“My Zinc Bed” (HBO): Addicted to love, on the rocks

Dir. Anthony Page
(2008, Not Rated, 75 min)
★

Paddy Considine. Uma Thurman. Jonathan Pryce. Three splendid actors altogether sunk by this entire floofy enterprise. “Floofy” is a word I made up. I don’t know quite what it means, but I know it when I see it. My Zinc Bed was produced by HBO and the BBC and despite its stars and pedigree — the writer is Oscar-nominee David Hare (The Hours, The Reader), adapting his own play — was dumped onto the American airwaves and unceremoniously rushed to DVD. Now I know why. It plays like Days of Our Lives written in iambic pentameter, which might be sort of a novel idea if there were even a shred of emotional truth in it.

Considine stars and narrates as Paul Peplow, a struggling British poet who means to tell us the story of the Summer That Changed Everything. “Joseph Conrad says that inside every heart there burns a desire to set down once and for all a true record of what has happened,” he tells us in voice-over. That’s how he talks. I suspect he would announce going to the bathroom by first quoting Emerson: “Be not a slave to your own bladder. Plunge into the sublime toilet bowl!”

The first two scenes demonstrate an intimacy the film and its characters haven’t remotely earned. In the first, Paul meets with Victor Quinn (Pryce), a businessman who runs a company called Flotilla. Paul has been assigned to interview him about some kind of malfeasance that is never directly explained. But the interview descends into an argument about Alcoholics Anonymous. Victor has somehow learned that Paul is in recovery. Paul responds to this violation of his privacy angrily but proceeds, for no good reason I could discern, to confess the most sordid details of his drinking.

The interview falls through, but Victor gives Paul a job at his company. There he meets Elsa (Thurman), Victor’s wife, and in the second scene he proceeds to tell this stranger a whole new set of dark secrets. By the end they’re kissing in his office. These spontaneous outpourings of his soul ring utterly false, and the infidelity is both shamelessly melodramatic and thuddingly obvious. Within the space of a couple more scenes, Paul is in love with Elsa, and grows paranoid about what Victor knows. Will he fall off the wagon? Could he stop after just one drink?

What on Earth is this film about? For all its florid language, which dances prettily about topics like addiction, capitalism, and marriage, it has nothing of value to say. It’s not serious about alcoholism, which is just topical window dressing for the affair. The business side is so underdeveloped it’s a mystery why it’s brought up at all. And the dialogue — oh the dialogue! How the screenwriter uses so many elaborately assembled words to express so little!

The director is Anthony Page. I suppose I should mention him, though there is little sign of him in this picture. Hare’s script tramples over him and the actors. Tramples over the audience too. It revels in the kind of philosophical posturing that thinks it’s more profound than it is. We long for something — anything! — spoken plainly, emphatically, genuinely. I quote Shakespeare when I say, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” In honoring the Bard’s wisdom, I can sum up this entire film in two words: It sucks.

On DVD: “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”

Dir. Nathan Frankowski
(PG) ★

Early on, a talking head in Nathan Frankowski’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed argues that science would benefit if we admit our biases, religious or otherwise, rather than demonize faith. Fair enough. I am agnostic, a lapsed Catholic, a proud liberal. I believe in evolution broadly, in the sense that I believe that our species, and others that walk the Earth, have changed over time from earlier forms to the ones we now occupy. As for the more specific and minute details of Darwinism, I am not a scientist and not well equipped to lead that charge in one direction or the other.

The star and subject of Expelled, Ben Stein, makes a persuasive case for intelligent design, and establishes convincingly that there is a suppression in the scientific community of anyone who dares breathe its name as a legitimate scientific approach. It is important that we define our terms. Intelligent design, as Stein and his impressively credentialed interview subjects explain, does not purport to ascribe any particular deity with creating the building blocks for life, but rather posits that there is a reasonable question that Darwinian evolution fails to answer: Why is their life instead of no life?

