zedz wrote: Mon Jun 23, 2008 11:57 pmUntil the End of the World
When this first came out, my reaction was one of dismay. I was on a bit of a Wenders kick, having recently seen many of his great 70s films for the first time, plus
The State of Things. I'd been less thrilled by his US films, but
Wings of Desire had hit me as a triumph of pure cinema, and was probably one of my favourite films at the time.
And then this farrago. It was bewilderingly bad, and its badness had an uncanny clarity, as if all of Wenders' wrong moves were laid out before you on the screen.
To summarise, the gaudy first half seemed little more than filler: international locations, cameos-a-go-go, but thin on content with a repetitive catch-and-release structure. The second half in the outback had the opposite problem - this was where the film's real ideas resided, but it seemed rushed and cheap, and Wenders' cinematic vision seemed to fail him badly at the crucial juncture (a scientific laboratory in a cave? Where'd you get a CRAZY idea like that?) As if this wasn't bad enough, the back of the film was broken by largely mediocre performances and some really abysmal dialogue. The audience I saw it with was right with the film at the start but gradually lost their will to live. When, after two and a half hours, Sam Neill's narrator announces something like "we thought it was over, but our story was only beginning", a collective groan went through us like a Mexican Wave. Wenders' cinema never really seemed to recover from this debacle.
So I approached the full-length version with equal parts trepidation and optimism. The extension could theoretically have resolved some of the pacing issues, at least.
Well, sort of. The film's problems are all still there, and some have even been amplified. The final act is better paced, but the first, globe-trotting part still masks narrative stasis with the illusion of forward motion, and once the gang gets to Coober Pedy we don't even have that illusion to cling to.
The performance problems are even clearer in long-form. Solveig Dommartin just can't carry a film. She was appropriately decorative in
Wings of Desire, and pretty good in
S'en fout la mort, but in both cases she was just playing back-up to much stronger actors (in the latter, when you're up against Alex Descas and Jean-Claude Brialy in full flight the smart thing to do is get out of their way). Here she's clearly The Director's Girlfriend (and she even gets to sing The Director's Favourite Song - not very well, but even that can't drain the emotion from Ray Davies at his songwriting peak) and the only particular skill she brings to the role is her ability to speak several languages. She does a bad drunk, and she never brings much depth to the more demanding scenes. Her character's personality is narrated at us (by another character, even) rather than acted out.
She's not alone. William Hurt's performance is phoned in; Sam Neill is awful and unformed throughout (and his purple narration is particularly irritating); Jeanne Moreau is hopelessly constrained in what should be the film's emotional centre; David Gulpilil has even less latitude - so much wasted talent, and so little chemistry between any of them. Only Rudiger Vogler manages to invest his character (old standby Philip Winter) with any real spark of personality, and he's given almost nothing to do.
The dialogue is a big problem. So much of it is clunky and expository that it kills everything on screen, reducing a promising science fiction premise to movie-of-the-week platitudes. Here's a gem from William Hurt: "All I want is for my mother to see, and for my father to know that I love him." Isn't it cosy that the end of the world can be reduced to such familiar dynamics?
Unfortunately, my favourite line from the short version (which must have required even more bald exposition) seems to be missing from the long one. It had long been my gold standard for a magical convergence of a bad line and a bad line delivery, when Neill's character petulantly spits: "You've just become junkies on your own dreams!" This version doesn't even have that camp payoff.
I assume this four and a half hour version was developed for television, as each of the three 'episodes' are of equal length, carry titles and credits and use the opening narration to recap what's gone before. I confess I could only digest it in instalments. Although the film's structure is better balanced overall, with the denouement less rushed, it's still unforgivably overextended. Wenders assembles a huge cast of characters but has no idea what to do with them. Most of them are all but superfluous even on their first appearance, so when they all wind up in the desert, their superfluity is even more pronounced. Wenders' solution in the long cut is that all of these pointless characters form a band, which is, conceptually at least, pretty funny. Not so funny when you have to watch lots of scenes of jam sessions, or the film that precedes them.
Which brings me to the music: the film has a rather daunting bespoke soundtrack (U2, Nick Cave, R.E.M., Elvis Costello, a resurfaced Patti Smith, a reformed Can - a good mark of the accrued good will Wenders was burning through with this project) but to me it's incredibly badly integrated into the film, songs just tacked onto the background of scenes. It's particularly mystifying when you consider how great Wenders' instincts for pop music in films used to be, and how perfectly the sound and images were integrated in
Wings of Desire (think of Laurie Anderson in the library; or 'From Her to Eternity' - one of the great uses of a rock performance in film). The songs are generally good and evocative (notable exceptions being Lou Reed's atrocious bar-band drivel 'What's Good' and the lame, anthemic song that closes the film), they're just unimaginatively thrown in, much as you'd expect from a Hollywood smash-and-grab soundtrack.
The premise of the film is one I think is actually really strong: a great technological breakthrough (allowing the blind to see) gets sidetracked into solipsism because of its unplanned but implicit alternative uses. It's a grand theme (the perils of self-interest, particularly in the scientific realm), but it's left until the very last section of the film and saddled with so much other banal bumf (dysfunctional-family psychodrama; indigenous romanticisation; millennial paranoia; joyless globe-trotting) that it doesn't get the attention it warrants. By this point everyone seems to be so exhausted that the film just explains in voiceover or dialogue what it should be delicately suggesting.
So what else went wrong? Wim was presumably too besotted with Solveig to acknowledge her limitations, or even to use the over-stuffed cast to shoulder some of her burden. He also seems to have seen this as his chance to do something really big, but that's hardly where his strengths as a filmmaker lie. Even his most ambitious previous films (
Kings of the Road,
Paris, Texas,
Wings of Desire) were essentially about a handful of characters and their interrelationships - and that's the film that's buried deep under the glossy distractions of this one as well. So the film comes off as a great big, undisciplined splurge, with Wenders vamping ineffectually through too many iconic locations and faltering when he gets to the material that should have worked best - there's a clear yearning for the visionary imagery of
Walkabout in several sequences of the second half, but in most cases it doesn't amount to much more than your generic TV-series canyon shoot. It's a film that falls at every fence, but there's nevertheless something perversely admirable about it. I'm certainly fonder of it than of many of his subsequent, similarly compromised but less ambitious, features.
