“And Then There Were None” - René Clair (1945)

And Then There Were None (1939) is not only English mystery writer Agatha Christie’s most popular novel, it is the most widely read mystery novel ever written, with more than 100 million copies sold [1].  This novel (which was originally titled Ten Little Niggers but was soon changed to And Then There Were None) was refashioned by Christie in 1943 into a stage play with an altered, more upbeat, ending; and it is this play that has served as the basis for numerous film and TV adaptations around the world over the years.  However, the most famous of these adaptations was the first – the 1945 American film And Then There Were None, directed by René Clair.

What makes Christie’s story so irresistibly enticing?  It is undoubtedly the story’s foundational proposition – ten strangers stranded in a lone mansion on a small island are facing the prospect that an unknown member of their group is intent on killing all the others, one-by-one.  As the murders proceed, the surviving parties (and the viewers) must continually revise their suspicions as to who might be the fiendish perpetrator.  Since everyone is ultimately under suspicion, the atmosphere for paranoia is intense.  As such, this turns out to be one of the ultimate claustrophobic whodunits.     

René Clair, the film‘s director, was a famous French filmmaker and something of an auteur, but he spent the  war years of  World War II self-exiled in the U.S., where he had the opportunity to direct a number of Hollywood films (e.g. The Flame of New Orleans (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow (1944), and finally And Then There Were None (1945)).  So not surprisingly, this film’s production was very much a standard Hollywood product, with the script, cinematography, editing, and music all handled by Hollywood veterans Dudley Nichols, Lucien N. Andriot, Harvey Manger, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, respectively.  Even so, the uniqueness of Agatha Christie’s story has made the film largely stand out as something of an art-house favourite over the years [2,3,4,5,6].

The film begins with eight people, all mutually strangers to each other, being delivered in a small boat to an isolated island off the English coast.  We will soon learn their identities:

• 
  Judge Francis Quinncannon (played by Barry Fitzgerald), a legal authority
• Dr. Edward Armstrong (Walter Huston), a medical physician
• William Blore (Roland Young), a police detective 
• General Sir John Mandrake (Aubrey Smith), a military officer
• Prince Nikki Starloff (Mischa Auer), an upper-class wastrel
• Emily Brent (Judith Anderson), an older upper-class woman
• Philip Lombard (Louis Hayward)
• Vera Claythorne (June Duprez)
  

They are all guests of a Mr. Owen whom they have never met.  When they arrive on the island, they are taken to a lone mansion tended to by two newly hired servants, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, who have also never met Mr. Owen.  When the guests sit down for dinner, they notice a flamboyant centerpiece on the table featuring ten figurines of (American) Indians.  This odd centerpiece, which can evoke the macabre children’s nursery rhyme “Ten Little Indians”, will serve as a physical metaphor for the gruesome events to follow.  

Then Mr. Rogers, following instructions he had received from Mr. Owen, plays a phonograph record having a recording addressed to the newly arrived guests.  The recorded voice asserts that, based on inside information, it knows and spells out how each of ten people in the house – the eight invited guests and Mr. and Mrs. Rogers – is individually responsible for the deaths of one or more innocent people.  Essentially, they are all unconvicted murderers.  And so, according to the voice on the recording, they all deserve to be executed.

Naturally, this announcement is disruptive to the equanimity of the group, who are in the initial stages of getting to know each other.  There are various angry denials, as well as confessions of some degrees of guilt.  But they all feel that they are now the targets of revenge for their alleged past deeds.

Then the sequence of mysterious deaths begins.  The first one happens quickly.  After Prince Starloff sits down at the piano in the drawing room and plays and sings the children’s nursery song “Ten Little Indians”, he takes a sip from a cocktail drink and then keels over, dead.  The cocktail drink was mysteriously poisoned.  In this and in the subsequent death cases, the identity of the  perpetrator of the vengeful murder is unknown.  But each occasion is accompanied by an equally mysterious disappearance of another Indian figurine from the dining room table.  And the circumstances of each death weirdly reflect the circumstances of the corresponding Indian disappearance mentioned in the nursery rhyme.  At first the life-threatened guests believe that there nemesis is somewhere on the island outside the mansion.  But after thoroughly investigating this possibility, they conclude that their existential antagonist is a disguised member of their own group.

Most of the guests are stereotypes of their professional backgrounds, and so they stereotypically apply their accustomed skills to finding who is the murderer.  Thus Judge Quinncannon sees things from a legal perspective;  Dr. Armstrong sees things from a medical perspective;  General Mandrake sees things from a military perspective; and Detective Blore just wants to collect all the evidence.  Although some viewers may like this heterogeneous problem-solving admixture, I found it a bit too artificial for my taste.

So the sequence of surreptitious murders continues to play itself out, with the identity of the cold-blooded killer being continually restricted to one of a set of candidates among the declining number of surviving guests.  Eventually the viewer does learn who it is, and I will leave it to you to see the film and find out for yourself.

Enticing as this challenging many-suspect whodunit might seem, though, the film And Then There Were None doesn’t live up to its potential for several reasons:

• For one thing, there don’t seem to be potential motivations for the murders committed on the island, and this leads to an absence of suspicions.  I believe murder mysteries are best outfitted with threatening suspects whose suspected motivations can help drive the narrative. This problem here likely stems from the overly simplified and stereotyped characterizations of the guests in this story.
   
  
• Two of the guests, Vera Claythorne and Philip Lombard (whose real name later turns out to be Charles Morley), are much younger than the other guests and very glamorous compared to the others.  This makes it too obvious that they are innocent parties and that they are likely to be the protagonists in identifying the true culprit.
    
  
• And finally, the film makes too light of the notion of death and basically adopts a mocking attitude toward the loss of life.  This may help lighten the dark tenor of the story, but the film dialogue goes too far in this direction.  In fact the incessant flow of superficial wisecracks in this area wears pretty thin before we come to the end of the story.
  

