Gone Are the Days of Plenty

The title of this film is a little misleading, since the lessons that the protagonists wish to impart to the bloated segments of society are secondary to their own lives and choices.  You may wonder what disempowered college–age idealists can possibly do apart from protesting, dope smoking and ratcheting up petty crime statistics.  The German title, however, gives us more information: it may be translated, like when it appears in the opening scene on a sort of dunning letter, as “your days of plenty are numbered.”  Literally, it could be "the years of plenty are gone,” or, as fett (akin to American use of "phat") means both "luxurious" and "cool" or "awesome," "the cool years are gone.”  This adage applies both to the young, weak and resentful students and the middle–aged moneyed elite they seek to overthrow.  And if you are familiar with tales of juvenile discontent, you may correctly assume that our film will begin with a crime.     

 

A crime, it should be said, that is more overshow than throw.  A luxurious villa full of the finest  technology and kitschy objets d’art (much more of a rarity in Germany than in the United States) is subjected to chaotic justice.  Jan (Daniel Brühl), one of the perpetrators, outlines the scheme he carries out in greater Berlin with his undernourished roommate Peter (Stipe Erceg): nothing is stolen, furniture and possessions are rearranged, and a note is left in plain view for the returning nabobs. The note is often signed, “The Educators” (spelled with a radicalizing “k” in the English release), with the aim of having these posh Philistines “feel less safe in their high security neighborhoods.”  Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) then asks Jan, with whom she has been spending an inordinate amount of time of late, why he and Peter don’t simply steal everything and give it to the poor.  Jan astutely counters that while these rich folk (a list of yacht club members is used as a basis for attack) expect burglars, since they themselves rob society’s coffers to meet their own exorbitant whims, they do not expect righteousness.  Few things could be more frightening than having someone come into your house, play with your possessions, then inform you in writing that you simply have too much money.  Will they come around and put an end to their excessive habits, or will they resent society even more?  But our Educators are not concerned with that type of result; they want to instill the fear of a higher authority in the hearts of their victims, and with that fear a realization that the world, and the people who run this world, are unfair.        

Jule has her own problems.  A year ago she rammed her uninsured Golf into a high–end Mercedes driven by an equally high–end business executive.  Yes, the accident was both her fault and not subject to payment by her insurance company, so she legally had no claim to make when ordered to pay back the full ticket price of the totaled car.  After one year, we are informed, she has worked off almost one–eighteenth of the sum, and her job as a waitress will neither improve that percentage nor allow her to pay her rent on time.  Facing eviction, she turns to Jan for inspiration.  He tells her quite politely that although the accident was her fault, there is nothing worse than destroying the life of a young woman so that one privileged German can drive a car worth the average annual income of thirty Serbs.  She nods her head and sees his point, but what are they to do, disenfranchised and disaffected as they are?  One solution presents itself immediately, and things move quickly towards Jule’s integration.

Exactly halfway through the film, there is a predictable change of perspective.  Up to this point we have been able to side with the 'truth of youth,' of the fundamental principles of equality and fairness which all young people should espouse and with which the majority of older citizens should try to reacquaint themselves.  While broadly drawn, the characters are likeable and their cause tenable.  But those darling Educators become hostages to the plan of another party when they attempt to retrieve a conspicuous item they left behind at the house of one of those yacht club members.  This shift is necessary dramatically, for otherwise our parable of moral damnation would get a wee bit tedious.  Consequences for these actions, however harmless in essence, are as inevitable as the taxes that Jan, a consummate anti–institutionalist, laments.  The nature of man, we are told, is to be better than others.  We are also told that it’s not he who invented the gun who is guilty, but he who pulls the trigger.  The war of truisms begins, but for some magical reason it seems real.  It seems real because both sides are right and wrong, both sides are looking out for their interests and understand a part of human nature that cannot be denied.  Yet only one side is moral.  And moral doesn’t only mean saying and doing the right things, it means grasping the basic principles of human interaction and seeking fairness and equality of opportunity.  When one of their victims laughs off his guilt by saying he was not born in southeast Asia and is therefore not responsible for those who were, the rebuttals he receives make him think.  He thinks of another time.  His own youth, especially the wildness of 1968, flashes before his beady little eyes and, with that youth, the sweetness of invincibility and righteousness.  Back then he was not a top executive but a teacher, poor but happy, and totally in love with his young wife.  And those fabulous days, his best days, are all gone.     

