Master Acting In "The Master"

Late in the summer I sought out The Master to witness an acclaimed director, Paul Thomas Anderson, do his thing with two of the most interesting actors around, Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The result seems a bit ... experimental.

Like most PTA films (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights), this one does get inside you and worm its way around, leaving you vaguely discomfited. The question with The Master is whether this is discomfort for discomfort's sake or whether there is actually any There there.

The Master is not as satisfying as There Will Be Blood -- because though Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview character is over the top in greed and intensity, we as indoctrinated Americans understand intuitively the Old West, up-by-your-bootstraps, greedy business maverick, Citizen Kane, rags-to-riches-to-wretchedness narrative. By contrast The Master forces the audience to work harder to co-author its intent. For one thing, we Americans tend to frown on the idea of cults and charlatans in anything but comedies or cautionary tales. So culturally, the character of The Master -- though played by Hoffman as an avuncular humanist -- is not sympathetic. Further, we expect our villains -- for as brilliantly portrayed as Phoenix can make him, Quell is a villain -- to get their comeuppance. Because of this, the film is a curiosity and offers no real tension. It has a great premise, but squanders it. Depending on what you go to the cinema for, it seems The Master has limited payoff.

For no real reason is Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell an immature, sex obsessed, badly socialized alcoholic who previously had unseemly congress with an aunt, romanced an adolescent neighbor, and survives WWII with all his quirks intact -- including an ability to concoct moonshine from found and frequently toxic ingredients. The film tries to posit Phoenix as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but my impression was that he went to war a weirdo. And Phoenix makes him frightening -- unpredictable, strange, menacing, violent, vulnerable, and both romantic and fatalistic. It's a tour de force piece of acting, because when he is on screen you can't relax. His Quell is a psychopath.

And for no real reason -- other than a fondness for moonshine and lost causes -- does the Lancaster Dodd character take the volatile Quell under his wing. Portraying The Master of the title, Hoffman's Dodd is a self-crowned crusader of new age thinking and therapy called The Cause that is along the lines of Dianetics, and in some ways he is as maladjusted as Quell. He is self-important, manipulative, eccentric, and didactic. He is also loving, supportive, forward-thinking, and vulnerable. His Cause has developed a significant following, and Dodd is genuinely devoted to teaching his flock how to plumb the depths of their existence to find their own truths. How much of the Cause is b.s. -- and how much Dodd knows that it's b.s. -- is addressed but barely in the story.

Without inwardly being altered or renewed by the teachings Quell nevertheless becomes so outwardly committed to the Cause that he physically retaliates against any detractors. This brazen volatility threatens the Cause's legitimacy, already being questioned by the press. However, few consequences are doled out to Freddie for his acts of violence (one scene has both Freddie and Lancaster jailed for resisting the police, but Freddie is not prosecuted for the beatdowns he delivers). Quell's character is well developed, but he has no arc in terms of change. We simply view a series of events in their lives. Neither of these characters seem profoundly changed through their relationship -- they are simply co-dependent until Dodd decides that Quell is too much of a liability to the continued operations of The Cause.

The film is really a study of the unique and uneven bond between a pair of diametrically opposed misfits. It's a cautionary tale about the mentor-mentee relationship. It's about blind belief. It's about loneliness and the need to belong, the need to create family from those around you. In a way, it's about the less-cinematic and less uplifting realities of human nature. In classic film narratives, most protagonists undergo a physical and/or emotional journey in which they come to some profound revelation and thus change their behaviors for good or for ill. The journey transforms them. A lesson is learned -- by the protagonist, the audience, or both. However, there is no such transformation for Freddie or for Lancaster in this film. And in that sense, The Master is a frustratingly empty excercise. We wonder why we just spent three hours watching.

The answer is to have the privilege of watching Phoenix and Hoffman do the most powerful and astonishing acting of their entire careers. And to glory in the pristine beauty and gargantuan proportions of 70-millimeter film, rendering many of the shots iconic in composition.

And that may well be director Anderson's point.

12 Things I Learned Watching "Skyfall"

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We love James Bond, oh yes we do. We're the ones who put the 24th film in the franchise at the top of the Box Office earners list on opening weekend during its highly touted 50th anniversary year. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone says it's a Top Five Bond film of all time. Roger Ebert says it's the best Bond flick in years, calling it "a full-blooded, joyous, intelligent celebration of a beloved cultural icon."

