Miss J. EDGAR Regrets...

Postscript 11/9/11- The Village Voice review today was pretty positive, including hints Leo didn't balk at the queer closet aspects... so maybe this wild prediction of mine is way off? I hope so.

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Was it true that J. Edgar Hoover liked to wear women's clothes or was that a communist plot to discredit him? By all accounts he was a hopeless voyeur who got his kicks listening to bugged tapes of JFK having sex with numerous shakedown starlets and the gay stuff with sheep-dipped plant Sal Mineo even more so. He had a lifelong best friend (ala Robin to Hoover's Batman?) in Clyde Tolson, who inherited Hoover's estate, and they took all their vacations together, but were just pals as far as anyone knew. Biographers theorize Hoover was too paranoid from his own copious blackmailing to ever risk doing anything sexual, gay or straight, and got his rocks off as a voyeur as a result... but that thing with Tolson...

If Leo dons a fez, I'll know I'm wrong.

I worry that in Eastwood's upcoming film the voyeurism angle will be 'neutered' and his sexuality will be conveniently arrested by his duty to a strong but ailing mother figure. I've been reading James Ellroy's awesome Underworld trilogy, wherein Hoover gives his implicit but unspoken okay to the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK and leaves the mob alone in return for their privately eliminating threats to his tenure while he waxes wroth at the safe-to-wax-at danger of communism.

Also, Hoover was allegedly also good buddies with Howard Hughes, who DiCaprio played with similar sweaty reverence in THE AVIATOR. Just as that film dismissed the tissue box shoes and long nails of his later years with a wave of piss jars and a round the clock screening of HELL'S ANGELS, so  J. EDGAR will wave away Hoover's plots against, say, Martin Luther King, through some arbitrary dialogue.  I can see Leo's personal cadre of writers noting that DiCaprio doesn't care for racism, or gaybashing, but may allow a topless shot to show off his jailhouse abs.

I predict also that any actual J. Edgar mom issues will be sentimentalized as in John Ford/Norma Bates/Spielberg sunset sanctification and since Hoover's use of sex tapes and shakedowns made him too paranoid to either approach starlets (there were rumors of him having a thing with Dorothy Lamour) or, probably, to get funky with his longtime companion Colson, sex will be shuttled to the shadows. Leo's penchant for ghostly dead wives haunting him in guilt-wracked moments of boozy self-reflection are likely to provide the alternative 'out'.

Bottom line: the current persona of the Leo DiCaprio hero as a confused, damaged tough guy reflects his use of his own box office clout to avoid genuine emotional risks in his choices of roles. That's why he would make a good J. Edgar Hoover, but I doubt it's the reason Eastwood or DiCaprio thought he'd fit. It's like his unconscious is trying to tell him hey, Leo, you need to stop trying to look tough in manly suits and raincoats and shoulder holsters standing tall on courthouse steps in high contrast blacks and start cackling like the neurotic gunsel / Richard Widmark psychos or grinning and laughing like the romantic fools you were born to play.

Of course I hope I'm wrong. I hope Eastwood's film will dare question Hoover's intentions, manhood, and moral compass in a way that's real and honest and not mere craftsmanship window dressing on a white-washed sainthood canon shot / shoe-in Leo Oscar nod. We know from the promo Leo 'ages' into a crazy old Capote (Phillip Seymour Hoffman would be the ideal choice to play Hoover, and wouldn't flinch from covering the darker areas Leo will doubtlessly sidestep).

Leonardo needs to throw that momma of his down the stairs and get in a real fight, Mickey Rourke-style, that would solve the babyface aspect of his persona he so clearly longss to transcend.
If he wants to return to this era in his historical biopics, he should consider playing a scumbucket racist like James Earle Ray. Now that would be a stone cold brave role for old Leo. But he won't go there, and maybe one day he'll understand why that in itself makes him perfect for the part... of the real J. Edgar!

(POSTSCRIPT: See my praise that Leo did just as I advised - as in his racist role in DJANGO UNCHAINED! In best of 2012)

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American Grievers, Part One: INCEPTION (2010)

Was INCEPTION--released this week on Netflix--the trippiest film of 2010? Outside of THE BLACK SWAN, TOY STORY 3 and ENTER THE VOID, perhaps. Is it great? Perhaps not. The high-def uber artsy set and lighting make it impossible to hallucinate into; the hallucinating is done for you, by professionals. Jungian resonance glimmers, swirls, and fades away before it can cohere into myth, a sad failure to launch -  the question is, who chickened out at the last minute when it came to laying bare their sad soul?

