Moviegoer Diary: The Devils, Iron Man

THE DEVILS

Plot in a Nutshell
Ken Russell’s 1971 drama about a flawed yet effective priest in 17th-century France who becomes a martyr when political machinations and religious hysteria overtake his city.

Thoughts
I’ve always feared that one of my flaws as a critic is my somewhat adolescent willingness to forgive completely undisciplined movies, to approve of horribly hammy actors for their “bravery” and their willingness to look ridiculous on camera, and to romanticize directors who can’t resist following their muse down the path that leads to nothing but swollen budgets and alienated audiences. Which often leads me to prefer intellectually incoherent movies to coherent ones. Which is kind of perverse, right?

Maybe it’s because I tend to doubt myself in my own life, to be cautious and shy in my social relationships, that I admire directors who go for broke on such a grand scale time and time again. (I'm the guy, after all, who put William Friedkin's Bug at the top of my Top 10 list last year... and John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes at #10. I drew the line at Southland Tales, but it was a tough call.) I don’t think I could argue that it’s a better picture—or at least a more “serious” one—but on a gut moviegoing level, I do respond to the grotesque excesses of Ken Russell’s The Devils much more viscerally than, say, Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, to use a comparison that is going to really put me in the doghouse with serious moviephiles. Maybe that makes me a vulgarian, but we're living in a vulgar age.

At the same time, I’d be much too embarrassed to actually watch The Devils with somebody else in the same room. It’s such a mortifying movie—and not just the famous, crazy scene where the nuns of Loudon strip naked and cavort around the room like maenads, humping candles and molesting a statue of Christ, a sequence so genuinely blasphemous that it makes even an atheist like me uncomfortable. It’s the way the movie lives at such an extreme emotional pitch that you can’t help but feel embarrassed for the actors, even the ones whose performances actually work. (Especially Vanessa Redgrave, playing a hunchbacked nun barely able to keep a lid on her desperate sexual urges—I love the way she keeps erupting into these short, sharp bursts of girlish giggles, as if her body needs to relieve the pressure building up inside her, like steam venting from an espresso machine. That Ken Russell does like his actors to cackle a lot, doesn't he?)

I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to watch The Devils on the gigantic screen of a movie theatre; people must have been staggering down the aisles once the credits started rolling. Just watching it on my laptop was enough to give me nightmares, with Michael Gothard’s Father Barré figuring strongly in them. Russell’s visual conception of this character, probably the most loathsome figure in the entire film, is a bit of counterintuitive brilliance: a young, handsome man with round, tinted John Lennon eyeglasses and a sleeveless cassock, he looks more like David Essex than an exorcist. And yet, despite his anachronistic appearance, he’s absolutely terrifying, going about his grim work without a trace of joy—just an implacable, self-righteous desire to prevail over anyone who opposes him.

There’s an excellent documentary by film critic Mark Kermode (one of the film’s biggest admirers) about the making of The Devils called Hell on Earth—you can find it on YouTube. It’s surprising to learn a film that is such an assault on the senses was apparently created in a spirit of tremendous harmony and mutual respect: composer Peter Maxwell Davies, editor Michael Bradsell, and actors Dudley Sutton, Georgina Hale, and Vanessa Redgrave all speak of Russell with tremendous respect, and the fierce pride they take in the film they made together is inspiring and surprising, given the controversy surrounding it. Even more surprising: of all the actors, the one who’s aged the best is Murray Melvin, who plays Father Mignon in the film, he of the bowl haircut, thin face, and freakishly birdlike nose, but who in his 70s has bloomed into a downright elegant-looking aristocrat.

I started out by saying that I was mortified by The Devils, even a little bit embarrassed by it. But I’m a little afraid of it too. And kind of awestruck by it. I’m an atheist, but the fact that a film this extreme and upsetting even exists makes me willing to believe that somewhere there exists... well, not a God, but maybe some minor deity who does what he can to help even the looniest movie find its way to completion.

RATING: 5/5


IRON MAN

Plot in a Nutshell
Robert Downey Jr. plays a wealthy arms manufacturer who becomes a crime-fighting superhero after inventing an invincible flying suit of armour.

Thoughts
Maybe it’s only because I watched the two movies back-to-back, but Iron Man reminded me a lot of The Devils. Like Father Grandier in The Devils, Iron Man hero Tony Stark is a womanizing playboy who finds unexpected depths of heroism within himself after being captured and tortured by religious fanatics.

Grandier and Stark both have skinny redheaded women who are secretly in love with them: Grandier has the insane Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave), who writhes on the floor in sexual agony at the mere thought of him, while Stark has the much more self-composed Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), a girl Friday who channels her unrequited love for her boss into her PalmPilot instead of her rosary beads. At the end of The Devils, Jeanne is presented with Father Grandier’s charred tibia; midway through Iron Man, Pepper gets Tony’s artificial heart. Sister Jeanne bites Father Grandier’s lover on the arm and tears off her sleeve; Pepper Potts greets Tony’s lover the next morning with an armful of dry-cleaned clothes and makes a joke about “taking out Tony’s trash.”

Hmmm... I’m not sure where I’m going with this analogy. Does that mean Terrence Howard is Father Mignon? Is Jeff Bridges Father Barré? Or would he be more like Cardinal Richelieu? Is Stan Lee God?

Okay, maybe the comparisons don’t add up, but you can’t deny that these days, Robert Downey Jr. is looking startlingly like Oliver Reed.



RATING: 3.5/5