“The 24th Day”: Tie me up, tie me down

Dir. Tony Piccirillo
(2004, R, 96 min)
★ ½

Writer-director Tony Piccirillo’s The 24th Day, adapted from his play, uses a lot of words, but doesn’t have much to say. It’s a claustrophobic little chamber piece where the two main characters talk and talk and talk and talk, and it’s all so very Important; they say things like, “Is that the truth-truth, or is that your truth?” “The truth is confusing,” one of them explains. When he tapes the other’s mouth shut we wish he’d tape his own as well, and then we wouldn’t have to listen to either of them.

Tom (Scott Speedman) is a shy, shaggy-haired young man who brings home Dan (James Marsden) from a bar. There’s some flirting, some small talk, followed by some not-so-small talk. It’s clear to us long before it’s clear to Dan that Tom is a weird creep and Dan should head for the exit, which is locked from the outside anyway, but still. Tom attacks Dan, ties him to a chair, and reveals that he is HIV-positive. He believes Dan infected him during an encounter five years prior that Dan doesn’t remember. He will test Dan’s blood and depending on the results decide whether or not to kill him.

We see Tom discretely hand off the blood and later get the results. Question: Who is the woman accepting this sample, and doesn’t it seem strange to her that she’s being handed a blood sample like it’s a drug deal? Maybe she’s complicit in the kidnapping. Maybe she helped him board up the windows of his Manhattan apartment, which apparently no one ever noticed him doing, not even his landlord.

Never mind.

Tom and Dan talk. They struggle. They talk some more. They trade pop culture references that are too old for either of them: Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Starsky & Hutch. I suppose men in their late twenties or early thirties might be generally familiar with those shows, but for both of them to rattle off trivia with such authority — and under such circumstances — suggests that these are Piccirillo’s references and not his characters’, and that, maybe, short on material, he popped in episodes of 1970s camp classics for inspiration.

Blah, blah, blah, I wanted to be an archaeologist. Blah, blah, blah, I liked sports in college. Blah, blah, blah, human beings are too complex for sexual labels. Enough already! These two are so insipid it’s a wonder anyone has ever agreed to sleep with them. The dialogue mostly lacks the pompous, self-consciously florid language of playwrights who like nothing more than the sound of their own words, so that’s some relief; a few of these getting-to-know-you scenes might actually have been good in a film unburdened by the ridiculous tied-to-a-chair premise.

Throughout we get some haphazardly edited and incoherent flashbacks from Tom’s point of view that are intended to tease out his background. He eventually tells us the whole story, and it doesn’t change much for us. He’s still a self-important nut-job who had sex with a drunk stranger he picked up at a bar and was sober enough to remember five years later what they were wearing and whether they kissed each other behind the ear but apparently too stupid to make sure the inebriated jerk wore a condom.

I imagine Piccirillo endeavored to make a dark meditation on sexual safety and responsibility, but it’s really a shallow whine-a-thon about a couple of punks who should spend less time pontificating and more time contacting each and every person they’ve slept with. We learn that recently, after finding out he had contracted HIV, Tom stalked Dan and watched him bring another young man to his place, presumably for sex. How noble of Tom to kidnap Dan and take him to task for his sexual irresponsibility! Not noble enough, however, to step in and prevent this poor kid from being exposed to the virus. If Tom and Dan end up killing each other, it would be a happy ending because it would take them both out of the dating pool.

Want to make a truly scary film about sexual responsibility? Forget all the kidnapping melodrama. Show us an irresponsible jerk with HIV and follow him for 90 minutes as he is forced to inform all the men and/or women he recklessly endangered. The reactions of the exposed parties — shock, terror, anger — would do far more to promote sexual safety than this silly, bondage-happy psychodrama.

To see this material done correctly, rent Hard Candy, a similarly staged drama about a young girl who turns the tables on a presumed sexual predator. That was an even darker film, more finely written, more tautly directed. It played for keeps. The 24th Day just plays.

On DVD: “Blindness”

Dir. Fernando Meirelles
(R) ★ ½

What a gifted filmmaker Fernando Meirelles is! … I’ll let this one slide.

I have developed a reliable barometer for the quality of a film. There comes a point during a bad one where I push my hands back through my hair in aggravation. If I begin to pull at it, we’re venturing into one-star territory. While screening Speed Racer, I kicked the barrier of the mezzanine and motioned as if to choke myself. If there had been ejector seats during Bratz: The Movie, I would still be in orbit.

Blindness achieves the first stage of aggravation. And as I mussed my hair I yelled at characters to behave as I would behave — indeed as any right-thinking adult would behave. I squinted my eyes; with cinematographer César Charlone, Meirelles works to convey a sense of his characters’ titular condition, but he succeeds only in giving us ugly vision. His images are overexposed, glaring, garish. Most of the characters are afflicted with a kind of blindness where all they can see is bright white. One character retains healthy vision. Those of us in the audience, however, are made to suffer a kind of sight where our eyeballs can’t make up their minds.

