A
note: This piece contains spoilers.
This season’s three runaway
critically acclaimed hits—Gravity, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave—have all leveraged that
classic piece of advice about good dramatic writing. Tie the audience to a
relatable protagonist, competent yet not inherently heroic. Put that
protagonist in jeopardy. Keep him or her there. Put them in more jeopardy.
Repeat until the audience can't take it anymore, then go further.
Mortal danger is usually
most effective in getting audiences to tense their muscles, clench their jaw
and prepare themselves to look away from
the screen if need be, though a filmmaker might go further than that and inflict
pain, humiliation, self-doubt and dark pasts upon our worthy avatars. Only when
they have totally brutalized us will we accept we’ve seen a great film.
The lightest of this season’s
three masochistic masterpieces (which is saying something), Gravity focuses on danger that taps into
space-age existential angst. Its harrowing threat is getting lost in infinity, a
surprisingly claustrophobic place, more like suffocating in an endless wash of molasses.
If Sandra Bullock’s Astronaut Ryan Stone is not attached to
something—anything—she will drift into space die. EM Forster probably never
imagined so literal a depiction of his maxim “Only connect.”
Captain
Phillips and 12 Years a Slave are more layered and topical, not surprising since both are
based on true stories. That’s some reassurance going in—you know they lived to
tale the tale. 12 Years even gives
you a time limit. Both films lack the technologically produced astral beauty
that makes Gravity so watchable. They
provide no distraction from their assault.
Tom Hanks’s Phillips,
captain of a cargo ship that must pass through Somali pirate territory, faces
down humanized blowback from the inequities of abstract global capitalist
systems. We in the Western world thought we could hoard the world’s wealth,
but, no, the losers in our divided world will find a way to grab something for
themselves, putting people who don’t even consider themselves to be on the
front lines of this class war in harm’s way. Not of this is spoken. You just
pick it up from the setting and the expressions on the characters’ faces.
12
Years a Slave, about a
free black man in the US North who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the
South pre-1865, is even more deeply engaged in social criticism, giving an
innocent and naïve free man a dehumanizing guided tour of the savagery that was
necessary at all levels to maintain the savage system of slavery. At first Solomon
Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) suffers under a somewhat sympathetic plantation
owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have no recollection of his character’s
name is nor do I think I was meant to have one—Cumberbatch is a mere amalgam of
everyone who presents themselves as good and kind yet blames “the system” for
their failure to act on these supposed virtues. Michael Fassbender, who plays Northup’s
second owner is a much more singular character. Who can say whether slavery
turned him into a sociopath or whether it merely lured his already warped
personality into its horror-filled kingdom?
In all three films, Stone,
Phillips and Northup find inner courage and tenacity, if not always to get
themselves out of their predicaments, then at least to make the best of it,
practically and soulfully. These films’ power comes from their relentlessly
sharp focus—the filmmaker’s decision to cut away most of the padding that
usually goes into building a world, building characters, explaining context,
creating a framework of relationships the audience can grab onto. For directors
Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and Steve McQueen, it’s all peril from the word
go.
Unlike last year’s Life of Pi, for example, which also
dropped its protagonist into mortal danger and kept him there, there’s little
time spent on the characters’ lives before or after the story’s crisis. Gravity’s biggest flaw was the tacked-on
feel of Stone’s backstory (thank God there were no flashbacks to her daughter
before her death) while Captain Phillips’s
misstep was the perfunctory and clichéd introductory scenes of Phillips’ home
life (and Catherine Keener’s bad hair). 12
Years a Slave’s quick introductory sketch of Northup’s family life was certainly
the most treacly part of an otherwise unsentimental film, though director Steve
McQueen’s worst decision was to cast Brad Pitt as the Jesus-y looking Canadian
who “saves” Northup; that role should never have been deified by star power. The
films work best when they keep the audience in the moment. Gravity and Captain Phillips,
especially, operate almost in real time; 12
Years a Slave just felt like it was that long.
As tough as these films
were to watch, their makers realize the pleasure of viewer masochism comes not
in the torture itself, but in the release from it. And release they did. All
three films deliver short, sharp and astonishingly uncomplicated happy endings—Disney
could hardly do better.
