The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The Silence, an impeccably acted but ultimately un-engaging mystery.

Silence, adapted by Baran bo Odar from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel and denoting Odar’s feature directorial debut, is a then-and-now flick. We first see two men track down an eleven-year-old girl in a field; one murders her while the other looks on. Nearly a quarter-century later, another young girl vanishes in what appears to be a copycat crime, stringing together the lives of grieving family members, detectives, and killers alike, all of whom are broken in their own, not unfamiliar ways.

If Silence so far sounds fairly by-the-numbers, that’s because it is, in every sense of the genre, procedural. Odar’s script hits all the expected notes in dealing with the aftermath of a grisly crime, but the net result is less than symphonic. Loss and estrangement permeate pretty much the lives of everyone attached to this case, whose resolution seems pre-ordained thanks to the film’s overt preamble. David (Sebastian Blomberg) is the detective who becomes obsessed with solving the current case as a means of distracting himself from his own recent widowhood. Burghart Klaussner’s Krischan, meanwhile, cannot let go of the earlier, unsolved crime despite his retirement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” glibs Elena (Katrin Sass) about the loss of her daughter 23 years ago, a wound that Sass shows us still bleeds internally even as Elena maintains a stiff upper lip. Even the two murderers we first meet, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) and Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), remain affected by their crime as they go about their lives.

Silence is smart until it isn’t. The notion of the past constantly nipping at the heels of the present is not a revelation. And the idea of suffering and proximity to danger fails to cast a suspenseful shadow over his film, even as an innocent young child injures himself on a trampoline. (We get it: harm lurks around the corner for everyone. Let’s not get too carried away.) And it is eventually a mistake to focus on the inner lives of the film’s tangled web of characters instead of making the central mysteries more engrossing. Still, Odar wrestles wonderful performances from his ensemble. Blomberg, Möhring, and particularly Sass are all quite credible in rendering people whose lives have become untethered, showing what it is to be lost in plain sight.

Sympathy comes for all, but empathy has a more difficult time entering the room. Odar’s portrayal of quiet mourning is eventually too, well, silent for its own good. All of these characters behave in ways that are psychologically justified, but they suffer from a lack of exploration. And most are stoic, so while Odar steers clear of melodrama, there’s also a lack of any kind of dramatic potency to shepherd his story along. And since we know early on whom the perpetrators of at least one crime are, there is little suspense (the thorough explanation by one character of another’s motive provides an unnecessary denouement as well).  One roots for the film and its talented players onscreen and behind it, but Silence is a murder mystery that is all too clinical. Like the events of the film itself, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

The Silence is currently playing at Cinema Village.

I was a teenager when Koch was elected to his first term, and I thought his chutzpah, moxie and general bluster was admirable and probably just what the city needed when the collective morale of New Yorkers bordered on outright despair. Edward I. Koch was bold, he was optimistic, he knew New York was better than its financial crisis and crime statistics.

He lifted our city out of its financial woes, embarked on an ambitious public housing program, made some innovative criminal justice reforms and gave New York its swagger back. When I went off to college in upstate New York in 1980, I felt that I was leaving a city on an upswing, with a mayor who was steering us to a better place.

Then in 1982, Koch overreached, and the Greenwich Village pol set his sights on the Statehouse, a job that required living in upstate New York. He stumbled, making an ill-conceived joke about the sterility of the suburbs, and my college newspaper in Ithaca wisecracked in the headline of its endorsement for governor: “Koch for Mayor.”

The people of upstate and my colleagues on the college newspaper editorial board sent the fish-out-of-New York-harbor-water a message: Stay in the five boroughs, where you belong. Koch went on to re-election in 1985, the same year I returned to the city and became the editor of a weekly newspaper, The West Side Spirit, which not only covered the mayor, but had a weekly political columnist, Dick Oliver, who was one of Koch’s chief antagonists.

Koch, in his third term (there were no term limits then) started collecting lots of enemies and critics. His administration was beset by scandal, from the Parking Violations Bureau mess that led to the suicide of Queens Borough President Donald Manes to the imbroglio over Koch’s close friend, Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bess Myerson, whose romantic life with an alleged mobster led to one of the more bizarre scandals in NYC history.

Like a marriage that goes sour after a decade, Koch’s relationship with the city and its various constituencies curdled in his third term. The African-American community attacked him for his racial insensitivity, and Wilbert Tatum, the publisher of the city’s largest black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, put “Koch Must Resign” on his front page every week. For two years.
I was an eager young journalist, in my mid-20s, who was still awestruck to be covering larger-than-life figures like Koch and his ilk. I decided in 1987, two years before his ill-fated third stab at re-election, to write a long cover story: “Can Koch Make a Comeback?”

