35. Patton

Franklin J. Schaffner, 1970

“Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”

Be seated. General George S. Patton Jr. was a lot of things. He was one of the most decorated officers in the history of the United States Army, he was a four star general, a master at tank war fare, a poet, a warrior, a firm believer in reincarnation, and, frankly, a complete bastard, but a magnificent bastard at any rate. I know virtually nothing about Patton, except for what I’ve seen in this film. I don’t know exactly how accurate it is and I don’t really care. The man in this picture is so awesome, so much larger than life, that he must be, to some degree, a dream of the real man, but it is so impressive a dream that I could hardly bear to replace it with the reality.

Patton, as he appears in the film, is a terribly complex character. He is a brilliant military leader, but his sense of self and his expectations of his men truly belong to the bygone days he claims to actually remember. As Patton himself says in a scene set among Carthaginian ruins, “The Carthaginians were proud and brave, but they couldn’t hold on. Two thousand years ago. I was there.” Still, in the years of the second World War, in which the film is set, the world had moved past tolerating the sort of martial order that was appropriate two thousand years ago, or, even, a single war ago. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, and a scene which also brilliantly illustrates the internal contradictions of the man, an impressively compassionate Patton enters the medical tent to visit those soldiers who were injured under his command. To some he offers kind words, to others, purple hearts, to a third man Patton simply leans down and whispers some powerful words into his ear. We cannot hear what he says, but the action is so incredibly gentle and compassionate that you cannot help but be touched. With the next man, though, things change. Patton approaches a young soldier, apparently uninjured, sitting on a stool. Patton asks what’s wrong with the boy. When the soldier tells Patton that his nerves are shot, Patton calls him a “God-damned coward.” The boy starts to sniffle and Patton backhands him so hard, he knocks the boy’s helmet off. “I won’t have a man who’s just afraid to fight stinking up this place of honor!” Say what you will of Patton’s actions, they are not the actions that modern society is willing to tolerate and Patton ultimately has to apologize in front of the entire third army. That is what this movie is, though. It’s a portrait of a man out of time, a brilliant, brave bastard fighting the only way he knows how and loving it.

Of course, Patton wouldn’t be half the movie it is without the incredible talent that is apparent in every frame. Franklin J. Schaffner brings his remarkable sense of pacing and camera angles along with his ability to coax exceptional performances from actors in difficult scenarios to the director’s chair. Jerry Goldsmith, one of the film world’s finest composers, brings an incredible martial score. It’s a personal favorite of mine and I wish I could convey the driving melody of the piece in print, but, somehow, I don’t think “bum bum bah bum, ba bum ba dahdah dum” really covers it. Finally, I cannot say enough times how incredible George C. Scott is as Patton. It’s the performance of his career. Hell, I’m pretty sure Patton himself wasn’t half the Patton Scott is. It’s a brilliant, hard bit, renegade performance that is easily as rough around the edges as it is immediately endearing. That’s all.

36. The Piano

Jane Campion, 1993

“The voice you hear is not my speak voice, but my mind’s voice.”

The Piano stars Holly Hunter as Ada, a girl who has been unable to speak since childhood. She does however have a young daughter, Flora, played by Anna Paquin, and an incredible talent and affinity for the piano. Since she doesn’t talk, she’s considered quite the oddball around Victorian England and, so, she is shipped off to New Zealand to marry Sam Neill. While there, she also meets and slowly falls for Harvey Keitel, playing an Englishman who’s gone a bit native with the local Maori.

On it’s surface, the film is a haunting, complex love story and a sort of post modern bodice ripper. It is, to some degree, comparable to Picnic at Hanging Rock, number 87 on this very list. What goes on just beneath the surface, though, is a rather surprising and thorough examination of feminist film theory. Director Jane Campion (a woman director?!) seems to be working from the scholarship of well known (at least to us uber-nerd film students) feminist theorist Laura Mulvey. Mulvey’s principal idea, and forgive me if I don’t get the whole argument down, it’s been a while, is that the cinema is an intrinsically male, voyeuristic tool. Film for her is all about the “male gaze.” Take for example the character of Miss Torso, the ballerina who lives across the alley, in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. When Jimmy Stewart’s character looks at Miss Torso he sees her as one thing and one thing only: a sex object. According to Mulvey, this is the essence of the woman in cinema, to be looked upon at all times and in every essence as a sex object. Further, women in the audience have no choice but to look at the women on the screen in the same way. Mulvey argues that since the camera’s gaze always takes the perspective of the male gaze, a woman has no choice but to view women on screen through the filter of the male gaze. Thus cinema becomes a demeaning, voyeuristic tool. Now, there is more to Mulvey’s argument than I am presenting here and it has been some time since I’ve considered it in any length. Further, I’m a bit biased as I don’t particularly agree with Mulvey’s ideas. If you’re interested in her full argument, and why wouldn’t you be, check out Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema by Laura Mulvey. There’s a sort of critical approach to that work from John Haber at this site which might explain things better than I have. http://www.haberarts.com/mulvey.htm

In the meantime, it seems clear watching The Piano that Campion is, in part, replying to these ideas. That certainly seems to be at the root of Ada’s inability to speak. She cannot relate to the world around her as it is the world of the male gaze. The film continues to be full of this sort of thing, continually putting Ada into positions of subjugation at Neill’s hands, her relationship with her daughter, and her being denied her own piano. Where Campion begins to differ though and where I really begin to like the movie as something more than haunting, vaguely Victorian romance comes with giving Ada power. She has power over Keitel and, slowly, over her own fate. Campion then begins to change the conventional language of cinema, recreating Ada’s index finger as a clear phallic symbol. What begins to happen is that she starts to confuse the gender identities of Ada and Keitel, giving one certain conventionally masculine characteristics and the other feminine. This, then, seems to be a refutation of Mulvey’s central idea that men and women cannot communicate and that the male gaze controls all. What develops here is a clear notion that men and women must work together and that the female is capable of as much power as the male when she is willing to take it.

So, pretty heavy stuff I know. But I am back. Expect more updates next week. I promise the next couple will be less thinky.