Penn's picture goes all the way out to the places where its real life protagonist trekked into certain danger, while Scott has created arguably the most enveloping vision of the future yet committed to celluloid, at the opposite end of the authentic/artificial construct spectrum from Into the Wild, but the movies have ended up complementing each other in my head, because both of them are extreme exploration of what it means to be a human being.
The human condition: both movies pose big questions about free will.
I'm going to hit some SPOILERS now, so here's your warning, with the caveat that what I'll refer to in Blade Runner has already been discussed everywhere since the first Director's cut was released, but if you haven't seen the movie you may want to skip. With Into the Wild, the ending is well known from Jon Krakauer's book among other sources, pretty much everyone I talk to knows the ending going in, but here's your SPOILERS warning as well.
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It's never really celebrated as such, but Blade Runner is the most adult -- i.e. grown-up -- movie ever made about robots. Since the replicants are so human-like, especially the three most advanced models (Roy, Rachael and, admit it, Rick Deckard), and since they die with more blood than circuitry, the audience doesn't really think of them as robots. But that's what they are, androids, a.k.a. machines.
By playing Rick's condition so subtly, the brief giveaway with the iris and the unicorn being the only solid pieces of evidence, and by directing Sean Young's Rachael to demure insolence, we end up falling for the love story, the only bolt of hope at the end. But we know that replicants all have expiration dates -- that's their defining characteristic -- we just don't know Deckard's; so it's as doomed a love affair as ever graced a noir, we're just happy for whatever few years of joy they may win.
The robots -- I mean replicants -- in Blade Runner are killers, whether commando-programmed (Roy) or pleasurebots (Pris). They think, therefore they are, as the private joke goes between those two, but they clearly are because they have killed humans, and have no conscience preventing them from doing so.
The good guys, the good bots, they have remorse. Deckard feels sick after killing Joanna Cassidy's Zhora. Watching the film a second (or third or fiftieth) time one gets the sense that he knows, at least he suspects (does he really seemed so surprised when he examines the origami unicorn?) and it makes his feel like a race traitor, with all the self-loathing that goes with it. Rachel is horrified when she guns down Leon as well.
What makes it truly complex, something you have time to feel and even dwell on thanks to the movie's dreamlike pacing, is the Brechtian element of social metaphor. If Harrison Ford is being torn apart having to retire his own kind, who are we to shoot each other, blow each other up?
We're the ones who are supposed to be human.
Having only seen one other Sean Penn-directed feature (but wishing I'd seen more) I can only say that Into the Wild is a very, very accomplished movie, relatively raw and real, an art film that could potentially cross over to the multiplex, a throwback to the early 1970's impressionistic school of Hal Ashby and Terence Malick, while being all Penn's own.
Like Blade Runner, it's an impeccable cast. Emile Hirsch courageously performs in ice cold mountain water and with a very real bear, emaciating himself over the course of the shoot, but more than that actually capturing the independent spirit of Christopher McCandless. He's one of those guys everyone knew in college, super smart but self-contained, looking forward to spending time in nature, whether in a naturalist position somewhere out in the middle of nowhere U.S.A., or maybe trekking the fiords with a hiking buddy.
The question McCandless' story asks us is how far out can one really go from society. If you cut up your credit cards, your driver's license and social security card (shades of Jack Nicholson in Antonioni's The Passenger), if you decide to go by a made-up name and sever, without warning, all contact with your family, if you go up, up to the places on the map where few or no people live, are you really finding a higher truth?
Are you now just an organism, hunting/gathering for daily survival?
Are you one with nature?
Penn ultimately reveals what I assume is a real final passage from McCandless' diary showing that he'd changed, he'd learned something about humanity that he'd taken for granted in the past. And while Penn's trustworthy technique makes a strong case in favor of his protagonist's own sincerity, the heroic side of his quest for freedom, there's also the feeling that he knows McCandless has made a bone-headed move, that's he's a young fool but a fool nonetheless, and we wonder where the line might be.
Should he we the surrogate son for the lonely octogenarian he's revived, Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook is an Oscar-worthy performance, maybe one of his last)? Should he join forces with the hippy couple (Catherine Keener and middle-aged first-timer Brian Dierker) living in Slab City in the winter and just driving their mobile home around in the other seasons, waiting patiently for the angelic and horny sixteen year-old across the way to grow legal? She he just give his trusted sister a call?
As he passes through the lives of lonely people, sprinkling them with his presence which seems to heal rends and right boats, the sense you get is of a world of loneliness, one he accepts and embraces, one that comes as a shock to his heartbroken parents, one that speaks endlessly about the human condition.
Here's a guy who chose to be lonely. And however much we might admire or love him, he couldn't go the distance in the end. Because it's only an ideal; an impossible place to go.
McCandless builds his own trap but it's bourne of the ultimate truth that we all die alone, wondering how what we did before leads to where we end up. Deckard and his most sentient fellow replicants know that their past is a plant, that the memories are just design values, that they have a time to end just like us, albeit one more ruthless in it's scheduling.
Not a bad combo for a week.
Restores one's faith in going out to the cinema.
1 comment:
Even though, as you can tell from my review, I had less sympathy than you for McCandless, I have to heartily agree that movies like this indeed make me thankful that we still get flicks that challenge us so much, especially in its last half hour .. As for the multiplex movement, however, I don't think so, since it indeed came to mine but left in about a blink of time
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