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October 27, 2006
Movies to die for BY MICHELLE DEVEREAUX
If great stories about death are ultimately about life, it makes sense that the title of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) translates in English as “Living.” Takashi Shimura portrays Kanji Watanabe, a mid-level Tokyo bureaucrat biding time until retirement in the city’s seemingly useless Department of Public Affairs. When he finds out he has terminal stomach cancer, the miserly old man determines to live the rest of his life fully which, he assumes, means lots of drunken carousing while blowing large wads of cash. He soon realizes he’s incapable of doing any of that, but then discovers his true salvation: to make a difference by actually doing his job, working tirelessly to get a public park built in a poor neighborhood. Brilliantly acted and unconventionally structured, Ikiru is not just a potent, moving portrait of one anonymous man’s struggle for peace with his life and death; it’s a blistering attack on bureaucracy and cowardly groupthink. No one would ever dare accuse Bette Davis of cowardice. She’s even got nerve enough to smoke in her hospital bed before brain surgery (of course, things were a little different in 1939). In Dark Victory, Davis plays Judith Traherne, a headstrong, fast-living, 23-year-old Long Island socialite who enjoys breaking rambunctious colts when not tippling martinis. When Judith discovers her frequent headaches and poor vision are due to “more than a hangover,” surgery is enough to alleviate her symptoms but not to forgo the inevitability of her death. But hunky, sympathetic Dr. Steele (George Brent) refuses to tell her the truth about her condition, and to complicate matters she falls in love with him (despite the advances of hot-to-trot horse trainer Humphrey Bogart). It’s tempting to think of Dark Victory as just another melodramatic “women’s picture,” but it’s actually a sharp and sophisticated, intricately plotted satire of “polite” society’s—and the medical profession’s—refusal to deal with the reality of death. “I’ll have a larger order of prognosis negative!” she cackles while at lunch with Steele, revealing she’s discovered the truth. No one would ever accuse Davis of being overly polite either. In 2003’s My Life Without Me, Ann (Sarah Polley) doesn’t have to worry about conforming to the expectations of polite society—she’s too busy working nights as a janitor and cooking meals for her husband and two small girls in their ramshackle trailer. Ann may be the same age as Davis’s Judith, just 23, but her world couldn’t be more different. Dad (Alfred Molina) is in jail, Mom (Deborah Harry) is a trashy, bitter pill (and, worse, a Joan Crawford fan!), and her only friend is nut job Amanda Plummer. So it makes sense that her reaction to her imminent death from the Big C is anything but glamorously flashy or histrionic—she calmly creates a “Things to Do Before I Die” list, which even goes so far as to find a new wife for her clueless husband (Scott Speedman). Despite her grim existence, Ann is incredibly emotionally evolved, and Polley brings her usual soft-spoken dignity to the role. Thankfully she’s allowed a few deserved transgressions, like a brief but intense affair with land surveyor Lee, played by Mark Ruffalo. Ruffalo may not make up for dying at 23, but he’s certainly one hell of a going-away present. Of course, dying is never easy, whether in middle age or in youth. In Mike Nichol’s Wit (2001), Emma Thompson plays revered scholar Dr. Vivian Bearing, a 48-year-old university poetry professor who falls prey to end-stage ovarian cancer. Normally formidable, Vivian is reduced to a childlike state of near-incomprehension, sucking on Popsicles in between endless rounds of ravaging chemotherapy. From the confines of her hospital bed, she recounts the indignities of her illness—including receiving a pelvic exam from a former student, a jerky male resident let’s call Doogie Howser, F.U. While Vivian gets top-level medical care, her doctors treat her as little more than an interesting research case. (Herself a researcher who admits little interest in humanity, she’s wise enough to recognize the irony.) Thompson gives the performance of her career in this intimate chamber drama—a more agonizingly real death may never have been captured onscreen—and the full-circle quality of Vivian’s life is heartbreaking to behold. If Wit doesn’t sound like much of a laugh riot, Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions (2003)—the tragi-comic story of bawdy, womanizing Rémy, also a dying university professor—might be a little easier to take. (Although not for Rémy, who’s forced to contend with the incompetence and corruption of Quebec’s crumbling healthcare system.) When his estranged son Sébastien, a wealthy financial-risk manager living in London, returns to his father’s side, he promptly starts managing his death like he’s brokering a shady oil deal—bribing hospital administrators, paying Rémy’s students to visit him, and even securing him a regular source of heroin from the junkie daughter of an old friend (Marie-Josée Croze), who Rémy soon comes to regard as a kindred spirit. A sequel to 1986’s The Decline of the American Empire, the Oscar-winning Barbarian Invasions envisions a world that is no longer safe for the avowed sensualism and romantic idealism of Rémy and his friends; instead, like Watanabe’s Tokyo, it’s overrun with bureaucrats and money managers. The ultimate indignity for Rémy is not his inevitable death, but the fact that his illness has taken away the small pleasures of his life during those last precious moments. “I never thought I’d see the day you turned down fresh truffles,” his friend laments. It seems as though the Philistines have won. In Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice (1971), Gustav Von Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde) is as Puritanical and pious as Rémy is hedonistic. An aging composer and family man prone to rigid moralistic outbursts about truth and purity (“There is no impurity so impure as old age,” his friend warns earlier), Gustav becomes entranced by an angelic Polish boy in a ridiculous sailor suit while vacationing by the Italian seaside. His feelings for the boy both thrill Gustav and wrack him with guilt. This inner torture unfolds against the backdrop of a Venice being enveloped in the fetid stink of a cholera epidemic. It’s as if the city itself is dying, disease oozing through its vein-like canals. Eventually Gustav, his mental state weakening to near madness, succumbs to the fever as the boy—a shining beacon of youth, vitality and idealism—remains mockingly just out of his reach. Based on the 1912 novella by Thomas Mann, Death in Venice is as slow as coagulating hemoglobin, but it’s also just as rich. Released in the same year but lying on the other end of the death movie spectrum (or DMS) is Hal Ashby’s cult classic Harold and Maude. Harold Chasen (Bud Cort) is a rich and idle young man obsessed with death, and is peculiarly fond of staging his own mock suicides. When he’s not driving his Jaguar-hearse combo (the ultimate Goth hybrid) or hanging from the ceiling by a noose, he attends funerals. At one such funeral Harold meets Maude, a 79-year-old free spirit obsessed with the potentialities of life, a fire-breathing yin to his suicidal yang, and they miraculously fall in love. “In life, it’s best not to be too moral,” Maude tells Harold after he puffs on her hookah (and no, that’s not a euphemism). “Aim above morality, and you’re bound to live it fully.” Bursting with absurdist black comedy and scathing social satire (directed at religion, government, psychiatry, the military, etc.), Harold and Maude never couches its commentary in cynicism—it’s a perverse love letter to life in the guise of a morbid exercise in death. Which actually might make it a good movie to watch next Valentine’s Day too... but one b-list holiday at a time, please.
PHOTO: DARK VICTORY THE DEATH ISSUE: |
 Appointment with death Hi Grandpa. How are you? I am fine. How’s the weather beyond the grave? Burying the past Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you have to take your burial lying down |
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Slasher films and splatter fests are so cliché this time of year. Movies about death and dying—ones that deal with their reality, in all its messiness and humanity—can be more disturbing than all the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street sequels put together (and yes, that includes Freddy vs. Jason). This Halloween, why not turn off the lights and freak out with another kind of scary movie?  |
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