So now, a week after its opening, you've already seen it. If you haven't I'd say check it out, it's entertaining and delves deeper into the mythology of Bond than previous films. Don't want to offer any spoilers, but in no particular order here are

TWELVE THINGS I LEARNED WATCHING SKYFALL:

1. Bond never dies.
Nor does he age significantly. I know, obvious after so many films. He's just on vacation until the next assignment. Or until Mommy calls. More on this below.

2.You can never go home again.
Particularly if you are into high-stakes international espionage with a well-financed, p.o.'ed shadow on your tail. Because said home is guaranteed to go up in smoke, and that's a shame -- even if it is an isolated Scottish estate with more foreboding atmosphere than ten Wuthering Heights and enough bad memories to launch a legion of malcontents, it's still purty.

3. A bad bleached blonde dye job is the first indication of a mental break.
Particularly in a male. It will lead to instant villainy, delusions of grandeur, and a quest for world domination. Some people just shouldn't go blonde (that means you, Javier Bardem) and when they do, bad things will happen.

4. Javier Bardem can never top Anton Chigurh.
I have loved Bardem since I saw him portray a quadraplegic, basketball-playing former cop in Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh in 1997. He is a gifted actor and he was a decent nemesis here. I hope he won't now be typecast into accented villain roles because he was so fabulous in No Country For Old Men, in which his Chigurh was so creepy, delusional, unpredictable and pathological that he made all of us suspect every stranger we'll ever meet again.

5. Take the shot.
Good life philosophy. Even when things go wrong, at least you tried.

6. You can overcome a weird and funny name (Moneypenny).
It's best to prove your mettle at some really dangerous gig first -- say, tracking assassins with high-powered weaponry and stunt driving in foreign countries -- before your name is ever uttered. Even if you put that aside and take a desk job later, no one will doubt that you mean business. This has nothing to do with race or sex. Develop a series of snappy double entendres to trade with your favorite agents just to prove you've still got it.

7. M stands for "Mommy."
Or "Mum" as her agents call her in the British approximation of "ma'am." I love Judi Dench as an actress, and in Skyfall we get to see a lot of her as M, and she's been running things at MI6 for a while and facing some life-changing ish. (Spoiler alert: We know a man succeeds her, but his M may well stand for something else.)

Corollary 1: As such, M's agents have some serious Mommy issues. We don't know if M has children of her own, but she knows how to manipulate her underlings emotionally and physically like the best Oedipal nightmare. Bardem's rogue agent Silva actually whines something like "mom loved you best!" OK, he doesn't actually say that. But he implies nastily that 007 is indisputably M's favorite.

Corollary 2: Further, "orphans make the best agents." The better for M to assume that maternal role in their lives. (Mere protocols keep her from making the covert calls asking, Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?" a la the nightmare political mom in The Manchurian Candidate.)

8. If there are Komodo Dragons anywhere on the premises...
... and it is not a highly secure, national zoo, keep Murphy's law in mind.

9. Bond girls are still (sort of) eye candy.
Women in the Bond franchise have become increasingly lethal and pivotal outside the bedroom (and less laughable -- remember Christmas Jones, pint-sized rocket scientist?). Halle Berry kicked ass in Die Another Day as NSA agent Jinx, but she also appeared in a bikini. Neither Naomie Harris as Moneypenny nor Bérénice Lim Marlohe appear in anything more suggestive than an evening gown (though Severine's does employ some strategically placed sheer net panels), and the Skyfall plot does turn on their character's actions. But the new Bond storylines are more politically correct than in the past, stripping away one of the traditional personality traits of our hero: Womanizer extraordinaire. It was this user mentality that allowed Bond to do what he does. Whenever he gets touchy feely and falls in love, the franchise founders.

10. James Bond is a fist with eyes.
The third time is the charm, and Daniel Craig has definitely settled into the role of Bond with Skyfall. Thanks to his casting, the iconic 007 no longer looks like an upper-crust smoothie who'd rather crack wise than crack heads. He may show up in a tuxedo, but for this Bond there are no martinis in sight (OK -- he has one but doesn't speak the immortal "shaken not stirred" line) and he speaks only when necessary. While the films stress that he went to Oxford, this Bond looks like a wiry bare-knuckles brawler who'd as soon snap your neck as look at you. (I miss the witty repartee and double entendres of the Sean Connery and Pierce Brosnan films, when there was a bit of irony, camp, and cleverness to the proceedings. Now we have a new Bond for a new generation: mostly threats and explosions.)

