2001: The Year of the Cinematographer; Ali Is an Evolutionary Leap in Biographical Cinema

Was 2001 the Year of the Cinematographer? Perhaps so. In the past 12 months, we've seen a number of notable films shot in an array of diverse, arresting, personal, even innovative styles. The sheer variety of textures and moods suggests that we might be entering some kind of Golden Age of modern movie photography. What's onscreen suggests that our top cinematographers have moved beyond craftsmanship or artistic pretension; they're thinking like adventurous, capable actors, and giving their own performances through the lens?performances that are sometimes more noteworthy than all but a handful of performances taking place in front of it.

Space precludes a full, detailed accounting (so many Christmas releases to review, so little time), so a short list will have to do. Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg's regular collaborator, topped himself in A.I., pushing Spielberg's already profound understanding of the uses of darkness and light into new realms of fairytale expression. Even when the film's narrative and message faltered, Kaminski's fine shadings of blue, gray and black described the eternal fugue state in which the little robot David was condemned to dwell. The great Roger Deakins did fine work in two very different movies, finding a naturalistic cousin of black-and-white film noir photography in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There, and reinterpreting the glossy biopic for Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind. In the smart, unnerving, critically undervalued horror hit The Others, cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe reimagined classical Hollywood camerawork, doing black-and-white Hitchcock in something like Technicolor, finding a midpoint between cinematography's past and present. In Baran, Mohammed Davudi's compact, classical compositions and burnished Neorealist textures raised this tale of unrequited love beyond simple melodrama into the realm of fable. The final shot?a departed woman's footprint in mud being dissolved by rain?was one of the most powerful images in a year with more than its share.

?Emmanuel Lubezski earns a spot on the short list for his work on Ali. This eagerly awaited epic biography from director-cowriter Michael Mann builds on the look of The Insider. The tobacco-whistleblower drama fused the intimacy of handheld, documentary-style camerawork with the epic pretensions of Oscar-baiting Hollywood drama. The result was too long, bloated and fuzzy for its own good, but it was mesmerizing in places?a 90s version of a 70s movie like Serpico or The China Syndrome, which insisted that human-scaled rebels deserved as big a canvas as generals, explorers and prophets. Mann and his regular collaborator, Dante Spinotti, adopted a visual strategy that was unusual for Hollywood; instead of trying to explain away the inconsistencies and mysteries of persecuted hero Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe), or get inside his head with dream sequences or childhood flashbacks or voiceover monologue, they decided instead to get as physically close to him as they could and let it go at that. The camera often fixated on Wigand in closeup, letting us hear what other people in the room were saying as we watched Wigand react; when Wigand entered disputed or dangerous territory (his cigarette company's offices; the CBS News building; federal court) the camera often hung just behind his ear, so that the "L" created by the side of his head and the top of his shoulder formed a frame-within-a-frame, locking us inside Wigand's perceptions without pushing into first-person.

Ali pushes Mann's approach even further, creating a look so distinctive that I felt I was seeing an evolutionary leap in biographical cinema. The film's about a half-hour too long, just like Mann's previous two movies?like too many A-list Hollywood directors, Mann often mistakes scope and length for importance?and it takes too many detours into side alleys; sometimes it mounts lavish setpieces we've already seen before, like its re-creation of the murder of Malcolm X (who's surprisingly well-played by Mario van Peebles). But even when its momentum falters, its visuals never do. Lubezski, the wizard who went storybook-painterly for Tim Burton's gruesomely entertaining Sleepy Hollow, shoots nearly the entire film with handheld cameras and gyroscopically stabilized Steadicams, shifting focus spontaneously in each shot as if he's recording history as it happens. It's arresting, alive and provocative?a documentary affectation reimagined for Hollywood, and it goes a long way toward making Ali exciting even when it's not making much sense.

Bulked-up Will Smith plays Ali, formerly Cassius Clay, and he gets the intonation and fighting style about as right as any human could hope. This is a performance, not an impression; when it loses focus, it's usually because Mann has lost focus, re-creating the man's environment and inner circle for their own sweet sake, without any clear dramatic point. It bugs me to think that so many critics will dismiss Smith's fine work simply because we know what the real Ali looked and sounded like, and Smith isn't Ali. He's funny, sexy, smart and slightly opaque?deliberately so, just like Ali. He makes us ask if the man's whole life was a performance that swallowed up the man (and transformed him into something greater).

