My Favourite Film Number 4

This is part of my effort to write about my 100 favorite films in two pages or less. This one is still in it's rough stages.

The Last Of The Mohicans
by Michael Mann

In order for one to understand my love for this film, one must know the role it has played in my life. My childhood had a very definite incidental soundtrack; my parents loved music and movies more than anything else I can think of. Along with the music of Richard Thompson, R.E.M., and Talking Heads, there were films that both my mom and dad loved enough to watch regularly. The film that enthralled me most of these white noise pictures was Michael Mann’s Last of the Mohicans. As a child it was easy to understand why I loved it: the sound of cannons and muskets firing, that visceral score, swordsmen on horseback, chaotic atmosphere, intense fighting with knives and hatchets, what’s not to love? As I got older and began to remember the film, I felt I probably had an incomplete picture as I don’t think I had ever sat down and watched it all the way through. When I finally took the time to view our battered VHS copy, I was amazed there was so much I had missed. It took a few years to appreciate the nature of the romantic direction it takes, the criticism of the colonial mindset, and that the reason I loved watching every second was because of the unbelievably gorgeous cinematography, but I did know that this film was going to last forever because at its core was unbridled passion the likes of which I’d never encountered before and have rarely seen since.

The plot, though idiosyncratic to boot, might be the most satisfying love story ever filmed. In the forests of an America caught in the midst of the French Indian War, a white man raised by Mohawk Indians and the daughter of a Scottish general fighting the French meet by chance. When the English regiment assigned to protect the woman, Cora Munroe and her sister on their way to their father’s garrison, they are ambushed by a Huron war party. The man, Hawkeye (Nathaniel by birth), his adopted father and brother come to their rescue and escort the sisters and Cora’s inept suitor Duncan to the fort. Nathaniel and Cora do not understand each other, and are at odds for a time due to their differences. When they see that perhaps they are not so different, they begin to fall in love, unfortunately this happens to coincide with Nathaniel’s decision to lead the colonial militia stationed at Munroe’s fort to leave the fort to check on their families (the Huron war party has evidently been busy). Nathaniel is nearly hanged for conspiracy to aid sedition, but a brief truce with the French leads the English army out of the fort and into the arms of the waiting Huron. It seems their leader, Magua, has a blood feud with Munroe and wishes to see both the man and his two daughters killed. This proves to be a greater obstacle than British shackles for Nathaniel, who must rescue Cora after she is taken north to the Huron land by force, but it is also the single greatest display of love ever filmed.

As a kid, I got that this movie was different from most others; I returned to this before I re-watched many of the movies intended for my age group. I know that this is due mostly to my love of the film’s soundtrack. Trevor Jones’s half of the score sounds like the musical equivalent of thunder and makes everything on screen ten thousand times as urgent and romantic. It was because of the music that I understood that though the violence is what attracted me to the film, it is the boundless love between the heroes that makes this film transcendent of its time and constraints. The movie is powerful enough, for example, to leave its weak source materials behind (which include James Fennimore Cooper’s unwieldy novel and the 1936 movie starring Randolph Scott). This is a movie that benefited from the time of its conception as much as it did the people who crafted it. There are the two composers (Randy Edelman was brought on due to time constraints to score lighter sections of the film, the standout being the scene in which a courier is dispatched from the fort), Jones’ music being some of the greatest ever written for a film (the source of his recurring theme was a Celtic traditional). The two greatest scenes of the film (Hawkeye’s race across the battlefield to rescue Cora, and the final clash between the Mohicans and Hurons) would be flat were it not for Jones’ compositions. His music is so important because so much goes unspoken. Michael Mann and co-writer Christopher Crowe were smart enough to leave much of the feelings (the resentments especially) silent so that the resolution of these conflicts could be simple and effective. When Magua murders his enemy, he makes a point of telling him why; when he fights with Chingachgook, Hawkeye’s father, they have no need for words. When Hawkeye and Cora first kiss passionately to Jones’s swooning strings, they don’t utter so much as a word. Mann knows that words aren’t always good enough, nor are they always necessary.