Corollary: And he has elf ears.
Daniel Craig wouldn't look out of place in Rivendell, is all I'm saying. You know, in the kickass archery corps fighting Orcs or something.

11. Top-secret government lists of undercover agents have a way of getting into the wrong hands.
Wasn't that the whole premise of the first Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise? The whole "knock list" debacle? I know, I know, a whole movie genre would be wiped out if this possibility didn't exist. But there's gotta be another way, people.

12. Adele RULES.
So let the sky fall/when it crumbles/ we will stand tall/face it all together at Skyfall backed by a 70-piece orchestra is just heaven. I dare you not to hum it on your way out of the theater.

Notorious (1946)

I have a love for older films, and Ingrid Bergman has always fascinated me. Born in Sweden, she was already a working actress there when she was brought to Hollywood, and she was anything but a typical movie star. She refused to pluck her eyebrows, wear plunging necklines, sport high heels (she was 5 foot 9), polish her nails, or submit to a Max Factor Hollywood makeover. Yet she was naturally beautiful, and no other actress was quite so mesmerizing or believable when it came to playing love scenes – there was a naturalness to Bergman such that every emotion she played radiated through her and leaped out of the screen. (Another Bergman favorite of mine is Gaslight). This is one of my favorite classic movies: An Alfred Hitchcock production in hazy black and white. In typical 40s fashion, the title says more about Bergman’s character than anything she does in the film.

SYNOPSIS: Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, purportedly a “notorious” German-born party girl whose father has just been convicted in Miami of Nazi collusion. This role was against type for Bergman, who usually played naïve, dutiful, virtuous gals, or at least gals whose passions were honest. Miss Huberman sleeps around, it is implied, and Bergman plays a careless, troubled drunk in the flick’s early scenes delightfully, her dialog fraught with inebriated, eye-closing pauses, wearing an outfit where she shows just a sliver of bare midriff – shocking, for Bergman. (Cary Grant’s character –who has crashed her party -- emphasizes the bareness by tying a handkerchief around her waist to keep her from “getting cold” before they go out for a drive in her car.

Alicia has been recorded refusing to go along with her father’s schemes, so she is targeted by a government agency for use in a spy scheme to rout out more Nazis in Brazil. Grant is the smooth talking agent Devlin who recruits her and accompanies her to Rio de Janeiro, where Alicia claims to have changed her slutty ways. Despite his misgivings Devlin ends up falling for her (there’s a scene on the plane when they are flying into Rio and she leans across his lap to look out the window; Grant’s heated look at her is priceless). The two American spies tour a few Cariocan hot spots, including Sugarloaf, and when Alicia accuses him of not believing she can change, Devlin shuts her up with a kiss. In a scene inside their seaside Rio apartment, Bergman is lit up with love and affection, and she and Grant engage in a long series of intimate kisses and intermittent dialog that was daring for the times, when no one kiss could last longer than 20 seconds. (“This is a funny kind of love affair,” she says. “Oh, why is that?” “Maybe because you don’t love me,” she sighs.)

But no sooner have they come out of their first clinch when the agency lays down the law: Miss Huberman is to use her sexual skills to ensnare a former suitor, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains in his best Napoleon In A Pompadour attitude), who is suspected of being part of a Nazi ring. Both Dev and Alicia are stricken by the news, but company man Dev lets her make up her own mind about the assignment. Hurt that Devlin doesn’t object to the scheme or stop her, Alicia bitterly plunges ahead.

Sebastian falls for Alicia all over again, and despite his mother’s cautions, marries her. Now wedded to this wealthy Nazi kingpin, Alicia tries to ferret out what information she can about his associates and activities, passing news to Devlin via a series of brief rendezvous about town. Devlin is bitter but professional, helping the new bride arrange a large party at the Sebastian mansion so he can infiltrate and try to discover what secret is being held in the wine cellar. It turns out that a special kind of uranium ore mined from nearby mountains is being smuggled to Europe in wine bottles. We never find out exactly what’s so important about this ore or how it’s being used, only that it’s important to the Nazi cause; the audience instead is caught up in Alicia’s daring scheme to get the only cellar key from her husband then pass it to Dev at the party. Hitchcock uses a long overhead tracking shot from the top of the sweeping staircase down to Bergman standing in the grand entrance hall as she greets guests then telescopes the focus even further to her hand in which we see her nervously clutching the key. (Grant reportedly kept the UNICA key after filming and presented it to Bergman years later as a gift.)

