Brief impression: “Abuse of Weakness”
August 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
If there are a handful of cinematic devices used by filmmakers in the hopes of appealing to the arthouse establishment, a top five list of these would probably include: elliptical storytelling, long/extended takes, banal dialogue, narrative and thematic repetition, and hyper-naturalistic performances; of course, there are probably a handful more that are equally overused. Catherine Breillat has already established herself as one of the key voices of current French cinema, whether as undisputed queen of the so-called New French Extremity or otherwise, so it is hard to argue that her most recent film is an attempt to be ‘arthouse’ by way of somewhat rote application of the above devices, hyper-naturalistic performances aside. Why then does this (or did this initially) seem to be the case, at least in this individual’s eyes?
‘Abuse of Weakness’ is Breillat’s adaptation of her own autobiographical 2009 book of the same name, one which documents her relationship with international conman Cristophe “phony Rockefeller” Rocancourt following a debilitating stroke she suffered in 2004. Initially attracted to his dangerous charisma which she intended on translating to an on-screen performance by casting him in a film project based around the man himself, Breillat – renamed Maud Schoenberg in this film and embodied by the always dependable Isabelle Huppert – found herself writing Rocancourt a string of cheques amounting to nearly €700 000. Breillat blamed her irresponsible cheque-writing and her susceptibility to Rocancourt’s scamming skills on impaired mentation following her stroke, which – to be fair – is not the most implausible claim, an approach which successfully flew in court and subsequently landed the conman in prison.
Now, there isn’t much point in wondering why Breillat decided to convert her book into a film seeing as she was a novelist before she was a filmmaker and has up to this point based four of her films on her own literary works, including her cinematic debut. This being said, is the film intended to be a means by which the subtle or not-so-subtle gender dynamics and perhaps sexuality which may have underpinned and driven Breillat and Raconcourt’s relationship is teased apart and analysed? Because, if so, ‘Abuse of Weakness’ may not be particularly successful. In fact, the film’s achievement may be to further validate Breillat’s assertions of mental incapacity by providing barely any perceptible reasons why Breillat/Schoenberg is putty in the slimy hands of her conman muse. While the film’s version of Raconcourt, named Vilko Piran and played with some level of gusto by Kool Shen, may possess an appreciable brutish allure, this is undercut by the placement of frankly dull, almost embarrassing dialogue in his mouth. The frequent jibes and lame insults Piran lays on Schoenberg, to which the half-crippled filmmaker responds with Huppert’s signature smug smirk, seem to portray the conman as being a lot less extraordinary than €700 000 in swindled loans would suggest. As the film progresses, it would not be surprising if a viewer were almost squinting, trying to see in Piran what it is that Schoenberg sees in him, and in failing to do so, turning the squint on Schoenberg in hope of glimpsing the obvious deficiencies in her that Piran is exploiting. Unfortunately, Scheonberg – as played by Huppert – come across as being more brash, carefree and stubborn than gullible and temporarily dim, and as the film reaches its conclusion in a scene which is a lot more emotionally commanding than it perhaps has any right to be, the possibility that Breillat is still unable to truly explain exactly what was going on in her head during this fateful period in her life becomes less of a possibility and more of a tentative certainty. Was it a crush or was it love? Was it fear? The French auteur, it seems, has little to say about why exactly she fell victim to “phony Rockefeller’s” tricks (apart from the post-stroke-deficit angle). I’d say she has even less to say about Rocancourt and the effect he must have had on his other victims, probably because the key question is not about the exploitation itself but that which was exploited.
Given a handful of weeks to stew over this film, its effectiveness has risen in my estimation, almost improbably. Breillat’s use of the banal, the elliptical and repetitive now appears to be less of a cheap attempt at satisfying the arthouse mode. They truly do seem to highlight the often elusive nature of weakness, the kind that one person has for another.
