No cigars (updated)

Michael Angarano and Jemaine Clement in Gentlemen Broncos

I always enjoy seeing a critic champion a picture that's been pretty much reviled by his or her peers. It partakes of a long tradition that has its roots in the likes of Manny Farber taking B movies seriously, or Andrew Sarris or Robin Wood addressing Hitchcock's Psycho as a work of art rather than a mere, and sensationalistic, entertainment. Jared Hess' third feature, 2009's Gentlemen Broncos, was largely dismissed in the main, but got a handful of respectful, appreciative notices from some substantive critics, and Armond White. The notice that convinced me to give the new Blu-ray disc of the film my time was from The New Yorker's Richard Brody, who wrote that here Hess creates "a forthright and original religious vision matched by few films, whether dramatic or comic." 'Cause he's from "a Mormon community," y'see. Well, anyway, I'm a sucker for religious vision in cinema, so I went there. 

What I saw was not as Brody describes, but I could see, sort of, how he could/would describe it as he did. Let me explain. Hess's film, which concerns young amateur sci-fi writer Benjamin (Michael Angarano) whose work is, on the one hand, adapted/corrupted by a couple of perverse young no-budget filmmakers, and on the other, out-and-out plagiarized by the pompous, famous, out-of-ideas pro Dr. Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), is genuinely quirky, and filled with a lot of intriguing conceits. There's some very funny dialogue writing as well—I was particularly tickled by the line "Yeast Lords is amazing, and it's definitely worth a couple of hundred bucks," which is given an appropriately insincerely enthusiastic reading by Halley Feiffer, as one of the filmmakers usurping Benjamin's work. The film has the very ambitious notion to re-create, or simulate, Benjamin's magnum opus Yeast Lords in several different manifestations within the diegesis; first, as it's seen in Benjamin's own imagination, an inadvertently gonzo paean to his late father (the hero of Lords is played in all cases by Sam Rockwell); then, as it's lifted by the fatuous Dr. Chevalier, who changes certain crucial details to make it his "own;" and then, its "improvement" by the polymorphously warped young "filmmakers" Tabitha and Lonnie. This is where the trouble starts; while all this probably looked swell on paper, Hess simply isn't a distinctive enough filmmaker to successfully set the competing "visions" against each other. (And certain stuff seems thrown in just for the sake of it. Dr. Chevalier's Yeast Lords hero is rather spectacularly effeminate, but even given Chevalier's own bent, I couldn't figure out quite why. Although it is kind of funny to see Rockwell acting as if he's auditioning for Creation of the Humanoids, or a Kuchar film.) I believe that Brody was, as was White, so taken with what the film wanted to achieve that he overlooked defects such as Hess' alternately indifferent and ham-fisted framings (which he seems, on occasion, practically eager to give Arnaud Desplechin hell for—and, to my eye, with much, much less reason) and came to see a more fully-realized work than I did. On the other end of the spectrum was Manohla Dargis' New York Times review of the film on its (almost unnoticeable) theatrical release, in which she more or less admits to have been so put off by a shitting-snake gag that she pretty much checked out of the whole enterprise. While I do agree with White's observation that Broncos is a piece of genuinely personal filmmaking, I have to finally categorize it as an almost-noble failure. 

Johanna Wokalek in The Baader Meinhof Complex

While Uli Edel's The Baader-Meinhof Complex achieved a much, much more favorable critical consensus than Broncos,  the review that really piqued my curiosity about it was a rave for the DVD, similar in almost preacher-like passion to Brody's on Broncos, by Michael Atkinson over at the IFC site. "A movie about terrorists...a movie that heroizes terrorists...a valentine to every imp of political ire we hold in our bellies." All right, then. And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest.

I suppose if there was ever a proper context in which a film critic might raise his or her political freak flag, a film such as this one certainly provides it. And Atkinson makes a meal of the opportunity with his notice, coming on like Long Island's own answer to Robespierre. Lemme tell ya, when/if The Revolution gets here, and I'm still alive in the aftermath, should I see Atkinson coming, I am gonna turn and run like a motherfucker. 