Unintentionally, Koch taught me one of my most valuable journalism lessons when he refused to grant me an interview because my newspaper— particularly columnist Dick Oliver—had continuously bashed him.

Undeterred, I did a “write around,” interviewing more than 25 people in the administration and in the New York punditocracy, and it became one of my proudest pieces of journalism: a balanced and thoroughly reported picture of a once-mighty mayor on the ropes and hanging on for dear life.
In 1989, David Dinkins dethroned Koch in the primary and unceremoniously sent him back to private life.

In the following years, when well-wishers on the street told Koch they missed him, he would reply: “The people have spoken. And now they must be punished.”

One year after he left office, I decided to write another profile of Koch. My last question in that interview was a throwaway line: “So now that you have all this free time, how do you spend it?”

Koch replied: “I go to the movies two or three times a week.”

The next morning, I phoned Koch.

“Hey, Ed,” I said, “how would you like to be the West Side Spirit’s movie reviewer?”

“What would you pay?” Koch replied.

“How about $50 a week?” I said sheepishly, knowing that I was already committing a high percentage of my weekly freelance budget.

“Fifty dollars a week?! I wouldn’t cross the street for $50 a week!”

“But we’re a small paper,” I said plaintively.

“Well, call me when you get bigger,” he said and then dropped the receiver.

The Spirit had recently become part of a chain of five weeklies in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and the Hamptons. I phoned each publisher about my idea, asked them to contribute $50 per week for a syndicated movie column—and presto, a critic was born.

“How about $250?” I offered the next day.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll start today. But I have some ground rules: I don’t do openings. I don’t do cinematography. I just tell the reader whether the movie is worth the price of admission.”

For the next 23 years, Edward I. Koch reviewed a movie or two each week, with his trademark + or –, symbolizing his thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the everyman’s film experience.

One night a few months after he started, a friend called to tell me he saw Koch on the Johnny Carson show saying he had seven jobs in his post-mayoralty career but his favorite one was writing reviews for a chain of weekly newspapers.

Now that we all mourn the loss of a colorful New Yorker and a man who relished being called Hizzoner, I take some comfort that a young editor’s gimmicky idea to grab attention in a tough media town gave Koch some joy.

If they serve popcorn in heaven, I hope Koch has found his seat and is taking mental notes on the show unfolding before him.

This time, perhaps he’ll notice the cinematography.

Tom Allon, a 2013 candidate for New York City mayor, is the former editor and publisher of this newspaper.

These are Scorsese’s hack years. He hasn’t made a decent movie since hitching his cineaste ambitions to Leonardo DiCaprio’s box-office power. Each recent catastrophe (Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island), routinely hailed by critics as masterpieces, lacked the personal, real-world touch that had been the promise of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. The childhood fantasy in Hugo doesn’t express Scorsese’s urban Italian Catholic sensibility; it’s a false, Pixar-ish externalization of the ethnic, hormonal and psychic tensions that distinguished even a second-tier Scorsese movie like The Color of Money—it was either about a boy’s search for an artistic father figure, or a brash young acolyte’s competition and infatuation with a mentor, take your pick.

To read more of Armond White’s review, head to City Arts.

Monsters is a love story between two shallow, annoying people, Sam (Whitney Able) and Andrew (Scoot McNairy), who resemble Cameron Diaz and Ethan Coen wannabes, the kind of hipsters you see at the Independent Film Awards. They’re stuck in Mexico when an extraterrestrial invasion attacks Earth. Crisis brings out the couple’s foolishness (her weak bladder, his irresponsible loss of passports) and draws them together.

Director Gareth Edwards only has self-satisfaction in mind. He exploits the same sci-fi/horror movie trend as District 9 and The Blair Witch Project, using the same inept form: handheld, imprecise imagery and inefficient, repetitious improvised dialog. During long, dull stretches (where TV news broadcasts of aliens killing 5,000 humans provides weak backstory), you might think back on truly amazing apocalyptic narratives: Spielberg’s ferry spectacle in War of the Worlds; Paul W.S. Anderson’s 3-D dynamism in Resident Evil: Afterlife. And when these aliens, who resemble neon octopi, mate atop a Texaco gas station and put Sam and Alex in the mood, you might also think on the sentimental slop of Cloverfield.

Yet, Edwards’ idea of fitting his homemade F/X into a monster/make-out movie is better than the film’s trite political allegory: The “Infected Zone” of the alien attacks resembles the U.S./Mexican border, which is visualized as a bunker-style fortress resembling China’s Great Wall: Sam gasps, “It’s like the Seventh Wonder! The largest man-made structure I’ve ever seen!” This depiction of the Immigration crisis is slightly less ridiculous than the already-forgotten Machete. If Monsters’ poor craft, makeshift commentary and air of mystery and danger are about anything, it’s really about contemporary film narrative and communication collapsing into self-satisfied, indie-movie nonsense.
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Monsters
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Runtime: 92 min.