Mann and Lubezski do the Insider thing with Ali. They linger on his face as he ponders his destiny (or listens as others do it for him), hanging behind his shoulder as he batters opponents, spars with the press and greets his awed, curious public. The effect makes even sluggish sections of Ali mesmerizing. Mann appears to be working with multiple cameras, both inside and outside the ring. The onscreen action nearly always seems spontaneous, as if he blocked out the actors' movements before he let the cameramen come on the set; their lenses try to follow and fix people as they move, talk and live, treating them not as actors, but as unpredictable human beings who actually exist. Often the cameramen are a split-second too late to record the key moment; this, too, is real.

Like David Remnick's memorable biography King of the World, the reverential Ali pays special attention to the years 1964-1974, when Ali transformed himself from the Kentucky-born showboater Cassius Clay into a devout Muslim named Muhammad Ali, incurring the wrath of whites (and some blacks) for daring to reject Christianity and infantry service in Vietnam. ("Yeah, I know where Vietnam is," Ali snaps to an adviser. "It's on tv.") The real story here isn't a man's climb to athletic or financial success, but his push toward self-creation. Ali wants to claim his own destiny not merely as a man, a black man or an American, but as a member of the human race. "I ain't gonna be the champ the way you want me to be the champ," he insists. "I'm gonna be the champ the way I wanna be the champ." In Ali's 1964 fight with Sonny Liston, he avenges Liston's thuggish complacency with his fists, accenting each blow by shouting, "What's my name?"

The film's re-creation of the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle is huge, logistically complex and thrilling, but its high point isn't the bout itself?which was retold with far more clarity and vigor in Leon Gast's documentary When We Were Kings?but an encounter that took place not long before the fight, when Ali jogged through the streets of a village in Zaire trailed by poor, adoring African children. He pauses before a child's mural representing Ali, their champion?the People's Champion white sportswriters always wanted him to be?and stares at it for several long minutes, realizing, perhaps, that his principled, selfish pursuit of individuality is what finally merged him with the great mass of humankind.

I say "perhaps" because Mann and his cowriters don't try to explain Ali or summarize his emotions. They just photograph a re-creation of one decade from his life and let us draw our own conclusions. To some people, that's an abdication of responsibility; I see it as a gesture of respect. In the final shot, Ali towers frame right, reaching his gloved fists over the crowd in Zaire while the ceiling spotlights recede above him like a sea of stars?a god trapped on Earth, taunting the heavens.

Framed

I was ready to say a lot of complimentary things about Monster's Ball, an inventively photographed, naturalistically acted death-row drama, but as I sat down and tried to gather my thoughts, I realized the film was already starting to dissolve from my memory. While you're watching it, however, it's riveting, thanks mainly to the lead performances by Billy Bob Thornton as death-row guard Hank Grotowski and Heath Ledger as his hotheaded boy, Sonny. Halle Berry plays single mom Leticia Musgrove, the widow of a man executed on Hank's watch. (Her doomed ex is well-played by, of all people, Sean "P. Diddy" Combs; maybe he'll embrace acting full-time so we don't have to suffer through his music anymore.)

Directed by Marc Forster and written by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, this unusual film gives Southern Gothic atmosphere a grungy, lifelike, 70s movie treatment. Cinematographer Roberto Schaefer splits up his wide, grainy Cinemascope frames into two or three panels, partly obscuring significant moments behind partitions, doorframes and foreground objects?a visual correlative to our inability to truly understand what drives these people. Too often, though, the movie meanders through strong scenes and skips past crucial moments; it mistakes vagueness for mystery, and a few of the performances substitute overwrought, fidgety, "naturalistic" mannerism for truth. I wasn't impressed with Berry, a likable actress who hurls herself into the movie's already notorious sex scene with heroic force (Billy Bob works up a sweat, too), yet fails to capture the depth of Leticia's pain and confusion. Neither she, Thornton nor the director makes sense of Leticia's attraction to Hank, a slightly self-satisfied good old boy who still dotes on his putrid racist dad (an uncharacteristically rotten Peter Boyle, in Cape Fear-style pseudo-Southern accent). The story ends just when the relationship is falling into sensible patterns. Maybe that's the point, but it's still unsatisfying.