Movies about Verbal byplay
Some of the most notable scenes of the recent summer movie season involved great sights and spectacles — and little to no talking.
In several of the biggest upcoming fall releases, directors have crafted memorable characters out of a mute janitor, a deaf young girl and a near-silent victim of a Cambodian genocide.
Film dialogue is for suckers?
After a generation of scripts from the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Aaron Sorkin celebrated the motor-mouthed and the silver-tongued, many directors are embracing a new moment. They’re making movies that include long stretches without speech or even sound at all.
Modern moviemaking is rife with counter-trends, reactions to once-novel ideas that have since grown tired. Take the boomlet in practical effects that succeeded years of CG overkill, or a pronounced lack of backstory following a slew of exposition-mad films.
Now the notion of talking may be getting dragged to the rubbish pile too.
“I’m a big fan of silent cinema,” director Christopher Nolan says, “telling the story primarily pictorially and through sound and music.
“[W]hat’s exciting about movies right now,” he adds, “is being taken to a world you would never normally travel to in a primarily visual sense.”
Nolan would know. If this past summer season was a time of peak silence in film, the Brit was a key reason why. His smash World War II picture “Dunkirk” chronicled a heroic beach rescue by often using little more than the sharp images and unique sounds of conflict. Quick, name the five best lines in “Dunkirk.” The movie’s most indelible moments were sights, not speech.
Nearly a century after “The Jazz Singer” signaled the end of the silent era, dialogue-light movies are making a return, with a distinctly 21st-century spin. It’s a new and, many filmmakers say, welcome development in a medium constantly seeking fresh ideas. But the trend also raises questions about the definition of cinema in the 21st century — not least whether it could undermine one of the most treasured aspects of moviegoing.
Examples of conversational minimalism abound. In Matt Reeves’ “War for the Planet of the Apes,” one of the summer’s best-reviewed films, entire scenes unfurl in silence as apes communicate via looks and sign language. The film is notable for its quiet moments, for a lack of words from man or beast.
In the age of emojis, it seems, sometimes you can say it better without words.
And in one of the season’s indie breakouts, David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story,” Casey Affleck’s character haunts the action by watching over his former partner Rooney Mara without saying anything. Five or 10 minutes often go by with barely a word spoken; the dialogue in the entire film could probably fit on a corner of Affleck’s signature sheet.
The trend continues this fall. Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” an early Oscars-season front-runner after its warm reception at festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, is notable because it features a mute janitor, played by Sally Hawkins, who’s mainly given expression through her eyes, hands and the film’s score.
Or “Wonderstruck,” Todd Haynes’ mystical October release about two deaf young people across 50 years of time. Half of the movie, set primarily in 1927 New York, plays like a silent film, with no spoken dialogue at all.
Even Angelina Jolie’s historical drama “First They Killed My Father” — a new Netflix film about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in 1970s Cambodia — is characterized by its young heroine’s dearth of dialogue.
When wordy was better
This represents a major shift. For the past 25 years, after all, many of the best English-language movies were defined by, well, talking. Films that captivated and won honors — Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” and “Django Unchained,” the Sorkin-penned “A Few Good Men” and “The Social Network,” Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Boyhood,” to name just a few — did so because of distinctive and even excessive dialogue.
There was no such věc as excessive dialogue. Words were good and more words were better. The quality of a film was often judged by the crackle of its conversation; the ambition of a script could be measured by the number of its pages.
But something is changing. While a fair share of movies still attract attention for their verbal byplay, some of the best new works do so despite — or because — of no talking at all.
In a time of cable-news blather . . . film may be going quieter because the world has gotten noisier.
Directors cite a number of explanations for the switch. An artistic pendulum-swing is one: If so many auteurs have been mining dialogue for so many years, maybe it’s time to go another way and ratchet it down, they say.
Technology has also played a role. After all, it’s never been this inexpensive to create high-end images.
The influence of other art forms can’t be discounted either; the mainstreaming of video art, experimental cinema and other forms of imagemaking is exerting its pull. In the age of emojis, it seems, sometimes you can say it better without words.
But the directors also raise social explanations — asking if in a time of cable-news blather and social-media pontification, the cinema establishment is reacting in kind. Film may be going quieter because the world has gotten noisier. Movie theaters are now a refuge from the yammering.
