Tag: Mig's Reviews

THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE (1974)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Joseph Sargent
CAST: Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An NYC transit chief must outmaneuver a gang of armed professionals who have hijacked a New York subway train and threatened to kill one hostage per minute unless their demands are met.


How?  How is it possible that it’s taken me this long, until fifty years after its release, to finally watch the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three?  Until now, my knowledge of the film included only its title, its basic plot, and the fact it was remade with John Travolta and Denzel Washington.  Now that I’ve seen the original, my desire to watch the remake has dwindled from microscopic to zilch.  This is one of the most thrilling heist films I’ve ever seen, and its influences are clearly felt in the best thrillers in the decades since its release, from Die Hard to Speed to Reservoir Dogs.

In the first half of the 1970s, widely regarded as one of New York City’s worst decades (at least by me, anyway), four armed men methodically hijack a subway train, decouple the engine from the rest of the train, and bring it to a stop between stations.  Their leader, known only as Mister Blue (Robert Shaw), radios the transit system authorities with his ultimatum: deliver one million dollars to the train in one hour and leave quietly or he and his companions will kill one hostage for every minute the money is late.

The chaos that ensues is sprinkled with the kind of humor I did not expect from any cop thriller made before Die Hard.  The transit chief, Lt. Garber (Walter Matthau as an unlikely but strangely convincing action hero), must interrupt a tour he is giving to a visiting cadre of Japanese subway officials.  Colorful dialogue is provided to the transit system engineers and administrators as their carefully maintained schedule is destroyed by the hijackers.  One of Garber’s associates shows where his priorities lie when, in the middle of a hostage crisis, he complains, “Jesus…you realize the goddamn rush hour starts in an hour?!”  This and many other moments provide welcome comic relief, but they are also firmly grounded in the reality of career officials under a great deal of stress.  There is never a moment that doesn’t feel exactly right.

When it becomes clear the hijackers mean business and will have no compunction about following through on their threats, important logistical questions arise.  Where will they get the million dollars from?  The bedridden city mayor (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ed Koch, four years before the real Koch was elected) doesn’t know.  The hijackers want it in specific numbers of bundles of fifties and hundreds.  How long will it take to assemble the money correctly, assuming they even GET the money?  Lt. Garber raises an interesting question: where will the hijackers go once they get their money?  They can’t simply get off at the next station, and they can’t leave the controls of the train while it’s in motion, thanks to the “dead man’s switch” that prevents such a thing.  What’s their end game?  Another transit official, played by Jerry Stiller, has the answer: “They’re gonna fly the train to Cuba.”

These and many other questions (including why the train is called Pelham One Two Three) are answered during the film’s running time, although one of them is answered without getting too specific because either it really is impossible to do so, or the filmmakers had no desire to lay out a step-by-step procedural for budding criminals.

One of the most important factors in the film’s success is its slam-bang pacing.  I’m not saying it’s cut together like Run Lola Run or an MTV video, not at all.  But the flow of the film is meticulously managed to keep the suspense going even when not much is happening on the train for their one-hour waiting period.  This is accomplished by having a local beat cop happen upon the train and provide close-cover reconnaissance to the transit authorities.  There’s also suspense among the passengers, obviously, as they plead with their captors.  (They provide more comic relief when one of them asks how much their captors are asking for their release.  “One million dollars,” one of them answers.  The hostage takes a perfectly timed beat, then says, “That’s not so terrific.”  Welcome to New York, ladies and gentlemen.)

Everything comes together so efficiently, so elegantly, that it’s a bit depressing that the film’s director, Joseph Sargent, would return to his roots and make a string of TV movies with only one other high-profile film to his name 1987’s Jaws: The Revenge.  That these two movies were made by the same director is mind-boggling.

I do have one quibble, though, and I will do my best to spoil as little as possible.  It involves a showdown where one man has a gun and the other doesn’t, and the infamous “third rail” in New York’s subway system.  If someone can successfully explain to me why one of those two men makes the choice he does, I will be happy to mail them a shiny new penny.  As it stands, that man’s decision made zero sense to me.  It almost felt like the screenwriter had written himself into a corner.  It was the one questionable moment in the entire film for me, but it did not ruin the movie, for what it’s worth.  It’s still an amazing ride.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three deserves to be mentioned on any list of great ‘70s thrillers like The French Connection and Dog Day Afternoon, especially the latter with its tricky mix of humor and suspense.  It grips you with its realism and credibility right from the opening scenes and barrels along with barely a minute to breath right up to the literal final image.  This is superior filmmaking, and any fan of film, at any level, needs to add this to their must-watch list.

ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS (Italy, 1960)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
CAST: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Claudia Cardinale
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 90% Fresh

PLOT: An impoverished family from rural southern Italy moves north in search of a better life in Milan, a “big city” that puts their familial bonds to the test.


Movies like Visconti’s celebrated Rocco and His Brothers are much-needed reminders that films need not provide explosions or alien invasions to be interesting or exciting.  I won’t say it’s perfect (several scenes could have been trimmed and still been effective), but I was as absorbed in the story as I am when reading a particularly good novel.  (For some reason, I was reminded of my headspace while reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch; the story and style grabbed hold of me and had me riveted the whole time, despite the fact my preferred tastes run to Crichton, Clancy, and King.)

Since I make no claims to be a historian, filmic or otherwise, I cannot vouch for the verisimilitude of Rocco and His Brothers in terms of Italy’s social and demographic picture in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  I seem to remember reading something somewhere about how this period reflected to some degree the Dust Bowl era in the United States when displaced midwestern families flocked to the West coast in search of better lives.  In the world of this film, we are led to understand that families like the Parondis, faced with financial hardships, were migrating north to Milan and other larger, modernized cities.  Some folks were able to adjust, others were not, and that was that.  The Parondis – Mamma Parondi and her five sons – are determined to make the move work no matter what.

The tone of constant struggle is set near the beginning when the Parondis arrive in Milan and, ominously, no one meets them at the station.  The eldest brother, Vincenzo, was supposed to be there, but he was distracted by a gathering of his girlfriend’s family.  When the Parondis arrive unannounced to the gathering, they are initially met with open arms, but innate prejudices about “country folk” get the better of everyone and they leave in a huff.  They find cheap lodging and the brothers make their first bits of money by shoveling snow.  A revealing scene shows the mother rousing her sons out of bed in the middle of the night at the first sign of snowfall so they can beat everyone else to the jobs.  Rocco and his brothers are reluctant at first, but they rally together and stay positive because, well, they must.  These strong ties will be tested as never before by the time the credits roll.

