Edge of Tomorrow

It’s a testament to something that Doug Liman has used footage from the 24-hour-news cycle as a prologue to his last two films: Fair Game (2010), the story of the Bush regime’s persecution of Iraq War dissenter Valerie Plame, and the new Edge of Tomorrow, which is about an alien invasion that throws Tom Cruise for a time loop. With a face that could set the white balance, Cruise’s talking head looks perfectly natural floating above the word “expert” in the CNN chyron. The primped uniform on his person belongs to Major William Cage, who is shilling victory to the viewing public in the form of suits of armor that turn soldiers into inverted Terminators: buggy exoskeletons with soft human innards. Forgive me if I’m being glib, but when Cage transitions—by virtue of a janky, somewhat implausible device—from his on-camera cable sinecure to conscription into active duty and combat and thence into the movie’s stripped-for-action Groundhog Day scenario, it’s like he’s going from one pernicious loop to another.

Whether I’m being glib or not, Edge of Tomorrow has been graced with an intelligence that makes such readings more than idle or perverse. Source Code teased the military-industrial complex into the time-warp formula; but never, to my reckoning, has it been allied with the notion of “endless war,” or the trench-war futility of World War I, which the writers (Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, from a graphic novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka) overtly cite. Their intelligence finds a rare partner in optimism—a disposition that has become largely, perhaps systematically, outmoded in the summer-blockbuster form—and which possibly accounts for the blammo cyberpunk D-Day reenactment. In a way, the film is a superhero origin story on themes from Malcolm Gladwell: a spray of gunk spurs Cage’s change from weasel to warrior, but it’s the 10,000 hours of boot camp he gets from Rita (Emily Blunt) that makes him an authentic hero. 

Rita is the Morpheus to Cage's Neo, but has to be reminded of this each time he resets the game clock. Rita used to have Cage’s power to relive the previous day every time she died in battle; the aliens have used time travel as their secret weapon all along, but inadvertently surrender their control over it whenever they bleed on an opponent. With each resurrection, Rita learned from her mistakes; this led to her winning the home team’s only victory, as well as the monikers “Angel of Verdun” and “Full-Metal Bitch.” But once she lost the power, which is undone by transfusions of measly old human blood, the ball was back in the aliens' court. Blunt gives Rita substance; she challenges Cruise, and the pathos might have been overwhelming had Cage not been shaped to his persona, and made to give off the vibe of a marketing guru who lives to give TED talks. Cage is at a perpetual disadvantage because Rita’s default is to be dismissive of him, and he’s a stranger after every reboot. Damaged by her own failures, she’s too focused on the mission to notice, as we do, how weary he is of watching her die.

Upstream Color

Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, which is deliberately muffled and dislocated, is almost promiscuously allusive. When it decides, on a whim, to be in the "normal" world, it's jarring because one becomes accustomed to the dislocation; there are very few moments when someone's lips are mouthing the dialogue we hear, and what we hear is indistinct. At one point, when the heroine is bobbing up and down in a pool, murmuring at intervals, the hero asks her what she's saying. It seems almost an inside joke--and then we realize she's reciting Walden, which her captor (who hypnotized her with worms harvested from orchids) was leafing through early on. Her captor says he cannot be looked at because he's made of the same material as the sun. This movie can't be looked at head-on, or else its own spell is broken. But its aural-visual-rhythmic flow has its magic.

After her captor (called the "Thief") extorts money from her--which seems a peculiarly earthbound motive--and leaves her alone with a pinhead, infantilized mind and worms coursing through her body, the heroine instinctively treks into the wilderness where a balding man--the "Sampler"--saves her, possibly by transplanting flesh from a living pig. The pig, tagged with her name, is released to a farm; the Sampler is a pig farmer, surgeon, and sound man. He seems to care for his livestock, but is impatient when they act out; a few end up in a sack in the river, where they secrete the blue color of the wormy orchids. The Sampler also peers invisibly over the shoulder of random people--presumably they've been tagged, too--and mixes sounds such as those of streams running or stones sliding down drainage tunnels. The pigs are clearly doubles of the people, who can hear the sounds he records--he has his own label--at home, and are drawn to him like baseball players to the Field of Dreams. There's other doubling: The Sampler throws the sheet music that, one assumes, he cannot replicate with his nature recordings into the water, and the hero does the same with office paperwork at the hotel he works at, for reasons unknown. When the couple puts the Sampler out of his misery, and take ownership of the pig farm--mailing out copies of Walden to their fellow survivors--they are clearly taking back their own lives, and going back to nature. It's fascinating to read the Sampler as a sort of non-omnipotent God, a benign caretaker who observes his flock rather helplessly. The cycle is broken; those larval worms (the first stage of life) can no longer be harvested by older-looking versions of kids we saw in the beginning with the Thief, popping the worms like drugs.

