nixsight

A week of animal-centric movies, where the animals are metaphors for men with guns, or something…

Tigerland

We hadn’t heard of “Tigerland” before spotting it in our friend’s collection. We were looking for a war movie to watch – Girl One is very into them, and I’m a boy, so it was about time we watched another – and it was distinct in that it was about the only one that neither of us had yet seen.

Directed by Joel Schumacher, the film is set in 1971, and follows a platoon of recruits and conscripts in the US army as they undergo the final stages of their training before being shipped out to Vietnam.

The film’s focus is Pvt. Roland Bozz, a character played with appropriate complexity by Colin Farrell at the very beginning of his Hollywood career. Bozz is probably the most capable soldier in the platoon, but is also anti-war – his stated mission is to either get himself out of the army, or if he has to be a soldier, to stay human through the process.

This earns him some friends, and of course enemies, within the platoon. The friends are many, but they are eclipsed in how much they influence events by his key rival, who is of course an absolute psychopath. The film, and Farrell’s performance, is strongest when it observes the conflicted relationship that Bozz has with the sympathetic characters in his platoon – his antics and conflicts with authority and Wilson, the dangerous and bigotted rival recruit, are drawn well enough, but they are fairly standard interactions that we’ve seen before.

The role that Bozz plays in the platoon, however, is quite unique – he becomes a reluctant hero, helping fellow recruits escape the system when he realises that they won’t likely survive it, but complaining bitterly about any efforts that anyone makes to befriend or relate to him. Farrell carries this conflict off well, as well as playing up to the more charismatic side of Bozz’s role as joker in the pack, and it’s becomes another performance that makes me wish I hadn’t been prejudiced against him for such a long time!

Tigerland is the name of the training ground in Louisiana that the soldiers have to face in their final week of training before going to Vietnam, and the place has a peculiar presence in the film, acting as both a proxy for Vietnam itself within the narrative’s structure – the viewer is never actually taken to war within the movie – and as a sort of purgatory; the last stop before they have to go to hell, both traumatic itself, and demoralising because of the anticipation it represents.

Fandom has never really forgiven Schumacher for “Batman And Robin”, but I’ve always found it easier to see that as a blip on an otherwise quite solid career – aside from that movie, which seemed more indicative of where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film career was going than anything else, the director’s other movies have been pretty good, if often not actually perfect.

Granted, I haven’t seen all of his films, but I class “The Lost Boys” among my favourite films of all time – it holds up pretty well, considering – and “Flatliners”, “A Time To Kill”, “Falling Down” and “Phone Booth” are all better than average movies. “Falling Down” could, in fact, have been awesome, if it wasn’t for the copping out of the final act. And okay, I admit it – “Phantom Of The Opera” was a very capable adaptation of a very cool musical – loathe as I am to say it…

“Tigerland” is up there in the top third of his films. Despite the persistent lampooning of the man as insisting on bright colours and kitsch, campy nonsense in his work, the camera work and general look of this film is beautiful – muted colours and grainy filters pull down the volume of the visuals up on the screen, giving the whole thing a look that makes it both very stylish, and utterly places it in the era where it’s set.

He also goes against the reputation that people have given him, by using a smart restraint when depicting the more liberal side of the era – yes, there is quite graphic nudity and yes, there is free love, but at no point is the film distractingly garish in it’s depiction.

The film isn’t perfect, mind.

Although the supporting characters are well depicted and acted by a largely unknown cast, and work is put into establishing them enough that their actions don’t come completely out of the blue, many of them are place-holder characters in this sort of movie. The trainers are for the most part abusive and unflinching, and each cast member plays their role as set down by the almighty god of “boot camp” movies – the unrestrained bigot who loves the idea of killing, his not quite as bigoted and not quite lunatic toadie, the sensitive and thoughtful writer, the well-meaning and eager but ultimately ineffectual recruit who is given more responsibility than he can handle – all of the archetypes are there.

The competence of the cast, the vibrance and intrigue of Farrell’s performance, and the skill with which the whole thing is filmed carries you through that feeling that you’ve seen it all before, and more tightly put together.

The one thing that is difficult to shake, though, is the slight inbalance of the time that the film actually spends in Tigerland itself. Although the place is every bit as draining and harsh as the recruits and the audience have been led to believe, not enough time is really spent on this segment of the film to really deliver on the anticipation of the place – and of course, this in turn leaves the eventual close of the film, with a busload of the newly trained soldiers driving away from us toward their likely deaths in Vietnam, a little more muted than it should.

Of course, it’s possible that this is missing the point of this particular movie. The true message of it is probably more to do with how conflicted the psyche of the young men, and by extension young America, was about the whole conflict, both at the time, and ever since. But as an audience I think we’ve been conditioned to expect certain things from films that take a similar shape to this one, and while it’s admirable that Schumacher tried to do something different with this one, this film falls between two chairs: It isn’t tough or punchy enough to distinguish itself among it’s peers, and it isn’t quite different enough to break the mould.