The film is broken up into sections, one for each brother.  The first section, “Vincenzo”, shows how his life seems to have changed for the better after relocating himself to Milan some months before the rest of his family, but their sudden arrival puts a crimp in his personal life when he is obliged to move in with them.  The next, very lengthy chapter focuses on Simone, a handsome, outgoing fellow who is spotted by a boxing coach and achieves local fame by winning a high-profile match soon after he begins training.

Shortly after this win, the family gets entwined with a local prostitute named Nadia who arrives unexpectedly on their doorstep in need of some clothes.  Before long, she becomes involved romantically with Simone, but tells him outright that she’s not interested in anything long-term, despite his obvious desire to be near her whenever possible.  The affair ends, and Nadia leaves town after having a crucial conversation with Rocco.

The third chapter, “Rocco”, follows Rocco after he serves a brief tour of duty in the military, after which he fatefully reconnects with Nadia after over a year.  They fall in love, and Nadia surprises herself by truly falling for Rocco despite her previous wishes not to be involved in anything permanent.  But when Simone discovers their relationship, events are set in motion that are as devastating as they are unexpected.

(The last two chapters, “Ciro” and “Luca”, focus on the fallout of the previous three sections.)

Rocco and His Brothers feels like it was adapted from an Italian opera.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if I learned that someone had turned it into an opera.  There are emotions and reversals and shocks and tragedies on display here that rival anything on American daytime television, but it rarely feels like soap opera.  Yes, there are some moments when the characters and the filmmakers take the time to deliver speeches that don’t seem to spring out of any true motivation other than to pound home the point the director is trying to make at that stage in the film.  (I’m thinking especially of Ciro’s final scene.)  But I am inclined to forgive these momentary lapses in momentum because, in retrospect, they lend emotional weight to the characters.  Novels can achieve this with a paragraph or two detailing the inner thoughts of their characters, but in film, the characters have to tell you what they’re thinking, verbally or nonverbally, or the audience gets lost.

I have hinted only vaguely about certain tragic aspects of the story.  This is because Visconti and his editor took great pains to allow them to arrive organically in a way that took me completely by surprise, so it would be wrong of me to give those surprises away.  For those of you who have seen the film, you know what I’m talking about.  It’s these moments that elevate Rocco and His Brothers into something more than a mere soap opera.  Some of the acting will strike modern audiences as exercises in histrionics, especially as exhibited by Mamma Parondi and Nadia.  To that I would say: “What do you want from opera, subtlety?”

Rocco and His Brothers is one of those elusive films that I’d heard and read about for some time now, and I’m grateful that I’ve finally seen it.  I’ll be honest, it’s not exactly a film I’ll take down and rewatch multiple times in a year, but it’s worth seeking out if you’re looking for a good old-fashioned family drama that’s not quite a tear-jerker, but it’s certainly no bed of roses, either.  Martin Scorsese once deemed it one of 39 foreign films every moviegoer should see before they die.  And if you can’t trust Marty, who can you trust?

THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN (1932)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Frank Capra
CAST: Barbara Stanwyck, Nils Asther, Toshia Mori, Walter Connolly
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: During the Chinese Civil War, an American missionary is gradually seduced by a courtly Chinese warlord holding her captive in Shanghai.


When I hear people talking about the “pre-Hays-Code era” of Hollywood, I conjure up seldom-seen images of nearly-nude starlets bathing or swimming or dancing in unison, as filmmakers and studios took advantage of the proven formula: Sex Sells.  But it never really occurred to me that some filmmakers would be able to use that freedom to make films that not only showed a little bit of skin, but also took the time to tell a story that appealed to mature adults in ways that seem fresh and alive nearly a century later.

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a contemporary “Beauty-and-the-Beast” tale of an American missionary, Megan (Barbara Stanwyck), who travels halfway around the world to Shanghai to marry her childhood sweetheart, Bob (Gavin Gordon), also a missionary.  It’s set in an unspecified year during the Chinese Civil War [1927-1949] when turmoil rocked the city and hundreds of thousands of refugees filled the streets.  A remarkable opening shot shows hundreds of extras flowing past the camera as Shanghai burns in the background, while a houseful of Americans prepares for Megan’s wedding, untouched and unbothered by the human misery thirty feet from their doorway.  (I was reminded of the idyllic family scenes in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun where English families held birthday parties oblivious to the impending chaos in Japan leading to World War II.)

Bob insists on postponing his wedding to Megan so he can help rescue some orphans stranded in a burning section of the city.  During the rescue effort, they are separated; in a surprisingly violent scene, Megan is struck on the head by an angry civilian and is knocked unconscious.  She wakes up on a train and finds herself under the care of General Yen (Nils Asther), a famous warlord, reputed to be more bandit than soldier, but who is unfailingly courteous and polite to Megan, even as he informs her that he is unable to return her to Shanghai for security reasons, effectively making her his prisoner.

This scene on the train is a masterpiece of visual storytelling.  Yen sits in a chair and is tended to by Mah-Li (Toshia Mori) who seems to be more than just Yen’s servant.  In an unspoken passage, Mah-Li puts a pillow under Yen’s head, covers his legs with a blanket, and reclines on a chaise.  Megan, with her head bandaged, observes this ritual, then notices Yen staring intently at her.  She becomes acutely aware that she is showing a small patch of bare leg through her covers.  As slowly as possible, she gently pulls the covers up to cover her leg.  Mah-Li observes all of this, Megan watches Mah-Li, and they all go to sleep, each one of them knowing exactly what has been stated without saying a word.  Brilliant.

In a bold move, once Megan is under Yen’s care/protection/whatever, the film never cuts back to her fiancé or to any of the missionaries.  In fact, Yen refers to a Chinese newspaper article which states that Megan is missing and presumed dead.  So that takes care of that.

In another scene of startling violence for its time, Megan wakes up one morning in her private room to the sound of gunfire.  Yen’s soldiers are executing prisoners in a courtyard across the way.  Megan is horrified and complains to General Yen, who promptly orders the soldiers away: “They are taking the rest of them down the road, out of earshot.”  Megan calls him cold-blooded, but he reasonably says he has no rice to feed any prisoners: “…isn’t it better to shoot them quickly than let them starve to death slowly?”

The theme of the film establishes itself in this and other scenes.  Megan, a Christian missionary who believes that people can and must be good for the sake of their souls and their fellow man, finds herself at odds with (and strangely attracted to) a soldier who is brutal by necessity and has no illusions about any innate goodness to be found in any man during a time of war.  There is a powerful scene when she argues with Yen, and in a heated moment utters a racial slur, and as soon as she says it Yen goes silent and squints at her, and she realizes she has crossed a line.