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Brief impression: “Summer of Sam”
July 30, 2014 § Leave a comment
If Spike Lee’s underrated (I would argue) ‘Summer of Sam’ is more concerned with the effect that the year-long Son of Sam killing season had on the general atmosphere in New York City during the summer of 1977, then I wonder about the scenes featuring Michael Badalucco as the titular figure; I wonder about the presence and the significance of these. Are they intended as periodic reminders of the ‘madman’ whose relatively simple acts had an entire city by the throat for twelve whole months, or are they part of a narrative device by which the concurrent ratcheting of tension in both the character-drama storyline and that of the crime-thriller feed into and feed off one another? Perhaps they are simply obligatory inclusions of an individual in a film whose overall existence is largely dependent on that very individual. Once the film comes to a conclusion though, it is clear that the explicit depiction of the true killer is a kind of dramatic irony: Adrien Brody’s Ritchie, one of the film’s key characters, is increasingly believed to be the Son of Sam by his ‘friends’ on account of his adopting the confronting dress code and lifestyle of the late 70s British Punk establishment (though anyone who knows the actual name of Son of Sam would realise that poor mohawked Ritchie is innocent,) with some fairly unfortunate consequences.
Each time Berkowitz is shown thrashing about in his morbidly lit abode, being tortured – presumably – by the voices chewing at his brain, or when Lee follows Son of Sam or his silhouette from behind as he stalks his human prey in the darkened streets and shrubs, there is almost undeniable deliberateness to the way his identity is concealed. Now while it is common practice to shroud dangerous and shadowy characters in mystery, either for purposes of suspense or to create a sense of otherness, the portrayal of the killer in this film highlights the frustration and tension inherent in his behaviour, or at the very least it seems that this is the case; that he is a wound-up, frustrated man with no other conceivable outlet but the barrel of a pistol. The strong sense I get is that this man is not so far removed from the ‘regular’ folk on whom he preys. Vinny, Ritchie, Ruby, Dionna, Joey and the rest of the cats that populate Throgs Neck, the section of the Bronx that serves as the film’s setting…these characters are all in some way trashing around their own personal hells, victims of their own personal demonic forces, their own 2000-year old black dog (an entity to which Berkowitz actually attributed his crimes): whether it’s Vinny and his irrepressible, wandering eye which finds him repeatedly cheating on his gorgeous wife Dionna, or Ritchie’s immersion in various subcultures that may or may not weigh on him but which certainly contribute to his being ostracised and viewed with undue suspicion, ‘Summer of Sam’ is bold enough to draw parallels between the psychic struggles of these characters and Berkowitz’s rage, confusion and enslavement to his violent urges.
Spike Lee has always been a filmmaker who appears obsessed with the psychological complexities – no, the schizophrenia – of the cultural broth that is New York City, the psychosocial inferno that is created when ethnicities, generations and disparate value systems not only co-exist but frequently clash. In ‘Summer of Sam,’ Berkowitz is less a character than he is a personification of a community’s state of mind at a particular time in its history. Now, whether or not this film successfully explores exactly what state of mind the city of New York was in during this period is a difficult assessment to make, but there is no shortage of first-hand testimony of the fact that the late-seventies saw New York going through a very rough period indeed. Perhaps Berkowitz’s reign of violence was simply one of several possible outcomes; maybe it was even somewhat ineviable. That being said, this film is not so much an exploration of his crimes as it is one which uses his crimes as a way in, a way into the soul of a little section of the Bronx in the summer of 1977.
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Brief impression: “A Face in the Crowd”
July 23, 2014 § Leave a comment
All of a sudden Sidney Lumet’s 1975 masterwork seems that much less original. Of course, there is a rich history of great films being informed by other great films, but Elia Kazan’s 1957 gem pre-empts ‘Network’ so thoroughly that it is simply hard to ignore the latter’s indebtedness to the former. Strangely, while both films dissect, by way of dogged satire, the phenomenon of cult of personality and its place in popular media, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ may be a much more apt commentary on the current culture of ‘following’ and being followed than a film of its age has any right to, particularly nowadays during which it seems to take less and less for one to acquire a posse or legion of fans and adorers, whether in the flesh or otherwise.
