A curiously complex comic?ro;”?ro;”take two.
You couldn't blame a 13-year-old gay kid for considering X2: X-Men United the greatest film imaginable, because its derring-do corresponds to his specific adolescent anxieties and hopes. So what's everybody else's X-cuse? At the beginning of X2, a narrator repeats the Marvel comics concept about an aggregate of mostly young, specially gifted misfits-called mutants-who fight against conservative, straight-world oppression (as well as the megalomaniacs among themselves).
"Mutants are regarded with fear, suspicion, even hatred," we're told, and as the mutants utilize their idiosyncratic powers (typified by their preposterous names: Magneto, Rogue, Professor X, Cyclops, Pyro, Wolverine, Mystique, Storm, etc.), each freakishly superheroic trait seems the projection of a child's wounded ego-whether embodied by the perpetually youthful Halle Berry as Storm, or soft-faced, quizzical-looking Anna Paquin as Rogue.
They metaphorically attack adolescent torment, feminist malaise, racial distress, political unrest-but primarily homophobia. Director-writer Bryan Singer keeps coming back to the anguished homosexual theme that was covert in his previous films The Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil. This sequel to Singer's 1999 box-office hit, X-Men, displays a better sense of purpose and craft; its commitment to comic book allegory goes beyond mere escapism to express the heart of an awkward child's alienation.
When mutant Iceman (Shawn Ashmore) visits his parents ("There's something I need to tell you..."), it seems Singer has finally found his metier, trifling though it is. That family confab may be the most concise depiction of an unhappy coming-out ever dramatized in a Hollywood movie (replete with parental guilt and sibling denial). Problem is, X2 continues in its mode of whimsical earnestness; denying the poignancy of its gay-child dismay, insisting on being the type of entertainment that can only satisfy a pre-adolescent mind. (Older viewers may prefer De Palma's abused-child themes in The Fury and Raising Cain.)
What looks expressive in X2 cannot be fully trusted. From Hugh Jackman as the he-man child-protector Wolverine (critic Gregory Solman nailed him as "macho conservative iconography taken out of mothballs") to the mercurial Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming), a Maxfield Parrish creature with moonlight eyes who bears the stigmata of "sin" and hopes for redemption, Singer interweaves several interconnecting levels of gay fantasia. The imagery ranges from ribald to innocent, primal to effete. But without evolving into liberating camp-or putting conviction behind the mutants' understanding of one another's sensitivity-it's just dumb sci-fi that refuses to confront audiences with any struggle for human connection beyond the heterosexual "norm." In a word, childish.
After two teams of mutants have exercised their underappreciated gifts and beaten back their oppressors-the evil scientist William Stryker (Brian Cox) and evil congressman Robert Kelly (Bruce Davison)-Team A returns to the seclusion of its academy/ghetto, run by Patrick Stewart's Professor Xavier. (Team B's simply forgotten.) X2 never integrates the miserable outsiders into the regular world but leaves them-and their legion of viewers-in the cocoon of adolescent daydreaming. ("You're a god among insects," Ian McKellen tells a boyish mutant, flattery that suggests an oppressed group's booster psychology-or dangerous elitism.) X2's trite fantasy of empowerment and victory embarrasses the adaptation of comic books into movies. It diminishes the story's potential, as usually happens with comic book-derived flicks (including a bogus "serious" film like Road to Perdition that attempted to elevate its comic book origins with art-movie gloss).
Action and special effects in X2 are an equally distracting and dishonorable folly. Beneath the generic threat of world domination (Stryker's enforcing bigotry and mind-control), Singer features each mutant's individual sexual neurosis. Mystique (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) changes identity for a T-room assignation. Another mutant describes a parent suffering gay-panic who takes "a power drill to bore the images out of her skull." All codes for gay suppression. Thus, Singer makes the sci-fi adventure movie his own, but without enhancing it. At its most bumptious, X2 imitates Spielberg's knack for pell-mell excitement but doesn't come close to Spielberg's ethical, genre-defying challenge. The changes that Spielberg rings on genre convention from The Color Purple to Hook to A.I. prove that drawing viewers deeper into human feeling is the utmost challenge to viewers' reception of formula. Meanwhile, Singer's very stealthiness and reticence gets accepted-even praised-as a harmless good time.