This is not the kind of moral and ethical complexity I expected from a melodrama made only five years after the advent of sound.  I saw the name of Frank Capra and the weirdly evocative title, and I imagined a potboiler with outdated attitudes and cheesy dialogue and racial stereotypes galore.  I could not have been more wrong.  Yes, the title character is played by Nils Asther, a Swedish actor in “yellowface,” but I had to remind myself that, in the time the film was made, this was de rigueur for most films dealing with Asian characters (the highly popular Charlie Chan films starred white actors in the role for years).  I don’t endorse the practice, but it is a fact that must be acknowledged.  And, it must also be said, Nils Asther’s performance as a Chinese man is quite convincing.

The Bitter Tea of General Yen gives us espionage, intrigue, forbidden romance, high melodrama that teeters on the verge of soap opera but never gives in to that temptation (not like Gone with the Wind would do in 1939 with, let’s face it, a rather similar character arc for the two romantic leads).  It’s a film that could be remade today, almost word-for-word, and I have no doubt it would feel right at home with today’s hip audiences.  So many other films of that era feel obviously dated by their dialogue or their performances.  The Bitter Tea of General Yen suffers none of those drawbacks.  It’s a modern classic that just happens to be over 90 years old, that’s all.

[Author’s Note: there is, in fact, one sequence which I’ll call “The Dream Sequence” that feels uncomfortably over-the-top in its depiction of the vilest racial stereotypes associated with Asians.  However, given the context of the scene, who’s having the dream, why they’re having it, and the dream’s resolution, it fits perfectly with the story.  I can’t find it in myself to “cancel” this film based on this sequence.  Just in case anyone was wondering.]

TUESDAY (2023)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Daina Oniunas-Pusic
CAST: Julia Louis-Drefyus, Lola Petticrew, Arinzé Kene (voice)
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Fresh

PLOT: A mother and her teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of an astonishing talking bird.


Movies about death are a dime a dozen.  Movies about “Death” with a capital D, as a character, are a bit rarer, and for a movie to make its mark in this subgenre, the personification of Death incarnate must be something interesting or unusual.  Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen portrayed Death in the expected way, a skeletal figure cloaked in black and carrying a scythe, but it could also disguise itself.  Meet Joe Black dressed Death in a tux and gave it Brad Pitt’s face and body – perhaps unlikely, but good for ticket sales.  And in the most famous movie version of Death, it was a pale man in black who played chess with Max von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman’s uber-classic, The Seventh Seal.

But no movie that I’ve ever seen has ever approached the character of Death itself the way Tuesday does.  In this film, Death is a bird.  A parrot with dirty gray feathers.  A parrot that can change size at will, sometimes as tall as a house, sometimes as tiny as a toad (or smaller), and sometimes just parrot-sized.  And, as we eventually discover, it can talk and mimic voices.

Tuesday looks and feels like an early Spike Jonze film, back in the days of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation.  It is filled with imagination and unexpected plot turns and laden with meaning, but it never feels pretentious or preachy.  It tells a familiar story – we must make peace with Death one way or the other – but the uniqueness of Death’s form and what happens after it reveals itself had me riveted for the entire running time of the film.

In this film, Tuesday is a 15-year-old girl (Lola Petticrew) who is dying of an unspecified disease that has relegated her to home-hospice care with an attentive, if slightly impersonal, nurse (Leah Harvey) and her mother, Zora (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, giving the performance of her career).  Zora has not seemed to get past the first stage of grief, denial.  She literally sneaks past Tuesday’s room so she can leave the house just as the nurse arrives, without having to speak to her.  Instead of going to work, Zora spends her day going to pawn shops and coffee shops and sleeping on park benches.

On one such day, Tuesday looks up and sees…this parrot.  The overall vibe of this parrot is hard to describe.  It looks beat up, it’s dingy, it’s blind in one eye, but there is a sense of menace to it.  Tuesday immediately intuits what the parrot is and why it’s there.  As it approaches her to perform its duty, Tuesday stops it by telling a joke.  (It’s the one about the cop who stops a guy who has twelve penguins in his car.)  The parrot takes it in and…laughs.  I’ve never been in the same room with a laughing psychotic, but I would imagine it would sound pretty much the same as when Death laughs.

And then the parrot opens its mouth and talks to Tuesday.  They have a conversation.  And suddenly Death seems to suffer some kind of panic attack, as the voices of all the creatures on Earth whose time has come assault Death’s ears.  Tuesday instinctively coaches it through a breathing exercise.  The voices go away.  She recommends a bath.  They bond.  She pages through a history book and gets Death’s commentary on dead historical figures.  Stalin: “An absolute prick!”  Jesus: “Oh, He LOVED irony.”  It mimics Jesus’ voice.  Whatever you think Jesus’ voice really sounded like, I promise you will be surprised.

Also, don’t get the idea that this is an all-out comedy because of the above dialogue.  Keep in mind that this is Death we’re talking about.  Death’s voice, when it speaks, is low, gravelly and menacing, even when it’s cracking jokes.  At one point, Tuesday plays an old song on her computer, and Death, being eternal, is familiar with it.  It even sings along and dances.  At least, as far as any parrot CAN dance.  Yet even in this moment of levity, there is still that sense of menace in the offing because of that brilliantly chosen voice, provided by an actor named Arinzé Kene, who is unknown to me, but if I ever see that he recorded an audiobook, I’m buying it.

This whole time, I’m watching the movie thinking to myself, WHERE is this GOING.  I was fascinated by this exceedingly odd couple.  The direction by first-timer Daina Oniunas-Pusic is just as assured and risky as anything by Spike Jonze or Sofia Coppola.  I was worried that it was going to veer off into a weird tangent where Death falls in love with Tuesday, but nothing like that happens.  Death knows its function, and so does Tuesday, so the problem now is how to deal with Tuesday’s mother, who is clearly not prepared to deal with Tuesday’s death, imminent or otherwise.

…and from here on out, I am going to give no more story specifics.  To say that I went into this movie cold is an understatement.  Trust me, the colder you are, the better it will be.  The ultimate message of the film, as I said, is not that far removed from any number of other films.  I would even compare it to the first Inside Out from Pixar, which demonstrated that sadness is an ultimately necessary part of becoming who we are.  Tuesday also uses a CG character (in the real world) to remind us that the only way to make peace with who we are is to make peace with where we’ll all be in 100 years.  The final words of the film are a call to action to everyone watching.

[Ed. Note: Tuesday is one of those so-called rarities, a completely original studio film, released in movie theaters before heading to a streamer, that’s not a sequel or insanely high-budget.  It’s intelligent, compelling, and non-stop surprising.  And it had absolutely zero publicity, at least in my area.  I saw no trailers, no posters, no internet hype.  According to boxofficemojo.com, it has grossed a little over $320,000 since its domestic release on June 7th.  Not exactly setting attendance records.  If you’re interested in seeing it in theaters, I’d say your window is extremely limited at this point.]