And this is all very well and good, I suppose, except when Atkinson's extra-cinematic enthusiasms compel him to misrepresent the actual film. According to Mr. A, the film is "peppered by terrorist assault sequences that are a sudden and confrontational as mid-period Scorsese." Um, not so much. With one or two exceptions, most notably an early protest sequence involving the Shah of Iran that serves as a catalytic event in the formation of the so-called Red Army Faction, the action sequences are largely pro forma in shooting and editing, and are scored to rather cheesy orchestral music (as opposed to galvanic rock or pop); hence, not particularly Scorsese-esque at all. And "confrontational?" No. They neither intimidate nor implicate the viewer. They're flat. Atkinson further insists that the film devotes "time and attention to understand the Group's reasoning and passion" and hence makes "a zestily convincing case for their justification." Again, not so much. Aside from chronicling the radicalization of one-time mainstream journalist Ulrike Meinhof in a rather perfunctory fashion—a lot of closeups of the paper in her typewriter registering words, of indignation, you know—and having one of the film's police functionaries (played by a saturnine Bruno Ganz) make remarks such as, "By no means do I approve of terrorism. But I want us to understand their motives the best we can," the film never really goes there. (Which, among other things, spares it the inconvenience of even having to vaguely consider the irony of German terrorists collaborating with Palestinians, for instance.) The film is mostly a fragmented, cluttered, intermittently engaging procedural.

At least until its principals get sent up the river, as it were. As it happens, I found the prison material, dealing with the states and states of mind of Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleitbau), Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), after they're in lockup, the most compelling and thoughtful sections of the film. It sensitively details the characters' corroding psychologies, their retreats further and further into increasingly abstract ideology that result. Ensslin's taunts of Meinhof (Wokalek's performance is, I think, the most magnetic in the film) resonate darkly, as do Baader's insistence that he'll be as disruptive as possible during hearings—immoveable force meets irresistible object—and his final pronouncement that events are now out of his hands, and a second and third generation of the RAF (people he doesn't know personally at all, he points out) will bring even more destruction. It's in these scenes that Bleitbau actually gets to act, instead of swagger. Little wonder Atkinson barely mentions these scenes in his review. Too busy tittering at the spectacle of "rich white men" (not to mention their more lumpen chauffeurs and bodyguards, which Atkinson doesn't) getting theirs, he can't be bothered to consider that Baader-Meinhof was a wide-ranging sociological and cultural trauma that scarred even those who sympathized with the group's views and aims. (Not that the film gives more than lip service to this fact. With respect to this, allow me to recommend the artist Gerhard Richter's interviews and writings on the subject, pages 221-246, in Writings 1961-2007.)

In any event, I can't fully get with any history of Baader-Meinhof that writes out Uwe Nettelbeck, the critic/writer/impresario, whose coverage of an early trial of Baader's nearly got him bounced from Der Zeit. Subsequent to that, he published a good deal of Meinhof's work in the counterculture magazine konkret. His next big move was helping to found the rock group Faust, and installing them in a commune-like environment in a converted schoolhouse in Wümme. Nettelbeck also sponsored the electronic music of Anthony Moore, who, with pal Peter Blegvad and then-wife Dagmar Krause, formed the immortal Slapp Happy, recording at Wümme with Faust's rhythm section. Nettelbeck maintained his radical connections throughout—it is rumored that Baader himself had the occasion to hide out in Wümme. His subsequent business dealings for Faust would have him running afoul of Richard Branson, whom Nettelbeck went on to wish very ill on any of his ballooning excursions. Nettelbeck was based in France when he passed away in 2007. I actually had the privilege of meeting Anthony Moore for the first time just a couple of evenings ago, and he spoke quite warmly of Nettelbeck. (Moore is, among other things, a quietly droll gentlemen. Me: "I was thinking of Slapp Happy the other night, because I was watching this rather silly film about Baader-Meinhof—" A. Moore: "Yes, as one will...") In any event, Edel's film, co-written with producer Bernd Eichinger (from a non-fiction book by Stefan Aust), ejects the fellow completely from the history, which is peculiar, and even a little more so when you consider that Nettelbeck's filmmaker daughter Sandra is the auteur of 2001's Mostly Martha, which stars Martina Gedeck...who plays Ulrike Meinhof here.

