They emerged as hot phenoms, at Cannes and in Hollywood, within a couple years of each other. Steven Soderbergh brought his first feature here in 1989. That's when sex, lies, and videotape proved itself a come-from-nowhere winner of the Cannes Palme d'Or in 1989, then a sizable commercial success, Quentin Tarantino showed Reservoir Dogs at Cannes in 1992, but that was the merest fanfare to his Pulp Fiction, a Palme d'Or triumph in 1994 and probably the defining movie — certainly the most vivid, film-wise comic epic — of its decade.
Since then, Soderbergh has won an Oscar (for directing Traffic), guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (Ocean's), while Tarantino, a slower worker, created the vertiginous, voluminous Kill Bill. Today both gents were back on the Riviera, Soderbergh for the world premiere of his Che Guevara bio-pic, Tarantino to give a film "master class" — essentially a 2hr. interview, plus clip show, with the eminent French critic-historian Michel Ciment.
Not to keep you in suspense, Q.T.'s session was loads more illuminating, cinematic and fun than S.S.'s.
CHE PASA?
In preview stories on Cannes, some movie each year is referred to as the most eagerly anticipated of the festival. There should be another category — most acutely dreaded — and this time that was Che. At an announced running time of 4hr.28min. (it wound up at about 4hr.20min.), and with the madly idiosyncratic Benicio Del Toro as his star, the film wasn't promising so much as it was threatening.
Say this for Soderbergh: among all contemporary American directors, he has the most restless ambitions. His interests range far and wide, across different genres but, more important, different kinds of movies: the indie romantic comedy (sex, lies, and videotape), the all-star action spectacle (Ocean's) and the defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience's prejudices (Erin Brockovich) or virtually say, "Don't watch me" (Bubble). He has the clout to get his projects off the ground and the work ethic to make them quickly: Che is his ninth feature this decade, not including shorter films and the TV series K Street. And he doesn't just direct his own films, he photographs them (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews). Yet Soderbergh seems defined more by these giant, wayward ambitions than by a discernible authorial personality. If his name were taken off his films, sophisticated viewers would be hard pressed to locate a visual or thematic through-line.
Che is a halfway movie: too expensive (reportedly $61 million) to be relegated to art houses, too stiff and forbidding to appeal to any part of a mass audience. In its Cannes gestation it was presented in two parts (though neither part bore an official title here), each slightly more than two hrs.: The Argentine, which covers Guevara's role in Fidel Castro's 1958 campaign across the Cuban jungle, ending in the flight of President Batista and the ascendency of Castro (Demian Bichir); and Guerilla, detailing Che's failed, ultimately fatal attempt to bring revolution in Bolivia.
In the program notes, producer Laura Bickford says that the first part is "more of an action film with big battle scenes," and the second part "more of a thriller." Actually, neither tag truly applies. Though Part One begins by hopscotching from 1955, when Castro and Guevara meet, to later scenes in Havana and New York, at least 80% of the whole effort takes place in the Cuban or Bolivian jungle. It's the woodsiest war movie ever, and less along march than an endless slog.
Directors often say that their favorite version of one of their films was the 4hr. rough cut; after that, trimming the material down to standard length was like flaying or filleting your baby. Given the expanse of Peter Buchman's script, Soderbergh must have figured he had a story that would take 4 hours to tell and, dammit, that's the movie he'd show here. So the running time is not the problem of this honorable, doomed effort; it's that so many scenes are repetitions of earlier ones. Che has to instill military discipline in his ragtag rebels in Cuba, then in Bolivia; in both places he has to decide whether to accept underage volunteers; in both, he gives his men a chance to quit before the decisive battles, where they are fired on by unseen regular soldiers and suffer the deaths of friends who've made their big speech or poignant impression moments before. And forgive me for asking, but with all these young men spending up to a year in the jungle, why (with one rapacious exception) so they never express any interest in women. Are they bearded Boy Scouts, or celibate monks with guns?
