Filmed during a time when it still seemed like America's best and brightest could, at any moment, wind up dead from an assassin's bullet, The Parallax View is a thriller that asks just where all those assassins might be coming from. A lot of people get assassinated in this movie, to an extent that nearly borders on absurd. Just about every major character, and many minor ones, end up assassinated, often for unknown reasons.
But The Parallax View isn't a movie that's concerned about whether its plot makes a whole lot of sense. What's important here is the idea that society is being systematically manipulated by shadowy forces behind the scenes, and shadowy forces have a way of making plot holes just disappear. Fortunately, this is a very well made film, so if the story seems to be missing a few components, everything else is firing on all cylinders. Warren Beatty stars as a shaggy-haired, small fry reporter who discovers a trace of the conspiracy and decides to see just how much of it he can unravel. Beatty has a great screen presence, but the real star here is genius cinematographer Gordon Willis, working in a 2:35 widescreen format that looks fantastic. Between thrilling long shots where actors are dwarfed by their surroundings and close-ups where big blocks of colour threaten to push them from the frame, Willis creates a world where everyone is on the verge of drowning or being swallowed up by the oppressive space around them. This is a film that truly benefits from being up on the big screen.
As a whole, the film feels a bit disjointed, drawn out some times and rushed at others, but its individual sequences are little masterpieces. Structurally it kind of weirdly reminds me of the rock opera "concept albums" from the same era, complete with a prologue and a reprise, and great individual parts that don't quite gel together into a coherent way.
There's the short and smartly edited opening sequence on Seattle's Space Needle, the gleefully offbeat action romp in a Northwest country town, the taunt, the sublimely Hitchcock suspense of the airplane scene, and the operatic final showdown, but what stands out the most is an unsuspected piece of avant garde cinema spliced into the middle of the film.
Beatty's character, having successfully infiltrated an organisation that trains assassins, is taken into a darkened theatre and shown a film intended to brainwash him. It's a propaganda created like Soviet montage but with a distinctly Americana flavour, and it completely fills the screen, as we watch it along with Beatty's reporter. Images and words flash on the screen that are initially comforting, but become more threatening and confusing as they are repeated faster in different sequences. It's a powerful example of just how easily people, and that includes the audience watching The Parallax View, can be manipulated by the media, especially film.
The montage is constructed to make the viewer believe that the world has descended into chaos and that only the viewer can set things right again by becoming a hero, as symbolised by the repeated image of Marvel Comics' Thor. It's interesting that this is also the journey that most feature films take us on, as well. How often after watching a great adventure movie where the protagonist triumphs, do we leave the theatre feeling like we too can take on the world?
The Parallax View subverts this to some extent, although it doesn't go as far as it might have. After all, Beatty's character is a lone hero who believes that he's the only one who can rescue the world from encroaching chaos, even before he views the propaganda film. He acts above the law and solves problems through violence. He's scrappy and nearly unbeatable as a James Bond character, and the audience is meant to identify with him. He plays the same part as Thor does during the propaganda montage, and the film's downbeat ending doesn't really defray that effect.
What the montage scene does do is alert the audience to the fact that they are being manipulated, even after that scene is over. It may be the ultimate paranoia film, in that it asks "Is society being controlled by unseen forces?" and then answers "Yes, and you are being controlled just by watching this movie."
No comments:
Post a Comment