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Peter Yates
CAST: Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Alex Rocco
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After his most recent arrest has him looking at a long prison sentence for repeat offenses, an aging Boston gangster must decide whether or not to snitch on his friends to avoid jail time.


When scrolling through movie titles online or on your favorite streaming service, you might be forgiven for thinking that a 1973 movie with a title like The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a dialogue-driven character study by John Sayles or John Schlesinger, about a group of friends gathered at a hunting cottage or a class reunion or something.  Imagine my surprise when I watched it, and it turned out to be a nearly-forgotten gem of early ‘70s crime films.  (I’d call it a neo-noir, but it was released over fifty years ago now, so I’m not sure the term “neo” applies anymore.)  Featuring spare, economical storytelling reminiscent of other crime classics like Rififi [1955] or The Killing [1956], The Friends of Eddie Coyle is indeed a character study, but one that manages to downplay even Robert Mitchum’s heroic persona.

Eddie Coyle is getting old, and he knows it.  He’s currently facing up to 5 years in jail when he goes in front of a judge in a few days, but his old associates still rely on him to obtain “clean” firearms to use in pulling bank robberies.  The first time we see him doing this thankless job, he tells his cocky young supplier a story about why he has extra knuckles on his left hand, a speech that might have been written by a multiverse version of Quentin Tarantino.  (In fact, the bank robberies are accomplished when Eddie’s friends hold the bank manager’s family members hostage, so he’ll open the vault without question, a method paraphrased by “Pumpkin” in the opening scene of Pulp Fiction.)  Mitchum delivers this mini-logue with his trademark brand of world-weariness and menace, leading us to believe at the outset that he’s a man not to be trifled with, when in fact he’s little more than a glorified gofer for his bosses.

The film oozes a 1970’s atmosphere in every frame, but somehow it doesn’t feel all that dated.  There are no long zooms or extended chase sequences.  The most suspenseful scenes are the two bank robberies and one aborted car chase that is over as soon as it starts.  (I actually thought that was pretty clever, subverting our expectations by ending the chase after about fifteen seconds; this method was also put to good use in 2003’s not-as-bad-as-you-think S.W.A.T.)  The dialogue feels more modern, laced with f-words and racial epithets that, again, feel more at home in a Q.T. film than in a Robert Mitchum movie.  For my money, there may be a few movie-watching experiences that can top hearing Robert Mitchum telling someone to go f— himself, but I can’t think of what they are right now.

Director Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away) never once strains for effect, never showboats.  Like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, it is content to merely set the stage and observe what happens, letting the events and the characters drive the plot instead of contrived action scenes or fancy camera movements.  Instead of becoming bored, I was drawn into Eddie’s dilemma, his conflict between loyalty to his so-called friends and his desire to stay out of prison.  Complicating matters is the fact he has a wife and three school-age kids; they all live in a tiny townhouse where you can touch both walls of the kitchen with your arms outstretched.  This is a wrinkle uncommon in most gangster films, where the heavies lead unattached lives.

When Eddie approaches a federal agent (Richard Jordan) and asks if the New Hampshire judge will look favorably on Eddie’s sentencing if he agrees to squeal on his gunrunner friend, I felt a little sorry for him, and that’s a neat trick.  Because of Mitchum’s presence, you almost automatically want to root for him to do the right thing, but because of the character he’s playing so well, I just got the feeling that things were not going to end well for him, and I was right.  After getting a taste of what Eddie has to offer in terms of high-profile arrests, the federal agent leaves him dangling, telling him the judge will keep him out of jail if he keeps ratting on his buddies.  Poor Eddie is in an impossible situation, and the irony is, when he finally makes his decision, it’s already too late…but I don’t want to spoil anything.  It’s a brilliant catch-22 that left me feeling even sorrier for Eddie than I did before.

The whole movie is like that.  We’re shown right up front that Eddie is a criminal.  But the hands-off filmmaking approach allows the viewer to make up his own mind.  You could, I suppose, watch this movie in one of two mindsets: either you empathize right away with Eddie and his predicament, or you can take him at face value and watch the movie waiting to see if he gets what’s coming to him, both for being a crook AND for squealing on his friends.  Either way, I think the movie’s resolution satisfies both interpretations, which is not an easy task.

If you sit down to watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle, just remember that it’s not The French Connection or Heat or anything splashy or flashy.  It’s a grim, gritty crime drama with a bona fide legend playing a petty thug instead of a crime lord.  Mitchum fits the bill, and the movie fits Mitchum.  The Boston environments – all shot 100% on location – mirror the way Eddie walks and talks: gray, blank, tired.  Beneath that grimy coating, though, is a rather brilliant character study of a man whose life has brought him to a crossroads where he must decide what’s more important to him, his friends or his life.  (His decision kinda surprised me, I’ll be honest.)

HOTEL TERMINUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF KLAUS BARBIE (1988)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Marcel Ophüls
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: A documentary about Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, France, and his life after the war.


There is so much to unpack in Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophüls’ epic documentary, that I am hesitant to even try to write about it.  In terms of the craft of filmmaking, there is nothing to critique aside from the skillful editing, which surprisingly makes its 4.5-hour running time fly by.  In terms of content…I mean, where could I even begin?  Here’s a summary I found online: “Marcel Ophüls’ riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed ‘The Butcher of Lyon.’ Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape – with U.S. help – to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.”

Wait, what?  The United States intelligence apparatus smuggled a brutal Nazi officer out of Europe?  Six years after the Nuremberg trials?  Yes.  Ophüls interviews various players from US Army Counterintelligence – known as the “CIC” in the 1940s – who state flatly on camera that Barbie had connections and information regarding Russian communists, so it was in America’s best interests to keep Barbie alive and out of prison and get him to South America.

So, at the very least, today I learned something.

This sprawling documentary also features eyewitnesses to Barbie’s atrocities in Lyon, France, where he was stationed.  I don’t want to recite a laundry list of these terrible acts, but the film does key on two specific events during his tenure: the arrest and execution of Jean Moulin, a French Resistance leader, and the deportation to Auschwitz of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage in a town called Izieu.  Ophüls interviews scores of people who were in the room when Barbie arrested Moulin.  Many of them disagree who was to blame – a rat or someone with loose lips – but they all remember who made the arrest.  The stories from witnesses to the deportation of the children are beyond belief.

What is the point of a documentary like this?  Why should it be important for a filmgoer, or just an average Joe, to block out nearly five hours to watch a series of talking heads tell story after shocking story about the inhuman tactics of a monster?  Well, for one thing, that’s not the whole story.  Hotel Terminus actually has an arc, because Barbie was discovered living in Bolivia in 1972.  In 1983, he was extradited to France where he was convicted on numerous crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1991.  The filmmakers didn’t know that in 1988, of course, but it felt good to throw that factoid in there.  Another interesting factoid: America apologized to France in 1983 for helping him escape to Bolivia in the first place.  Better late than never, I guess?

