David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: The Brink
and The Mustang)
The Brink
Reviewing a movie about firebrand Stephen K. Bannon is
low work. You feel like a cat who finds a fat, dead roach in his hairball. The Brink, from documentarian Alison
Klayman, is a rapid montage of her Bannon interviews, also his speeches, meetings,
rants and moods. It follows the “architect” of Donald Trump’s election after
his quick 2017 exit from the White House which, even as Trump’s free-form playpen,
cramped Bannon’s gonzo impulses.
He swaggers onward, suffering defeat with one of the
worst candidates ever to stain old Alabama, Judge Roy “Gimme a Filly” Moore. Next
he becomes the free-lance prophet of a multi-national pirate crew of power grabbers,
his chosen chevaliers de Steve for a crusade
against elitist “globalism.” Everything boils down to fear, tactics and
propaganda, the harbingers of strife, chaos and coming klepto-regimes. Once a
pet favorite of the ultra-right Mercer family, Bannon knows how to follow the
money.
Most of us have encountered the Steve type: the aging,
hefty dude at the bar, with grotty skin and an avuncular smile, happy to clamp a
bear paw on your shoulder as he pours a crackpot cascade of nonsense into your
ear. Canny and funny (he fed rich diss to Michael Wolfe’s book on Trump), Bannon
has seldom met a group he couldn’t affront, bemuse, befuddle or rouse with paranoid
hormone injections about God and country, about the outraged Us vs. the alien
Others. His young debut gig was being elected macho class president, soon ousted
by the administration. Before the Web gave him the crank’s megaphone of Breitbart,
he was a fringe pest and Hollywood barnacle. Now he confers with oil-slick
English demagogue Nick “Brexit” Farrage, raises money for rising stars of angry
nativism, plays foxy for Fox and touts Trump as the Great Oz of our times. Both
men seem involved in a crazy crusade to make America less American.
Bannon is vague about the cheap, alarmist movies he made,
though still pleased that in one “my shit at Auschwitz really rocked” (he praises the hellish camp’s Germanic
engineering). Batting away accusations of fascism, he also does a giddy
frat-boy riff about Nazi director Leni (Triumph
of the Will) Riefenstahl. In a funk of self-pity he compares himself to suffering
Lincoln, and Abe’s portrait oversees his condo living room. A crafty hustler with
no compass of moral maturity, Bannon can always deliver a sound bite, yet never
approaches a credible, viable ideology. The future he promises is pure backwardness,
a dystopian, predatory world of combative fools. Its big novel will be Atlas Mugged.
The Mustang
The horse movie is a lariat tangent of the Western,
though my faves are not Westerns: Carroll Ballard’s boyhood classic The Black Stallion and Cindy Meehl’s
portrait of a horse (and rider) trainer, Buck.
A prison equine movie set in Nevada, The
Mustang is about a furious, repressed con, Roman Coleman. No Ronald Colman,
he is played by Euro-macho star Matthias Schoenaerts like a bald bullet (with a
trim beard for extra ballistic effect). Swollen with muscle and guilty rage
about past family mayhem, Roman faces a newly caught, pale mustang only slightly
less taciturn than himself. In the inmate program which “tames” wild creatures
for border patrols (or adoption), angry man and angry beast start to breathe
together, finding trust. Riding his steed, after learning the limits of fists,
Roman gains mental release from his alpha-male cage. And connects with his slowly
forgiving daughter, played very well by Gideon Adlon.
The feature debut of director Laure de
Clermont-Tonnerre, daughter of a French count, The Mustang has some of the he-manly
poetry of Claire Denis’s Foreign Legion film Beau Travail. She and cinematographer Ruben Impens craft a vision
of stark Nevada hills, taut con bodies, fast horses and the severe modern prison.
Schoenaerts uncoils from Bronson/Stathem silence without mushing too far, with expert
support from Jason Mitchell as an impish inmate and veteran Bruce Dern, 82, as
the seen-it-all buckaroo who bosses the program. High moment: toothy Dern biting
off “Not only do it – get it done.” The
story fuzzes a couple of plot points. It could have used more time with Roman
and his mustang as they bond and learn. But it puts us in a tough, touching
place.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Ace
Depictions of Political Villains
In order of arrival, with star, film, date: Hynkel, i.e. Hitler (Charlie Chaplin,
The Great Dictator, 1940); Cesare
Borgia (Orson Welles, Prince of Foxes,
1949); Willie Stark, i.e. Huey Long (Broderick Crawford, All the King’s Men, 1949); Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman, Viva Zapata!, 1952); King Richard
(Laurence Olivier, Richard III, 1955);
Boss Finley (Ed Begley, Sweet Bird of
Youth, 1962); Hitler (Noah Taylor, Max,
2002); Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker, The
Last King of Scotland, 2006); Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo, Il Divo, 2008); Mussolini (Filippo Timi,
Vincere,
2009).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
In
his diary (April 2, 1957) Charlton Heston fondly recalled the wrap on Touch of Evil: “We finished work with a
final dawn shot, of Orson’s death in an overturned chair on a dump heap, then
had a celebrant drink or two in the trailer. Orson and I took along the last
magnum of champagne and found a place still open, to give us bacon and eggs to
go with it. A hell of a picture to work on. I can’t imagine it won’t be fine.
We saw Orson’s Lady from Shanghai on
TV. It’s good, but not as good as ours, I think.” (Heston was right about that.
From David Kipen’s new book Dear Los
Angeles: The City in Diaries and Letters 1542 to 2018.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Scripted
and rehearsed, the ricochet rhythms of Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (GeneWilder)
found in The Producers a wild spritz
of freedom: “The tango of shared anarchy is acting so free (but precise) that
the players must fly or die as they ‘wing it.’ Expense of energy allowed few
takes, and the verbal duel surpassed, that same year, Walter Matthau and Jack
Lemmon in The Odd Couple (equation:
Mostel’s flung coffee, Matthau’s hurled spaghetti). Cornered by close-ups, we
smell the sweat, feel the spittle, taste the adrenaline. The ‘60s fibrillation
of ‘30s screwball had found more style, but not more humor, in Dr. Strangelove, four years before.”
(From the Zero Mostel/The Producers chapter
of my book Starlight Rising,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Cynical
opportunist Aguirre (Joseph Wiseman) tries to steer rebel idealist Zapata
(Marlon Brando) in Viva Zapata! (20th
Century Fox, 1952; director Elia Kazan, photography by Joseph MacDonald).
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