BEFORE: Another film that I'd planned to watch on an Academy screener, but which has become available on Amazon Prime since I made my plans - so that's how I'll watch it tonight. That way I'm sure I can turn on the subtitles, not all of the screeners give me that option.
I remember seeing John Callahan's cartoons when I was a young teen, I'd read books in the humor section of B. Dalton's or Barnes & Noble at the mall, even though I didn't know his backstory. I just thought his cartoons were funny and shocking, like a dark version of The Far Side. Later, when I got out of college, I started working for an animator (former strip cartoonist) from Portland, who happened to be a friend of Callahan's - both had gone to Portland State, though maybe not at the same time.
Joaquin Phoenix carries over again from "You Were Never Really Here".
THE PLOT: On the rocky path to sobriety after a life-changing accident, John Callahan discovers the healing power of art, willing his injured hands into drawing hilarious, often controversial cartoons, which bring him a new lease on life.
AFTER: This is another entry in the "fractured timeline" series of films, that trendy method of storytelling where they don't start at the beginning or end at the end, but just dump all the clips out in random order, like a jigsaw puzzle that the audience has to assemble in their own minds. Why, dear God, WHY? Why can't we go on John Callahan's life journey the way HE experienced it, and see him walking around Portland as a young twenty-something man, then watch that fateful night he was involved in a car accident, then go on his long, arduous semi-recovery period with him, experience the frustration of being a paraplegic and having to learn how to do everything in a different way, and then go through the 12 steps to sobriety in the proper order, just like he did?
I'll admit that even biopics that DON'T jumble up the timeline are also manipulative, like the two I watched about Winston Churchill. "Churchill" started with him on the beach, years later, then flashed back to the crucial days leading up to D-Day, and "Darkest Hour" started at a very specific point in his life, when he became Prime Minister, and ended shortly after Dunkirk, when he was riding high. Neither of them went from birth to death, because that would take too long, and both sort of ended on high notes, which is a form of manipulation akin to "happily ever after", when in fact, nobody ever lives happily ever after, everyone at some point will get sick and/or die, so every biopic is destined to be a real bummer if you think about it.
But if you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I'm usually against this sort of non-linear jumbling of the timeline, because most people who aren't Tarantino don't really know how to do it right. Still, I have to admit there are some flashes of brilliance here in the John Callahan biopic. Right off the bat, we see Callahan addressing a crowd of fans in an auditorium, and then the scene cuts to him addressing an AA meeting, another place at another time. And he gives (almost?) exactly the same speech to introduce himself. The same stories, the same words, in two different contexts, have two completely different meanings - one is comic, the other is tragic. Both are true. Honestly, I'm blown away by stuff like that. This takes planning, the words have to be chosen very carefully, but still, they all have to feel like they're coming from the same character, just at two very different points in his life.
Unfortunately, the time-jumping continues for the whole picture, and if you ask me, it should have stopped after this brilliant intro. From there you could easily flash back to the young John Callahan, before the accident, and just proceed forward from there. But perhaps Gus Van Sant tried this and it just didn't work, because years of story time spent watching him suffer during physical trials, while drinking himself into stupors, might have been too much. How long was the "dark time"? We don't really know this way, and maybe that's for the best.
But I stand by the theory that the time-jumping causes more problems than it solves. We're introduced to many of the characters at that AA meeting early in the film, and then we have to watch Callahan meet the characters AGAIN, one by one, when he joins the select group therapy meetings offered by his sponsor. So there's a constant process of watching Callahan introduce himself over and over to these people, which we feel that he already should know. And then about halfway through the film, we're shown his decision to quit drinking, and then attend his first A.A. meeting, so, you guessed it, he gets to meet all these people again for the first time, but it's the third time for us - at that point it feels more like a time-filler than anything else. Plus, there's no dramatic tension in showing that decision to quit drinking, because we already know that he's going to do that at some point.
At my job, we often joke that there must be something in the water around Portland that makes for good cartoonists and animators, because there have been so many of them - not just Bill Plympton and Will Vinton but Matt Groening's from there, and Lynda Barry, Arthur Adams, Mike Richardson of Dark Horse Comics, people from Laika Studios, and so on. It's kind of like how so many rock stars came from Seattle or became part of the grunge movement there, because the weather was so bad that teens couldn't go outside, so they stayed in and learned to play guitar. Only in Portland, another notoriously rainy city, kids stayed inside and learned how to draw cartoons - that's the theory, anyway.
I've been to Portland three times - twice for business and once for a friend's wedding, and I think this film pretty much nailed it, with the emphasis on drinking, cartooning and being LGBT friendly (and this was back in the late 70's). Plus there were a lot of weird, creative types - throw in stoner culture and a trip to Voodoo Donuts, and that's pretty much what I remember about Portland.
NITPICK POINT: According to the rules of the 12-step program, alcoholics have to surrender themselves to a "higher power", even if they're not particularly religious. This can be a sticking point for some AA members who are also atheists or agnostics. This might be part of the reason why Callahan's unorthodox sponsor refers to God/Jesus as "Chucky", the name of the doll from the "Child's Play" horror movies. There's just one problem, though, Callahan quit drinking at the age of 27, which would have been in 1978. The first "Child's Play" movie wasn't released until 1988, 10 years later, so Donny wouldn't have been able to use that cultural reference, it didn't exist yet.
NITPICK POINT #2: While this is an honest depiction of a man coming to terms with his alcoholism and the reasons for it, which many may find inspirational, they trace the causes of his drinking to both Callahan's injury and the fact that his mother gave him up for adoption, and that's not the whole story. He was a big drinker long before the car accident, so there's no logic in using that as an excuse. According to his Wiki bio, he was sexually molested by a female teacher at the age of 8. Why leave that out? If he started drinking at 12, isn't it logical to conclude that he drank to cover up the pain of the abuse? This seems misleading to suggest that his alcoholism came more from his status as an unwanted child, but I guess it's easier in the end to depict someone forgiving a parent who gave them up than an authority figure who molested them.
Also starring Jonah Hill (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Rooney Mara (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Jack Black (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Mark Webber (last seen in "Boiler Room"), Udo Kier (last seen in "Dogville"), Kim Gordon (last seen in "I'm Not There"), Beth Ditto, Ronnie Adrian, Carrie Brownstein (last seen in "Tag"), Tony Greenhand, Olivia Hamilton (last seen in "First Man"), Angelique Rivera, Heather Matarazzo (last seen in "Sisters"), Rebecca Rittenhouse, Ron Perkins (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Rebecca Field (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Ethan Michael Mora, Peter Banifaz, Emilio Rivera (last seen in "Venom"), Christopher Thornton, Michael Chow (last seen in "You Only Live Twice"), Sunny Suljic, Mireille Enos (last seen in "The Captive"), Nick Rutherford, with a cameo from Gus Van Sant.
RATING: 6 out of 10 boycotts of Willamette Week
No comments:
Post a Comment