Click on the image to enlarge.

Angst in the American suburbs, circa 1955. It’s well-traveled territory in movies but remains an interesting subject, at least to those of us who did time in the American suburbs of the 50s and 60s.

The fascination lies in the contrast between the image of a suburb, peace, security, home ownership and big green yards, far from the mean streets of the city . . . and the reality of a suburb, isolation, loneliness, the absence of social amenities that help create communities.

The suburbs were a creation of post-WWII America, and their soullessness has become a cliché in popular culture. So a film like Sam Mendes’s American Beauty, which lays bare the angst of a modern American suburb, feels like shooting fish in a barrel, like the day before yesterday’s news.

Going back to the era when suburbs were born has at least the virtue of cultural archaeology, a chance to meditate on the social aspirations and anxieties that produced the phenomenon.  Mendes’s Revolutionary Road is a respectable meditation on the era of the suburb, on the crude attempts of isolated people to establish community, on the despair that seemed to simmer just beneath the Leave It To Beaver facade.

Winslet and DiCaprio give oddly uneven performances, punctuated with moments of genuinely harrowing brilliance.  They make you forget entirely that they once played the young lovers of Titanic, which you’d think would be impossible.  The film’s greatest asset, however, is the cinematography of Roger Deakins, with its beautifully composed shots and its subtle but expressive lighting.  The images draw you in imaginatively, make you feel a part of what is, at bottom, an overly familiar tale.

Those of us who lived in the suburbs in the first two decades of their existence know well the sense of dread evoked by the neat rows of freshly painted houses with their freshly mowed lawns — a sense of what can go wrong in such places, so difficult to escape, cut off as they are from the life of a real city or town, from corner bars or soda fountains or barber shops or churches within walking or biking distance.

Deakins really captures the sunlit hell of vintage suburbia, and makes the angst-driven narrative of Revolutionary Road seem inevitable.

Click on the images to enlarge.

Gone these three years but still here, too, young, beautiful, cool, Irish — as he will always be . . .

This is an earnest, reasonably well-directed film with a clumsily structured script. It jumps around between different periods of J. Edgar Hoover’s life so often that it never manages to create any momentum in the story it’s trying to tell, the portrait it’s trying to paint.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as J. Edgar Hoover has its moments, but he seems to be hamstrung by the thick accent he adopts, which for some reason is thicker than the real Hoover’s accent.

Hoover’s very bizarre personal life is presented with compassion, without glossing over anything. It’s hard to understand why anyone wanted to make this film, except to garner Academy Award attention, but it basically lacks the juice to compel any kind of attention at all.

Click on the image to enlarge.

[SPOILER ALERT — don’t read further if you haven’t yet watched True Detective but plan to.]

So it ended up being lurid pulp fiction after all, not a supernatural thriller.  The title should have tipped us off about this.  Yet the whole thing was a kind of wild fever dream, always teetering on the brink of the plausible — it made you feel unsteady, filled you with dread.  Doing this without supernatural elements was a fine achievement and a very satisfying one.

It kept you guessing to the end.  When Rust pointed his finger in the direction of the kidnapped sheriff next to the boat and gunshots exploded out of nowhere at the places Rust was pointing, I thought for a second that Rust had been revealed to possess magical powers.  But, no — there was a hidden sniper firing those shots, a device perfectly suitable to lurid pulp fiction.

When Rust and then Marty entered the grotesquely decorated maze of Carcosa, the suspense became nearly unbearable — because they should not have been doing this by any rational calculation.  They should have gone in together, or waited for back-up.  But they had to navigate that maze, whatever the cost — it was a symbol of the maze of the case itself, which they had become obsessed with, willing to risk everything to solve.

Not the least of the risks they ran was madness.  Trying to enter the mind of a severely deranged psychotic killer left them on the margin of sanity themselves.  But they needed to enter the madman’s story to chart the maze he’d created and destroy it.

The references to The King In Yellow became clear at last.  The King In Yellow was a series of stories about a play that induced madness or despair in people who watched or read it. In other words, a series of stories about a story. That’s its significance to True Detective — not the supernatural element in the original book. Errol William Childress was telling stories about himself through his grisly deeds, which induced Rust and Marty to search for the story that inspired Childress’s story, and its significance. Only by unraveling that story could they change it. In the process, both risked losing their minds.

In the coda after the chase in the maze, a coda that is the true climax to the series, Marty reminds Rust about his youth in Alaska when he’d stare up at the night sky and make up stories.  There’s a suggestion that telling stories is the only reasonable response to the forbidding mystery of the cosmos, and that the foundation of all stories is seen in the night sky — darkness versus light.

In the coda, we find that Rust, the bitter nihilist, has found faith — in something beyond death.  The supernatural intrudes at last, in the last place we’d ever expect it — Rust’s petrified heart.  But it doesn’t appear out of nowhere — Rust’s obsession with solving the case was always based in faith, an idea that stopping a few of the world’s horrors does mean something, does bring a spark of light to the darkness of existence.

Marty points out that the dark holds more territory in the night sky than the light, but Rust won’t let that be the final word.  “Once there was only dark,” he says.  “If you ask me, the light’s winning.”

That’s his story now, but every step he and Marty took in the course of the series was a part of telling that story, necessary to the creation of that story.

Matt Barry’s latest movie — short, sweet, dark . . .

I thought this was an exceptionally dumb movie.

Christopher Nolan is really the grand duke of mediocrity.

Nolan knows how to make hit movies but he doesn’t know how to direct a movie.  This is only possible in an age when people think of factory-fabricated Twinkies as “cake”.

The great cinematographer Gordon Willis (above) didn’t like zooms in general and especially not in period films. He and Coppola agreed early on they they wouldn’t use zooms for The Godfather.

There is, however, one obvious zoom in the movie, in an establishing shot of the Woltz mansion just before the bedroom scene with the horse’s head.  It turns out that Willis didn’t shoot it.  Coppola and another cinematographer went out and stole several establishing shots of the mansion at dawn because Coppola felt he needed them and there was no money left in the budget to get them done officially.

The zoom in question pushes in on Woltz’s bedroom window, and you can see why Coppola used it, given that he didn’t have a crane or tracking equipment to get the same effect.

I hate zooms myself, in any kind of film, agreeing with Jean-Luc Godard that zooms should only be used to annoy and alienate the audience, and that zoom in The Godfather has always stuck in my craw, even knowing how and why it was created.

Ironically, it turns out that there is another zoom in the movie, one I never processed as a zoom until I read about it.  It’s the famous three-minute opening shot of Bonasera telling his troubles to Don Corleone.  It starts close on Bonasera’s face and opens up slowly to show Bonasera in a wider shot over the Don’s shoulder.

This was done with a mechanized computer-controlled zoom lens set to proceed so slowly that you never really resister the optical distortion inherent in a zoom.  It works fine and doesn’t take you out of the period visual style crafted so meticulously by Willis, but part of me wishes I didn’t know it was a zoom.