The Perfect Storm

Sebastian Junger’s bestseller The Perfect Storm is a first-rate piece of journalism — compact and packed, loaded with anecdotes about life on fishing boats, the effects of a hurricane, and so on (he even tosses in a pretty frightening passage on what drowning feels like). Junger assembled all this information around a void — the void left by the Halloween Storm, the October 1991 convergence of three volatile weather events that destroyed, among other things, the Gloucester swordfishing boat the Andrea Gail. Aside from the basic fact that the boat was lost at sea (only a couple of fuel cans were ever recovered), nothing is known about what happened to the ship or the men aboard. Junger’s account is mainly informed conjecture about what might have happened. The new movie version is conjecture, too, but it’s informed by Hollywood conventions. The Perfect Storm, competently directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, Air Force One), comes across like Apollo 13 without radio contact and with a downer ending.

The characters are defined chiefly by action — what they do under pressure tells us who they are — but since they behave more or less like generic movie people, what does that really tell us? Despite its poignant basis in fact, The Perfect Storm is only a small notch above Armageddon and many other disaster thrillers. The real-life men are recast as stereotypes: Captain Billy Tyne (George Clooney), the hard-bitten veteran skipper who wants to go out for one last big haul; Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg), an eager rookie with a passionate girlfriend (Diane Lane) waiting at home; loyal, fuzzy-wuzzy Murph (John C. Reilly); shifty troublemaker Sully (William Fichtner, whose features have doomed him to playing shifty guys); bedraggled loser Bugsy (John Hawkes), who can’t even get laid before he ships out; and the West Indian Alfred Pierre (Allen Payne), who has, I think, a grand total of three distinct lines of dialogue.

The nervous grouchiness of men at sea, dealing with a lethal natural menace while rubbing each other’s nerves raw, probably couldn’t be handled better than it was in Jaws, and The Perfect Storm doesn’t come close. (Twenty-five years later, you remember Quint and Brody and Hooper a hell of a lot more vividly than you’ll remember Billy or Bobby after a week.) There isn’t a bummer in the cast, but all of the actors play second fiddle to the elements, and Petersen has cast a variety of intriguing actresses only to shove them into the margins. Diane Lane, for instance, tries so hard to do something fresh with her stock girlfriend-in-waiting that she overplays almost every scene she’s in. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as a nearby boat captain, has a radio microphone grafted to her hand for most of the film (it’s easy to forget she’s supposed to be playing Linda Greenlaw, an author in her own right); and it’s nice to see Cherry Jones (Cradle Will Rock) and Karen Allen getting work, but why waste them as two women trapped on an imperilled sailboat who have almost no dialogue?

If you go to see bad weather, The Perfect Storm gives you probably a good 45 minutes of it, as the Andrea Gail is batted around the sea like a toy boat in the bathtub of a sadistic kid. We feel batted around, too, and the effect, cumulatively, is less overwhelming than overbearing. The movie devolves into spectacle, a series of CGI shots for us to ooh and aah at. If we know the story’s outcome, all the strenuous efforts the men go through seem like a sick joke, but the movie works hard to ennoble them anyway. The climax is monotonous and punishing — after 45 minutes of waves hammering the boat, you say, Okay, we get it.

The grinding sameness of the violent sea makes you appreciate James Cameron’s handling of the chaos in Titanic, which had some incongruous visual beauty going for it. The only hint of beauty in The Perfect Storm — and it’s a chilling moment, and George Clooney’s moment of glory — comes when the Andrea Gail abruptly enters glass-smooth waters and sunny skies. Everyone on board is ecstatic except Billy, who knows the worst is yet to come; they’ve just moved into a safe, small pocket in between storms. Clooney’s wordless horror in the face of sunshine is more terrifying than anything the special-effects whizzes came up with.

But The Perfect Storm isn’t truly fatuous until the very end, when it’s suggested that sweet, saintly Bobby somehow contacted his girlfriend in a dream before he drowned. Of course, we don’t clearly see any of the men die, presumably out of respect for their families. But if you’re going to respect real-life tragedy, you don’t make a much-hyped summer movie out of it. This empty memorial to those lost at sea is really only about the realistic mayhem made possible by computer imaging. For all its technical advances, The Perfect Storm can’t do what Junger did: make you feel what it’s like to work on the sea and die under it.

Audition

You should probably go into Takashi Miike’s Audition as blank as possible, though, as with Psycho, you can enjoy it even if you know where it’s going. Hell, the marketing spoils any big surprises it has (if you catch this on DVD and have a habit of watching the trailer for the movie before the movie itself, do not do that with Audition; the enclosed two trailers give away quite a few shocks that need to be experienced virginally and in context to retain their full oomph). But, like a lot of people who’ve seen Audition, I have a sadistic little daydream of showing it to clueless friends who’ve never heard of it. I wouldn’t show them the DVD cover art; I would even make them stay out of the room until the film was in play mode, so they wouldn’t even see the menu. Then they’d watch the movie and take it for a sensitive Japanese drama about a widower looking for companionship — up until the halfway mark, anyway. They would have no idea what they were in for. Of course, the daydream realistically ends with my shocked and disgusted friends throwing me out of their living room by the scruff of my neck, so perhaps it should stay a daydream.