Occasionally, the film is enlivened by the guest appearances of familiar actors, sometimes cast appropriately (Lou Diamond Phillips as Mario Monje, Catalina Sandina Moreno as Che's second wife), sometimes not (Matt Damon as a negotiator in Bolivia!?). But the major burden falls on its star, who as one of the producers has nurtured the project for almost a decade. And Del Toro — whose acting style often starts over the top and soars from there, like a hang-glider leaping from a skyscraper roof — is muted, yielding few emotional revelations, seemingly sedated here. Except for one thrilling confrontation at the UN between Guevara and ambassadors from other Latin American countries, Che is defined less by his rigorous fighting skills and seductive intellect than by his asthma.
The dyspepsia of Del Toro's performance is partly due to the bromides he has to enunciate — that the most important quality of a revolutionary is "love," and that he's not a Catholic but "I believe in mankind" — and partly because so little information is vouchsafed about his non-jungle career or his private life. (You're about 100 mins, into Part One before Che mentions in passing that he has a wife and child back home.) Halfway through the film he has lost much of the power and poignancy you might expect of such a character, and by the end he's relinquished all our interest. After all that time spent with the revolutionary leader, the viewer still may ask, "So, who is this guy?"
As Roger Ebert put it: "No attempt is made to get inside the mind of this complex man, Guevara. We are told he was a medical student, suffered from asthma, was more ruthless than Castro, was the real brain behind the operation. Big deal. ... When we aren't getting newsreels, we're getting routine footage of guerrilla clashes in the jungle. ... All this movie inspires toward the Cuban Revolution is excruciating boredom..." He wrote this in 1969, in a review of the flop Hollywood bio-pic Che!, with the not-very-Latin Omar Sharif as Guevara. Yet most of Ebert's denunciations apply to Soderbergh's movie, which dispenses with the exclamation point — and, in fact, with almost all of the compelling, sometimes contradictory drama in Guevara's life.
VIVE QUENTIN!
Before a packed house at the 800-seat Debussy Theatre, Tarantino bounds onstage with the sort of animal and intellectual energy seen in few films here this year. Without much prodding from Ciment, he pinwheels opinions, more or less praising the new flop movie Speed Racer (bravo, brave Q.T.!), and railing against film composers, coming in at the last moment to "save" a film with their intrusive underscoring: "Who the f--- is this guy, throwin' his sh-t over my movie?"
He was sharpest in recalling his early days, when a film lover had no video store to serve as his library-cinematheque. Instead, he said, "I'd get the TV Guide every week, go through [the movie listings] cover to cover, circle the films I was going to record." Later he famously worked at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, Cal., but that was only part, and not the crucial part, of his film education. "Everything I learned about writing I got from acting class." James Best, a longtime film and TV actor (Sam Fuller's Verboten!, Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome and Ray Kellogg's The Killer Shrews, to pick only from his work in 1959), taught a class called Camera Technique: how to act in movies. "He started teaching me the vocabulary of the camera." That was the beginning of Tarantino's rise to becoming a writer with camera movement and actor's behavior as well as the wild dialogues that get all the attention in his movies.
Just before he was to make Reservoir Dogs, he took part in a directors' workshop at the Sundance Institute. He shot a long-take dialogue scene and showed it to three veteran directors; they all thought it stank, and one cinematographer told him, "Not only is this scene horrible, the most frightening thing is that you're going into production." The next week, a new group of directors came in; this time there were raves for the same scene. Terry Gilliam offered encouragement, and Volker Schlondorff said, "Ah, da little genius!" Tarantino says this taught him an important lesson: "People are gonna really like my stuff or really not, so get f---in' used to it."
By now, the world is used to Tarantino's stuff, and most of the time can't get enough of it. (Now he's working on a World War II epic.) But in the back of his head is the grudging ambition of the outsider, the movie geek, the 45-year-old fanboy. He still feels defiantly out-of-step; while every other director is going digital, Tarantino says, "I go backwards. It's lower-lower-lower tech for me." More than once today, he confided what he once felt and may still feel: "They don't let people like me make movies."
They ought to. Indeed, considering the vapid quality of films these days, at Cannes and beyond, they ought to make him make more movies.
TIME.COM,22/5/2008,written by Richard Corliss
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Soderbergh and Tarantino: Warrior Auteurs (TIME)
Tags:
