Retain, Even In Opposition, Your Capacity For Astonishment: Lincoln (2012)

I will do something that happens all to often on this blog, in my open choice to recant a previous belief that in regards to Oscar nomination for best male in a lead performance that nobody had anything on the excellent Joaquin Phoenix whose presence in The Master leaked through its crackled surface and glossy veneer to cut at the very question of a likable human being.  I was sure that even with my undeniable zeal for Daniel Day-Lewis that his performance would be lesser than what Phoenix provides.  While I still very much adore Phoenix and think his performance may well be the best of his career, when I popped Lincoln into view, I was aware from the moment that Lewis and his method acted version of Lincoln filled the screen that his acting would without question be far superior to his absolutely excellent counterparts.  It is something far different than There Will Be Blood, but, nonetheless, manages to show a very honed set of skills that jump out to viewers, each lengthy monologue welcomed with just the right amount of score by the infallible John Williams is more than enough to cause a viewer to become heavily invested in the film, so much so, that when it finally does end and the credits emerge the emotive drain is hard to ignore.  I mean to consider that alongside Day-Lewis' Lincoln are a slew of other respectable actors including, amongst others Tommy Lee Jones, Joseph Gordon Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook and Tim Blake Nelson, and that is only naming a few.  I am not one to hold Spielberg in contempt for his particular style of filmmaking, especially in regards to its heavy handed nature, instead, I am fully aware of the stylistic choices he makes as a director and allow for them to permeate my experience, something I have attempted to do with more recent Michael Bay films with no success.  Even the detractors of Spielberg cannot deny the absolute magnitude and cinematic zeal of Lincoln, an absolutely inspiring narrative that is only made the more precise by a decidedly on-the-nose Tony Kushner script, Lincoln is what one should aspire to when making a biopic, in all its absolute intensity and surprising modesty.

Lincoln, despite being a film about one of America's most well-regarded presidents, nonetheless, considers a very specific portion of his presidency, the months leading up to the signing into affect of the Thirteenth Amendment, ultimately, and legally abolishing slavery in the Union, soon again to be The United States in a completist sense.  As history has shown, this was an incredibly complex process and one that Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) had to face while also handling the woes of his personal life, firstly, dealing with his mentally-troubled wife Mary Todd (Sally Field) and his gung-ho son Robert (Joseph Gordon Levitt) who felt it necessary to join the war effort to assure his self-worth, despite running the very real risk of losing his life.  Being the brilliant man that Lincoln was he is fully capable of navigating the various rungs of his administration, gathering respect from most everyone he talked with given his penchant for long-winded stories and breadth of factual knowledge, despite being almost entirely self-educated.  The problem emerges, not when opposition emerges, because Lincoln and his conclave of politicians are sure that they can obtain swing votes, it is the though that pushing the amendment through will only occur if a suggestion of its necessity to a peace agreement can be created, something that is problematized when the officers of the Confederate Army find themselves desiring piece talks.  Lincoln facing the decision to prolong slavery with the posibility of instant peace or ignoring these request with an assurance that the enslavement of man will end in The United States leads him to a multi-tiered moral quandary, which is only solved while rambling about geometry with a scribe one night.  Along with the help of Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) and the surprising swing votes of a handful of democrats the amendment is able to pass and slavery is subsequently abolished, not long after a crippling Confederate army surrenders and Lincoln allows them to flee accordingly.  While this is not a film about his entire life, it does, nonetheless, include his assassination, although it happens out of the scene, instead focusing on the trauma faced by his youngest child.  The film closes with an aging Lincoln offering a speech on prosperity and the human will, before somberly fading to black thus ending the epic narrative of a few months in America's bloodiest war.

