Movie Review: Planet of the Apes (1968)

Isn't it ironic?

    What immediately stands out about Planet of the Apes, at least when watched from the perspective of jaded millennial movie-goer, is how earnest it is.  This, after all, is the yesteryear equivalent of a modern Hollywood blockbuster- 1968’s answer to The Dark Knight Rises or The Hunger Games, something designed to put asses in seats and keep them there with garish displays of pop opulence.  And yet no modern blockbuster has the courage, or the folly, to be this straight-forward about its message.

    In fact, no modern blockbuster would even go near this kind of message- Planet of the Apes is a sci-fi action movie built to tell us that humans are corrupt, war-mongering beasts doomed to destroy their own planet.  Pretty heavy for a movie that stars people dressed in monkey costumes that look only a few steps more realistic than something you’d see on The Muppet Show.  Camp and solemnity march hand-in-hand here.  That could give anyone who wants it plentiful excuse to mock the movie as outdated, but it’s also an interesting look into a time when audiences weren’t so ready to reject any message they didn’t have to drill through several layers of irony to unearth.

    The plot of Planet of the Apes is pretty well-known. Charleston Heston stars as a grizzly-faced astronaut who crash-lands on a distant planet where intelligent apes rule all and humans gape at each other and forage for crops like so many loin-cloth clad locusts.  Heston is taken prisoner, and all of ape society is aghast at this talking, properly walking freak of nature.  Adorable reversals of popular phrases follow.  “Man see, man do,” one ape says.  The Scopes Monkey Trial is reenacted with apes in the roles of both Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, the latter arguing that apes could not have evolved from humans since the ape scriptures clearly state otherwise.

    Today, all of this stuff would be incredibly tongue-in-cheek, and according to reviews written at the time, they may have been true even then.  But whatever its original audience thought, the movie at least has the confidence to play everything with a straight face.  That leaves it open to ridicule- it’s very hard not to roll one’s eyes and crack wise when some guy in a Halloween costume flaps his lips vaguely in time with his line and says “To apes, all men look alike,” and yet, by wearing its heart so obviously on its sleeve, the movie can land on images of surprising power.  The famous last shot, where Heston comes across a ruined Statue of Liberty poking out of a beach and realizes that humans are responsible for the sorry state of the world, is stark and haunting and effective.

    It’s been said we’re living in an Age of Irony.  People today simply know too much- about their friends, about their society, about other people’s society- to be surprised or delighted by much of anything.  In a world where we can safely assume that everything will eventually go downhill, treating things ironically is the only way we can squeeze enjoyment out of them.  Planet of the Apes comes from a different time, one where people actually enjoyed things for their own sake and believed that warnings against letting humanity’s darker impulses take it over might actually be useful.  And yet there are those who argue that the Age of Irony is over and that most people are ready to embrace simple things like family and country and to enjoy them sincerely.  Whether Planet of the Apes plays like an artifact from a time long gone or a rousing action-adventure with a pertinent warning about our future as a species may depend on which camp you fall into.

    Except for the monkey make-up, which is goofy no matter how you look at it.

Movie Review: Barry Lyndon

Herein is contained a review of the film Barry Lyndon, its title character’s rise and fall, its methods, and its view of the world.

Every once in a while during Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 costume drama, a title card like that will fade onto the screen, announcing the film’s intentions. The movie also has a narrator, a voice of calm British detachment who tells us what turns the plot will take long before they arrive. Clearly, the movie is not interested in keeping us in suspense, and even without the narrator’s help we sense the direction the story is taking. The movie chronicles several years in the life of its title character, observing his transformation from a penniless Irish nobody into a member of the 18th century British nobility and his subsequent return to his original status. But the events of the movie are not as important as the movie’s attitude towards them, and as observed by its director they are a long, empty endeavor devoid of any human warmth or meaning.

It’s definitely a Stanley Kubrick movie.

