Spymistresses

Like most, I would rather watch a good film than a mediocre film.  In this case, however, I experienced a sensation most akin to relief as it became clear that the film I was attempting to get through was utterly lacking in dramatic tension, structure, intrigue, or character motivation.

The film in question is the abysmally-titled Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), a WWII drama recounting the life of one Violette Szabo, an ill-fated British spy who infiltrated France twice by parachute in an attempt to coordinate some disparate Resistance Groups.

Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo in "Carve Her Name with Pride (1958)"

I say I was relieved because only a few months ago did I discover the existence of Violette Szabo and her powerful story and decide to try and draft a screenplay based on her life.  When I stumbled across the existence of Carve Her Name, I concertedly avoided watching it, for many reasons, one being that if it was good, I would abandon the project immediately, having no interest in making a film that would be reduced to a side-by-side comparison with another, better film.

Mostly, though, I didn't want the film to effect my dramatic decision-making process in any way.  Best to start with a clean slate, gather the research materials, and then chip away at the dramatic truth of the story as it occurred to me.

After months of research and sketching, I grew frustrated with several details of Violette's story.  Widowed by the age of 20 when her husband Etienne is killed in the African front of the war, Violette's motive for joining the war was powerful indeed.  This was a woman who dreamed only of killing Nazis, though she would never have said so.  With a two year-old daughter to care for, she had to make some interesting choices in joining the war effort in such a dangerous, secretive capacity -- as an operative for Churchill's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine outfit that engaged in covert action the CIA would blush over.

But it wasn't immediate clear what the script should be about.  Another WWII revenge fantasy script would fall squarely into the melodrama camp and is thus undesirable, but at the same time what else was there to grasp onto?  The fact that she was a young mother seemed a promising thematic area to explore; how did her instincts as a mother intersect with the grim possibility that she might have to engage in acts of extreme violence?  How did she reconcile herself to the decision to leave her daughter in the care of others while she persued a course of action so dangerous that the prospect of survival seemed highly dubious?

In my desperation to gain more insight into how these questions could be explored dramatically, I reluctantly turned to Carve Her Name.

What I discovered was surprising.  Curiously, all trace of Violette's motive for joining the SOE and ultimately giving her life in its service is missing from Carve Her Name.  Saddled with a rote a screenplay, Virginia McKenna, though blessed with quite a bit of natural charisma, gives no inidcation of the motor driving Violette to such a reckless, if brave, course of action.

This is problematized right off the bat with the script's handling of Violette's romance with Etienne, reducing it to a handful of frivilous pastoral scenes in which they talk about their future and roll in the grass.  We feeling nothing of the strong emotions these two characters puport to have for one another and instead patiently await the news that Etienne has been killed on the front.  And even when that event occurs, we get no sense of the anger or despair that afflicted Violette as she wrestled with her responsibility to her infant daughter and her unyielding desire to serve the cause against the Nazis.  Act One is scripted so mechanically that it proves distracting and cringe-worthy.

The film stumbles headlong into cliches and inanity from there.  We are forced to endure a "training montage" in which Violette learns silent killing techniques and parachuting, her dangerous information-gathering missions in France, presented with all the suspense of a Power Point, and a blazing shootout that eventually ends in her capture.

In short, Carve Her Name taught a reassuring lesson: it sure as hell isn't easy bringing history to life, especially the more obscure chapters.  And so, the book is not closed after all on the female SOE agents and just how badass they really were...

Even before forcing myself to watch the film, my attention began to turn to a more arresting SOE soul, the similarly doomed Noor Inayat Khan, a young children's book author living in England by way of France and Moscow who was descended from Indian royalty.  She would become the SOE's only channel of communication with the French Resistance as a wireless operator, leading an incredibly perilous life of evasion until the Gestapo finally closed in on her after months of close calls.

The research from the Violette Szabo project has carried over seamlessly to Noor's story, and in many ways Noor's is easier to write in three-act structure.  In fact, it's going so well that I expect to be done with a draft in about two weeks' time.  This will be an incredibly rough draft that will no doubt require tons of fact-checking and scene deletions, but at least it will be in some state of completion, something I haven't pulled off with a feature-length in some time.

Wish me luck!

Visiting "the Dead"

I forgot how much I admired Bringing Out the Dead until I watched it this week.  What struck me in particular this time around was the film's historical context.  It's as much a period piece as Gangs of New York is (and a more humane film, too).  Robert Richardson's cinematography, leaning heavily on overexposure and saturation, carefully reconstructs the aesthetic of the great television crime dramas of the late 80s and early 90s -- "In the Heat of the Night," "Law & Order," "Homicide" are just a few that come to mind.  High contrast, grainy footage characterized those productions as the gritty, "real" life dramas they were, but Richardson's work then elevates the material to the world of the spiritual, skillfully painting the streets of New York with the blackest shadows and the brightest lights.

