Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

"You're still nothing but two-bit outlaws on the dodge. It's over, don't you get that? Your times is over and you're gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where."

"Wherever the hell Bolivia is, that's where we're off to."

When a filmmaker looks to the past, they can do so from an almost objective, if somewhat nostalgia-shaded viewpoint.  The period drama portrays traditions and styles of that time which are now almost completely lost, and sometimes a hint of modernity is allowed to peer through, connecting the contemporary audience to the old stories they watch.  This all makes for a nearly universal theme throughout films and stories set in the distant past - Everything, at some point, is carried away by the currents of time.  This will happen to all of us, but we can most easily see it when we watch a film about Egyptian pharaohs, samurai, or cowboys.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starts with a short silent film describing the exploits of its protagonists.  Right from the start, it lets you know they're all dead now, something which should seem obvious, and might detach the audience from the film, if not for the pitch-perfect performances delivered by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the titular roles.  When you watch these two banter, it brings the long-dead historical figures to life, and might even allow you to forget their inevitable fates until the film reminds us of those dark clouds on the horizon.

The first five minutes of BCatSK are filmed in sepia tones, almost as a way of "introducing" us to this historical period.  Once the more naturalistic color bleeds in, we are fully immersed in this world, along for the ride with these likable, entertaining characters.  And indeed, we allow ourselves to be entertained by them for what feels like a very short time before that theme of inevitability sets in.  Butch and Sundance rob a train, when suddenly a second train approaches on the tracks.  It opens up and a posse rides out.  From that moment on, our protagonists are on the run.  A good 20 minutes of screentime is dedicated to them desperately fleeing their seemingly unstoppable pursuers.  Multiple times, after seemingly losing their tail only to pick it back up again, Butch and Sundance ask "who are those guys?"  We do get an answer to that question, but that question is missing the point.  Cassidy said something much more relevant the moment he first saw the posse: "Whatever they're selling, I don't want it."  The real question is, what is that posse selling?  The answer is, the same as the comic relief bicycle salesman from earlier in the film: the future.  This posse doesn't cause the physical death of Butch or Sundance, but it is their downfall.

The bicycle is a handy little visual metaphor for this idea of the inevitable current of time.  A sheriff tries to rally up an old-fashioned posse to go after the outlaws, but is overshadowed by a man selling this handy new transportation method, repeatedly insisting that it represents the future.  Butch Cassidy, amused by this spectacle, buys one, enjoying the rewards of technological and societal progress.  But what he ignores is that, as an outlaw, he is not a part of that society, and it will eventually reject him.  Indeed, while the bicycle is replacing the horse, a new kind of posse is replacing the old-fashioned, easily avoidable one proposed by the sheriff: the owner of a corporation decides he's fed up with being robbed, and assembles a team of the best trackers and lawmen across state lines.  Butch and Sundance both seem perplexed by the idea that these lawmen might leave their respective states - they're used to a posse assembled in one night, comprised of novice militiamen from a single town.  Once they've narrowly avoided this super-posse and decided to leave the country with Sundance's girlfriend Etta Place, Butch Cassidy discards his new bicycle, realizing he wants no part of this new world.  The camera holds on the spinning wheel on the ground, and we return to sepia.  This wheel could represent either the unstoppable wheel of time, or Butch and Sundance's wheels spinning to a stop.  The good times are behind them now.  They're on the run, as much as they might tell themselves they're going to Bolivia by choice.

And of course, Bolivia is where they die.  The final act of this movie is a depiction of two once-great men getting swept aside by time, trying desperately to cling to their former ways.  Right near the end we see them at a complete 180 from the Butch and Sundance we've known: rather than two charming outlaws using their wits to avoid violence and escape tricky situations, we see two men gone straight, committing a brutal act of violence to get their money back.  Etta leaves them.  In their final scenes before the climactic shootout, their carefree rapport is all but gone.  They're two tired, stressed and disgruntled men who don't know what they want anymore.  Then the entire Bolivian army arrives and kills them.  In their final moments, they do retain some dignity, and find the spark of what used to drive them now that they have a motive, as desperate and hopeless as it may be.  They charge outside and, in an iconic moment, the camera freezes on them, in presumably the final moment we get to see them alive.  That sepia returns as we hear, but don't see, the hail of gunfire that cuts them down.  Time continues on without them, but we have been fortunate enough to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid frozen and preserved for our enjoyment.