To divert Sebastian from going into the cellar for more champagne – and thus noticing that he doesn’t have the key -- Devlin presses a kiss on Alicia, which she can’t even pretend to struggle against. Caught, she tells her husband that Devlin is drunk and forced his attentions on her. Despite the subterfuge, Sebastian realizes that his cellar key is gone. His suspicions mount further when he awakens the next morning to find the key mysteriously returned to his key ring. Sebastian is undone by Alicia’s betrayal and confesses to his mother (“I am married to an American agent”). It is Madame Sebastian who comes up with the ingenious and diabolical plan to slowly poison Alicia and cut off her outside contact once she becomes incapacitated. Thus their vicious Nazi associates will not suspect them of any missteps (in an earlier scene a former colleague, Emil Houpka, publicly freaked over wine bottles used at a dinner party and was summarily disappeared by the Nazi leader).

When Alicia shows up to their next meeting looking beat down, Devlin assumes she’s been lushing it up again and she lets him think so ( alcohol “lightens my … chores,” she tells Dev). But when she misses even more meetings, Devlin goes to the house and learns that “Mrs. Sebastian is ill and confined to her bed.” While the butler goes to fetch Mr. Sebastian, Devlin slips upstairs into Alicia’s room for one of the most romantic scenes ever. “Alicia, tell me, what’s wrong with you?” “Oh Dev, they’re poisoning me...” Alicia says she thought she’d never see him again, and he says he had to see her, he’s in love with her. “Say it again,” she says, “it keeps me awake.” The scene is in tight closeup, you see Bergman doing her love thing, languishing on Grant’s shoulder, her relief palpable, a sick woman reveling in the knowledge that she is loved and ultimately redeemed.

Devlin gets her out of the bed and onto the stairs to get her out of the house. Though Sebastian and his mother attempt to stop them as they descend the long staircase, they are thwarted by the fact that the other Nazis are in the house for a meeting and the Sebastians don’t want to create a scene or reveal that they have been infiltrated by American spies. Devlin saves the day, getting Alicia into the getaway car and locking Sebastian out. Now Sebastian is being summoned by the Nazis, who know something is amiss. THE END.

COSTUME NOTES:
Bergman is at the height of her gorgeous simplicity, her hair loose for the most part, yet while her costumes aren’t much to look at, her accessories are stunning.

•Alicia’s engagement ring from Sebastian is a giant square ice chip of a diamond that seems to weigh down her hand, representing the devil’s bargain she has made.

•For the big party scene, she wears a simple black long-sleeved gown with a deep V neck and back. The V represents her role in this intrigue as both vamp and victim. Her hair is swept into an elaborate bun at her nape crossed with a braid pinned with a diamond brooch. She also wears a glittering diamond necklace, earrings, and a diamond-studded chain belt, items that dazzle the eye. The black gown accentuates her role as a femme fatale, a Mata Hari, though she is inexperienced as a spy.

•In the drawing room scene when she first realizes that the Sebastians are poisoning her coffee, she wears a simple silk blouse and below-the-knee tweed skirt. Over the collar she wears a heavy, too-formal necklace of encrusted jewels – hard to tell what gems they are in black and white – cabochon cuts linked together with teardrop stones cascading in the front, with matching teardrop earrings. The jewelry is, as they say, to die for. The necklace appears to be made of tears, a noose of woe representing the trap she has stuck her pretty neck into. Poisoned and vulnerable, perhaps she will die for what she is attempting.

OTHER NOTES
•Notorious is a fraught word. Face it, Bergman was playing what we would call today a ‘ho. A woman who chooses to cast away virtue – an unrepentant non-virgin in other words – is trash, and deserves whatever she gets. In the 1940s, OK, this was supposedly before the enlightenment. But it goes on today. What happened to women’s lib, gender equality, all of that? One of the axioms or suppositions of the plot, in Devlin’s mind as well as the audience’s, is: Once a ‘ho, always a ‘ho. While love is a transformative value in popular culture, love and transformation come to fallen women conditionally and only after they survive near fatal odds.