When the people talk about their personal lives, it's like watching a movie within a movie. Carruth shows some talent for a more domestic piece about two survivors of trauma finding each other and finding love when the hero hides the heroine's prescription bottles with a menu at a cafe. But the film isn't tethered to their "story," which is about as grounded as a series of flashbacks would be: the B story to another movie's A story. But this gives Upstream Color a dreamy texture. What doesn't is the Malicky running of hands across surfaces, a celebration of the sensory which has no more meaning than the impulse a child has to touch all the artwork at a museum. And there's (probably a lot) that doesn't add up, such as why the hero and heroine's childhood memories are intertwined. But I'm glad there's mystery; it balances out the obviousness in the homages to Walden, which themselves give a contemporary meaning and narrative propulsion not normally found in films this abstract. It's about finding one's baseline in nature and love.

Stroszek

Stroszek (1977) is an odd synthesis of Werner Herzog and Raymond Carver--more like Five Easy Pieces than Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Herzog's movies are often about the interplay of man and nature, man and beast; though he pans his singularly ethnographic lens from Berlin to Railroad Flats, Wis., in Stroszek, this movie seems to present life as a flat line that goes from urban European dreariness to its equivalent in rural America. Grubbiness is an insuperable condition for Bruno, the depressive street musician who was abused at a Nazi reform school growing up and has been bullied ever since, and Eva, his blank-faced prostitute girlfriend. No doubt its roots are in New Hollywood at its most cynical (Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy), and it probably served as inspiration for the even-more-abstract immigrant tale Stranger than Paradise, and the American indie boomlet to come. There's a strain of defeatism here that may have been tailored to the movie's star, Bruno S., but Herzog's almost stodgily objective style seems appreciative of the small pleasures of life, of music, of a premature baby that still has a chance to grow up, even of American kitsch, and the American dream on its most shoestring scale. This isn't the story of a classy European slumming in the hinterlands. The old German uncle who uses a voltage meter to measure "animal spirits" is as goofy as the American nephew who thrusts his hips in a yokel sex dance or the banker who's clearly out of his depth--he seems almost as diminutive as the pubescent agent on Louie, a show that's no doubt on the same wavelength as Herzog's sense of humor. When the expats join the nephew in his search to find a tractor (and its driver) under a frozen lake, there's something about this eccentric Calvin and Hobbes hi-jink that's as rewarding as a cup of hot coffee on a frosty day--but with that morbid undertone that makes their happiness as fragile as the ice. Sad-sack Bruno, the only member of the expatriate trio who doesn't learn English, sees the end point on the horizon before the movie does--and it almost seems like a cheat when the movie catches up to him with a vengeance. There's a barber-shop robbery as poorly conceived as any crime in a Coen Brothers movie, and a selling out of a character that seems to be excused only because Bruno is by then unhinged. The film, reportedly written in two days, is more like a short story than a feature. Bruno worries what will happen to his instruments--like his dusty piano, his "black friend"--when he croaks, and we don't know; they don't follow him to the New World. And Herzog can't hold in his bafflement about kitsch forever, so the final scene is a doozy: "We can't stop the dancing chicken," says a cop who looks to be of Pacific Northwestern Indian extraction, in regard to the livestock arcade that Bruno sets off when he reaches the literal end of his rope. They can't stop the dancing chicken. Is that his legacy? Bruno seems borderline autistic--although when people are speaking in rat-a-tat German, it's hard to tell. He's a good man who purses his lip when he talks and emotes at times with silent-film grandiosity,  but he's also a weak man--or at least a man who was irreparably broken long ago. Ian Curtis saw this film before Joy Division was to go on its American tour; he killed himself instead.