KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (or so) I have usually have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.
This week, which really spans the past 3 weeks, is just two films, as I rewatched Across the Spider-Verse in theatre twice more, and I've been series watching both the classic Planet of the Apes pentology and the sextet of Lone Wolf and Cub. I'll write each of those up in their own time.
So for, this week, it's:
Men (2022, d. Alex Garland - AmazonPrime)
Mandy (2019, d. Panos Cosmatos - DVD)
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Men is also pretty ugly and uncomfortable to look at, at times, with makeup and digital face transplants and cgi... erm... sequences... of... things... happening, all juxtaposing against the beauty of the scenery.
All of Alex Garland's films so far (and also including his mini-series Devs) are so full of intentionality, of thematic purpose, it's just that the purpose here is maybe a little muddier than his other works. Men trades so heavily in metaphor that it almost exclusively exists in metaphor. Where Garland's other works are entertaining outside of the metaphors, Men has little else but it to offer. This feels akin to Aronofsky's mother!, another ambitious and unsatisfying horror fable.
Having Rory Kinnear be every man in Men (save one) only for it to go unacknowledged in the film is making very much a "they're all the same" type comment (and perhaps as much a product of pandemic shooting as conceptual conceit?). Yet there's more nuance here than that blunt "all the same" statement, in the different ways Kinnear's men carry themselves, and the film's awareness of the systemic misogyny that's baked into them. The finale of the film -- an ugly, epic "birthing" sequence that is at once upsetting in it's unnaturalness in concept as its cgi unnaturalness -- is meant to hammer home the sort of generational handing down of toxic masculinity with little growth. As the scene, and its cycles play out, what started out as frightening to Jessie Buckley's Harper eventually just becomes more of men's tedious bullshit that is being forced upon her. She walks away but the birthing keeps following her, as if to say "you must watch this , you must bare witness to my trauma for I cannot handle it myself" (and maybe also to say that there's a perpetual infant inside every man that comes out in the ugliest, and often most violent of ways).
The straightforward question of this film is "is this really happening?" Or "Is this really happening as we see it?" But even though there's a pretty chaotic aftereffect scene that hints at some reality to the events that happened, this question of "is it real" actually doesn't matter at all. It is what Harper has been going through, whether metaphorical or literal, or a bit of both.
Harper just wanted an escape after her husband's suicide/accidental death. She had filed for divorce and was immediately emotionally blackmailed by her husband. He threatened to kill himself, he put that on her. It's just one of so, so many things a patriarichal society puts upon women, and not the first of men in this film trying to put their figurative shit upon Harper, as if she owes them something, or that shes the solution to their problems, or that if she's not the solution there's something wrong with her .
Margaret Atwood said "Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them." You can substitute "laugh at" with "reject" or even, in some cases just "make them feel anything", so trained are men to suppress emotions that aren't the "masculine ones" (that also tend to correspond with certain sins, like greed and pride) that often any strong feeling can be unfamiliar and induce any manner of irrational response.
The message here isn't so simple as "men are bad", but instead that there's an ugliness to how men are raised and how men perpetuate this ugliness, not just generationally but among themselves, and how that then spreads to how women have to think or behave or react in a society that forces them to coexist amidst this, in essence, traumatic psychopathy.
I think its an interesting movie that doesn't always get its intentions across cleanly. People will (and have) bristled at it's message, because on the surface it does seem a trite metaphor. I think given the past 10 years of politics it's a lot more loaded as subject matter than the film actually considers it to be, but the title is provocative and evocative in maybe the wrong spirit. I didn't come out of it thinking Garland was smug and self-satisfied with solving misogyny, but instead I see a storyteller wrestling with a concept too big and complex to really be contained in just a film, but trying anyway. And what is art for, if not to wrestle with with the big concepts.
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As a result, Cosmatos' sensibility is imagery first, story second, which is certainly not to say that his works slouch in their storytelling, but capturing the aesthetic, the mood, the vibes, is really what its all about. It's also to say that his movies are just a trip to behold (to quote Toasty on his viewing of "The Viewing"..."Ouch. My mind just got fucked.")
Mandy can ostensibly be broken down into two halves, with the first focusing primarily on Andrea Riseborough's Mandy, her life with her loving husband Red (Nicolas Cage), and her kidnapping by a cult at the behest of its smitten, disturbed, pampered, psychotic, fragile Manson-esque leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache). The second half then becomes what Tarantino likes to call a "revenge-a-matic", where Red is out for blood, and it gets bloody.
It's a wild, jarring film that constantly makes you question what reality it exists in. It makes you wonder if the people we're seeing are human or not, if the setting is Earth or some other plane of existence. It's a film where characters are drugged, either forcefully or self-administered, which means perceptions are skewed. We're constantly jumping between points of view, different characters' experiences of the world, and as such it's hard to tell what truth we're actually witnessing. It's all very intentional.
It's totally a "vibes" movie, though not quite as completely as Beyond the Black Rainbow was. Once the revenge film kicks into high gear and Red goes on his most metal of crusades, it's just a hair away from being an action movie, yet still running high on fumes.
If anything pulls it out of its vibes, it's Cage. I'm ever so mezzo mezzo on Cage. I don't buy into his greatness, because I've seen enough of him that isn't great. When he goes "full Cage", it needs to be the right place and the right time. Here, there's a couple of "full Cage" scenes which just pull me right out of the film, where Cage isn't acting so much as improvising, emoting, and, you know, doing that thing he does. It doesn't fit the vibes, man.
That said, in the first half, as Mandy's loving partner, Cage is perfect, delivering a very subtle, supportive performance, which is just him at his best. And when he gets to dive into those fight sequences, his years and years on both blockbusters and low budget action features really comes through in his ability to sell the physicality.
Of Cosmatos' three productions, this is maybe his most accessible, and probably most entertaining, and yet, because of the Cage of it all, it's kind of my least favourite of the three... and yet that's faint condemnation. I still thought it was a blast.
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