Those who have heard of Audition — and it’s far from the only film in the insanely prolific Takashi Miike’s portfolio, but it is likely the most notorious — may, conversely, go into it expecting more than they’ll get. The first hour is becalmed (deceptively becalmed, of course), normal, mainstream — it’s television. It begins rather sentimentally, in a hospital room. Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is watching his wife slip away on her deathbed. Their young son, meanwhile, is walking towards the room with a homemade “Get Well Soon, Mom” gift in his hands. By the time he gets there, she has flatlined. The father and son leave the hospital together in quiet grief. Cut to seven years later. Aoyama and his now-teenage son Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) are fishing. They have an easy, comfortable relationship — we see that Aoyama has raised his son alone (with the help of his maid Rie, played by Toshie Negishi) and done a serviceable job; the kid turned out okay, with a possible girlfriend and an unquenchable passion for dinosaurs (which may suggest that in a lot of ways, the son hasn’t matured a lot since his mom’s death).

Aoyama, a production executive, is mostly content but vaguely lonely. His son tells him that he should remarry before he gets any older (he is perhaps in his mid-forties); his colleague and friend Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimura) seconds this, and proposes a plan for Aoyama to meet the perfect woman — i.e., “beautiful, classy, and obedient.” They’ll hold an audition for a non-existent movie, analyzing the women who arrive to try out for the “role,” asking questions relevant to Aoyama’s companionship needs. We get a pretty funny montage of various women sitting for the men and their camera, sometimes dancing around (a couple even disrobe).

Aoyama, however, has already made up his mind; for him, the audition is almost a formality to appease Yoshikawa, because while going through the paper applications, Aoyama has come across a woman whose story touches his soul. Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) writes about herself modestly, enclosing an innocent, almost bashful-looking head shot. She mentions studying ballet for 12 years until a hip injury ended her dream; facing the reality of her post-ballet life, she says, was “like accepting death.” Aoyama is hooked. He’s hooked even more when her audition shows her to be a quiet angel in white, even more beautiful than her photo allows, who doesn’t even bother to “act” or be “on” for this supposed “role.” She is simply herself.

Aoyama is in love. Yoshikawa has his doubts — he doesn’t like her; he can’t put his finger on it, but he muses that it’s “something chemical.” But we can dismiss that as the grumblings of a jealous friend. Aoyama will be happy again after seven years of loneliness. He and Asami go out a couple of times. Then, around 45 minutes into the film, comes a quiet and massively creepy moment — it’s one of the more frightening things I’ve seen in a movie. Asami sits in her apartment, on the floor, slumped and with her back to us; nearby is a phone, and, in the background, a laundry sack. Cut to Aoyama, debating whether to call Asami. Cut back to Asami: the phone rings. What follows is so chilling that it completely and permanently alters our perception of everything afterward.

And everything afterward is pretty fucking intense. I’m not going to reveal more, except to say that Takashi Miike is an unquestionable master. When he wants to make Asami look pure and beautiful, you want to hug her and protect her and make her happy. When he wants to make her look menacing, you’ve never seen anything scarier. The movie will get under your skin and stay there for many days. The denouement in itself is not particularly bloody or explicit — if you’ve seen Kirby Dick’s documentary Sick about Bob Flanagan, for instance, you’ve seen a lot more upsetting imagery than Audition offers. But the emotional force of it is what lodges it in your mind — the sense that the actions arise not from sadism or vengeful rage but from deeply twisted and damaged love. That’s a lot spookier. The night after seeing this, I literally had a nightmare about Asami smiling sweetly and chirping “Kiri-kiri-kiri” (“deeper, deeper, deeper”), which sounds like kitty kitty kitty (talk about cat and mouse games); it’s been a very, very long time since a movie infected my dreamsleep so immediately. Needless to say, I’m eager to watch it again as soon as possible.