•No people of color in this film despite the Brazilian location (though Rio is mostly repped by herky-jerky, stock film backdrops). America was caught up in its war stories, with Nazis providing the perfect villains as they do in Bergman’s best-known film Casablanca. Rio is almost unnecessary to the plotline, though during the big party scene Alicia tells Alex that she will ask the musicians to play Brazilian music after playing so many European waltzes. It is against the backdrop of Brazilian music that Dev and Alicia do their wine cellar snooping and then have their kiss, native music inspiring our leads to get elemental, get physical. The one Brazilian woman in the film is depicted as a boor.

•The flick was a bit daring in having a woman use her sexual wiles on a man she doesn’t love, ultimately winning the affection of the man she does. At the same time, Alicia is no supersleuth, she’s a woman caught in a bad circumstance who has lost faith in herself and is willing to do anything because she doesn’t care. It’s meeting Devlin that changes her, though the timing couldn’t be worse.

"Rebecca"

1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock
adapted from the novel by Daphne du Maurier

Mrs. Danvers (to Fontaine’s character): Why don't you go? Why don't you leave Manderley? He doesn't need you... he's got his memories. He doesn't love you, he wants to be alone again with her. You've nothing to stay for. You've nothing to live for really, have you? [softly, almost hypnotically] Look down there. It's easy, isn't it? Why don't you? Why don't you? Go on. Go on. Don't be afraid...

I first saw the film in junior high, I believe, when we were reading the novel Rebecca. I was too young to get into either the novel or the film in a deep way, thought both were a bore. The movie seemed like some old relic; I knew nothing about the storied Laurence Olivier, or of Joan Fontaine (blonde sister to the divine Olivia de Havilland) or the spectacularly slimy George Sanders, to me it was just some school flick hauled out of a closet from next to the hygiene films and unspooled to keep us girls quiet for 90 minutes. As far as the novel was concerned, I thought, “Why doesn’t she just throw out all of Rebecca’s shit and fire Mrs. Danvers?” Indeed. But then we wouldn’t have this delicious tale of psychological suspense.

To sum up: Orphaned and barely legal, nameless lady’s companion Fontaine has accompanied boorish rich American Mrs. Van Hopper to Monte Carlo, where on a solo sketching jaunt she comes upon a suicidal aristocrat, startling him out of taking a cliff dive into the sea. The moody landed gentleman, Maxim de Winter (Olivier playing a version of his later Wuthering Heights creation Heathcliff in a Homburg hat), has not been home to England in months due to a hinted-at personal tragedy. Finding in her a diversion to his ennui, he takes a fancy to our guileless girl and squires her around whenever she can get free of flu-ridden Mrs. Van Biddy. When her patroness tells her to pack up to for a transatlantic steamer trip home to New York, a panic-stricken Fontaine stalls in order to find de Winter and stammer out a goodbye. But de Winter shocks her with a matter-of-fact proposal: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool!”

Thus our naïf is wedded, bedded, and transported toute de suite to the massive, historic, cold English seaside manor Manderley, complete with endless rooms, a staff of 40, a resentful housekeeper, and nothing to do. Manderley has not been changed since the first Mrs. De Winter died a year earlier in a boating mishap. The former mistress – the titular Rebecca – was reportedly wildly popular, stylish, beautiful, and vivacious, all the things the new Mrs. De Winter is not. Traces of Rebecca are everywhere, from her personalized stationery in the morning room to the monograms on the dinner napkins to her entire former bedroom being closed off and enshrined by the housekeeper, the vaguely lesbian and decidely creepy Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson in an Oscar winning performance). This is the point at which my earlier comment becomes pressingly pertinent. Girl, get rid of this hussy’s crap, and cuss your husband out for not taking care of it in the first place! But Maxim is frequently absent, both physically and emotionally, which complicates matters considerably for his bride.

Young, gauche, and inexperienced, our new missus can’t hope to compare and is hopelessly confused, believing her groom is still in love with his fabulous dead wife and allowing icky Danvers to intimidate and dupe her. But when Rebecca’s sleazy “cousin” shows up in the form of Sanders, hinting at previous undercover hi-jinks indulged in by the deceased, things get more confusing.

When a coastal shipwreck reveals the ruin of Rebecca’s sailboat with her corpse still inside, the mystery unravels in short order. Maxim confesses to his bride that Rebecca was actually a despicable and unrepentant slut who threatened to embarrass the de Winters if he divorced her. In a quarrel where Rebecca revealed she was pregnant with another man’s child, who stood to inherit Manderley, Maxim accidentally killed her and attempted to cover up the mishap by sinking her boat with her in it and identifying another dead woman as Rebecca. A trial proceeds where it is proven that Max did not kill her intentionally, but a jealous and implicated Mrs. Danvers – who knew of the pregnancy – goes berserk and burns down Manderley with herself still inside. Our heroine and Maxim renew their love and drive off to places unknown. The end.