Who better to capture the urgency and passion of a man who discovers how much he will do for love than Daniel Day-Lewis. He may have spent 8 months in the woods learning how to run and fire a musket at the same time, but what makes his performance is the fire in his eyes when Cora is in danger. Today’s stable of leading men simply pale in comparison to Day-Lewis, who is at much at home throwing a knife as he is madly declaring his love with what little language his Hawkeye knows. Because we love the character, because we wish him to succeed, we suspend our disbelief. Could three men continually outfight entire regiments of armed soldiers? When the outcome is so pleasing, it’s hard to answer truthfully. With the music pounding, the brilliantly choreographed battle raging in the background, and the heroine in danger, belief is happily given over to the beauty of the film. Michael Mann has always been a master of building tension, and here he shows the simplest way to achieve it; two lovers are apart, one is in danger, the other starts running and will not stop.

Dante Spinotti may not have a lot of other work to his name, but he more than earns his place among the world’s greatest cinematographers here. Spinotti succeeds in making the woods and water that surround the characters as beautiful as the story itself. In a film about an America untainted by capitalism or the age of industry, he shows just how flawlessly and effortlessly gorgeous the natural world is. His footage of the North Carolina woodlands is stunning and has few rivals. While Mann’s compositions are doing their part, it’s the fathomless color of an endless world that captures the eye. From the opening pursuit of a buck, where every flash of moving bodies swims in a chasm of glorious, untouched scenery. The surroundings lose much of their charm when the greedy English occupy the frame (in one striking example, a perfectly composed shot of a bridge and its reflection on the pond below is slowly crossed by horse-drawn carriages). When the soldiers transporting Cora and her sister are ambushed, the scene is dark, dusty, and surrounded by dying foliage. The makeshift road is a pale brown and the forest is enshrouded in gun smoke and the red from uniforms and blood (as in the mesmerizing clash between the Hurons and the English refugees). When Nathaniel and his family take charge and lead the three survivors to Munroe’s fort, they immediately happen upon a small river framed in a rock bed. Between the deep green of the forest that extends for miles around, and the pristine water and stone, it is perfection. The lesson that Cora learns by falling in love with Hawkeye, that one must abandon material foibles and the petty English gentrification of the land, is one that Spinotti’s camera has already taught the audience subconsciously. This is a film that not only celebrates the love between two disparate people, but also declares its love for the land like fire from a cannon.

My Favourite Film Number 2

This is part of my effort to write about my 100 favorite films in two pages or less. This film is important to me for a lot of reasons, as evinced by my naming the place after it. So I only hope my words help you seek it out and uncover its mysteries. 

Apocalypse Now
by Francis Ford Coppola

“You Americans are fighting for...the biggest nothing…” That’s how artists must have felt all throughout the 1970s. A friend of mine who was around for it told me that people had been predicting a progressive era before the early 60s happened. They killed everyone…the peace movement became a joke…no one seemed to believe in love anymore. The films of the 1970s all had that feel, that joy was on it’s way out. Bertolucci, Scorsese, Coppola, Makavejev, Godard, Peckinpah, Bergman; it was a tough love the great directors gave to the world in the 70s. Film theory was being tested in a big way; the old ways of the studios was essentially abandoned, and vision was now dark, elaborate, and unfathomably long. The ways of the peaceful artiste, the harmless beatnik were gone in favor of the colorful realist. The idealist was dead; murdered like the ridiculous protagonists in Easy Rider. The centerpiece of the beautiful banquet of morbidity and lost love was Apocalypse Now.

Three hours long, darker than noir and twice as violent, and astoundingly beautiful, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now long went unseen as he intended it (and unlike more zealous epics like 1900 or The Last Emperor, it does benefit from it’s length), and so the breadth of Coppola’s disdain for America/organized humanity was long unknown. The movie is not a war film as had ever been done before. It’s a message, an elegy to peace and love, written backwards. Based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse follows Captain Benjamin Willard on a mission up the Nung River into Cambodia during the Vietnam war to kill a renegade colonel called Kurtz. He’s asked to do it by dry higher-ups in olive fatigues, and we will slowly learn the metaphor, the real nature of the mission as Coppola and co-writer John Millius envisioned it. Williard, the hero, has been sent to murder an idea, the innocence of America. Kurtz is an affront to order, standing in the way of the tidy military operation the men in green wish they were running. He is the free love that turned sour when Charles Manson started killing people (Manson’s face makes an appearance in a newspaper that the high-strung Chef reads in the mail). He is the irony of sending a pot-smoking 17-year-old African American to murder families to make his own family proud. The politics I suppose couldn’t be more clear-cut, the recurring musical theme is a Door’s song for pete’s sake. This is a movie that fed hundreds of cynical teenagers who’d missed 1968 by a few years.