So, it’s good to know while watching that the man in question will eventually get his just desserts.  But there are times when it almost feels like the “A-story” of Barbie’s eventual arrest gets overwhelmed by the “B-story,” which is the paradoxical attitudes of many of the people interviewed.  One man wonders, what’s the point of it all?  Barbie committed his crimes forty years earlier, and France has a statute of limitations of twenty years, so just let the man grow old and die in obscurity.  Another theorizes that stirring up old memories of the war when many would rather move on actually created more civil unrest in France and Germany.  Barbie’s defense attorney at his war crimes trial (a Eurasian Frenchman) wonders why Barbie is being tried for crimes against humanity while France’s own acts of torture and horrific imprisonment during the Battle of Algiers are discreetly ignored.

And always Ophüls has rejoinders for each of these statements with stories of families separated, men and women tortured, family members whisked away and never seen again.  One woman recalls being tortured as a girl by Barbie, while her mother was told, “This is YOUR fault; if you would just talk, we would stop.”  And so on, ad infinitum.  But I am compelled to point out again how compelling this was.  These and so many other stories like them did not depress me or lower my spirits.  Instead, I was riveted.  I can’t explain why.  For myself, I felt like this was something I needed to hear, and other people needed to hear.  Here was a record of something that really happened, to real people in a real place in a time that was not so long ago, in the grand scheme of things.

There was also a section that really made me take notice.  Many, MANY people said on camera that, in his old age, Barbie was “a good man.”  He was friendly to his neighbors – even some Jews! – and a loving father.  His daughter-in-law is interviewed, and she states that he always had a kind word for her and always tried to include her in his family circle, even after her husband (Barbie’s son) died.  It made me think about the driving force behind last year’s brilliant Zone of Interest: the banality of evil.  Perhaps among many others, Barbie was living proof that evil will not always wear a black hat and have glowing red eyes.  Evil is just as capable of engaging you in friendly conversation as the next man.  (I was also reminded of a line from David Fincher’s Se7en: “If we catch John Doe and he turns out to be the devil, I mean if he’s Satan himself, that MIGHT live up to our expectations.  But he’s not the devil.  He’s just a man.”)  Is that one of the lessons of this film?  That evil is not supernatural or some kind of horrific aberration, but just a small person with delusions of grandeur?  Discuss.

There are echoes of Schindler’s List in the details of these stories, but Ophüls notably never uses any archival footage of concentration camps or of the Holocaust itself.  He apparently felt that audiences had, regrettably, become accustomed to the gruesome imagery of those events.  Instead, he relies on the viewer’s imagination to provide all the necessary details.

He also, tellingly, never provides answers to the stickiest questions that surrounded Barbie’s trial, especially the one about France being willing to charge him with crimes against humanity while ignoring their own history in Algeria.  I thought about that one a lot in relation to America.  Our country is great for a whole host of reasons, but it’s not perfect.  We rise up in vocal disapproval when a foreign country commits genocide, or when a country’s citizenry is threatened by totalitarianism…while ignoring (for the most part) the fact that our country exists because of genocidal practices against indigenous Americans.  Am I suggesting that perhaps Ophüls is wrong to focus on Barbie and not France’s history?  Absolutely not.  Barbie was a monster and got what he deserved, belatedly or not.  But I am suggesting that the film raises questions that deserve further discussion.

Ultimately, I’m glad I saw Hotel Terminus, and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who asks.  The visceral nature of the stories told by some of the subjects is enough to make it compelling, even without the overarching structure of following Barbie to his downfall.  It’s a challenging watch, to be sure, but I promise you’ll never be bored.  Trust me.

HOMICIDE (1991)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: David Mamet
CAST: Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Pidgeon
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 88% Fresh

PLOT: A Jewish homicide detective investigates a seemingly minor murder and falls in with a Zionist group as a result.


Homicide is one of those movies where the lead character experiences just one damn thing after another until he winds up in a situation that is not even barely hinted at in the film’s first half hour.  If I didn’t think it was being a little pretentious – and maybe if I understood the term just a little more – I’d call it Kafkaesque.  It reminds me a bit of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, where that lead character is drawn unwittingly into the unexplored jungles of New York City at night.  Likewise, Detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) starts the film on a manhunt, searching for a wanted killer, and thirty-six hours later winds up begging Zionist activists to let him be involved in blowing up a storefront suspected of printing Nazi pamphlets.

In other hands, the events of the film leading up to Gold’s digression into racial/social activism could come off as comic.  First, he’s put on the manhunt case, searching for a man named Randolph.  Then a weirdo booked for killing his family wigs out at the station and attacks Gold, ripping the strap off his holster, and giving him a bump on the head that’s visible for the rest of the movie.  (I was unavoidably reminded of Jake Gittes’s nose in Chinatown.  Both wounds serve as constant reminders of either the odds the characters face or of the unpredictability of the world they inhabit.)  On their way to interrogate Randolph’s mother for his whereabouts, Gold and his partner, Sullivan (William H. Macy), randomly run into what looks like a hostage situation which turns out to be a cop cornered by a vicious dog in a candy store.  In the store is a dead woman.  The commanding sergeant arrives at the scene and gives Gold the dead woman case.  Turns out the dead woman is Jewish.  Her family shows up at the scene, learns Gold is Jewish, and insist he be their personal liaison for the case.  Meanwhile, Sullivan has to carry on with the Randolph case on his own.  A recurring theme will be how Gold keeps missing out on important events with the Randolph case while babysitting the family of the dead woman, a case he considers unimportant.

What happens next unfolds so naturally and surprisingly that I will not spoil it for you.  What I will say is that Mamet turns a standard police procedural into a searing character study of a man who has never really considered who he is in terms of his heritage.  At one point, he speaks with a Jewish scholar who shows him a page of Hebrew text.  Gold says, “I can’t read it.”  The scholar tells him, “You say you’re a Jew and you can’t read Hebrew.  What are you then?”  This is a question that Gold will try to answer for the rest of the film.

On a personal note, that bit of dialogue resonated quite a bit with me.  I’m full-blooded Puerto Rican on both sides of my family.  Yet my knowledge of Spanish is barely passable.  When faced with reading Spanish text, I can sound out the words, but my comprehension level is probably only 60 to 70%.  My conversation with fluent Spanish speakers is halting, at best.  I just never took the time to learn it as thoroughly as my parents or my sister did.  Does that make me any less Puerto Rican?  I don’t think so, and I might feel resentment towards a stranger telling me that I’m not Puerto Rican just because I don’t speak Spanish.  I know who and what I am, and my identity is not tied to what language I speak.