There’s merit to the argument, but pitting intelligent design against evolution is a faulty proposition from the start, not because evolution is right and intelligent design is wrong, but because both may be right or wrong since they pose different questions. From evolution, we may derive an understanding of how we got from the single cell to the creatures we have become today. From intelligent design, we may derive an understanding of how that cell got there in the first place.

It seems to me that the bigger problem with intelligent design as a scientific theory is that it is limited. To believe that life is too astronomically complex and improbable to have begun by any process but a deliberate architect of our molecules is to assume that the answer is unknowable by any other interpretation. You cannot test that hypothesis. You can neither prove it nor refute it. Critical examination ends. A brief featurette on the DVD discusses the advances made through intelligent design-guided research; scientists look to principles of engineering to understand the function of the human body. A reasonable approach. But one does not need to believe in God to imagine parallels between the human body and efficient machines. And short of isolating the creator, which no current science can do, when it comes to the big question — how did life begin? — intelligent design can’t explain itself any better than evolution can.

Neither should Darwinism be a sacred cow. Reasonable scientists in the film question Darwin’s theories, though Frankowski and Stein fail to shed adequate light on the specific tenets of evolution they find faulty. They discuss Darwinism more as a political and philosophical construct, an ideology, and I would have liked more rigorous science. The film upholds neither theory with any certainty, but calls for the best science to prevail, be it Darwin or intelligent design or … something else. Both sides of the debate would do well to take the counsel of William Shakespeare, who wrote, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

By the halfway point, Stein has made a strong case for broader intellectual curiosity. So how then to explain my rating of this film? Anything lower than two stars I reserve for films I begin to resent.

The problem is not Frankowski and Stein’s defense of intelligent design but their discursive dishonesty. I do not believe they have admitted their biases, and in launching into propagandist diatribes they contradict themselves and undermine any valid points they might have hoped to make.

After spending time insisting that religion and science need not be mutually exclusive, and that intellectual dissent should be debated rather than dismissed, Stein launches a deeply offensive attack against Darwinism, not as science, but as a godless and dangerous philosophy. Many evolutionists interviewed confess that their religious faith eroded as the result of Darwinism, from which Stein segues shamefully to the Holocaust. A godless society produces scientific minds hellbent on eugenics and Naziism, Stein claims, philosophies that were founded, at least in part, on Darwin’s theory of evolution. His implication is that belief in Darwinism leads to atrocity, and by extension evolutionary scientists are somehow complicit in the extermination of six million Jews. Wretched.

Stein’s argument is specious. Evolution was perverted into genocide and involuntary castration at the hands of Hitler and eugenicists, but even if we can accept that evolution kills God, one can simply counter by citing the perversion of God by His believers. It would be easy to demonize Catholicism on the basis of the Spanish Inquisition, or Islam on the basis of 9/11, but it would be equally unfair. How can Stein defend intellectual freedom and in the same breath conflate Darwinism with Naziism? How can he defend freedom of faith and vilify atheism? And how dare he exploit the Holocaust as the basis for his hypocrisy? This entire segment of the film is emotionally manipulative, intellectually dishonest, and morally bankrupt.

Expelled becomes increasingly self-important. Darwinists are equated with the Third Reich. The struggle of intelligent design proponents is likened to the civil rights movement. Science and reason are established as the gateways to genocide. At one point Frankowski equates Stein with Ronald Reagan when he called for the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and he trains the camera on the standing ovation at the end of Stein’s oratory. Patting themselves on the back for a job well done? Any semblance of fairness has long since vanished, because Stein talks out of both sides of his mouth. He’s full of it.

As an agnostic, I am in a special position to observe the fundamental irony of religion and atheism. They share something that an agnostic does not have: faith. A belief in God versus a belief in the lack thereof, but belief nonetheless. As I write this, I am still agnostic. I do not have the answers. But if there’s one thing I know for sure, neither does Ben Stein.

On DVD: “Funny Games”

Dir. Michael Haneke
(R) ★

I rented Funny Games out of curiosity. They say it killed the cat.

