Videodrome: written and directed by David Cronenberg; starring James Woods (Max Renn), Sonja Smits (Bianca O'Blivion), Deborah Harry (Nicki Brand), Les Carlson (Barry Convex), Jack Creley (Brian O'Blivion) and Peter Dvorsky (Harlan) (1983): David Cronenberg's career-long obsessions with bodily transformation, sex, and altered states of consciousness pulsate through this movie.
James Woods is razor-sharp as a Toronto television programming director at a thinly veiled version of early 1980's City TV (here 'Civic TV', complete with boss 'Moses' [Znaimer?]). One of Cronenberg's unexpected strengths as a film-maker has been getting career performances out of actors in what would once have been considered second-tier genre movies: Viggo Mortensen, Peter Weller, Jeff Goldblum, and Jeremy Irons have all benefitted from the Cronenberg touch, as does Woods here. Blondie's Deborah Harry holds her own in scenes with Woods, but it's clear he's the star of the show.
One of the in-jokes in Videodrome involves the early City TV's fondness for late-night 'Baby Blue Movies', softcore porn the Toronto station showed to boost ratings after the kiddies had gone to bed. Woods is basically searching for new sources of these things when he comes across Videodrome, a mysterious television signal emanating from deepest, darkest...Pittsburgh.
Videodrome broadcasts violent sexual fantasies that may or may not be staged. Woods has to find out who's really making and distributing this stuff. And woven through his investigation are the theoretical musings of the self-named Professor Brian O'Blivion, a guru of the new media with more than a passing resemblance to Cronenberg's old college professor Marshall McLuhan. The reclusive O'Blivion -- who can only be interacted with through cameras and TV screens -- has a daughter (Sonja Smits) who runs the Cathode Ray Mission for the homeless and the indigent who have been cut off from TV's cool, transforming light.
But there's a really big problem. Weird things are alive, and yet another conspiracy against the human race is in the process of unfolding. Behind the TV screen there are some forms of consciousness stalking the abyss, warring ideologies on the electromagnetic frontier with contrasting plans for humanity.
And then James Woods grows a giant vagina in his stomach and things get really weird. And the vagina plays VHS tapes. Sweet!
In its concerns with bodily transformation, strange new vistas of reality, and ideologies grown real and conscious and hungry for new minds to conquer, this is perhaps Croneberg's most Lovecraftian movie (the giant vagina sort of seals the deal). It's not a perfect movie, but it's a darned impressive one.
Is it ahead of its time? Yeah, yeah it is. Just imagine that Facebook, Skype, texting, and endless cellphone usage are all iterations of that devouring digital leviathan Videodrome and you'll start to get the idea. And only the new flesh can save us from an increasingly brutal and dehumanizing culture. Highly recommended.
A Dangerous Method: adapted by Christopher Hampton from his play "The Talking Cure" and the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr; directed by David Cronenberg; starring Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein), Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud), Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Vincent Cassel (Otto Gross), and Sarah Gadon (Emma Jung) (2011): If you'd turned to someone 30 years or so ago after watching Scanners and told that person that David Cronenberg would soon become one of the world's greatest actors' directors, you'd have been laughed out of the theatre. But he did, and after eliciting career-best performances from Viggo Mortensen, Peter Weller, Jeremy Irons, and Ralph Fiennes, in A Dangerous Method he makes Keira Knightley look good, partially by making her look terrible.
As Carl Jung's patient-turned-mistress Sabina Spielrein, Knightley looks for most of the movie like she needs a sandwich. A lot of sandwiches. Her gauntness enhances her performance, though it is distracting at times -- how much of this is method and how much of this is madness? Still, it's like nothing she's ever done: for the first time on-screen, Knightley isn't lovely but dramatically inert.
Fassbender and Mortensen have the much less showy roles as the more outwardly controlled Jung and Freud, respectively. But they do a lot with those roles -- Mortensen exudes disappointment at times, while Fassbender, one of the more controlled actors out there, uses that control and reserve to good advantage as the outwardly respectable Jung, who is inwardly and sexually on the brink of his great voyage into the collective consciousness and unconsciousness of the human race.
The movie charts the deteroriation of Freud and Jung's relationship at the dawn of psychoanalysis, as they go from master and apprentice to rivals dismissive of each other's theories of the human mind. But Sabina, who eventually becomes a psychoanalyst herself, has her own theories which seek to combine the approaches of the two -- and as she reminds Jung at the end, he used Freud's theories and practices to cure her of her psychiatric ailments.
Cronenberg's direction remains mostly transparent and unshowy throughout -- he's always been more for mise-en-scene anyway, and the composition of many shots ranges from lovely to subtly disturbing. I don't know that this is a great movie, but it's a very good movie on a difficult-to-film subject. Recommended.
Spider, written by Patrick McGrath, based on the novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath; directed by David Cronenberg; starring Ralph Fiennes ("Spider" Cleg), Miranda Richardson (Mrs. Cleg/Yvonne/Mrs. Wilkinson), Gabriel Byrne (Bill Cleg), Lynn Redgrave (Mrs. Wilkinson) and John Neville (Terrence) (2002): David Cronenberg, bless his soul, likes to go places other filmmakers don't, won't, or can't. In the case of Spider, he heads back into the territory of Dead Ringers, giving us a horror story in which there is no catharsis, no growth, and no hope. It's an astonishingly bleak film.
Ralph Fiennes, complete with hair that was apparently an homage to Samuel Beckett (the playwright, not the Quantum Leaper), plays the titular schizophrenic without the bells and whistles someone like, say, Robert DeNiro might have demanded. There's no showiness, no look-at-me-acting scene of yelling or imploring the audience for empathy. Spider is almost completely mute, and when he does talk, he mumbles incoherently.
Spider's been released from a mental asylum into a halfway house when the movie begins, in a rundown, vaguely 1980's-looking urban England. His nickname comes from a tendency he's had since childhood to weave elaborate webs out of string and pieces of rope. He's a pattern maker. But he's also schizophrenic. The patterns he makes, the viewer needs to remember, may look sound, but they're inherently flawed.
The movie takes us through Spider's reminscences of his childhood, of what seems to be an ogre-ish and unfaithful father and a saint of a mother. How reliable are Spider's memories? Therein lies the mystery of the movie, inevitable as death. This isn't a movie to enjoy in a normal way -- it's horrifying, and there's no attempt to make Spider warm and cuddly, a Hollywood madman. He's very sick. And schizophrenia doesn't spring from some easily understandable childhood trauma: it's a disease, a cancer of the mind.
I was exhausted by the end of the movie, and that was from watching it in 20-minute increments over several days. But it was a good exhaustedness. But this isn't Rain Man or A Beautiful Mind. There are no easy life lessons here, no Nobel Prize, no well-meaning brother who learns valuable things from someone with cognitive difficulties, though there are, even for Spider, flashes of clarity amidst the crushing horror. And the clarity just makes the horror worse. Highly recommended.