FILM NOTES: A classic of the gothic suspense genre filmed in smoky black and white, Rebecca is notable for Joan Fontaine’s portrayal of a completely innocent girl plunked down in a world far too sophisticated for her to fathom. Every crinkle of her nose, gape of her mouth, widening of her eyes, quirk of her brows, and swipe of her hand through her mousy hair betrays her growing dismay, insecurity, and dread. When Maxim comes clean about what has happened, she matures before our eyes into a strong woman who can do anything to support the man she loves.

However good Fontaine is, the film unmistakably belongs to the moments that Dame Judith Anderson appears on screen in all her severe, blank faced, intense weirdness. The scene where she shows the new Mrs. De Winter her former mistress’ bedroom, caressing Rebecca’s fur coat, reminiscing about brushing her hair, passing her hand beneath the dead woman’s transparent nightgown with sick adoration, is classic. Later, after she has manipulated the girl into wearing the very same costume worn by Rebecca to a Manderley masked ball, “Danny” spills all her venom and jealousy, telling Fontaine that she’ll never measure up and she might as well end it all. Trying to coax the bereft girl to jump from the open casement window onto the rocks below, she purrs seductively, “Why don’t you? … why don’t you?” Unsettling, in the extreme.

Hitchcock offers some signature shots, such as the opening “I dreamed I went to Manderley again” sequence, where the camera tracks through an iron gate down an overgrown driveway to the outline of Manderley in the moonlight – masterful. The set and set decoration of Rebecca’s bedroom is breathtaking, from the curtained windows to the gorgeous four poster canopy bed and linens, to the flowers, to the elaborately carved door, to the bureau with its side-sliding lingerie drawers – sumptuous and scrumptious. Hitchcock also uses shadow and light to great effect to add to the gothic anxiety, the sense of those kept in the dark and those whose light is frankly off-kilter, particularly lighting Danvers from underneath to appear more spectral. The shots of Manderley burning with the shadow of Mrs. Danvers in the flames is also pretty fantastic.

Hitchcock keeps to the book’s conceit – our girl has no name at all other than her acquired title of Mrs. De Winter. He also brilliantly never shows us Rebecca – there are no flashbacks and no photographs of her, so her legend grows disproportionately large in the viewers minds, just as it does in the mind of our spooked heroine.

The horror of Mrs. Danvers is broadly alluded to in Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein in the person of Mrs. Blucher the housekeeper, played by Cloris Leachman. So severe and forbidding is Frau Blucher that every time her name is spoken in that comedy, horses whinny in fright – definitely a response to the Mrs. Danvers film iconography.

"Revolver"

2005, directed by Guy Ritchie
written by Guy Ritchie and Luc Besson

Archived -
August 19, 2010

I watched the Guy Ritchie-Luc Besson flick Revolver over the weekend. I am a fan of actor Jason Statham as well as previous Ritchie cockney romps Snatch and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. But this flick was different. I had to watch it twice and I’m still not sure whether it falls into the so-bad-it’s-utter-genius camp, or whether it is the filmic runoff of a madman’s brain (uh, Besson, you have shown us your daffy brilliance before; can you say The Fifth Element, among others?). Either way, the movie is gorgeously photographed (filmed on location at a seaside resort in Britain). Every shot is jaw dropping in composition, lighting, color, and set design. Directors who offer up visions of what has rarely been seen before in cinema create a great viewing experience, in my opinion. But the script has to be tight as well.

Kicking off without any opening credits beyond the title, Revolver is a hard-boiled, dark contemporary revenge flick, akin to Payday or Get Carter, with a House of Games overlay to it. Statham — in atypical greasy black hair and beard—plays Jake Green, an overly successful gambler waging a war of retribution with casino boss Dorothy (Dorothy?) Macha, played by Ray Liotta, from whose establishment Jake once snagged his excessive winnings. From this premise, Jake and the film’s viewers are in for a series of brain-twisting shocks.