But the real problem is the screenplay by Don McKellar, or perhaps even the novel by José Saramago, which I haven’t read. It presents an inexplicable series events following a mysterious outbreak of blindness in an unnamed city that is an amalgam of Toronto, Canada; Montevideo, Uruguay; and São Paulo, Brazil. The blind are rounded up and interred in a facility not unlike a concentration camp, which has little infrastructure and zero supervision. Apparently, no one in charge has considered the drawbacks of holding a hundred or so newly blind people in a tightly packed, unfamiliar location with no one to tell them where the bathroom is. These must be the same people who were in charge of FEMA trailers in New Orleans.

It’s no surprise, then, that a small group of opportunists takes control and demands payment in exchange for food, first in the form of jewelry and then in the form of sexual currency. Here’s the wrinkle: one person in the facility, played by Julianne Moore, still has her sight. She faked blindness so that she could join her husband (Mark Ruffalo), who was infected, and she keeps it a secret from everyone but him. He is adamant that they not fight back, lest they begin a war in the facility.

Let us pause for a moment to consider his logic. When a team of sadists is forcibly raping your friends and neighbors with no guarantee that you will get food in return, would you be worried about starting a war? Perhaps the victimized women can explain to him when the war really began.

His position might be reasonable if he didn’t know his wife could see, which is such a tactical advantage that it wouldn’t be much of a war. The tyrants have possession of only one firearm and no one to aim it. How will she hope to avoid injury from the person wielding it? Take a small step to the left — war’s over. I am reminded of the final battle in X-Men: The Last Stand where the underlings engage in futile hand-to-hand combat while disproportionately powerful mutants like Magneto and Storm watch from above. If the underlings were smart, they would have sent Magneto and Storm to duke it out on a private island out in the Pacific. The winner would fly back and decide the future of mutant-kind. You would save countless lives, not to mention the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Julianne Moore character is Magneto. Her opponent is Mr. Magoo. Her inaction is baffling. But the screenplay simply accepts it, and so does Meirelles, whose direction of Moore’s performance suggests no such conflict. I don’t know if the novel is written in the same way; if it is, I have no desire to read it. The story does not survive it.

The film seems to be a study of human society collapsed as the result of great crisis, but none of the human behavior is credible. There is the Moore character, who refuses to take simple action to avert gang rape and exploitation. There is the Ruffalo character, who urges her not to do so. And there are the tyrants, who are not characters at all but variations of Snidely Whiplash. They are not Evil with a capital “E.” They are EVIL — all caps. At one point, one of the villains (Maury Chaykin) describes what he might do to a victim’s nipples, and the dialogue is both queasily ridiculous and wretched.

Eventually, the story leaves this facility and moves to the streets, which seem lifted from the bleak dystopia of Children of Men, a much better film about the collapse of civil society. These later scenes are better than what came before, but by this stage the story has lost me and isn’t getting me back. Blindness doesn’t have much of value to say about society, except that emergency facilities for the blind should be better operated and that a person with sight should not wait so long to do what is obvious. It says little about the human condition other than to demonstrate that prolonged exposure to over-lit photography can be irritating. What it says about filmmaking is that you should watch Children of Men instead.

On DVD: “Burn After Reading”

Dir. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
(R) ★ ½

Seldom has a movie that started with such intrigue ended as such piffle. Burn After Reading is too grim to work as comedy, too arch to work as drama, too senseless to work as a story, and too thoughtless to work as satire. The longer it goes on, the less of it there is, until it vanishes into thin air. It has nothing to say, nothing to show, and precious little to entertain us by. The emperor has no clothes, and there’s no emperor either.

The film draws us in immediately, with rapid footfalls that echo through a long corridor as CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovich) makes his way to an office, where he will be ambushed with the news that he has been fired. There is no exposition; we do not know what led to this scene or where it will lead. There’s an underlying mystery in the early going as we are introduced to characters and wonder how it will all connect, until we realize that none of it will connect.

There is Osbourne’s wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), who is having an affair with a married man, Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who in turn is having multiple affairs through an internet dating service. One of the women he meets is Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a physical trainer at a gym; Linda is too dim to realize that her manager, Ted (Richard Jenkins), is in love with her, and Ted is too dim to realize he’s better off without her. There’s a third character at the gym: Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) — that a character with that name is played by that actor tells you all you need to know about the casting. Tell you that he spends most of the film dressed in Lycra and I’ve given away the whole joke.

Chad and Linda stumble upon a CD filled with what they believe to be sensitive government secrets. Instead of destroying it, they decide to blackmail its owner, Osbourne, in the hopes of collecting a handsome reward. The rest of the film is a merry-go-round of covert liaisons involving the retrieval of the CD and the myriad infidelities. Funny thing about a merry-go-round, though — you’re always moving, but you never get anywhere.

