At Least it Isn't Twilight

Film: Vampyr (The Vampire; Not Against the Flesh; Der Traum des Allan Grey)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

I wonder sometimes how movies get selected for this list. I mean, how many vampire stories do we need? There are five versions of the basic “Dracula” story (the Bela Lugosi version, the one with Christopher Lee, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the two versions of Nosferatu) plus Lat den Ratte Komma In and this one, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, which also has about 100 different names--The Vampire, Not Against the Flesh, and Der Traum des Allan Grey; if that’s not all, IMDB claims that this film is also called Castle of Doom, making me wonder exactly how many names one film needs. I may well be forgetting one or two vampire films as well. And for all these vampires, we still don’t get Lost Boys or Near Dark and get only one werewolf, two Romero-style zombies, and three Frankenstein pictures, one of which is parody. Seriously, I’m getting a little tired of the vampires.

My familiarity with Dreyer prior to this evening was limited to The Passion of Joan of Ark, which is a true masterpiece. Vampyr was poorly received upon release, but in more recent years has become considered one of his more important films. Having seen it, I’m not sure why it’s gotten this resurgence of critical acclaim. It’s not that good.

Our hero is an occultist named Allan Grey (Julian West), who arrives in a small town and immediately starts having some bizarre experiences. Truthfully, this is the most interesting part of the film, with some unusual effects used by Dreyer to produce an unsettling atmosphere. We see, for instance, the shadow of a man digging, but he’s digging in reverse, with the dirt flying up to his shovel and being laid carefully back into the ground. More disturbing and far more effective are the shadows of people, which move independently of the people themselves. This is a great effect, in part because it’s difficult to see that it’s happening at first. The realization that the shadows themselves appear to be living things is a wonderful moment (I watched that part twice just to have that experience again).

Suffice it to say that there’s a vampire preying on the area, and in particular on a pair of daughters of the local lord. The older daughter, Leone (Sybille Schmitz) is currently under attack while the younger daughter, Gisele (Rena Mandel) frets. Grey learns all he needs to know about the vampire from a book left to him by the girls’ father (Maurice Schutz), who is killed early on. However, Grey also spends most of his time dreaming or hallucinating while most of the killing-the-vampire grunt work gets handled by the servant (Albert Bras). This kills the mood for me in some ways—the hero really does nothing but observe; the servant is the one who figures everything out.

It’s evident throughout the film that Dreyer was working with non-actors here. Schmitz (a professional actress) is quite effective when the madness of becoming a vampire is on her, and some of her facial expressions are reminiscent (at least in terms of camera angle and intensity) of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Mandel as Gisele is routinely awful and wooden and particularly unnatural. When, near the end of the film, she stands in a rowboat for the entire trip, I was at first nonplussed by the action, and then realized that her acting there was no less unnatural than it was anywhere else.

What this film does very well is create a genuine atmosphere that, while not especially horrific, is at least reminiscent of what horror should be like. Things are just off-kilter enough to be disturbing and strange. Rather than being terrifying, it is unsettling. The audience can’t simply witness what is happening on the screen, but has to actively attempt to decipher the vision it is given. This is most effective near the start of the film, and appears to be something of Dreyer’s specialty. That, more than anything, makes this film work. This sense is greatly enhanced by a tremendous soundtrack that only adds to the feeling of unease given by the setting.

What doesn’t work is the narrative. Dreyer’s story is confused and confusing. It’s not simply a question of paying attention to the details, but that things simply do not seem to work believably even in the context of the story. Careful attention doesn’t help here; the story simply does not follow any rules that can be ascertained. While that can make for an interesting experience some times, here it feels like a mistake.

Dreyer chose to have a great deal of this story told in large blocks of text in the form of the book being read by Grey and the servant. While this allowed him to cut down on the dialog (important, since he was filming in three languages at the same time), it also detracts from the story being told. The story thus doesn’t so much unfold as end up being handed to us, destroying a great deal of the mystery that could have come from this film and reducing the impact of the unsettling world Dreyer places us in.

Like many films of its era viewed today, Vampyr is a much easier film to respect than it is to like or sit down and watch. Dreyer’s ideas here are good ones, but he falls very short in the execution.

Why to watch Vampyr: It’s unsettling.
Why not to watch: It’s incomprehensible and not that good.

Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen

Film: Only Angels Have Wings
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’ve never read a Harlequin Romance. It’s my understanding, though, that in most of these books, the guy in the romance tends to be dangerous in some way (like a pirate) or have a dangerous occupation (like bounty hunter). I have no proof that the idea for this came from Only Angels Have Wings, and it probably doesn’t, but the traditional Harlequin Romance and this film have this particular aspect in common.

Geoff Carter (Cary Grant) runs a small airline based in a remote South American village. He and his crew of pilots fly the mail, work emergency medical transport cases, and otherwise handle air traffic in the area. Much of this air traffic has to fly through a particularly difficult mountain pass, which leads me to think that we may be in Chile or Peru. As the movie begins, a large ship pulls into the port, and a young, attractive woman named Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur) steps off and finds her way into the company of two of the pilots, Les Peters (Allyn Joslyn) and Joe Souther (Noah Beery, Jr.). The two compete with each other to see which one of them will get to buy Bonnie dinner.

As it turns out, there’s no real competition. Joe gets sent up to deliver the mail and Les gets sent off somewhere else while Geoff offers to buy the girl a steak…but she’s not taking, which means that you can bet these two will end up together. Of course, the fog rolls in, and Joe is forced to return to the ground, but he can’t see the runway or even the runway lights. Geoff tells him to stay up in the air, but Joe wants that dinner with Bonnie, so he brings the plane in and crashes, giving us proof that this is a dangerous occupation and creating some additional tension between Geoff and Bonnie. Why? Because Geoff and the other pilots seem to treat Joe’s death as just a thing—Joe suddenly becomes “Joe Who?” and it’s as if no one remembers him. Eventually, Bonnie figures out that this is the pilots’ way of dealing with the constant threat of death that hangs over them, even when the job is as mundane as transporting the mail.

A sort of romance blossoms between Bonnie and Geoff, but it’s one tempered by the reality that Bonnie won’t be staying long and that Geoff refuses entanglements with women since having his heart broken. We also learn that the airline, run by Geoff but financed by Dutchy (Sig Ruman) is in dire straits. They’ve agreed to a six-month test run of the mail route with the knowledge that they’ll earn a lucrative contract if they are always on time.

Now in need of a pilot, Geoff hires Bat MacPherson (Richard Barthelmess), who is actually Bat Kilgallen. This is important for two reasons. First, Bat Kilgallen is known as a pilot who jumped out of his plane, causing the death of his mechanic. It happens that the dead mechanic is the brother of Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell), who happens to be Geoff’s best friend. Second, Bat’s wife is Judy MacPherson (Rita Hayworth), who happens to be the woman who broke Geoff’s heart. Geoff takes Kilgallen on, but as the man who will take the worst assignments. The rest of the movie, then, needs to somehow redeem or curse Kilgallen, resolve his conflict with Kid Dabb, deal with the failing airline, and also deal with Geoff and Bonnie.

What struck me most about this film was the presence of Thomas Mitchell. Had you asked me about him a couple of years ago, I probably wouldn’t have known who he was. If I had known, he would have been Uncle Billy from It’s a Wonderful Life exclusively. I knew I’d see the same actors over and over, but I had no idea how much I would see him, or how much I would come to respect his presence in a film. The same is true of Noah Beery, who was tragically underused in this film.

If the movie has a place where it obviously fails for a modern audience, it’s the flight sequences. They simply do not have any sort of realistic impact. They look, frankly, fake. It’s not always easy to overlook the obvious “studio-ness” of old special effects, and they’re pretty egregiously poor here. Fine for 1939, perhaps, but not so much in this day and age.

Fortunately, the film doesn’t really focus on the flight, but instead on the relationships between the characters. There is a sort of “boy’s-own” adventure quality to the proceedings that feels very typical of this style of film and films from Howard Hawks of this era in general. These are manly men doing a dangerous and manly job; they face death on a regular basis and live wildly on the ground because of it. Death is treated not as a tragedy, but a matter of course—Joe’s demise is certainly regretted, but treated as an inevitability. Geoff and everyone else knew he’d crash some day, but Geoff let him fly anyway, because he knew Joe would rather die than be grounded. This comes into clearer focus when Geoff is forced to ground Kid because of Kid’s rapidly deteriorating eyesight. It’s a touching scene, one that dips into the ideas of aging and male bonding without losing a forced (and effective) light tone and an essential masculinity.

