Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/02/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara, 1993)

Gabrielle Anwar and Billy Wirth in Body Snatchers

Cast: Gabrielle Anwar, Terry Kinney, Meg Tilly, Billy Wirth, Reilly Murphy, Christine Elise, R. Lee Irmey, Kathleen Doyle, Forest Whitaker, G. Elvis Phillips. Screenplay: Raymond Cistheri, Larry Cohen, Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, Nicholas St. John, based on a novel by Jack Finney. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Peter Jamison. Film editing: Anthony Redman. Music: Joe Delia.

Abel Ferrara's version of Jack Finney's novel The Body Snatchers is nothing if not economical. The economy extends to the title: Don Siegel's 1956 version and Philip Kaufman's 1978 one were called Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Ferrara even drops the definite article. The story, too, has been pared down. Ferrara's version sets the story on a military base in Alabama instead of the urban California of the previous films. It also shifts the focus to a teenage girl, Marti Malone (Gabrielle Anwar), who comes with her family to the base when her father (Terry Kinney) is sent there by the EPA to investigate chemical pollution. The dynamic of a rebellious adolescent in a military culture is perfect for the conflict between individualism and conformity, the theme that unites all of the versions of Finney's story. In addition to her father, Marti's dysfunctional family consists of her stepmother, Carol (Meg Tilly), whom she dislikes, and her young half-brother, Andy (Reilly Muphy), who annoys her. Andy is the first to sense that something is seriously wrong in their new home when, during an art class at day care, all the other kids produce identical finger paintings. As they hold up their paintings, the teacher murmurs approvingly at each one until she comes to a halt at Andy's, which is unique. She clearly disapproves. One by one, the fact that people are being somehow replaced by identical but emotionless beings becomes clear. Ferrara is not particularly interested in the mechanics of invasion and transformation that took up more narrative space in the previous films. We get some nicely disgusting body horror scenes, but the response of Marti to the alien takeover is what drives the plot as she teams up with a handsome young helicopter pilot named Tim (Billy Wirth) to fight off the invaders. Tim's stoic military manner keeps us unsure whether he's not already one of the pod people, an ambiguity that persists until the end of the movie. Body Snatchers is a good rethinking of material whose previous versions are now considered classics. The source material was mined again for a fourth version, The invasion (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2007), which starred Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig but bombed with the critics.