Rejectamenta

A lengthy vacation (such as the one I’ve just returned from) is sometimes exactly in order just before the “serious” film season begins, when everyone rolls out their finest cinematic wares during the winter months in a well-timed stab at all the awards dished out up to Oscar® night, even the smallest of which is never bad for business. And speaking of big business, this is almost five years to the day (December 19) that the last and most massive critical and commercial smash, Titanic, was unveiled to the bedazzled public, and began its 15-week run at the top of the box office; watching it again last night on TV almost felt like catching a glimpse of the Caelocanth, for that movie’s unparalleled dominance is a feat aspired to by every subsequent December release but, it’s increasingly clear, one not likely to be equaled in our lifetimes.

What late 2003 instead dished out in unprecedented quantities was hype, as a handful of much-anticipated films finally made their way onto local screens, and as is too often the case, seemingly failed to live up to their promise. After six years in absentia Quentin Tarantino finally threw us a bone, but his Kill Bill Volume One fell out of the top ten after only four weeks in the theater; by mid-November you could only catch it once daily in all of Ann Arbor, and in a late-night screening at that, a theatrical burial that suggests Tarantino is finally failing to connect with viewers after only a decade of being touted as America’s miscreant genius.

Not even the concomitant free publicity from a controversial Dale Peck-esque review by The New Republic Online’s blogger Gregg Easterbrook, calling Tarantino’s entire output “pure junk,” and Bill in particular as an example of Hollywood’s lust for the “mass-market presentation of butchering the helpless as a form of entertainment,” seemed able to help the film’s fortunes at the box office, and only succeeded in drawing heat to Easterbrook for accusing Bill’s distributor Miramax’s “Jewish” head honcho of “worship[ing] money above all else, promoting for profit the adulation of violence.” (The fact that we can barely remember that racist brouhaha after only two months best illustrates Bill’s inability to capitalize on even the most bull-headed protests.)

If outrage can’t be blamed for Bill’s near-instant irrelevance, so much more confusing then is its actual excellence in both form and content, and the realization that Tarantino is simply way ahead of his time and his audience. For if a movie fails to make a significant splash commercially, one is inclined to write it off as either art or rubbish, terms often confused for each other, and whose combination Tarantino would probably embrace as his preeminent domain.

By all indications Bill was simply hopping onto the bandwagon of martial-arts flicks that were so well-received in recent years: the Matrix and Charlie’s Angels series, anything with Jackie Chan, and certainly Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which was supposed to have blazed a whole new direction in filmmaking blending Hong Kong’s dazzling combat artistry with a more high-minded narrative bent. Tarantino even employed Yuen Wo-Ping (choreographer for the Matrix films as well as for Dragon) as “martial arts advisor,” so the connection between Bill and those predecessors would be far from tenuous.

The one significant difference here? Tarantino’s near-apotheosizing of the physical violence the other films use largely as a pretext for narrative or character evolution or mere visual distraction. Whereas in other films all this aerial ballet of whoopass is essentially an exercise in style, for Bill the substance of the violence is paramount – by which I mean the pain, the damage, the corporeal ramifications of these melees take center stage.

Bill is an unmitigated bloodbath, to be sure, but that may make it simply more honest than its peers. Taking blades, fists, guns, and other weaponry to each other should be a messy business, and whereas writers like Easterbrook might deplore the insistent gore from start to finish, it’s not as though the film’s falsely rated PG-13 in a bid for a wider-paying audience. Uma Thurman’s Black Mamba is on a quest to wreak vengeance on those assassins who shot her in the head at her wedding, and though we may all have entertained our own eye-for-an-eye fantasies at some point in our lives, Tarantino’s unflichingly graphic presentation of tit for tat drives home the point that retribution is not for those of weak stomachs.

Rigorously aestheticized violence, check; seedy criminal underworld, check; slots in casting for long-absent former superstars, check (Daryl Hannah, David Carradine, Sonny Chiba); vaguely retro hair and costumes and music, check; highly elliptical and rule-bending narrative flow, check; possibly endless visual references to any number of obscure genre flicks, check; all the trademark elements of a Tarantino production find expression in Bill without compromise. But his most prominent signature yet makes perhaps the biggest impact on this first volume’s five chapters: maintaining an absolute balance between deadly seriousness and a lampooning wryness. Tarantino is distinguished more by an attitude than anything, and it’s possibly this perverse blend of determined physical cruelty and blithe unconcern that defenders of the moral order find so objectionable. Bill has this sensibility in spades, but without one side or the other his films would be either utterly irresponsible or an incredible bore.

