April 22-28, 2004

movies

Perfect Failures

The hollow triumphs of Kill Bill and Dogville.

Kill Bill, Dogville

by Sam Adams

Quentin Tarantino loves movies. To his acolytes, the phrase is axiomatic, like saying the sky is blue or John Woo's Hong Kong movies are better than his American ones. Similarly, you can't get through a conversation with a Lars von Trier fan without the word "provocative" coming up, as if that in and of itself was enough to explain his appeal.

My knee-jerk response to both descriptions is, "So what?" Do QT's admirers really believe that other directors, even bad ones, don't "love movies"? Do Trier's disciples really think being "provocative" or "controversial" is an end in itself? (You wonder if they'd apply the same adjectives to The Passion of the Christ.) Tarantino's Kill Bill and Trier's Dogville are close to polar opposites, but each is, in its own way, the ultimate expression of its creator's style. These self-conscious tours de force distill Tarantino and Trier's art to its essence, and in so doing, reveal its essential shallowness. They're perfect failures.

When people praise Tarantino for loving movies, what they really mean is that he instills or revives a similar adulation within them. If nothing else, the completed Kill Bill is a four-hour reminder to update your Netflix queue, seeking out the reference points that have been cataloged by endless articles and Web sites. The trouble is that, for Tarantino, paying homage is an end in itself. Midway through Vol. 2, Kill Bill breaks for an intended flashback in which The Bride (Uma Thurman) learns kung fu from a cranky, white-bearded master named Pai Mei (Gordon Liu). The sequence, shot by ace shape-shifter Robert Richardson, is a flawless evocation of Shaw Bros. martial arts classics, of which the Liu-starring The 36th Chamber of Shaolin may be the best known, complete with grainy, overlit compositions and corny zip-zooms. As parody, it's dead-on. But the sequence drags, not only because it's a one-note joke that goes on far too long, but because all the while, The Bride is lying under 6 feet of earth, buried alive by the washed-up-but-still-kicking killer Budd (Michael Madsen). What would make sense as a brief interlude explaining how The Bride is ultimately able to punch through a wooden coffin lid instead becomes its own bloated mini-movie, only tenuously connected to what comes before or after it.

Tarantino's "tributes" serve their intended purpose, but in the opposite way you'd expect: The shallowness of Tarantino's affection affirms his source material's depth. Vol. 2 opens with another flashback, this time to the wedding-day massacre that began The Bride's film-spanning odyssey of revenge. Richardson's expansive, gorgeous black-and-white recalls the dusty loneliness of John Ford's Westerns, while The Bride's head-to-head faceoff with Bill (David Carradine) instantly evokes the craggy visages of any number of Sergio Leone characters. But on the deepest level, the films made by Ford, or Leone, or any of the hundreds of filmmakers Tarantino reveres, express a vision of the world, not merely an affection for other people's visions. At the end of Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the depraved Tuco (Eli Wallach) runs frantically through a graveyard that stretches to the horizon, searching for the grave he believes contains untold riches. The camera runs right along with him, streaking past graves until they become almost a blur. By any narrative standard, the sequence runs far longer than it should, and yet it's exactly that length which gives the climax its power. You get the feeling that Leone shares Tuco's lust, or at least understands it on a level far too deep for words; the longer he runs, the more you forget why he's running, and the more his search comes to seem both absurd and universal.

By contrast, when Tarantino turns out the lights after The Bride has been buried alive, all you feel is the filmmaker's desire to fuck with his audience. (You can practically hear him sniggering in the dark.) Tarantino has absorbed the styles of directors like Ford and Leone (and Suzuki Seijun, King Hu and so on) without seeming to understand the first thing about what those styles might mean, or where they might come from. Though Tarantino's fans would never admit as much, he does his alleged heroes a profound disservice (I'm tempted to say "insult") by appropriating only the most superficial aspects of their craft.

In Getting Away With It, Steven Soderbergh's book of interviews with director Richard Lester, Lester draws a line between the movies he made before he became too famous to go out in public unobserved and those he made after, acknowledging that the inability to observe other people undetected inevitably changes an artist's work. Tarantino's cinema is hardly rife with observational moments, but it's easy to draw a similar line through the seven-year gap between Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. Tarantino has called Kill Bill his first "movie movie," an overt acknowledgement that its only points of reference are other movies. It's sad that this is what "loving movies" has come to -- tailoring the vision to fit the movies he wants to copy rather than copying the movies that fit his vision.

In a way, it's not surprising that so many self-proclaimed film buffs responded to Vol. 1, since Tarantino's approach validates much of today's hermetic, self-referencing popular culture, where movies are rewarded for their ability to distract audiences from the world around them. In essence, Kill Bill tells its audience that the best response to the world around them is to hole up in their basement with a stack of DVDs and wait out the apocalypse.

In Dogville, the apocalypse is already here, or at least life on earth is so close to hell that there's no need to wait for the second coming. Trier has a vision of the world all right: it's a cesspit of corruption overlaid by a paper-thin veneer of civility, as ugly as the digital video in which Dogville is shot. (Anthony Dod Mantle, of the more purposefully murky The Celebration and 28 days later... , set up the lighting, but it was always Trier behind the camera.) It doesn't take long for the residents of the film's Depression-era American small town to show their true colors when Grace (Nicole Kidman) asks for refuge from a mysterious gangster; their backwoods charm sours almost instantly, and they start exploiting their guest in every way you (or, more to the point, Trier) can imagine. The staging is grade-school Brecht: chalk lines on a bare stage, without walls to separate the characters from one another -- ironically appropriate, since apart from Grace, they're all revealed as the same under the skin. The characters are outlines, and Trier never bothers to fill them in.

The same people who find this sort of thing revolutionary doubtless think Trier's dour, one-note view of humanity is some sort of profound statement, rather than smug posturing. The film's anti-Americanism is entirely beside the point; it's the sheer anti-humanism that's offensive. Trier is unquestionably a master showman, but Dogville reveals him as a pure sham whose contempt for his audience permeates every frame. It's civics class for masochists.