Reservoir Dogs

Girl One hadn’t seen this film before, and neither I nor our close friend – she of the “Tigerland” lend, had seen it in ages, so…

… Actually, I should just address this one point, because it occurs to me that I’ve created a slightly peculiar picture of our social standing with this friend of ours. “Our close friend” and my other veiled references to her sound quite disingenious and euphemistic, and that gives a very false impression.

So just to clarify, the lady in question is not my and Girl One’s “special friend”, where “special” is a stand-in for “polyamorous threesome sex monkey”. She is an impressive individual, with the most awesome and perfectly circular afro you will ever see, and she is a bundle of contradictions – if two really big ones can count as a bundle these days.

But she is absolutely not a special guest in our bed ‘o’ love.

Because if nothing else, I’m hardly subtle about stuff like that… if Girl One and I were that particular brand of amorous, you already know that every other post here would be about that shit.

So, anyway, Girl One and Afro Girl – yes, I’ve decided that’s what I’m calling our friend now – settled down for a night of vintage Tarantino.

And it’s still a pretty good movie. I’ve always said that I much preferred “Reservoir Dogs” to Quentin’s later work, especially in reaction to people’s love of “Pulp Fiction” – which I thought had some excellent moments and performances, but was for the most part too rambling and loose at the seams. “Reservoir Dogs” is still incredibly tight, with each scene building up to the climax, and giving the narrative a very real kind of rhythm that almost feels like it’s thrumming through you.

The staging, as well, is beautifully compact, with the frame composition making the most of the very spare elements of each scene. I think it’s fair to say that Tarantino was never quite this concise again.

I also still get a small thrill when a piece of the Tarantino-verse unfolds in the movie – like the moment when you hear that Mr Blonde has the same last name as Travolta’s character in “Pulp Fiction”, or there’s a Scagnetti who’s a scumbag on the side of law-enforcement here, who is probably related to the Scagnetti who’s a scumbag law enforcer in “Natural Born Killers”. Or my personal favourite, the reference to Alabama, the female crook who it’s quite likely is the same girl as Quentin writes in “True Romance”.

If “pretty good” seems a little unenthusiastic, it’s because I remember the technical craft of the film being a lot better than it was, viewed the other night. The sound and editing are just that tiny bit out, with the one a tad too echoey and faltering, and the other entering a shot just a beat too early, or leaving it just a beat too late, giving it a “gifted amateur” feel that I didn’t remember from seeing it all those times before, despite the film’s origins.

That editing, or maybe a director not quite demanding enough of his really quite awesome cast, leaves dialogue that I remember sounding so certain and confidently delivered before sounding a little at sea now. Keitel suffers this the most, having by far the most screen time in the first half of the film. His performance is pretty good, and he sells his lines, but the scenes have a wooliness to the cut that makes me think of lower-rent films. It’s got a stagier feel than I remember – in fact, more than ever before, I was struck by how great a theater production of the script could be.

Other actors suffer the same sort of call-and-answer exchanges, but as I said, I noticed it more with Keitel because he’s up there on screen more.

(And it should go without saying that this is still a much more solidly made effort than Kevin Smith’s first “Clerks” movie, though both seemed to be held up as part of a similar trend in film-making.)

You know, thinking about it, maybe it’s a result of Tarantino’s love of his own “voice”, both literally and in terms of his scripted dialogue, because you can see shades of the same apparent desire to make the script take centre stage in “Pulp Fiction” – less-so in “Jackie Brown” and later self-directed films – but it isn’t there in “True Romance”.

In fact, “True Romance” is a good example of all of the things that aren’t quite as slick about “Reservoir Dogs” as I remember – although a much more poppy film, and clearly even more about style and coolness than the earlier film, Tony Scott’s direction and sharp editing just lets the script sing. It also makes something unique out of Tarantino’s words, where the self-directed movie borrowed an awful lot of it’s visual compositons, motifs and flourishes directly from other films, and simply overlaid some very original dialogue riffs over the top of them.

One thing about this most recent viewing of the film that really does stand out is Steve Buscemi’s performance. More than any of the other actors, he seems to truly get what Tarantino was doing – in a weird way not just inhabiting his role, but also the fabric of the film itself. While Roth, Keitel, Penn and Madsen all do great jobs, here, they still act like actors working on any other film. Buscemi doesn’t, so much – it’s like he almost instinctively falls into the tempo of Tarantino’s world in a way that the man himself hadn’t even done, yet.

It just makes me admire Buscemi even more, because thinking about it – although his character here has many things in common with his character in, say, “Fargo”, comparing the two side by side, it’s immediately obvious that they are very different.

One is a whiney, squirrely criminal who occupies the Tarantino world, where career criminals have their own personal codes and mantras, people tend to hit what they shoot at, and in their way even the guys who sound like cowards are competent enough that it takes a rat to make the heist go bad.

The other is a whiney, squirrely criminal who lives firmly in the Coen Brothers version of the real world, where even if a criminal has a code, they are too flawed or weak to live by it properly, and a person can’t even run in a straight line more often than not, let alone shoot in one.

Buscemi sells both as their own characters, and it’s why this time out, “Reservoir Dogs” is entirely his movie…