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Director and screenwriter: David Mamet
Shanghai Star. 2004-06-10
Starring: Val Kilmer, Derel Luke, Tia Texada, William H. Macy, Kristen Bell, Ed
O'Neill
The singular title of Mamet's screenplay for his movie is a reference to a story
from ancient Greece. It seems that once, when a neighbouring city asked the
King of Sparta for military assistance, a single Spartan hoplite was sent to
their aid.
The "Spartan" in this movie is named Scott (Val Kilmer) and Mamet shows
him as the embodiment of Spartan virtue - he's loyal, tough, resourceful and
obedient. This last "quality" is the most important one - he will carry out any
order he's given without question and, as Mamet shows in his film, this is
definitely not a virtue.
The film opens with what seems to be a "spoiler" for the main plot. A young
woman is being pursued through woodland by three men. The woman,
Jackie (Tia Texada) is a marine and her pursuers are other marines whose
task is to catch her. She successfully evades them but one of the marines in
the pursuit, Curtis (Derek Luke), won't give up the chase. They are all
candidates for admission into a special branch of the US Secret Service and
are being assessed by Scott. He is a senior member of the branch which
turns out to be a "black ops" outfit and Curtis eventually becomes his
protege.
Suddenly we're into the main plot of the movie - this time the object of the
pursuit is the daughter of the president of the US. It appears she has been
abducted from Harvard where she is studying when her secret service guard
was mysteriously absent.
But has she really been kidnapped? She has gone missing and it appears
her abductors are part of an international gang of white slavers run by Arabs
(who else?) who seize young, blonde Western women and ship them off to
Dubai where they will be sold to Middle Eastern buyers.
Mamet's plot twists and turns and we are asked to try to resolve a series of
incidents involving treachery, murder and unbelievable Machiavellian
machinations at the highest level of American politics.
Mamet's world of pervasive paranoia has echoes of Pakula's "The Parallax
View" where nothing is as it seems. At one point a body is wrongly identified
by its DNA. "How can you fake DNA?" Scott asks. "You don't," he is told, "you
issue a press release." This is a world where heroic masculinity and honour
confronts dirty politics and betrayal. And it really is a masculine world: there's
one scene between Scott and the lovely Jackie where she asks to talk to him
"man to man".
Kilmer is interesting to watch as he enters the realm of Mamet-speak - his
words say one thing, his face tells you another. His character, Scott, is the
complete secret agent, adopting and discarding personalities fluidly. In one
scene, played wordlessly, he is a murderous hold-up thug having fake blood
splattered over him by a silent crew of secret service agents complete with
clip-boards on which are written his next set of instructions.
Mamet's thesis is that the American public is blissfully unaware of how its
government really operates. "This is a vicious game and most of the time the
public would just rather not know," Mamet said in an interview earlier this
year.
Referring to the key role of Curtis in the movie and his relationship with Scott,
Mamet said: "Curtis represents the conscience of the hero because he's so
new to the warrior (Spartan) class. He keeps asking questions that have
been eradicated from Scott's conscience. Curtis makes Scott realize that he
has become what he beheld. He has put his conscience in the service of
those whom he has elected to believe and in so doing, he's become just like
them."
In the same interview (in the Detroit Free Press) Mamet's utter cynicism with
the American political process bursts out. He actually predicts October 17 as
the date when the White House will announce the capture of Osama bin
Laden, thereby ensuring George W. Bush's re-election victory in November.
So, after a roller-coaster ride, the message at the end of "Spartan" is an old
one: power corrupts and absolute power - we're talking about the president of
the US here - corrupts absolutely.
Barry Porter
Director: Nick Broomfield, Joan Churchill
Starring: Nick Broomfield, Jeb Bush, Aileen Wuornos
The recent blockbuster movie "Monster", based on the sensational Aileen
Wuornos case, won Charlize Theron an Academy Award for "Best Actress"
for her portrayal of the female serial killer who left a trail of corpses along the
highways of Florida. The 2004 documentary film "Aileen: Life and Death of a
Serial Killer" only confirms the astounding fidelity of Theron's performance,
while contributing background detail for those interested in the case and its
aftermath.
The new movie continues the story Nick Broomfield began in his 1992
"Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer", a film which investigated the
media frenzy and commercial excitement surrounding the arrest, trial and
imprisonment of Wuornos. The 2004 follow-up focuses on the final stages of
Wuornos' incarceration, leading up to her execution. The earlier obsession
with the "marketing" of the case, shared both by Broomfield and Wuornos
herself, tends to dissipate into disconnected conspiracy-mongering and
incoherent paranoia, despite the fact that various law enforcement officials
"resigned" after the exposure of unseemly commercial side-deals related to
the case.
Since "Aileen" has no plausible claim to make about the Wuornos case, it
becomes merely anecdotal, and arguably stronger for it. The material it
reveals about Wuornos' family and upbringing constitutes a truly gothic
indictment of the dark regions in America's social fabric, while the portrait of
her bizarre lawyer, an extravagantly incompetent pot-smoking ex-hippy called
"Dr. Legal", would be simply hilarious if it wasn't simultaneously terrifying. It is
the numerous prison interviews with Wuornos, however, that make up the
heart and cobwebbed soul of the movie.
Broomfield clearly sympathizes strongly with Wuornos, to such an extent that
his objectivity as a documentary reporter is utterly compromised. His own
evaluation of Wuornos as "truthful" is so far removed from the evidence he
presents as to be quite comical. In fact, even if the viewer were tempted to
believe Wuornos it would be impossible to do so, since her testimony is not
only wildly inconsistent on every substantive question but also increasingly
bizarre and conspiracy oriented. As if this were not enough to annihilate the
last vestiges of credibility, her various pronouncements and "revelations"
typically degenerate into wild abusive tirades mixed with blood-curdling but
empty threats.
Yet despite her relentless lying, swearing, unconvincing Christian religiosity,
spasms of violent rage and manifest evil, Wuornos is a surprisingly likable
figure. Her almost incredibly harsh background of rejection, childhood sexual
abuse and neglect followed by homelessness, prostitution, vagrancy and
ultimately murderous criminality - involving betrayal by almost everyone in
her life, from her pathetic mother to her odious lesbian lover - only
consolidated her feisty dauntlessness, weird sense of humour and general
eccentricity.
Whether she was, in fact, insane - whatever that means - is impossible to
judge, given her manipulative character and absolute indifference to truth and
falsehood. By the end of the movie, Broomfield seems to have no doubt that
she had indeed become mad, but this seems to have less to do with
balanced psychological evaluation than with the politics of capital punishment
and his own deteriorating relationship with his subject.
Among reviewers, "Aileen" has been hailed as a major statement about
capital punishment, with most seeming to concur that it makes a powerful
case against "the ultimate penalty". In fact, it is hard to imagine anyone who
has reflected on this issue having their viewpoint shifted substantially by the
Wuornos case, which despite its substantial legal imperfections led
eventually to the execution of a woman quite clearly guilty of horrendously
brutal killings, at least some of which were entirely unprovoked.
Nick Land
Copyright by Shanghai Star.