The New World

In the opening scene of this visionary film, John Smith (Colin Farrell), the hero of American history textbooks, is spared.  I should rephrase that, he is not killed.  But he is left to die by his captain (Christopher Plummer) who quickly decides that he would be better served returning to England for supplies.  As the only professional soldier among the men who founded this colony that just celebrated its quadricentennial, Smith is given tacit approval to poke around the local forests and see whether he can’t find some trading partners among the autochthonous peoples.  There is even El Doradoan talk about a rich king up the river, a dangerous journey for which Smith is appointed.  But of course Smith, played with hungover hesitation by Farrell, finds something much more precious than a city of gold.    He finds love.

Love in the form of the native Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher), a young daughter of a menacing Algonquian chief.  This plot thread as well as the inevitable battle scene (which, to its credit, is wholly bereft of gore), are the only clichés of an amazingly refreshing interpretation of an old chestnut: the conflict between the colonists, who were not really colonists but refugees, and the natives, who didn’t regard themselves as landowners but as nomads and tribesmen.  The land of America, they would have argued, belonged neither to them nor to the Jamestown settlers.  It belonged to whatever animist deities guided their thoughts and provoked their cries.  Theirs is a culture of vigilance and mistrust, because they could be ambushed by any other tribe or any rogue animals.   There are numerous instances of the wildness of the Algonquians, and the film smartly permits conversation in misunderstood terms, exactly as it must have happened, with each side utterly flummoxed by the existence much less the words of the other.  In time, the parties acknowledge that a certain degree of cooperation will be necessary.  All that remains is determining who will give up more in order to secure mutual survival.  

History aside for the moment, we must understand the harshness of the interaction as grueling and repugnant, with gunpowder ultimately triumphing over war hatchets.  We know the outcome of this confrontation, of the absurd arrogance of the colonists who themselves were in great number victims of persecution in their birthlands.  As the captain declares to a lovelorn Smith:

This is Eden.  We have escaped the Old World and its bondage .... This is the place where a man may rise to his true stature.

But, as we also know, there is more to this story than colonial exploitation.  Director Terrence Malick, one of the most unheralded geniuses of modern cinema (owing in no small part to his sporadic activity) parallels the pointless gesturing and miscommunication of the armies with the inner thoughts of Smith and his love.  They speak in voiceovers that embrace the melodrama of Elizabethan soliloquies, and their hearts dive and spin around each other in shared yearning for escape.  Old Europe falling for New America, one would think.  But again Malick diverts our attention from these easy equations and sets it back on the simple intercourse of different humans with different perspectives.  The Captain and his cohorts have many Biblical verses to offer as justification for their actions, and Smith has little but the solace of the boundless nature of which he has just become part.  He notices and begins to worship the beauty of the earth, but he returns time and again to his Pocahontas, who in the film’s final third also catches the eye of a new character, the widower John Rolfe (Christian Bale).   