We know the answer. These same elements occur in SHUTTER ISLAND so it's Leo. It's like he can't see his own elephant in the room, and he's the big star so the movie wears a blindfold while lecturing about the importance of sight. What is it about being a tight-lipped professional man with dark family secrets and a dead wife taunting from beyond that so appeals to Leo that he has to play it over and over? A fine actor and true humanitarian, DiCaprio is certainly is a success on many levels, so why is he so obsessed with this narrow-minded 15-year old's idea of masculinity?  Can it be mere dream coincidence that all these ghost wives and beautiful little ghost children and houses by the shore with swing sets are so very dead or far away? He's sorry, Rose, but he has a job to do. That job is looking tortured and behaving with little in the way of self-aware humor as he laments he can't be home with you, Rose. Don't you get it? DON'T YOU GET IT??? (emotion)

Still, if nothing else INCEPTION should illuminate--and make a great double bill with-- Nicholas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW, which always confused me before, but which now I understand and want to see again. Like INCEPTION, Roeg's film deals with a shifting reality (the ancient and ever-crumbling Venice) and involves parental grief and guilt, out-of-sequence narrative, a city sunk knee-deep in water, and little children whose faces you never see as they're always turning corners. Man, it's a trip, if you know what I mean.

I mean I wasn't high but I could feel the tang of salvia divinorum, the 'ride the snake' dragon teeth face melt with fried time-space onions and trans-dimensional sweetness of select INCEPTION images and scenes: Leo and Juno staring at each other as slow mo Zabriskie Pointed Parisian cafes explode around them; Ken Watanabe as ancient as Bowman at the end of 2001, his liverspots aglow in perfect unison with the lanterns on the wall behind him like an Alex Gray painting.

But the similarities in Chinese puzzle box construction between INCEPTION and SHUTTER ISLAND are too great to ignore (substitute planes for boats and it's more or less the same movie). In both, Leo is a dour, myopic brooder haunted by images of his dead wife and kids. In both films we must ask, WICKER MANnishly, is Leo actually investigating a crime or is he trapped in an Escher-like maze of the mind? Is he just paranoid or is everyone really out to get him? Or the classic latency test: is he convinced the whole world is a show put on just for him, and nothing exists outside his own realm of experience? Is he anima-dominated due to emotional dysfunction as a result of a show business childhood? Can it be that for him love is contingent upon uncrossable absence? No dad is more needy and pain-stricken about not being with his kids than a dad who can NOT get back to them. If the kids are actually there, then why bother even lowering the newspaper to behold their latest construction paper art projects? That's how that objet petit a keeps you crippled, as the Anima-Kali-Cotillard projection beats you senseless for not taking her out more often. Yeah, and you know what's the sickest part? You love it, because you're a holy inquisitor. You long to have her back so you can ignore her once again!

When a move's made about the mind, any evidence of  unresolved inner conflicts in the filmmakers will be made apparent via simple deconstruction, so be careful! We can discern from the text that Leo DiCaprio has never been married or had children. He dates models. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it shows-- at least on the surface-- a level of laddish insecurity: his women must be certified gorgeous so everyone knows he's a man. Playing a humorless widower allows him to be--in theory--a deeply romantic and caring soul, yet he doesn't have to unfold even a gram of tenderness... doesn't have to risk ridicule, doesn't have to get all sensitive up close and caring, as said kids and wife are not alive. He can just curl his lip and mope and we all have to accept it: grief trumps all. When the wife does show up, she's just a phantom, so he can yell at her without upsetting the feminists. He can, instead of dealing with his issues, brood.

Opium is the heroin of the masses

In Jungian terms, the dead wives here assume the role of Leo's anima--or the projected feminine ego of his unconscious. The anima takes many forms: she can come to you as a hot babe, or as a castrating vagina dentata Katharine Hepburn in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. When she's just a dead wife fantasia, it's kind of a 16-year old virgin's comic book fantasy of a real conscious-unconscious relationship, or am I just thinking of my own pre-adult fantasias wherein, for example, I pined and longed for Jean Grey to rise again as Phoenix in X-Men? There's no benefit to falling in love with a living comic book character! Where's the pine?