Lincoln is an example of the classical Hollywood style properly realized.  I know many film lovers who suggest that Clint Eastwood is the last classicist making films and while I would tend to agree with that in the fullest, I would also argue that Spielberg possesses a certain degree of classicism, the only difference is that he came to his through evolution as a filmmaker, whereas Eastwood began as an actor in the world of Western classics and took this style into his movies.  One only need to break down any shot in Lincoln and realize that the stoic staged presence of each actor, paired with a set that defines the idea of chiaroscuro, as wall as the previously mentioned John Williams scores, make for everything one must have experienced when attending a film during the alleged "classic" era of Hollywood.  Even the sort of bombastic, hyper intensity one comes to expect from Day-Lewis is reigned in within this film, although, it is not ironic in the slightest, considering that the probable expectation would be this intensity seen in There Will Be Blood or Gangs of New York for such a major and visioned figure in American history.  Instead, Day-Lewis goes the way of simplicity with his version of Lincoln, finding himself far more concerned with portraying the man in his most humane, humble, a bit awkward socially and completely occupied with the notion of justice and a greater truth.  Similarly, much in the way of classical style the film is inundated with notable actors and faces, however, when this often happens in newer films characters constantly attempt to one-up one another, often making a mess in the process.  Lincoln is much more in line with the classic stylings and respect for large casts of respected actors, in the case of this film it is clear that everyone involved works in the space of Day-Lewis while also realizing that it is his space and they have just been fortunate enough to briefly share it for awhile.  A combination of hyper-intellectual dialogue on the part of Kushner, masterful scoring and a roster of classic style actors makes the case for Spielberg existing in the realm of classicism more and more with each film he makes.

Key Scene:  As much as I do not want to side with the Academy the monologue they picked for Day-Lewis when showing his performance in Lincoln is certainly the highlight of the film and is one of many brilliant moments.

This is obviously worth watching and I would even say worth owning.  It is a reminder of the power Spielberg has when committed to directing something visionary.

There Cannot Be True Despair Without Hope: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

So I am admittedly pretty late to this film as far as the blogging game is concerned, considering that pretty much ever non-classical oriented blog I follow touched upon this film within days of its release.  I am also open in not being entirely thrilled with Christopher Nolan as a director, although I am more than willing to offer him praise for his cinematic grandiosity and willingness to try for something big every time, more than a few of my friends and fellow cinephiles are remiss to even offer him that much praise.  The Dark Knight has become somewhat of a cult film, not that it was lacking a huge acclaim, but the death of Heath Ledger seems to have cemented it as a bit transcendent of traditional film criticisms and considerations, not very different from what James Dean's death has seemed to do for Rebel Without A Cause.  The Dark Knight Rises, thus had some rather incredible expectations to film, mostly revolving around a demand that the villian prove equatable or grander than that of Ledger's Joker, a task that was doomed from the start, considering that on paper and in performance The Joker at least relating to The Dark Knight truly is something rare in cinema, on the same level as your Tyler Durden's and your Monsieur Hulot's all be it in a different genre and via a different manifestation.  Detached from all I know about this trilogy and my own personal relationship with the films of Christopher Nolan I am not entirely opposed to what viewers are given in what is assumedly the final installment for this particular manifestation of "The Batman."  Sure it suffers from some plot cohesion throughout and certainly throws special effects and the tools of melodrama into those voids, but the exceptional acting on the part of all involved, not to mention Tom Hardy who gives a performance equal to that of Heath Ledger, even if the awful choice for Bane's voice manages to throw it off a bit.  The film, even if Nolan denies its validity, invariably focuses on a heavy bit of political rhetoric and goes a long way to show that just because a film engages with a large viewership does not necessarily mean that it needs to dumb its material down or offer traditional roles.