“It’s partially personal — I have a hard time paying attention to people talking for more than five minutes before my mind wanders,” says Lowery, who came of age idolizing Tarantino dialogue until he started making films and realized his own scenes were more powerful with less of it. “But I also think throughout history filmmakers respond to the world around them, use the tools at their disposal to push back. And movies can be a respite from the rest of the world right now.”
Love and silence
Filmmakers say they increasingly realize that silence, more than just offering a moment of contrast or a simple breather, can be a device in its own right.
“The movie is in love with love and in love with cinema,” Del Toro says of the decisions he made for “The Shape of Water.” “And when you fall in love, if it’s not through song, words are entirely useless. And I thought, ‘I want the connection to be in the eyes of the actor or actress and for that connection to be beyond talking.’
“What does love do? It renders you mute.”
Jolie for her part uses silence as a kind of metaphor for our collective speechlessness in the face of war’s horrors. “Father,” based on the harrowing memoir of the survivor Loung Ung, is seen essentially from the young girl’s perspective. For much of the film the character is silently witnessing brutality, trapped in situations she can neither understand nor process.
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who as longtime music-video directors relied on visuals for much of their careers, are back in the talking game with this weekend’s tennis drama “Battle of the Sexes.” And they’re not sure how they feel about it.
“We love great writing, but it’s a little bit of a straitjacket sometimes,” says Faris, who directed “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Ruby Sparks” with Dayton. “What we really love is interakce. And that can come in many forms.”
“When a conversation works it can move things forward,” says Dayton, ironically in constant dialogue with his wife. “But talking plot can be a bit of a burden.”
It’s understandable that for so long so many great movies would contain sharp dialogue — it’s the most fun for screenwriters, not to mention actors. But directors (some of whom, of course, also write or act) say that such thinking overlooks the joys of silence.
“My favorite [part] is we’re able to just do behavioral things,” Reeves says. “The great thing about this is that that experience is part of what people are coming to see, to submit to this very uncanny experience where they’re seeing emotions and thoughts that flicker in the eyes of apes.”
(Some modern progenitors of the trend, incidentally, include 2015’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which while certainly never quiet, reveled in a kind of immersive experience more than conversation, and 2012 Oscar best-picture winner “The Artist,” which rendered literal the idea of silent film.)
Many directors say that while it seems tougher to write a great piece of dialogue than craft some sharp mise-en-scêne, in fact, that’s a screenwriter-centric view, and doesn’t consider the full trickiness of cinematography and direction.
But even if they pull it off, will audiences go for it? Moviegoers are accustomed to talking, to hearing their favorite characters have a feeling they’re not in Kansas anymore, of being made offers they can’t refuse. What becomes of these moments in a dialogue-light future? And what becomes of the artists who traffic in that dialogue?
“It all makes me feel like an outlier even though I kind of smile to myself a little bit about it,” Sorkin says, also noting the tendency he observed among his teenage daughter and her friends to present their lives to each other via shared photos instead of text. “I can just use what I have, and that’s words.”
To be sure, movie chatter isn’t going anywhere. Even in the summer hit “Baby Driver,” where long stretches of the action are conveyed through the eyes and music-synced motions of star Ansel Elgort, filmmaker Edgar Wright crafted sharp fast talk for Kevin Spacey’s crime boss and his gang.
Meanwhile, Sorkin himself along with Linklater have movies coming this fall: the poker-world drama “Molly’s Game,” which marks Sorkin’s directorial debut, and “Last Flag Flying,” the upcoming New York Film Festival opener in which Linklater chronicles Vietnam veterans on a fraught road trip. Both contain dense dialogue. “Molly’s Game” already received a strong reception in Toronto.
But they may be rare breeds. In a time of image-driven communication, cinema appears to be offering its own spin on the idea. Thanks to modern tools, a medium that began wordlessly is returning to its non-verbal roots.
“Cinema lexicon has developed so that you can now push boundaries visually,” Lowery says. “You can convey many bits of information without any dialogue between characters.” Sometimes, in other words, it’s best to stop using so many of them.
Times staff writer Josh Rottenberg contributed to this report.
