The Black Stallion (1979)
Director: Carroll Ballard
Screenwriter: Melissa Matheson, based on a novel by Walter Farley
Cinematographer: Caleb Deschanel
The Black Stallion is a movie unremarkable except for one thing: it is almost perfect. The story of a boy (the piquant Kelly Reno) who is saved from a shipwreck by a beautiful Arabian horse, the movie belongs to the “winsome child plus animal” genre that includes such classics as National Velvet and The Yearling. Unlike those movies, however, The Black Stallion achieves true artistry. Through director Ballard’s use of minimal dialogue, exquisite cinematography and the subtle acting of its cast, this remarkable movie transcends its genre and reaches the pantheon of truly great films. I have many qualms about the AFI Top 100 Movie List, but its exclusion of The Black Stallion is unacceptable.
The most striking feature of Stallion is its lack of dialogue. Much of the movie is silent but for the sometimes charming but just as frequently irritating music of Carmine Coppola. The most striking sequence in the film, the shipwreck and subsequent isolation of the boy and horse on a deserted island, is a dialogue free forty-five minute sequence that tells the film’s story with pyrotechnic manipulation of film’s basic ingredients, image and sound. Compare this to the endless chatter and noise of most movies, especially ones geared toward children, and you will see how a master filmmaker achieves his goals with transparency and grace.
The cinematography by Caleb Deschanel (father of actresses Emily and Zooey) is sensitive to the mood and plot of the story. On the island, it is harsh and gritty. Once the child returns to civilization and the suburban embraces of his mother (an amusing Terri Garr), the colors become softer and richer. The pacing of the movie, which starts off idyllically and then turns explosive, only to turn idyllic and thrilling once again, is masterful.
Stallion’s one inarguable fault is Carmine Coppola’s music, which is on occasion somewhat overly obvious. The worst example of this is an underwater sequence for the boy and horse, which turns coy with its use of “ballet” music. However, much of the rest of the score is really lovely, and that one sequence does not spoil the movie.
Kelly Reno, the child actor playing the lead, turns in a performance remarkable for his ease on screen and his emotional transparency. Garr is very funny in the stereotypical part of the bewildered mother, and the ageless Mickey Rooney, here playing a retired horse trainer, turns in a subtle performance notable for its comic grace. However, the great performance here is by the stallion himself: a horse named Cassolé who embodies Ballard's questioning attitude towards man's treatment of animals. The stallion, like the child, is happiest when free, and his eventual subservience to man's wishes (in the film's climactic high-stakes race) seems tragic rather than celebratory. The final shot of the movie, of the stallion shucking off its halter and shaking its mane, is both joyful and deeply unsettling. We know that the horse is not truly free, and neither is the child. Their freedoms were temporary, and no less joyful for that.
I’m always amused by the dismayed or unbelieving responses of adults to whom I recommend this movie. It's a "children's movie" because a child can understand it, but its thematic complexity and great beauty make it worthy of adult attention. Put aside your fear of sincerity and your twenty-first century post-ironic attitudes and you will be greatly rewarded by The Black Stallion.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
UP IN THE SKY
Man on Wire (2008)
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an almost impossible, inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy. The tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
Director: James Marsh
The documentary Man On Wire portrays Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers as an outlaw artist’s championship feat, an action disconnected from normal social interaction and free of any historical significance. It’s like an adventure story from 1930s Hollywood. As in She or King Solomon’s Mines, no one questions the reasonableness of the adventure, and the story takes place in a vacuum, simultaneously heightening the drama and making it more unreal. Proponents of the auteur theory will love Man on Wire’s re-creaton of the basic ingredients of a Howard Hawks film: brave men, unquestioning female, hopeless task which no one expects to return from. Man on Wire is a tidy little film about an almost impossible, inhuman feat that occurred on the site of a future tragedy. The tidiness both disconcerts and fascinates.
The story of Petit’s obsession with walking between the towers began when he saw an article about the building of the towers while sitting in a dentist’s office in 1968. From this humdrum beginning, Petit and his accomplices — who include his girlfriend, his best friend, plus a wire-walking expert and a fluctuating assortment of starry-eyed countercultural types — planned the walk over a five-year period. Petit had been obsessed with wirewalking since childhood and previous to the WTC walk had planned and executed outlaw walks on Notre Dame and a bridge in Sydney Australia.
The details of the planning are one of the fascinations of the film. The construction of the wire bridge on the roof of the WTC at dawn after a night of hiding from security officers makes for a great little caper film, and the director James Marsh plays up the sequence with some noir-esque touches. The other great charm of the film is the personalities involved in the feat. Petit himself is magnetic and playful, and it’s a salute to his magnetism that his friends and accomplices hardly seem to question his sanity. The accomplices are just as interesting: his girlfriend and best friend are as wholeheartedly committed as Petit, and their matter-of-factness about the nuts and bolts of the enterprise make their obsession all the more striking. The other accomplices are a mixed salad of 1970s post-flower child types: the songwriter who chickens out at the last moment, the be-whiskered bureaucrat who helps Petit’s team gain access to the building as part of his anti-establishment stace
The film’s refusal to acknowledge Petit’s feat as part of the history of the World Trade Center and their destruction gives the film an unusual power: it makes 9/11 seem more like what it is, a historical incident in a series of historical incidents, rather than what politicians and public hysteria have turned it into.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