But things are different for Detective Gold.  Earlier in the film, he talks to his partner, Sullivan, on the phone and talks about how the Jewish family he’s now working for, or with, are high-strung, crying wolf (they claim someone is shooting at them from the building next door, but there are no bullet holes to prove it), how they saved ten bucks a week by letting the old lady work at the store herself, how they’re “not MY people, baby.”  Only after he realizes he’s been overheard does he feel immense guilt and obligation to help the family.  Not to just solve the case, but to “find the killer.”  So, he’s experiencing all sorts of new emotions that may or may not be interfering with his ability to do his job impassively.

The people in Homicide sound as if they are speaking in subtext only, using Mamet’s unique writing style to bypass what we think of as “normal” speech and deliver lines that are almost poetic, even when laced with racial epithets and curse words.  This makes the overall tone of any Mamet-scripted film seem hyper-stylized, as if the characters are one level removed from reality, but not in a bad way.  It elevates the film somehow.  I’m at a loss to describe it more accurately.

One bit of dialogue exemplifies what I’m talking about.  Gold is being thrown out of a building.  The gentleman at the door tells him, “Don’t bother to return.  The next time you come, there’ll be nobody here.”  Don’t bother to return?  That’s unnecessarily decorous.  “Normal” conversation would be something like, “Don’t bother coming back.  If you do, we won’t be here.”  However, Mamet’s signature word choices here suggest an almost Shakesperean construction, as if the words are being shoehorned into a buried structure or pattern that operates subconsciously.  Based on what happens with Gold throughout the film, I could theorize that Mamet is trying to create a mood reminiscent of Greek tragedy, and the actors are reciting dialogue that has been translated from Greek or some other language.

But that’s just me.

The experience of watching Homicide will never be quite as exciting or kinetic as other superlative crime dramas like, say, Heat or The Departed, movies that also examine their characters in detail, sending them on similar journeys of self-discovery.  Those other movies are defined as much by their action as by their intelligence.  In Homicide, any “standard” action scenes are purely incidental, or sometimes accidental, intended not to thrill but to move the plot forward with a minimum of fuss.

In any event, the action is not the linchpin of this film.  We watch Homicide, not to see who Gold kills or who tries to kill Gold, but to see if he is capable of resurrecting the person within himself that he thought he had killed long ago, a sacrifice he made on the altar of being a good cop.  He has a painful conversation where he realizes that everything he’s done to suppress his own self has been, “Not for me.  All for someone else.”  He must decide whether to act in service of his conscience or his sworn duty as a cop.  The choices he makes have consequences he never anticipated, as with all good tragedies.  Homicide reminds us of that inescapable fact, not with a bang or a whimper, but with the calm, flat gaze of an impassive Greek god who lets us draw our own conclusions.

THE MAN IN THE MOON (1991)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Mulligan
CAST: Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, Reese Witherspoon, Jason London, Emily Warfield
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 91% Fresh

PLOT: A 14-year-old girl in 1957 comes of age when she develops a crush on a handsome neighbor…who only has eyes for her older sister.


The Man in the Moon has a plot that sounds like a high-concept pitch somewhere between an ABC After-School Special and a third-tier soap opera.  But somehow, magically, it transcends the trappings of soap opera and veers towards the truly operatic, touching on grand emotions while keeping itself grounded in reality.  I watched the movie in awe, wondering how something so sappy was holding my interest the whole way through.  Afterwards, I came up with two overarching reasons: the spectacular debut performance of a 14-year-old Reese Witherspoon, and the sure-footed direction from one of Hollywood’s old masters, Robert Mulligan, who cut his teeth on stage plays for television in the 1950s before directing his masterpiece in 1962, To Kill a Mockingbird.

Like Mockingbird, The Man in the Moon takes place in the deep South.  The time is 1957, when Elvis was king and children were still encouraged to say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to their parents.  Dani Trant (Witherspoon) is still young and tomboyish enough to escape her Sunday chores by dashing off to the local swimming hole after church.  Her older sister, Maureen (Emily Warfield), is set to start college at Duke in a few months.  Their close relationship is established in a sweet opening scene where they sit in their outdoor, screened-in bedroom, doing each other’s hair and talking about life and Maureen’s doubts and how Dani envies Maureen, and so on.  Like in real life, the conversation touches on deep topics, but never really resolves anything.  It just feels good to talk, to know the other person is really listening.  This scene is mirrored in the movie’s final scene in a fantastic bit of screenwriting where the conversation is very different, but the emotions being discussed are more or less the same.

One day, Dani goes skinny dipping in the watering hole and finds an unexpected visitor: Cort Foster (Jason London), 17, whose mother and younger brothers have just moved back to their old farm next door.  Turns out Cort’s mother, Marie, is an old friend of Dani’s mom, Abigail.  This is the kind of stuff soap operas thrive on, but even at that point, even though I was aware of the contrivances of the story, I never felt overly manipulated.  It all just felt very…real.  Once again, it’s a testament to the director’s skill in making sure nothing gets punched up unless there’s a reason for it.  It’s never bland, don’t get me wrong.  But it never feels fake.  I don’t like the word “organic” in connection with acting or directing, but that feels like the right word to use here.

Things move swiftly.  Dani and Cort become quick friends, but when things get a little too flirtatious at the swimming hole, Cort backs away and admonishes Dani.  “You almost got more than kissed, little girl.”  Dani asks Maureen for tips on kissing boys.  It looks as if Cort is always on the verge of making a bad decision, but he has the good sense to put on the brakes.  The film is making you think the movie is going to be about one thing, but then there’s a family crisis, and in the hubbub, Cort meets Maureen, there’s an instant attraction, Dani feels left out…

But that’s enough summarizing.  Based on what I’ve written, you may already think you know the arc of the film, but I can assure you, you’re wrong.

Let’s talk instead about Reese Witherspoon’s performance.  It must be seen to be believed.  It belongs in the pantheon of the greatest debut performances of all time.  She is as self-assured and confident and natural as she was in her Oscar-winning performance in Walk the Line.  It’s almost like watching some of the early films of Marilyn Monroe; the screen just seems a little brighter when she’s present.  Watch her facial expressions when Cort realizes who she is after their first encounter at the swimming hole.  Watch her smile after her first kiss.  Look at her self-control when she tells her father she understands why he had to take the strap to her (that’s a long story that I won’t spoil).  For the most part, I just watched her performance in awe, but once or twice I turned on my analytical mode and tried to see if I could “catch” her acting.  Couldn’t do it.  The fact she wasn’t at least nominated for an Oscar for this movie is a complete freaking mystery to me.

