Action Oomph
Transporter 2
Directed by Louis Leterrier
The Flowers of St. Francis
Directed by Roberto Rossellini
An Unfinished Life
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
Not many people these days know the elation of watching a well-made movie. The media discourages them from seeing the best. Even a partly enjoyable film like Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm, which promises visionary delight, winds up a tonally inconsistent hodge-podge of desperate gimmicks-and that inevitably discourages people from seeing anything. Hits like Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin don't even come close to narrative coherence and sustained visual interest. And art films like Last Days and Broken Flowers are so stingily conceived that they are, esthetically, the opposite of well made. In fact, they are punishing. So it's a relief to salute Louis Letterier for making Transporter 2 the most purely gleeful example of movie oomph since Joseph Kahn's Torque.
Letterier, a Luc Besson protégé, made his debut directing Jackie Chan in the excellent Unleashed. He was previously credited as "artistic director" on the first Transporter movie, but Leterrier isn't one of those television commercial/music video hacks whose filmmaking is no more than overzealous art direction (a trend ironically inspired by The Conformist as well as Blade Runner). Working with Besson, a bred-in-the-bone adept with an innate sense of what's watchable, Leterrier has learned the B-movie essence. He knows that action filmmaking must be justified by both a film's concept and the quality-the integrity-of its construction.
Start with how efficiently Leterrier lays out the plot of this action-movie sequel. On a break from his usual underworld activity, car-driving expert and loner Frank (played by the buzz-cut priapic symbol Jason Statham) gets drawn into combating a madman's scheme to kidnap a Drug Enforcement Administration official's small child. Bad guy intends to use the child to poison the official and his political colleagues. Now working inside the law, Frank's first loyalty is to the child he chauffeured and promised to protect.
It's Man on Fire again, only this time with the fairy-tale simple and sincere emotional punch that is Besson's frequent specialty. Besson taught Leterrier how to distill a plot to its modern good-vs.-evil essence. Such simplicity is what Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch pretend to be superior to; but their films prove that they don't really know how to set up a moral proposition without indulging affectlessness and drabness-the hipster version of sentimentality. Transporter 2 uncommonly mixes a formulaic emotional workout with brilliant, exhilarating technique. Leterrier performs with admirable deftness both the amusing craft that Gilliam can never quite grasp (see his complete botch of Chris Marker's La Jetée in 12 Monkeys) and the quick, archetypal human interplay that the directors of Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin barely know how to manage.
You've seen a quietly brooding hero attacked by crude thugs before, but the first confrontation in Transporter 2 is deliriously modern: Frank is nearly separated from his gleaming $110,000 Audi by a gang of male and female, multiracial petty carjackers who satirically resemble Black Eyed Peas. Next he must save his young charge from a trio of inept but outré ruffians who remind us what Euro trash is. The deadliest one is a punkish blond hit lady who wears red high heels with ballerina leg ties and packs an arsenal inside her dominatrix fetish gear. Leterrier's exaggeration of the femme fatale stereotype shows his gift for comic overstatement. Transporter 2 isn't "serious," it's delirious.
Frank's several chase scenes are not designed for shock, just awe. Yes, the vehicle he commandeers can strafe city streets. Yes, it will crash through a skyscraper. Yes, he will defuse the bomb attached to the undercarriage of his car-ingeniously so. Sometimes it seems that Hollywood is primarily concerned with devising new methods of destructiveness; it has made mayhem junkies of young moviegoing audiences. But if you've sat through the dull pandemonium of XXX: State of the Union, Stealth, even Michael Bay's occasionally vivid The Island, you know that most of those elaborate set pieces were done with lots of money and f/x but no humor. Letterier makes Transporter 2 a Man on Fire with wit.
Several marvelous fight sequences put Jason Statham through Jackie Chan?style paces (choreographed by Cory Yuen) but this is an advance, refining the Hong Kong standard into kinetics, not acrobatics-essentially turning Keaton into Eisenstein through Leterrier's clever employment of montage-editing speeds. Against a gang of hoods, Frank utilizes a firehose like an Olympics ribbon dance. His climactic fight with the odious villain (Alessandro Gassman) defies gravity as they tumble in a spinning plane cabin; the visual joke recalls Goldfinger as well as Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding.
Transporter 2 isn't the highest art; still, there ought to be standards even for action movies. When Frank's visiting pal Tarconi (Francois Berleand), a French cop, complains, "You wouldn't believe what passes for food in this place," he's not just talking about cuisine. Leterrier crafts the car-bomb sequence to be cartoon-obvious. Its apparent silliness is not childish but fun, and he never makes the mistake of having us laugh at cruelty, or depicting violence without a moral component. (The femme fatale's death scene is DePalma-like, if not a worthy homage.) Fantastic, not preposterous, Transporter 2 is a rare demonstration of laugh-out-loud visual integrity.
Robert Redford keeps returning to nature as if to create a personal screen mythology. From Downhill Racer, Jeremiah Johnson and Electric Horseman to The Horse Whisperer, The Clearing and now An Unfinished Life, Redford's characters seek a soul-cleansing wilderness for their (and his) old-fashioned display of decency. Redford's nostalgia is appealing given the cynicism that is ironically popularized at the Sundance Film Festival, and I was willing to give An Unfinished Life high marks for (predictable) effort until I watched Criterion's new DVD of Roberto Rossellini's 1950 The Flowers of St. Francis. It's a fair comparison because Rossellini's biography of St. Francis of Assisi also uses outdoor meadow settings to clarify his vision of human endeavor. Redford, through director Lasse Hallstrom, uses nature merely to simplify contemporary conflicts.
An Unfinished Life is a modernized western in which Redford's farmer, Einar Gilkyson, still grieves about his son's death when his daughter-in-law (Jennifer Lopez) shows up 10 years later with his grandchild. Einar represents old-time ethics in a contrived setting while Rossellini's monks traverse pastures that seem an eternal evocation of earthly turmoil. They act out affable conflicts and struggle with humility in a territory that might be paradise. Such unexpected levity makes this serious film a masterpiece (anticipating DeSica's Miracle in Milan).
Rossellini didn't fall back on a genre but invented a new style of cinematic parable. His celebrated neorealism received an unpredictable, transcendent practice whereas Hallstrom and Redford seem to be glancing back to cliché. Einar's best friend (Morgan Freeman) gives a closing speech about mortality that suggests these filmmakers are in hailing distance of Rossellini's insight. Their effort is touching. They're not wrong, just heavy-handed.