally made it into theatres it sank like a stone. The few critics who reviewed it weren’t impressed. I remember that the night I first saw the movie the audience numbered less than ten. In fact, it might have been less than five.
So why did Bigelow, after directing a series of audacious and offbeat action flicks, decide to switch gears and film a very intimate novel about two women trapped in suffocating marriages? It’s a question worth asking, and I think there are probably a few answers.
One answer might be that she felt like a change of pace. Directors, like actors, can be afraid of getting type cast, and it may be that Bigelow wanted people to know she could do other things besides make action movies. Beyond that, though, it may be that she needed to do something that took her outside the confines of commercial formulas. While she’d managed to test the limits of the action genre, and even subvert some of its most basic rules, Bigelow understood that she still had to deliver what audiences wanted. Playing with the public’s expectations can keep them from showing up at the box office. Near Dark had been a modest critical and commercial success, but after that she ran into trouble. Nobody knew what to make of Blue Steel. Point Break made money but got trashed by critics. Strange Days got some enthusiastic reviews, but audiences stayed away. So Bigelow may have been wondering if she needed to take a break from action movies and try something different.
Another factor may have been the fact that Bigelow is a woman. I mostly avoid bringing up gender in writing about movies, because I think too often we fall back on easy stereotypes, sticking people in categories based on their sex. There’s no reason women shouldn’t be able to make action films, and Bigelow had proven her skill in the genre. But it’s a fact that the audiences for that kind of flick are mostly men, and those men have very specific expectations. I think the biggest reason her early features didn’t always go over well is that she was deliberately turning the genre on its head. A thriller centered on a female cop? Commonplace these days, but not back in the eighties. An FBI agent seeking spiritual fulfillment? Shouldn’t he just focus on shooting people? The audiences that flocked to Die Hard didn’t want movies to play with their expectations. They wanted massive explosions and a high body count. Bigelow may have gotten tired of trying to deliver what the boys were looking for.
But most important of all, I think Bigelow felt a powerful, personal connection to Shreve’s novel. It tells two parallel stories about women who are isolated and frustrated, angry and alone. Given the fact that Bigelow was one of the few female directors in Hollywood back in the nineties, it seems likely that she was experiencing all of the above. On top of everything, though, she was married to a director who also acted as producer on two of her films. Given that James Cameron was one of the most commercially successful filmmakers of the time, this might seem like a tremendous advantage. Really, I don’t think Bigelow saw it that way. At all.
It’s always dangerous to make connections between an artist’s work and their personal life. However close the parallels may seem, we have to remember that the work is fiction, not fact. Because of what we know about Woody Allen’s personal life, we may be tempted think that at times he’s actually presenting scenes from his life on the screen. This is a big mistake. Even if the episodes he’s acting out seem to echo incidents we’ve read about, we should never be so lazy as to think what we’re seeing is the “truth”. Art inevitably transforms reality. Allen may be incorporating autobiographical elements in Annie Hall, but Annie Hall is not an autobiography.
On the other hand, for me, a work of art is only worthwhile if the artist reveals something of his or her self. This may sound like a paradox, but it’s not. Who cares if the details depicted in a movie reflect the details of the filmmaker’s life. All that’s really important is that artists are honest about the way they see the world, the way they feel about themselves. We can speculate forever about possible parallels between Orson Welles’ actual life and the storyline of Chimes at Midnight, but in the end, none of that matters. What does matter is that when Hal says to Falstaff, “I know thee not old man,” we can feel the pain that’s crushing the new king’s former friend, and we know Welles felt that pain, too.
Catherine McCormack
Anita Shreve’s novel The Weight of Water was inspired by a double murder that took place on a barren island off the Atlantic Coast at the end of the nineteenth century. A man was convicted and hanged for the crime, but speculation persists to this day that the jury sent the wrong person to their death. The book tells two stories, that of a young woman, a Norwegian immigrant, who relates the events leading up to the murders, and a modern story which focusses on a photojournalist who has come to the island to document the scene of the crime. Both the period story and the modern story are about relationships, both are centered on women trapped in unhappy marriages.