Pining is, above all, a performance... a slow... motion... tantrum... and it can be sweet, but on the basic level, it's absurd, juvenile, something Bella might write in her TWILIGHT diary and, years later, with nostalgic relish, read aloud to her sorority friends for cheap drunk laughs. Should art cater to juvenile minds or should it not also educate, enlighten, and transcend? When you blow the doors of your mind wide open, make sure the floors inside are clean, even if your movie is about dirty floors. Company is coming, and the company is a future self with a clean house that you made possible, defeating your ego at its own game.

But that's never the issue. The wifely anima projection in the unconscious of Leo's character/s is defined by her need for him, her wanting to be with him all the time, and of having no life of her own beyond her stifling adoration of her tortured husband. No true anima is that weak, or that crazy. They do their own thing. Half the time you can't even get them on the phone. The fantasy in these films is that Leo's anima is so needy and doting that she never just sinks into the dark and does something on her own. Just as Bella's animus Edward hovers over her like a clingy stalker, so too hover Leo's dead wives.

Perhaps it would be good if Leo owned up to his romantic streak: he might see that all the stale action sequences and need to embody Scorsese tough guys like Howard Hughes--and soon, Dean help us, Frank Sinatra-- is just a fear of looking wimpy to his laddish entourage. Word on the high-def rain-soaked GGI streets is that he's also going to be playing a serial killer in a period film about some old World's Fair! If he doesn't make the character a tortured brooder haunted by his dead wife or lost children, I'll eat my hat! Maybe he'll enrich this killer with twisted joyfulness, ala your Hannibals, Freddies, Nicholsons, and Karloffs... instead of his usual dour tortured cowboy--ala your Jason Patrics and David Boreanzs. I doubt it, but I don't brood about it. My own psyche is, after all, deeply invested in Leo as he reminds me a lot of my younger brother, Fred - the blonde hair, the baby face, the big bulky frame. God knows I've tried to reach him (Fred, I mean), but he just does his own thing - fixing motorcycles and listening to Metallica out in Phoenix, AZ, with his concealed weapons permit. It's an older brother thing. We have to live with our own frustrating inability to mold our younger siblings. We're America, beating up the world so it won't get hurt.

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The Wicker-Shutter Laffin'-Spittin' Man

Watching SHUTTER ISLAND last night, I felt kind of like how I did watching EYES WIDE SHUT or THE WICKER MAN remake, two movies where big budget and directorial over-thinking were applied to a story better served perhaps by a grimy, no-budget backyard or city-without-a-permit shoot full of unknown actors, discovered on a Something Weird double bill from 1972. There, any of these three films would be instant "discoveries" for the cult film niche dwellers, but with so much high tech Oscar-reaching craftsmanship involved in these B-movie plots, so many highbrow toots and expository whistles, we end up looking at both less and more than the sum of parts that probably originated in some screenwriters collection of DC House of Mystery comics and was never intended to bear the full brunt of 21st century Hollywood craftspeople.

Spoiler Alert! 

Here are some issues I had with the film:

1. "GOOD" GRIEF: If Leo's character is going to be delusional and alcoholic from issues of Holocaust and infant murder, I can assure you he'd a) start drinking again as things got really fucked up on the island and b) his first instinct when finding all that death in his big flashback would not be to scream "Noooooo!" up at an overhead camera--as has been a cliche as far back even as 90s "McBain" satires on THE SIMPSONS (and which I even made fun of Leo doing a few years ago, before he even did it!)

No sir, he would not.

A real alcoholic in dealing with something as horrific as that big climactic flashback would have calmly gone back in the kitchen for that bottle and started drinking and calling the cops, going safely into a fugue state of numbness from booze and repression, winding up a bit like James Stewart after his VERTIGO breakdown, which he'd clearly never emerge from. He's a Ranger, for Christ's sakes, not a wailing widow, and if he's going to process grief in huge cathartic Oscar-baiting howls of anguish that means he probably won't repress the memory two seconds later; you can't have it both ways: you can't process grief and repress it at the same time. The person who has hysterical hallucinations in denial of reality years later likely never properly reacted in the first place. Leo seems to be accepting all the blame and grief of the war in his ghastly howls: primal scream therapists would surely approve.

