MISHIMAPlot In A Nutshell
Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic about Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, complete with mini-adaptations of three of his key novels.
Thoughts
I’ll admit it: I bought the DVD because of the packaging. Criterion really outdid themselves with this one—a shiny gold box stamped with pink and orange flowers, a mesmerizing pattern of outward-radiating lines, and bunch of photos of Ken Ogata as Mishima, all arrayed in mirror patterns so that looking at the artwork is like staring into a kaleidoscope. It’s like the visual equivalent of the most epiphanic moments of Philip Glass’ score.
I hadn’t watched this movie since it came out, although I vividly recall seeing it at the (sadly now-defunct) Broadway Theatre in Hamilton, Ontario with my friend Ken, and how both of us were blown away by its breathtaking visuals and by Mishima’s passionate, rather frightening commitment to his art and his determination to wed beauty to action. I was a little surprised to see that the climactic seppuku scene was nowhere near as gory as I remembered it—over the last 20 years, my mind had embroidered that scene to the point where I pictured guts spilling all over the floor.
It’s amusing to listen to Paul Schrader’s audio commentary and learn that the artist he originally was planning to write a biopic about was Hank Williams, and that he only switched to Mishima when his brother Leonard, a lifelong Japanophile, brought his books to his attention. I’d still love to see what Schrader’s Williams script would have looked like, though—judging from Mishima, Patty Hearst, and Auto Focus, his other forays into the biopic genre, it probably wouldn’t have been a Walk the Line-style crowd-pleaser. When Auto Focus is the most “traditional” biopic on a director’s résumé, you know he’s not exactly courting Oscars.
Still, Schrader’s script deserves some kind of reward. I’m kind of surprised that movie biopics of famous authors haven’t used Mishima as a template—the idea of incorporating these pocket-sized adaptations of his novels as a way of understanding his character and his evolving outlook on the world just seems like such a sensible approach. I’ve never read any of Mishima’s work, so I don’t know how faithful Schrader’s versions of them are—from what I can gather, he’s really boiled them down to their essentials, concentrating more on capturing their central themes than on the nuances of the characters. But I love the way he stages them—I don’t know whether it was the Mishima material itself, working in Japan, or collaborating with Eiko Ishioka (the brilliant, visionary production designer whose work on Tarsem’s The Fall I also wrote about recently), but Mishima offers a level of visual pleasure that’s pretty much unique in Schrader’s filmography.
Mishima deals with topics that I am woefully inexpert on: Mishima’s writing, Japanese culture, bodybuilding, militarism, kinky sex. Twenty-three years after my first viewing, I find I’m still as blown away by it, and in exactly the same untutored, wide-eyed way. Wow, that Golden Pavilion set is amazing. Wow, did Mishima really take an army garrison hostage and commit ritual suicide by the commanding officer’s desk? Wow, I’d nearly forgotten what a great score Philip Glass wrote for this movie!
RATING: 4.5/5
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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDUREPlot In A Nutshell
Errol Morris’ 2008 documentary about the atrocities committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, with special attention paid to the dozens of photographs they took documenting some of the worst examples of prisoner abuse.
Thoughts
Well, I’ll say one thing for Standard Operating Procedure: it contains the most beautifully photographed, immaculately lit scenes of Iraqis being waterboarded in the history of cinema. Robert Richardson’s camera captures every drop of water bouncing off the burlap and sparkling in the light. I wonder if there’s anywhere where you can buy stills from this movie—they really deserve to be framed.
But seriously, folks—what was Errol Morris thinking when he made this movie? Stylized, slow-motion recreations of events have been part of Morris’ films ever since The Thin Blue Line, but here, that tic has gotten completely out of control. It’s so hard to pick out the most ridiculous moment, but my vote goes to the moment where one of Morris’ interviewees tells an anecdote about Saddam Hussein, on the run, showing up at a farmhouse, inviting himself in, and frying up an egg in the kitchen—whereupon Morris treats us to a long, lingering close-up of someone cracking open an egg and the yolk drip-drip-dropping into a puddle of cooking oil. It’s like something out of CSI, where if William Petersen so much as mentions that a suspect was coughing during an interview, the producers feel compelled to illustrate his comment with an expensive computer-animated zoom down someone’s trachea. (Second place: an endless shot of a Bic razor dry-shaving off some guy’s eyebrow.)
Perhaps it’s not fair to penalize a movie like this simply because a few other documentaries on the same subject arrived in my city earlier, but there’s not much in Standard Operating Procedure that didn’t get covered more thoroughly and hauntingly in Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib or Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side. Kennedy and Gibney also do a better job than Morris of showing the way policy decisions back in Washington trickled all the way down to the dimly lit prison cells in Iraq—and they did so without hyping their discoveries with a lot of obtrusive music and scary sound effects from the Foley guys.
Morris is a very, very smart guy, but based on my sole viewing of the film, I wonder if he got lost here in his intellectualized approach to the material. He tries to introduce this notion that photographs don’t tell the whole story, that you can’t properly evaluate an image without examining what’s just outside the frame. Maybe so, but it seems like a problematic notion to introduce into a film where the interviews clearly contain multiple ellipses and tricky edits that, for all we in the audience know, completely jumble the order in which the words originally appeared.
I greatly admire Morris’ work, but this was one of my biggest cinematic disappointments of the year.
RATING: 2/5
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