That's because critics are so comfortable with Singer's commercial formula, they don't see how he betrays his own interests. The cheap way he exploited the Jewish Holocaust and America's civil rights-era setting to justify sci-fi gim-crackery in X-Men contrasted its very disturbing-and more sincere-metaphor in which Rogue's (Paquin) sexual precocity led to AIDS-like petrification. In X2's episodes of combat and thrill, Singer adds on post-9/11 trauma. An effective opening sequence of Nightcrawler invading the White House evokes an assassination attempt, while a concluding presidential speech takes heed of threats against global understanding and acceptance. War is this film's upfront, 50s-ish allegory, but in the end, an allegory this noisily aggressive-this easy-is not about anything except a filmmaker's lack of seriousness.
Matthew Barney wants to be taken seriously as a filmmaker-not just an art maker-and he has progressively earned the label during the eight years from the first feature of his Cremaster cycle to the fifth and final episode. Working in film, not video (bless him), Barney's interest in the potential of visual narrative suggests rare faith in the photochemical and artisanal excitement of film. The Cremaster films may not be to everyone's taste, but they shame most of the movies made in this sci-fi, cgi, comic-book era.
By contrast, the multimillion dollar X2 is mere childish nonsense with only a tenuous grasp on what makes movie imagery special. Hollywood fantasy movies often sucker you into innocuousness-and there's a reason they're primarily sold to kids: Who else would fall for it? But Barney's Cremaster series connects to an adult sense of the fantastic, humorously rooted in the traditions of football, aeronautics, Busby Berkeley musicals, rock 'n' roll, industrialization, ethnic identity and murder.
Buñuel and Cocteau evinced this kind of pull on the subconscious, but Barney goes even further; never simply daring to be outrageous-though he often is, frequently reappearing as an androgyne in pink tartan-so much as always attempting to surprise. The major difference is that Barney has worked outside the movie mainstream, confounding what people think either museum art or movie art ought to be. As the promise of this summer's fantasy-movie ballbusters approach, Film Forum's Cremaster presentation (the cremaster muscle raises and lowers the scrotum) fortifies our faith in progressive movie art before we're swept away by hype.
If you've ventured into any previously shown Cremaster film, the most recently made (Cremaster 3) fulfills the investment. Unlike sci-fi movies that tend to provide solution (or the illusion of resolve), each set piece in Cremaster 3 ends up perplexing your assumptions about what Barney's enigmatic, beautiful grotesques mean-questioning is the luxury of art, placation (as in X2) is the trick of commercialism. Cremaster 3 revolves around the totem of the Chrysler Building-both its edifice and the culture it represents. Roaming eons before its construction, then inside its walls, elevator shafts-even the very ethos of American capitalist competition (symbolized in racetrack brutality or happy-hour drinking and gambling)-Barney plays with modern associations. Gloves are a recurrent image-on construction workers, barkeeps, elegant ladies, etc.-symbolizing manufacturing. Barney manufactures genre dissent (pace Noam Chomsky, once satirized as a graphomaniac) and is himself an imagistic maniac.
Cremaster 3's thematic extrapolation is like a musical composition; it surges and repeats, builds and climaxes. This is the most freeform narrative I've seen since De Palma's Femme Fatale; it moves by the logic and rhyme of visually transformed objects and locations. Barney frees viewers from the conformity of Hollywood narrative that connects him to pioneers like Eisenstein, Lang, Murnau, Welles, Cocteau and the surrealists. This belief in film sets him apart from 80s performance artists who repaired to galleries because they weren't good enough to be entertainers.
Barney uses the premises of sci-fi and fantasy filmmaking but subverts their formulaic creation of identity, irreverence, revolt (as in X2). Revolutionizing film form also means re-imagining its content; Barney proves he's freer than even Lord of the Rings' Peter Jackson, who exults in fantasy but to predictable, meaningless ends. For Barney, the Chrysler Building may itself be Hollywood, exemplifying the social and cultural hegemony Barney investigates and takes off from. The Hudsucker Proxy anticipated this film's deco luxe, and comic-surrealist Barney explores its lore. Yet only one other recent fantasy movie, Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (with a strong assist from Jean-Paul Gaultier and Chris Tucker), was nearly this prodigious or culturally provocative. Movies are Barney's proper medium-something one can't say about Peter Greenaway (a website artist before his time) or David Cronenberg (with his 20th-century notions about the outre). Kudos to Film Forum's Karen Cooper for recognizing Barney's wish as the real thing.