Bill infuses with this characteristic demeanor a multi-part tale where Mamba, formerly a formidable agent of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, apparently leaves the ninja-mercenary life behind for wedded bliss but is instead punished by her former colleagues at the altar for defecting. “The blood-spattered bride” miraculously survives the attack that wiped out her entire wedding party, and resolves to systematically eliminate her unsuspecting assailants one by one. Tarantino presents each chapter as yet another stage in Mamba’s quest of reprisals, with her exterminated targets crossed off the list one by one, but he takes liberties in the order each incident is presented, which should surprise no one who’s seen his earlier works. It remains for us to piece together the actual sequence of events, and it’s still not entirely clear at the end of this first volume exactly what happened at the wedding chapel. This is Bill’s overarching structure, slowly filling out the past as it unfurls the present, and one could see how audiences might’ve shied away from the challenge.

Tarantino similarly leaves no scene untouched with some evidence of directorial flair, from either dangerously lengthy pauses (to his credit, he’s not afraid of silence) to blatant musical cues (Tarantino loves his trumpets), from the crassest comic touches (Mamba drives a garishly-decorated truck named the “Pussy Wagon,” lifted from a male nurse who pimped out her comatose body in the hospital, even while she was spitting as an unconscious motor reflex) to the most intricate attention to detail (notice how the bullet holes in the chapel go up the walls only to a certain point, illustrating skill and focus).

For fans of his work, Bill will reaffirm their faith in Tarantino’s supererogatories, but for the unconverted it’s an awful lot to take in – not least the origin of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), “queen of the Tokyo underworld,” whose own fall-and-rise tale is presented in a surprisingly lengthy animated sequence that’s a thousand times bloodier than Mamba’s own live-action assaults. (In both worlds, though, according to Tarantino’s laws of biology most humans apparently carry around innumerable gallons of blood in their systems and have an elevated enough blood pressure that merely losing an limb causes a sanguine geyser that puts Yellowstone to shame.)

Extreme conceits such as this will either be your cup of tea or short-circuit your absorption, especially when Tarantino seemingly has no compunction against freely alternating from an insistent adherence to verisimilitude (Mamba’s atrophied leg muscles prevent her from simply walking out of the hospital when she snaps out of her coma) to a cartoonish artifice that belies Bill’s probably far-from-modest budget (Mamba’s clearly-fake plane flies first through clearly-fake-red skies, and then descends way too low over a clearly-fake miniature Tokyo).

And when Mamba finally takes on O-ren Ishii and her “Crazy 88” gang with a sword sharp enough that “God will be cut” were He to make an appearance, the grotesque and comical splatterfest that ensues will either sustain the spirit of fun that has carried you through or supercede whatever cinematic spectacle you previously identified as the most preposterous ever. For myself, it’s a prodigious instance of cinema for its own sake, but it still failed to mask the tomfoolery of a near-instantaneous snowfall between Mamba’s entrance at the restaurant and her victorious exit after offing all the expendable minions.

No visual flourish or affectation of plot has a particular rhyme or reason except because it was able to be done; if anything, Bill serves to demonstrate the demiurgic autocracy of its director. It’s surprising then when moments of humanity leak to the surface, such as Mamba’s looking sickened by all she’d done, and saddened by all she’s yet to do, when she finally crosses swords with O-Ren Ishii. Her ninja warrior, though assured in purpose, yet relishes none of the deaths and disfigurements she’s caused, which thankfully excuses Tarantino from charges of nursing a juvenile appetite for butchery.

And this is what situates Bill within the genre to which it most belongs – the Western, somewhere in between Leone’s visual extravagance and Peckinpah’s hyperrealist violence – neither of which lacked a heart. That the site of Mamba’s crashed nuptials was in the dusty Texan desert gives away Tarantino’s actual artistic leanings – though cloaked in the trappings of a Hong Kong martial-arts flick, it’s the lawlessness and wrath of the American Western to which Bill owes its roots – or perhaps Hong Kong owes more to Westerns than it realizes. (Listen carefully to the sometimes-rockabilly soundtrack and see if you feel otherwise.) Bill’s detractors may charge that it “glorifies killing as a sport, even as a form of pleasure” (per Easterbrook), but Tarantino’s simply doing what the Western did best in its heyday – glorifying the endlessly chthonic pleasures of cinema itself.

Certainly moreso than Bill’s first volume, the third and final installment of the Matrix series was expected to dominate the box office indefinitely, especially since it was the first film ever released simultaneously in both conventional and IMAX formats, but it too began its descent down the charts after only one week, and fell out of the top ten after only three. In the five years since Titanic, only eleven movies lasted longer than three weeks at #1 – that’s roughly two a year – ranging from Cast Away to The Sixth Sense to Saving Private Ryan to The Fellowship of the Ring (to name the most successful examples) – and none of those lasted longer than six weeks in the top position. Surely in light of The Matrix Revolutions’ unprecedented release schedule (screened only six months after its predecessor) audience enthusiasm would be at a premium and the revenue streams unceasing? Of course, that’s only providing the film’s any good.

