Machines in the Garden
In the animated ecological
epic
Princess Mononoke
, the camera travels over landscapes with a
clear, steady gaze, like a Zen hang glider. The images have none of the
comin'-at-ya pop-surrealism of American cartoons, many of which have characters
that spring out of the frame like jack-in-the-boxes. The Japanese director,
Hayao Miyazaki, who spent three years on Princess Mononoke and is
reported to have done 70 percent of its paintings himself, seems to work from
the outside in: to begin with the curve of the earth, then the mossy hills, the
watercolor foliage, the nubby stones, the whorls on the wood, the meticulous
carvings on a teacup. He captures the texture of light and the currents of air.
You could almost settle down in this landscape. A view of nature that some
would call "tree-hugging" doesn't feel softheaded when the trees are rendered
in such brilliant and robust detail.
But then, "soft" is not
a word you can apply to Princess Mononoke , however pantheistic its
worldview. The film, which is rated PG-13, is full of splattery carnage. If
Miyazaki in long shot is contemplative, in close-up he's ferocious. He's both
inside and outside the action: He knows when to rock your world and when to
induce a state of sorrowful detachment. According to the New
York
Times , Toy Story animators screened reels of his work when their
imaginations flagged, and writers for Star Trek named an alien species
after one of his features. Watching Princess
Mononoke --which has
been dubbed to Disney/Miramax specifications by American and English stars but
retains its two-hour-plus length, its gory beheadings, and its grim,
near-apocalyptic finale--you can understand their worship. It isn't that
Miyazaki's work is technically so dazzling in this age of digitized miracles;
it's that everything is sublimely in proportion.
The movie has a scope that makes Hollywood's homiletic,
follow-your-dream fables look even more solipsistic. Miyazaki is after nothing
less than the moment in our history (the film is set in the 14 th and
15 th centuries) when the power shifted from a "natural" world to one
shaped by human technology. It's the beginning of what Bill McKibben called
"the end of nature"--that is, when nature became no longer an autonomous,
self-regulating force but one touched (and, in Miyazaki's view, poisoned) by
human industry.
The hero, Ashitaka, a
warrior from the isolationist Emishi clan, is forced in the first scene to kill
a marauding boar--a god turned into a demon (covered in roiling, corrosive
worms) by an iron ball lodged in its body. Infected, destined to be consumed
by--and to die of--rage, Ashitaka leaves his village in search of the iron
ball's source. He discovers a fortress-cum-arms-manufacturing plant called
Irontown, presided over by one of the most complex villains in modern film: the
regal Lady Eboshi. On one hand, she's a benevolent industrialist who presides
over a warmly matriarchal society; on the other, she wants to destroy the
forest, harness its resources, and exterminate its animal deities--chiefly the
Spirit of the Forest, a magnificent deer god whose touch brings instant life or
death, and who transforms at dusk into the towering Night Walker.
P rincess Mononoke builds to a full-scale war between
humans and the animal kingdom--which does not, by the way, consist of your
father's cartoon critters. In fact, the boars and apes have little patience
with Ashitaka's call for nature and mankind to live together in harmony; they'd
like to eat him. The wolf god, Moro, is slightly more sympathetic, but that's
because her adopted "daughter," San (a k a Princess Mononoke), is human. San is
first seen sucking a wound of her huge wolf mother, then, as the gore drips
from her mouth, training her dark eyes on Ashitaka with feral hatred. Her
second appearance--a lone attack on Irontown to assassinate Lady Eboshi--is one
of the movie's high points. It's Miyazaki's use of sound--and silence--that
takes your breath away: the determined tap of the wolf princess's shoes as she
scuttles over the fortress's rooftops; the silence of Eboshi and her army as
they stare at this tiny yet formidable tomboy against the black sky. Their
battle is so furious that the blades streak and lose definition--it's almost
subliminal.
It's a shame that the
wolf princess warms up to Ashitaka and spends the rest of the film either
saving him or being saved by him. She loses that punk-bitch allure. The voice
of Claire Danes doesn't help. When Danes says, "I'd do anything to get you
humans out of my forest," she sounds like a Valley Girl peeved over lack of
parking spaces at the mall. (San needs a more ragged voice--I'd be interested
to hear the original Japanese actress.) Billy Crudup is just as Disneyfied
(Miramaxed?), but that doesn't hurt as much because Ashitaka is conceived from
the start as a rather bland ingénu. Gillian Anderson's growling Moro sounds
silly (she doesn't have the breath control), and the fey-hick tones of Billy
Bob Thornton are too recognizable as the Akim Tamiroff-like mercenary, Jigo.
But Minnie Driver--coming off a triumphantly dizzy Jane in Tarzan --once
again provides a voice that the animators deserve. "Bring the strange-ah to me
late-ah," she commands in sexy Martian Queen cadences that will stir the loins
of Flash Gordon fans everywhere. "I would like to thank him
puh-sonally."
The overfamiliar voices nudge Princess Mononoke
closer to its American counterparts--but not by a lot. There's always something
wondrously strange. The "kodamas" are little tree spirits on doughboy bodies.