There is so much to commend, from the style and exquisite artistic restraint to the colors, the sounds, the freshness of every encounter and every word, translated, or, more often, left to buzz in our ear like the chirps of an unfamiliar bird.  The score alternates between Wagner and Mozart, an anachronism so perfectly sewn into a film that seeks artistic authenticity that one cannot help admiring its boldness.  Heavenly pieces of music do seem to drift in from another, higher plane, an Eden or a “place where man may rise to his true stature,” and they are fitting selections and repeated as leitmotivs.  Gradually, Malick informs us that we are watching neither a true love story nor a historical epic, but what a transcendent memory might retain of these first steps.  The way Rolfe looks at Pocahontas, whom he baptizes into his faith as Rebecca; the way she asks him simply, “Are you kind?”; the lyricism of each inner thought; the short and pensive shots of a world that seems microscopic because the colonists know so little about it; the promises exchanged and broken.  Even christened, married, and a mother, Rebecca cannot shed her gods, and for her family she thanks the sun.  “Give me a humble heart,” she mutters in the face of all these events.  In the end, we have the finest a film that eschews conventional plot can offer: a collection of memories strung together by purpose and desire.  And what memories!

Red

You and I both know red as death and revolution.  It is the most elusive color, the most eye–catching and ornamental, the symbol both of decadence and, in latter days, of the earthbound proletariat.  And if we discard the small cross in the center of the Helvetian banner, red is the one hue common to the flags of this trilogy’s three settings, France, Poland and Switzerland.  But what distinguishes red is its general lack of natural occurrence.  Apart from our blood exposed to oxygen and a few random fruit and animal species, true nonsynthetic red is always the exception or locus of exception.  Our eyes, accustomed to blues, whites, greens, and browns, immediately veer towards such patches of brightness.  And when red surrounds Irène Jacob, the star of this film, they tend to stay there.  

She may from certain angles remind you of Juliette Binoche, but bears an uncanny likeness to this British actress.  She is Valentine Dussaut, wafting through the aptly named Swiss town of Carouge, attending college and ballet classes and modeling shoots, and ending up on a billboard for chewing gum.  The billboard, a profile surrounded by a swirling red mantilla and the reddest of backgrounds, boasts the inscription: “Whatever the occasion, the freshness of life.”  She is indeed like the chewing gum she advertises: fresh, sweet, untouched, and magnetically alluring in her ingenuousness.  She has a boyfriend who doesn’t love her, probably because she picked the one man who would not lie prone at her feet, and she exudes a loneliness that belies her youth and opportunity.  She is in many ways magnificent; what she is not, however, is convincing as a character since her small worries do not translate into tragicness.  So to keep our attention rapt, she must encounter someone who knows much about loss and pain, and she must become his heavenly foil.    

Ironically, it is she not the viewer who commits a clumsy crime by staring red down.  Her car injures a dog who happens to belong to an old judge (Jean–Louis Trintignant), a crusty curmudgeon in whom youthful passions flicker only rarely.  She brings the dog to its owner who suggests, to her humanitarian chagrin, that she keep it.  Although I shall maintain my policy of non–disclosure, I add that we come to see that this meeting is not coincidental.  She and the judge, whose name is later revealed to be Kern (German for “core” or “nucleus”), strike up a relationship that cannot be anything more than paternal on his part, yet she can certainly help him overcome his cynicism and hatred for the petty malice that usurps real life.  Since he has been hurt by a past betrayal, his vice is spying on others and finding out their secrets, a very consistent psychological phenomenon.  Most of his victims he treats as test animals and removes himself entirely from any threats of compassion. Yet he has a bit of empathy for one of his neighbors, a young law student named Auguste.  When Auguste, who of course drives a red jeep, catches his girlfriend with someone else (this is a long and dramatic scene, and unintentionally comedic), this faithlessness brings Kern to admit his crimes and throw himself at the mercy of those whose lives he has invaded.             

While the judge is the engine of the film, Valentine is its throbbing red heart.  Unlike the trilogy's other young female protagonists, she does not have sexual urges, but pants and bends to her ballet lessons while following some disturbing news in the papers, first about her brother then about the man whose dog she almost kills one night.  Kern intuits that one of the two junkies shooting horse (under the rubric of “After Zurich, Geneva,” referring to this rather unfortunate social experiment) is her brother, and also guesses why he might have resorted to such escapism.  Throughout the film, Kern knows precisely what he shouldn’t know, and his hunches invariably turn out to be correct.  How is it that someone so brilliant could possibly have missed the infidelity that took place right under his very nose many years ago?  Did he learn from this experience and become an astute emotional detective?  That is one explanation; but the film proffers another which shall not be mentioned here.         