The signs admittedly weren’t promising in the first sequel, Reloaded, which failed to find as satisfying a balance of ontological discourse and physical action as did the very first Matrix, but it was only fair to wait to see if Revolutions would reveal a deeper design justifying all the puzzling dialogue. How sad then to discover that Revolutions veers toward the even more abstract, and in failing to tie up Reloaded’s loose ends and succeeding in generating more confusion, Revolutions compromises the legacy of the entire franchise by revealing it all to be the proverbial sound-and-fury signifying next to nothing.

This therefore becomes the first instance where this reviewer confesses to being utterly bewildered by nearly all that transpires in Revolutions’ first hour. Neo’s consciousness appears trapped on some virtual subway platform where he encounters a matrix-encoded family whose emotional bonds have compelled them to flee the program via this same train route, an expansion of metaphysical consciousness for a trio of computer codes both insufficiently explained and of indeterminate purpose within the plot. Equally muddled is the Oracle’s clarification of her new outward appearance (an unavoidable casting change since the original actress, Gloria Foster, died during filming), yet another opportunity for that character to speak circles around everyone without ever making sense.

If anyone can illuminate for me, after all her speeches and appearances, just where the Oracle came from and what the Agents Smith did to her in the end, then it’s possible the writing/directing Wachowski brothers have a promising candidate for a script doctor (alas, too late).The Merovingian’s too-brief appearance in this final installment also fails to shed light on his role in Reloaded, and he throws away a line or two suggesting he’s got something to do with that existential subway system. Again, either the film’s failed to be clear or I’ve failed to put all my critical powers to bear – and I’m betting it ain’t me who’s performing at a subpar level this time.

And if you thought the previous films were garrulous, I can only imagine how many pages Revolutions’ script runs, because from Oracle’s cagey proclamations to Trinity’s final soliloquies, we get more of an earful for our money than anyone ever could’ve desired. And all we yet understand is that Agent Smith has assimilated each and every entity in the matrix into his army of clones, and that in the real world all the calamari-like automatons are but minutes away from breaching the defenses of Zion. Up to now we’ve been infinitely patient during the endless dramatic buildup, and though we are finally rewarded with the inevitable final showdowns in both realms, it becomes another instance of excess that proves wearying more than diverting.

Yes, the ordnance-equipped exoskeletons the defending troops of Zion sport are better than anything Industrial Light & Magic’s ever come up with, and the unfathomable swarm of Sentinels that debouch into the underground city constitute an unprecedented spectacle, but it churns on as endlessly as did all the previous philosophical mumbo-jumbo, and our appreciation wanes the more it refuses to quit. In my reviews of Reloaded I suggested that all the Wachowskis’ efforts, though impressive, might have crossed over from mind-blowing to simply exhausting, a critical shift in effect that could prove once and for all there can be too much of a good thing. I’m afraid those initial fears are confirmed in Revolutions: history will have to declare the franchise visually peerless but narratively bankrupt, a combination that only saps you of energy and bloats you like an out-of-control Thanksgiving meal.

The two ships Zion sent out at the end of Reloaded to retrieve Neo’s crew are now but one, as some double-crossing soldier prematurely fired an electronics-disabling EMP charge; it turns out the appropriately-named Bane accidentally got an Agent Smith downloaded inside himself, and while he later wreaks havoc in Neo’s ship, Jada Pinkett-Smith’s Niobe is piloting her ship the back way to Zion to deliver her EMP generator to where it’s really needed – but she’s got a gazillion Sentinels on her tail as well.

You follow all this? If Neo can get Bane off his back, he’s intent on flying into the Machine City on Earth’s surface to make some sort of deal with the machines’ ruling consciousness, as they somehow have a common enemy in Agent Smith within the matrix. With each movie, the scale gets bigger, and it all becomes less and less about Neo, though he fumbles his way toward figuring out his destined role in all this. The CGI is relentless, and certainly overtakes the plot in prominence, which means this franchise finally has something in common with Titanic. The feel is very Wagnerian by the end, with gods and men duking it out, but we’re constantly just trying to catch up with events and make heads or tails of it, and the effort required means two hours ends up feeling like ten.

So who wins? Would you believe, everyone? If the ending means the same to you as it did to myself, then you’re just as disappointed in the ultimate payoff and throwing up your hands in resignation. The Wachowskis deliver a denouement so devoid of dramatic release it can only mean they ran out of ideas – or had none to begin with. It’s a disappointment made all the more crushing by its constant visual panache – and the purported cinema event of the year fades into obscurity none too soon. Gimcracks such as this will make their mark in history only as the most stunning examples of failing to live up to their promise – in the end, all too much like the ship Titanic so effectively memorialized.