Movies into Film

Movies into Film

Buffalo Soldiers

Directed by Gregor Jordan

USA, 2003

The Noisy Americans

“Are you safer than before Dubya was appointed?” (Photo: Miramax)

A casualty of post-9/11 thought policing, the dark comedy Buffalo Soldiers sat on the shelf for two years so as not to offend “patriotic” sensibilities. Now, buoyed perhaps by the success of its cellmate The Quiet American and an ever-growing disenchantment with Bush, Buffalo Soldiers makes its belated debut, and the movie was worth the wait. It’s easy, in the very first scene, to grasp why Miramax freaked out. The film opens on a dream sequence of Joaquin Phoenix’s body falling through the sky, hurtling past tall office buildings and landing with a thud. What would have seemed supremely tasteless in late 2001 now appears to be visual shorthand for the American experience: we were all dumped out of those towers by our government’s lack of preparedness.

Like most of us, the movie has a divided soul. It works best as a sophisticated comedy, full of such delicious non-sequiturs as an Army colonel (Ed Harris) chewing out an enlisted man, then immediately apologizing for his insensitive behavior. (It’s great to see Ed Harris have the time of his life in this role.) Conversely, there’s a slight excess of galley-playing shtick: a tank marauding a street fair is fine, yet the film serves up just one demolished car too many.

I must admit I relish the thought of controversy sparked by Buffalo Soldiers’ vision of the U.S. military: a wasteland of convicts and dropouts trained to kill, almost all of whom profit from black marketeering. As the media genuflect before continued (and ineffectual) U.S. presence in Iraq, the uniformed drug runners who populate this movie come as a refreshing antidote to jingoistic holiness.

Phoenix plays the ringleader of covert operations on an Army base in Stuttgart, circa 1989, and it’s the best acting he’s done yet. The air of Valley Dude insincerity that hampered his earlier roles works to his advantage here. Anna Paquin invests the underwritten ingénue part with serious verve; she made me believe that her toothy smile and curly raven hair were (almost) enough to redeem Phoenix’s amoral opportunist. The too-seldom-seen Elizabeth McGovern scores another minor victory as the colonel’s ice queen wife, and Scott Glenn satisfies as a by-the-book serviceman until a late plot twist reduces him to a caricature.

If Buffalo Soldiers had ended with the stylized framing of Glenn and Phoenix in mortal embrace against an illumined night sky, the film might have been close to a masterpiece. The coda feels tacked on, as though the director thought “uplift” a necessary counter to the gallows humor that preceded.

Reliving 9/11

(Photos: ArtificialEye.com)

Of the eleven international directors whose short films comprise 11’09”01, it’s Mira Nair, maker of the frivolous Monsoon Wedding, who takes on the oozing self-righteousness that characterized those early days after the attack. Depicting a Pakistani family in New York whose neighbors snub them when the elder son is accused of terrorism, Nair gently skewers the psychotic prissiness of the American psyche. The topic and her approach are worthy of a feature-length film, yet Nair makes it flower in eleven minutes, nine seconds and a single frame.

Not every contributor uses his or her time as wisely. I’ll pass over the abject failures (Japan, Israel, Britain, Egypt) and steer you to the best of the rest, the segments from Mexico, France, Burkina Faso and, yes, the U.S.A. Sean Penn, in the director’s chair, proves once more to be an agile observer of compelling details; he wrests a great performance from Ernest Borgnine in the role of a widower who lives as though his wife were still alive. In laying out summer dresses on what was her side of the bed, the white-haired Borgnine resembles a flabby, overweight Olivier, and the level his acting reaches might amaze you. Claude Lelouch, who made his name with A Man and a Woman, returns to his perennial theme—love—in a romance between a deaf woman and her sign-language interpreter; she makes plans to break off their relationship as the towers crumble. The Mexican segment offers no comfort. Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritú’s minimalist piece projects a dark canvas broken intermittently by glimpses of bodies falling. By contrast, the lightest and sweetest of the bunch belongs to Idrissa Ouédraogo. He dares to have fun in his fable of a paperboy who spots Osama bin Laden lurking in Ouaga and decides, with his school chums, to capture Osama for the reward money.

Borgnine, unexpectedly magnificent (Photo: ArtificialEye.com)

There’s surprisingly little anger in 11’09”01. No blasts at Bush, no castigating the administration for their assaults on civil liberties in the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Diffident statements abound in this anthology, but something larger, deeper, overarching—what we’re waiting for—appears fleetingly and vanishes. – NPT (June 2003)

11’09”01 (September 11)

Directed by Mira Nair, Ken Loach, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Sean Penn, Claude Lelouch, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritú, Amos Gitai, Danis Tanovic, Shohei Imamura, Youssef Chahine, and Samira Makhmalbaf

France, 2003

Movies into Film

Email: npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com

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