The movie’s bleakly ironic outlook is established in its first shot. Two men are seen in an extreme long shot, staring each other down from opposite edges of the screen. They are each pointing guns at the other. The narrator informs us that Barry Lyndon, born Redford Berry, was the son of a lawyer and was destined for a great future in the law… Pop! A shot rings out and one of the men falls dead. …had his father not been killed in a duel. Already, Kubrick has made clear how little value life has in this universe. We never see the men’s faces; their persons are tiny against the daytime horizon. We have only known Barry’s father for the space of a single shot, not long enough to sympathize with his fate. And even if we knew him better, the calmly mannered narration lets us know that his death is something to be observed rather than mourned. Kubrick will cultivate and encourage this level of detachment throughout the length of the film.

One of the principle ways he does this is through the photography. In the early stretches of the movie, Kubrick often shoots his characters from far away, isolating them within large, beautifully panoramic shots of the English and Irish country-sides. There are vast, foggy Irish moors and verdant English hills; the movie soaks up landscape. These shots are wonderful to look at, sometimes seeming more like paintings than moving images, but their austerity sets an example the characters in the story cannot quite live up to. The life of Barry Lyndon is one filled with power plays and petty grievances, and neither he nor anyone else seems to notice the natural beauty around them. In one early passage, Barry has an awkward lover’s quarrel with his cousin Nora, who is leaving him for an older, richer English captain. They squabble in one corner of the screen as we look past them to a lake so picturesque it might as well have been painted right onto the film. Kubrick always finds a way to prevent us from getting too involved in the character’s plights.

Barry uses one opportunistic trick after another to improve his status in life. He goes from an Irish farmhand to an English soldier, from an army deserter to a professional gambler and finally to a member of the English upper class after he woos and marries Lady Lyndon, an aristocrat’s daughter and heir to a large fortune. At this point the film leaves the wide-open spaces of the first half and retreats into interiors. Much has been made of the fact that many of these scenes, in particular those lit by candle-light, used no artificial lighting whatsoever. Perhaps because of the limitations inherent in using such low-light conditions, the actors in these shots are barely allowed to move but for small jerks of their heads and hands. As the earlier exterior shots resembled landscape paintings, so do these interiors resemble precisely arranged still-lifes. The characters are quite literally trapped in space, posed for our viewing pleasure. They have only their faces to express themselves.

Curious then that the actors seem to have been directed to look as blank as possible. Kubrick has chosen as his principal players Ryan O’Neil and Marisa Berenson, who play Barry and Lady Lyndon respectively. O’Neil was a heartthrob at the time the movie was made, and Kubrick uses his matinee good looks as a kind of mask to cover whatever thought might be stewing inside Barry’s head. The narrator tells us that Barry is angry, or sad, or in love, but O’Neil’s face doesn’t change very much, and his voice doesn’t rise. As Lady Lyndon, Marisa Berenson is even more an impassive figure. In one shot, Kubrick slowly zooms out on her face as she sits, elegantly posed in her period dress, on a sofa. The narrator tells us that she feels depressed because of Barry’s philandering, but we can’t help but think that she looks like nothing so much as part of the furniture.


If all of this talk of detachment sounds critical of the film, it is not meant to be. Most movies are fascinated with their characters. They want to get to know them, and they want the audience to sympathize with their problems. In Barry Lyndon, Kubrick all but dares the audience to keep as great an emotional distance from the characters as possible. The events of Barry Lyndon are the stuff of high adventure. Over the course of his life, Barry is robbed at gunpoint, participates in the Seven Years War, becomes a Prussian spy, marries into opulence and fights not one but two gentlemanly duels to the death. Yet all of it is regarded with as much interest as are cornfields passing outside of a car window. The movie discourages audience involvement to the point of being audacious.