UPDATE: Bronco booster Richard Brody has a generous and thoughtful response to my critical second-guessing of him at his blog at The New Yorker. (Yes, The New Yorker.) As a longtime, true-blue champion of both Fuller and Tashlin, I'm not quite sure what to say to one of his analogies, but I think I can convincingly enter a plea of not guilty to any charge of high art/low art hierarchy mongering, for sure...

Comments

[James Keepnews]

Of course, Mr. Atkinson also championed them thar BRONCOS on ifc.com. Myself, I'm very partial to the Hess/Black collab NACHO LIBRE, a warm trifle that still tickles me every time I see on cable.

As for THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX, I guess I found it less of a procedural than you did, although the conventional aspects of the film (notably the scenes with Ganz' gamely performed stand-in for West German Civilization) do drag the film down. That said, the pre-prison sequences where the gang's various acts are carried out and the implications of social foment through German society demonstrated through archival footage, headlines -- and, yes, Ulrike typing words like "Schwein" -- seemed very compelling and not unduly expository, as such cinematic socio-histories go.

The main failure of the film for me -- what can I say? I'm more about Can than Faust... -- has to be its handling of Ulrike Meinhof, quite superbly/mournfully portrayed by Gedeck. It's her the film focuses on at first, and thus building our sympathies towards her. As with pretty much everyone else, however, Edel never gets beneath the surface of her character, though the negative capability at play once she's out of the picture (literally) does carry a discomfiting flavor of reality intruding on a set storyline. We see her in maternal uxorious mode initially, one uprooted by her husband's infidelity and her subsequent radicalization which is well enough dramatized. But the narrative makes short work even of her maternity, and she's always an outsider, among her "class" and then among the cadre, increasingly dismissed and then as noted out of the picture -- her presence in the film, ever on the periphery, really does give the film a general taste of the peripheral. Moreover, there's another, deeper and sadder film about Meinhof promising to break free from Gedeck's contained, wary and melancholy work here in isolation that Edel has no time for -- as, in fairness, it seems history didn't, either.

The resonant word throughout the film is "Verrat" -- i.e., betrayal, a word thrown around by the revolutionaries and, in summation by Meinhof herself in her final speech to the court. There's so many betrayals to consider in this treatment of the B-M Gang -- Meinhof's towards her children, the West towards Vietnam and other reactionary support for tyrants like the Shah, the New Left towards other movements, and most importantly each individual towards her/himself. I'm not a huge fan of Edel -- Last Exit in Brooklyn was alarmingly overrated, when not overacted by people I usually enjoy like JJ Leigh, Stephen Lang, &c. -- but I did walk away THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX a bit shaken and more than a bit reflective.

[lipranzer]

My problem with THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX, although I liked the movie more than you did, Glenn, was trying to keep track of all the characters that show up in the last 40 minutes. It did seem like Edel was trying for the fly-on-the-wall approach, which might suggest why he doesn't try to go inside the characters heads too much, or he lets the actors do it (and I think Gedeck does the best of the three major characters), but it does mean some events are confusing to anyone who doesn't know enough specifics about the history of the RAF - myself, for instance.

That said, I wasn't bothered by those action sequences (I agree comparing them to Scorsese is overstating the case, but I didn't find them flat), and if nothing else, it did get me reading Aust's book, as well as Jeremy Varon's "Bringing the War Home," which talks about the RAF in the larger context of other revolutionary groups in the 60's and 70's.

[Jeff McMahon]

I think most of Armond White's reviews are more about the idealized film in his head than they are about the actual film that ended up on celluloid. I can't imagine how else to explain his raves for Mission to Mars, Torque, or Next Day Air.

[warren oates]

Hi Glenn,

Mostly agree with your assessment of both films, both of which I wanted to be so much better than they are. A much more interesting riff on the RAF can be had in THE STATE I AM IN -- have you seen it? Like RUNNING ON EMPTY remade as a thriller.