In ‘Network’, news anchor Howard Beale’s dwindling audience share only skyrockets once his impending axing flips his switch and turns him into a crazed or perhaps pseudo-crazed mad prophet of the airwaves, one who seems to echo and articulate the frustrations of the average television viewer in post-Vietnam, post-Watergate United States of America. In contrast, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ gives us Andy Griffith in a loose-limbed, powerhouse performance as song-singing drifter Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes, a self-professed “just a country boy” whose small-town charm, charisma and latent narcissism is snapped up by sharp-eyed Arkansas radio promoter Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal in perhaps the performance of the picture) only for him to snowball into a national television sensation. It turns out that there’s just something about this fella Lonesome that millions of Americans seem to love, so much so that he wields an immense influence in fields that your usual TV personality perhaps ought not to. Sure, Rhodes may very well have been a composite of the Elvis Presleys and Buddy Hollys of the day (as well as media personalities like Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey), but beyond the effect Lonesome has on his legion of screaming adolescent females, this film takes a peek into the socio-political implications of a personality this big and this self-assured. Rhodes’ mentorship of a presidential hopeful is a sad reminder of how personality can and often does supersedes policy and principle in The People’s choice of a leader.
Preventing this film from floating off into the stratosphere where overly brash satires that sadly disappear into a vortex of their own cynicism go to die is Kazan’s dedication to a sort of grassroots realism that tends to wheedle its way into his generally baroque approach, acting almost as a sobering reminder that the mythical heights to which Lonesome Rhodes rises in the film do not exist exclusively in a world of cinema and fantasy but in the same world that is home to the everyday, the average. This is perhaps no more evident in Lonesome’s grand homecoming when he is treated to a routine by the local high-school cheerleading team (a slight call-back to the forbidden sexuality in Kazan’s previous film ‘Baby Doll’). The choice of interweaving of candid-looking, almost verité shots of the small-town American crowds that have come to see their local hero with more staged and stylised depictions of Lonesome’s antics and reactions seems to suggest that there is an element of mutualism at play here; that Lonesome satisfies his fans’ need to adore, to worship, to elevate as much as they feed his need to be adored and worshiped and elevated. The truth of course is that this not quite mutualism or commensalism but a kind of mutual parasitism whereby both parties feed off each other to satisfy needs that do not in any way benefit either of them in the long term.
But for all the socio-political commentary, as is true of a great deal of Elia Kazan’s work, ‘A Face in the Crowd’ is great entertainment in the broadest Hollywood sense: it’s classical rise-and-fall storytelling that moves at a cracking pace, populated by the faces that have a certain star quality. This picture is one strong piece of evidence in favour of the idea that a film can package intelligence and insight in a snappy, flashy package of song, sass and swinging style.
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Brief impression: “Manakamana”
July 18, 2014 § 1 Comment
Aside from the incomprehensible technical prowess it must require to craft some of his sculptures, the genius of Ron Mueck’s work – most of which depicts not mythical deities or surrealistic peculiarities but what one might call “average human beings in various states of vulnerability” – is that it renders the commonplace inexplicably captivating; no, hypnotic. It was only on viewing a Mueck sculpture that I realised, perhaps with a slight shudder of inward-directed horror and shame, how rarely I consider the physicality of my fellow humans with any degree of vested interest, with the slightest bit of genuine, unadulterated curiosity. Even those whom I consider beautiful, sexy or pleasing to behold only tend to register in my mind as a combination of features, broadly speaking: nice eyes, full lips, hourglass figure, ample bosom, a stately pair of legs; even in as intimate a situation as sharing a bed with such an individual, how often do my eyes scour every inch of their face in simple wonderment, as opposed to focusing on the moistness of lips or the shimmering of eyes? Of course, it is not often that one is offered the opportunity to visually explore the raw, physical humanity of another person, one whom they encounter walking down the street or sitting in a café or travelling on the train. But how often have I thought to myself “if only I could study the very pores on this individual’s face, only then would my curiosity be satisfied?” This is the magic of Mueck’s sculptures: opening one’s eyes to the endlessly fascinating bodyscape of the human creature, stirring up latent curiosity or curiosity which previously did not exist and, in doing so, dragging the beholder from their cocoon of self-interest and propelling them into a state of social and spiritual receptivity that may pave the way for greater empathy. Similarly, this is the magic of a film like ‘Manakamana.’
