Backdraft (1991)

 

Backdraft is the story of two brothers in Chicago who go into the family business, firefighting. Kurt Russell plays the older brother, Stephen McCaffrey, who’s quite the impetuous hero at times. However, his recklessness has cost him his marriage to Rebecca De Mornay’s Helen and the respect and trust of his fellow firefighters. He’s also an alcoholic who’s living in his father’s old boat, now in dry dock. William Baldwin plays Brian, the younger brother who’s fresh from the fire academy and assigned to work in the same firehouse as his brother. Brian has had several unsuccessful careers, and Stephen doesn’t think his brother is ready to be a firefighter. Of course, given that when he was a boy, Brian witnessed his father die in a fire, you’d be right to question his abilities to be a firefighter. This certainly begs the question of whether or not you would become a firefighter if you had watched your firefighter father die in a fire, but the film doesn’t allow for such questions to be examined too deeply. Naturally, Stephen (who has acquired the nickname “Bull”) and Brian clash a lot, and sure enough, Brian leaves the firehouse to join arson investigator Donald Rimgale (Robert DeNiro). They have a series of mysterious deaths to figure out in terms of both method (how were they killed) and motive (why were they killed). You’d think that would be enough to fuel a plot, but Brian also wants to reconnect to an old flame of his, Jennifer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who’s an assistant to an alderman who wants to be mayor and may have a connection to the series of arson deaths. You’re supposed to accept that even though Stephen and Brian fight, they truly love each other even if you don’t get a lot of evidence to support that idea in the film itself. Russell is reliably good; he’s always been rather underrated as an actor, to be honest, if well-liked as a movie star. Baldwin isn’t much of an actor, to be fair, and his facial expressions seem rather limited. He often looks like he has smelled something unpleasant although he’s supposed to be amused or happy. (His character also has a rather expensive, stylish wardrobe, rather unexpected for someone who’s been unsuccessful at so many jobs.) The cast includes a lot of great character actors, such as Scott Glenn as “Axe,” a firefighter who worked alongside the boys’ father and now with them; Donald Sutherland as an arsonist up for parole who provides Baldwin’s Brian with some guidance on the arson cases; and Jason Gedrick as Tim, Brian’s fellow firefighter candidate who serves as a cliched sacrifice. This being a film directed by Ron Howard, Backdraft also has a brief appearance by his brother Clint Howard as a morgue attendant. Clint does sometimes get fun cameos like this one. This being a Ron Howard film, there’s also egregious use of several movie cliches: slow motion, manipulative music, and cutesy montages, for example, none of which truly furthers the narrative much. I mean, why do we have to watch firefighters trying to catch a bunch of loose chickens? Backdraft features some spectacular scenes of fires, and those sequences are the best aspect of the film overall. It also features some remarkable stunt work. Once the film has ended, it’s not the arsons or the other aspects of the plot that linger; it’s the visual effects. The film was nominated for Best Visual Effects and two other awards for its sound, but interestingly, it lost all three of them to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I wouldn’t disagree with the Academy voters on any of the three, frankly. 

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best Sound

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1991, The Silence of the Lambs is one of the few movies to sweep the major awards. It also won that year for Best Director, Actress, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay, and it arguably deserved them all. I can't say that I particularly enjoyed watching this film again because it always gives me the creeps. However, I do admire the skill with which it is made.

Jodie Foster plays Clarice Starling, an FBI agent-in-training, who is recruited to talk to convicted killer Hannibal Lecter, played by Anthony Hopkins. Lecter, infamous for cannibalizing his victims, may be able to provide assistance in the case of a serial killer who has been kidnapping women and removing their skin. Starling and Lector have a series of encounters, culminating in her deducing the location of Buffalo Bill, who (it turns out) has been attempting to make himself over as a woman by creating a "body suit" out of the skins of the women he has kidnapped.

I realize that some will think that I have just revealed a key plot point. However, knowing the motive behind what Bill is doing in no ways lessens the suspense of the film. And I need to talk about the way that Bill is represented in the film. To do that, you have to address whether or not the film is homophobic (or, perhaps, more accurately, transphobic) in its depictions of him. There were many protests at the time of this film's release about that very issue. It isn't difficult to see where such ideas arise. Bill is certainly meant to be "diseased" or "ill" or "dangerous." Yet I think the film's story is a bit more complex than that. Bill is obviously unhappy with himself, unable to accept himself as he is. His actions, gruesome as they are, reveal some sort of mental illness, certainly. Whether or not it is a result of repressed homosexuality, as some felt the film suggests, I cannot definitively say.