Jean Arthur is a wonder in this film, adapting as quickly as possible to the devil-may-care attitude of Geoff and the men, but revealing frequently that this is merely on the surface. She’s a character of surprising depth for a female lead in 1939, even more surprising because of how she is treated and talked about by the male cast.

Only Angels Have Wings is not a film I would rank with the greats in terms of its overall story or technical prowess, but I would rank it as a film that is essential for understanding the history of the medium. This, like similar films of the era (Gunga Din and Stagecoach--both from the same year and one starring Grant and the other Mitchell) are very much the beginning of a path of the action film with romance elements. That there is less action here is not so important; the danger is implied throughout and extant in enough places that we remember it without being buried by it. Geoff Carter is a natural ancestor to characters like Indiana Jones and John McClane. To get to those, you have to go through here.

Why to watch Only Angels Have Wings: A surprisingly deep and effective cast.
Why not to watch: Audiences have become accustomed to things looking more realistic.

Shhhhhhhh!

Film: Bin-Jip (3-Iron)
Format: DVD from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’m not someone who watches a lot of romances. In today’s world of films, “romance” tends to mean romantic comedy, and based on the last however many years, romantic comedy tends to mean predictable and stupid. I’m even less likely to rush out and purchase a romantic film. So it comes as something of a surprise and out of character that I went out and purchased a copy of Bin-Jip (3-Iron) shortly after watching it the first time. Admittedly, I purchased it from a Blockbuster going out of business, but nonetheless, I wanted a copy after seeing it.

Kim Ki-duk’s film is an unusual one, to say the least. The main protagonist, Tae-suk (Hyun-kyoon Lee) is a silent man who spends his day putting up flyers for restaurants on the front doors of houses and apartments. Later, he returns to neighborhoods he has canvassed and looks for houses that still hold the flyer. When he finds one, he breaks in and lives there for a couple of days, eating the occupants’ food and sleeping in their beds. He repays their unwitting and unplanned hospitality by doing small things around the house for them. He fixes small appliances, waters the plants, and does their laundry.

Things change when he breaks into a large mansion. Tae-suk believes he is alone, but he is not; he is being observed by the woman of the house, Sun-hwa (Seung-yeon Lee). Sun-hwa shows evidence of having been beaten—her face is bruised and her lip is cut. After a day or so, she finally (and silently) confronts Tae-suk. He leaves, but thinks better of it and returns, only to observe her being beaten and humiliated by her husband, Min-gyu (Hyuk-ho Kwan). Rather than specifically intrude on the scene, Tae-suk attracts the man’s attention by using his golf clubs in the back yard. When Min-gyu goes to confront him, Tae-suk turns and starts hitting golf balls into the man with his 3-iron. He leaves, and Sun-hwa follows him, and the two ride off together.

Their life together settles into a familiar and happy rhythm. They follow his daily life, breaking and entering, but taking nothing. Things change initially for them when they are discovered by one couple. Things change again when they find the owner of a house dead on his floor. Not knowing what to do, Tae-suk and Sun-hwa proceed to bury the man with a great amount of respect, but are confronted by the man’s daughter and son-in-law, and are arrested. Tae-guk is charged with murder, kidnapping, breaking and entering, and several other crimes.

If the film wasn’t weird up to this point, here is where it takes a turn for the very bizarre. In prison, Tae-guk develops a skill of essentially becoming a ghost. While still a flesh-and-blood creature, he slowly learns to hide in plain sight, becoming undetectable unless he wishes to be seen. In most respects, he becomes a creature of almost pure spirit. He uses this ability to win his freedom, and returns to Sun-hwa and her husband for a most unusual confrontation.

There are aspects of this film that I find difficult to parse out into something meaningful. Tae-suk, for instance, steals Min-gyu’s 3-iron and a golf ball. He puts a piece of wire through the golf ball and ties it around trees. He then spends a great deal of time just hitting that golf ball. Sun-hwa sometimes stands in front of him when he does this, preventing him from swinging the club. This almost has the feeling of a courtship ritual, like she is offering herself to him. This occurs until one day when the ball goes shooting off the wire and strikes a young woman in a car, quite possibly killing her. After this, Tae-suk stops swinging the club, and the two consummate their relationship.

The most interesting part of the film is something I have only lightly touched on. These characters don’t talk. Sun-hwa speaks only a couple of lines at the end of the film and Tae-suk never speaks at all. Their courtship, romance, and relationship is entirely silent, almost as if they are connected at a deeper level mentally and emotionally rather than through mere physical communication. It’s surprising effective and moving to see these characters find each other in this way and make this strong bond with each other without dialogue getting in the way.

