“I’m learning a lot about manure. Very interesting.”
— John Book
More drama than thriller, Peter Weir’s Witness is laced with action, sexual tension, and for good measure (or for good use of star Harrison Ford) a bit of comedy.
Ford is John Book, a jaded smartass Philadelphia detective. While investigating the murder of an undercover cop at a train station, he meets six-year-old Samuel Lapp (Lukas Haas), an Amish boy who witnessed the killing from a stall in the men’s room, and the boy’s recently widowed mother, Rachel (Kelly McGillis). She doesn’t quite trust Book or the world he comes from, but has to set aside her misgivings because he’s their protector for the time being.
Book stumbles upon a plot inside the Police Department and is forced into hiding after an ambush that nearly takes his life. At Rachel’s insistence, he retreats to her community in rural Lancaster County — “Amish country.” Book clumsily and reluctantly adapts to the lifestyle, and he shows he’s got a heart of gold beating underneath all that urbane crustiness. His “English” presence, though, threatens the peace of the Old Order and jeopardizes Rachel’s standing.
A sort of Blade Runner (https://moviebloke.com/2017/03/26/blade-runner-the-final-cut/) set in Amish Pennsylvania, Witness gets into morality, corruption, and culture clash. Its comparison/contrast of the Amish with the modern world is platitudinous and heavy-handed, so much that I found myself rolling my eyes at points. The climax is totally predictable but the tension between Book and Rachel is actually pretty good — good enough to make their subplot romance more interesting than the rest of the film. McGillis bears her breasts in an uncomfortably erotic scene. Bonus: Patti LuPone and Viggo Mortensen both have small parts, which I did not know going into this.
With Danny Glover, Josef Sommer, Alexander Godunov, Brent Jennings, Jan Rubes, Angus MacInnes, Frederick Rolf, John Garson, Beverly May, Ed Crowley, Timothy Carhart, Marian Swan, Maria Bradley, Rozwill Young, Robert Earl Jones
Production: Paramount Pictures, Edward S. Feldman
Distribution: Paramount Pictures (USA), United International Pictures (UIP) (International), Cinema International Corporation (CIC) (France), Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) (Sweden)
Captain Fantastic came out last summer, and I wanted to see it then. I must confess, the cast interested me more than the plot.
Viggo Mortensen is the aptly named Ben Cash, a long disenfranchised survivalist who is, like, so over American capitalism and politics. He and his wife, Leslie (Trin Miller), shown almost entirely in flashback, decide to raise their six kids—three boys and three girls—off the grid in the mountain wilderness of Washington State. Removed from society, Ben and Leslie teach their kids everything from logic and philosophy to hunting and gathering to Norman Mailer and Guns ‘n’ Roses. They do it all without iPhones or religion. Kudos to that!
Nothing is perfect: Leslie suddenly dies, forcing Ben to take his feral kids into the outside 21st Century world for the first time, ever—which calls everything they planned for their family into question.
Director and screenwriter Matt Ross poses some interesting questions about society, conformity, and the social contract in a provocative and often lighthearted way. However, Captain Fantastic is not terribly surprising, which is why it doesn’t work as well as it could. At heart, it’s a standard fish out of water dramedy. Frankly, I spotted every “twist” coming before it got to me: the cop (Rex Young) who pulls over their Partridge Family van, the mildly blasphemous excuse that saves the day, the family’s visit to the supermarket, their reaction to their extended family (and vice versa), that lame scene in which Ben’s sister-in-law (Kathryn Hahn) calls him out onto the carpet for his choices and his youngest daughter (Shree Crooks) recites the Constitution to prove her wrong, eldest son Bo (George MacKay) proposing to the first girl who gives him attention—a trailer park teen queen (Erin Moriarty)—and the colleges he manages to get into, the “situation” that requires modern medical attention. Meh.
For all its grandiose intentions to take on the establishment, Captain Fantastic actually relies on a rather orthodox and pedestrian approach to make its point. Maybe that is its point, that you can’t escape society. It doesn’t mater: this story is predictable and sentimental, two things that never bode well. I expected more than Spokane Swiss Family Brady Bunch, which is essentially what this is. The one thing that saves this film from total mediocrity is the acting, which is great all around.
With Frank Langella, Ann Dowd, Samantha Isler, Annalise Basso, Nicholas Hamilton, Charlie Shotwell, Steve Zahn, Elijah Stevenson, Teddy Van Ee
Production: Electric City Entertainment, ShivHans Pictures
“Sometimes horrible things happen quite naturally.”
“It’s all so horrible, you know, the nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse. One day you’ll wake up, and you’ll be past it. Your beautiful skin will wrinkle and shrivel up. You’ll lose your hair, your sight, your memory. Your blood will thicken, teeth turn yellow and loose. You will start to stink and fart, and all your friends will be dead. You’ll succumb to arthritis, angina, senile dementia. You’ll piss yourself, shit yourself, drool at the mouth. Just pray that when this happens, you’ve got someone to love you. Because if you’re loved, you’ll still be young.”
