Catching up with 2013: All is Lost

J.C. Chandor’s All is Lost is a mesmerizing experience. One of the very best pictures of the year. Much of this, no doubt, is owed to the film’s lead — and only — performance. “Tour de force,” that oft-used cliché when describing an award worthy performance, comes to mind when describing Robert Redford’s performance as Our Man (the fact that he remains nameless and, for the most part, history-less is one of the many things I admired about the movie). And that is an appropriate way to describe Redford since all 105 minutes of the film is all Redford all the time, so the performance better engage the viewer, and it better be something that keeps the viewer always wondering what’s going to happen next. Redford is nothing short of phenomenal here. Redford’s face says it all: the look he gives when he knows he’s in some shit, the devastating look he gives his ship as he watches it sink, and the heartbreaking way he lets go of the tether to his life raft — fully aware that things are about to get even more bleak. There is also moment of realization on that life raft that is so frustrating, so deflating, that Our Man simply cannot hold it in anymore and yells out the most anguished “Fuck!” I’ve heard in quite some time. Is it to God (doubtful since he doesn’t add a “you” to the end of it)? To himself for being so careless? To the life he knows he will not return to? This little moment is just one of many where Redford says so much by doing so little.

Yet, as crucial as the lead performance is to the film’s success, All is Lost would merely be a “good” film and not a great and memorable film were it not for Chandor’s attention to details (there are so many moments where I found myself on the edge of my seat wondering what he was doing and why he was doing it, watching this character think and process and survive) and the film’s tremendous use of sound (in addition to the great storm scenes, there is a moment where Our Man goes back onto his sinking boat to retrieve some items, and the creaking and cracking and deep moans that emanate from the doomed ship are downright terrifying). The ending will no doubt be a point of contention for some (this will be one of those movies that I recommend to people, and they’ll probably wonder what the hell is wrong with me), but like all great works of existentialism, the ending can mean whatever you want it to mean depending on how you view the world — similarly, like all great existential works, it has the ability to make us inventory on our lives and think about the world in which we inhabit a little differently.

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Sydney Pollack: Havana

Sydney Pollack doesn’t instill fervency within one to go back and look at his films with fresh eyes in the way many have recently been passionately singing the praises of damned-upon-released films like Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate (the latter, especially, has seemed to be piquing interest in the blogosphere, thanks to its recent Criterion release, with many claiming that the film is some kind of misunderstood masterpiece). I don’t sense the urgency for bloggers and critics to run out and say, “oooh, I should revisit Havana because, gosh darn it, people were just so unfair to that movie when it was released in 1991.” Now, I’m a bit cynical with all this revisionist criticism stuff (what’s next, Howard the Duck or Hudson Hawk are masterpieces, too?), but I have to admit something: the minute I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack’s career, I was most interested in watching Havana for the very reason that it seemed so unfairly maligned at the time.  I mean the film couldn’t be that bad, right (“Seinfeld” even took a little bit of a jab at)? I was kind of excited to take a recent look at Havana in hopes that it might reveal itself to be one of those forgotten masterpieces – one of those films people like to go back and talk about now as if we were all crazy for thinking the film was bollocks to begin with. Well, I’m here to tell ya’ll: Havana is no such film. The film – everything about it from the performances to the faux Scorsese-esque energy Pollack tries to inject his film with – is inert. A lifeless film filled with lifeless performances and a lifeless romance at the heart of it.

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Sydney Pollack: Out of Africa

Out of Africa is one of those “sweeping epics” the Academy loves so much, so it’s no wonder that it – and not better films like Three Days of the Condor or Tootsie – won Pollack his Oscars for directing and producing. I put "sweeping epic" in scare quotes because Out of Africa, although decent at times, is painfully ordinary in how it tries to win the audience over as a big, 'ol fashioned epic. It wants to be big in scope and sprawling in its love story; however, Out of Africa is not even close to being Pollack’s best film (in fact, of the five films nominated that year, it’s easily the fifth best of the bunch). It’s too satisfied with its “scope” to be anything more than a pandering awards season picture. It has some nice, quiet moments between its two leads (nothing new for a Pollack film), but the episodic nature of the narrative left me feeling cold. In fact, while watching Out of Africa, my mind was drawn to 1995's The English Patient (another film that feels like a false epic): an apt comparison in that it too was just an okay movie with some decent performances that isn’t nearly as romantic or sweeping in its scope as the Academy hype wants us to believe. I certainly didn't have any Elaine Benes outbursts while watching Out of Africa, but it did fill me with a kind of apathy that I've rarely felt while working my way through Pollack's films (the only thing that really comes close is Absence of Malice or Bobby Deerfield).

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Sydney Pollack: The Electric Horseman

If you follow this blog at all, then you probably know that I am not someone who favors plot or story over other elements in film. I don’t need a mind-bender to keep me interested; in fact, I have no use for movies like The Usual Suspects, Inception, and films of their ilk. Mostly it’s because I feel like a lot of those kinds of films (with the exception of Inception which had great stunts) use their twisty storylines as a way to mask their film’s deficiencies. Sometimes the actors can make it work, and sometimes the film just falls completely flat because I’m spending the entirety of the movie trying to figure out just what the hell is going on instead of getting invested in the characters. There are countless filmmakers that I don’t need to waste your time by listing their names that can balance this, but I generally don’t look for films with “interesting” storylines” to draw me in.

