In the Mouth of Madness (John Carpenter, 1994)

Julie Carmen and Sam Neill in In the Mouth of Madness

Cast: Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, Charlton Heston, Frances Bay. Screenplay: Michael De Luca. Cinematography: Gary B. Kibbe. Production design: Jeff Ginn. Film editing: Edward Warschilka. Music: John Carpenter, Jim Lang.

A box office failure in its theatrical debut, John Carpenter's cleverly recursive In the Mouth of Madness has since gathered an enthusiastic following. I'm not one of the enthusiasts -- I find it much too frantic to be very scary, entertaining, or thought-provoking -- but I see what they like about it. It's partly a satiric look at the popularity of horror fiction and its movie spinoffs, centering on an obvious target: Stephen King. In the film, the horror writer is called Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), who lives in New Hampshire (next door to Maine, where King lives). Maybe to avoid any legal problems, the analogy is made explicit in the movie: King is name-checked several times. The other obvious horror writer target is H.P. Lovecraft, who isn't mentioned, but he's dead and can't sue. One reason for my discontent with In the Mouth of Madness is the miscasting of Sam Neill, who plays an insurance investigator who gets caught up in the search for Sutter Cane and his latest manuscript. Neill is one of my favorite underappreciated actors, but he seems all at sea here: Even his well-practiced American accent is sometimes clotted with his native New Zealand vowels. The role, which has a comic undertone, needs a more smart-alecky performer like Jim Carrey or Bill Murray. But then most of the cast -- including a cameo by Charlton Heston and a screen debut by Hayden Christensen as a paperboy -- is just along for the ride as the special effects and the plot kinks mount up. 

 

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

 

Event Horizon (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1997)

Cast: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, Joely Richardson, Richard T. Jones, Jason Isaacs, Jack Noseworthy, Sean Pertwee. Screenplay: Philip Eisner. Cinematography: Adrian Biddle. Production design: Joseph Bennett. Film editing: Martin Hunter. Music: Michael Kamen, Orbital. 

The makers of Event Horizon made the same mistake as the makers of the classics 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), that of assuming the exploration of space would continue unabated, so they set their movies in the early 21st century. In Event Horizon, for example, we’re told that the first moon base was established in 2017, and the rescue of a ship in the orbit of Neptune is occurring just 30 years later. (One reason I admire the TV series For All Mankind is that it intentionally plays out as alternate history, in which the space race with the Soviet Union got a boost when the commies landed on the moon before the Americans.) But that’s only a quibble, because mainly Event Horizon is a mess. A scary mess, to be sure, one to be watched for thrills, not for consistency or even plausible sci-fi. Some of the mess is the result of interference from Paramount, the releasing company, which was afraid that James Cameron wouldn’t finish Titanic in time for its scheduled release, so it put pressure on the producers of Event Horizon to get it done quick and dirty. The movie has since developed cult status, and there have been rumors that Paul W.S. Anderson has a director’s cut that would smooth out all the roughness of what was released. Those have remained rumors. I don’t think any cut is going to solve the fundamental problems of Event Horizon, that it doesn’t give fine actors like Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill solid enough characters to play, and that the central menace – something that happened to the titular ship when it was thrust into another dimension – is so vague. The crew of the Lewis and Clark, the rescue ship, is terrified by hallucinations drawn from the darkest moments of their lives. Something is causing these nightmare visions, but it’s never made clear exactly what. Moreover, they keep telling each other that “it’s all in your head,“ which is the kind of non-reassurance that I thought most of us had outgrown. Still, as I said, Event Horizon is scary if you don’t think too much about it, which may be enough for some.

Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979)

Cast: Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Wendy Hughes, Robert Grubb, Max Cullen, Aileen Britton, Peter Whitford, Patricia Kennedy, Alan Hopgood, Julia Blake. Screenplay: Eleanor Witcombe, based on a novel by Miles Franklin. Cinematography: Donald McAlpine. Production design: Luciana Arrighi. Film editing: Nicholas Beauman. Music: Nathan Waks.