So And Then There Were None may offer you an interesting mind diversion sometime, but it is a story that could have been fashioned into a more compelling cinematic experience.

★★½

Notes:

1. “And Then There Were None”, Wikipedia, (30 September 2021).    
   
2. Bosley Crowther, “SHE SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'And Then There Were None,' With Barry Fitzgerald, at Roxy, Appears Opportunely as Goblins Pay Annual Visit Universal Offers a Refashioned Drama of Pirandello in Film 'This Love of Ours,' New Bill Showing at Loew's Criterion At Loew's Criterion”, The New York Times, (1 November 1945).   
   
3. Variety Staff, “And Then There Were None”, Variety, (31 December 1944).   
   
4. Leonard Maltin (ed.), “And Then There Were None”, Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, PLUME, Penguin Press, (2005). 
5. Jeremy Arnold, “And Then There Were None on Blu-ray”, Turner Classic Movies, (18 September 2013).   
   
6. Jay Carr, “And Then There Were None - And Then There Were None”, Turner Classic Movies, (9 January 2014).   
   

“Django Unchained” - Quentin Tarantino (2012)

Django Unchained (2012) is perhaps iconoclastic American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s most popular film, and it has received both considerable critical praise [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] and numerous awards [8].  As was Tarantino’s custom, he played here with an existing film genre, but amplified and exaggerated the cinematics to achieve an almost cartoon effect.  In the particular case of Django Unchained, though, there were some novel aspects that were unique, even for Tarantino.

For one thing, the existing film genre that Tarantino exploited in Django Unchained was the “Spaghetti Western”, which was already a parodic exaggeration of an existing film genre, the Western, which involved stories set in the old American West and often featured cowboys.  The Spaghetti Western genre, which played with and exaggerated the Western, got its name because its earliest exponent was the Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone, whose trilogy of films – A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) (collectively known, variously, as the “Dollars Trilogy” and the “Man With No Name Trilogy”) – were the classic Spaghetti Westerns.  So with Django Unchained, Tarantino was making a parody of a parody.  In my opinion, however, Tarantino, despite his cinematic pyrotechnics here, does not come close to outdoing Leone in this film.
                                                
A second novel feature of Django Unchained is that the principal protagonist cowboy, Django, is a black person (an African American), an unlikely personage to star in an American Western.  Thus the people that Django encounters in the film, set in 1958 in the American South (in Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi), all seem to regard the idea of a black cowboy as an impossibility.  But in fact there apparently were some black cowboys in the U.S., even before the American Civil War (1861-1865) [9,10,11,12].  So Django’s cowboy appearance to these people should not really have been that much of an oddity.

The story of Django Unchained begins in Texas with a couple of white slave traders marching some chained black slaves through a forest.  Improbably, they encounter an itinerant dentist, Dr. King Schultz (played by Christoph Waltz), whose real profession is now that of a bounty hunter.  Schultz is looking for a slave who might help him identify some wanted outlaws that he wants to capture “dead or alive” in exchange for a posted bounty.  It turns out that one of the slaves, Django (Jamie Foxx), can identify these outlaws, and Schultz seeks to buy him.  Although Dr. Schultz comes across as a civilized, erudite German, we will soon see he is a ruthless killer.  He soon shoots and kills the slave traders and takes Django away with him.

Now Schultz and Django go to the Tennessee plantation where the sought-after outlaws are overseers.  Django is now outfitted by Schultz to look like a freed black who has become a cowboy.   Together, Schultz and Django kill the three outlaws as well as most of the white people who work at the plantation.  With Django as Dr. Schultz’s apprentice bounty hunter, the two of them go on to rack up some more bounties.  Finally in appreciation for Django’s assistance, Schultz agrees to help find and free Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is also a black slave (since it is later revealed that Broomhilda can speak German, we might assume that her real name is actually “Brunhilde”).  

They eventually discover that Broomhilda is now a domestic slave at a large Mississippi plantation, Candyland, owned by the seemingly charming Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio).  But despite Candie’s genteel exterior, we soon learn that he is cruel and sadistic.  One of Candie’s favorite pastimes is staging “Mandingo” fights, a gambling sport (for the spectators) in which two male black slaves are coerced to fight each other to the death, like a cockfight.  The film devotes some time to this gruesome activity, presumably to emphasize just how depraved is Calvin Candie.

So Schultz and Django go to Candyland with the feigned interest of purchasing a top Mandingo fighter from Candie.  But their real intention is to come up with a way of freeing, by means of a separate purchasing transaction, Broomhilda, with whom they pretend not to be acquainted.  Their deception is disrupted, though, when Candie’s suspicious head house slave, Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), discerns that Broomhilda and Django know each other and informs Candie of the fact.  This leads to a breakdown in the hitherto cordial negotiation between Schultz and Candie, and the two prideful and trigger-happy negotiants start shooting at each other and soon turn the entire plantation into a bloodbath.  Django, too, joins in the killing spree.  Schultz and Candie wind up dead, but Django, after killing many people, finally surrenders when he sees Stephen threatening to kill Broomhilda.  
Django is now a prisoner/slave again and about to be shipped to a slave-owning mining company, but he has more killing ahead of him.  He manages to escape from and kill the people who are taking him to the mining company.  Then he returns to Candyland and rescues Broomhilda from slave custody before blowing up the plantation mansion with dynamite, presumably killing most of the people there.  In the end, Django and Broomhilda ride off together with documents certifying their free statuses (i.e. not slaves).

Altogether, we could say there are four successive narrative segments of very unequal length that make up this lengthy 2-hour-and-45-minute film – (1) Django encounters Schultz, (2) Django and Schultz together as bounty hunters, (3) Django and Schultz with Candie, (4) Django’s escape.  So how do they collectively stack up when compared with Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns, such as For a Few Dollars More?  Well, when it comes to realism, both Tarantino and Leone make significant compromises, although Tarantino seems to go further in this respect.  For both of them, the protagonists fire their guns with never-miss lethality, while their respective opponents always miss their targets.  But Tarantino’s gunshot absurdities seem to be even more comic-book flavored than Leone’s.  And also, I was surprised to see the slave Django able to read.  But the real problems with Django Unchained lie elsewhere.

