Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (43 page)

A black cop (Don Cheadle) is having an affair with his Latina partner (Jennifer Esposito), but never gets it straight which country she's from. A cop (Matt Dillon) thinks a light-skinned black woman (Thandie Newton) is white. When a white producer tells a black TV director (Terrence Dashon Howard) that a black character "doesn't sound black enough," it never occurs to him that the director doesn't "sound black," either. For that matter, neither do two young black men (Larenz Tate and Ludacris), who dress and act like college students, but have a surprise for us.

You see how it goes. Along the way, these people say exactly what they are thinking, without the filters of political correctness. The district attorney's wife is so frightened by a street encounter that she has the locks changed, then assumes the locksmith will be back with his "homies" to attack them. The white cop can't get medical care for his dying father, and accuses a black woman at his HMO with taking advantage of preferential racial treatment. The Iranian can't understand what the locksmith is trying to tell him, freaks out, and buys a gun to protect himself. The gun dealer and the Iranian get into a shouting match.

I make this sound almost like episodic TV, but Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.

For me, the strongest performance is by Matt Dillon, as the racist cop in anguish over his father. He makes an unnecessary traffic stop when he thinks he sees the black TV director and his light-skinned wife doing something they really shouldn't be doing at the same time they're driving. True enough, but he wouldn't have stopped a black couple or a white couple. He humiliates the woman with an invasive body search, while her husband is forced to stand by powerless, because the cops have the gunsDillon, and also an unseasoned rookie (Ryan Phillippe), who hates what he's seeing but has to back up his partner.

That traffic stop shows Dillon's cop as vile and hateful. But later we see him trying to care for his sick father, and we understand why he explodes at the HMO worker (whose race is only an excuse for his anger). He victimizes others by exercising his power, and is impotent when it comes to helping his father. Then the plot turns ironically on itself, and both of the cops find themselves, in very different ways, saving the lives of the very same TV director and his wife. Is this just manipulative storytelling? It didn't feel that way to me, because it serves a deeper purpose than mere irony: Haggis is telling parables, in which the characters learn the lessons they have earned by their behavior.

Other cross-cutting Los Angeles stories come to mind, especially Lawrence Kasdan's more optimistic Grand Canyon and Robert Altman's more humanistic Short Cuts. But Crash finds a way of its own. It shows the way we all leap to conclusions based on race-yes, all of us, of all races, however fair-minded we may try to be-and we pay a price for that. If there is hope in the story, it comes because as the characters crash into one another, they learn things, mostly about themselves. Almost all of them are still alive at the end, and are better people because of what has happened to them. Not happier, not calmer, not even wiser, but better. Then there are those few who kill or get killed; racism has tragedy built in.

Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect Crash to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves. The movie contains hurt, coldness, and cruelty, but is it without hope? Not at all. Stand back and consider. All of these people, superficially so different, share the city and learn that they share similar fears and hopes. Until several hundred years ago, most people everywhere on earth never saw anybody who didn't look like them. They were not racist because, as far as they knew, there was only one race. You may have to look hard to see it, but Crash is a film about progress.

INTRODUCTION

This is not a collection of the best foreign films of the years covered, although they are without exception great films. It's more a selection of directors, countries, styles, and purposes. It's one of the sections that makes me grateful for the hard work of the book's editors; for me to choose from hundreds of titles would have been an agony.

Most of the reviews are exactly as written at the time, even if later I revisited them in a longer Great Movies essay. The purpose is to capture the immediate experience. In a few cases, such as The Music Room and Au Hasard Balthazar, a Great Movies piece was the first review I wrote. In the case of Belle de Jour, we have my review of a 1996 revival.

It is so poignant to be reminded of the 19706 in particular, when every year or two would see a new film by Luis Buiiuel, Fellini, Bergman, Bertolucci, Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Godard, Satyajit Ray, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, not to mention the Americans.

I am right now teaching a class on Fassbinder, who would have been sixty in the year 2005. When he died at thirty-eight, we lost all of those films. He directed ten in his first year as a filmmaker. What I appreciate now more than I did at the time is that despite his unceasing activity, his speed (a three-week shoot was typical), his alarming personal lifestyle, and his pose of alienation, he was along with everything else a painstaking stylist, a perfectionist whose visual strategies, often with Robby Muller behind the camera, are elegant and considered. On the DVD of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, there is an introduction by Todd Haynes (who, like Fassbinder, was influenced by Douglas Sirk). Listen to his comments on "The Look," the way the film is about how people and groups define each other by how they regard each other, and how in the film Fassbinder observes this, and his camera regards them.

OCTOBER 16, 1972

asujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story tells a tale as simple and universal as life itself. It is about a few ordinary days in the lives of some ordinary people, and then about the unanticipated death of one of them. What it tells us about the nature of life or death is not new or original-what could be?-but it is true.

Ozu's story can be summarized in a few words. An old couple make the long train trip to Tokyo to visit their children. During their stay of a week or ten days, they are treated politely but with a certain distraction; life moves quickly in the big city, and there is not always time for the parents and their courtly provincial ways. On the train journey home, the mother falls ill. The children are summoned, and all but one are at the bedside when she dies.

There is great sadness, of course, and sympathy for the old father. But life must go on. The children were casually indifferent to their parents in life. Now that the mother is dead, they speak of their regrets that they didn't do more for her; but they also maneuver quietly for some of her possessions, and within a day after the funeral they have all returned to the city, leaving the father alone.

Of all the relatives, the one who is most considerate of the father is not even a blood relative: a daughter-in-law, the widow of a son who died, was the warmest toward the old couple when they were in Tokyo, and now she is the kindest to the old man. He tells her, after his wife's funeral, that she should remarry as soon as possible. "My son is dead," he says, "and it is not right for you not to marry." He says he would feel better if she forgot his son; he does not see any irony in this attitude, so soon after his wife's funeral, and perhaps there really isn't any.

Tokyo Story was made in 1953, or at about the same period that a group of great Japanese films was beginning to make a first impression on Western audiences. The best known are Rashomon, Ugetsu Monogatari, and Gate of Hell. But Tokyo Story was not imported at that time, and its current national release represents a kind of posthumous tribute to Ozu.

It is clear that Tokyo Story was one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the early- 195 OS Japanese cinema, and that Ozu has more than a little in common with that other great director, Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu). Both of them use their cameras as largely impassive, honest observers. Both seem reluctant to manipulate the real time in which their scenes are acted; Ozu uses very restrained editing, and Mizoguchi often shoots scenes in unbroken takes.

This objectivity creates an interesting effect; because we are not being manipulated by devices of editing and camera movement, we do not at first have any very strong reaction to Tokyo Story. We miss the visual cues and shorthand used by Western directors to lead us by the nose. With Ozu, it's as if the characters are living their lives unaware that a movie is being shot. And so we get to know them gradually, begin to look for personal characteristics and to understand the implications of little gestures and quiet remarks.

Tokyo Story moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material. And there are scenes that will be hard to forget: the mother and father separately thanking the daughter-in-law for her kindness; the father's laborious, drunken odyssey through a night of barroom nostalgia; and his reaction when he learns that his wife will probably die.

We speak so casually of film "classics" that it is a little moving to find one that has survived twenty years of neglect, only to win Western critical acclaim nine years after the director's death.