For those who missed that unexpected satirical graphics lecture on the current recession that capped Adam McKay’s The Other Guys, Inside Job is the next best thing. With entertaining clarity, writer-director Charles Ferguson explains what caused the recession that began September 15, 2008. Not a comic like McKay, Ferguson seriously chronicles the twisty financial dealings and recondite legislative details of deregulation that started back in the Reagan administration and eventually let the banks go wild with subprime loans and kickback benefits. He traces more recent government history that led to the current economic meltdown, but then Ferguson gets caught up in satisfying the “Gotcha!” urge that ruins most recent docs—like his 2008 anti-Bush, Iraq War screed No End in Sight.

Spitzer had his own inside job.

This time, as Ferguson comes close to Gotcha—uncovering the family tree of government appointments and greedy corporate privilege that led to lost jobs, foreclosed homes and banking bailouts—he backs down. He not only drops his entertaining intelligibility, he loses the deeper subject that would give this documentary power.

It isn’t enough that Inside Job ends on a muckraking note—“Some things are worth fighting for”—which calls for what? Revolution? Putsch? Anarchy? Narrator Matt Damon mouths Ferguson’s glib sentiments, appealing to populist anger (rubber-stamped by an ad-blurb promising the film “will get you boiling mad”). Simplifying the complex of establishment corruption prevents Ferguson from being the Patrick Henry of the digital age. His true interest is subtler than pamphleteering: He likes examining the structure of America’s power elite like Lewis Lapham’s The American Ruling Class.

No End in Sight disappointed because Ferguson settled for Bush-bashing as an end-all, blame-all explanation and absolved the workings of the government bureaucracy (whistle-blowers) he had discovered. Inside Job, as its title suggests, is more clear-headed about white-collar guilt, perhaps because financial misdeeds are so common—so implicitly understood—that Ferguson doesn’t immediately go into high-dudgeon. Instead, he gets right to the source of political and managerial arrogance. He begins with the folly of politicians, using the example of Iceland privatizing its own banks then destroying its economy. It is both a warning and an allegory. After all, what really offends Ferguson and drives his filmmaking is officialdom: the workings of egotistical authority from the Ivy League to Wall Street to Washington, D.C.

This linkage is fascinating beyond the recession itself (John Kirby and Lapham got at it definitively in the little-seen The American Ruling Class). Ferguson might deal with it exclusively some day, given that Inside Job shows improvement, avoiding No End in Sight’s partisanship. The financial mismanagement shared by Democrat and Republican administrations over the past three decades suggests Ferguson’s viewpoint is growing, getting closer to what most recent docs lack: understanding.

Inside Job provides financial summaries and information that most mainstream newsmedia haven’t. Still, the despair and anger and suspicion it arouses needs a place to go if this is going to be better than McKay’s lark or a feel-righteous Daily Show episode. Ferguson’s explication requires even greater feeling than the sarcasm of Peter Gabriel’s “Big Time” that opens the film; it requires art such as Oliver Stone provided in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, where stock market megalomania was put in human, rather than tabloid, terms. Critics disparaged Stone’s thrilling exposé because it didn’t provide them with easy castigation. (They always expect Stone to be a less conscientious, imaginative and skillful director than he turns out to be.) Money Never Sleeps understands the characteristics of bureaucracy that Ferguson glosses in Inside Job, yet struggles to comprehend.

Ferguson’s method (he’s a political science doctorate from M.I.T. and Brookings Institute fellow) is to follow the career paths of bureaucrats and government appointees like Charles Keating, Henry Paulson, Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke and the lofty fiats of Reagan, Clinton, Bush and, briefly, Obama. He outlines the culprits who de-regulated the banks long before Bush took office and currently have come back to justify their earlier mistakes. This clarity opposes the fat cats’ sleight-of-highhandedness—as when quoting Greenspan’s contemptuous evasion, “If you had a PhD in mathematics, you couldn’t understand whether de-regulation was good for you.”

Inside Job becomes rousing when Ferguson gets a bureaucrat in his crosshairs, like disingenuous lobbyist Scott Talbot, fumbling Fred Mishkin, hard-nosed David McCormick or short-tempered academic-factotum Glenn Hubbard, who dares him, “Take your best shot.” Ferguson counters them with a series of exclamations: “For me that’s clearly not true!” “You must be joking!” “You can’t be serious!” Ferguson’s querulous tone departs from the film’s cool, five-part structure because he can’t hide his ire which comes from his distaste (same as No End in Sight) for the temperament of these prevaricating pols—such as economist and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, shown reclining with a glass of scotch in his hand. And the best part of Inside Job tracks these guys to their lairs.

