Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

Morning Lines

A week after seeing Hulk, and I’m forgetting it already. Matrix Reloaded? That’s soooo May 15! For worse or better, the world of movies and DVDs and information grows larger by the day. Francois Ozon’s likable psychodrama Swimming Pool opens nationwide on Wednesday, and I’m looking forward to transcribing the smoky hour I got to spend with Charlotte Rampling’s sardonic young co-star, Ludivine Sagnier.

There are other movies I shouldn’t write about yet. Watching Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, I admired Jonathan Mostow’s quiet efficiency, realizing only afterwards just how simple, how quiet, almost uneventful a film he’d managed to make. More next week. And Miramax is finally rolling out a roster of their film festival circuit acquisitions, including Stephen Frears’ Dirty Pretty Things, Gregor Jordan’s wonderful, quietly savage satire Buffalo Soldiers and Peter Mullan’s wrenching, acid The Magdalene Sisters. More in the weeks to come.

Then again, Harlan Jacobson seems ready to be King of the Morning Line, Ma!, all but canceling any buzz for the 2003 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival in Wednesday’s USA Today. Still, Jacobson does quote Piers Handling, the festival’s head, to commonsensical effect: ''We're seeing a lot of films, and we don't lock down our program, (typically more than 200 films), for six weeks.''

Aside from the work getting done by the young bunch of documentarians I hang out with, one of the most thrilling things I’ve heard in the past week is that one of my favorite directors, the Swede Lukas Moodysson has not only finished a film ten months after the Swedish debut of Lilja 4-Ever, but it’s already out in his home land. A documentary about young activists jailed after the June 2001 riots at the European Union summit in Goteborg, it’s called Terrorists – A Film About Those Who Were Sentenced. Working with eco-sensitive director Stefan Jarl, Moodysson tells Screen International that “As a grown-up and a father in this society, I think you have a responsibility to take an active part when things like this happen.” Is the camera mightier than the pen? Can engaged art remain art? Questions raised by The Magdalene Sisters as well, and I’m anxious to hear Peter Mullan’s side of what went into that impassioned piece of work.

HULKed out

A twentysomething friend greets me on the street with a grin the other evening. A musician, a self-described grown-large comics geek, he’s spilling over about The Hulk. I ask him what he thinks of some of the criticisms that have found their way into print, particularly about the bleak life of its central character. "But Hulk's the superhero whose powers are a curse!" he immediately points out. “You mean, like post-adolescence and adulthood, as it's usually seen through the Stan Lee prism?” I ask, getting a bigger smile in return.

Ang Lee's first film since the worldwide hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a vigorous, concerted attempt to commandeer the summer-movie format to broaden Lee and customary co-writer (and producer) James Schamus' lasting fascination with emotional repression. The opening hour (reportedly trimmed at the studio's suggestion) patiently lays the groundwork for later explosions of id; the slow, seething simmer suggests "Raging Lull" more than the every-ten-minute blow-`em-ups expected during this season.

Watching the movie, I didn’t know what to think, reveling in the visuals, never quite engaging with the story. I’m not one who demands “likable” characters or even wants to watch empathetic characters. Still, except in the more formal elements, I was pretty much at sea throughout. An example of the sort of loveliness I could take home with me: In one quiet, affecting visual element, Lee shows us lichen surrounding Banner's childhood home in the desert, which later matches the blotching of Hulk’s transformative skin, and later still, the texture from sky-high of desert expanses seen from satellites.)

Eric Bana (the estimable chameleon at the sociopathic center of Chopper, one of the best “unreliable narrator” tales of the past decade) plays Bruce Banner, a driven scientist who has problems with relationships, who's just broken up with co-worker Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly). They're experimenting with "nanomeds," working with molecular-sized machines that parallel some present-day real-world testing. A laboratory accident exposes him to a megadose of lethal rays, which he survives, but which also activates something awry in his blood stream. Enter bad dad Nick Nolte, who unpremeditatedly passed on the disfigured pedigree. "Emotional damage can manifest physically," someone deadpans later in the story. (Doh!)

The damaged, quietly tormented Banner's like Kurt Cobain without a guitar: there's rage in his belly, and modern chemistry cannot help: Smells like green spirit. (To flip through the pages of Cobain's agonized, near-intolerable journals is to witness a range of inner fury and desolation that the Lees Stan and Ang can only compose the most distant metaphor for.) Lee and his collaborators, particularly exceptionally able cinematographer Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet, and Lee’s The Ice Storm), often break the frame into comics-like panels, and the effect is more dreamy than kinetic, a kind of mega-consciousness that traffics in transitions made of spatially impossible digital wipes and sweet, dreamy susurrations that psychologically "freeze" a frame composed of several bits of motion. There are a couple of shifts that suggest a kind of freedom within narrative time frames I'd only ever seen before in movies by Shohei Imamura, such as his time-loosening Vengeance is Mine.

A number of middle-aged critics have taken Lee's dark dream about rage and power and freedom to task for this recurrent tic of spatial-temporal swooniness, using it to swat the 49-year-old director for being more esthete than action gorgon. While watching the movie, a deeply unhappy and sorrowing mood was more apparent to me than any sort of narrative suspense, and it may be the contemplative and lyrical instances that offended some of these early reviews. (I won't even address the senselessness of experienced writers trying to explain their personal vision of what a "plausible" skyscraper-tall green id monster ought to look like.)

Aside from many knowing allusions to other pop and pulp—King Kong, anyone? Beauty? Beast?--there are sneakier riffs. Producer-co-screenwriter Schamus is a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on austere Danish master Carl Theodor Dreyer, and there's an iris-in where black consumes the entire widescreen frame except for Bana's face, straight out of a silent Dreyer film I'm struggling to recall. How does a director follow that? Lee cuts to an onrushing shot of vast desert salt flats that could even keep Michael Bay from cutting for a few seconds. The film's second hour kicks in as Banner is taken to the desert to be confined and exploited for "national security" in the bowels of a secret research lab, surrounded by teams of doctors 24-7 as if he were as fragile as Dick Cheney. When the most pissed incarnation of Hulk erupts, the planet becomes a mere trampoline, and in pursuit, the military levels part of Monument Valley as if it were merely Mesopotamia. The look on that computer-generated face is timelessly gentle, expressing, "I'm capable of this? The wind feels this way on my cheeks?" (Lee tops himself with a scene high above San Francisco Bay that tempts the stars and heaven.)

But forget the beast for a moment and focus on the beauty who can tame him, and even collaborate with him: Connelly's Betty Ross, shot mostly without filters in wide-eyed close-ups, engaging her features, fierce smile-lines, blemishes, freckles, pocks and all. Golden light on that precious aquiline nose? A close-up of an inhumanly human face, that’s cinema to me, even amid the clatter of the two families' successive generations of Oedipal bedlam. And the lovers' reuniting echoes one of the classics of climactic grace: "You found me," Bruce, de-Hulked, murmurs. "You weren't that hard to find," Betty says, smiling. "Yes, I was," he says. It's a paraphrase of the ending of Robert Bresson's overwhelming 1959 mediation on how we move through the world, Pickpocket. Hulk's coda does not attain the purity of that masterpiece, but at least Lee, Schamus, Elmes, Universal Pictures, et al., strain toward it.

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