At the start of the flick Jake is sprung after seven years in jail and is now bent on getting even with the man who put him there. He’s about to launch a grand scheme against his nemesis -- who is also gunning for him -- when he literally tumbles into a trap laid for him by clever underworld “brothers” Avi and Zach, played by rapper Andre 3000 and The Sopranos’ Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore. (Does Ritchie have a thing for the name Avi? I recall that a character bore that name in Snatch as well.) Using metaphors from chess and classic con games—and the stunning revelation that Jake has somehow contracted a quick-killing fatal disease-- they make Jake a you-can’t-take-it-with-you offer he can’t refuse in which he must join them in their loan sharking operation using the millions he’s previously banked from his gambling – the same millions with which he’s only just been reunited. Jake is none too happy, as you can imagine, being that he has long-harbored plans for his dough, his archrival, and essentially the rest of his now foreshortened life. Hijacked, Jake goes along with the scheme though he still has it in for Macha.

Things get a bit convoluted. Jake is forced to dole out his own money to a series of losers and assist Avi & Zach in the increasingly violent collection efforts, all the while baiting and evading Macha’s minions. As played by Max Factor-eyed Liotta, Macha is all hissy fits and tightie-whitie crotch shots, as I guess the essence of portraying an Underworld Big Shot consists of running around a mansion in a variety of flimsy silk robes and Fruit of the Looms shrieking “I don’t care, just do it!” into the faces of other grown men. Chief among Macha’s dirty workers is the taciturn hitman Sorter, who bears not a small resemblance to the iconic operative Joubert from Three Days Of The Condor (Robert Redford flick from the '70s -- look it up). Like Joubert, Sorter is a tall ascetic with glasses who kills without compunction. Jake is on his lengthening list of marks, although he confusingly lets Jake slip away fairly often, to Macha’s increasing displeasure.

All of this plotting is, if not standard contemporary gangster film fare, still fairly well expected of Ritchie. But what makes this flick different is that it is extremely verbose, to Mamet-meets-Tarantino proportions, as Avi puts Jake – and Jake puts himself – through an existential funhouse of is-it-real-or-is-it-Memorex philosophizing on the nature of winning and losing, being and nothingness. There is much voiceover as Jake struggles to make sense of whether he is who he thinks he is, if he is in fact his own enemy, if he has a split personality, if everything that is happening is indeed happening, and whether he can win a game where the rules seem to be constantly changing.

In a bizarre series of developments, Jake becomes trapped by Macha’s men and the situation looks dire for our hero. Enter Sorter, who appears ready to deliver the coup de grace on Jake, but instead turns on Jake’s enemies and coolly dispatches them all as Jake escapes. Reeling from the confrontation, Jake now goes all New Age, Art of War counterintuitive by turning the other cheek on his arch enemy: giving money to charities in Macha’s name, then sneaking into the Big Man’s opulent bedroom in the wee hours and delivering a groveling, albeit armed, mea culpa at Macha’s bedside. What disgraces a man more than to be at the mercy of his enemy, only to have said enemy walk away? In other words, Jake has the opportunity to kill Macha while he sleepsnd doesn't, a fact that seems to destroy Macha mentally as we are served another shot of half-naked Liotta having a shuddering tear-streaked meltdown, repeating, impotently, “Fear me! Fear me!” as Jake brushes him aside. (Um, even the name Dorothy Macha is entirely emasculating, as this hard-to-watch emotional disintegration shows him to be a distinctly non-macho wuss.)

And so Jake — who discovers that his supposedly deadly blood disease was mysteriously misdiagnosed -- has won. It turns out that Avi & Zach have been his puppet masters all along, as they reveal themselves to be the two unseen yet beloved prison mates housed on either side of our hero during his seven year bid. In a twist reminiscent of The Usual Suspects, we learn that the two “brothers” – a master chess player and a master con artist -- have imagineered Jake’s labyrinthine post-prison journey, hinting at its progression and significance through chess maneuvers penciled into the margins of books they shared in the Big House, all in an attempt to continue an education they’d begun for Little Jake on the Ways Of the World -- or at least the Ways of the Big Con. And so there is celebrating all around, as Jake’s money and sanity are (we assume) restored, he is reunited with this Odd Couple of crime Yodas, and we the audience are left to sort through the psychic fallout.

While the film's title is a direct reference to a weapon, viewers are left to puzzle out the title's multiple meanings, including someone who or something that constantly revolves or spins; or even the Spanish meaning, which is to shake up or turn upside down. -- jc