David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: The
Lighthouse and The Current Wars)
A little light on two movies fixated on light:
The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers, who shivered many with The Witch in 2015, has made The Lighthouse as a steampunky quest for a maritime fable. His vision concerns a Victorian lighthouse on the raw North Atlantic coast.
We can imagine this rugged outpost hosting Edward G. Robinson’s crazy Captain Wolf
Larsen (The Sea Wolf), or Wagner’s Rhine
maidens on an ocean cruise, or even (why not?) Wilson the volleyball, floating
in from Cast Away. Framed in a
classic 4:3 aspect ratio that tightly funnels Jarin Blaschke’s gothic, black
and white photography, The Lighthouse
joins other movies with primal stories and curt, primal titles: The Island, The Hill, The Hurricane, The
Fog, The Gun, The Village, The Wind, The Road and The Birds (menacing seagulls seem to have flown directly from
Hitchcock’s nightmare of bird paranoia).
Antiquity’s fabled lighthouse was the giant Pharos of
Alexandria. Eggers and his design team have turned a Nova Scotia lighthouse
into a wave-pounded phallus of Neptune (or, in Freudian terms, a big cigar). The
macho master is old Tom Wake. Willem Dafoe, having played Christ, Satan, the
Buddha, Van Gogh, Vulko (Aquaman) and
Green Goblin (Spider-Man), isn’t
about to miss a trick with this rockbound Ahab. Stomping around on a peg leg,
his gnarly, glaring face like a hairball of seaweed, Wake shouts lewd shanties
and spouts Moby-Dickish gusts of mad rhetoric. As a foghorn booms, he taunts and
enslaves his new apprentice, Winslow (Robert Pattinson), who hauls coal for the
steam motor, cleans rampant filth (Wake: “Swab,
dog, swab!”) and carries loaded chamber pots out to a jetty during a gale. The
men are like blowfish trapped in a septic aquarium, and their drinking binges expose
guilty secrets.
We must believe that Eggers wanted comedy when
Winslow, sick of Wake’s slop buckets of seafood gruel, bellows “If I had a
steak I’d fuck it!” Wake replies like
a miffed Julia Childs, “You don’t like my cooking?” Their increasingly feral
(and erotic) duel of wills could be compelling, except that Pattinson, in strapping
prime with arms like anchors, uses a slurred, Boston chowder accent and can’t
match Dafoe’s vocal power. Only Wake has high-rise rights to the top of the
tower where, risking blindness, he worships the mighty light beam as Neptune.
Never before has alcoholic mysticism had such a platform.
It is impossible to out-Melville Melville or
out-Conrad Conrad. Anyway, old actor and sea skipper Sterling Hayden surfed
this particular wave long ago, in his boozed rants on a houseboat in the
documentary Pharos of Chaos. The Lighthouse is a beached whale, stuffed
with lurid themes of sea mania, macho dominance and pent-up gay desire harpooned
by homophobia. The images are often terrific, such as the cold, dreamy mermaid who
lures drunken Winslow with her grasping tentacles. But the text is gibberish,
and the film becomes self-parody. Full fathom five, and foolish, this movie
lies.
The Current War
As a kid I discovered Chicago’s Museum of Science and
Industry, the grand, almost Roman pile first built for the Columbian Exposition
of 1893 (Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck would save the building, which
became a huge wonderland for tech nerds). The
Current War rightly climaxes with the dazzling electric light of the fair,
the topping showdown of the lords of early electricity, prolific inventor
Thomas A. Edison and industrial visionary George Westinghouse. Their long,
money-burning struggle to dominate the new lighting of America is echoed on a
small scale by the movie’s near blackout. After showing at the 2017 Toronto
festival, it fell victim to the collapse of sex scandal Harvey Weinstein’s
production firm. Now it arrives as a “director’s cut,” thanks largely to Martin
Scorsese, who came to the rescue of filmmaker Alfonso Gomez Rejon.
The movie has a great subject. We learn a lot, in a rushed
way. Gaudy with CGI retro design and
fabulous machines, the film is giddy (hyper-active pacing, hoggish close-ups.).
Everyone seems wired (Edison’s wife recalls their Niagara honeymoon as “enough
to illuminate a lifetime”). As brilliant egotist Edison, Benedict
Cumberbatch is so ablaze with his “direct current” dream that he almost sparks like
Elsa Lanchester’s Bride of Frankenstein.
The contrast with “alternating current” advocate Westinghouse, played as a
block of hard-headed integrity by Michael Shannon, gives the movie its vital friction
(at first serving Edison, then saving Westinghouse, is Nicholas Hoult’s Nikola
Tesla, the émigré genius who provided a key breakthrough).There is plenty of
moral skirmishing about patents, legal schemes and whether to build the first
electrocution chair. There is also a ripe sense of scale and history, and when
the White City beams, we catch an era at
its joyous peak (even though the Beaux Arts exposition structures set back
modern architecture for years). The
Current War deserves a booking at the Museum of Science and Industry, maybe
near the stunning steam locomotive or the Nazi U-boat.
SALAD (A List)
Twelve
Good Seafaring Movies
In order of arrival (with star, director, year):
Mutiny on the
Bounty (Charles Laughton, Frank
Lloyd, 1935), Captain Blood (Errol
Flynn, Michael Curtiz, 1935), The Sea
Wolf (Edward G. Robinson, Michael Curtiz, 1941), Captain Horatio Hornblower (Gregory Peck, Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Cruel Sea (Jack Hawkins, Charles
Frend, 1953), 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea (James Mason, Richard Fleischer, 1954), The Enemy Below (Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, 1956), Moby Dick (Gregory Peck, John Huston,
1956), Mutiny on the Bounty (Marlon
Brando, Lewis Milestone, 1962), Jaws
(Richard Dreyfuss, Steven Spielberg, 1975), Master
and Commander: The Far Side of the World (Russell Crowe, Peter Weir, 2003)
and Riding Giants (Laird Hamilton,
Stacy Peralta, 2004).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
What
the French call mise-en- scene would
translate into Orson Welles English as mix-and-match. Never more than in the
marvelous pastiche of his exotic 1955 noir Mr.
Arkadin, shot on the run with a skeletal budget and scrambled script: “The
Munich Christmas scenes were filmed on a set of reception rooms for Luís
Marquina’s film Alta costura in
Spain, and at the Hilton Castillana which Welles filled with a crowd of unpaid
extras invited to ‘a filming party.’ The luxurious La Gavina hotel on the Costa
Brava was used for terraces of Sophie’s Mexican residence. Arkadin has to have
a castle in Spain, so that will be no less than Segovia’s Alcázar.” And so it
went, hopping around much of Europe. (From Orson
Welles at Work by Jean-Pierre Berthomé and Francois Thomas. Of Arkadin’s various edits, the best is
Criterion’s Comprehensive Version.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Brilliantly
versatile writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante nailed a crucial truth: “Vanishing Point is my script as seen on
the white mirror of the screen, in DeLuxe color, running at 24 frames per
second, in stereo sound—much more than I ever wrote, or could write. That’s a
movie. I just wrote the screenplay.” (From the Introduction in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Enigmatic
billionaire Grigori Arkadin (Orson Welles) looms over the exotic locations that
define Mr. Arkadin (1955; director
Orson Welles, d.p. Jean Bourgoin).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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