So what am I getting at? Well, by selecting Sydney Pollack as my director for this retrospective I have dug myself into a bit of a hole compared to the other two filmmakers I’ve previously covered in this projected (truncated retrospectives on Oliver Stone and Ken Russell) because of the fact that I love the simplicity of Pollack’s films so much (there really is nothing “twisty” about his plots; they’re simple, classic storylines) I often find myself lacking for content beyond the general plot synopsis. The Electric Horseman is no different: a film with all of Pollack’s favorite themes, two great lead performances, a storyline that is nothing new, and a small chase scene to break up the monotony. It’s not that it’s a bad movie (just like Bobby Deerfield wasn’t a bad movie), but it lacks the elegiac tone of something akin to it like Junior Bonner. Where Peckinpah’s film was an elegy to the Old West as the New West pervaded it, The Electric Horseman is similar in tone (Las Vegas artifice/corporate exploitation of an old cowboy’s morals is similar to the ever-changing rodeo circuit and quickly evolving New West Junior confronts in Junior Bonner)  but acts more as an adventure/buddy picture; a little more light-hearted than previous Pollack/Redford collaboration, Jeremiah Johnson, but very similar in tone (both films were shot at Zion National Park in Utah, so there is a similar feel in setting).

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Sydney Pollack: Three Days of the Condor

Note #1: Throughout this retrospective I’ve referenced this interview with Pollack. I couldn’t find a place to reference it in this piece, so I figured I would put it up at the beginning. 

Note #2: Many, many thanks to Odie, whose fresh look at this piece helped trim a lot of the fat. This was one of the first pieces I actually started working on when I decided to do a retrospective on Pollack, and I was dreading the due date because I knew I was nowhere close to finishing it since I found myself adding more and more every week. If I were rich, I would hire an editor for this blog because god knows I often need one. Thanks, Odie!

In 1975, Sydney Pollack released two movies that were polar opposites in tone and style. His first release that year was the Paul Schrader-penned The Yakuza – a violent tale of a begrudging partnership that was new territory for Pollack – and the second release was yet another vehicle with his favorite star (to that point) Robert Redford that tackled a popular theme of the mid-‘70s (paranoia), Three Days of the Condor. The former is something of a cult classic now and thought fondly by those that like the divergence in style and tone Pollack took in directing that film; however, the latter is the more popular (and one of the most popular of Pollack’s oeuvre) and the film that stays with me much more so than the former. Three Days of the Condor is not Pollack’s best film, but it’s one of my favorites  in the way it sets up themes and tropes he would later tackle in films like The Firm (and in the films he acted in like Michael Clayton and Changing Lanes) and for what is probably my favorite performance that Redford gave Pollack.

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Sydney Pollack: The Way We Were

The Way We Were is everything its title song suggests: capital “d” dramatic and capital “r” romantic. In other words, it’s not subtle at all. It’s not even close to my favorite of Pollack’s films (Pollack himself didn’t seem to care all that much for the film, stating that his biggest accomplishment was merely, “getting the thing made”), but there’s something classically deliberate and endearing about the tone of the first half of the film: an hour that knows exactly the kind of film it is and executes the romantic melodrama perfectly. It’s in the second half of the film that story becomes problematic as Pollack and his screenwriter Arthur Laurents try to cram too many topical, political subplots into the film. The effect is a film that starts off earnest in its romantic schmaltziness but devolves into a film totally unable to shift tones.

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Sydney Pollack: Jeremiah Johnson

“I was never what I would call a great shooter or visual stylist.”

That quote is from Sydney Pollack, referenced in Roger Ebert’s obituary for the director, and it’s an apt description of the director's style that he would more or less stick to throughout his career. We’re a ways from the end-point in this retrospective, and I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself; however, I couldn’t help but think of that quote as I watched Jeremiah Johnson, a film that so badly wants to be an epic western. The film is good, even great in certain moments, but it’s a little too strained in its approach to be an epic (the movie is not even two hours and it contains overture and an intermission complete with “entr’acte” title card) in the same vein as other anti-establishment, Vietnam era westerns like Little Big Man and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Each film is different in tone, sure, but they all share something similar in that modern society does not allow for man to peacefully enter into nature and try and not only understand it but become one with it – to get away from all of the violence and self-imposition; society is always seeping in to corrupt and impose its own will. Those are the moments that are brilliantly effective and play to Pollack’s strengths as a director. When Pollack isn’t meandering from one scenic view to another (struggling to make the film visually poetic), Jeremiah Johnson is a beautiful, introspective western akin to something felt while reading Thoreau (there’s even a line where the character says, “the Rockies are the marrow of the world,” echoing the famous line from Walden). It is in those small, and often quiet, moments that Jeremiah Johnson works. 

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