Review: The Pawnbroker (1964)

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Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Rod Steiger

For a landmark film from one of the major American directors of the latter half of the 20th century, Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker seems to be woefully underseen and underappreciated. The first American film to deal with the Holocaust and a film credited with providing a chink in the armor that would lead to the dismantling of the Production Code, The Pawnbroker is a historically important film, but it's also an incredibly good one. A character driven film about the enduring trauma of the Holocaust told from the point-of-view of a survivor who has attempted to segregate himself from the rest of the world as a mode of protection against further pain, The Pawnbroker features one of star Rod Steiger's best performances (and earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor). An enthralling and emotionally wrenching film, The Pawnbroker is a film worth seeking out.

Friday's Top 5... Films From Sidney Lumet

A great American director, RIP

#5: The Verdict

A tight and intense drama about an alcoholic lawyer with a case he absolutely needs to win. The film was nominated for multiple Oscars (including Best Director) and features one of Paul Newman's very best performances.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Network (1976)

Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, William Holden

Seen today, Network resembles a prophesy come true. It presents broadcast news as teetering over a precipice, about to slide the level of national discourse down to the lowest common denominator. Framed as satire at it’s most extreme, the film now seems like a mirror of our own time when the quest for ratings expands the definition of “news” into meaninglessness, and people only matter as much as the rating and share they can win.

It begins with Howard Beale (Peter Finch), a veteran newscaster with “an 8 rating and a 12 share” who has just learned that his final broadcast will come in two weeks. Rather than accept this and slink away into nothing, Howard makes an announcement that he will use his final show to commit suicide on the air. His ratings suddenly go up; people want to see if he’ll actually do it, and the network executives go back and forth on the legal and moral issues of letting Beale go through with his plan. They let him go on the air, but he doesn’t kill himself. Instead, he announces that he’s “run out of bullshit” and gives a brilliantly wrought speech which buys him the opportunity to become the network's "angry man" newscaster. However, the novelty of this new act quickly begins to fade and he’s once again on the verge of being fired. He has a revelation one night and shows up at the studio to make his most famous speech, the one that culminates with him yelling, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” With this he starts a national sensation and the news program is remade to look more like a variety show.

While Beale (and the no-holds-barred performance by Finch, who won a posthumous Oscar for Best Actor) is the center of the story, the point around which the rest of the narrative turns, it's Faye Dunaway and her character Diana Christensen who really own the film. This is a character who not only creates programs for television, but seems to have been created by television herself. She can’t talk unless it’s in network speak, relating everything to ratings and shares and demographics. Her idea of foreplay is to discuss ratings, and her relationship with Max Schumacher (William Holden) is consistently referred to by both as a “script” or a “show.” She’s head of the network’s entertainment division, which is doing so well that she’s being allowed to take over Max’s news division. She has an idea for a show about the Ecumenical Liberation Army (not so loosely based on the real-life Symbionese Liberation Army): “Each week we open with an authentic act of political terrorism taken on the spot, then we go to the drama behind the opening film footage… You’ve got to get the Ecumenicals to bring in that film footage for us. The network can’t deal with them directly; they are, after all, wanted criminals.” It’s reality television taken to the furthest extreme, but given some of the “reality” shows that get put on television now with the expectation that they will entertain us, it does seem sometimes like a show following terrorists is only a season away. Her takeover and merging of the entertainment and news divisions will eventually lead to Beale’s death when he’s assassinated by the terrorist group, who also have a show on the network, jauntily called the Mao Tse Tung Hour.

Dunaway gives a marvellous and finely etched performance which keeps Diana from being simply a robotic extension of the television screen or a caricature. There is humanity in her, however limited it may be (and it becomes more limited with each minute she spends at the network). Her flippant, ironic humor (“I was married for four years and pretended to be happy; and I had six years of analysis, and pretended to be sane. My husband ran off with his boyfriend, and I had an affair with my analyst, who told me I was the worst lay he’d ever had”) is used to distance herself from real-life, and she feels emotions less than she "acts" them out, playing moments in her life as if they were scenes. She's the one who comes up with the way to kill Beale, reasoning also that it will be good publicity for the Mao Tse Tung Hour. By the end of the film, none of the others are human beings to her, just characters, and what happens to them are simply plot points.