Audition becomes a bit of a confuse-a-thon in the end zone. Miike plays guess-what’s-real games: “Oh, it was all a dream” segues into “Okay, guess it wasn’t all a dream” and from there into “Okay, what the hell is or isn’t a dream?” This may be a deal-breaker for those who don’t appreciate such capricious directorial prerogative. But Miike knows what he’s doing. He begins with a straight and mainstream story, then sets the chaos of decay in motion. The story collapses; the only reality left is agony and shock. Or, as Asami points out, “Words can lie; pain is all you can trust.” And the movie is immaculately acted through all of it, by two leads who are not primarily actors; you wouldn’t know from Ryo Ishibashi’s placid, recessive performance as Aoyama that in real life he’s a rock musician, and Eihi Shiina is almost an absolute beginner, a model stepping into acting. (She’d better give up on any hopes of being hired to advertise innocent-image products, that’s for damn sure; maybe she has a bright future modelling latex aprons or medical supplies.) Audition is a serious, affecting drama that turns into an emotional slaughterhouse and endurance test (those who are queasy about seeing vomit in movies had better stay far away) but remains serious and affecting. Miike says he tries not to work in easy genres, but this is a horror film in the purest sense: You witness in close-up the physical and psychic pain one human can inflict on another, in the name of love, and being horrified is the only conceivable reaction.

Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)

Both the ad campaign and the opening credits for Gone in 60 Seconds come on very hip, very techno, very 2000. The film itself, though, is comfortably cheesy — a real beer-and-pizza movie. In spirit, I imagine it’s close to the original Gone in 60 Seconds (which I haven’t seen), a 1974 drive-in flick considered a cult classic by B-movie buffs. The new film gives us reasonably likable characters, gives them a clearly defined conflict, and gets out of the way as they go about resolving it. There’s not one scrap of art in Gone in 60 Seconds, but there’s no flab either; in its pedal-to-the-metal professionalism, it’s almost a lowbrow version of Ronin.

Perhaps only in recent years could two Oscar winners (Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie) appear, without apparent irony or disdain, in a megabudget action movie produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Con Air, Armageddon). Or perhaps not — perhaps this film is a ’70s throwback in more ways than one: remember the Oscar winners peppered throughout The Swarm and The Poseidon Adventure? (Both were produced by Irwin Allen, the Jerry Bruckheimer of the ’70s.) In any event, Cage and Jolie seem to be having fun, and Jolie in particular likes to tease her generally bland lines as if playing with chewing gum. She’s a whiz at keeping herself amused; I have a feeling she’ll be a wild card in movies for years to come.

Cage is in penitent-nice-guy mode as Randall “Memphis” Raines, a former car thief who’s been out of the racket eight years. Memphis is happy enough working in a garage and supervising a kiddie race track, but just when he thought he was out, they pull him back in. It seems his kid brother Kip (Giovanni Ribisi, looking like Shaggy), himself a budding car thief, has gotten in hot water with a vicious ganglord known as “the Carpenter.” This criminal mastermind is given such a dread-ridden build-up that part of the movie’s oddball charm is that he turns out to be Christopher Eccleston, who could possibly frighten a cup of tea, if that.

The Carpenter (screenwriter Scott Rosenberg does love these baroque names for gangsters) offers Memphis a deal: Steal and deliver 50 fancy cars, and Kip can stay among the breathing. So Memphis swiftly puts together a crew, including his old flame Sway (Jolie), his mentor Otto (Robert Duvall), old friend Donny (the scene-stealing Chi McBride), and the wordless Sphinx (Vinnie Jones). The cars that have been targeted for theft are all given female names, and the many heist scenes have the ardent, furtive quality of romance; Memphis slips into a beauty, hot-wires her, and revs her up. When Sway gets into the action, it’s almost a Sapphic love scene.

Writing about An Officer and a Gentleman, Pauline Kael called it “crap, but it’s crap on a motorcycle.” Well, Gone in 60 Seconds is crap in a Shelby Mustang GT 500. The movie was directed by Dominic Sena, an MTV veteran whose only previous film was 1993′s Kalifornia, a sun-bleached serial-killer thriller with David Duchovny and Brad Pitt; the only link I can find between the two films is that they’re both a lot better than they had to be. Partly it’s thanks to Scott Rosenberg, the quirky scripter (Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead) who has worked for Bruckheimer before (Con Air and, uncredited, Armageddon). Here, Rosenberg finds the right balance between action-propelled narrative and odd touches, such as a comic-relief cop duo (determined Delroy Lindo and goofy Timothy Olyphant). The movie also pauses to let a minor character sing the praises of an unprintable technique known as “the Stranger”; I respect a film that stops to smell the sleaze.

In all, this is the first Bruckheimer production I’ve enjoyed. I only regret a little too much camera jitter in the car-chase scenes, which are otherwise staged with a tongue-in-cheek taste for the ridiculous (Memphis gets behind the wheel of that Shelby Mustang and makes her defy gravity, physics, and Delroy Lindo). What amazes me is that many critics are praising the bloated Mission: Impossible 2 while dumping on this light-headed, light-hearted fare, as if punishing Bruckheimer for past cinematic sins. Maybe Bruckheimer hasn’t quite reformed, unlike Memphis, but Gone in 60 Seconds at least shows that he can make entertaining trash, instead of his usual boring trash.