The Manakamana Cable Car runs between Cheres station in the Chitwan district of Nepal and Manakamana Temple located in the neighbouring district of Gorkha. Since 1998 the Austrian-imported cable car has transported locals, tourists and cargo over and across the surrounding valleys and mountain ranges, back and forth, from nine in the morning to five in the evening when the system shuts down for the day. The average trip from Cheres to Manakamana takes roughly ten minutes and for a touch under two hours Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab dare to subject viewers to eleven uncut, static shots depicting exactly eleven trips between the two stations. It is evident after a handful of these segments that the filmmakers probably shot a wealth of footage and that the final cut of the film is comprised of a considered selection of trips shot in different cable cars at different times as opposed to it being eleven consecutive journeys in one particular car. One of these segments actually takes place in a cargo vessel transporting a bunch of goats through the Nepalese sky, recalling – whether tongue-in-cheek or not – ‘Sweetgrass’, a film also produced by HSEL. Apart from the goats, the subjects are largely locals going about their daily business or on pilgrimage, though there are some English-speaking tourists and a trio of young, blackclad, long-haired Nepalese metalheads, for a touch of variety.
Interestingly, thirty-plus minutes into the film, long after I found myself subtly hoping and pleading for the film to offer up subjects other than locals quietly exchanging everyday banalities or sitting in utter silence for minutes on end, the metalheads appeared on screen. But by this point, ‘Manakamana’ had taught me how best to watch it, how best to appreciate what it had to offer, which was (and continues to be) the opportunity to be simply and selflessly fascinated. Rather than being a cute little bit of cinematic tourism that seeks to provide a box-ticking portrait of the cable car and the various types of passengers it services, ‘Manakamana’ is an anthropological exercise, albeit one which requires nothing more than patience, curiosity, but mostly a generosity of spirit of the kind that is rarely allowed to exist let alone thrive in a decidedly impatient and breakneck world. While the gently rocking landscape outside the cable cars is splendid in its natural beauty and soothing in its repetitiveness, and while there are endless moments of raw human behaviour in each segment that are both funny and sobering, it may very well be that ‘Manakamana’ is less about what is projected onto the screen and more about what it demands of the willing audience member, which is ultimately empathy in its purest form; the selfless desire to appreciate and perhaps understand the existence of another. Like Mueck’s sculptures, ‘Manakamana’ constructs a situation in which patrons are given the opportunity to do that which either time, social decorum or both prevent them from attempting or even considering.
Much as Ron Mueck’s sculptures were a sobering experience for me in highlighting, on my part, a disappointing lack of curiosity about things, ‘Manakamana’ challenged me to consider why it is that sitting quietly in the presence of a stranger can be so uncomfortable. I suspect it has to do with the fact that inquisitiveness of this kind – being selflessly interested in others and their plights – has become so darn unnatural. Perhaps it has always been. If so, bravo to ‘Manakamana’ and other such work that seek and strive to undo this state of affairs one film and one viewer at a time.
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Brief impression: “On Dangerous Ground”
June 3, 2014 § 2 Comments
Is the latter half of ‘On Dangerous Ground’ undone/done-in by the former, which is to say: has my being slightly underwhelmed by the romance and intrigue of the final forty minutes anything to do with the sense of breathless awe that I had when watching the film unfold in its strong, silent, semi-procedural way? A simple tonal shift is probably not reason enough to dismiss a vital portion of a film seeing as, in this one, the protagonist must undergo an inner softening similar to the way the movie itself seems to soften visually and with regards to pace and manner, taking on a more pastoral rhythm. I wouldn’t like to think that I value somewhat gritty matter-of-factness above romanticism and honest sentiment, at least not unequivocally.
I suppose the reason for my reactively lukewarm feelings towards ‘Casablanca’ and similar mainstream canonical “classics” from the Hollywood “golden age” is the fact that these films, which tend to be among the few “older” pictures that the general film-viewing public have seen, colour the way in which cinema from this period is widely perceived. Having spent a good deal of my university days wading through the file sharing networks through which my fellow dorm residents and I could access each other’s legally – cough – obtained movie collections, I can remember being struck by how often ‘Casablanca’ and co (‘co’ being other mainstream canonicals i.e The Magnificent Seven, The Wizard of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, West Side Story) were the only representatives of pre-1970s cinema on lists that almost suggested that the art form was invented in the mid-80s. So when the commonly held idea of a quintessential “golden age” film involves fast-talking-high-pants, swooning dames and swelling strings, soft-lighting, staginess or air thick with naiveté, it’s no great surprise. Of course, ‘Casablanca’ at times has a mildly tough edge to it, relatively speaking, but if I thought old-timey film romance was a little ‘cute’ after watching that sacred cow, then watching an alternative sacred cow – something like ‘Brief Encounter’ – made me think twice.