               "I won't watch you die. I'll miss that scene if you don't mind."

Works Cited:

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross. Twentieth Century-Fox Films, 1969.

Juno

Over the past few years, an entire sub-genre of cinema has sprouted up, referred to as "indie films".  They are identified not by their independence from major distributors, but by their low-key drama, young and quirky protagonists, and soundtracks showcasing unknown acoustic artists, often the stars themselves.  At the genesis of this movement in 2007 was Juno.



It stars Ellen Page in her breakout role as the eponymous protagonist, a high schooler who was knocked up by boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera).  She decides to keep the child and give it to a pair of seemingly ideal adoptive parents (Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman).  Meanwhile, quirky acoustic music plays in the background, and Juno and her friends employ a lot of bizarre slang that is already aging poorly, and fortunately never caught on.  Hence, Juno quickly gained its reputation as "that popular movie about teenage pregnancy with quirky humor", something that was viewed as kind of revolutionary at the time.

After seven years, Juno's freshness has faded and it can be judged on its own timeless merits and faults.  It is certainly not without fault.  The opening scene plays out clumsily, giving the film a shaky foundation - we see Juno standing on her lawn, observing a chair, with voiceover "It started with a chair".  Cut to flashback of Juno preparing to copulate with Bleeker, and unwittingly conceive a human life.  This established, she inexplicably adds, in voiceover, her admiration for the living room set.  Then the opening credits commence, set to the first of many mumblecore love songs.  These shaky first couple minutes give us an idea of what the rest of the entire film will be like - genuinely compelling human drama interspersed with awkward humor.  As the film gradually comes to emphasize the former, in typical dramedy fashion, it finds its legs.

The film's humor is not one hundred percent terrible, but notably it seems like the funniest moments are the halted deliveries in Page's exchanges with her parents, her child's prospective parents, and Bleeker.  Diablo Cody's script itself delivers few genuine laughs, and a lot of lines like "honest to blog".  And when the film dispenses with its cuteness, it has some fascinating character study to provide.  Juno, feeling adrift and alienated at high school, gravitates closer and closer to Mark, the adoptive father, who is creepily receptive.  What does Juno want out of this budding relationship?  What does Mark want?  Neither seems absolutely certain - the only definitive truth is that a tryst between the two is a terrible idea.

The film's action could accurately be classified as episodic, divided into three definitive acts with themes and tones linked to their respective seasons - "Fall" establishes our characters and their worries about the future, "Winter" brings conflicts to a head and pushes the characters to their low point, and "Spring", naturally, has a motif of birth/rebirth - Juno gives actual birth to the baby, Vanessa starts a new life as a single parent, Mark throws it all away and heads off to unknown midlife crises, Juno and Bleeker begin their relationship anew, doing so "backwards", as Juno describes it.  Of course, the action could also accurately be described as rising.  Though the +-nine months of the film's story are divided by seasons, the action itself is fairly straightforward, featuring the same characters and the same fundamental conflicts throughout, all driven by Juno's pregnancy.

2.5/4 stars


Works Cited

Juno. Dir. Jason Reitman. Prod. Lianne Halfon, John Malkovich, Russell Smith, and Mason Novick. By Diablo Cody. Perf. Ellen Page and Michael Cera. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2007.

Barsam, Richard Meran., and Dave Monahan. Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2010. Print.

Inside Llewyn Davis

Just FYI, this review contains spoilers.

"Wouldn't mind the hanging, but the laying in the grave so long;  Been all around this world, poor boy, been all around this world."

This is not a biopic.  Llewyn Davis is not a real person.  Real people like Llewyn Davis almost certainly existed, sure, but they're not the kind of people that get biographies of any kind.  Llewyn never gets his big break.  He doesn't spiral into drug-addled self destruction and find himself isolated at the top.  The implication, at the end of the film, is that this will never happen to Llewyn Davis.