So what does the movie gain by separating itself so thoroughly from the audience? It draws our attention to the sumptuously photographed environments, for one thing. But its main function, I think, is to present us with a certain point of view. By robbing us of suspense, by photographing the story so dispassionately, and by giving us performances more mannequin than method, Kubrick gives us no choice but to view the storied life of Barry Lyndon with cool indifference. It is an attitude that seeps into the audience throughout the movie, and perhaps even lingers afterward. It is an attitude that most movies, even most Kubrick movies, do not engender.

Kubrick never really made films that were autobiographical, but this one strikes me as one of his most personal. His movies were often criticized for being cold and lifeless. With Barry Lyndon, he admits that while this may be so, that does not make them any less worthwhile. It merely means that while most movies see the world one way, his movies see it another.

Movie Review: 8 ½

What most interests people? Other people, for one. Sex, violence, science, war, religion, history, and politics, for another. All of this is interesting. But nothing interests people quite as much as themselves. And so we come to 8 ½, a movie about a popular Italian film director given to intellectual flights of fancy on-screen and womanizing in his private life. 8 ½ was directed in 1963 by Federico Fellini, a popular Italian film director known for those same habits. It has been called alternatively an exercise in stylistic vanity and one of the best films ever made. The pertinent question perhaps is: why can’t it be both?

Whatever else the film may be, it is Fellini down to its bones. All of the director’s trademarks are here. There are dance sequence featuring exotic Italian beauties set to swinging salsa beats. The backgrounds of shots are as busy with actors moving in and out of frame as are the foregrounds, and the movie ends with the entirety of the very large cast joining hands and running around in a circle while a five-member brass band plays in the center. Fellini loved parades. Fellini loved the circus, and many of his best films have the same kind of chaotic energy to them. 8 ½ has a plot involving director Guido Anselmi’s attempt to come up with ideas on the fly for a film that technically is already in production, but the movie is at its best when its inside Guido’s head, following him on whatever indulgent fantasy currently has his attention. The movie weaves in and out of reality and fantasy so often that the viewer can be forgiven for not always knowing what is real and what is imagined, but this barely-there structure is exactly where Fellini is most at home. It allows for his ideas to breathe and for his images to emerge without constraint. The movie is not so much a story about Guido as a rumination on him and the people surrounding him.

But how vivid those ruminations are, and what interesting company he keeps. There are many characters, and while none besides Guido gets much attention, they all splash onto screen long enough to make an impression. There is Guido’s on-edge producer, desperate for a script, an idea, anything to appease the investors. There is a quibbling writer, forever criticizing Guido for his lack of focus and originality. To Fellini, making a movie is a maddening dance that saps the spirit and imagination. It is no wonder that Guido retreats into his fantasies, which are uniformly colorful and entertaining and far more easy to handle than his real life.

And then there are the multitude of women circling Guido’s star: his long-suffering wife, his self-deluding mistress, his ethereal muse. In a movie this unbound by any traditional structure, even figures from Guido’s past reach out to him. His devoutly Catholic mother disapproves of him from out of his childhood, and in one memorable sequence a young Guido and his schoolmates visit a full-bodied prostitute who lives on the beach, and she dances for them. Guido cares for all of these women but is incapable of committing to any of them. In what is arguably the movie’s best and certainly one of its most entertaining scenes, Guido imagines that he lives in a harem with all of his women, past and present, and that they give him whatever he needs. But even here reality intrudes. The women revolt, indignant over their split shares of affection, and Guido has to fend them off like a circus trainer does a pack of hungry lions. The sequence is absurd and funny and desperate and strangely moving. It is in brief what the movie tries and so often succeeds to be.

While in production, the working title for 8 ½ was The Beautiful Confusion. The film lives up to it. In the later years of his career, many criticized Fellini as his movies veered into self-indulgence, but 8 ½ proves that the director was fully capable of marrying stylistic excess with a beating heart. Guido has problems. He’s immature, he doesn’t know what he wants, and he prefers fantasy to reality. He has a beautiful brain, though. And he learns. Furthermore, he does it with style.