Speaking of repressed homosexuality... is there a more gay-identified character than Hannibal Lecter? What with his fastidiousness and his love of gossip and his affection for classical music and art, Hannibal seems almost as repressed as Bill. And then there's the whole cannibal thing, which I will try not to make into too much of a metaphor. I would only point out that most of his victims seem to be men; at least, the ones shown in the movie are all men. He even quotes show tunes to Clarice upon one of her arrivals: "People will say we're in love." And notice that he keeps a copy of Bon Appetit magazine in one of his cells--that's a rather perverse touch. Perhaps it's this equation of homosexuality or gay-identified behavior with serial killers that set off the protests?

Hopkins gets the flashier role here, and he certainly seems to relish playing it. He's quite the object of fascination for a moviegoer. Foster is almost his equal, what with her tightly coiled personality and flashes of emotion. Her eyes reveal a great deal of what's going on inside Clarice's head. It's a remarkably mature performance from Foster, a clear sign that she had the talent to make the transition from child star to adult actress and sure evidence that The Accused, which had won her an Oscar only a few years earlier, was no fluke.

The suspenseful nature of the film is enhanced not only by the performances but by the use of close-ups throughout the story. I remember watching The Silence of the Lambs for the first time and feeling very uneasy. It later dawned on me that it was, at least in part, because of the intensity of Hopkins' stare during the interrogation scenes. Both he and Foster are often shown in close-up during those scenes, and Hopkins continues to be seen in close-up all the way through his portions of the film. It's a pretty intense way to keep an audience riveted, and it is used quite effectively here.

JFK (1991)

Nominated for Best Picture of 1991, JFK is a dizzying film in many ways. I've never managed to sit through the entire movie until I started this project. As happy as I am that I've managed to do so, I'm also pretty glad I will never be obligated to watch it again. It's an amazingly muddled film, difficult to follow at times, yet dazzling in its technique. I'm not sure that any of it is really based upon what happened back in the 1960s, but that's not really the point. What the director/co-writer, Oliver Stone, seems to be saying is that we are only given fragments of historical events anyway, bits and pieces from lots of different sources, and we are thus obligated to put all of this together to develop our own sense of what happened. I certainly appreciate that idea; having earned a bachelor's degree in history, I do understand how we reconstruct past events. But while Stone's approach makes for an interesting film, I don't think I'd want to read a history book composed in that way.

At the center of the story is Jim Garrison, a district attorney in New Orleans who begins to develop his own theory as to what happened in Dallas that November day in 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. He launches his own investigation, and the movie attempts to follow all of the bizarre twists and turns through speculations about the Mafia, the FBI, Cuba, the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War, homosexuality, the Warren Commission, the reverse vampires (or was that an episode of The Simpsons?), well, you get the idea. Unfortunately, Stone selected Kevin Costner to play the part of Garrison, and he makes for an incredibly boring hero. At so many points during this movie, I wanted to turn it off because I just couldn't believe Garrison was going on another tangent (and I really wasn't interested in following him one more time). While the frustration created by the film certainly mirrors our national frustration with getting the truth about Kennedy's assassination, picking a different person as your primary focus, perhaps someone with a bit more personality, would have made the story more intriguing.

Technically, the film is a marvel. The editing is certainly worthy of praise, the use of a variety of film stocks is a genius move, and with the exception of Costner, the cast is first-rate. It seems as if almost everyone in Hollywood had a role in this film. Watching the entire movie almost becomes a game of "Isn't that...?" However, you can't watch this film and just be intrigued by the editing or the cinematography or the acting or any other of its components individually. You have to return to the story and grapple with what it forces you to consider. I don't turn to the movies for history lessons. In fact, I've even given my students assignments that have asked them to determine how the historical record and the movie version of an event or a person's life are vastly different from each other. So I'm not enraged by what Stone has done or even what he suggests by this film. We will likely never find out the "truth" of who was involved in the assassination, but hopefully, most people will not turn to this film and accept it as an answer. It's really more of a question, and perhaps it's an appropriate question to ask.

Several years ago, I visited my brother for Thanksgiving. He lives near Ft. Worth, so we took a day to drive to Dallas to see the plaza and go to the book depository, which includes among its exhibits a discussion of the various conspiracy theories that have gained prominence in the past 44 years. It was interesting to see just how much of our understanding of Kennedy's death is intertwined with our notions of who might have been involved and the reasons for their involvement. To that end, Stone's movie does justice to one of our nation's lingering obsessions. Just don't ask me to see it again. I might feel compelled to begin my own investigation.