So where does this particular installation of The Dark Knight Trilogy pick up, well we are shown a Gotham City still reeling from the loss of their long deceased knight in shining armor political figure Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), while the city seems on the verge of complete cleanup from criminal activity, even if Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) seems to demand a cautious eye be kept on the streets.  Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has decided against retaining his role of Batman, primarily because the alias has become the scapegoat for Dent's death, instead; living a life as a recluse and fending off attempted robberies by a catlike female burglar named Selena (Anne Hathaway).  Meanwhile Bruce Wayne's shrinking wealth has lead to the freezing of funds towards an orphanages where Officer Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)  a "hotheaded" policeman found shelter as a child, leading him to come into the world of Wayne Enterprises, which also happens to be the company at odds with tycoon Daggett (Ben Mendelshon) seems rearing to overtake, going so far as to request the help of superhuman escaped convict Bane (Tom Hardy) in his endeavors.  Bane, however, has his own set of plans which involve breaking Batman and his place of power in Gotham City, in the process attempting to return power to the hands of its people, in a marshall law form of political and societal rule. While the narrative deals with these emerging issues, as well as Officer Blake's attempts to find his own identity within his role as law enforcer, Bruce Wayne struggles with how best to reemerge as The Batman, especially since to do so assures his being apprehended by law enforcement.  Eventually, though the aid of Selena, who by now is clearly to be Catwoman, he is able to encounter Bane, who does indeed break Wayne's back and locks him at the bottom of a prison, from where he escaped by climbing out of after some time.  Upon emergence from the prison, Wayne returns to full-on Batman mode coming to the point of having Bane in his death grips only to discover that the true enemy was much closer at hand than even he realized.  Bane and his group have managed to set a large scale nuclear bomb to explode in the city and it is up to Batman to sacrifice himself to assure its detonation far from Gotham City, a task that leads to his assumed death, but if the closing moments of the film suggest anything, his legacy is far from over.

I could afford this portion of my post to discussing the political elements of The Dark Knight Rises, but this seems to be a considerably contentious ground to cross and the readings I would favor have been done to a heavy degree, although I was rather fond of this one, even though I am not entirely committed to the more Christian inclined elements of the argument.  Instead, however, I want to consider the philosophy of despair and notions of imprisonment that seem to help manifest the character of Bane, who is half-Nietzche and half-Camus in his rhetoric.  The notions of hope and despair, at least in the way Bane visualizes them seem straight out of the texts of Beyond Good and Evil, in so much that he seems to suggest for good to exist there must also be bad and vice versa, except Bane applies these ideas directly to finding a way to maneuver through darkness, something he believes Batman has taken for granted, yet he also shows Batman that it is his own ties to the light (i.e. goodness) that seem to make him so susceptible to weakness, clearly making specific reference to his deep loss earlier in life, as well as years earlier with the loss of his love interest.  Bane too is interesting because he seems to thrive off of despair, yet one cannot ignore that he lives within a exoskeleton that helps him ignore physical pain on a large scale, thus freeing his mind to deal with his own existential woes, ones transcendent of the physical.  As for the notion of climbing out of a seemingly inescapable prison one cannot help but consider Camus' Myth of Sisyphus in where a man is cursed to push a boulder up and down between two hills for eternity never achieving any progress.  The climb out of this prison proves similar not in that it results in Wayne's being returned to the bottom, but that he realizes that the prison is only a small scale of the climb that he must make within Gotham City or even his own personal life, something that is endless, until it is of course interrupted by "death."  The prison too does help to conceptualize Nietzsche in that it creates an oppressed group of lesser "bad" individuals who are separated from the good and suppressed not through the panoptic gaze of traditional prison setups but through their assumption that their is some good in the world, yet their badness makes it out of reach and only an impossible vision to obtain.  This assumption of obtaining goodness/freedom is enough to keep most prisoners dwelling at its bottom, although when an individual does break out it proves, as is the case with The Dark Knight Rises, to completely throw notions of darkness and light into complete chaos.  Mind you this film is nearly three hours long so my apologies for missing any major key points in my brief synopsis.

Key Scene:  As over-claimed as it may be, the football stadium scene is so cinematic and surprisingly detached for most moments from either Bane or Batman that it almost seems out of place in the film.  Yet, certain statements and events bring viewers back to its very real attachment to Gotham City.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable film and hopefully a praiseworthy completion to a sound trilogy.  Of course, we cannot be for sure where this particular vision of the franchise will go as the ending opened up possibilities for Robin becoming a fixture of Gotham City as seen by Nolan.  Rent it or buy it depending on your preference for blockbuster films.