“He dies when it dies”. Dennis Hopper’s photojournalist, the last jabbering follower of the dying colonel squeals when Willard finally arrives to do the deed. When Willard kills the man (an act just as inevitable as the one in I Shot Jesse James), his armed followers, his children, throw down their guns and obey the conquering soldier, just like the baby boomers threw away their ideas, put suits on, and started their own wars. Murder is literally everywhere and men are supposed to function as people, let alone as soldiers. Kurtz’ retreat into his own world would make sense to any bored basement-dweller today, and so the legacy of the late 70s lives on. Will they act when the time comes? The Iraq War continues. During the late 70s the young mavericks were getting to use old Hollywood stock players they had so long worshipped. Wim Wenders got Nicholas Ray, Roman Polanski got John Huston, Bernardo Bertolucci got Sterling Hayden and Burt Lancaster, and Coppola got Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando. Brando’s first appearance in the film is not unlike a child’s nightmare. Martin Sheen, the man we’ve been pulled into complicity with, our guide through the horror of war, is a man of average height. The photograph we’ve seen of Kurtz makes him look like a beast; sasquatch or a serial killer. He lies, bathed in shadows, his enormous head and hands looking inhuman next to Sheen’s. His face is always partially shrouded in shadow, just like the mission. Of course Brando is almost no match for Sheen who gives one of his strongest performances. He wears every second of combat on his face, and I feel no one else was quite capable of taking this journey from weary GI to bleary-eyed killer and staying in control.

And what a journey. This film is as much Coppola’s as it is Walter Murch and Vittorio Storaro’s. Murch, the chief editor and sound designer gives this movie it’s frantic, combat-like pace. All war films that followed were in his debt. The sounds, breaking from the background and raging to the foreground, is riveting. Like the characters, it moves in and out of fog, becoming warped here and crystal clear there. He went to great lengths to let us know the difference between the ending throws of Ray Manzarek’s organ and the guitar solo on the small tape player at the Do Lung bridge. Storaro, already one of the greatest working cinematographers, paints the most vivid picture of his career. The last trick the movie has up its sleeve is the change in color scheme. As Willard nears his objective, the danger heightens, the death toll rises, and the colors become lush and tropical. I’m always stricken by the difference between Martin Sheen’s sweating figure and the serene water behind him. Every set piece and symbol comes in colors; the purple flares, the blood, the pink tracer rounds fired from the jungle, the deep greens that constantly surround the boat. Smoke, haze, fog, rain, fire, layer upon layer, each ignited by the ferocity of their context. It is a brilliant, bold color scheme, one that is wonderfully dissonant with the muddled humanity on display. The movie tries repeatedly to evoke the feeling of a drug-induced state; I surmise that the vividness of the color, and the incredible soundscape were attempts at recreating both the feeling of war through the filter of an acid trip.

Part of the reason I love this film as much as I do is because of the history I’ve had with it. In the sixth grade, when my dreams were still hazy, I was eyeing my first electric guitar, my love for film already cemented, my teacher, a 30-something ex-soldier, used to talk to me freely, unlike the rest of my class. We would discuss music and film (I bought him a Grateful Dead bootleg for Christmas, and he lent me The Doors greatest hits), and he suggested I watch Apocalypse Now. The sound and the color were not given justice on the warped VHS tape I rented, and there were many Americans who had never heard the word Redux, but I knew this wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. “Do you think Kurtz was right to do that?” My teacher asked me the day after I watched it. He clearly considered doing something similar, fed up as he was with my classmates. I had no idea; I still have no idea. At the start of my senior year, after my initial foray into foreign cinema, I found it playing, heavily censored, on network television. They began running it once a week, and I made a ritual of watching it (always with guacamole chips and black bean salsa). The place where I usually tuned in was when the boat stops at a French plantation. Willard listens in a daze to the noise of an entire family (the conversation is a marvelous insight into colonial mentality, but that’s not what did it for me). After dinner Willard and Roxanne, the only member of the family not related by blood retire to the deck of the house. Her silky French tongue and the swelling synth music prepared me for something that never came; a tender love scene. Instead Roxanne takes Willard to her bedroom, gets him high like she would her deceased husband, and then undresses, a scene made more haunting in the TV edit as her naked body would become a dark blur in the lowlit room, a nightmare in the middle of a rapturous dream. The scene isn’t tender or romantic, but overpowering and urgent. Her words to him make perfect sense, more sense than anything about the Vietnam War, “All that matters is that you are alive.”