While Shreve’s book relates the known facts of the case, she makes it clear in a brief preface that it’s a work of fiction. The author creates a journal in which a young Norwegian woman named Maren talks about her youth, the pressures that forced her to take a husband, and the brutal challenges she faced after migrating to America, where she and her family are isolated on a remote, rocky island. The story that takes place in the present is centered on Jean, a photojournalist married to a famous poet. She loves her husband, but realizes his attention is straying, and the knowledge is slowly crushing her. As she investigates the Smuttynose murders, Jean finds Maren’s journal, and it’s clear she relates to the young immigrant’s desperation. They’re both just looking for a little affection, a little understanding.
Bigelow takes the fiction even further. Her film spends less time detailing the facts of the case and more time extending Shreve’s view of Maren as a deeply lonely, bitterly angry woman. In the book, the description of the actual killing is fairly brief. In the movie, the murders are crucial, and they are shown in terrifying detail. Like any filmmaker who uses historic fact as the basis for their work, Bigelow takes liberties to shape the story she wants to tell. Up to a point, I can accept that, but I’m not comfortable with showing a reenactment of a murder that’s based more on speculation than on evidence. Yeah, the film does offer a disclaimer, but it’s at the end, after we’ve seen a graphic depiction of Maren Hontvedt killing two family members. In reality, nobody knows who commited the crime.
It’s possible that the movie’s more visceral, graphic approach was the result of commercial considerations, but I doubt it. While I believe that Bigelow related to Shreve’s novel on a very personal level, as artists these two women are almost polar opposites. Shreve is a very careful, thorough writer who maintains a rigorous objectivity in her work. I have to say that I had trouble getting into the novel at first because the tone is so restrained. Gradually I was drawn into the world the author had created, both by her insight into human nature and the austere beauty of her prose. The book is really very moving, but Shreve always maintains a careful objectivity. She always keeps us at a distance from her characters.
Bigelow doesn’t keep her distance. As an artist and a filmmaker, she dives right into the world and drags us along with her. In her early films she used sound and image to create a voluptuous, kinetic experience, and at her best she pulled us right into the middle of it. Her characters were often thrown into situations where boundaries disappeared, and they’d find themselves caught between terror and euphoria. Though The Weight of Water is by no means an action film, again Bigelow’s protagonists find themselves pushed to their limits and beyond. In this case, though, the limits are less physical than psychological.
Elizabeth Hurley and Sean Penn
Here Bigelow uses her gifts to bring us into the characters’ state of mind. Jean sits on the deck of the yacht surrounded by placid blue water and crystalline vistas. The beauty and serenity of her surroundings are at odds with the tension that’s eating away at her. She watches her husband glancing furtively at the other woman on board the boat. She watches the other woman sliding a piece of ice down the length of her body. Seeing all this through Jean’s eyes, we know she’s just barely managing to hold herself together. The world Maren lives in, on the other hand, seems to be an expression of the melancholy she feels. The inside of her home is claustrophobic and dark. Within its oppressive quiet every small sound, the groan of the floorboards, the creak of a chair, is clearly heard. Even when Maren leaves the house, she’s still a prisoner on a barren island. There is no escape.
The script is extremely intricate, balancing the two stories against each other and weaving them together using deft, often abrupt, transitions. There are sudden shifts that may seem arbitrary, but actually the various threads are woven together with tremendous skill. Screenwriters Alice Arlen and Christopher Kyle make Jean’s investigation of the murders an exploration of her own troubled marriage. The more she learns about the case, the more she’s convinced that Maren is the killer, and the more she understands Maren’s motives.
And Maren’s motives are complicated. She goes about her chores dutifully, sticking to the routine that keeps her sane, but inside she’s drowning in a sea of conflicting emotions. She seems to have accepted her life of lonely drudgery, but the arrival of her brother and his wife creates new turmoil. The presence of Maren’s jealous, vindictive sister Karen makes life even more unbearable. Maren’s family isn’t a source of comfort. It’s a prison.
Anders W. Berthelsen, Vinessa Shaw and Sarah Polley
Bigelow is not credited as a writer, but I wonder how much input she had on the screenplay. The film sticks to the general outline of Shreve’s novel, but there are a number of alterations, some of them important. One change that strikes me as crucial is the fate of Jean’s husband, Thomas. At the climax of both the book and the film, the boat they’re on is battered by a terrible storm. In the book, Thomas survives. In the film, he dies. In my mind, I can’t help associating this choice with the break-up of Bigelow’s marriage to James Cameron.