‘On Dangerous Ground’ opens with a shot that typifies the movie’s old-school modernism: a gun-in-holster is carried and fastened to a male cop’s body by his female better-half, quietly, without musical accompaniment, with understated gestures and few words, and this moment is repeated with several fellow coppers in a way that is haunting by way of its suggestions of impending doom, but in a way which also proves to be thematically indispensable. The visual demonstrativeness of Ray/Lupino’s very classical filmmaking is balanced out by a streak of naturalism in the performances and even in the dialogue at times, the result being that the movie looks and feels to me like a stylistic portrayal of an era that has its own peculiarities and rhythms, but which is by no means exponentially different to the one in which I exist; almost as if its otherness is only an artefact of cinematic representation. As the cops go about their business of catching a cop-killer there is a sense of simmering danger and intensity to the procedural sparseness with which the cop-catching business is captured, so much so that it renders the overbearing cheerlessness of present-day police procedurals tired and artless. But as world-worn detective Jim Wilson ventures out into snow-laden small-town USA, and especially once he encounters his eventual love interest Mary Malden, the movie takes on a quality one could consider to be more in keeping with what people expect of a film from the era of shimmering eyes and string swells.
Jim’s affection for Mary appears to be predicated on pity more than genuine attraction, and pity seems to be the means by which his misanthropy eases, but maybe this is an unfairly cynical assessment, more cynical perhaps than Jim himself. It is of course implied that Mary’s lack of distrust despite her being practically blind forces Jim to reconsider his own hard-hearted attitude towards humanity at large, but I wonder whether or not the film’s flirtations with sentimentality were an earnest change in tone on the part of the filmmakers, or if Ray, Lupino and company simply fell into certain stylistic rhythms which continue to misrepresent mainstream American cinema from that period as being invariably maudlin. But seeing as I’m loath to end a piece of writing about this wonderful film with the word ‘maudlin’, I shan’t.
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Brief impression: “Only Lovers Left Alive”
May 19, 2014 § Leave a comment
After the initial giddy feeling inspired by the geeky, cheeky last shot of Jim Jarmusch’s newest picture, I immediately began to wonder if the white-haired iconoclast had unwittingly undermined the preceding two hours of his movie or whether he was making some kind of a statement with this image of married vampires Adam and Eve approaching the camera, fangs drolly bared, coming in for their close-up, for their kill.
This drily romantic movie infuses Jarmusch’s aloof, absurdist style with moments of sensual expressiveness that I can’t remember seeing much of in his previous work. Considering the movie’s setting is entirely nocturnal, source light plays a key visual role in all its forms, from dull glows indoors to effervescent streaks and pulses out on the streets; this somehow provides an ambience that suggests both a sense of nostalgia for the past and a zest for the present. Adam is fed up after being exposed for centuries to the eternal foolishness of mankind (though there is a strong possibility that he is just as equally fed up with himself), but Eve, on the other hand, seems to lack Adam’s misanthropic depression; she has soul, a love of literature and knowledge (hence the biblical namesake?) and the ability to marvel at a breed of fungus and quote its binomial nomenclature. The one thing they do seem to share unequivocally and in equal measure is a love for blood, which they acquire illegally, lap up from little crystal chalices and respond to as if it were grade-A heroin.
So when Eve travels from Tangiers to Detroit to once again free her reclusive rock god husband from his Cobain-as-portrayed-in-Gus-van-Sant’s-“Last-Days” style melancholy, one could be forgiven for expecting Adam to gradually – perhaps painfully – gain a newfound appreciation for life and all its wonders. But being a Jarmusch film, this isn’t quite the case, and though there is a moment towards the end when Adam seems to experience awe for what may be the first time in decades if not centuries, the truth is that when life is stripped down to its bare scaffoldings and they are forced to reconsider their priorities, the only thing that either Adam or Eve seem to give a shit about is blood. Five hundred years ago they would have feasted on the necks of victims; today they acquire screened blood from dodgy doctors. But in the event of a shortage of good sangre they are willing to abandon their modern, civilised methods to get their juice of choice. Even Adam, a man who is practically suicidal, will kill to live. Funny.
