Jailbirds
Having risked appearing
foolish in the cause of his art; having tackled his parts with demented,
hyperbolic integrity, letting the madness of his roles infuse him and carry him
into the ether; having snagged an Oscar for his besotted, bebop melancholia in
Leaving Las Vegas ; Nicolas Cage has now set out to prove that he can be
as much of an overmuscled jackass as Sylvester Stallone. For an actor so gifted
this was no easy feat. It took months of labor with a personal trainer to
develop both a beefcake physique and that distinctive deadness-behind-the-eyes
of the practiced bodybuilder. And it took a project of rare slickness and
vacuity to help him blot out all traces of his hitherto peculiar but attractive
personality. It took Con Air .
This is a
film that disdains prosaic time and space. The action is hooked to a backbeat.
The actors float, abstractly, in the frame, lit so that their muscles have a
luster. None of the images breathe; the details are fixed as in cement. In this
airless setting, nothing seems truly at stake--with the possible exception of
Cage's artistic soul, which has been sold to Jerry Bruckheimer, the surviving
half of the team that brought you Flashdance (1983), Top Gun
(1986), and last summer's The Rock . Here is Cage, a noble convict,
swollen pectorals pumping as he runs from an exploding airplane hangar in slow
motion, looking every bit as credible as Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk. Here
is Cage, brawny arms hugging a bullet-pierced buddy who rasps that there is no
God--to which he answers, without a whisper of irony, "I'm gonna prove to you
that God does exist!" breaking up their pPieta to trash a planeload of drooling
sociopaths while electric guitars squeal their hosannas.
Cage has been incarcerated, Rambo-like, for killing in
self-defense. Paroled after seven years and with a yearning to see his daughter
and loyal blond wife (Monica Potter, the apotheosis of the Ivory girl), he has
the bum luck to land on a prison transport flight described--in one of those
testosterone-laden lines that can be comfortably transplanted to coming
attractions--as "a planeload of pure predators." These include serial killers,
massrapists, cannibals, and a "poster child for the criminally insane" called
Cyrus "the Virus," played by John Malkovich, who recycles his carnivorous Bugs
Bunny act from In The Line of Fire .
Once the
prisoners stage their inevitable coup, blow away a few guards, and install
their own wild-man pilot, the movie gives them little to do except fly the
unfriendly skies. Really, their ambitions are shockingly limited for a
planeload of pure predators. They don't rob Fort Knox, attempt to wipe out the
Eastern seaboard, or even molest the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They just wing
it, leaving plenty of time for softy agent John Cusack and meany agent Colm
Meaney to debate the merits of shooting the jailbirds out of the sky. (Cusack
seems to have a psychic bond with Cage, perhaps because he's playing the part
that Cage would have played in his pre-hunk, pre-lobotomized era.) Bystander
Cage doesn't side with the escaped prisoners, as you wouldn't if you had a wife
who looked like that waiting for you. He's also pissed at Malkovich, who is
insufficiently concerned that Cage's prison bud needs a shot of insulin bad.
Yes, Scott Rosenberg's empty opportunistic script can't even generate
believable conflict among convicts.
Apart from a cunningly tasteless tea-party in an empty
swimming pool featuring a little girl and a Jeffrey Dahmer-like mass murderer
(Steve Buscemi), Con Air is boring to the marrow. It's much less
entertaining than The Rock , which had a genuine comic snap in the scenes
between Cage and Sean Connery, back when Cage wasn't striking heartthrob poses
(except for those amusing occasions when his characters were striking
heartthrob poses). Is there any death more conclusive for an actor than putting
on a muscle shirt and walking around in slow motion?
Movies as synthetic as Con Air make me wonder if my
time wouldn't be more enjoyably spent watching a duck. Let me explain. The
writer Bill McKibben begins his meditation on television and nature, The Age
of Missing Information , by describing a duck gliding around a pond,
contrasting a morning spent watching its languorous motion with the rat-tat-tat
of images and data on more than 100 cable TV channels--images that, he argues,
carry far less information about the way the world works than the
back-and-forth of that lone quacker. (I'm oversimplifying, but that's the
gist.) My old friend McKibben's aesthetic is not the same as mine (his favorite
movie is Gandhi ), but since reading his book I pay closer attention to
the temporal aspects of film, convinced that even, say, a successful formula
thriller like Breakdown derives much of its power from its simulation of
real time.
From that
angle, the starkest counterpoint imaginable to Con Air is Ulee's
Gold , which begins with a leisurely scene of Ulee Jackson (Peter Fonda), a
traumatized Vietnam veteran, aside a swamp, tending impassively to his tupelo
honeybees. In the film, which opens next week in New York and Los Angeles,
beekeeping is a mark of spiritual purity. Ulee might have cut have himself off
from the emotional hurly-burly of life, but he's deeply in tune with the
natural world. "The bees and I have an understanding," he announces, stoic in
his denims. "I take care of them, they take care of me."
Judging from his films, among them A Flash
of Green (1984) and Ruby in Paradise (1993), the director and writer
Victor Nuñez believes it's improper to let events unfold in anything other than
real time. There always seems to be plenty of it, along with the chance to
study the faces of his characters, even when there's not a great deal going on
in them. (In Ruby , the face on display was a nice and interesting one,
belonging to Ashley Judd, so this wasn't a problem.) Ulee's Gold does
evolve into a sort of thriller, as Ulee's family runs afoul of his convict
son's ex-partners in crime. But even during the climax, it is possible to look
up and count the Exit signs, or the tiles on the ceiling. Nuñez's movies go
places, but with no acceleration, like the duck on the pond.
Lacking the compression of
the greatest movie making, the realism of films like Ulee's Gold leaves
me slightly yawny. The unassuming way Nuñez tells a story assumes, in fact, an
enormous amount of audience indulgence. Nonetheless, there are compensations.
Consider a scene in an Orlando hotel room, in which Ulee meets with Eddie
(Steven Flynn) and Ferris (Dewey Weber), the two thugs who wish to extract from
him a hidden stash of loot. Flynn speaks politely, deliberately, in no hurry to
press his point and yet unwilling to let his listener off the hook, persisting
in the pleasantries well past the point of pleasantness. The seconds crawl,
and, as they do, you realize that the immobile, obsequious Eddie is infinitely
more terrifying than any of the slobbering, muscle-flexing, knife-wielding
psychopaths of Con Air . A Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster can't waste a
beat simulating a real human exchange. Victor Nuñez has all the time in the
world.
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