—Dolphin Blue
British playwright and occasional film director Philip Ridley’s first picture, The Reflecting Skin, is a wickedly devious bait and switch. It opens downright beautifully with seemingly precious eight-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) walking through an unnaturally radiant golden field of wheat carrying a huge frog to his friends, Eben (Codie Lucas Wilbee) and Kim (Evan Hall), who are waiting for him on the side of a rural dirt road. The idyllic scene, which could be straight from a Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper painting or maybe even a Mark Twain novel, immediately takes a seriously twisted turn when one of them sticks a straw in the frog’s butt and inflates it. The tone is set: as Ridley himself admitted, “the opening of the film deliberately dupes you into thinking you’re going to watch Little House on the Prairie, and then it suddenly becomes The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with reptiles” (http://thepeoplesmovies.com/2015/12/the-reflecting-skin-philip-ridley-interview/). Ummm, yeah.
Poor Seth: his name rhymes with death, which is all around him and it’s tearing his world apart—he doesn’t even realize it. The adults in his life seem incapable of explaining any of it to him. He lives in a crumbling old farm house next to the gas station that his henpecked father, Luke (Duncan Fraser), operates in an isolated prairie town somewhere in Idaho (a fact I picked up from a state trooper’s uniform) in the 1950s. Maybe the town has seen better days, but probably not. A group of handsome greasers in a big black Cadillac comes into the station for a fill up. The creepy driver (Jason Wolfe) asks Seth a few weird questions and promises to see him soon before driving away.
WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead!
The aforementioned frog was the unfortunate pawn in an awful prank involving one of the Doves’ neighbors, a glum and taciturn English widow with the spectacular name Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan). Seth’s mother, Ruth (Sheila Moore), a raving termagant obsessed with the smell of gasoline in her house, makes him go apologize to her. It’s a weird exchange: Dolphin relates that she used to burn cats when she was little and shows Seth a box containing her dead husband’s teeth, hair, and cologne before she breaks down, sending Seth running away with a harpoon. Soon after, Eben disappears. Seth blames Dolphin, whom he concludes is a vampire in part because she looks like the one on the cover of a pulp novel his father is reading. The police, particularly cynical Sheriff Ticker (Robert Koons), think otherwise: they blame Luke because of a past transgression. Feeling backed into a corner, Luke eventually immerses himself in gasoline and sets himself on fire.
Seth’s older brother, Cameron (Viggo Mortensen), comes home from the military, where he’s serving on a mission in the Pacific. Cameron meets Dolphin at the cemetery—a spark ignites, and they start spending time together. Seth is horrified when his brother tells him he’s sick: he’s losing weight, his hair is falling out, and something is going on with his teeth. Seth again blames Dolphin, who he thinks is turning Cameron into a vampire (although Cameron reveals what’s really going on when he breaks out a photo of a Japanese baby whose skin turned silver from an atomic bomb). After catching an intimate moment while spying on the budding lovebirds, Seth observes the guys in the Cadillac snatch Kim.
“Innocence can be hell,” is the last thing Dolphin says to Seth before she accepts a ride into town from the black Cadillac.
The Reflecting Skin makes a simple point: children will use their imagination to fill in the blanks of what they don’t understand. The story is told through Seth’s eyes, and his conclusions are often bizzare but he arrives at them using what little he has to work with (that whole deal with the fetus he finds in a barn and rationalizes is Eben—yuck!). As Ridley explained, “it’s a kind of remembered fantasy of childhood; it’s being told by an unreliable, possibly psychotic narrator; objects are used symbolically; there’s this huge kind of nightmare journey through one mythical childhood” (http://thepeoplesmovies.com/2015/12/the-reflecting-skin-philip-ridley-interview/).
The way he illustrates his point is fascinating. Everything about the story is horrible. With an approach worthy of David Lynch, Ridley takes a hodgepodge of characters—vampires, religious zealots, suspicious small town law men—and throws them into this weird mix of the macabre, sexual perversion, punishment, and subtle dark humor. His use of symbolism is liberal to say the least. The story is meticulously plotted: every character, scene, and little event is in here for a reason.
This is all underneath Dick Pope’s gorgeous cinematography, which is loaded with vibrant colors and a beautifully fine-tuned attention to detail: the vastness of the wheat fields, the crazy black hair of both brothers, the flies that are always present. Nearly 30 years on, The Reflecting Skin still looks arresting; in fact, it’s one of the most beautiful looking movies I’ve ever seen. Nick Bicât’s heavy and haunting baroque-inspired score is a perfect fit. The overall result is wonderfully dreamy and surreal, yet we definitely sympathize with Seth—probably because we all know that childhood does in fact suck. He’s grounded in reality.
I would be remiss not to mention the acting, which is all around superb. I doubt this film would work with lesser talent.
A dearly departed old friend of mine introduced me to The Reflecting Skin in 1993 or 1994. I’ve never had an opportunity to see it on the big screen, which is a pity because this is one film clearly meant to be seen in a theater. For years, I had a shitty VHS copy and recently found it on DVD. It’s not an easy film to find, but it’s totally worth the effort.
moviebloke 