Every
month, Director Spotlight takes a look at an auteur, shines some light
on a few items in the director’s body of work, points out what makes them an
artist, and shows why some of their films work and some don’t. August’s
director is body horror auteur David Cronenberg.
NOTE: Look, I’m tired of typing it out for pretty much every
entry, so here it is in the opening: there’s going to be spoilers in this
thing, and in almost every entry of Director
Spotlight. There’s a lot more to a film than the rote plotting, which is
only a small part of the enjoyment as far as I’m concerned. Still, if it’s
going to bother you, I’d highly suggest not reading ahead until you’ve seen the
movie in question.
Grade: 75 (B+)
David Cronenberg and writer J.G. Ballard are such kindred
spirits that many assume Cronenberg’s theatrical debut, Shivers, was inspired by the Ballard novel High Rise when in fact the two similar works were released in the
same year. It makes sense, then, that Cronenberg would tackle Ballard’s
controversial novel Crash after a
pair of earlier difficult adaptations (Naked
Lunch, M. Butterfly). 1996’s Crash
(which I am obligated to point out bears no relation to the lousy Paul Haggis
Oscar-winner about racism of the same name) is Cronenberg’s most controversial
film, an NC-17 rated lightning rod that polarized critics and faced release
delays after Ted Turner, who owned the rights to distribute it, spoke out
against it. But while it’s certainly a hard film to love, it’s still an
admirable addition into Cronenberg’s filmography.
James Ballard (James Spader) is a film producer whose
relationship with his wife Catharine (Deborah Kara Unger) is cold and distant.
The two have an open marriage, but their sex is dispassionate and almost
mechanical. Ballard is involved in a car accident with Dr. Helen Remington
(Holly Hunter), whose husband is killed in the accident. Ballard is intrigued
when, immediately after the accident, Helen exposes her breast to him. Helen
introduces Ballard to Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a man who stages recreations of
famous car crashes and leads a group of car crash fetishists. Ballard and
Catharine get involved with Vaughan, Helen, and the rest of the group, but
their newfound sexual behavior often leads to dangerous places.
Crash sees
Cronenberg pushing his clinical, distant style to an almost perverse degree. It’s
his coldest film, which is saying something considering that this is the guy
who made Shivers and Dead Ringers. When Cronenberg shoots the
sex scenes, he shows the interest of an alien studying human behavior in the
most mechanical way possible. Characters are almost comically disaffected,
almost as if Cronenberg had threatened to shoot James Spader and Holly Hunter
if they showed any emotion (Deborah Kara Unger didn’t really have to change
what she usually does). Almost everyone in the movie whispers their lines and
behaves as if they’re in a trance- Spader, a go-to guy for playing perverts,
plays Ballard like an icier, less emotional version of his Sex, Lies, and Videotape character. Howard Shore’s typically
fantastic score is filled with odd, tonal guitar work that pushes an already
uneasy film to extreme degrees. And while many Cronenberg films are
deliberately paced, Crash is
downright glacial, taking its sweet time to go where it’s going. Crash is a deeply flawed movie- it’s
slow, it’s self-serious, a major character (Hunter) disappears from the film
for no reason, it’s seemingly disinterested in most of the characters beyond
their behavior, and it sometimes plays like a parody of a Cronenberg film (it
features a scene where Spader has sex with a woman’s leg wound, for Christ’s
sake). But Crash is also a deeply
fascinating look at people who don’t know how to relate to each other, at two
seemingly disparate obsessions (cars and sex), and at the extreme degrees
they’ll go to in order to feel something.
Ballard and Catherine have extramarital affairs, but they
don’t seem satisfied by much of anything. They’re isolated and alone. These are
people who don’t know how to act like people except through behavior- sex is an
option. Love? Unknown. But a car crash is an event one can’t remain
dispassionate about. It’s a violent, potentially deadly event, and it causes
more passionate behavior in Ballard and the similarly disaffected Helen. The threat
of death and destruction is a major turn on. It may seem strange to us (most
fetishes seem strange), but it’s the only thing that makes these people feel
alive.
The perpetually underrated Canadian actor Elias Koteas is
easily the strongest element in Crash,
in large part because Vaughan is the single most passionate character in the
film. Car crashes are, as Vaughan argues, fertilizing events rather than
destructive. The best scene in the film shows him restaging the famous James
Dean crash to a crowd of fascinated- and in some cases, sexually aroused-
onlookers. The immortality of this car crash makes it particularly erotic to
Vaughan. It’s a liberating release of energy. Vaughan doesn’t discriminate- he
sleeps with both women (Unger, Roseanna Arquette) and men (Spader). It is the
action that turns him on. When he stops by a particularly nasty car crash, he
sounds positively ecstatic as he’s taking pictures (“slow down…oh yeah…stop”).
Crazy as it all may seem, he seems to care more about what he’s doing than
anyone else does, and it’s by following this behavior that Ballard and
Catherine finally become more passionate, albeit not quite to the point where
they seem like recognizable human beings. It took a near fatal car crash to do
it. Maybe it’ll take a fatal one for one of them to go all the way. As Ballard
ominously says at the end, “Maybe the next one, darling”.
Did you know that you can like The Film Temple on Facebook and follow @thefilmtemple on Twitter? Well you do now!
Did you know that you can like The Film Temple on Facebook and follow @thefilmtemple on Twitter? Well you do now!
No comments:
Post a Comment