For that matter, the whole movie is a mystery to me.  Before watching it, I had only heard about it from a rave review by Roger Ebert.  I couldn’t find it streaming anywhere so I had to pay a relatively pretty penny to get it on Blu ray, sight unseen.  (Spoiler alert: it was worth it.)  Yet here is a brilliant gem of a film that tells a simple story of love and sadness and doubt and everything in between.  There are some plot surprises – I won’t say twists, exactly, it’s not a Shyamalan movie – that I absolutely did not see coming.  In retrospect, maybe I should have, but the storytelling kept me engrossed in the moment.  It kept me focused on the here and now, so I never felt the need to try and guess what was around the corner.  I hesitate to use this word, too, but it was mesmerizing.  To tell a story this cornball (on the surface!) and keep it fresh and alive is some kind of miracle.

It’s been said that no good movie is too long.  The Man in the Moon clocks in at just under 100 minutes with credits, but I was prepared to stick with it for at least another half hour, just to see what these characters would do and say, and how they would deal with the next challenges life throws at them.  When the movie ends, it doesn’t feel like an ending.  It has the good sense not to make things too final, as if the solutions to all the issues in the film could be wrapped up in a bow.  All that remains is the bond between two sisters, and if they have that, that’s all that matters.

BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST: Tom Cruise, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley, Caroline Kava, Willem Dafoe
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A biography of Ron Kovic, a fiercely patriotic Marine who fights in Vietnam, is paralyzed in battle, and experiences a dramatic turnaround upon his return home.


I can already tell this is going to be a difficult review to write.

There is nothing overtly wrong with Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July.  It is expertly directed, and the pacing never flags.  Tom Cruise’s Oscar-nominated performance is deservedly legendary; he leaves nothing in the tank, a fierce rebuttal to critics who thought he was nothing but a pretty face.  But even though there is much to admire, when the closing credits rolled, I felt oddly detached.  The movie kept me at arm’s length from really engaging with the lead character.  Or maybe I kept the movie at arm’s length.

Could it be that I simply don’t care for Vietnam films anymore?  Not likely.  One of my absolute favorite films is Michael Cimino’s masterpiece The Deer Hunter.  In fact, the opening scenes of Born on the Fourth of July are reminiscent of that earlier film in that it takes its time establishing the main character, Ron Kovic, as a young man in the early-to-mid 1960s at the dawn of the Vietnam War.  Born and raised in Massapequa, New York, his strict Catholic upbringing and his devotion to high-school wrestling instill a strong sense of right and wrong in the world.  A point is made about how America had never lost a war up to that time.  Kovic’s wrestling coach exhorts him and his teammates as if he were a Marine drill instructor.  “I want you to kill!  You hear me?! …You got to pay the price for victory, and the price is sacrifice!!”  It’s not very subtle, but Stone is making it clear that, in those days leading up to the Vietnam quagmire, the American credo was, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing.”

Kovic enlists, sees combat, and during two horrific sequences, he experiences: an unintended massacre of Vietnamese civilians, the accidental shooting of a fellow soldier (with Kovic himself behind the trigger), and a fateful gun battle during which a bullet went through his right shoulder, collapsing a lung and severing his spinal cord, paralyzing him from the waist down.  These scenes are appropriately skittish and terrifying, putting us in Kovic’s boots and making us feel the unimaginable stress of fighting a war where half the time you weren’t sure who or what you were shooting at.  Kovic is shipped stateside…and here, as they say, is where his troubles REALLY began.

If the scenes set at the VA Hospital during Ron Kovic’s convalescence weren’t based on his actual experiences, I would denounce them as sensationalistic and manipulative.  Rats roam free among the beds.  (A nurse provides spectacularly unhelpful advice: “You don’t bother them, they ain’t gonna bother you.”)  Orderlies spend their down time getting high on marijuana or worse.  Unchecked catheters get backed up.  When a vital blood pump malfunctions, a doctor has to go to the basement to “rig up a substitute.”  And through it all, Ron Kovic does everything in his power to prove to the (correctly) pessimistic doctors that he will walk again, even re-injuring himself in the process.

(It’s futile, I know, to critique a film for what it’s not instead of what it is, but I can’t help wondering if I might have developed a more emotional reaction or attachment to the film if the entire film had focused on Kovic’s tenure at the VA hospital…although I will admit that would be a thoroughly depressing film.  Also, it might have developed some unintentional similarities to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Who knows.)

The rest of the film details Kovic’s return home to his family, his emotional swings between the lowest kind of depression (“Who’s going to love me, Dad?  Who’s ever going to love me?”) and angry shouting matches with his parents and occasional bar fights.  Eventually, Kovic has a revelation: he still loves his country, but he can’t stand the government that sent him and his friends halfway around the world for a cause he no longer understands.  After a short hiatus in Mexico (I won’t get into too many details about that plot point because it’s the one section of the film that borders on boring), he returns home and dedicates his life to speaking up for the men and women who returned from Vietnam to a country that, at worst, hated them, and at best, simply didn’t care about them.

Again, the film is a stirring portrait of a man and a life.  However, as much as I want to, I can’t pin down what it is about the movie that failed to reach me at the kind of emotional level that other biographies have done before.  I just recently watched My Left Foot, with Daniel Day-Lewis’s towering performance at its center.  Another film biography, another main character confined to a wheelchair, a character who comes to terms with himself and how the world responds to him and comes up with a way to respond to the world.  But My Left Foot made my heart soar in a way that Born on the Fourth of July never achieved.  I watched the movie intently, focusing on every plot development and every nuance.  But it just didn’t grab me.  I am at a loss to explain why.

Could it be because of the presence of Tom Cruise in the lead role?  He showed these kinds of acting chops again ten years later in Magnolia, giving another Oscar-nominated performance.  In that movie, he completely disappeared into the role, despite having one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.  Perhaps the younger Tom Cruise (only 27 at the time) emits the kind of wattage that overshadows those around him?  So that you’re aware of the face first and the character second?  Maybe.  So why doesn’t the same thing happen in Magnolia or even The Last Samurai?  Perhaps it took him ten years to find a way to modulate or customize his performance so that, when it counts, the character comes first and the Cruise persona second.

I’m speculating.  The bottom line is, Born on the Fourth of July is a worthy addition to the resumes of both Oliver Stone and Tom Cruise.  It knows the story it wants to tell and resolutely sticks with it the whole way.  There are no sidetracks at any time, not even when he becomes an activist.  The focus is always on Ron Kovic, not the cause.  Stone and his screenwriters trusted that the story of Ron Kovic would draw enough attention to the cause on its own.  That approach would work with just about any other film.  This time, it had the effect of diluting the emotional experience while still holding my attention all the way through.  I would still recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it, if for nothing else to see Cruise play a role where he gets to sound notes he rarely got to play in his early career.  Would I watch it again?  Maybe.  I think the story is important enough for me to try to see what I might have missed this time around.