And all that is okay, because this is a Coen Brothers film.  If we were talking Martin Scorsese, or Paul Thomas Anderson, you could reasonably expect a more sprawling epic, about a tortured artist reaching the pinnacle of worldly success and throwing it all away, then maybe dying or redeeming himself at the end, or whatever.  But the Coens have never really been about that.  Their films are small stories that find their sense of grandiosity in a wide existential backdrop.  On the surface of their stories, they are more attuned to farce, failure and anticlimax, and they have a real talent for finding the poetry therein.

The story of Llewyn Davis is one of many non-events.  He plays gigs at a small-time club for minimal profit, scavenges for royalty money from his agent, sings back-up vocals on a pile of shit called "Please Mr. Kennedy", and watches his career die before it ever even started.

Does this make someone like Llewyn Davis less significant than, say, Bob Dylan?  On a cultural level, sure.  But all the musicians of the 60s, both successes and failures, were human beings and artists.  Some of them made it big.  Most of them did not.  Compare this film to last year's "Not Fade Away", the feature debut of "Sopranos" creator David Chase.  Both films tackled these unsuccessful rock musicians.  But while "Not Fade Away" found its protagonist Douglas essentially outgrowing the music scene and going to film school, Llewyn Davis remains completely and thoroughly trapped when we part ways with him.  On one level, yet another brutal farce left him without any kind of job opportunity outside the music scene.  But on another level, we get the sense that music is all Llewyn Davis is really suited to, even if he will fail at it commercially.  After a closing number back at the Gaslight, his usual small-time venue, Llewyn announces "That's what I got."  And audiences are touched by his music, even if that doesn't mean success - as the camera pans in on producer Bud Grossman, listening to Llewyn's rendition of "The Death of Queen Jane", he sees something in the musician.  But nothing that will make him money, which, at the end of the day, is the ruling concern.

Llewyn Davis has nothing to his name but that music, but when he plays it we feel it.  He's the kind of character that other musicians would sing about, recalling the time when they were like him, with no big breaks on the horizon, and maybe recalling that without a stroke of luck, they might still be there.  Llewyn has no real expectations of success - after Bud Grossman's rejection his reaction is mostly resigned.  Llewyn's more concerned with where his next meal is coming from.

And though he has no mass audience in-universe to validate him, that doesn't really matter, because he has us, the people sitting in his movie theater, watching his story play out.  And it feels significant.  Llewyn's story gains a fable-like quality from the framing device of a cat belonging to one of Llewyn's hosts, the Gorfeins, as Llewyn accidentally lets it out, has to carry it around New York, loses it, finds it, realizes the new cat is a different one, and discovers later that the original cat found its way home on its own.  Even if he'll never find success, Llewyn still has a soul, and day-to-day things like that cat give his life meaning.  His partner, Mike, committed suicide before the events of the film - one can imagine that maybe he was too preoccupied with the big picture, lost sight of what it really means to exist in this world from moment to moment, and threw it all away.  But Llewyn keeps carrying that cat.

Midway through the film, everything comes to a halt as Llewyn hitches a ride to Chicago with two other musicians, burnout jazz player Rowland Turner and taciturn young beat poet Johnny Five.  We spend what feels like an eternity in the car with these two, though the journey amounts to about a day.  John Goodman is at his best in years playing Rowland Turner, a character who is equal parts absurdly comical and morbidly pitiful.  I lost track of how many times the film would cut from one shot in that car to another, hours later, interspersed with the almost hypnotic, trudging rhythm of the car passing over bumps in the highway.  This part of the film is where the Coens really indulged in what they do best, concocting a profoundly surreal sequence in which their character catches a glimpse of that existential backdrop looming over all his worldly affairs, and the story becomes almost mystical.  Llewyn goes on this surreal journey essentially alone, on a very different wavelength than either of his fellow journeymen.  And with what does this journey culminate?  Llewyn sitting in a club, playing a song for a music industry big-shot, and getting rejected.  That rejection, which felt almost inevitable, is really more of an afternote to the car ride with Rowland and Johnny.  As they say, it's more about the journey itself than the destination.  And in a film about someone like Llewyn Davis, that makes sense.