In many ways, I should think it would be harder to recreate a period of time only ten years behind the present (the film's release was in 1999) than the more easily identifiable signposts of, say, the post-Victorian era represented in The Age of Innocence.  But Scorsese has been documenting the transformation of New York neighborhoods his entire career, so it's interesting to think of Bringing Out the Dead as a natural continuation of his life's work.

With every Starbucks and Kinkos that pops up on the corner, it's easy to take for granted that even as recently as the early 90s, New York was still very much a violent, depraved city, far from the "safest big city in the world" tag it has now.  To that end, Bringing Out the Dead is fascinating, illustrating the ways in which the city used to be so vital, thrilling, and hellish in the era of the Central Park Jogger and the crack epidemic.

The script, adapted by Paul Schraeder from Joe Connelly's book, brilliantly realizes the psychological ambiance of 4 a.m.  The act of "bearing witness" to death preoccupies the film's haunted hero Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage), an EMT who comes to see himself as a kind of death angel, someone who in actuality saves a very small percentage of the patients he responds to and is simply there to mark the passage of their souls into the next world.  One patient named Rose in particular, an asthmatic girl in her teens who dies on his watch, troubles him throughout.

Of the many qualities of Schraeder's script, one of its strongest is its allowance that Frank is delusional in this regard.  A masochist at heart, Frank does plenty of self-medicating on the job, abusing anything from Gin to shots of adrenaline to get through a long shift.  He may be suffering, but he has settled into his suffering.  After depositing a gunshot victim at the doors of Our Lady of Mercy, an unrelenting carnival of surreality that acts as the film's central locale, Mary (Patricia Aqruette), the daughter of one of the patients he's brought in, points out, "You're covered in blood."  With a kind of vacant, knowing weariness, Frank replies, "I know."  More troubling is the idea that Frank is torturing himself with ghosts of the people he couldn't save for no good reason.  As one of Rose's apparitions points out, "Suffering was your idea."  Schraeder effectively illustrates that Frank's recently-adopted world view is a coping mechanism that circumvents the fact that death is arbitrary or, worse, meaningless.  If he can attribute the death of a patient to his own bad-luck or a kind of punishment being handed by some mysterious Presence, it is somehow easier to find meaning in his job, even if it's in a perverse way.

All of this self-flagellation actually makes Frank more sympathetic.  Rather than perform his job with the same detachment as his partner Larry (John Goodman), the thrill-seeking of Tom (a crackling Tom Sizemore), or the theatrical spirituality of Marcus (Ving Rhames), Frank's personal investment in offering some kind of closure to patients and their families make him a worthy avatar through which we experience the frights of urban decay.  He seems to be the only EMT who is aware that human lives and all their associated costs are at stake.

Thus, his attachment to Mary.  As her father see-saws between life and death, Frank feels compelled to try and look out for her, offering her rides to and from the hospital in the ambulance, offering up slices of his pizza, and checking on her father's condition whenever he can.  As she details her tortured relationship to her father, she asks him, "Do people usually just spill their guts out to you like this?" and he replies, "Yes, something about my face... my mother always said I looked like a priest."

While Mary and Frank seem too damaged to participate in any kind of meaningful relationship, one of my favorite scenes in the film reveals a little glimpse of their connection without a word passing between them:  Just the two of them riding in the back of the ambulance on their way to the hospital, grateful to be in the presence of the other's company, even if they have nothing to say.  On paper, Frank and Mary helping each other through what amounts to three days of insanity (beginning on a Thursday night, the better to invoke the Passion) might not seem like a worthwhile arc, and at times it comes off as stilted, but in the hands of masters like Schraeder and Scorsese, their relationship, no matter how understated, offers a welcome reprieve from the unrelenting violence of Frank's world.

The soundtrack is exceptional.  Choosing from a slightly more up-to-date rock pantheon than usually appears in Scorsese's films, Scorsese manages to finesse the line between diagetic and non-diegetic music while nailing the pathos of the film at the same time.  We can readily imagine R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" coming over the ambulance radio in the early 90s, or the Clash's "Janie Jones" on the classic rock station, but Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" and Van Morrison's recurring "T.B. Sheets" underscore Frank's soul-sickness.

Cage, who at that point in his career seemed satisfied with churning out silly action movies (The Rock, Con Air), offers up dynamic performance in Dead, ably navigating material that veers wildly from the humorous to the insane and beyond.  Mostly, though, it is a humble performance, allowing room for the vivid supporting actors to flourish, among them an almost unrecognizable Marc Anthony, and it's refreshing to be reminded of what Cage can do with compelling material.

Interestingly enough, Bringing Out the Dead is not included in Schraeder's unofficial "Night Worker" installment, which began with Taxi Driver (which Dead most resembles narratively and aesthetically), and continued with American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and most recently 2007's The Walker.  Dead is better than all but one of those films in Schraeder's installment, and Frank Pierce is easily the most redeemable night worker in this lineage.  Perhaps this is precisely the reason it's left out:  Unlike Schraeder's more nebulous low-lives, we acutely sense that there is hope for Frank.