While Valentine is a red, February 14th–type of a name, her last name may be (very) loosely rendered as “of the leap.”  The leap of faith one makes in believing in someone and giving oneself to that person soul and soul cage?  Whatever the symbolism, making her a model, albeit somewhat of a clueless one, viciously jars our reality because runway models do not elicit much sympathy.  There is also the dream that Kern has of her being happy at forty or fifty and her fears that he might be a clairvoyant.  “I have the impression,” she says as innocently as possible, “that something important is happening around me.  That scares me.”  Then a frightful storm breaks out and something or someone seems damned.  She crushes her plastic cup and realizes something very important is being kept from her.  Kern finally divulges what has made him tick all these years, and concludes that, despite the massive age gap, Valentine might be the woman he was destined to meet.  How curious it would be if she were this woman and then ran right into the young, recently dumped law student!  Is this an overlap of time and space?  Whatever it is, the result is harmonic and euphoric, as stunning as the poster of Valentine that collapses under the weight of the hail that threatens Carouge in the final scene.  There, a fire starts, as if God were casting plagues down upon the land.  And if not He, then maybe some other, lesser hegemon.   

Damage

Love and war are old pastimes; obsession brings forth much more interesting data.  Some may reply that love itself is an obsession, a maniacal urge to experience life’s greatest reward regardless of the personal cost (and as you can see, that last sentence makes as much sense as love).  True enough, obsession often comprises many facets of love, but it is a selfish love, a bitter, corrosive lust that lurks in both the good and the wicked.  Love is always nauséabond; obsession cannot lead to anything good.  We know this and yet, as we watch this magnificent film unravel, as so many reviewers have put it, like a slow-motion car wreck, we cannot look away although (or maybe because) doom for all is veritably assured.

There are no ugly people, scenery, or moments in Damage, as the film itself is obsessed with obsession, with caring about something so much that it slowly engulfs everything else.  For an aesthetic project, this means beauty, and often what accompanies beauty – youth, lust, irreverence, irresponsibility, betrayal, and pain.  Stephen Fleming (Jeremy Irons) is a rising deputy minister who will likely be promoted to the cabinet.  His life has everything a plain, material mind could wish for as well as those things that most every soul needs: a loving spouse (Miranda Richardson), two well–adjusted children (Rupert Graves and Gemma Clark), and a solid marriage based on admiration, respect, and love.  But he has been a responsible and driven workaholic for too many years, ever since he was a "young doctor, doing simple things well."  One day, his son Martyn, a young, handsome newspaper editor, announces he has a new girlfriend, apparently nothing more than the flavor of the month.  This woman is Anna Barton (Juliette Binoche), whose alphabetic name already suggests her primordial importance, and before Martyn can even introduce her to his parents, she approaches Stephen at an official reception.  The look they exchange is one of the most impressive bits of understatement in recent cinematic history.  It says absolutely everything about their relationship, about Anna’s mind and personality, as well as about Stephen’s hard-won position of influence and what he has had to give up to get there.  Their first physical encounter is wordless, the phone call that abets their urges almost as taciturn, and we understand the weird chemical processes programmed into each of us, for many never to be truly unleashed.  This is brute force, animalistic and unstoppable, but there is also much more to this than meets the eye.