For one thing, the characters of Django and Broomhilda are essentially dramatic ciphers.  Broomhilda is little seen, and Django is so laconic that we never get a feeling for him or what he is about.  He just shoots and kills people who stand in his way.  The only potentially interesting character is the convivial and crafty Dr. King Schultz, but his extended encounter and confrontation with Calvin Candie doesn’t come to any narrative resolution.  They both just get abruptly wiped out.  And anyway, Schultz is not a character with whom the viewer is likely to want to empathize.  And, as I said above, the clearly-identified protagonist across the four narrative segments of the film, Django, is too opaque to sustain a full narrative.

Instead of a compelling narrative, Tarantino has presented to the viewer an extended and emphatically gritty bloodbath, comprising an endless succession of killings, mostly on the part of the film’s protagonists and many involving the deaths of likely innocent people.  We need more narrative motivation for this slaughter.  Does Tarantino believe that all U.S. Southern whites are responsible for the horrible institution of slavery and therefore deserve to die?  Even if he were to hold such an absurd belief, no such justificatory point is made in the film.  No, Django Unchained just seems to be a carnival of violence supposedly in support of a black narrative figurehead, but probably primarily just designed to appeal to people who like to watch endless violence.  I will concede that there are some interesting scenes involving Christoph Waltz as Dr. King Schultz, but  I would say that Leone’s films offer altogether more captivating cinematic narratives.
★★½

Notes:

1. Murtaza Ali Khan, “Django Unchained (2012): American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino's lampoon on human trafficking”, A Potpourri of Vestiges, (January 2013). 
2. Roger Ebert, “Faster, Quentin! Thrill! Thrill!”, Roger Ebert’s Journal, RogerEbert.com, (7 January 2013).  
3. Omer M. Mozaffar, “Django America”, Roger Ebert’s Far-Flung Correspondents, RogerEbert. com, (29 December 2012).    
4. A. O. Scott, “The Black, the White and the Angry”, The New York Times, (24 December 2012).    
5. Anthony Lane, “Love Hurts ‘Les Misérables’, ‘Django Unchained,’ and ‘Amour’”, The New Yorker, (30 December 2012).    
6. Peter Travers, “Django Unchained”, Rolling Stone, (13 December 2012).     
7. Erin Aubry Kaplan, “‘Django’ an unsettling experience for many blacks", Los Angeles Times, (28 December 2012).
   
8. “List of accolades received by ‘Django Unchained’”, Wikipedia, (2020). 
9. “Black cowboys”, Wikipedia, (3 March 2021).    
10. Katie Nodjimbadem, “The Lesser-Known History of African-American Cowboys”, Smithsonian Magazine, (13 February 2017).  
11. Jennifer Oast, "Black Cowboys In The American West: On The Range, On The Stage, Behind The Badge", Civil War Book Review, (Article 16, Spring 2017).    
12. David Goldstein-Shirley, “Black Cowboys in the American West: An Historiographical Review”, Ethnic Studies Review, Volume 20, (1997), pp. 79-89.    
    

“Parasite” - Bong Joon-Ho (2019)

One of the most lauded films of the past few years has been the South Korean thriller Parasite (Gisaengchung, 2019) by the popular writer-director Bong Joon-Ho.  The film portrays a bizarre set of interactions between two families of vastly contrasting wealth statuses and social standings.  One family (the Park family) is wealthy and refined, while the other family (the Kim family) lies, from just about any perspective, at the bottom of the social heap.  Over the course of these interactions, we would expect the lower-standing family to be hopelessly disadvantaged.  But they have an arrow in their quiver that can always be used to counter the often-prejudicial social norms of those in power – duplicity.  And this is what seems to fascinate so many viewers of this film.   

Indeed Parasite has been almost universally praised by critics [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] and has amazingly won just about all the top awards.  In particular, it won the Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival; and at the 92nd U.S. Academy Awards that year, it won Oscars for Best Picture (the first non-English Language film to do so), Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film – making only the third time that a film won both the Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Picture.  

Nevertheless and despite all these accolades, I feel Parasite is somewhat overrated.  True, the film has lots of plot twists (based on Bong Joon-Ho’s original story and the script by Bong and Han Jin-Won), dynamic cinematography (by Hong Kyung-Pyo), and good acting.  But it takes  more than that to make a great movie – in particular it takes a compelling and meaningful narrative.  In this connection, it’s noteworthy that many viewers find close similarities between Parasite and Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2018 Palme d’Or winner, Shoplifters, although I think there are distinct differences in the tones of these two narratives and the way the characters in these two films are portrayed.

 

Parasite’s narrative has two major segments.

1.  The Kim and Park families

At first we are introduced to the impoverished Kim family living in an urban basement hovel.  They are father Kim Ki-Taek (played by Song Kang-Ho), mother Chung-Sook (Jang Hye-Jin), and their two early-twenty-something offspring – son Ki-Woo (Choi Woo-Shik) and daughter Ki-Jung (Park So-Dam).  They work in temporary, menial jobs folding pizza boxes for a food delivery company, but they still don’t have enough to make ends meet.  

Then, however, Ki-Woo’s college-educated friend Min-Hyuk pays him a visit before leaving to study overseas and offers to recommend that Ki-Woo take over his job as the English tutor for a wealthy family’s teenage daughter.  Min-Hyuk has romantic interests in the girl and doesn’t want anyone else to move in on her.  So even though he knows that Ki-Woo will have to lie about his educational qualification, Min-Hyuk trusts his friend.  But as we will soon see, trusting anyone in the Kim family is a dubious proposition.  