For a romantic film, the sudden bursts of violence are shocking. They are also effective and nicely used. The moments of violence are effective for the simple reason that they are so basic. The violence happens naturally, but often with little warning.

This is a beautiful film, one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and few shots compare with the power of the final shot of the film. It’s uplifting and gorgeous, and remains one of my favorite memories in the film.

In short, this is a tremendous and beautiful film that demands not only to be watched, but to be studied. All movies should strive to challenge. It really is that special.

Why to watch Bin-Jip: Romance has never been this unusual.
Why not to watch: Romance hasn’t been this silent in 80 years.

Future Past

Film: Things to Come
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I have a big soft spot for old science fiction. I’d love to say it’s because I grew up on early sci-fi, and that is a part of the reason. I love early pulp stuff and there’s some truth to the idea that I’m enamored by science fiction that predicts a crazy future that has never come to pass. Things to Come, based on work by science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells, is that sort of film. The film covers nearly 100 years of “history” from war to war to devastation, recovery, restoration, and the threat of war again.

Interestingly, the film predicts a massive war starting at the end of 1940, missing the actual start of World War II by just a little more than a year. On Christmas day, war appears imminent, and three men discuss the possibility of coming hostilities. Cabal (Raymond Massey) is pessimistic, believing that war will only cause terrible harm. Harding (Maurice Braddell) agrees, and he does not look forward to the coming conflict. The third man, Pippa Passworthy (Edward Chapman) does not share their fears, suggesting that war probably will not happen, but if it does, it will stimulate innovation and invention. When the war starts that night with a bombing raid on “Everytown” (a loosely-concealed and renamed London), the country mobilizes and the war truly begins.

The war here is stylized to look very much like the sort of static trench warfare that World War I was most famous for. The war continues for years to the point where it is being fought simply because it is still being fought. Humanity is stricken by a plague known as the wandering sickness (in many ways the first cinematic zombies) that only adds to the general destruction and desolation. In 1970, the wandering sickness is essentially cured through the actions of The Chief (Ralph Richardson), who simply shot anyone came down with the illness, which ultimately claimed half of Europe’s population.

At this time, a strange airplane lands in Everytown. It's Cabal from the beginning of the film. He represents a group of scientists who now live in Basra, claiming that his, well, cabal (called Wings Over the World), has outlawed war and independent nations in the attempt to restore order and civilization. He is captured by the Chief and put to work getting the Chief's airplanes back into service. The Chief's main mechanic Gordon (Derrick de Marney) uses the fixed airplane to hie himself off to Basra to warn the scientists. Wings Over the World attacks, dropping a sleeping gas on Everytown, and when everyone is asleep, Wings Over the World occupies the town and kills the Chief.

And progress goes on. We get a montage of nearly 70 years duration as the world once again embarks on that path toward a technological world of marvels, but there are some who wish for it to slow down or even stop. Unrest begins as Wings Over the World attempts to launch people into the aether above the world. But many want the progress to stop if for no other reason than to prevent things from turning into war and pestilence again.

Any film that predicts a recent future is obsolete before too long, and while this film is disturbingly accurate in terms of what it shows humanity to be like, the future it predicts never really comes even close of coming to pass. Science fiction films always have this trouble, and it is definitely true here, when this film was rendered obsolete a few years after the arrival of the major conflict and long before the walking sickness.

It’s an interesting view of the future world, but it would in many ways be so much more interesting if it didn’t attempt to be anything that has since become such typical old science fiction tropes that they become expected and cliché. It’s not fair to this film, since in many ways it invented these particular clichés. However, once the cliché is there, it's almost impossible not to see it, regardless of it being fresh and new here.

Sadly, this is a film that has aged poorly. It comes off as stagey as well as preachy and moralizing. Too bad, really. I imagine for its time it was something truly special, but now the story is a bit dull and silly. While the lesson is still an interesting one, I’d rather not have a moral shoved down my throat simply because it can be.

Why to watch Things to Come: Science fiction when it was new.
Why not to watch: It’s aged less like wine and more like a dairy product.

Springtime for Hitler

Film: The Producers
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

Of late, I’ve been watching a lot of seriously depressing movies, so I figured it was time for a change. I don’t remember the first time I saw The Producers, but I remember that it was really funny. Screamingly funny. Pee in your pants and almost pass out funny. So it was time to watch it again because I’d really had enough of watching things that made me want to pound my head on the wall until I fell unconscious.