“Does Columbia Business School have a conflict-of-interest problem?” Ferguson asks, hunting down the strange, suspicious connection between academic sponsorship and government promotion. He comes close to revealing how academic elitism and privilege facilitates Wall Street’s personal interests and the government’s collusion. When Ferguson details the history of Treasury Secretary and Federal Reserve positions, he’s on fascinating, dangerous ground—meekly exposing Obama’s elitist agenda. But this calls for something more than a Gotcha movie.

Consider that Inside Job’s one clear villain, Larry Summers (recent Obama Cabinet resignee, past Harvard University president and former Department of Treasury Secretary from 1999 to 2001) is also a hero in The Social Network. The only way to escape this hall of mirrors is for Ferguson to abandon Michael Moore-style denunciation and get closer to the human propensity for power and self-interest. If Inside Job were a great movie it would rebuke the asinine class/ethnic games of The Social Network, in which Summers is used to humiliate the CGI Winklevoss Twins. Ferguson hasn’t gotten there yet. His poli-sci fascination still needs to attain Oliver Stone’s insight or even the depth that Marcel Ophüls brought to his 1970s documentaries, where humanity was more important than political stance. If Ferguson means to surpass the purely topical snark of The Other Guys, he needs to realize this: Compassion can also be a clarifying tool.
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Inside Job
Directed by Charles Ferguson
Runtime: 108 min.

Politics don’t matter to directors David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh and Olivier Assayas, whose Carlos, a lavish, gracefully-paced depiction of the terrorist Ilich “Carlos” Ramirez is strangely apolitical, even amoral. It’s part of the new affectless style—derived from hipster cool and leftist guilt that condemns the capitalist West for its culpability in colonialism and any advantage resulting from imperialist history. “Carlos” is the tag claimed by a South American killer trained in Moscow who pretends to want a social revolution on behalf of exploited workers, and exploits the Palestinian cause against Israeli Zionists. Played by Edgar Ramirez as a sexy sociopathic careerist, he is shown for his daring ability to insert himself into rebel organizations, kill OPEC delegates, cross borders, shoot police point-blank and seduce women. (“Treat weapons gently, tenderly. Weapons are an extension of my body.”)

Edgar Ramirez plays sexy sociopathic careerist Carlos the Jackal.

Overall, Carlos is an elegantly made, yet unarousing history—taking the theme of Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 thriller Day of the Jackal and Steven Spielberg’s Munich and making those productions seem bourgeois by following Carlos indifferently, without so much as a moment of shock even when he massacres cops in front of his own bourgie, guitar-strumming allies. His outrages are meant to be viewed dispassionately. This isn’t a new concept of biopic, just something less satisfying because Assayas—like Fincher in Zodiac and Soderberg in Che—is a Flatliner. He creates cinema by extracting emotion, morality and political commitment.

The key to Flatliner cinema comes with an opening epigraph: “Despite a great deal of historical and journalistic research there remain controversial gray areas in Carlos’ life. This film must therefore be viewed as a work of fiction tracing two decades in the career of a notorious terrorist. His relations with other characters have been fictionalized as well.”

Reducing political terrorism to “gray areas” shows that its truth—and horror—are of little interest to Assayas and his brethren. It smacks too much of middle-class conventionality, calling for patriotic devotion and possible jingoism—those unhip cinematic codes, which, it should be pointed out, Munich movingly transcended.

Flatliners promote social detachment that, in turn, seems nihilistic, like the irresolvable crimes in Zodiac and the numbing chaos of Che. Yet Assayas’ fluid technique—radiantly photographed by Yorick Le Saux and Denis Lenoir—makes it chic and far superior to the mess of Mesrine. This is what romantic 1960s radicalism has come down to in the new millennium: long, drawn-out “process” and “drift” (as a highbrow art magazine praised Zodiac). Although Carlos is full of murder, treachery and sociopathy (the Venezuelan-born serial killer proclaims himself “the armed wing of Arab revolution”), this is a fleet-footed, light-hearted epic—an aesthetic alternative to the Old School movie epic that is referenced when Carlos invokes Lawrence of Arabia to a classroom of African rebels. Its series of haphazard, sometimes inept, massacres is Assayas’ extended exercise in dark whimsy, a terrorist carnival that sucks the political marrow out of the historical epic genre—his real Irma Vep.