Soon Ki-Woo gets the job and  is tutoring the daughter of the affluent Park family, Da-Hye (Jung Ji-So), and arousing romantic fascination from both Da-Hye and her innocent mother, Choi Yeon-Gyo (Cho Yeo-Jeong).  Continuing his activities in deception, Ki-Woo manages to get the unsuspecting Park family to hire his sister Ki-Jung, who uses an assumed name and poses as an art teacher, to tutor Da-Hye’s kid brother, Da-Song (Jung Hyeon-Jun).  Before long, Ki-Woo and Ki-Jung have finagled the Park family into firing both their chauffeur and their live-in housekeeper, Gook Moon-Gwang (Lee Jung-Eun) and replacing them with their father (Ki-Taek) and mother (Chung-Sook), again using assumed names and pretending to be unrelated to the other members of their family.

So now, by means of their relentless deceptions, the Kim family has embedded itself with posh positions working for the Park family.  When the Park family goes off on a camping trip, all the Kims come over to the Park mansion to feast themselves.

2.  Another Parasite

But while the Parks are still away, the former housekeeper Moon-Gwang shows up at the door  of the mansion, saying she left something in the basement.  When she is given permission to look downstairs, it is revealed that there is an underground bunker below the house that was built by the original owner and architect of the mansion, unbeknownst to the Parks when they moved in.  Living secretly in this bunker for the past four year has been Moon-Gwang’s husband, Oh Geun-Sae (Park Myung-Hoon), who is hiding out from creditors.

This sets up a conflict.  The Kims want Moon-Gwang and her husband out of the mansion, but Moon-Gwang discovers that the Kims are frauds and that their lies were responsible for her getting fired.  She says she will inform the Parks about this if they force her out.

So now we have three levels of humanity in conflict.  At the top level is the clueless Park family, and below them is the deceitful Kim family, who are feeding off them.  At the bottom are Moon-Gwang and Geun-Sae, who want to feed off the upper two levels.

But now the narrative shifts from one dominated by deception to one overwhelmed by lethal violence.  What ensues is a series of incredibly brutal interactions between the various contestants, with a number of killings, the bloody violence of which seem to lack motivation.  In the end, many of the characters I have mentioned above are dead.  This shocking violence may appeal to some viewers, but I found it gratuitous.  I will leave it to you to watch the film and see how it all comes out.

In the end, with no truly satisfied characters at the conclusion of this story, we might inquire into any underlying themes in this film.  I would say that one could point to the following themes:

• Deception. 
  The Kim family lives entirely by deception.  Everything that they do or claim to be is fraudulent.  One might wonder if Bong is suggesting that perhaps all the attributes people claim to have in society are not much more authentic and worthy of belief than those of the Kims.
   
  
• Economic Exploitation.
  The Kims, Moon-Gwang, and her husband are all victims of an economic system based on winner-take-all exploitation.  This leads to severe inequality and desperation on the part of those who are at the bottom.  Our lower-class characters in this film innovatively came up with their own schemes, but they were exploitative, too.  What we really need is a social system built around teamwork and community – one that goes beyond the zero-sum-game mechanics of what largely prevails in today’s increasingly gig-economy.
   
  
• No Planning. 
  Kim Ki-Taek believed in a life devoid of planning, and he explicitly advocated that policy to his son, KI-Woo.  Now it is true that being opportunistic and ready for change has its advantages, but Ki-Taek took this commitment to avoid planning way too far and into the realm of absurdity. And ini the coda at the close of the film, Ki-Woo expresses his determination to move in the opposite direction and commit himself to a hopeless plan that has no chance of succeeding.  What was Bong saying here?  I don’t know.

Altogether, Parasite’s most entertaining moments occurred, for me, in the early stages of the film when the Kim family members took advantage of off-the-cuff gambits of deception in order to worm their way into paid activities in the Park family mansion.  These scenes are probably what prompt some people to call this film a comedy.  But as I mentioned at the outset, there are some weaknesses that keep this film from reaching a top level:

• Missing motivations for the murders. 
  There are a number of anger-filled murders that take place in the latter part of the film, but these are not well-motivated.  Even in cheap revenge films, there is more time and effort spent in developing an understanding of what fires the vengeful actions depicted than is done here in this film.
   
  
• Aimless camera tracking. 
  Although Bong and his cinematographer Hong Kyung-Pyo are skilled in concocting elaborate moving-camera shots, this card is overplayed in Parasite.  In many cases these camera-tracking shots seem to have no purpose and are merely distracting.
   
  
• Deflating Coda.
  The last few minutes of the film present a somewhat deflating coda depicting Ki-Woo’s hopeless long-term plan to buy the mansion.  But this closing segment seems only to detract from the dramatic intensity that has come earlier [7,8].         
   
  
• No sympathetic protagonists. 
  A compelling narrative has to have at least one character that attracts the viewer’s (or reader’s) empathetic interest.  However, Parasite is devoid of such characters.  Almost all of the characters here are opaque and deceitful.  So the overall story has a random nature to it.

Thus, although Parasite has some individual scenes that are skillfully executed, for me, they don’t all come together to make an outstanding film.

★★½

 

Notes:

1. Brian Tallerico, “Parasite”, RogerEbert.com, (7 September 2019).   
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “‘Parasite’ Review: The Lower Depths Rise With a Vengeance”, The New York Times, (10 February 2020).  
   
3. Richard Whittaker, “Parasite”, Austin Chronicle, (25 October 2019).  
4. Justin Chang, “Review: Thrilling and devastating, ‘Parasite’ is one of the year’s very best movies”, Los Angeles Times, (9 October 2019).   
   
5. Micah Bucey, “Parasite (Gisaengchung)”, Spirituality & Practice, (n.d.).   
   
6. Peter Howell, “‘Parasite’ is a savage, surprising class satire that pricks the conscience”, Toronto Star, (17 October 2019).   
   