Two characters observe the action from afar. Credited only as “CIA Officer” (David Rasche) and “CIA Superior” (J.K. Simmons), they meet periodically to discuss developments in the plot. The officer relays the information, and the superior regards it with a puzzled look, struggling to understand what it means and why it matters. He speaks for the audience.

This mess was perpetrated by the Coen brothers, whose previous film, No Country for Old Men, was at the top of my list of the best films of 2007 and won them three Oscars, including Best Picture. Their screenplay for Burn develops a few interesting characters, but they willfully, almost maliciously squander them. The most frequent criticism of the Coens I encounter is that they condescend to their characters; this is unfounded for a masterpiece such as No Country, but there are films where I can see where they’re coming from, even though I disagree (Fargo). Burn, however, demonstrates a mean-spiritedness that is indefensible.

There comes a moment of extreme violence that completely forfeits their claim to comedy — I won’t reveal it, but you’ll know it when you see it. It’s not funny. Nothing that comes after it can be funny. For filmmakers who swept the previous awards season with a drama so insightful about the nature of violence, it represents a profound lapse in judgment. And it’s so cavalier that it shocks the conscience.

It would be bad enough if the film had a purpose, but it doesn’t. It ends with such a shrug that it made me angry — angry that it wasted my time, angry that it wasted the time of its cast, which includes three Oscar-winners and two who are nominated this year. I was angry that the Coens wasted their own time. They’re better than this.

“Synecdoche, New York”

Dir. Charlie Kaufman
(R) ★ ½

“Synecdoche” is defined by Merriam-Webster thusly: “a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage).” I quote it in full because I don’t think I could boil it down. It’s one of the most confusing definitions I’ve ever read. The dictionary entry needs its own reference guide. Or maybe it’s just been too long since high school English.

What I do understand is that it’s about representation. You reference the sails to stand in for the ship and the boards to stand in for the stage. Perhaps Synecdoche, New York stands in for a movie.

The film is the directorial debut of one of my favorite writers, Charlie Kaufman, the man responsible for three of the most original scripts of the last ten years: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Like his previous works, Synecdoche is more concerned with the fractured workings of the mind than with objective reality. His subject is Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director from Schenectady, New York, who receives a prestigious grant and hopes to use it to create a performance piece of great truth. (Many of Kaufman’s subjects have been beleaguered artists; methinks this dour, reoccurring figure reveals much about Kaufman himself.)

As he sets out to create his labor of love, the film comes apart. Reality blurs and merges with his creative process. Like the title suggests, it’s all about representation. Seeking truth from his own experiences, he builds sets based on places he lives and works. He casts actors to play himself and the people he loves and then casts more actors to play the actors. Eventually, he puts so much into his representative world — his warehouse set becomes a city unto itself — that it seems nothing represents anything anymore, and everything is meaningless. But I don’t know if that’s a criticism of the film or just a description of its themes.

What I know for sure is that I don’t like the film. It is visually drab. Its tone is relentlessly dreary. Scenes are short and clipped. Time passes erratically. The dialogue doesn’t connect. The characters don’t connect, if you can call them characters. It is filled with such self-pity and misery that I wanted to escape. And some motifs seem without basis — a house on fire, the home of Caden’s lover Hazel (Samantha Morton), is at first absurdly funny, but finally becomes aggravating. This is a torturous film to sit through; it may be the longest two-hour movie ever made.

It is the kind of movie that seems to be talking to itself. Challenging, avant garde films can be brilliant, but they need an entry point, a means by which the audience can become involved, or else it’s not filmmaking, it’s masturbation. David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive was like that; he hooked us with a noir mystery before pulling the rug out from under us. Synecdoche plays more like Lynch’s Inland Empire; it alienates the audience almost from the start. It closes itself off to us, and we can only watch from a distance — an impenetrable oddity. I cannot dismiss the film, and I admire its ambition, but frankly I am weary of unbearable films with admirable ambition.

Sadly squandered are a promising character and a great performance. Caden is a fascinating man: his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) has left him and taken their daughter to Europe, his relationships crumble under his increasing depression, and all that is left for him is to transform his pain into art, but even that crumbles. Hoffman anchors the film as well as he can; the depth of anguish he brings to Caden is heartbreaking. I wish I could have seen this character and this actor brought together for a film better able to communicate him to the audience. There is great beauty and sadness in the last scene, but by then my patience was spent, the narrative had collapsed, and there was no way back from it.

The film is blessed with a remarkable cast that also includes Dianne Wiest, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Robin Weigert, and Lynn Cohen. I won’t describe their roles, because I’m not sure I properly can. Surely Kaufman can make sense of this material. Perhaps only Kaufman can. But then he should have made it a journal entry and not a movie.