And here I may be making the kind of assumption that I was criticizing earlier. How can I justify drawing a connection between something that was happening in the director’s personal life with a fictional event that she depicts on the screen? But honestly, I’m not trying to tell you that Bigelow wanted Cameron dead. And I’m not even trying to tell you that Thomas is a surrogate for Cameron. The way I see it, his death has a broader and a deeper meaning.
Earlier I talked about the fact that Bigelow was one of the few women directing films back in the nineties. While she had a few female allies in Hollywood, for the most part she was trapped in a system controlled by men. And whatever her personal relationship with Cameron was like, it had to be difficult making movies with your husband acting as producer. I think Bigelow’s choice to make The Weight of Water, at least in part, came out of a desire to change both the course of her career and the course of her life, to break away from the action genre and the limitations imposed by a male-dominated studio system. I think killing Thomas was a symbolic way of setting herself free, of burying the past. The more I think about The Weight of Water, the more it seems to me that the film is an exorcism. A way of casting out the demons.
While Bigelow’s earlier work had a spiritual dimension, it was usually in the background, easy to miss amid the shootouts and high-speed chases. In The Weight of Water, spirituality is right in the forground. In her misery, Maren feels cut off from God, and wonders why God has imposed this harsh, loveless existence on her. And while Shreve’s book outlines Maren’s religious beliefs in a general way, the film explicitly embraces a Christian perspective. The cross is used as a symbol throughout the movie, sliding across the screen in the title sequence, worn as a necklace by one of the women on the boat, cast as a shadow on a wall in Maren’s home. Bigelow is clearly exploring the Christian themes of suffering and salvation, asking difficult questions, and not necessarily expecting any answers.
The Weight of Water came and went very quickly. While Bigelow has enjoyed greater recognition than ever in recent years, this movie is pretty much forgotten. It’s certainly not for everybody, but it doesn’t deserve its obscurity. No question the film is a grim, sometimes harrowing, journey into the souls of two women who feel completely, desperately lost. But it’s also one of the director’s most passionate and personal works. Near the end of the movie Maren says, “I believe that in the darkest hour God may restore faith and offer salvation.” The Weight of Water is Kathryn Bigelow’s statement of faith.
Detour (1945)
Tom Neal
The movie Detour has long been considered a film noir classic. Reams have been written about director Edgar Ulmer’s amazingly terse, unnervingly intense exploration of alienation and despair on the lonely stretches of the American highway. Ulmer was certainly a gifted filmmaker, and Detour is one of the high points of his career, but it’s odd that in the seventy years since it was made, almost nobody has talked about the novel it was based on.
The novel Detour was published at the end of the thirties, and in many ways seems to be a distillation of the period it was written in, the tail end of the Depression. Like Alex Roth, the luckless musician at the center of the story, author Martin Goldsmith had spent some time hitchhiking, no doubt getting well acquainted with hunger and hardship. The film’s screenplay is also by Goldsmith, and almost everything in it comes directly from the book. It’s an unusually faithful adaptation.
There are some major differences. In turning his slender novel into a surprisingly spare film, Goldsmith cut one of his characters almost entirely. While the book is framed by Alex’s story, starting and ending with him, the chapters he narrates alternate with chapters narrated by his girlfriend, Sue. The two met and fell in love working at a club in New York. Determined to become an actress, Sue left for Hollywood, postponing their marriage indefinitely. Desperately lonely, Alex decided to hitchhike to LA so he could rejoin his girlfriend. The book goes back and forth between the two of them, giving us an intricate portrait of their tangled relationship.
While Alex and Sue are basically decent people, they’re both driven to degrading acts by loneliness and lack of money. Goldsmith lets them explain themselves in their own words, and their stories are a mix of desperate self-deception and brutal honesty. Alex knows he’s basically a bum, but he can’t let go of the idea that some day he’ll become a successful musician. Sue realizes she’s just another star-struck fool scraping by as a waitress, but she keeps telling herself that somehow she’ll break through in Hollywood. They’ve both done things they’re not proud of and spend a good deal of time trying to justify their actions. Bottom line, neither one of them is perfect, and they know it all too well.