7. Stephen Dalton, “'Parasite' ('Gisaengchung'): Film Review | Cannes 2019", The Hollywood Reporter, (21 May 2019).  
   
8. James Berardinelli, “Parasite (South Korea, 2019)”, ReelViews, (1 November 2019).     

“The Departed” - Martin Scorsese (2006)

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was another one of his dazzling crime thrillers (such as Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019)), which featured atmospheric and emotive coverage of a gangster underworld.  On this occasion, Scorsese had a $90 million production budget and a star-studded cast, featuring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin, to help ensure that The Departed would be another blockbuster at the box office.  And sure enough, the film won great favor with the public and the critics [1,2,3,4].  It also garnered four Oscars, including the one for Best Picture.  One of the other Oscars that the film gained was the one for Best Director – the only time that Scorsese has ever won that particular award (he has been nominated for such an Oscar eight other times over the course of his illustrious career).  Nevertheless, The Departed has not won universal acclaim from all critics, and I am among those who have found some shortcomings with the film [5,6,7,8].

One of the main things that fascinates viewers of The Departed is its convoluted spy-versus-spy story structure.  It has a plot based closely on that of the popular Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) that was directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and written by  Mak and Felix Chong.  William Monahan’s adaptation of this same story for The Departed won him an Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

The story for The Departed is set in South Boston and involves a struggle between a mobster’s gang in that area and the Massachusetts State Police (MSP).  The leader of that underworld gang is Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson), but he has so far been too cagey to ever get arrested by the police.  We see an early example of that caginess when the film shows how Costello has groomed a young man from his neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), to be a mole for his gang inside the police force.  Sullivan advances quickly inside the MSP and is soon accepted to join the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), which is headed by Captain George Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) and whose current main goal is to pin a rap on Costello.  So a spot in the SIU is exactly where Costello has wanted Sullivan to be.

Meanwhile a student about to graduate from the MSP academy, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is recruited by Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to become a spy for the police inside Costello’s gang.  Queenan and Dignam then appropriately doctor Costigan’s already sullied background to be suitable for him to join Costello’s outfit.

Much of the rest of the film follows the parallel, and mostly separate, narrative threads concerning the activities of the two moles.  Since their identities and activities must be kept secret, the secret identities of Costigan and Sullivan are unknown to each other, as well as unknown to their colleagues on each side of the fence.  When both Costello and the SIU eventually figure out that each of the contesting groups has an unknown rat informant in their ranks, it is not too surprising that both Costigan and Sullivan are then tasked with the jobs of uncovering the hidden mole (i.e. themselves) in their respective groups.

Things get even more entangled when both Sullivan and Costigan wind up talking separately to a young female police psychiatrist, Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga).  And, of course, what should never happen in such circumstance, does indeed come about – Dr. Madden soon has sexual relations with both Sullivan and Costigan.  This unlikely plot contrivance provides a particularly striking narrative opportunity for dwelling on one of the film’s major themes – establishing one’s true identity.  

Throughout the film, we see interactions among people with hidden identities.  And these veiled interactions set up opportunities for the endless double-crosses that take place in the story.  One mind-blowing additional identity obfuscation is revealed when, well into the story, Costigan learns that gang leader Costello is actually an FBI informant and therefore protected.  

But there are two aspects of identity – external and internal.  The external is what is presented to other people, and that can be falsified for opportunistic gain.  But one’s internal identity is how one sees him-or-herself, and this was a matter of deep concern for Sullivan and Costigan.  In particular, Sullivan was concerned about his manhood and sexual identity.  His implied impotence even leads him to unconsciously question his own sexual gender preference.  Costigan, on the other hand, had a guilty conscience and was concerned about his authenticity and the control of his volatile temper.  

Another theme in the film, and one that is common in Scorsese films, concerns masculinity.  Of course this is probably always an issue in the criminal underworld, but it is heavily emphasized in this film.  Sullivan is particularly concerned about his masculinity, and his self-doubts are starkly contrasted with the hyper-confidence of his idol, Costello, whose motto is

    “I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!"

Anyway, the various encounters involving masculinity confrontations and identity misunderstandings only accelerate and fuel further double-crosses as the story proceeds.  And these lead in the closing scenes to a string of murders undertaken for revenge and self-protection.  There is no morality or sense of human justice in this gangland underworld.  Eventually, most of our principal characters wind up getting killed – Sullivan, Costigan, Costello, Capt. Queenan, and Costello’s right-hand man French (Ray Winstone).  But is there a narrative purpose or resolution to all these killings?  What is the story being told here?  It seems that many viewers have problems on this score.  In particular Sean Dignam’s murder of Sullivan at the very end of the film has left many people wondering why (although some plausible explanations have been put forward [9]).

So, overall, what do we walk away with at the close of The Departed?  Although, as I mentioned, the film did win many awards and success at the box office, I would still say that there are a number of weaknesses that detract from the viewing experience.  I have already mentioned the aimlessness of the narrative, but there are other major problems with this production, too.

• Film Production
  Unfortunately, the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus and film editing of Thelma Schoonmakeris is pointlessly agitated, and these only serve to distract the viewer.
      
  
• Acting
  The over-the-top acting, particularly on the part of Jack Nicholson (as Frank Costello) and Mark Wahlberg (as Sean Dignam), is also distracting for the viewer.  Wahlberg is constantly exploding into epithet-filled diatribes that almost lead us to believe his character is incapable of normal discourse.  Even worse is Nicholson’s ham acting as Costello, a key figure in this story.  It is reminiscent of his satanic characterizations from earlier films, but it is way too exaggerated here.  On this score, critics Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez have commented on how Nicholson’s performance helps bring the whole film down [6]:
  

  “Quoting James Joyce, cursing with racist glee, enjoying cocaine-drenched interracial threesomes, and licking squashed bugs off the palm of his hand, his [Nicholson’s] is a routine of typically outsized Jack-ness that’s chillingly fearsome and daunting in spurts (i.e. when his gaze remains stern and his arching eyebrows remain lowered) but flamboyantly cartoonish in its entirety—a description that too often also accurately applies to the alternately scintillating, silly, and distended The Departed.”