The Plainsman (1936)
Režie: Cecil B. DeMille
By Roderick Heath
Plainsman is bunkum. But it’s entertaining bunkum and one of Cecil B. DeMille’s best films. Plainsman, fairly well-written, and punctuated by neat verbal byplay reflecting DeMille’s recently abandoned interest in racy screwball comedy after the failure of Madame Satanová in 1930, is given special force by two grand performances, from Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur, as an incredibly romanticized Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane. It’s also a veritable super-Western, beating Jak byl dobyt Západ (1962) to the punch by nearly 30 years in trying make a vast historical saga out of sprawling, disconnected events and gilded genre clichés.
DeMille stretches truth and credibility to near-ridiculous lengths to provide a streamlined narrative leading from Abraham Lincoln’s (Frank McGlynn Sr.) plans for postwar America, outlined just before he goes to a performance at Ford’s Theatre, to Hickok’s being shot in the back in a card game. At least the movie is honest enough in its credits to admit to compressing events for the sake a dramatic narrative, whilst also being vague enough in its changes to disguise the timeline of events. The oft-recycled, epic plot, follows the efforts of dastardly financiers with investments in repeating rifles who are unlikely to be paid back after the Civil War’s end deciding to sell them to Indians, hiring seedy trader John Lattimer (Charles Bickford) to do so. The Indians, unhappy at the large number of young men following the advice to “go West,” start agitating more aggressively than expected.
Hickok, returning from war service, runs into old pal Buffalo Bill Cody (James Ellison), newly married to a dainty, peace-abiding Eastern miss (Helen Burgess) and fretting irritably over ex-flame Jane, who’s working as a stagecoach driver. They’re all soon embroiled in frontier skirmishes, and both Bills are sent off on disparate missions by General Custer (John Miljan) in an attempt to head off a war. But war comes anywhere. At one point, renegade Cheyenne chief Yellow Hair (Paul Harvey!), tortures his captive, Will Bill, to loosen Jane’s tongue about where Buffalo Bill is leading a relief column. Because she’s a girl, she spills the beans, and the two Bills end up holding off a massive assault on the train whilst Jane tries to alert Custer.
Needless to say, they get out of that scrape. When Hickok attempts to bring in Lattimer, he instead has to gunfight with three soldiers who are his partners, killing them all but suffering wounds himself. Custer, believing Hickok to be a murderer, wants him arrested and sends Cody after him. Both men soon find out that Custer and his men have been killed at the Little Bighorn with guns sold by Lattimer to Sitting Bull. Hickok tracks Lattimer down to Deadwood, takes out the nefarious villain, and decides to wait out Cody’s return with the cavalry to round up the rest of them. He plays a game poker with them, where he draws a hand of aces and eights.
It’s balderdash, of course, but not quite as big a load of it as I first assumed. Jane, prone to romancing, did claim to have worked as a scout for Custer at the frontier Fort Russell, but was all of 13 when the Civil War started, possibly lending a weird subtext to Hickok’s prewar affection for her. The two Bills were indeed acquainted, having met before the war when Hickok was 18 and Cody 12. But Hickok didn’t meet Jane until a couple of years before his death in 1876. Hickok’s assassin, mining roughneck Jack McCall (Porter Hall), is reinvented as a dapper, craven associate of Lattimer’s. The screenplay is, nonetheless, amusing and clever in how it weaves together vignettes in the legends of all four into a tight story that rockets along.
Arthur’s wondrous Jane ought to be more famous than it is as a landmark screen heroine who, in one particularly delightful scene, strips off the sable dress she’s wearing to reveal trousers, wields a Winchester, and rides off with rare zest to fetch Custer. The problem is she’s undercut by DeMille; he was fond of willful, rule-breaking heroines but always made sure they were taken down a peg for it, becoming overwrought and eventually either deliberately or inadvertently treacherous. Jane is properly disgraced for being weak enough to spill the beans to Yellow Hair, but it does give Arthur a marvelous moment, when Jane lolls in pure, self-loathing despair.