Getting back to that final shot: I wonder if Jarmusch is suggesting that human endeavour and human values are ultimately subservient to our innate desire to survive, to simply exist as living beings at the very least. While we are here on this rock we may seek knowledge, expression, love and companionship, pleasure…but above all we just want to breathe. Perhaps this is the irony of Adam’s disdain for mortal men whom he nicknames “zombies” assumedly on account of their (our) mindlessness and their (our) being relative slaves to their basest and most basic instincts. But isn’t Adam, he who is the only living true Renaissance man, just as much of a zombie as the next warm-blooded individual when it comes to his utter dependence on his crimson life force? And isn’t Eve, who seems to think she is Gaia incarnate, no more than a junkie with a predilection for reading and music? Perhaps Jarmusch is gently ridiculing his creations while adoring them with his camera (an approach that scores of film artists over the decades have taken), though I will say that he clearly admires Eve’s considerable verve.
I still think there is more to “Only Lovers Left Alive”, or would at least like to think that there is, but am not quite sure what this would be. This movie’s final image is either loaded with subtext, or it is Jarmusch saying “hey, it’s just a vampire movie after all – this is what they do, is it not?”
* As an aside, I wonder if “Only Lovers Left Alive” would make one half of a fitting immortals-living-amongst-us double-feature when paired with Wim Wenders’ magnificent “Wings of Desire”, if only to contrast Damiel the angel’s desire to become human and to feel human in the latter with Adam’s sheer disdain for mankind and everything it stands for in the former, though one could argue that the very thing which Damiel envies about humanity is precisely what Adam feels our species has lost or perhaps never did have and that Damiel is in for a nasty surprise. But then again, Eve represents much of what Damiel romanticises about the human experience, and she could very well be seen as an analogue of Marion, the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds-loving trapeze artist with whom Damiel falls in love and who is as much a muse to him as Eve clearly is to Adam.
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Brief impression: “Blue Ruin”
May 13, 2014 § Leave a comment
Jeremy Saulnier’s sophomore feature as a writer-director spent much of 2013 screening at festivals where it was widely lauded for reasons unclear to me; unclear not because ‘Blue Ruin’ is a bad film, but because it does not strike me as being undeniably outstanding. It generally follows the current mould of independent American filmmaking: shallow focus, intimate framing, deliberate naturalism, humming score, flirtations with slow pacing, loose narrative flow….
In my mind, this movie’s saving grace is the general feeling it gives off, the feeling that protagonist Dwight does what he does because he truly has nothing else to do with himself and is unable to rustle up an alternative sense of purpose. This may perhaps be the very thing which keeps it from coming across as merely a vehicle for a series of suspenseful set-pieces or just a standard tale of vengeance, which is unfortunately the way in which the final standoff/shootout threatens to immortalise the picture. I appreciate that the final few shots then seem to pull the tone of the film from the edge of trigger-happy bombast back to one of sobriety and mild sentiment, as if to say “yes, there have been thrills, there has much suspense and your heart might be racing, but this is ultimately a lament.” Lamenting what: loneliness and its consequences? Gun ubiquity in the US? Humankind’s affinity for tribalism and the resultant violence? Misguided loyalty? I can’t say for sure.
Through a careful interplay between leading man Macon Blair’s “I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum” performance and the way Jeremy Saulnier chooses to observe and follow Dwight’s endeavour to avenge his ma and pa, a strange sense of motivational credibility is achieved. Dwight is wide-eyed and appears somewhat hyper-aware, but in a way that suggests constitutional behavioural quirks as opposed to plain old paranoia. Maybe he was always a bit “special”, but this specialness has been “exacerbated” by the tragedy he has suffered and the consequent sense of dislocation he likely feels. Saulnier’s directorial approach is a mix of the anthropological and the procedural, patiently watching Dwight as he perceives the world around him, reacts to these perceptions – however heightened, and thinks through the challenges thrown at him. Within minutes of the film’s opening, the significance of this loss on his overall stability as a person is made perfectly clear: here is a man who now has nothing and who is simultaneously angry about it, disoriented by it, and desperate to restore some sort of moral balance. I would tentatively argue that it is this increasing aura of confusion and misguided devotion which subtly separates Dwight’s quest for retribution from the pig-headed bravado that seems to drive most vengeful protagonists, making “Blue Ruin’s” mild mayhem into more than just genre indulgence.
the odd employment 