The Producers is the first movie Mel Brooks ever directed, and in many ways it is his best film. It’s his most coherent film, at least. Many of his other films go off on wild, fourth-wall-breaking tangents. These tend to be funny, but off the plot. The Producers arguably breaks the fourth wall once or twice, but tends to follow a basic story from start to finish.

Our story features a Broadway producer named Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) who has fallen on hard times. Once one of the best producers in town, he currently produces only flops. To get money to produce his flops, he is reduced to seducing little old ladies in his office. During one such seduction, he is interrupted by an accountant named Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder), there to do his books.

What Leo discovers is that for his last play, Bialystock took in $60,000 but spent only $58,000, making a sort of profit of $2,000. Bloom is convinced to hide the two grand and makes the observation that under the right circumstances, a producer could make more money with a flop than with a hit. If he oversold the play, getting tons and tons of investors, and then produced a terrible play, there’d be no profit to split with the backers, and he could keep everything.

The two decide to go for it, and look for the worst play they can find. The find it in “Springtime for Hitler,” a play praising the Third Reich, written by a former Nazi named Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars). They then seek the worst director they can find, settling on the flamingly gay, cross-dressing, and completely off the deep end director Roger de Bris (Christopher Hewitt). They then need to cast the worst star they can, getting permanently drugged oddball Lorenzo “LSD” St. Dubois (Dick Shawn). Bialystock seduces the little old ladies, they fund the show, and Max and Leo prepare to make close to a million dollars (real serious money in 1968) and head down to Rio. Unfortunately, the play turns out to be a massive hit because de Bris has turned it into a comedy, leaving Bialystock and Bloom facing a long prison term and an author who wants them dead.

It’s a straightforward story. To turn this into a comedy, Brooks needs to get as much out of every situation as he possibly can, and he does. The film is consistently funny at the start, balancing the manic energy of Zero Mostel against the near-hysteria of Gene Wilder, who could not be more perfect as the needy, nervous and painfully neurotic Leo Bloom. He’s a step or two past believable, but it doesn’t matter because he’s ridiculously funny.

The movie starts to kick into high with the appearance of Kenneth Mars, who is one of the real high points of this film. Kenneth Mars is great, and his character, like all of the characters in this film, is too far to one extreme to be a real person, but is so funny that it doesn’t matter. He wrote his play praising Hitler because he hates Churchill, and because Hitler was a great dancer. Bialystock and Bloom, two Jews, are forced to wear swastikas and sing the German national anthem to convince him, but the play is so bad, they figure it’s worth it.

Dick Shawn’s arrival is equally brilliant. He’s taken so many drugs in his lifetime that he has trouble remembering his own name, and he can’t manage to keep a thought in his head for longer than a couple of seconds.

Although all of this is great and everything is going the way Max and Leo want it to, no single moment in this film, and few moments in the history of film are as funny as the actual opening of the play and the musical number “Springtime for Hitler.” No matter how many times I see it, it never fails to make me laugh out loud to the point where I have trouble breathing. I can’t think of a single moment of film that makes me laugh harder than this one. Even the lyrics are great: “Springtime for Hitler and Germany/Winter for Poland and France./We’re marching to a faster pace./Look out, here comes the master race.”

The Producers, like all good Mel Brooks comedy from his heyday, is horribly offensive and in terrible taste. That’s sort of the point. If you let yourself be offended by it, it’s there to give you offense. If you let it go, it cannot fail to make you laugh unless you have no sense of humor. This film is constantly and consistently funny, and builds to a crescendo of humor that truly and completely pays off. What Brooks figured out with this film is that the best way to defeat a tyrant isn't to engage in debate or shout him down, but to laugh at him. Laughter makes it possible to not take him seriously, and that spells defeat for any despot.

Mel Brooks made a lot of funny movies early in his career, but he was never again this focused. The Producers remains one of the funniest films I have ever seen, and certainly will be forever. The remake is cute, but doesn’t have the manic intensity of the original. Watch this. Watch it soon, and then watch it again. You’ll laugh just as hard the second time.

Why to watch The Producers: Because it’s damn funny.
Why not to watch: If you offend easily, it will offend you.