There are elements of the film which date it, but the content ultimately keeps Network relevant because we haven’t really moved away from what it is warning against. It is a film that was made thirty-two years ago, but what it is saying speaks as much for today as it did for the year in which it was made. Beale no doubt said it best:

“There is an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people… when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?”

Words to consider next time you’re watching Fox news.

100 Days, 100 Movies: 12 Angry Men (1957)

Director: Sidney Lumet
Starring: Henry Fonda

Social issue movies always run the risk of being so dry and didactic in their eagerness to make their point, that the entertainment value of the films can get lost along the way. Sidney Lumet is a filmmaker who has always been able to find the right balance between the message and the medium, expressing what he has to say about the given subject without sacrificing his narratives to the level of tutorials. In 12 Angry Men he examines a facet of the justice system - namely how a jury renders its verdict - casting a critical eye on something we take for granted as being fair and just, when in truth it can be anything but. He also creates a riveting film experience out of just twelve characters - the jurors in a murder trial - and one room, proving once and for all that sometimes less really is more.

The trial in question is never seen and the defendant is seen only briefly in the opening moments. What we know about the case we learn in the jury room as it is debated and discussed. To eleven of the jurors, it’s an open and shut case and the deliberation is little more than ceremonial, something in which they will half-heartedly participate before rendering a guilty verdict. For Juror #8 (Henry Fonda), however, this will not do and he refuses to vote along with the rest, eventually making a deal with them so that they will discuss the case. He’s motivated less by the belief that the defendant is innocent than the belief that it is their duty as jurors to actually discuss the evidence rather than make a hasty pronouncement. Slowly but surely, he breaks down the prosecution’s case, turning one juror after another against a guilty verdict.

There are a number of memorable scenes in this film. In one, Juror #8 recreates the shuffling walk of a witness who claims to have seen the defendant fleeing the scene. In another, he produces a switch blade that looks exactly like the murder weapon, which the prosecutors have claimed is unique and could only belong to the defendant. In one of the most powerful scenes, Juror #10 (Ed Begly) makes a virulently racist speech about the defendant’s obvious guilt, throwing around phrases like “those people” as the other jurors, one by one, stand from the table and turn away, refusing to listen to him. The film deftly explores issues of race and class with regards to the justice system, and its success in this lies in the fact that it doesn’t go the obvious route of making the defendant the sympathetic protagonist, but rather by showing the prejudices and assumptions brought to the trial by people who’ve never even met the defendant. We don’t know exactly what is referred to by #10’s “those people,” but our brief glimpse of the defendant shows someone who is vaguely “ethnic” looking in a very general sense. There is also the presumption amongst many of the jurors that as someone from an impoverished family, the defendant is accustomed both to experiencing and perpetuating violence. Many of the jurors are ready to believe that the defendant is guilty simply because he appears to fit the mould of a “dangerous person” as determined by the dominant ideology. This attitude of course begs the question of how the defendant is supposed to get a fair trial by a jury of his peers when the jurors don’t consider themselves his peers, but see him very much as part of “them” who is in contrast to “us.”

The film’s strength lies not only in it’s message, but also in the way that it’s filmed. It begins with the jurors filing into the jury room on a hot summer day. The fan isn’t working and the room seems to swelter as Juror #8 holds out and begins making his case and most of the others fight him, refusing to be swayed. Watching, we feel how hot it is in that room just as we feel the tension that’s ever rising. There is a degree of intimacy in the way this is filmed that is heightened by the set itself. As the film progresses, the room seems to get smaller, more claustrophobic.