Besides Ramirez’s striking performance, Carlos’ most distinctive aspect is Assayas’ perverse decision to score the 1970s-set story with anachronistic pop music from British and American post-punk bands of the 1980s. This helps distance the story’s political and moral significance by emphasizing the fun of post-punk rhythms and political affectation. If Wire’s “Ahead” didn’t have such stirring rhythms fit for exhilarating cinema, this gimmick would seem decadent and appalling—particularly for how it distracts from historical gravity, such as a clip of Yasir Arafat’s stunning UN speech: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let branch fall from my hand.” Does its inclusion mean Assayas’ endorsement or merely a period marker for a film too cool to announce such things?

As Flatliner cinema, Carlos lacks the psychological insight on terrorist activity that distinguished Marco Bellocchio’s Red Brigade tragedy Good Morning Night or Haile Gerima’s trans-European political sojourn Teza. Assayas’ divertissement preferences the genre’s superficial attractions—highlighting Carlos’ evolving physique over a sense of global menace. (Before his capture, Carlos was denounced as “a historical curiosity, a communist windbag who is of no use to Arab leaders anymore.”) His con-artist allure makes for the film’s best scene when he seduces German feminist Magdalena Kopp (crafty Nora von Waldstatten) to join his gang: “Are you ready to submit to it unconditionally?” he asks just before she blows him. Yet even his vanity is observed with Fincherian apathy.

Carlos gives hipsters Munich minus the moral conviction and dramatic cogency that hipsters fashionably distrust. It’s being presented in two versions: 330 minutes and 165 minutes, one as emotionally flat as the other.

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Carlos
Directed by Olivier Assayas
At IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas
Runtime: 165 min.

We can’t pretend that anything is more important in film culture than the Internet humiliation-death of Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi taking place the same week as the media hype for The Social Network. After that human tragedy, the media’s celebration of the Facebook movie (a cinematic calamity) shows an alarming disregard for how movies intersect with real life. The Social Network so glamorizes the destructive effects of Internet license and individual greed that its carelessness reflects upon Life As We Know It—a perfect dovetailing with the new romcom starring Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel that re-wires the argument about same-sex marriage into a tired screwball formula.

Don’t worry: Katherine Heigl isn’t knocked up in this one.

The distance between Life As We Know It and real life is the same prevaricating distance between mythologizing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s anti-social behavior and ignoring the actual hostility that his invention has made possible. (Clementi posted his suicide note on Facebook.) This should force any thinking moviegoer to question the media’s explicit celebration of the Internet industry. How the movie ignores Internet incivility repeats the callous way our culture accepts all manner of Internet bullying. Thus The Social Network helps to glamorize the “kewl” ways that the Internet makes us less responsive to each other as human beings. The slippery slope hits the pits.

Life As We Know It also shows Hollywood’s insensitive manipulation of real life issues. Director Greg Berlanti, who made his directing debut in 2000 with the amusing gay soap opera The Broken Hearts Club, refrains from what he seemed to know and has made a film that resembles the over-simplification and dramatic compromises that he learned worked on TV’s Brothers & Sisters series. That artistic concession has led to gimmickry: Heigl and Duhamel play Holly Berenson and Eric Messer, not-so-young singles in the whitest parts of Atlanta, Ga., that look just like Brentwood, Calif. Their careerism is interrupted by sudden, unexpected adopted parenthood. (Don’t ask, the set-up is just plain morbid.)

Berlanti’s irreality—following the cutesy script by Ian Deitchman and Kristin Rusk Robinson—results in a synthetic vision of life that is, essentially, an appeasement of the pre-fab, bourgeois status quo. He goes from the Broken Hearts Club of gay male experimentation and self-discovery to the Conformity Club of doing and thinking like others. The presumption of suburban heterosexual normality disguises sentiment for same-sex marriage in the very Doris Day-Rock Hudson template from which previous generations of gay people had recoiled. Life As We Know It’s underlying feeling gainsays civil rights issues. Bad boy Messer, who Duhamel makes resemble Jackass star Johnny Knoxville, gets completely domesticated; his maturation turns personal choice (individuality) into conventionality.

Unlike François Ozon’s sexually unorthodox characters who seek to fulfill their humanity through procreation, Holly and Messer’s leap into parenthood capitulates to an unquestioned social standard. Not accidentally, Berlanti’s camera emphasizes the expanse and expense of the lavish abode Holly and Messer inherit along with an infant. Their progressivism is materialistic, not philosophical. Broken Hearts Club was a community made of others; this film is all about the house. Berlanati has moved from homo-liberalism to homogeneity. That could be commendable if only the story’s process made it clear—or maybe funny.