The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990)

Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, and Scott Glenn in The Hunt for Red October

Jack Ryan: Alec Baldwin
Marko Ramius: Sean Connery
Bart Mancuso: Scott Glenn
Capt. Borodin: Sam Neill
Admiral Greer: James Earl Jones
Andrei Lysenko: Joss Ackland
Jeffrey Pelt: Richard Jordan
Ivan Putin: Peter Firth
Dr. Petrov: Tim Curry
Seaman Jones: Courtney B. Vance
Capt. Tupolev: Stellan Skarsgård
Skip Tyler: Jeffrey Jones

Director: John McTiernan
Screenplay: Larry Ferguson, Donald E. Stewart
Based on a novel by Tom Clancy
Cinematography: Jan de Bont
Production design: Terence Marsh
Film editing: Dennis Virkler, John Wright
Music: Basil Poledouris

What to make of the fact that the KGB man assigned to be "political officer" on the Red October (and swiftly offed by the defecting captain) is named Putin? Coincidence, of course, but it's one of the things that make John McTiernan's film of Tom Clancy's blockbuster novel The Hunt for Red October still relevant. The film turns on the perpetual dilemma summed up in the oxymoronic Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan turned into a foreign policy, "Trust, but verify." This first Jack Ryan movie is a bit overplotted and occasionally slow to generate the tension a thriller needs, but it has weathered the fall of the Soviet Union better than a lot of stories about the Cold War, and having a character named Putin (though he's Ivan, not Vladimir) with a background similar to the current Russian strongman's does tickle the imagination a bit. The best thing about the film itself is its casting. Even though this was Alec Baldwin's only outing as Jack Ryan (he was replaced by a bigger box-office draw, Harrison Ford, in the next two Tom Clancy movies, Philip Noyce's 1992 Patriot Games and 1994 Clear and Present Danger, and the role has been played by Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski), Baldwin gets the souped-up everyman quality of the role right. But he's overshadowed -- as who isn't? -- by Sean Connery, as well as by those two exemplars of Actors Who Make Every Movie They're in a Little Better: Sam Neill and Scott Glenn. The fantasy of Neill's Capt. Borodin is one of the screenplay's high points: "I will live in Montana and I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck and maybe even a recreational vehicle." It makes the character's dying words, "I would like to have seen Montana," an unexpectedly poignant moment for an action thriller. Glenn similarly finds the humanity within a character who could be just a stereotype, the tough-talking cowboy with an empathetic streak that keeps him from shooting first and asking questions later.

The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993)

If Jane Campion had gone with her original plan, Ada (Holly Hunter) would have gone down with her piano like Ahab lashed to the whale. The comparison to Moby-Dick is not, I think, terribly far-fetched: The Piano is one of those works, like the Melville novel, that tempt one into symbolic interpretations. Ada's obsession with her piano is, in its own way, like Ahab's obsession with the white whale, a kind of representation of the extreme irrational nexus of mind and object. But in Campion's completed version, Ada loses only a finger, not her life, and the piano is replaced along with the finger. Does this resort to a happy ending vitiate Campion's film, or should we accept as a given that life does in fact sometimes work that way? I think in a movie as enigmatic as The Piano so often is, Campion has blunted the emotional impact by having Ada and Baines (Harvey Keitel) wind up together in what seems to be a pleasant home far from the wilderness in which most of the film takes place, she teaching piano with her hand-crafted prosthetic and learning to speak, as Flora (Anna Paquin), that devious, semi-feral child, turns cartwheels. (Flora puts me in mind of another child of the wilderness in another work of impenetrable symbolism, Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.) Happily ever after seems like a lie in the mysterious terms with which the film began. We never learn why Ada turned mute, or who Flora's father was and what happened to him, or why she agrees to move to New Zealand to marry and then spurn Stewart (Sam Neill), or find a way to resolve any number of other enigmas. But the great strength of the film lies its power to evoke the imponderable, to make us wonder about Baines's life among the Maori, about the persistence of an imperialist culture (women wearing hoopskirts and men in top hats) in an alien land, about the nature of awakening sexuality, about the function of art, about the tension between innocence and experience in a child's life, and so on. It is, I'm certain, a great film, just because it is so hard to grasp and reduce to a formula.