DEKALOG (Poland, 1989-1990)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Krzysztof Kieslowski
CAST: A host of Polish actors unknown to me
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: Not Rated

PLOT: Director Krzysztof Kieslowski presents ten short films, each related in one way or another with one or more of the biblical Ten Commandments.


Nearly every review or description I’ve ever read of Kieslowski’s Dekalog states that the ten 1-hour films in this ambitious cycle are each based on one of the biblical Ten Commandments.  Not so.  I also assumed that each film would somehow be a moral tale ending with an unequivocal statement about right and wrong.  Also not true.  These films are the most mature and literate explorations, not of morals, but of ethics, that I’ve ever seen.  We believe we know what’s right and what’s wrong, and that we would have the ethical fortitude to do what’s right, given the option.  Dekalog argues that, in today’s world, whether it’s late-1980s Poland or present-day America, the moral absolutes dictated by the Ten Commandments are unachievable.  All we can do is choose what we believe is the right thing and hope for the best.

Kieslowski, much better known perhaps for his Three Colors trilogy, seems to have written these films, along with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, as case studies or thought experiments for ethical quandaries.  In Dekalog Two, a woman has a semi-comatose husband.  She approaches the doctor with a dilemma: she is pregnant with another man’s child, so she must know whether her husband will recover or if he is beyond hope.  If the doctor says he will recover, she will get an abortion.  If the doctor says he will die, she’ll keep the baby.  Now the doctor has two lives in his hands.

In Dekalog Four, a young woman’s father is away on business.  She discovers a letter, hidden by her father, from her dead mother, that says, “Open after my death.”  She opens it (dishonoring her father’s obvious wish that it not be found), and what she finds could radically redefine her relationship with her father, along with resolving some sexually ambiguous feelings she’s been having lately.

I could go on and on.  For the curious, a full synopsis of each film in the cycle can be found online.  But you get the idea.  Each self-contained story is a “what would you do” scenario where your answer may tell you more about yourself than you anticipated.  They seem more inspired by the format of Jesus’ parables instead of Moses’ tablets, just without the neat and tidy ending.  (Well, Dekalog Ten’s ending is cut-and-dried, but that’s all you’ll get out of me in terms of endings.)

For me, the weakest of the ten films was Dekalog Two, despite its sensational premise.  It gets a little too mystical for its own good at one point.  But setting that one aside, I was amazed at how enthralled I was while watching each chapter.  Kieslowski begins each film almost as if you were walking into the middle of the story instead of starting cleanly at the beginning.  Characters are introduced who appear to have no connection whatsoever, and you must be a little patient as the story develops.  At first, I found this approach a little discombobulating, but as I got more accustomed to it, I thought I could see its purpose.  This is real life, not the kind of storytelling we are accustomed to from Hollywood and (let it be said) elsewhere.  The stories we remember and retell from our lives don’t begin with a lovely credit sequence and stirring music.  It’s usually something like, “So there I was, at the doctor’s office, and he told me I was impotent…”

This method also had the effect of sharpening my attention as each film began.  Since I wasn’t being spoon-fed the story, I paid close attention to each shot, trying to memorize a face or recall a name.  And each story had this remarkable ability to lure me into complacency or banality, and suddenly BANG, a monkey gets thrown into the wrench, reshaping everything you just saw, or what you thought you were going to see.  I’m thinking especially of Dekalog Four, with the dead mother’s letter; Dekalog Seven with the ostensible kidnapping with hidden motives; and Dekalog Ten where a father’s death brings two estranged brothers together for one last surprise in his heavily secured apartment.

Because I was watching so carefully, there were several things I noticed that carried over from one seemingly unrelated tale to the next:

  • REFLECTIONS: Every film makes liberal use of reflections for some compositions, whether it’s a scene shot in a mirror or a pane of glass or a puddle or even just reflections on the lens of the camera.  I am not enough of a film scholar to elaborate what that could mean, aside from the obvious: these films are intended to elicit self-reflection from the viewer.  Passive viewing of these films simply will not do.
  • CAMEOS: All ten films take place mostly in or around the same imposing apartment complex in Warsaw.  (Look closely at the structures and the beams for the outside porches resemble church crosses.)  As such, characters from one chapter will “bleed” into at least one of the others.  The father in Dekalog One appears near the beginning of Dekalog Three.  The pregnant wife in Dekalog Two is trying to catch a cab in Dekalog Five.  The impotent husband in Dekalog Nine shows up in reverse order as a bike rider in Dekalog Six.
  • EXTERIORS: I cannot recall more than two or three shots in all ten films that showed an unambiguously sunny day.  Daytimes in Dekalog are invariably overcast and gloomy.  If we are meant to interpret that as a symbol, and the apartment complex is the world we all inhabit, then Kieslowski seems to be saying that the world is a dark and dreary place, indeed.  Is there any hope at all in this gray cycle of films?  I think so.  Many of the films end on, if not exactly a happy note, then at least a hopeful note.  For myself, I watch the credits roll on each one and I imagine the characters making peace with their choices, because…well, that’s what I have to do daily.  If I can do it, they can do it.  Or vice versa.
  • THE WATCHER: There is one actor who appears in nine of the ten films in Dekalog.  He never speaks, is never named (on IMDb, he is credited simply as “Young Man”), and never directly interacts with any other character.  I took to calling him The Watcher, after the Marvel Comics character who is doomed to spend eternity witnessing human history without the ability to help in any way.  What does he represent?  Is he an angel, in keeping with the cycle’s biblical name?  He seems to appear whenever a main character is about to make a choice of some kind; in one instance, he gives an almost imperceptible shake of the head as if to say, “Don’t do this.”  If you ask me, I would say the Young Man is the embodiment of guilt, a warning stare from some cosmic force that is saying, “Can you live with what you’re about to do?”  The main characters make their own choices, deciding what they can or can’t live with.  Discuss.

I hope all this mumbo jumbo hasn’t deterred you from seeking out this series and giving it a go.  All the same, as much as I do recommend Dekalog, I’m a little stuck on who exactly I would recommend it to.  All told, it’s a 9-hour-34-minute excursion into the kind of ethical dilemmas that could occupy an entire semester at a film school…and probably has.  On the other hand, with streaming popularity at an all-time high (depending on who you ask), one can think of it as a 10-part HBO miniseries…in Polish.  After all, that’s how it was originally envisioned anyway, as a limited series for Polish television. Take a chance.  Find a copy to buy online.  Or stream it if anyone is offering it.  I promise, you will be mulling over these films long after the latest Venom movie has faded from memory.  (Sorry, cheap shot, couldn’t resist, but you know I’m right.)