2. TOO TOUGH - Leo needs to learn that gaining a bunch of weight won't make him look coppish, just bloated. He still needs to try that thing of leaning on his baby face for dangerous criminal associations, ala Richard Widmark in ROAD HOUSE and KISS OF DEATH, which I've been urging since his Ridley Scott film, BODY OF LIES (2008). Instead, Leo acts as if he's been obsessed with the JFK-style "Bahstin" accent he learned for Marty's last film, THE DEPARTED (pronounced "the dee-pAHted") and is determined to perfect the "tough cop who cared too much" martyr role even if it kills us. As it is, he's still one of those actors who becomes laughable when they try to be menacing, to get information. Until he plays on his strengths rather than weaknesses, he'll seem petulant rather than assertive, sulky rather than manipulative, comical rather than dangerous. A role with John Wayne in a Hawks film might have saved Leo from this strait-jacket, as it is, he's like Lancelot without an Arthur. And Scorsese ain't no Arthur, he's more like the New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court, scribbling down notes in awe as Lancelot prattles about his ability to poke other dudes in the shield. And PS, Lancelot would have been a wash-out if he didn't weaken and sleep with Arthur's wife. Until Leo does a similar high horse-dismount and armour removal, he'll always be just a guy on a horse with a rod, trying to be tough, like Wilmer the neurotic gunsel in MALTESE FALCON, only he's cast as Samuel Spade.

3. BOOZE: Alcoholism is not a trait you can pick up and put down with the ease that Leo's characters seem to, in Marty's films anyway. For THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, Leo ably--nay, brilliantly!--conveyed the effects of opiate withdrawal, so why in THE DEPARTED is he a Xanax head when the mood suits him, as if he felt his cranberry-drinking little pisher character needed some edginess, then forgot about it two minutes later once Farmiga scribbles him a script for 20 Valium, even though she recognizes his sulky petulance as "drug-seeking behave-yeh." And why is his SHUTTER ISLAND United States mah-shall an alcoholic only in flashbacks and  thus able to refuse offered drinks when he's clearly sweating and shaking like a lunatic and there's about a thousand justifications for a relapse all around him? No alcoholic suffering so much delusion would be likely to forget that relief is just a swig away. Also, his shakes and migraines would make much more sense if he was detoxing... i.e., if he never intended to spend the night at the island and so didn't properly, ahem, pack for the trip. If I'd have seen this with my old AA crew, we'd have walked out over these details!

4. DACHAU BLUES - The use of Nazi concentration camps could have been very effective but again it's overkill and explains nothing, as Leo's memory of it is refracted enough to make him a hero of the war by shooting unarmed Nazi guards during liberation. This actually one of the film's most hilarious moments - a cliche'd ridiculous tracking shot along a huge row of disarmed German guards lined up against a fence, all patiently waiting for the camera to reach them before dying in a spastic dance, falling only as the camera passes onwards; before the camera reaches them they just cower in little clusters rather than running for it like any sensible soldier of the Reich - they're filmed like a bunch of bathing beauties in an Esther Williams musical number, diving into the pool one at a time as the camera passes by. Giving Leo this cathartic moment should be enough! Leo, you avenged the Jews singlehanded, how can they ever cower, Schindler-like, before you enough in gratitude!? But no, Leo also has to brood and sulk about it later (and maybe it didn't happen we learn later, not that anything matters by then). Again it's a matter of having cake and eating it too. He's processed hate and grief and anguish but repressed them at the same time and that ain't how it works, except when Oscar beckons, and Scorsese indulges.

