I used to think “Domino”
would be the last movie we would ever experience as a culture.
My feelings for the film,
which felt apocalyptic, stemmed from the unpleasant experience of actually
watching it. I saw the film gather supporters even after it was released to
poor reviews and nonexistent box office, though I couldn’t imagine any of them
would see it a second time, with its propulsive soundtrack, Tourette’s-level
editing and irrelevant subplots involving tabloid talk shows and show business
personalities obscuring that the story surrounding a sexy female bounty hunter.
To me, it seemed like the
farthest point we could push the art form: the tacky sensibilities of a loud,
violent, incoherent blockbuster marred with the hell of non-sequitier-based
experimental filmmaking. Both styles were belligerent, in a way, the film
stuffed with lens flare-equipped desert fantasies, cacophonous R-rated
violence, bleached-out color schemes and actors seeming to exist only on the
periphery of director Tony Scott’s canvas: Edgar Ramirez, as Domino’s (Keira
Knightley) love interest, seemed like he was speaking his lines from another
movie playing on a screen next door, desperately trying to sneak into this one.
Tony Scott, 68, passed on
yesterday, ending his life through suicide. I only hear distant rumors, ones I
half-pay attention to. Rumors that made it sound as if Scott was a typical
Hollywood hotshot, not afraid of a party, even at an accelerated age. He had a
reputation as being something of a wildcard: in contrast to taciturn, sly
brother Ridley, Tony was the life of the party. It came across in his films,
particularly contrasted against Ridley’s. The latter brother was focused on
cerebral, poker-faced entertainments that placed a premium on size, scope, and
seriousness. Tony’s pictures were always more than a little crude, outlandishly
adolescent fantasies that skirted the edge of comedy, more focused on
old-school masculinity than Ridley’s fascination with Big Ideas. More
importantly, both spent a lot of studios’ money, and they used it to blow
everything up.
My favorite Tony Scott film
might be the gleefully ridiculous “The Last Boy Scout,” which features an
opening scene where a linebacker fires a gun into the defense on the way to the
end zone before ending his own life. Scott would make bombastic actioners,
though in his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino and Shane Black (writer of “Boy
Scout”), it’s clear he valued the written word, even if that word was
ludicrous. “Boy Scout,” which is both overcomplicated, and eventually
predicated on the plot twist of a bomb strapped to a football, certainly fit
that definition.
Scott’s interest remained
firmly in the story’s pyrotechnics, though the script has a number of smaller
character moments, eccentric one-on-ones and even heart-to-hearts, and Scott
never obscures the prose. For a big, crowd-pleasing action comedy, however,
Scott was still able to enforce his will over it: it’s still quite ugly and
unpleasant, a neo-nourish narrative where women are props to be demeaned, and
men must rail against attacks on their sexuality through cars, guns, and
sports. Considering the smirky, typically pissed performance from Bruce Willis,
and a vulgar turn from Damon Wayans, it is entirely appropriate. “The Last Boy
Scout” also has the most acidic opening of any nineties-era actioner, with that
linebacker shootout contrasted with the deliriously catchy opening credits for “Friday
Night Football,” mixing in the show’s entrance music with the film’s actual
credits.
I didn’t care for Tony Scott‘s
work, but one couldn’t deny the impressive toolbox he brought to each set. In
his early days, he cannily worked within the Simpson-Bruckheimer model to add a
nasty R-rated edge to “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” and to contribute the attitudinal
sheen that made “Top Gun” a favorite of all movie-loving alpha males. The
turning point probably came at his commercial peak, teaming with Quentin
Tarantino for the colorful “Badlands” takeoff “True Romance” and the propulsive
Naval thriller “Crimson Tide” (allegedly co-scripted by an unbilled Tarantino).
He’s had biggest hits than “Romance,” though no film more properly captured the
Tony Scott aesthetic -- playfully experimental, gleefully nihilistic, and often
painfully violent and vulgar. In a PG-13 era, Tony Scott was still proudly
R-rated, and when you entered his world, you knew bodies would hit the floor,
accompanied by a flurry of f-bombs.
Though it’s a ridiculous
film, “The Fan” represents a crucial step in Scott’s evolution. The tale of a
baseball superstar and the fan that wouldn’t let go was often ridiculously
overheated, Scott fracturing the visual vocabulary of the film as knife
salesman (of course) Gil Renard’s psyche breaks, pushed even farther by an
incessant Nine Inch Nails score. And yet, “The Fan” (a vast improvement over a
joke of a best-seller) features some of the best performances of any of Scott’s
films: Wesley Snipes is wonderfully paranoid as a harried superstar who would
always be looking over his shoulder even if there wasn’t a killer pursuing him.
And De Niro brings unexpected dimensions to a cliché of a character, and his
scenes with Snipes’ Bobby Rayburn crackle with a mixture of contempt, hero
worship, and mental imbalance.
Scott’s editing techniques
eventually became more abrasive, more abstract. “Man On Fire” came in 2004,
pushing his aesthetics against a pedestrian Mandingo-With-A-Gun storyline and
creating what some may consider a post-action film. Much of the violence occurs
offscreen, though a large portion of it is seen multiple times refracted
against itself, playing with the notion of onscreen time and geography.
Appropriately, “Man On Fire” has the sort of narrow-eyed view of Mexico shared
by the darkly comic Tilda Swinton thriller “Julia,” the only difference being
the weirdly sweet message Scott places in the end credits thanking the film’s
Mexico locations and praising them for being wonderful places, in spite of the
hellholes we’ve just seen Denzel blast his way through.
Post-”Domino,” I had a dim
view of the filmmaker, even though I appreciated that he toned down those
stylistic perversions that littered that film. “Déjà Vu” was a dim actioner,
though I concede it featured a few clever sci-fi action sequences likely
similar to the ones film nerds anxiously await in next month’s “Looper.” And
his last film, “Unstoppable,” is something I’ve seen probably five or six times
already. I can tell you the progression of the plot, what occurs when, and how
the story resolves itself, but little else, considering it seems like it’s always
on in the background on HBO. For Scott, I feel that’s a step up.
He had always threatened to
make a more “contemporary” remake of “The Warriors,” an idea I thought came
from a bankrupt mind. In a similar vein, I found it audacious that he would attempt
to remake “The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three.” To this day, I have not seen
his version of the film, though I know it can never replace the matchup of
Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, nor could it come close to the all-timer of a
score by David Shire. Perhaps I held Scott in contempt. More than likely, I was
afraid he had made a cruder, more violent, more vulgar version of the source
material. Perhaps I have always been afraid I might secretly like it.
At this point, it’s difficult
for me to process this, knowing that Scott, for all his questionable artistic
impulses, was a large part of the contemporary film community. My gut reaction
is to find “Domino” again, and to pair it with Godard’s “Film Socialisme.” It’s
an appropriate time to consider that perhaps the man may have been more ahead
of his time than we thought.
Rest in peace.
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