September 21, 2009
There will come a time six months from now when you will be trawling the shelves of Blockbuster for something worth taking home. Kubrick or Bergman will feel too heavy, but your stomach will also spin from the lack of gravity in everything else. It won’t be true, this perceived lack of gravity, but you’ll feel it anyway. It’s a lonely feeling. And Moon is a lonely film, but when you find the DVD on the shelf, you will recall the distant memory of disappointment you felt when it left the theaters. A sense of anticipation will carry you home, and will put the disc in for you. You will give it your full attention, and it will lead you by the finger through a paradoxic darkness. When you emerge 97 minutes later, a thin coat of moon dust will have settled under your eyes.
The story is as sparse and simple as you would imagine three years on the dark side of the moon to be. An astronaut technician, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), manages a mining base with the help of his computer, GERTY. Every morning, he wakes to GERTY’s alarm, waters his ferns with friendly words, and receives a new video-message from his wife. Because he is faced away from Earth, direct communication is impossible. Cut off from live contact, his skin grows gray with desperation, and memories of his wife drip one by one away.
The pock-marks in the plot’s complexion come from the revelation that Sam is a clone. When a twin clone appears, it shatters Sam’s assumption that he is himself. What is most surprising is how calmly he reacts. The only thing he knows he knows is that he loves his wife, and this becomes his only faith and prayer. His love for her is real, and is made so by his choice alone. By remaining loyal to his own emotions, he insures that no clone can take that love away.
The spirit of this film is one of patient longing; Sam’s loneliness will sour in your dry mouth like a lime aged four months at sea. When this sourness turns your mouth inside out, you will have no choice but to ask GERTY for help. You will question GERTY’s motives as a tool of Sam’s employers, but Kevin Spacey will temper these doubts, giving GERTY’s voice a tender note of pity. You will sense that GERTY, too, is lonely. This emotional development gives GERTY a sense of agency it did not have before. Guilt begins to influence the computer’s actions. Anxiety thaws its cold prescience. These moments of indecision are sublime.
I won’t tell you how the film ends, because I don’t know for sure myself. I will tell you that Sam gets severely injured in an accident. With little hope of escape, he will turn to you to hold him, and will comfort you with his defeated, weary smile. This smile lingers with me still, as do tremors in my legs from powerless compassion. My concept of humanity is left a scab I still can’t help but scratch. Incompletely healed, it has become the kind of endearing scar that can always start a conversation. When you see Sam wane unconscious beneath a pile of rubble, you will know it is the only burial fit for a man so far from home. You can do nothing but echo his smile, and watch his tragic legacy float off to space like a balloon letting go of its string.
Review of Moon
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Review of The Hurt Locker
July, 2009
A few weeks ago, the Harvard Film Archive hosted an advance screening and director’s Q&A of Kathryn Bigelow’s latest film, the Hurt Locker. Bigelow is a conceptual artist as much as she is a filmmaker. When asked why she made this film, she described how she wanted the Hurt Locker to be an enveloping experience which forces us to become the characters we watch as they stay true to their flaws, and as they constantly brace for attack. I almost never like it when an artist describes his or her ambitions for a piece, but here, I believe Bigelow, because she has completely succeeded in translating her sophisticated concepts onto the screen, where they are accessible to everyone alike.
In a way, the audience was indeed constantly under attack, in that Bigelow maintains suspense by keeping the characters in both physical and moral danger. This prevailing tension even survived a projector malfunction between the film’s fourth and fifth reels. In this unintentional intermission, it came to mind how, despite being aware of the devices Bigelow uses, I still could not escape the film’s empathetic and corporeal engagement.
This film is nearly flawless, and that is why the reviews of the Hurt Locker are almost unanimous in offering unabashed praise. The camera constructs a lucid, three dimensional geography of suspense and danger with a style similar to what we saw in 2008’s Gomorrah. In addition to stellar writing and performances, Hurt Locker completely disarms any shadow of disbelief.
When asked how she made this experience so real while departing from many of the war-movie conventions from the past, Bigelow talked about how loyal her directing had been to descriptions of Iraq in 2004. Sergeants on site told her time and again how well her crew had done in recreating the scenarios on which the script is based. This observance of reality has made the piece much stronger in its fictions. As we crane our necks up toward the screen, we feel shards of broken glass beneath our cautious footsteps, and count anxiously with our soldiers the days we have left to go. We don’t need a yellow ribbon to follow them along. Under constant threat from civilians lining the streets, we join the two supporting characters to feel we have no choice but to follow our team leader into the desert heat. There, he leaves us hanging, casting off his headset and armor to untangle death’s wiry pelvis for the 873rd time.
This film is not withholding of prickly scenes. A sniper stand-off in the desolate hills condenses the world to a two-dimensional plane anchored between two gun barrels, and strings with it tensile validation for each of our three teammates. One reaches around a gun to feed another Capri Sun. One receives said Capri Sun graciously. One licks blood from bullets and gets his first kill. Another scene, similar in after-image to The Wrestler, uses a cereal aisle in a grocery store to show how irrelevant and powerless our main character feels outside the battlefield. A vigilante excursion into civilian Baghdad questions this very relevance, and ends in humiliation under the unleavened hostility of a brandished rolling pin. These scenes and many others make us wince with vinegary heebie-jeebies as they show us how fate can trap a character between an alien war and an even more alienating home.
Hurt Locker’s ending troubled me for a while. It is stupid in a sense, because it draws us needlessly back to the desert with a cliché walk into the afternoon sun. But even though the character makes his choice not to abandon the tension and the staggering waves of heat, his reasoning makes sense, and the world he brings the film back into is the only world he can exist in. In this feeling, Bigelow has successfully echoed the ending to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. She has crafted a character’s duty with which to lead him, and his audience trailing behind, passively across a psychological sea from the life he’s come to shed.