I had read the reviews and was fascinated — mostly, fascinated by the scorn with which some critics responded to it, moving beyond a simple objection to its content to a resentment of its maker, Austrian director Michael Haneke (Caché). Said Newsweek’s David Ansen, “So as you’re squirming in your seat, gagging on Haneke’s cinematic castor oil, try to remember: this movie is good for you!” And Mark LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: “… just because it’s a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn’t make it any less vile, useless and pointless.” Even some of the film’s defenders are ambivalent, like Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly: “He’s a clever and sophisticated filmmaker; he’s also a self-important highbrow Euro pain freak.”

The review that most made me curious to see it for myself was by A.O. Scott, of The New York Times — ironic, as his review is the most searingly negative of all. He wrote, “Funny Games tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness … It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.” If you read only one review of Funny Games, it should be his. If you read a second, go ahead and parse mine.

The fourth paragraph. I have cited the opinions of other critics but as yet have not offered my own. Haneke’s film is an intellectual exercise, an example of cruel cinematic violence intended to comment on cruel cinematic violence. So I gathered my thoughts, regained my bearings, and sought out further analyses to better inform my own. My conclusion: I’m with Mr. Scott.

According to Haneke, Funny Games is “a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naiveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings.” He made a German-language version in 1997, and he has remade it, reportedly shot-for-shot, in English, to bring his scorn for us straight to our doorstep. How generous of him.

The story concerns an affluent American family: Ann (Naomi Watts), her husband George (Tim Roth), and their son Georgie (Devon Gearhart). Soon upon arriving at their posh, gated cabin, they encounter a pair of polite young men dressed all in white, including their gloves. They are Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), and they are sociopaths. They hold the family hostage in their home and bet that all three will be dead within twelve hours.

That’s the story, but that’s not what the film is about. On occasion, Paul speaks into the camera, addressing the audience directly. He talks to us about our desire for neat resolutions and asks us if enough is enough. How should we answer? In one scene, he presses rewind on a remote control and repeats an event for us differently. The film knows it’s a film and means to consider not the interactions of the characters, but the interaction of the audience with the cinema.

But Haneke, you see, is a moral coward; his camera, in the merciless, indifferent way it observes the family’s plight, identifies with the sociopaths, but he absolves himself of responsibility by asserting that he is only feeding the beast, providing fodder for the bloodlust of us depraved Americans. “You asked for it,” he seems to say through Peter and Paul as he commits unspeakable crimes against the innocent family. It’s the philosophical equivalent of pounding us with our own fists and asking, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

But of course Haneke has a point. Fetishistic violence has been a commodity of American cinema for a long time, and the advent of so-called “torture porn” seems inevitable in hindsight. (Saw V opens October 24 in a theater near you!) So it is not Haneke’s theme I object to, but rather the manner in which he expresses it. He directs with icy, meticulous skill, and he effectively creates an atmosphere of dread, but he inflicts it upon the audience like a cudgel. Smug and sanctimonious, he scolds America for its exploitation of suffering for entertainment, but is it any less contemptible to exploit suffering to make a ham-handed statement about our thirst for it? “How dare you enjoy this!” he chides, while beating, violating, and humiliating his characters. Well, I didn’t enjoy it, Mr. Haneke. Do I pass your test? Is my misery penance enough for the sins you have ascribed to me?

One scene questions whether there is an appreciable difference between reality and fiction, implying that by celebrating violence on the screen we promote violence in the world. Well, let’s imagine a scenario as it might unfold in the real world. A man walks down the street. A philosopher crosses his path and for no reason throws a stone at his head. As the man bleeds to death on the pavement, on-lookers watch the scene in horror, and as the police arrive to arrest the philosopher, he says, “It does not matter that I have thrown the stone or that the man suffers. What matters is that you watched.” “Yeah, yeah,” says the cop, rolling his eyes as he puts the philosopher in cuffs. “Tell it to the judge.”