For Anna, Stephen is safe.  Apart from being twenty years her senior and married, he is the father of her boyfriend, so they cannot possibly have a relationship glazed with sweet nothings.  He also allows her to indulge her lifelong therapeutic need of fighting possessiveness by cheating.  If you don’t see this unbelievably selfish streak, and how she instigates everything then wants no responsibility for her actions because of the cruel fate of her young brother (a back story that I will not spoil), your ethical standards may need some ironing.  "Damaged people are dangerous," she says with some gusto, "they know they can survive."  Throughout the film, Anna thinks of herself as a tragic figure even though she has enjoyed a privileged if itinerant life, and her mother’s numerous marriages do nothing to dispel her cynicism.  No less culpable but much more idealistic, Stephen is taken by her for reasons we can and cannot understand.  Surely Martyn is reveling in the freedoms of youth that presumably eluded Stephen owing to his career and long marriage, and Stephen is sentimental for those times when his whole life lay before him, unread, undetermined, but very promising.  The less transparent reason is his own, something that he makes light of at the end of the film, and has to do with Anna as the person he was always meant to covet, to have, and perhaps to keep.  The two of them conspire on an affair that only gets more heated once Martyn and Anna announce their engagement.

Reviews of the film tend to sprinkle their compliments on the fine acting (Irons and Richardson in particular are more than perfect, they are unforgettable), beautiful decor, and straight road of destiny that each of the characters follows.  Yet among these same reviews, one finds numerous concerns about the plausibility of the whole endeavor.  Anna is not the type of woman that drives a man to passion or obsession say a few critics, apparently experts on both subjects;  there are, others point out, additional character issues apart from the extramarital affair that remain unexplored (a valid observation were it not for the fact that the movie is about monomania and the extinction of everything else); then there are the numerous sex scenes which critics tell us, with no small disappointment, are simply not sexy; finally, since this is a film about passion, an emotion to which Stephen is famously accused of being immune, the alleged sparks between the two main characters are, they are sorry to say, decidedly cold and, well, passionless.  All in all an attractive picture if a fairy tale. 

How curious it is that the same reviewers who suspend their disbelief for giant extraterrestrials, ghosts, talking animals, vampires, werewolves, and sharp-witted, benevolent teenagers find the circumstances in Damage, as well as the particular casting, unlikely.  True enough, there are certain assumptions made of artistic melodramas that confine them to the realm of the real and preclude supernatural or otherworldly intervention.  Yet how can we judge what is, in essence, a fairy tale with modern princes and princesses living in the upper echelon of early 1990s London?  This is hardly a realistic slice of life for the majority of viewers.  Why should their tastes and emotions (and the strange way in which they express these emotions) be any more familiar to us than their lifestyles?  They are not.  Nothing seems real because the whole film is a wild dream that sees its end in its beginning and rambles forth undeterred hoping that it will survive.  It is Stephen’s second youth and his death, although we pity him more than anyone else in the film.  He is lost, utterly lost, utterly without a center or a pole or gravity itself.  He cannot crash down to earth, and because he cannot let go of one woman who doesn't seem so different from anyone else, he is exiled to hover forever in space and watch his innermost desires from afar.  And, unlike Anna, he does not know whether he can survive. 

He Was a Quiet Man

Upon being asked for his creative method, a famous novelist once said he always began by constellating the criteria of an artistic problem.  An artistic problem is one that does not rely on history for its strength (the death of a real seventeenth–century queen is no more tragic than that of a peasant woman in contemporary Eritrea), nor pretends to be about art while concealing a political or religious agenda (a parable for Calvinism, feminism, or cultural differences are all simply parables, but not art).  That said, from great art you can derive every philosophical, political, ethical, and religious treatise imaginable because they are all contained, to one degree or another, in such works of creative genius.  Do you not sense all our evolution when you gaze upon Bosch’s netherworlds?  Does listening to Bach not give you a clear portal to eternal peace?  Surely, some may say, these are lofty ideals.  Yet without ideals we are but mud ticks hopping from dirt patch to dirt patch until all quickness is drained from our bodies.  So we come up with artistic problems and we masticate on their possible resolution.  After a time and some good thought, we begin to sense an outline, a thin skeleton below the water.  Pebbles become stones and rise together like a bridge across the low tide of Saint Michel, and we have seen the alpha and omega of the issue and scamper back to check our calculations.    