This unconscious capitulation—coming on the heels of The Social Network’s media domination and the suicide at Rutgers—feels uncomfortably hegemonic. It illustrates unexamined social influence not much different from the license to harass that The Social Network condones—and has subsequently proven disastrous in real life. The Zuckerberg character’s seething envy of Harvard WASPs, and even of up-market hedonism, are casual forms of social pressure that Aaron Sorkin’s script ignores. Sorkin brags about the “irony” of anti-social Zuckerberg creating a socializing technology, yet he never questions how that technology—without personal responsibility, regulation or a truly socializing impulse toward compassion—can become a destructive, intimidating tool.

The Social Network advertises Internet wealth and power very similar to the luxuriously displayed class advantages in Life As We Know It. And the fawning media—what critic Prairie Miller astutely terms “controlled media”—automatically corroborates it. Exalting Zuckerberg’s incivility and social ineptitude is part of the corroboration that encourages Internet snark by which other cyberspace miscreants—following the Zuckerberg characters’ vindictive insecurity—bash individuality. By targeting a gay classmate, the Rutgers bullies evinced the same homophobia that is repressed throughout The Social Network.

This callousness is also a form of capitalist collusion that carries its own idiotic mystique—as when director David Fincher relates his multi-narrator film to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. If Fincher was intellectually agile and truly film savvy, his comparison would have extended to Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, where the “auto-mobile” inventor worried that his contraption “may be a step backwards in civilization. It may be that they won’t add to the beauty of the world or the life of men’s souls. I’m not sure. But automobiles have come. And almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They’re going to alter war and they’re going to alter peace. And I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles. And it may be that George is right. May be that in 10 or 20 years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine but have to agree with George that automobiles had no business to be invented.” Seems the “auto-mobile” functions as a perfect synonym for the Internet.

Both Life As We Know It and The Social Network are equally glib. Film culture cannot go forward unless we recognize that these two movies evidence subtle, even uncharitable, change in men’s souls.
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Life as We Know It
Directed by Greg Berlanti
Runtime: 112 min.

Let Me In ought to be rated NC-17 due to the problematic nature of its vague concept: Spooky Abby (Chloe Grace Moretz), a child vampire, encourages her wimpy neighbor Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to emulate some of her bloodthirsty rage in response to his school bullies. It’s a morbidly grim Afterschool Special. Yet some movies are not suitable viewing for those who cannot formulate the expediency of right and wrong—which usually means children. Let Me In proves there are unprincipled adult filmmakers who can’t tell right from wrong either.

A scene from Let Me In.

Bluenoses who complain about the ratings system don’t understand that ratings are not censorship nor a quality judgment but a guide to an out-of-control industry that will do anything for a cheap thrill. This perverted fairy tale about Owen’s guardian vampire degrades the vampire genre simply to exploit adolescent sappiness. Let Me In draws an unclear conclusion about social behavior, exploiting Owen’s suffering and Abby’s treachery just for lurid kicks. Less than ambiguous, its portrayal of teenage loneliness is dubious—replacing nerdiness (Owen endures an excruciating wedgie) with the delight of murder and revenge, disregarding social and psychological stability. It warps the instructive purpose of fairytales and settles for horror movie sensationalism.

Matt Reeves, who last perpetrated the ludicrous neo-Godzilla movie Cloverfield under the aegis of TV schlockmeister J.J. Abrams, directs in the same style of visual mumbo-jumbo: When Reeves’ camera can’t swish-pan, it blurs. Either way you still can’t see the action clearly. (Expect unsophisticated viewers to praise the “indirect” method of his submerged swimming pool massacre climax.) The opening ambulance trauma scene recalls the inanity of The Blair Witch Project, where degraded technique (fuzzy obfuscation) is meant to create suspense. The same dumb logic governs Reeves’ attitude toward Owen’s dilemma and Abby’s malevolence; he confuses one’s pathos with the other’s immorality (she’s always looking for the next meal anyway).

The 2009 Swedish film Let the Right One In originated this confusion. Its title—borrowed from a 1993 Morrissey song that expressed adolescent longing—sentimentalized moral ambiguity. Abby cannot enter her friend’s home without being invited, requiring his acceptance of evil. Bringing teen anguish to vampire lore (M. Night Shyamalan-style rather than Buffy-style) was lamely nihilistic—and inferior to the vampire romance Twilight that opened the same season. But critics preferred Let the Right One In for its self-pitying view of adolescence. That’s also the sell point of this American remake—add on trite political commentary by setting the story in the nuclear test site Los Alamos, N.M., during the 1980s and frequently cutting to TV broadcasts of President Reagan as a right-wing ghoul warning: “America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good…”

So teen anguish gets smashed-up with facile politics, America-hatred and routine Christianity bashing. (Owen’s mother is a grace-saying, Bible-reading drunk whose estranged husband complains about “more of your mother’s religious crap.”) Meanwhile, vampirism—though freaky—gets idealized. But when Abby’s father (Richard Jenkins) mutilates himself after fouling-up a blood-raid/murder-spree and she goes on her own feeding frenzies—including neighborhood lovers and the only cop in town—the gruesome bloodletting lacks the beautiful moral symmetry of the all-time great adolescent horror movie, Brian De Palma’s 1976 teen classic Carrie. Apparently, neither Reeves nor critics remember De Palma’s part-satiric, part-melodramatic demarcation between Carrie’s pathetic need to belong and her tragic acts of revenge.