DeMille was the most famously and proudly chauvinistic of filmmakers, yet also a man of curious contradictions — the devoutly religious, intensely patriotic patriarch whose sex-and-drug orgies were famous in Tinseltown, and with a biting cynicism about the expectations of the American public he went to such great effort to entertain. When they rejected Madame Satanová and jazz-age raciness, he turned to religious subjects; when they rejected Křížové výpravy (1934), he abandoned world history for a time, and did it always with a smirk.
Despite his strictly conservative bent, sympathy for the oppressed and degraded is a potent theme in DeMille’s work: he reassures us of Lattimer’s total villainy when he kicks a black porter in the head for dropping a crate of rifles. Despite that, it’s not exactly PC in terms of its portrayal of Native American interests. Like many films of the period (Zemřeli v botách, 1941; Měla na sobě žlutou stuhu, 1948, etc.), the blame for the Indian Wars is put more on irresponsible arms dealers, sharklike profiteers both individual and corporate, and renegade bigots of both races, clearing guilt away from government policies, callous military ventures, and endemic racism.
Jako v Zemřeli v botách, Custer is the perfect cavalier forced into a war and final destruction by forces beyond the ken of both him and the Indians, rather than the crazed, messianic butcher we’d be getting by the time of Malý velký muž (1970). Amusingly, a very young Anthony Quinn, appearing in his fourth movie appearance, plays a Cheyenne warrior who tells Hickok and Cody about the Little Bighorn battle. He bluffed his way into the role by pretending to speak authentic Cheyenne, whilst speaking pure gibberish. Quinn would later marry DeMille’s daughter Katherine and continue a long association with him, directing a remake of his Buccaneer v 1959.
Far more so than John Ford’s films, which, even when portraying Native Americans at their most villainous, bestowed a certain dignity on them, DeMille is happy shopping out patronizing attitudes, for example, showing them behaving with childish fascination when Jane distracts a war party by interesting them in Mrs. Cody’s hat collection, and then moving to destructive tantrums and grotesque torture sessions. You can see variations on the same plot, each time tweaked a little further around the dial in meaning, through Rio Grande (1949) do Major Dundee (1965) a Ulzanin nájezd (1972). Whereas Ford found the theme of former enemies of the Civil War fighting together on the plains intriguing and volatile enough to generate several movies, for DeMille’s it’s a throwaway comedy touch, as if the war was an automatically healed wound in the great march of American history.
Ale Plainsman feels like a generic textbook for other reasons. DeMille had the classical director’s understanding of how audiences respond to detailed flourishes of action, and Cooper, at his youthful best, is the catalyst. His Hickok is a study in rest and motion, situating himself in easy poses with an unassuming expression, tersely measured motions, and reactions until driven to action. He becomes a blur of brilliance—riding between two horses through a battle, picking off pursuers with a one-handed Winchester shot, spinning his pistols on his fingers and slipping them back in their holsters without taking his steely gaze off the men he’s challenging.
Cooper’s Hickok is the perfect Western hero, and perhaps better than any other film, this one shows off Cooper, the lean, sexy, innately physical actor, supremely confident in controlling a scene. One throwaway gesture exemplifies Cooper’s style—trying to avoid discussing Jane’s betrayal with Cody, he ends with a slight move of his head, a momentary parting of his lips, as if to say something more, but then demurs, clamming up, ending the scene with an unspoken tension. It’s the sort of telling, barely noticeable flourish that affirms Cooper as both an intelligent actor and a fascinating star.
Cooper’s innate sense of subtlety is particularly cool when contrasted with DeMille’s complete disinterest in it. He pursued a kind of illustrative ideal to the point his final—and greatest—film, Desatero (1956), achieved a kind of perfection in its total, depthless stylization. The themes and characterizations in Plainsman practically stand on a table and shout, and his schoolbook sense of pictorial history results in tableaux vivant depictions of Lincoln and Custer’s Last Stand.
Yet DeMille warrants more respect as a filmmaker than he generally gets today. Like a relative handful of Hollywood directors of the time—Ford, Hawks, Walsh, Wellman, Dieterle, Capra—he had a recognizably individual style of framing shots, more vivid than the standard, dull, medium group shots of the average studio hand and usually handled with the care of a Victorian academic painter. He specialized in finely detailed and composed živé obrazy, such as those of the battered soldiers hunkered down, but never let such fussiness spoil his sense of high action.