They cock their trapezoidal dice heads and emit a series of clicks; then their
heads pop back with a conclusive rattle. Something about them seems just right;
I could watch them for hours. (Miyazaki limits their appearances to seconds--he
doesn't wear out their mystery the way that, say, George Lucas would.) And no
Hollywood animated feature would end with such a powerful vision of apocalypse,
as the land is bestridden by a colossus dropping a thick, caustic, tarlike gel
that recalls the post-Hiroshima "black rain." Can you take the kids? I think
so. As Miyazaki said at a New York Film Festival press conference, "Children
understand intuitively that the world they have been born into is not a blessed
world." Princess Mononoke , at least, can tell them why.
"A special smile ... a
certain touch ..." So begins the elevator-music theme song of
Music of
the Heart
... "I never had a lot that I loved so much." The credits had
just started and I was already looking for a barf bag. Did Miramax and director
Wes Craven have to work so hard to schlockify the story of Roberta Guaspari
(played here by Meryl Streep), whose violin courses in East Harlem elementary
schools have become a beacon for such programs nationwide? A fabled taskmaster
(her story was told in the 1996 documentary Small Wonders ), Guaspari
used music as a way to teach self-discipline--along with the healthy
self-respect that follows in its wake. When the New York school board cut the
funding for her program, she proved a marvel of self-promotion, attracting
features in all the major dailies and ending up along with her best students at
Carnegie Hall for a benefit "Fiddlefest"--along with Itzhak Perlman, Isaac
Stern, and other legendary "fiddlers."
Streep has said that she spent so much of the time on the
set learning the violin (she doesn't play any instruments) that she didn't
bring the full force of her acting technique to bear on Roberta. Maybe that's
why the performance seems so natural. Let her always learn an instrument on the
set! Still, she doesn't make much sense of Guaspari. The script, by Pamela Gray
( A Walk on the Moon ), has her students complain of her nastiness and
perfectionism, but Streep--who has made herself look dumpy, thick-waisted, and
bedraggled--is so busy telegraphing her vulnerability that all we get is dippy
niceness. Instead of a monument to an individual's iron will, Music of the
Heart becomes the story of a woman so helpless that she arouses the
kindness of strangers.
Directors of violent
genre pieces like Craven (who got this mainstream gig in return for doing the
Scream sequels) or Carl Franklin or Sam Raimi sometimes want so badly to
belong to Establishment Hollywood--to go to the Academy Awards--that they
neuter themselves. Bending over backward to show how sensitive they can be,
they forget that violence--even if it's just emotional violence--belongs in
"ordinary" dramas, too. Craven does good work with the young actors in the
classroom scenes, but the film has a reticence common to most biopics and a
mushy, TV-movie humanism that blands out its texture. OK, I was a puddle after
some scenes, like the one where Guaspari pushes a student to get her to improve
her posture and discovers that the girl is wearing a leg brace. But how much
more emotional the Carnegie Hall climax would have been if instead of suddenly
seeing these East Harlem kids on stage with Perlman, Stern, Joshua Bell, etc.,
we'd seen them rehearsing first and struggling to keep up. There's too
much music of the heart and not enough music of the callused fingers.
In outline,
The Limey
is a lean little
B-movie revenge melodrama about a felonious Brit (Terence Stamp) who's newly
sprung from prison and flies to Southern California to get to the bottom of his
beautiful daughter's death: "My name's Wilson ... Who dunnit?" The film,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, would be worth seeing just for Stamp's
performance, at once rock-hard and goofily blinkered, and for Peter Fonda's
wittily self-parodic turn as the suspected killer, a music producer who coasts
on '60s counterculture easiness while his lackeys do the dirty work. ("Oh,
man," he says, the fear finally seeping through the ether. "This is getting all
too close to me.")
But the picture's glory is its layered and intricate
syntax. The dialogue moves ahead--there are great gobs of exposition--but the
images continually double back: to Stamp and Lesley Ann Warren, as his
daughter's acting teacher, simply gazing at each other; or to Stamp sitting on
a plane, remembering his daughter as a girl on the beach, the lens of his home
movie camera creating an eerily bright--almost supernatural--spot that dances
over her face. The film's most violent act happens well off screen. (You hear
the distant "pop-pop-pop-pop-pop" of the hero's gun.) The rest is only
half-glimpsed, fantasized, or saturated by memory--or is the present the
memory? Is all of The Limey a temporal hiccup?
Some, including the critic at Time , have
questioned Soderbergh's sanity. (But of course--Soderbergh flouts time!) I see
a method to his madness. Less grandiosely than Harmony Korine in Julien
Donkey-Boy , Soderbergh pores over every scene in search of its essential
dramatic gesture. He's saying: This --not all that other stuff--is what's
important. He telegraphs the ending--you know the Limey will somehow be at the
root of his daughter's death--but it's still an emotional wow. The climax
justifies the technique. It says the point of this odyssey isn't revenge but
regret--for irredeemably blown chances and a tragic waste of love.
Soderbergh is one of those rare filmmakers who learn
on the job. Working within a tight genre structure, he's discovering hundreds
of ways of editing a given scene that can give it the richness of a novel. Is
he totally successful? No; he misses now and then, which is why the technique
sticks out. But what a fantastic effort. See it and weep for what's missing in
most other movies.