In the movie Sue is pretty much gone after the first reel. The screenplay gets her out of the way to focus on the poisonous relationship between Alex and Vera. This makes sense for a commercial feature, but it also makes the movie more conventional. Part of what makes Goldsmith’s book so interesting is the audacity of using a pulp thriller to dig into the maddening contradictions inherent in most relationships. Making Vera the central female figure brings the movie much more in line with the classic pulp framework, a more or less innocent guy dragged down by a scheming femme fatale.
Another interesting aspect of Goldsmith’s adaptation is the fact that he cuts out all of his rants about Hollywood. In the movie, pretty much all we see of Tinseltown is a series of rear projection shots, and the characters only refer to it in passing. In the book, the author spends pages describing his characters’ reactions to film capitol, and gives us a fairly detailed account of what it was like to live in the community at the end of the thirties. Goldsmith was living in Hollywood when he wrote Detour, and it’s clear that he was both horrified and fascinated by the place. His characters have wildly different reactions to what they see there. Alex arrives in Hollywood and likes it right away, describing how clean and sunny everything looks, admiring the people who look so healthy and tanned. But Sue, who works as a waitress because she’s had no luck with the studios, is bitterly angry that she was foolish enough to believe the hype. “I had arrived so thoroughly read-up on the misinformation of the fan magazines that it took me a full week before I realized that the ‘Mecca’ was no more than a jerkwater suburb which publicity had sliced from Los Angeles….”
The movie is just as relentlessly cynical as the book, but in a different way. Born in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century, Edgar Ulmer was steeped in the northern European traditions of romanticism and expressionism. Before he started his career as a director, he had worked as a designer in stage and film, assisting Max Reinhardt, Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. In making a film out of Detour, he brings a significant shift in emphasis. Goldsmith’s book is rooted in gritty reality, and in their moments of honesty the characters acknowledge that their lives were shaped by the choices they made. In contrast, Ulmer’s movie is about an innocent man whose life is completely derailed by fate. He has no choice. And there is no escape.
Ann Savage and Tom Neal
Ulmer spent most of his career working on low-budget and no-budget productions. At the time he made Detour he was under contract at PRC, possibly the cheapest outfit in Hollywood at the time. Most of PRC’s output was shot in six days and cut in one, an outrageously short schedule for making a feature film. In spite of these extreme limitations, Ulmer charges the movie with powerful imagery, making the visuals more striking and expressive than almost anything the major studios were doing at the time. Whether hitching a ride through the burning desert or brooding over a cup of coffee in a tiny diner, Al Roberts* is travelling through a dark psychological landscape. It often feels like the movie is taking place in his mind. Al is briefly enraged by a jukebox song that reminds him of his girlfriend. When he calms down again, the camera dollys in quickly to a tight close-up and the frame suddenly grows dim except for a small patch of light illuminating his eyes. Ulmer has no qualms about using a blatantly artificial effect to show the character’s emotional state. When Al stands over Vera’s corpse on the hotel bed, we see the room from his perspective, the camera panning slowly over various random objects, bringing them briefly into sharp focus, then allowing them to go hazy. We’re brought into the room with him, we share his feeling of stunned disbelief.
Another major difference in the movie is the way Vera dies. In Goldmsith’s novel, Al is so maddened by anger and fear that he strangles her when she tries to call the cops. It may not have been premeditated, but it’s definitely murder, and while Al is shocked by what he’s done, he doesn’t spend much time mourning. He runs. In the movie Vera’s death is definitely accidental. Having decided to call the cops, she grabs the phone, runs into the hotel bedroom and locks the door behind her. In total panic, Al grabs the cord and pulls with all his might, hoping to rip it out of the phone. Then he breaks down the bedroom door and finds Vera dead, the phone cord wound around her neck. There’s no knowing how this change came about. Did Goldsmith alter the scene on his own? Did Ulmer ask for something different? Was the production code a consideration? Whatever the reasons for the change, it definitely alters our perception of Al’s story. In the first version, he’s a murderer, even if he didn’t consciously choose to kill Vera. In the second version, he’s a helpless victim of forces beyond his control. After Haskell’s sudden death, Al’s chance encounter with Vera, and then her death in a freak accident, there’s no question that fate has taken a hand. He can run but he can’t hide. It’s only a matter of time before the darkness closes in.