Moreover, though intended as thundering entertainment, Plainsman is not stupid. It’s a film that actually manages to be about ethical growth. Hickok, so Buffalo Bill assures his wife pleasantly, has no rival as a “corpse-maker.” He’s the distillation of the violent West’s quick-draw wits and an angry misogynist. He even considers killing Cody when he comes to arrest him. But Hickok’s also decent man, who had taken Lincoln’s utterance about the need to bring order to the West to heart. Hickok eventually comes to the realization that a life of casual extermination is getting old, and begins learning to forgive Jane her failure of nerve and Jack McCall for their sins. The irony being, of course, that McCall will shoot him in the back for his newfound pacifism.
Martin McDonagh risks self-parody in a movie about mayhem — and movies
by Matt Wolf Wednesday, 05 December 2012
And then there were none: Colin Farrell and Woody Harrelson dice with death in Martin McDonagh’s latest
There’s only one Martin McDonagh as is proven anew by sedm psychopatů, the latest from the London-born Irish playwright and erstwhile wunderkind who in recent years has transferred his brand of casual and often comic cruelty to the screen.
Featuring a predominantly male ensemble that amounts to McDonagh’s ad hoc repertory troupe, the film is cheerfully violent on all manner of topics including the nature of movie-making itself, and its «meta» quality is sure to divide audiences, who will either be entranced or irked by what’s on view. 
McDonagh devotees can groove on a script that pokes fun at itself within minutes — «Overkill?», «Hear hear» goes a characteristically self-satiric early exchange — leaving uninitiates to the onetime literary bad boy’s modus operandi wondering when proceedings will sober up. On that front, the only response is to take a leaf from the onscreen lush, a Hollywood-based screenwriter played by Colin Farrell. The short answer is never, so in the meantime, bottoms up! Inebriation isn’t the worst state with which to greet a tattooed Woody Harrelson (nahoře nahoře). To be fair, McDonagh has plenty on his mind, from an anatomy of film violence (how much is too much is the implicit question) to an essay in machismo that deliberately places women at the margins. Starting with some verbal byplay about getting shot through the eyeball — fun, eh? — sedm psychopatů places itself on a continuum stretching from Sam Peckinpah to Quentin Tarantino, all the while filtered through its creator’s ever-skewed, sidelong vision. One smiles and groans, in turn, as the fearsome frolics mount up, the greatest single laugh on one particular night of late reserved for McDonagh’s own remark at a post-screening q&a that people who laugh at his film are «sick fuckers». The opener finds Boardwalk Empire stars Michael Pitt and Michael Stuhlbarg engaged in the deliberately wince-inducing exchange about eyeballs referenced above, only for both sweet-faced young actors to vanish so the big boys can take charge. Those include Farrell as the frustrated scribe busy peddling a gore-drenched script (its title: sedm psychopatů ) that can’t compete with the bloody business of daily life, and Harrelson as a gangster with a thing for dogs and not much regard for humankind. 
Along for the ride are Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell, joint alumni of the 2010 Broadway premiere of McDonagh’s play A Behanding in Spokane, here crafting loopiness into something approaching art. His line readings as comically off-centre as ever (told to put his hands up, he replies, «No, I don’t want to»), Walken saunters through the gathering carnage as if in some softly spoken altered state, while Rockwell, playing Farrell’s best buddy, obsesses about chlamydia and gets to play Mercutio to the Irishman’s equivalent Romeo (the Shakespearean comparison came from McDonagh at the post-screening talk: make of it what you will.) Women don’t survive long in this climate, which is a shame when the likes of Abbie Cornish (pictured above with Rockwell) a Drahocenný star Gabourey Sidibe are allowed to slip in and out of view. Then again, Harrelson’s Charlie Costello talks of having had five friends killed over time, including a girlfriend he didn’t actually like much. Life is cheap, one feels watching sedm psychopatů, and some of the comedy is too, but if you’ve always hankered to see Christopher Walken play a loftily spoken dognapper who wears a cravat, well, ignore the «spazzy shit», to co-opt the screenplay’s own language, and give the film a go.
One smiles and groans, in turn, as the fearsome frolics mount up
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