Such a design, common to the great artists in all fields for centuries, has either fallen into desuetude or warped itself into hyperspace.  Now films and books either have no plot at all, or are so overplotted for the demands of the reader who wants every last loose end tied into a bonnie bow, that we yearn for basic character studies unvitiated by an unpronounceable disease.  Many of us do suffer from disorders, and they deserve our compassion; but our compassion should be no narrower for the unfortunate nerds and introverts of the world who have no recourse to any joy in their lives.  There are a number of reasons for this, the least of which is the actual environment of the outcast in question.  Of greatest weight is the personality of the individual, of his ability to overcome the storms that life inflicts upon us every so often, and to rise above the morass and breathe in the air.  Most of us will not succeed.  In fact, some will fail so spectacularly in their attempt to join the rest of humanity that the oddest and most horrifying ideas start welcoming them when they get home (nothing else is there to do the trick).  They palliate their stress by going, in their minds, on distant journeys alone or with some coveted partner well out of their league.  Little by little, they move on to bolder acts of righteousness; perhaps they even contemplate a poisoning or two.  Who would miss their bedevilers anyway?  We could always do with fewer bullies and thugs.  More dreamlike strolls through the parks of vengeance lead to even more devastating ideas, ideas that would fix everything with a modicum of planning and subterfuge.  And soon, very soon, the tide is low and we have our bridge in glorious concatenation.

Such is the plan of Bob McConnell (Christian Slater), this film's miserable victim of circumstance who spends his free time getting lectured by his fish and devising the destruction of his hated workplace.  In this day and age in particular, we scoff less at the possibility of these cubiclicides since we know well what despair lies in the hearts of men.  Bob is a true threat, that is clear; and it just may be a matter of time before the fuse is lit and he perches with a remote control detonator on a nearby hill to ensure that no Schadenfreude eludes him.  What Bob does not immediately suppose is that in a building of that enormousness there are bound to be other Bobs, some maybe far more miserable than he, with similar ambitions.  And so, one fine day, Bob sneaks a loaded pistol into the office with every intention of using it or at least brandishing it wildly to gain a few seconds of respect.  Picking up one of his beloved paper clips (or so he claims) prevents him from falling victim to another shooter, an officemate that’s basically an older, bitterer version of himself who guns down a roomful of colleagues before Bob, yes Bob, slays him and becomes the hero.  The obvious question in this scenario is why no one really finds Bob’s very convenient means of retaliation suspicious.  Some characters do consider it; but Bob is so timid and pathetic and easy to pinball around that anything except self–defense is unimaginable.  The thing is, of course, that Bob’s foiled plan for retribution is essentially self–defense against a lifetime of verbal and physical battery.  
    
Bob is deified and promoted to the rank of VP of Creative Thinking by his worthless and loveless boss (William H. Macy), a former military officer whose desk proudly juxtaposes a faux Rubik's cube and a gilded grenade.  VP of CT is in all respects a high altitude post: Bob now drives a luxury car and after years of requests finally has a windowed office.  The office most recently belonged to one of the victims, the lovely young vice president Vanessa Parks (Elisha Cuthbert), herself a V.P.  The bullet that hit Vanessa left her paralyzed, which makes her curse Bob for not having finished her off before the paramedics arrived.  Soon after that, however, the two bond and a love affair hovers, but we know that this is not that kind of film.  The humor is dark, the company’s name is ADD and no one ever seems to do anything at all, and there are abject displays of cruelty lifted from everyday interaction that make your blood curdle.  Expect more than one twist, and make of the ending what you will; but don't forget to watch Slater in the role of his career.  Throughout the film he maintains the complexion and demeanor of a drunk gopher, no mean feat.  As we know he is a kind man who cannot treat others the way he has always been treated, we are sympathetic to the plight and want him to win something from this ordeal.  But all people, even the kindest and especially the quietest, have their breaking points.