Once adrift, Stone returns
to Earth’s loving pull; the mud virtually hugs her. Phillips, once he calms
down, will go back to his messy haired wife, his cleverness acknowledged and
respected, his uptightedness vindicated. When Northrup leaves his slave labour
and hops in the carriage that has come to rescue him, we know in that moment
that he is free because his white friend has a bigger hat and a more steely-eyed
gaze than crazy, crazy Fassbender. We gasp in relief. The momentary worry that
Northrup’s wife may have remarried—that his family may not want him back—is
quickly pushed aside. Like Hanks in Captain
Phillips’ final scene, the audience finally exhales and shudders like a
panic attack has just ended.
Tense films, but their
happy endings betray their intentions. They want the audience to leave
satisfied. Case closed. Our surrogate is home safe. None of them as bleak as Ender’s Game, which messes with the
recipe to deliver a darker message that should follow filmgoers home. Yes,
darker than slavery because its ideas inform slavery and world history before
and after slavery.
Based on a 1980s novel, Ender’s Game is not a well-made film. It
had the rushed, clunky feeling of a work that compensates for overcompression of
the source material with clunky overexplanation and uneven pacing. Its effort
to attract both younger and older audiences leaves it satisfying neither. Many
of the performances are laughable—the talented Viola Davis looks like she had
no idea what movie she’s in.
But the film’s ending—the
revelation that concludes young Ender Wiggin’s (Asa Butterfield) tests and
torments as a trainee to lead the Earth’s forces against possible alien
invaders—is as far from Hollywood happy as you can get. Most films are about
love, courage, strength and trueness to oneself. This one’s about power,
tactics and deceit. It nod to empathy as a virtue, but it doesn’t have a heart.
Perhaps it hopes the audience has one, but even that’s not certain.
Despite his savvy in combat
both personal and intergalactic—perhaps because of this savvy—Ender is bullied
by his brother, his peers and his handlers in the future Earth’s
military-industrial complex. He’s been recruited as their saviour but, like
Harry Potter, is left to figure out the “how” on his own. Excessive violence
usually works.
Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, though, which reveals
itself to be a satire of fascism, and which attempts (unsuccessfully, one might
argue) to make its audience feel bad for cheering on the humans in their aggression
toward the enemy, Ender’s Game’s POV
on its fascistic future society is not so clear—are we to despise or admire it?
As a good messiah should, Ender
cleverly navigates through all the obstacles put before him and even wins
allies. But then, in startling reveal, discovers he’s been had—the obstacles
were not what they seemed. What should be a triumphant Hollywood movie
ending—he and his team of misfits succeed in a computer simulation of a war
against their insect enemies—turns into something radically different. The
simulations were actually real. He was not playing an elaborate videogame, he
was waging real war. In demonstrating that he could, theoretically, destroy an
enemy planet, Ender does destroy an enemy planet. And is filled with not with
joy, but remorse. There were other ways of winning, he suspects, that would not
have caused so much harm.
The Ender books have been
criticized for depicting a protagonist who commits violence but who remains
innocent because harm was not his intention. But just because the saviour is
untainted, culpability doesn’t vanish. It moves elsewhere. It moves onto the
system which lied and manipulated him. The systems humans create are perfectly
capable of destroying us, even if those pulling the strings have created
technicalities that depersonalize that culpability. Tactics wow us but they are
not our humanity.
In Captain Phillips and 12 Years
a Slave (Gravity doesn’t think so
much about these themes—how we wreak evil on ourselves), our protagonists are reborn
merely by escaping the trials the system has thrown in their way. Once Phillips
and Northup are happy, we’re happy.
Ender’s
Game doesn’t let us off
the hook so easily. If we’re uneasy with a child being manipulated into
genocide, the manipulation itself must be unpacked, even if the peril faced by
the child has ended.
By delivering their heroes
to such clear safety, Captain Phillips
and 12 Years a Slave relieve of us of
our worry for the individual we have bonded to. They allow us to put their
peril behind us, even though the world that created their troubles continues. Domestic
contentment is restored in the foreground.
For all their seriousness,
this kind of thrill isn’t so different from what you might get from a roller
coaster. Once it’s done, it’s done. In Ender’s
Game, we still have much to work through.