• Realism
  In an expressionistic film such as this, we may expect some exaggerations beyond authentic realism, but many of the goings-on in this film are highly implausible, from both physical and psychological perspectives.  I won’t itemize them here, but many situations, such as Madolyn Madden’s involvements with both Sullivan and Costigan, seem very much contrived.
  
  
• Profanity
  Although profanity has been alluded to in the above points, its loud, incessant presence in this film almost suggests that it is also a significant theme on its own.  And it’s not just the gangsters.  I would think that criminals and law-enforcement people would be tougher than this and would not be constantly succumbing to adolescent temper tantrums throughout the day.

So although The Departed has some characteristic Scorsese virtues, it has enough deficiencies to bring it down a few notches.  And this means that the film, despite its flamboyant production values, does not quite measure up to its inspiration, Infernal Affairs.
★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Good and evil, in each other's masks”, RogerEbert.com, (5 July 2007). 
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered With Bloody Deceit”, The New York Times, (6 October 2006).  
   
3. “The Departed”, (A Nutshell) Review, (12 October 2006).   
   
4. Colin McCormick, “10 Greatest Quotes From The Departed”, Screen Rant, (30 January 2020).   
   
5. J. Hoberman, “Bait and Switch”, The Village Voice, (26 September 2006).    
   
6. Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez, “DVD Review: The Departed”, Slant Magazine, (7 February 2007).   
   
7. Brian Koller, “filmsgraded.com: The Departed (2006) Grade: 55/100", filmsgraded.com (4 April 2014).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “Departed, The”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
9. Shane O'Neill, “The ending of The Departed explained”, Looper, (22 June 2020).   
   

“Andhadhun” - Sriram Raghavan (2018)

Andhadhun (English: “Blind Melody”, 2018) is an award-winning Indian crime thriller that has achieved immense popularity both at home and abroad [1,2,3].  The story, which is something of a multiply-linked whodunit, concerns a blind piano player who finds himself suspected of knowing too much about an unsolved murder.  As the story unfolds, the plot becomes progressively more complicated with a succession of threats and lies, and this has led some people (but not me) to view the film as a black comedy. 

Director-writer Sriram Raghavan was inspired to fashion this account after seeing Olivier Treiner’s 14-minute French film L'Accordeur (The Piano Tuner, 2010).  However, Raghavan and fellow script writers Sriram Raghavan, Hemanth M Rao, Pooja Ladha Surti, Arijit Biswas, and Yogesh Chandekar considerably expanded on Treiner’s work.  What they came up with was a noirish tale in which almost everyone we see is engaged in misrepresenting themselves and doublecrossing their temporary partners in order to further his or her selfish aims.  Everyone turns out to be a fake, and so the resulting multiple confusions concerning real identity are what doubtlessly lie at the base of this film’s popularity.

The narrative of Andhadhun unfolds over roughly six parts, but I will give you only a partial description of what happens so that you can go through the discovery process, yourself.

1.  Akash, the Pianist
Akash (played by Ayushmann Khurrana), the protagonist of the film, is an accomplished young pianist who is apparently blind.  Because the film’s focalization is almost exclusively on Akash, the viewer sees things going on around Akash that he, himself, may not be aware of.  But relatively early on we learn that Akash is not really blind – he fakes his blindness by using obscuring contact lenses in order to enhance his hearing and thereby improve his piano-playing skills.  However, noone else knows that Akash is not really blind.  When he goes out on the street, he wears dark sunglasses and uses a blindman’s cane to tap his way around. 

One day out on the street, Akash is knocked over by a girl, Sophie (Radhika Apte [4]), driving her motor scooter.  Sophie sympathetically helps the evidently blind Akash to his feet, and soon they become friends, and then lovers.  Sophie gets Akash a gig as a piano player at her father’s café, and there his playing attracts the admiration of retired actor Pramod Sinha (Anil Dhawan), who invites Akash to come to his home and play the piano for his upcoming wedding anniversary.

2.  An Unwitting Witness
Akash comes to the Sinha’s home on the appointed date, and the door is answered by Pramod’s wife Simi (Tabu [5]).  Simi sees that Akash is blind and lets him in to start playing the piano as a warmup for the anniversary party.  She tells him that her husband is not home yet.  But Akash sees that Pramod has just been brutally murdered and that the dead man’s bloodied corpse is still lying on the floor.  He also sees Simi’s apparent lover, the brutish-looking Manohar (Manav Vij).  But Akash is forced to remain silent and pretend he hasn’t seen anything.

Akash quickly goes to the police to report what he has seen.  But at the police station he notices that Manohar is a police officer, so he is again forced to withdraw from taking any action.  Later Akash happens to see Simi murdering her suspicious neighbour by pushing the elderly woman out of her upper-floor window.  Again Akash is the unwitting witness to foul play, and again he feels compelled to remain silent.

3.  Efforts to Eliminate the Witness
Despite Akash’s silence, Simi and Manohar are suspicious about the supposedly blind Akash, and Simi visits his apartment to test him.  After some staged interactions, Simi eventually discovers that Akash is not blind and threatens to kill him.  Akash pleads for his life and promises to remain silent and disappear from India.  But Simi has already given him a drug that  in a few minutes makes him now truly blind.
 
Manohar, though, is not satisfied with leaving Akash alive, even if blind, and comes to kill him.  Despite his blindness, Akash manages to knock Manohar out and escape, but running out on the street, Akash crashes into a telephone pole and is himself knocked out.

4.  New Adversaries
When Akash wakes up, he finds himself in what he believes to be a hospital bed.  But he soon discovers that his unconscious body on the street had been discovered by a corrupt rickshaw driver, Murli (Pawan Singh), who had taken him to an organ harvesting clinic.  The clinic’s director, Dr. Swami (Zakir Hussain), intends to kill Akash and sell his organs for a profit.

So now, halfway through the film, Akash’s situation seems hopelessly dire.  He is facing two ruthless groups – (1) Simi and Manohar and (2) Dr. Swami and his two assistants – which are both out to kill him.  And now Akash really is blind.  But there are a lot more complicated machinations to come, and I will leave it to you to find out what happens when you watch the film.

