Patriot Games
NOW I'VE seen everything," says Broadway actor-turned-"counterrorist" trainee Gary, flying over New York in a winged stretch limo.
"No."
"Well, then, you haven't seen everything."
After sitting through Team America: World Police, you won't feel you've seen everything, but you'll have witnessed sights you did not expect to see in a major studio release, including a ballad by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the year's most graphic Hollywood sex scene and a close-quarters massacre of left-leaning celebrities. This whirlwind of cheekiness passed muster with the MPAA (barely) because the filmmakers, South Park guys Trey Parker and Matt Stone, tell the story with marionettes. The result doesn't, er, hang together (for reasons I'll get to shortly), but it's appallingly funny-possibly the only halfway significant slapstick movie of recent times that was not directed by the Farrelly brothers.
Director Parker and cowriters Stone and Pam Brady are not subtle people, and their corpse-strewn opus is as obnoxious as the films they send up. But unlike the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (Top Secret!), the Team America gang isn't just mimicking action-film tropes to prompt guffaws of recognition. They insist the movies we consume are not "just" movies, but feel-good brainwashing tools that hammer political complexities flatter than Fruit Roll-Ups.
The tale begins in Paris, a Rankin-Bass fantasyland inhabited by clueless, beret-wearing ninnies. The pastoral vibe is punctured by the arrival of stereotypically bearded, turbaned terrorists who terrify a moon-faced French tyke with their blank-eyed, hateful stares. (Cue vaguely Middle-Easternish music-which, as critic Godfrey Cheshire rightly notes, has been Hollywood's go-to signifier of fathomless evil since the Cold War ended.) Enter counterrorist strike force Team America, whose wisecracking commandos destroy not just the bad guys, but the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. (Gotta break eggs to make crêpes.)
The action-movie japes are nothing new-The Simpsons does a good one every other week-but thanks to the filmmakers' sense of political context, each bloody gag has a comic sting. Team America's supercops gossip and banter while bullets fly; Paris burns and civilian corpses pile up like sandbags, but the good guys don't flinch until one of their colleagues gets waxed by a treacherous Arab, a tragedy that prompts commando babe Lisa to weep over her dead comrade's body in a God's-eye-view shot. This cliché camera angle might be even funnier if you hadn't seen similar images in Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Tears from the Sun and other straight-faced combat pictures that depersonalize foreigners, avoid political specifics and depict war mainly as a test of brotherly love.
Team America never improves on its socko curtain-raiser. But the notions are solid and so are many of the jokes. As in the more coherent
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, every scene contains a sly grace note, from the USA-centric title cards (North Korea: 5945 miles west of America) to the fake Arabic spoken by the terrorists ("Durka durka! Jihad!") to the circa-1986 drum synthesizers that power the film's main theme, a throaty-voiced, Top Gun-styled rock anthem titled America, F*** Yeah! In one of many sight gags that revel in the film's big-budget-but-low-tech format, Kim Jong Il-who sounds like a speakee-no-English cousin of South Park's Cartman-feeds U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to an itty-bitty shark. (Did they marinate the puppet in chum?)
Parker's astute direction mimics the coercive visuals that compose Hollywood action-film grammar: the tightly framed, telephoto closeups that fuzz out everything but the movie star's face and effectively negate the outside world; the de rigueur wide shot of defiant heroes walking four abreast while martial music galumphs on the soundtrack; the bad guy, wrongly believed dead, rising in the background behind a good guy, raising his weapon, then getting raked by righteous firepower, his slo-mo death spasms blurred by double-printed frames.
The pyrotechnic faceoffs between heavy-metal Team America and their bedraggled foes points up a central contradiction of American action cinema, explored by critic Tom Shone in his forthcoming book Blockbuster. The forerunner of all modern jingoist hits is Star Wars, which exploded onto screens after a decade's worth of bleak, serious films that forced Americans to entertain a possibility the rest of the world had accepted as gospel: We were scruffy global new kids from 1776 until about 1945, but after that, we were the establishment-or the empire. George Lucas' Star Wars inverted the equation, pitting Vietcong-like guerillas played mostly by Americans against quasi-fascist imperial stooges that talked like effete Redcoats and strode through cold steel sets that suggested Ernst Stavro Blofeld's hideout redecorated by Albert Speer. To some extent, all American action blockbusters that followed Star Wars-including Independence Day, The Matrix, Black Hawk Down and many other pictures ridiculed by Parker and Stone-aped Lucas' David-and-Goliath inversion. In Shone's reckoning, the true subject of all these pictures is "the implications that being global top dog have on a film culture that is geared, right down to its last molecule, to singing the praises of the underdog." F*** yeah!
Is Team America a left- or right-wing puppet comedy? More the former than the latter-although the movie doesn't tip its tiny latex hand until the final sequence, which find our heroes infiltrating a global "peace conference" hosted by Kim Jong Il and staffed by war-protesting members of the Film Actors Guild. (Repeat the acronym over and over and over; Team America does.) The film's outrage over Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore and Sean Penn dwarfs its facetiously gung-ho attitude toward Islamo-fascism and its enablers. The climactic monologue Gary recites at the peace conference reclassifies the world in terms of dicks, pussies and assholes, but it only sounds anti-establishment because it can't be reprinted in the New York Times. It's actually a hawkish, glass-half-full mission statement, not far removed from the mainstream of American feeling.
We may be pampered, junk-watching, geography-challenged yahoos, says Team America, but we're the only hope this world has got. Coming at the tail-end of 90 corrosive minutes, this backhandedly triumphalist sentiment reminds us that Hollywood, like America, has a knack for absorbing its would-be destroyers, Parker and Stone included. David, meet Goliath: This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
THE MACHINIST
DIRECTED BY BRAD ANDERSON
YOU KNOW A distributor has an unusual movie on its hands when its advance publicity is built around the fact that its star dropped more weight for his role than Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Brad Anderson's The Machinist, a psychological thriller about a machinist who insists he hasn't slept in a year, is an odd, nearly unclassifiable drama, to be sure, but it has more going for it than the cadaverous physique of its usually beefy star, Christian Bale. It has cleanly composed visuals, shot in bleached-out widescreen by Xavi Gimenez, and a terse, elliptical narrative, courtesy of Anderson's script, which seems informed by Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant, Kafka's The Trial and Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (which Anderson unwisely references in an insert shot; talk about tipping one's hand). And it has several outstanding supporting players, including Jennifer Jason Leigh as the hero's hooker sweetheart, who dotes on him with disarming tenderness.
Most of all, though, it has Bale, who has learned a lesson that eludes most of his rivals: The actor who listens and thinks is more interesting than the actor who won't stop talking. As the paranoid, accident-prone, despised hero, Trevor Reznik, Bale exploits his handsome, slightly masklike face to splendid effect. He reveals little beyond Trevor's tiny spasms of fear, anger, hunger and denial, but these hints are more powerful than soliloquies by lesser actors.
Bale's Trevor is a man who, for cagily undefined reasons, stands outside of society, morality and his own tortured mind. This flesh-and-bone insomniac has a spiritual connection to Dostoevsky's self-destructive loners and some of the damaged fringe-dwellers played by Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel. One can draw a line connecting those protagonists to Trevor and then to other Bale characters, including the cold, brutal but spiritually inquisitive "cleric" in the underrated sci-fi thriller Equilibrium, the bloody-minded yuppie Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and even the Huck Finn-like wartime hustler Jim in Spielberg's tough but open-hearted Empire of the Sun. Bale is still young, but he already seems a rare actor who wishes to build not a career, but a filmography; not a body, but a body of work.