True to millennial faithlessness, Let Me In rejects Carrie’s complexity, emphasizing both Abby and Owen’s misery. Young scholar Jesse Tucker wrote a brilliant essay describing De Palma’s final twist (where Carrie’s hand grasps her schoolmate’s) as a forgiving gesture toward commiseration. Reeves flips that beautiful motivation in the scene where Owen ignores a reach for help from one of Abby’s victims. It’s an obscene devolution of the genre. Children should not be exposed to this lurid display of helplessness and pessimism—and adult viewers should be wary of the nihilistic indulgence.

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The Social Network glamorizes a new paradigm: How the Internet’s basic disconnect characterizes contemporary public discourse. Director David Fincher’s lustrous video images make instant, stylish mythology out of the way Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg re-popularized the Internet by founding the Facebook in 2003. This brainy, insular 19-year-old pinpointed the Internet as a personal, rather than formal, means of communication and thus became the nation’s youngest billionaire. TV’s Aaron Sorkin concocted a script that pretends to assess Zuckerberg’s sea-change, but it’s Fincher’s mythmaking (his usual yellow-green color scheme, more burnished than ever) that uncannily combines moral confusion, social decline and empire building—although leaving out such crucial details as where the money comes from and the moral consequences of all that glorified disconnection.

The Social Network explores the early days of Facebook.

The scene where pre-billions Zuckerberg takes revenge on the girlfriend he’s neglected by leaping to his computer and then writing and transmitting a blog that defames her physical person, intelligence and family heritage comes across as a frighteningly casual presentation of the self-righteous hostility that has become Internet etiquette. It derives from Zuckerberg’s viciousness and nearly autistic social detachment—an immaturity that infects the Internet but here is looked at uncritically. Fincher’s indifference and Sorkin’s calm about Zuckerman’s malediction is an early indication of the film’s failure. The Social Network glibly accepts Zuckerberg’s selfishness as entertaining and nerd-cool—even when Zuckerberg allegedly betrays his Harvard university colleagues, cheating them out of a fortune.

If it is true that The Social Network defines the decade, as an ad blurb states, then that’s just an accident of its shortcomings. We need to look deeper: It inadvertently defines an era when subterfuge and reprehensible behavior are accepted as a social norm—especially if it proves lucrative. No wonder mainstream media minions have flipped for The Social Network; they recognize the fiat of technological privilege.

Hollywood and the journalism industries—both cowed by the Internet breathing down their necks—have perfected a method to curtail individual response to movies, thereby dictating widespread enthusiasm for this shallowly complicated film. To Fincher and Sorkin, Zuckerberg represents a new cultural avatar who (like other snarky Internet avengers) must be worshipped, not held to account. They inflate Zuckerberg’s story as a “creation myth” (as one lawyer calls him), the better to concede victory to a tycoon of new technology rather than apply normal social or professional standards to his hostile relations with people. The Social Network sucks up to successful, wealthy young powerbrokers.

As played by pale-skinned, curly-headed Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg may be the most obnoxious movie protagonist Noah Baumbach didn’t write; his lack of family and cultural background (apparently Jewish but only explicitly a smart, fast-talking Harvard dork) makes him Everyphenom, the exemplar of a brilliant new generation we must learn to admire and excuse. Power-worship keeps Sorkin from making a What Makes Sammy Run? inquiry or Paddy Chayefsky jeremiad. Rather, he slickly exploits ethnic narcissism, yet never penetrates feelings of inferiority or competitiveness that made Eisenberg so moving in Holy Rollers, last spring’s extraordinarily soulful and chagrinned tale of a Hasidic youth’s worldly aspiration.