As for BRONCOS, Chevalier alone was funnier than most movies I've seen recently. The real problem with the film for me is not so much direction as it is writing, that it doesn't go anywhere story-wise. The stakes for the young writer protagonist seem pretty high, but he doesn't seem to care enough or do enough. He's far too passive for too long and when he finally takes any action--like rescuing his mom from that creepy dressmaking sex fiend--it has to do with a completely irrelevant subplot. The script seems like an interesting first draft. I wish someone had forced them to rewrite it and jettison the low-budget adaptation and most of the silly Mom stuff and focus more on the huge main conflict of plagiarism and the competing visions of what the sci-fi story should be like.

[Stephanie]

The Baader-Meinhof Complex could have been a lot better, but it's still good. I didn't find the action sequences to be all that flat although some are more routine than others. In fact I thought that Edel could have used the scrupulousness and detail he spends on recreating Baader-Meinhof's Greatest Hits more profitably on a few of his characters. The movie is fragmented, as Glenn notes, like the book by Stefan Aust on which it's based and which it follows closely (the book is worth reading but ultimately disappointing) and without some prior knowledge of the group's activities I would think parts of the movie would be hard to follow. Intertitles might have been helpful.

Contra Glenn I found the movie sagged a bit in the second half as it became more focused on the activities of people to whom the audience hasn't been introduced - the pivotal figure of the fierce Brigitte Mohnhaupt appears more or less from nowhere. There isn't enough of a connection between the thoughtful Baader we see in jail and the hoodlum with a short fuse presented earlier. I also disagreed with the depiction of Rudi Dutschke, which seemed to suggest that he was in some way a godfather to the the group.

Random note: Baader appears to have been a chainsmoker but I thought the movie's emphasis on everybody smoking constantly was straining at period effect. If you look at movies made when everyone smoked all the time, there is smoking but people usually aren't pointedly puffing away in every scene. Enough already.

Wokalek was superb.

[Paul]

Nice to see Broncos getting some attention - I enjoyed it a great deal (well, Napoleon Dynamite's firmly ensconced in my Top Ten Most Enjoyable and Rewatched Films of the Decade, so that's a given) but the leading actor fell on the wrong side of nerd-passivity, failing to provide any real focus for the audience. I think the Hess brothers have a distant kinship to the Kaurasmaki brothers in their love of the hopeless outsider, those who live in unfashionable places and unstylish ways (why the weird Buckyball homestead? Why not? I've seen weirder things in Middle America). There's a generosity in their work that I love, and a rather sweet attempt to hold on to non-generic ways of telling a story, that sets them above the rest of the indie schmindie comedy pack.

As for Baader Meinhof - well, it would have made a rather good four-hour tv series, I thought. They somehow managed to drop anything that would have given the audience the slightest idea of what all the fussin' and fightin' was about. But at least they kept the bombin' and shootin'. I kept wistfully thinking about Fassbinder's Third Generation.

[Jeff McMahon]

The Hesses are a married couple, not brothers (and one of them's a woman).

[Tom Russell]

Married couples make the best filmmaking teams. :-)

[Paul]

I did not know that (well, duh). I always pictured them as a filmmaking version of Napoleon and Kip Dynamite.

[Dan Coyle]

My reaction to Gentlemen Broncos could be summed up in one sentence: This is the kind of film for the science fiction enthusiast who thought Harlan Ellison was "too restrained" when he wrote "Xenogenesis"

[bill]

Science fiction as we know it doesn't enter into GENTLEMAN BRONCOS. The SF in the film is the kind of SF that would exist in the same world that would or could contain characters like Dr. Chevalier, Napoleon Dynamite, Uncle Rico, and so on. That world has its own form of art and entertainment, and we have ours.

I liked BRONCOS. Clement was, I thought, extraordinary, and pretty much shouldered the burden of everything that didn't work.

Also, I loved "Xenogenesis". I should re-read that.

[Glenn Kenny]

Ah, Harlan Ellison. Back in 1993 I had one of the great freelance gigs of all time, which lasted only a year, alas: Sci-Fi/Fantasy columnist for TV Guide. Interviewed the great Christopher Lee. Covered the debuts of "Deep Space Nine" AND "The X Files." Discovered that the Viv Albertine who was directing the revival of "The Tomorrow People" for British television was, indeed, the same VIv Albertine who was a founding member of The Slits. Laughed my ass off when I was told that TV Guide would absolutely under no circumstances print the band name "The Slits." And so on.