As I've written before, these things seem to point to some inherent fear on Leo's part to alienate audience sympathy, and yet, Leo! Leo! Look at your antecedents who might have starred in this film were it made in the 1950s when it's set: Bogart, Van Johnson, Aldo Ray, Robert Taylor, Robert Ryan, Dick Powell (hell Powell's face was even babier than Leo's, yet Powell pulled off playing tough guy Phillip Marlowe pretty damned well in MURDER MY SWEET), none of them would have been afraid to delve into audience alienation via realistic displays of sadism, greed, delirium tremens (Mitchum in EL DORADO expertly plays one of those rare drunks that's funny, sad, and realistic at the same time), lust, avarice, masochism, uncontrollable rage, moral weakness, humor, or hostility. Look at IN A LONELY PLACE or ON DANGEROUS GROUND. Imagine the tortured resilience Ryan would have brought to SHUTTER ISLAND. Leo might have done all right if SHUTTER was directed by Nicholas Ray, but instead we get lost in a house of guilt-edged mirrors that's both a noir-flypaper doom device and a taunting reflection of Leo's own inability to "go all the way"  into audience-alienating ambiguity the way, say, Nicolas Cage does so well in LEAVING LAS VEGAS, THE WICKER MAN and KNOWING.

Another baby-faced brother, Orson Welles, explored all the ambiguities of a would-be romantic lead/fall-guy in LADY FROM SHANGHAI when he should have been playing the cranky genius crippled lawyer, a demon who gets all the lines and which Orson surely meant at least unconsciously for himself to play (his old Mercury Theater stock player, Everett Sloane, does a good job, but lacks the charisma that even slimy lawyer villains need if they're going to get so many lines). As a leading man, Orson's all wet, and the wet becomes part of the thing. If the wet could become part of the thing for Leo, then well, maybe Stumpy could put the bottle away.

All that said, the film is still cool and I loved the ultra-ambiguous (tragic? who knows?) ending which leaves you with a lot to think about, and then forget ever happened. But hey, at least they freaking smoke in this movie, which was the style of the time and don't let 'em tell you different!

There's a lot of beautiful little ways in which the always superb and surprising Mark Ruffalo steals the show as Leo's fellow marshall (maybe). As his voice lowers, with only a hint of sadness, back to saying "What's up, boss?" we get a nicely understated and ambiguous look at the way insanity reasserts itself, a veritable entire MEMENTO warped and shrinky-dinked down into a single line.

P.S. If you liked the whirligig weirdness of SHUTTER ISLAND I'd also recommend the 1962 CABINET OF CALIGARI, an in-name-only remake of the old silent expressionist classic. Penned by PSYCHO author Robert Bloch, it's got the budget of an anthology TV show but really uses the limits of the frame and dodges the cliches of horror films and "sanitarium" films to play with audience sympathy and narrative expectations. And it tells almost the same story. Or does it? Mwhahahaha! And instead of a pudgy man-child determined to convince us he's Russell Crowe, we have a hot blonde chick with retrograde amnesia and a tendency towards violent outbursts, making this film like the limbo world between the two halves of PSYCHO (that is to say, HORROR HOTEL and DEMENTIA).

I'd still recommend SHUTTER ISLAND, but I'd lower my expectations, drink a bottle of whiskey and smoke "laced" cigarettes before watching, otherwise you might suffer from the compulsion to remember the trauma of watching millions of dollars and acres of craftsmanship and talent all laser-beam focused on telling a story that's been told before, but it's still better than that ambulance ghost movie Scorsese made awhile ago, WAKING THE DEAD. Well, even Hitchcock had his SHUTTER ISLAND moments, i.e. SUSPICION and STAGE FRIGHT. And sure, SHUTTER is entertaining and refreshingly free of sex or violence. But frankly, it's the sort of story John Carpenter would probably pass on as too cliche'd. And he's the one who should be making it, on a budget of $5, in his backyard, in the dead of night, with Adrienne Barbeau as the cop.

And Leo, if you keep frowning your face is going to look as Satanic as Robert Taylor's in his sleek MGM late 1950s prime. Is that what you want? AWESOME! But you've still got about fifteen years to go before the lines will set. May I recommend next time you make a film like this, that you go ahead and play the evil doctor? Or learn some karate? Or take some freakin' challenges other than the testesteronally-challenged wunderkind asserting his fierceness and cracking up in the process? What Hawks would have taught Leo is that being "good" has nothing to do with gruffness or bulk, and crazy has nothing to do with screaming up to heaven while cradling a perfectly dead child in your arms, it has to do with being a good shot, and sticking up for your friends, and most of all, being true to your nature, and freakin' takin' a drink once in awhile. Luke, I am your Fah-thuh.

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