Ignoring any possible spiritual investigation, Sorkin crisscrosses two separate lawsuits brought against Zuckerberg: one by the WASP Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer and Josh Pence) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), classmates who first engaged his Internet ingenuity to build them a dating website; and the other by dormmate Eduardo Savarin, who financed Zuckerberg’s early experiments but was frozen out of eventual profits. Then a third party—Napster cutthroat Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake)—enters the fray, driving Zuckerberg’s egomania. Timberlake’s soft-voiced shark briefly hones the film’s craven focus: “Revenge is not a dish served cold; it’s served immediately and relentlessly.” But Fincher and Sorkin go back to sentimentalizing Zuckerberg-as-victim: Their shared backgrounds in TV advertising and prime-time diversion are evident in trial scenes that play Zuckerberg’s superciliousness against his opponents’ hurt desperation and in glossy high-life scenes that distract from Zuckerberg’s self-interest, trading audience prurience and envy for insight.

Particularly egregious is a Royal Regatta sequence meant to ridicule the Winklevoss lifestyle. Fincher shoots it just like a Nike commercial break. He’s an affectless director who disregards the emotional impact of every scene and situation: Zuckerberg’s dating faux pas are staged as coldly as his contempt for legal procedure. And in each scene, Sorkin’s approach to Zuckerberg’s conduct is unctuous with fake significance, letting the protagonist’s eminence excuse his reprehensible misbehavior. It’s disingenuous for Sorkin to prioritize Zuckerman saying, “For the first time in the Winklevoss’ lives things didn’t work out for them,” for really that applies to his own privilege.

Not Soul Man, Harvard Man nor The Paper Chase—all movies that “got Harvard” to varying instructive degrees—The Social Network is simply Hollywood’s way, post-Obama, of sanctioning Harvard’s “masters of the universe” mystique. It’s an attempt at glorifying a contemporary aristocracy-cum-plutocracy through flattery of Zuckerberg and his ilk. Ironically, these are the same shameless tycoons Oliver Stone takes out with sniper precision in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (a title that also fits this Facebook legend).

Like one of those fake-smart, middle-brow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It’s really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness. That’s why it evades Zuckerberg’s background timidity and the mess that the Internet has made of cultural discourse. In interviews, Sorkin brags about the multiple narrative and Fincher has even invoked Citizen Kane—both are grandstanding excuses for Zuckerberg’s repeated masturbatory request for friendship—a mawkish George Clooney ending. Here’s the truth: Kane was not about a brat’s betrayal, but about a sensitive braggart’s psychological and philosophical shift inward. The Social Network is more like Hollywood’s classic film industry self-romance The Bad and the Beautiful. Yet that Kane-lite film never excused its bad-boy protagonist’s sins and ended magnanimously by converging his three injured parties’ points of view into one beautifully clarifying narrative. It admitted our cultural compromises; this is TV-trite. In The Social Network, creepiness is heroized.

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For one brief moment, The American becomes a true thriller when George Clooney, playing an enigmatic assassin, stakes out a new assignment in Italy and encounters Filippo Timi (who played the mesmerizing figment of Benito Mussolini in Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere). Here, Timi—the actor of the year—projects another fully imagined life: a wary yet generous village mechanic so emotionally open that his complex humanity exposes Clooney’s dull sham.

George Clooney in The American

Clooney’s still on his anti-American kick, sentimentalizing the corruption that appeals to cynical film critics who fall for his forced, noxious “charm.” Portraying a killing machine who murders unknown people for unknown reasons might be a clever metaphor for Clooney’s disingenuous occupation—perhaps even a confession—except that Timi, by exuding irreducible life, shows the art of great acting while Clooney’s closed-off automaton is merely another imperti-
nent conceit.

Instead of examining the pessimism Clooney displays in Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck or Up in the Air, The American abstracts it into a generalized, quasi-political dread. “You’re an American; you think you can escape history,” an Italian priest tells the assassin. So Clooney continues his path of disconnected malaise—throwing in flirtatious episodes with vacuously sexy women but going for an attitude of meaningless cool. (He wears a tattoo of an endangered butterfly.) His confession, “I don’t think God is very interested in me,” doesn’t carry the weight of remorse or hopelessness. It’s a pose—customized like director Anton Corbijn’s crystalline postcard imagery.

Clooney revisits his 1970s movies fetish, imitating the mysterious, nefarious protagonist of Coppola’s The Conversation and the doomed assassin of The Parallax View, but without the authenticity of those overrated films. Corbijn imitates their studied calm, but this is not the penetrating quiet of a real locale or genuine paranoia or suspense but of portentousness.

Despite The American’s artsy style (evoking Soderbergh’s The Good German), it doesn’t refine post 9/11 distress. Yet Clooney’s still trying to profit from updating ’70s counterculture dissent. By portraying a cipher who spreads murder across the globe, Clooney falsifies the difficulty of living with a conscience that Timi gets across in only a few seconds. In The American’s bloody climax, Clooney romanticizes the guilty conscience he doesn’t have.
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The American
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Runtime: 103 min.