One of the perks of the gig, as it happened, was that I would get not infrequent phone calls from Harlan Ellison. At home. At peculiar hours. I don't know how he got my number. He would wanna talk about this and that...the current state of the art, the upcoming book version of his script for "City on the Edge of Forever," that kind of thing. It was highly entertaining. And, yes, a little odd.

I didn't hear from Ellison much after Steve Redicliffe took over the editor-in-chief reins of the magazine and got rid of all the columns, except for Terry Bradshaw's. No, really. I still hate Steve Redicliffe for that, and I'm not afraid to say so. C**ksucker. Anyway, I sometimes miss my little chats with Mr. Ellison. I wonder if he ever thinks of me...

[Dan Coyle]

It's in "Xenogenesis" where Ellison discusses his tactics of tracking down the phone numbers of people. He likes to impersonate police detectives.

I spent most of Gentlemen Broncos wondering what the hell happened to Jared Hess that made him swear upon his dying breath that Ursula K. LeGuin, Isaac Asimov, Barry Longyear, Baen Books, Tor, and etc. would pay, they would pay, ONE DAY THEY WOULD ALL FUCKING PAY.

That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. It was quite funny, and as Bill said, Clement was extraordinary. But you gotta wonder about a guy whose idea of the worst, most pathetic thing in the world is the science fiction scene and its fans.

[Paul]

"a guy whose idea of the worst, most pathetic thing in the world is the science fiction scene and its fans."

I had this same argument around the time Napoleon Dynamite came out, with people who thought the film was horrendously nasty about geeky midwestern teenagers. It isn't. They are its subject. I suspect a fly on the wall documentary about the science fiction convention scene would produce scenes far more grotesque, without the Hess's leavening Everygeek humour.

[IV]

Bernd Eichinger, BAADER-MEINHOF's writer / producer, is a pretty interesting figure. He produced CHRISTIANE F. (of the Bowie soundtrack), which was also directed by Edel, and splits his time between prestige movies (like DOWNFALL, of the Hitler video meme, and PERFUME, both of which he wrote and produced) and special effects heavy genre franchises (he's the producer of the RESIDENT EVIL and FANTASTIC FOUR movies).

The fact that he also produced HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY and WRONG MOVE only makes this more confusing. I sorta wish his US arthouse releases would capitalize on the popularity of his multiplex movies. I can just imagine a poster for BAADER-MEINHOF that reads "from the producer of THE NEVERENDING STORY."

[Tom Russell]

I'm with Paul on this one-- at least as far as DYNAMITE is concerned. The farm stuff aside-- I'm a suburban midwestern-- my friends and I pretty much did and said a lot of the same things.

Hess certainly has his weaknesses as a director, but a lack of genuine affection for his subjects isn't one of them.

[PaulJBis]

Eichinger goes back a long, long way. He was the producer of "Das boot", as well as "The name of the rose".

[Jeff McM]

I think it's obvious that Jared Hess is a big sci-fi fan and is putting himself into the movie in a deep and personal way. Apparently not to everyone!

[Paul]

Tom Russell - I'm relieved to hear you say it, I'm not very familiar first-hand with the midwest but Hess's stuff has always felt very real to me, and I've stuck my neck out many times and said that Dynamite is much closer to everyday life in the midwest than, say, Boys Don't Cry or the other films made by the sort of people I've heard derisively refer to "the flyover states".

[IV]

PaulJBis,

Yeah. And he's a pretty heavy hitter in Germany, maybe the heaviest. Bruckheimer is an apt comparison, adjusted-box-office-wise (Eichinger's been responsible for some of the biggest commercial successes ever made in Europe) -- and Bruckheimer did, after all, produce AMERICAN GIGOLO, THIEF and the extremely weird FAREWELL, MY LOVELY.

[Dan Coyle]

Damn, I loved Das Boot. One of my favorite war films.