Capsules is a monthly diary of older movies either seen for the first time or revisited after many years. This month, crime, crime, Pauline Kael retros, crime, and a museum.

Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996)

Thing I wasn’t allowed to do in 1996: see Fargo in theaters. Caught on 35mm in Santa Monica, the Coen brothers’ crossover hit looks more than ever like one of the great American films: a version of the USA where comically exaggerated immorality and comically exaggerated folksiness play tug of war, with Frances McDormand an even brighter spot of virtue in her world than Philip Marlowe was in his. In some small way, she can sway this fucked up, dysfunctional place, not only through her actions but through her very presence. As many ironic laughs as the film has, watch her closely. See what this pair of cynics aren’t ironic about.

✬✬✬✬✬

*****

Amores Perros (Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, 2000)

I’ve never been a big admirer of Iñárritu’s pursuit of importance—his capital-T Truth feels too much like capital-M Movie, even if the end-of-youth, something-to-prove mode of his 2000 debut suits him. Oddly, by the mid-point of Amores Perros I thought of Douglas Sirk, and how a soap opera that smuggles in serious statements is more agreeable than a serious statement that pretends it’s not half soap opera. But you have to admire this: the man can sustain visual and narrative energy for two and a half hours straight.

✬✬✬✩✩

*****

Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)

The 90-minute long take rocked me to sleep in 2002, when this was one of the first “art films” I saw in a theater, so a revisit is in order. The flashy “one-take” movies that have come out since feel like a directorial high-wire act; here, the method is appealingly at one with the dreamlike subject. The technical achievement shows scrappy post-production seams, and I’m ambivalent about its alchemy of unapologetic high-brow aspirations and blunt metaphorical hand-holding. But when it hits a sweet spot of lucidity, abstraction, and Sternberg grandeur, it’s everything it wants to be: a trip through the culture and history of an isolated country, seen by a melancholy artist loyal to it in spite of its flaws—and well aware of how hard it’d be to change course, even if you knew the right direction.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Message to young baby-boomers: break all the rules, look sexy doing it, piss off the establishment, and don’t think too hard about the consequences of your actions. The (ostensibly fun, mainly irritating) glamor-icon bandits begin to flesh out in the homestretch, and it’s the movie’s saving grace: they begin to think and feel their way through, and it’s almost as if these freewheeling/sociopathic upstarts would have become real people if they weren’t offed. Maybe the sensation showed how boomer rebellion would curdle into selfish politics. Or how the filmmakers liked Breathless but didn’t entirely understand it.

✬✬✬✬✩

*****

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

I always think I don’t really know The Godfather because I only remember the famous scenes. Then I look again—this time at a beautiful print at LACMA—and realize it’s all famous scenes. I doubt it averages 15 minutes without an iconic moment. But to know the film is also to see that it’s as much a piece of popular entertainment as any Hollywood movie. The nuances and intricacies are in the visual craft, the acting, and the number of plots it juggles, not necessarily the ideas. It leaves very little unsaid, and its morality play and social commentary are actually rather uncomplicated—put it alongside a contemporary like Barry Lyndon or Taxi Driver and you’ll see what thoughts can be stirred by allowing more ambiguity. So this godhead of American cinematic art might just be the sum of its parts. But damn, those parts are perfect.

✬✬✬✬✬

*****

You can give M. Night Shyamalan this: when he has something to say, he wants to be damn sure you know it. With Glass, the conclusion of his comic book trilogy begun with Unbreakable and continued in Split, he joins Brad Bird as one of the few directors to earnestly look for metaphors for pop culture’s current superhero obsession. Like Bird, he’s drawn to the idea of individuals at odds with suppressive normalcy. Unlike Bird, he sees this in quasi-New-Age-spiritual rather than cranky-political terms. So where Bird’s two Incredibles films are a pungent, even dangerous balance of cynicism and idealism, Shyamalan does his best to stay starry-eyed.

The comparison, however, doesn’t do favors for Shyamalan. The first issue with Glass is one of showmanship: the film is riddled with jokes that don’t land, suspense teases that don’t hook, and horror stings that don’t horrify. But the very existence of Glass in 2019, while the Marvel Universe climaxes, is fascinating to consider, starting with the fact that anyone expecting a superhero action movie will have to wait. The bulk of the film is spent with Shyamalan’s heroes and villains (Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy) locked in a hospital and forced into therapy, where a psychologist played by Sarah Paulson—misguided? evil? play along—tries to convince them that they’re just ordinary men with delusions of grandeur. When the showdowns do come, they’re often filmed indirectly or restrained by close-ups. The film even teases a big Marvel-scale skyscraper brawl before letting it drop in favor of a tight grapple instead, as if Shyamalan has determined to keep any spectacle as earthy as possible. This may sound like some sort of genre subversion is being attempted, yet the opposite appears to be true. Glass, like no film since the partly lovely, partly insane, mostly awkward Lady in the Water, positions Shyamalan as the guardian of something sacred in these kinds of stories.

At one point in the film, Samuel L. Jackson says that children, unlike adults, have the ability to see the world the way it really is. That philosophy has never exactly been airtight, but it has made for some good films over the years; Spielberg, at his best, has elevated it to lyricism. But the second issue with Glass is that, where the best Spielberg films demonstrate, Glass can only exposit. Its central idea is that we might recognize comic book tropes as a possible truth if only we showed more humility towards the mysteries of the universe, and this is expounded upon until it becomes both academic and illogical. The film is better served by the moments when it does demonstrate—like having two super-villains, in the middle of their escape, subtly conspire to stage the mise-en-scene of a striking shot, purely because the world would be too mundane if they didn’t.

It’s easy to see why any director, particularly one with Shyamalan’s track record, would like the symbolism of where this is heading: heroes and anti-heroes busting out the doors of an institution to turn their aberrations into strengths for all the world to see. For the last 20 years, Shyamalan has operated principally in a blockbuster mode, and the context has made his flaws more apparent and his virtues more complicated to build a consensus around. He stumbles over pre-fab elements that this town is designed to spit out like clockwork. But his films, the good and the bad, feel like 21st century blockbusters beamed in from some alternate world where blockbuster priorities are different. When it works (Unbreakable), it’s exquisite. When it flops, it feels nakedly inept in the way only a sincere artist can be. With Glass, it’s simply ungainly and unsatisfying. But if audiences are indeed still willing to attend and debate this quest, I’d call that a good thing. (For whatever reason, my thoughts on Split are, to my surprise, this blog’s most trafficked post by a wide margin).

So it’s both strange and appropriate that his most anticipated film in years is his equivalent of a great many unsatisfying but more corporately-guarded threequels. Its flaws are not unlike the bloat of The Dark Knight Rises, or Spider-Man 3, or X-Men: The Last Stand: lopsided and misconstructed, at once too short and too long, muddling the tone, losing the earlier sense of discovery, and letting moments that should ring with finality instead land in a puff of exhausting anticlimax. Only for Shyamalan, the overextended maximalism doesn’t manifest in the form of action or plot threads or set-pieces. It manifests in the form of a statement—big, proud, and inarticulate.

✬✬✩✩✩

*********

Glass is available on home video. Fellow procrastinators, now’s your time to shine.