This film, which looks simple on paper, is amazing in its complexities, and in Juror #8, Fonda creates on of his many great characters, but the other eleven actors are also worthy of high praise. While they’re sequestered, we never get to know any of the jurors’ names, but we truly get a sense of each and everyone of their personalities, some of them are strong and determined to hold steady, while others easily succumb to a herd mentality and are afraid to speak up if they disagree, and one just wants to get the verdict over with so that he can make it to the baseball game in time. By showing us these people, the ways that some are swayed to change their minds, and the ways that others make up theirs, and the way that evidence can be presented without really being considered, the film makes a strong and critical commentary on a deep flaw in the justice system. The power of the film lies not in whether or not the defendant is guilty or innocent, or in whether #8 proves the defendant’s innocence, but in how the jurors come to the conclusion of their verdict. And that’s what makes a simple story about twelve men in one room so memorable.

Review: Before The Devil Knows You're Dead

This is a fantastic film. Tightly plotted, well acted, and compelling, this is easily one of the best films of the year – and in a year full of great movies, that’s really saying something. It’s a crime film, but one that’s less concerned about the crime than it is with the consequences of it. The two perpetrators, Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), don’t just spend the movie trying to get away with it; they also contend with their remorse and regret for having done it in the first place.

Hoffman and Hawke play brothers – which might not sound believable on paper, but in the film it works. In their conversations leading up to and following the crime, you get a feel for the history that exists between them. You believe that Hank would let Andy talk him into the heist because you get the sense that all their lives, Andy has been coming up with ideas and getting Hank to follow through on them for him. There’s a very natural older sibling/younger sibling dynamic at play between them.

The plot itself – two people need money, they plan a crime, something goes wrong, and mayhem ensues in the attempt to cover it up – is standard, but the way that director Sidney Lumet presents it is not. We follow a character towards a plot point, reach it, and then the film doubles back to go towards that point again from a different perspective. The narrative structure is one of the film’s many strengths because we see things from every angle, and it allows the film to focus less on the crime itself than on the people who have to live with its fallout.

The performances in this film are excellent, especially those of Hoffman and Hawke. Hank is a guy who just can’t seem to get it together, who owes his ex-wife (Amy Ryan who between this film and Gone, Baby, Gone could carve out a nice niche for herself as women with chips on their shoulders) three months of child support, and his inability to pay for his daughter’s field trip leads her to declare him a “loser.” There’s an assumption on Andy’s part that Hank was always the favourite of their parents, though their father (Albert Finney) disdainfully declares that Hank has always been “such a baby.” Desperation surrounds Hank: he’s desperate to pay off his debts, he’s desperate to do something with his life, but mostly he’s desperate for love.

While Hank is a character who seems to have already lost control of his life before the film begins, Andy is a character who seems much more controlled, though in reality his life is just as chaotic. His marriage to his wife, Gina (Marissa Tomei) is troubled, the IRS is about to catch up with him for embezzling from his company, and he has a drug addiction that seems to have taken over his life (there is a scene early in the film where Andy cuts up some cocaine and emits a long sigh. This, too, has become a routine chore in his life). While Hank looks scruffy and nervous, Andy is cool and calm, his hair always perfectly slicked back. When he lets out his frustrations at home, he doesn’t manically trash the place but instead methodically goes through the house displacing things, going through the motions of anger that he doesn’t quite want himself to feel because he might not be able to control it.

As I said before, this is a crime film, but it isn’t an action film. This film takes its time, it slows the action down, distils it. We listen to the characters talk and sometimes we simply follow them through rooms, getting a feel for their lives. We understand their relationships with each other. One of the more interesting aspects of the film, to me, is that both brothers assume that it’s Hank, the perpetual screw up, who will do something to blow their cover. However, it’s something that Andy does which brings about the final scene and an act that falls somewhere between Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill.

See this movie. I can’t recommend it enough.