Psychosis

Film: Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

As I looked through the list of films still to watch, it occurred to me that there are a number of directors I have either ignored or virtually ignored. Ingmar Bergman is one of those directors. He’s got 10 films on the list, one of the very small list of directors in the double digits, and yet I’ve watched only two. Tonight was time to remedy that by sitting through Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf). I don’t really know why I decided on Bergman specifically, except that I’ve just sort of avoided him so far. Of course, the same is true of Robert Altman, whose six films remain unwatched. However, in the case of Altman, it’s because he often seems to confuse me or put me to sleep.

Thought by many to be Bergman’s descent into the horror genre (or for those of us who are horror fans, Bergman’s rise into horror), this film is also very much a companion piece to Persona, as it touches on some of the same general themes. And it is a horror piece, even if it’s not what you might expect from something called a horror movie. This is an existential horror movie, one that works on the psychological instead of the jump scare. The horror doesn’t come from monsters or machete-wielding guys jumping out of the shadows, but the fear of the past, the fear of memory, and the fear of guilt.

The film begins with a voiceover from Bergman telling us that the film is based on the diary of an artist named Johan Borg, who disappeared without a trace. His wife speaks to us well, telling us that she doesn’t know what has happened, and that she will soon give birth. It is she who gave the journal to Bergman. In some ways, at least obliquely, this film is the parent of The Blair Witch Project.

Johan Borg (Bergman mainstay and muse Max von Sydow) is an artist who is troubled by his past. His wife, Alma (Bergman’s other muse Liv Ullman), attempts to be sympathetic to him and be there for him. It becomes evident early on that Johan has some things going on mentally. He’s started to see people in the area around him and his wife as something akin to demons. An old woman with an enormous hat, for instance, removes her face along with her hat according to Johan. He’s given nicknames to the people who appear to be plaguing him—Carnivore, Bird-Man, Schoolmaster, etc. The hardest time of the day for him is the time between midnight and dawn, the eponymous hour of the wolf when, according to Johan, most people die and are born.

During these nighttime hours, Johan talks to Alma, telling her about his past and things that he remains guilt-stricken over. Slowly, both Alma and the audience realize that the demons that Johan is seeing are shades of these past guilts and terrors—he is being plagued by his own past, although that doesn’t mean that the demons aren’t real. Since Borg is a well-known painter, he and his wife are invited to the castle of the man who owns the island they are on for a dinner. What proceeds is a surreal dinner filled with the same sort of demons and temptations that have attacked Borg since, evidently, before the beginning of the film.

Ullman and von Sydow constantly look out of place in this film, nowhere more than at the horrific dinner at the castle. This is naturally intentional—the fact that they are constantly uncomfortable makes us uncomfortable as well. The film attempts (and succeeds) in putting the audience off balance and keeping the audience off balance for as much as possible. So, as much as it is the natural parent of Blair Witch, it is similarly at least a paternal uncle of a film like Jacob’s Ladder. Ullman in particular looks as if she is constantly on the verge of running away. The fact that she looks like she’s about 12 does nothing but enhance this effect.

Vargtimmen is exactly the sort of horror film that I favor. Oh, I don’t mind a bit of gore now and then when it makes sense in the film, but I’m not a big fan of splatter for the sake of splatter. Vargtimmen doesn’t go anywhere near that sort of gratuitous violence, but tries (and succeeds) is creating a world that is just skewed enough from the normal to be become terribly disturbing and frightening because of its surface normalcy and subcutaneous evil and weirdness. It’s damn weird, but it hits every twisted, strange, horrible note perfectly. We don’t even get a title card until the movie is more than half over—almost as if the first half of the film is nothing but set up for the true horror and psychological evil that comes at the end.

I don’t want this to sound like there aren’t moments of true shock in the film, because there are. There are some moments that are truly awful and horrific, and yet filmed with a disturbing clarity and beauty. It’s truly masterful when a director can make something so terrible to witness something riveting to watch at the same time. I see pieces of other films here--Blair Witch in the sense that it plays like a found story, Jacob’s Ladder in how it plays as a mental drama, Eyes Wide Shut for its blatant voyeuristic sexuality, Repulsion for its slow descent into madness. The fact that it predates all of these except Repulsion only indicates that even Kubrick borrowed from Bergman. That this reminds me of later films only indicates that I saw those first.

So far, it’s my favorite Bergman. I realize that doesn’t say a whole lot, but this is a film I plan on watching again, because I can only imagine that it gets better with additional viewings. It’s not really nightmare fuel, but it certainly has the ability to haunt one’s thoughts for some time after viewing, which may be the most complimentary thing I can say about any film.