Though I won’t go over the details of the remaining two parts of the film, I think it is still appropriate to remind the reader that the people in the two ruthless groups out to kill Akash are all unconscionably self-absorbed and exclusively out for their own material gain.  Therefore they are all in competition with each and liable to become mutual enemies.  This is what can make things complicated, and you will not be surprised that there are more deaths in the offing.

And remember that all these people are telling lies.  In this respect, the viewer should also keep in mind that even the at-first seemingly innocent Akash is also an inveterate liar.  This is a significant issue, because at the film’s outset there are indications that this whole tale is a narrative told by Akash (there are voiceover passages early on reflecting Akash’s reflections).  Thus the viewer may be justified in questioning whether certain events presented in the film are accurate representations of what is supposed to have actually happened.

In particular there is a climactic sequence of events near the end of the story that, to the careful viewer, seem to be told in two conflicting versions.  The sequence of events at issue concerns a scene showing Dr. Swami driving, with Akash seated next to him in the front seat, down a country road.  One of the versions of this scene is presented as part of the normal, top-level narrative of the film.  And the other, slightly different, version is presented as a flashback reflection on the part of Akash that he shares with Sophie when she runs into him in Europe two years later.  Since both versions are told by Akash (remember the whole film is supposedly narrated by Akash), at least one of these versions of this late sequence must be a lie.  How to resolve this question, and indeed how to come to a clear understanding of the ending of Andhadhun, has been a matter of considerable discussion among people who have seen the film.  You can check out some of these speculations by looking at a few of the discussions on the Internet discussion site Quora [6,7]. 

But no matter what conclusions you might come to about that  matter concerning the film’s conclusion, your overall appreciation of Andhadhun will probably depend on the degree to which you enjoy all the plot twists and playing all the guessing games that keep coming up.  From my perspective, those things don’t quite add up to a successful viewing experience.  Although actors Tabu and Ayushmann Khurrana have a certain degree of screen magnetism, they do not portray characters here with whom the viewer is likely to feel sympathy or even fascination, especially as the story progresses.  Indeed, all the significant characters other than Sophie are contemptible and ruthless narcissists, and so we are not drawn into empathizing with their thoughts and motivations.  But successful  narratives are usually those in which the reader or viewer is moved to empathize with one or more of the characters.  That is not the case in Andhadhun.  The only sympathetic character in this story is Sophie, and although she has potential, she is here basically only an observer who has minimal impact on the other characters and what ultimately happens.

Thus for these reasons, Andhadhun is of some interest, but it does not really reach the top level.
★★½

Notes:

1. Priyanka Roy, “Andhadhun: Thrilling and intelligent whodunit”, The Telegraph, (6 October 2018).   
2. Renuka Vyavahare, “Andhadhun Movie Review”, Times of India, (17 October 2018).    
3. Raja Sen, “Andhadhun movie review: A terrific game of blind man’s bluff. 5 stars”, “Hindustan Times”, (5 October 2018).   
4. Radhika Apte also starred in “Chokher Bali”, a part of Stories by Rabindranath Tagore, Episodes 1, 2, & 3, directed by Anurag Basu (2015).   
5. Tabu, whose real name is Tabassum Fatima Hashmi, is very well-known and has appeared in the following films that I have reviewed: The Namesake (2006), Haider (2014), and Drishyam (2015).
6. “How do you explain the ending of the Andhadhun movie of Ayushmann Khurrana?”, Quora, (n.d.).      
7. “How did Ayushman Khurana got back his eyes or was he never blind in the movie - Andhadhun?”, Quora, (n.d.).     

“Gran Torino” - Clint Eastwood (2008)

Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008) was well-received by critics upon its release and seen as a presumable swan song for the then 78-year-old actor/director.   After all, the film seemed to offer a reflective take on some of the characteristic themes in Eastwood’s films: morality, personal justice, and revenge.  And although Eastwood has amazingly gone on to direct nine more films since then, some people would say that Gran Torino still stands as a significant Eastwood statement on the appropriateness of revenge.  In fact some critics felt that Eastwood was finally turning his back on revenge entirely in this film [1].  This was significant, because over the course of forty years, Eastwood had become the iconic face of vengeance – in such films as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), Dirty Harry (1971, plus four sequels), and Unforgiven (1992).

Gran Torino, too, includes aspects of vengeance, but it also features some comedic elements and reflections on the decay of traditional American family life.  The question is – does this film show a novel Eastwood renunciation of revenge as a moral instrument?  I would say it does not.

The story of the film, which is scripted by Nick Schenk, is set in a decaying residential neighborhood in Detroit and concerns a retired auto assembly-line worker, Walt Kowalski (played by Clint Eastwood), who had served in the Korean War (1950-53).  Given those dates, we can guess that the cantankerous Kowalski must now be in his late 70's.  Throughout this story, which comprises five parts, the two themes of retributive justice and family-love redemption keep reappearing.

1.  Two Neighboring Families
The film begins with the traditional Catholic funeral of Walt’s wife, in the attendance of which are the families of Walt’s two grown sons, Mitch and Steve.  Both sons are preoccupied with their own middle-class materialistic concerns and have no interest in and have long since abandoned socializing with their curmudgeonly old father.  As far as they are concerned, Walt should now be shipped off to a rest home.  But Walt wants to stay living in his old house, even though the neighborhood is increasingly rundown and now overrun by new Hmong refugee families from Southeast Asia.  The Hmong people are very family-oriented, just the opposite of the familial-isolated Walt Kowalski.  Walt’s only interests are his dog, his perfectly preserved 1972 Ford Gran Torino, and keeping neighborhood children off his lawn. 

Early on we see Hmong teenager Thao Lor (Bee Vang), who lives next door to Walt, forcibly recruited by his cousin “Spider” (Doua Moua) to join a Hmong street gang.  Thao’s gang initiation assignment is to steal Walt’s Gran Torino.  But Thao bungles the attempt, and Walt almost shoots him with his rifle.

