Learn about our streaming media
Now Playing:Up Next:
View our complete schedule
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio.Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio
6:50 PM CST
|
|
|
Learn about our streaming media |
|
Now Playing: Up Next: View our complete schedule |
|
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio. Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio |
|
Jul 4, 2009 6:50 PM CST |
|
|
|
|
||||||||
| Programs |  |
Events | |
Listener Services | |
About Us | |
Press Room | |
Contact Us |
|
Brokeback Mountain, the new film by Ang Lee, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was a highlight at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals. It is something of a novelty: a gay cowboy movie. It features spectacular locations; dynamite, brave performances by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal; and a nuanced script rich in detail from Ang Lee with assistance from Larry McMurtry. The film is based on a short story by Annie Proulx. Much of the controversy around the film when it is released will undoubtedly center on the love affair that is at the center of the film; what makes it work is Ang Lee’s straightforward approach: it is a passionate, romantic relationship between two men in the American West. The big news for those looking for cinematic trends is that the Western genre seems to be finally back, reinvented once again. Brokeback Mountain delivers one twist, while a terrific new Australian film, shown at the Toronto Film Festival, delivers another. The Australian Western, directed by John Hillcoat, is called The Proposition. The screenplay is written by musician Nick Cave. The film is set in the astonishingly beautiful Queensland outback in the late nineteenth century. Ray Winstone plays Captain Stanley, an Englishman imported to civilize the brutal frontier. As the film begins, we witness a graphically violent shoot-out with the outlaw Burns gang which had recently committed a massacre of some settlers. Charlie Burns and his mentally challenged younger brother are captured by Stanley. But Stanley is after the big fish: he wants the leader of the gang, Arthur Burns, and so he makes Charlie a proposition. He will save his life and give him freedom if Charlie finds his brother and kills him. This is the “deal.” It’s a pretty terrific film, not only for its cinematography and dynamic performances, but for the characterizations. Arthur, played by Danny Huston, turns out to be a psychopath. He is brutal in the extreme, but spews out poetry and stands on a mountain ledge soaking in the beautiful sunset. John Hurt is the vile, opportunistic bounty hunter, while Emily Watson, as the wife of Captain Stanley, tries to maintain an outpost of British Victorian culture. The film’s climactic scene, sadistic and bloody, takes place as Watson and her husband sit down to an English Christmas dinner in the dusty, hot Outback. Oddly enough, despite the gallons of on-screen blood that are spilled here, the violence is never gratuitous. The Proposition makes a significant critical case, not only about the brutal life on the frontier, but about the patronizing and evil cruelty of the colonizers. Hillcoat reveals their sadism, racism, and disregard for human life. These are qualities parallel to those embodied by the outlaws. Good and evil were always the dichotomies which informed the moral values of the Western genre. Both Brokeback Mountain and The Proposition push us to look at these values in more extreme, harsher light. The examination of the roots of violence is also the theme of the latest film of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, History of Violence. First shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was also a gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival. History of Violence will undoubtedly be criticized by Cronenberg groupies who will accuse Cronenberg of making a film which is too accessible to an audience. But after the commercial disaster of Cronenberg’s astonishing film, The Spider, who can blame him? History of Violence is a sharp thriller, based on a graphic novel. Set in the idyllic small town of Millbrook, Indiana, the equally-idyllic family consists of father Tom (played by Viggo Mortensen), lawyer-wife Edie (played by Maria Bello), teenage son Jack, and young daughter Sarah. A sinister stranger, played by Ed Harris, arrives in town and breaks the idyll. He wants something from Tom and we don’t know what it is, except gradually we realize that it is revenge, because Tom is a man with a secret past. Underneath the veneer of middlebrow America and the tranquil life he’s so carefully built for himself and his family is the dark secret of Tom’s violent past. As Cronenberg gradually strips away the layers of lies that cover up Tom’s personal history, he is forced to return to the people in his past and confront them. Cronenberg’s film succeeds so well because it works as a psychological thriller—the demons in Tom’s past are the anxious nightmares of every man’s unresolved existence. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
|
|
|
©1998-2006 WBEZ Alliance, Inc. All rights reserved. | |
|
|||