We all think we can see destinations in our future.  Some of us are musicians who keep playing gigs, hopping from band to band, waiting for the day when we make it big and become a household name.  Some of us are writers who keep making spec screenplays and reviewing movies on Blogspot, waiting for the day we make it big and become the showrunner for an award-winning drama series.  Some of us are careerists, looking towards the day when we meet the right partner, settle down, and start a family.  But ultimately, every perceived destination is an illusion.  That horizon stretches past your happy ending, and the only real conclusion in life is death.  The life of Llewyn Davis is this concept in its most distilled form.  Llewyn doesn't plan ahead, and doesn't count on any future goal to validate or satisfy him.  His whole life is one long journey.  At the end of the film, in which Llewyn is beaten up in an alley, just like he was at the beginning, with a budding Bob Dylan playing a song inside, we should be depressed by just how unfair Llewyn's life appears to be.  But he'll be alright.

The Matrix

The phobia addressed in The Matrix is an intangible one.  Until the truth of the Matrix is revealed, it doesn't seem like there's anything to fear.  You could live your whole life in ignorant bliss, to quote Cypher, grow old and die, seemingly in the real world, when in fact you are an overdeveloped fetus in a pod attached to a machine somewhere.  But if you take the red pill and wake up in that pod, you finally realize what's so terrifying about the Matrix: claustrophobia.  You are trapped inside this system.  You might not be able to see, hear or feel it, but you are trapped inside that pod.

This sense of claustrophobia is probably best captured in the film's most infamous sequence: Neo chooses the red pill, then touches a mirror, only to find its material growing on him, covering his body and travelling down his throat.  We cut from an interior shot of that throat to a p.o.v. of Neo's real-world predicament.  Everything about this sequence shows us Neo's ignorant perception butting up against the claustrophobia of his situation.  He is terrified of the reflective material coating his body uncontrollably, encasing and trapping him.  The camera travelling down Neo's throat traps us with him, and meanwhile indicates that there is a tube sticking down his throat in the real world.  The liquid mirror is a kind of symbol for Neo's body recognizing that it is surrounded by fluid.  Indeed, this sequence has some disturbing imagery, but is most terrifying for putting us in Neo's shoes as he discovers just how trapped and powerless he really is.

The Matrix explores the most viscerally terrifying aspects of its subject matter in another well-known scene: treacherous Judas figure Cypher decides that he will give Morpheus to the Agents, and kill off the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, in exchange for being returned to the blissful ignorance of life in the Matrix.  With the crew split up inside the Matrix, Cypher exits, shoots the two conscious crew members, and proceeds to unplug the rest of them.  As Neo and the others gradually realize what's happening, the horror of this situation is best summed up by one crew member's last words: "not like this".  It's a chilling way to go, being aware of the fact that your life is in the hands of someone looming over your unconscious body.  The parallel editing between the crew in the Matrix standing around, and their helpless forms in real life, as Cypher first gets creepily intimate with Trinity, then toys with Neo in humiliating fashion, convey the same sense of impotence.  The only reason Neo and Trinity survive this is essentially a Deus Ex Machina, as one of the conscious crew members recovers from his injury and kills Cypher.  As powerful as Neo might become, even once he realizes he is the One, all it takes is one weak-willed team member back in reality, and he can essentially die of an aneurysm.




Outside of the sense of claustrophobia provided, the Wachowskis employ some more cryptic techniques to establish a sort of visual continuity throughout the film.  The aforementioned scene of Cypher looming over Trinity's unconscious form, lamenting his feelings for her, is paralleled in the climax of the film in less sinister fashion, when Neo has seemingly been killed, and Trinity leans over his body, confessing her love to him.  Soon afterward, when Neo has been established as The One and exercises his powers, he freezes a hail of bullets in the air and causes them to fall.  This cuts to a shot of a screen on the Nebuchadnezzar
, with the iconic "falling data" image paralleling the bullets.  Ultimately, almost all of the imagery and editing in The Matrix is about drawing that line between the Matrix world and real life.

Works Cited
The Matrix. Prod. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. By Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Carrie Ann Moss, and Laurence Fishburne. Warner Bros., 1999.