Tom Neal has a forlorn charm that’s perfect for Al, an ordinary guy who’s trapped by an extraordinary set of circumstances. He just wants to get by, and at first he thinks everything will be okay if he just plays it cool. As things get worse and the pressure grows, Neal shows us Al’s nerves go from ragged to raw. He goes from ranting and raging to bargaining and begging, desperately trying to claw his way out of the mess he’s in. As Vera, Ann Savage burns a hole in the screen. It’s easy to believe that Al’s afraid of her. She’s a bottomless pit of anger and bitterness, and her intensity is scorching. But unlike the book, the movie gives us brief glimpses of another side of Vera. In her own way, she’s just as lost as Al. Vera’s led a hard life and probably doesn’t have long to live. In the few moments that Savage lets us see flashes of insecurity and desperation, it makes the character more than just another femme fatale. She seems vividly, pathetically human.
In the book, Alex manages to evade the law, but he can’t go home and he can’t go back to his girlfriend. He’s haunted by the memory of Sue, and tormented by the fact that his musical career has ended before it began. Goldsmith leaves Al stuck in limbo, bumming rides from one small town to another, earning a buck whenever he can. Still, he keeps moving forward. Life goes on. Ulmer’s ending is much more bleak. Al may have momentarily slipped free of the hangman’s noose, but he knows it’s only a matter of time before he’s caught. It’s not just bad luck that’s sent him on this detour. A mysterious force has singled him out, and there is no escape. When the highway patrol car pulls up alongside him at the end, he doesn’t struggle or try to run. He meekly steps inside. Because he knows it isn’t the police taking him down.
It’s fate.
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*
In the book the character’s name is Alex Roth, but in the movie it’s changed to Al Roberts, no doubt because nice “normal” Anglo names were always preferred for Hollywood heroes.
Getting ready to drop a dime.
Women in Hollywood
Alice Guy
In April of this year and again in November, the LA Weekly ran a two-part article on the way Hollywood treats women like second-class citizens. The author goes into detail describing the various ways that male studio execs stifle women’s voices. She interviews a number of women, and some men, all of whom confirm that women have a much harder time landing directing gigs, getting scripts produced, and even getting equal pay for work.
It’s pretty depressing, but hardly surprising. Just like every other corporate culture around the globe, Hollywood is dominated by highly-competitive men who see no reason to share power unless they’re forced to. I’d love to see this change, but I doubt that the solutions that are being debated will have any lasting impact. You’re going to shame these guys into sharing power? Good luck. They have no shame. If you don’t believe me, just take a look at the endless parade of stupid, empty action films that the studios churn out. Sue the studios? They have lawyers who can drag these things out for years. Even if a settlement offered some concessions, who’s going to enforce them?
So what’s my solution? Let’s take a look at Alice Guy, a pioneering filmmaker who started her career in the nineteenth century. Guy is one of the first people to ever shoot a movie, and after a successful directing career she started her own studio, the Solax Company, in 1910. Acting as a producer and director, Guy made hundreds of films for Solax, and while the studio eventually collapsed, for years Guy was one of the most powerful people in the industry.
I think women filmmakers need to follow Guy’s example. Don’t wait around for the alpha males in Hollywood to change the situation. The change has to come from outside. I realize that building a movie studio takes years, and that there are plenty of roadblocks. Finding financing, getting distribution, putting together a production schedule, all those things are major hurdles. But there are thousands of women in Hollywood who have the intelligence and talent to make it happen, and many of them would probably be willing to give up some compensation for a chance to make movies they believed in.
Hollywood has always been dominated by men, and as long as the billions keep rolling in from the endless rounds of worthless blockbusters, they won’t see any reason to change. The only thing more important to these guys than money is power, and they won’t give anything up unless they have to.
Which is why I say, don’t ask for power. Take it.
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If you’re interested in reading the Weekly articles, here are the links.
How Hollywood Keeps Out the Stories of Women and Girls
And if you don’t know about Alice Guy, I urge you to read up on this phenomenal woman. I’m including two links below. There are many gaps in our knowledge of her career, and you’ll find the articles offer conflicting information. What is undisputed is that she was one of the earliest film pioneers, she made one of the first narrative films, and she experimented with sound and color long before Hollywood even existed.
Reality Is Scary 