Why to watch Vargtimmen: Bergman + horror.
Why not to watch: Blair Witch plus Jacob’s Ladder plus Repulsion plus Eyes Wide Shut equals a big ol’ WTF.

The Wheels on the Bus go 'Round and 'Round

Film: The Sweet Hereafter
Format: DVD from NetFlix on portable DVD player.

Tragedy, according to ancient Greek fuzzyhead Aristotle, comes from someone making a terrible mistake and undergoing a terrible reversal of fortune. Typically, people think of traditional tragedy as coming from a character flaw, which results in an inevitable conclusion. Regardless of it being a mistake or a flaw in the person him- or herself, classic tragedy comes not from chance or random fate, but as a matter of course. We expect the ending we get, because the ending is in a sense pre-ordained.

Today, though, tragedy is more or less the word used for any terrible event regardless of how it happens or what brings it about. The central event of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter is not a classic tragedy, but a modern one. In a small town in British Columbia, a school bus accident has killed many of the town’s children. This has naturally left the town in an emotional shambles.

In the wake of the accident, a lawyer named Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) arrives in town. It’s his contention that the town needs to act quickly if they are to receive any damages by claiming that the bus was faulty. Initially, the parents resist this idea, still mired in their grief, but eventually, Stephens convinces them that a class action suit is a good idea. Eventually, the case comes down to the testimony of a surviving victim named Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley), who was paralyzed in the crash.

The Sweet Hereafter has a difficult road to go down here, and for many people, it starts with some significant strikes against it. As a parent, the idea of watching a movie that focuses on the deaths of two dozen or so children is not something I sit down to lightly. I don’t want to see children die, and I don’t want to contemplate it. I don’t want to put myself in the position of the parents in this film. Considering the death of a child is not something that crosses my mind, not because I think it doesn’t or can’t happen, but because I don’t want to think about it happening to me. And so, I went into this film with my guard up.

A great deal of the film comes out in flashback as Stephens speaks to a childhood friend (Stephanie Morgenstern) of his daughter, Zoe (Caerthan Banks). It becomes evident very quickly that in many ways, he is dealing with a more traditional tragedy of his own. Zoe has been addicted to drugs for years, and is in and out of rehab centers, clinics, and halfway houses. Much like the people of the town have lost their children, he has lost his own, and in a real way, he empathizes with their plight.

This film could have gone in a number of directions, almost all of them bad. A nudge here, a twist there, and this becomes melodrama. A tweak in one spot or another turns it into maudlin farce. Instead, the film is very tightly controlled throughout. We aren’t thrust into the tragedy, but moved into it slowly. We’re given the small details of the people and of the day that the accident occurred on as the film progresses, allowing us to, in a way, ease into the pain that we know will come eventually. From the first ten minutes in, the moment we first see the bus that has been pulled from the water, we know where we are going, but we are given the mental and emotional room to get there on our own.

How does one react to this film? Personally, I think. There is no specific or general reaction to a film that has such enormous potential for reaction. Many a person will rip through a box of tissues as this film goes on while others will respond with a sort of numb shock. In other words, people will react in ways much like the parents of the children themselves. There is no correct response for this, because every response will be a personal one.

Part of the wisdom of this film is that it presents the people here as real, and their lives as real. The town is not as idyllic as we may wish to believe at first. The sorts of problems that people have in the wider world happen here. Abuse happens. Affairs happen. Private tragedies—real tragedies—go on and give us new ways to look at what has happened and what will happen with these shattered lives and broken families.

The Sweet Hereafter is a masterful piece of filmmaking. If Atom Egoyan never made another film after this, he’d be remembered for this one. For a film that could have so easily been something awful and brutal, it is surprisingly beautiful. I cannot truthfully say that I enjoyed this film; the pain of innocent people is not on my list of pleasures. I can’t say I want to watch this again. I can say that unlike many films that seem to wallow in misery and self-pity and a need to wring every last emotional response out of its audience, that this film feels real and honest. It is a punch to the gut, but is the sort of punch that makes the viewer come away whole. Sometimes we break so that we can rebuild stronger. This film is like that. But I don’t want to break this way again.

Why to watch The Sweet Hereafter: Because life goes on after tragedy.
Why not to watch: How much tragedy do you need?