2.  Getting to Know Walt and the Lors
In this part we get know a little more about Walt and the Lors.  Shortly after the botched Gran Torino theft incident, Spider’s Hmong gang starts to punish Thao by roughing him up on the street, but Walt intervenes with his rifle and chases the gang members away.  Later a rival black gang threatens to sexually harass another young member of the Lor family, Sue (Ahney Her), but again the gun-wielding Walt comes to the rescue.

The Lor family are extraordinarily grateful for these interventions, and they come over and shower Walt’s front porch with gifts.  They also compel Thao to come to Walt and formally apologize for his earlier wrongdoing.   

However, we see that Walt didn’t do these things out of kindness; he did them out of hatred and contempt for racial minorities.  Walt is a hard-core racist – he repeatedly calls all the people in his neighborhood “chinks”, “slopes”, “slants”, and “gooks” – an attitude that probably goes back to his experiences in the massively deadly Korean War (roughly 3 million Asians killed [2]).  In fact Walt is the kind of ignorant urban redneck (IUR) that today makes up the core support for Donald Trump. 

Nevertheless, Sue manages to coax Walt into coming over to the Lor household for a wider-family luncheon party, where Walt is shown that the Lors are indeed human beings.  Afterwards, the Lor family insist that, as an act of penance, Thao must come over and work for Walt for a full week.

3.  Walt and Thao

Walt reluctantly takes Thao on, and as Thao performs various odd jobs for Walt, they gradually warm up to each other.  In fact Thao gradually becomes something of a new son to Walt, and Walt’s intuitive paternal concern for Thao is increasingly invoked.  This is culminated when Walt gives Thao permission to use his prized Gran Torino to go out on a date that Walt has encouraged for Thao.  It is in this section of the film that the beauties and subtleties of family concern are brought to the fore.

However, when Thao gets roughed-up again by Spider’s gang, Walt angrily goes over to the gang  members’ house and brutally beats one of their members. 

4.  Hmong Gang Retaliation
We now seem to be in something of a gang war, but a decidedly unequal one.  It is Spider’s Hmong gang versus the Lor family “gang”, which has only one warrior – Walt.  That night Spider’s gang drives up to the Lor house and delivers a massive fusillade of bullets through the windows.  Many of the Lor family members are seriously wounded from the attack.  Then Sue, who had been out at this time, staggers home after having been viciously raped and beaten by the gang members. 

When Walt learns what happened, he is consumed with hatred.  Young Catholic priest Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), who had presided over the funeral of Walt’s wife and who has always earlier been seen advocating forgiveness, comes to visit Walt; but he, too, is filled with anger and doesn’t know what to counsel this time.

So is Eastwood setting up the viewer for another customary vengeance-filled finale?

5.  A Coming to Terms?
The next day Thao comes over to Walt’s house seeking revenge.  For him, Walt is his uncompromising “Exterminating Angel” suitable for the task.  However, Walt puts him off and tells him to come back later that afternoon.  Then Walt calmly goes out to buy a new suit, gets a haircut, and goes to the church to confess his life’s sins to Father Janovich.  Having recently come to feel paternal affection for a young Asian boy, Walt now feels guilt over having long ago killed thirteen young men in the Korean War.  When Thao comes back later, Walt tricks him into getting locked in his basement.  He evidently wants to keep the vengeful boy out of danger. 

That evening Walt goes to the Hmong gang members’ house and stands there in the front lawn loudly berating them, which attracts the attention of many neighboring onlookers.  When he slowly reaches into his inside coat pocket, suggesting to the watching gang members that he is reaching for his gun, they all blast him with a deadly round of bullets.  But Walt was unarmed and was only reaching for his cigarette lighter.  It is clear that he had staged his own heavily-witnessed murder so that he could have the gang members arrested by the quickly arriving police and given lengthy prison sentences.

Later, at the reading of Walt’s last will and testament and with his younger family members eagerly in attendance, it is revealed that he leaves nothing to his family.  He bequeaths his house to the church (i.e. the community) and his beloved Gran Torino to Thao.

A number of reviewers have liked this film, because they view Walt’s final act of sacrifice as heroic [3], and/or they see Walt as ultimately having undergone a transformation suggesting the possibility of a reconciliation between traditionally prejudiced working-class America and non-white immigrant communities [1,4,5].  And the eponymous Ford Gran Torino is a symbol of this sector of American society in need of a more conciliatory outlook.  As Manohla Dargis remarked [4]:

“Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore . . .  “

But is it realistic to believe that Walt Kowalski really underwent a transformation fueled by ersatz familial love?  I am in sympathy with critics who question the plausibility of such a reading [5].  To me, Walt is a racist curmudgeon to the very end.  His final action is very much a hate-fueled act of revenge.  Knowing that his future life allotment was limited, Walt chose to carry out the most destructive action he could think of that would inflict the most pain on his collective adversaries through the instrumentality of the punitive system.  This was not an act of heroism or a quest for justice – it was just the maximal possible punishment.

It would have been better for this narrative to have been constructed so that Walt, through his gradual familial relationship with Thao, would develop a more humane way of interacting with all people.  Instead, he relapsed into his own form of self-sacrificing revenge.

So in my opinion, Gran Torino is just another revenge movie, but it lacks the ameliorating narrative elements that are sometimes present in other, more-satisfying Eastwood movies.

★★½

Notes:

1. John Patterson, “On film: A farewell to vengeance”, The Guardian, (19 December 2008).  
2. “Casualties”, “Korean War”, Wikipedia, (20 June 2020).    
3. Roger Ebert, “Get off my lawn”, RogerEbert.com, (17 December 2008).   
4. Manohla Dargis, “Hope for a Racist, and Maybe a Country”, The New York Times, (11 December 2008).   
5. Maryann Johanson, “Gran Torino (review)”, FlickFilosopher, (2 January 2009).