For the week of December 26th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing Andrea Arnold's teen road drama American Honey to Blu-ray. Arnold also directed the British drama Fish Tank, and on the surface, American Honey shares a lot of similarities with that 2009 feature: reliance on non-actors in the lead roles (Arnold discovered Honey's Sasha Lane while at a Spring Break party in Florida), an emphasis on street-level neorealism (with its story about wayward teenage magazine sellers, American Honey could be an updated version of something like Vittorio Di Sica's Bicycle Thieves), and a love of the boxy Academy Ratio. However, in its intensified scope and attention to detail, American Honey has a richness that outstrips anything in Fish Tank, as accomplished as that earlier film is. This is a true American epic; it's long (163 minutes) and visceral and challenging, and deeply committed to chronicling the obsessions behind the American character. You don't watch American Honey - you experience it alongside Lane's rough-hewn protagonist, following her from the strip malls of South Florida to the oil fields of West Texas, and all the suburbs and motor inns that fall between them. Part of that immersion stems from Arnold's full-throated aesthetic. If anything, her longtime DP Robbie Ryan deserves as much credit for the film as she does. Ryan doesn't so much frame shots as make the camera a participant in the scenes, an effect that gives American Honey such kinetic energy. Part of the reason the film never drags is because we get caught up in all the moments. You find yourself holding your breath with this one. Yet even as the film maintains such heedless forward momentum, Arnold and Ryan find ample time for genuine visual poetry. Some of those moments are expected (Lane blissing out while driving over a wrought-iron bridge); some less so (the characters breaking out into an impromptu dance when Rihanna's "We Found Love" blares over a Kmart PA system); but they all work to mythologize the experience of being alive and young. But this isn't a Terrence Malick movie: anyone familiar with Arnold's work knows that she has zero patience for armchair mysticism, and she keeps leavening her ethereal approach to place and mood with a hard-edged acknowledgment of just how perilous life can be. Graphic sexuality (including a couple of love scenes that make the infamous Donald Sutherland-Julie Christie coupling in Don't Look Now look tame) and violent aggression are just as likely to flare up as something beautiful, and with no provocation or preamble. Looking over what I've written, I see just how hard it is to write a review for a movie like this. Like Barry Jenkins' great Moonlight, American Honey understands that there's nothing as exhilarating or terrifying as the human experience, and that sensation doesn't lend itself easily to prose. Just see it. Maybe the most tremendous film of the year.
Switching gears, we arrive at Universal Home Entertainment's In a Valley of Violence. Director Ti West's crafty little Western has no greater social agenda - it's a B-movie through and through about a mysterious cowboy (Ethan Hawke), a town full of reprobates (including John Travolta, James Ransome, and Toby Huss), and a whole lot of bloodshed. What we appreciate is West's approach to this material. Primarily known as a horror-movie director (he made the wonderful The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, as well as the significantly less wonderful The Sacrament), West proves unusually adept at transitioning over to action and Western theatrics. West loves the slow-burn build (all those previous films take more than an hour before dropping their most hardcore genre thrills), and even though In a Valley of Violence is a touch faster-paced, West isn't in a rush, preferring instead to linger on mounting tensions until the bullets start flying. If it worked for Sergio Leone, it's good enough for West. In fairness, West isn't a visual stylist on the same level as Leone, but he compensates in other ways. This is a remarkably playful Western. Sure, Hawke is playing a pretty traditional taciturn hero (and unsurprisingly, he's wonderful meting out frontier justice), but the movie around him is quirky and off-kilter. I mean, the most important relationship in the film is the one between Hawke and his faithful dog, and at times their interplay turns parts of the movie into an R-rated Disney adventure. Furthermore, Ransome and Karen Gillan are a hoot as a beyond-obnoxious, entitled couple, and Travolta gets his best role since Savages, playing an ornery, crippled old sheriff who knows damn well how bad things will get after Hawke goes all Clint-Eastwood-from-the-end-of-Unforgiven and grows ever more exasperated when he realizes he'll have to face that same reckoning. And we still get glimpses of the filmmaker who Spoiler Alert blew Greta Gerwig's head off in House of the DevilEnd Spoiler Alert: when the violence does hit, it's hard and very bloody, especially in the extended gunfight that concludes the film. In a Valley of Violence doesn't reinvent the genre, but that's not a problem. It's content to riff along on the sides, and we're pretty content watching it.
After all, a little intentional frivolousness is better than empty self-importance. Case in point: Oliver Stone's logy docudrama Snowden. Without question, the story of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (played here by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who finds his natural charm doing battle against a supremely distracting "Snowden voice" and losing) warranted the big-screen treatment; not only are Snowden's revelations about government surveillance terrifying and provocative, but the means behind his acquisition of this information AND his subsequent escape from the United States also could have come straight from the Alfred Hitchcock Thriller Playbook. How, then, do we account for Stone's urgency-free retelling? He's working in the pared-down, straightforward style of his W and World Trade Center, and whenever he does try to get our pulses going, he intercuts these hackneyed visions of the "digital realm" that seemed dated when Iain Softley trotted them out in Hackers twenty years ago. About the only charge we get is watching Stone's supporting cast at work: Stone is able to fill even the tiniest of roles with ringers like Melissa Leo, Tom Wilkinson, Zachary Quinto, Rhys Ifans, Joely Richardson, Timothy Olyphant, and Nicolas Cage, even though I'd be lying if I said the parade of familiar faces didn't get distracting after a while (you have expect to see Sean Bean wander in as a random TSA employee). More and more, I'm wondering where the Oliver Stone who made JFK and Natural Born Killers went. His maximalist dramas (the guy was making video essays before a thousand YouTube auteurs started behaving likewise) were often overwrought and as subtle as a flying mallet, but they also throbbed with hyperkinetic purpose: here was a man who stood appalled at our country's sins, and he was willing to turn cinema into his attack dog so you'd be just as appalled, too. The best that Snowden can pull off (when it's not restaging parts of Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald's far-superior documentary Citizenfour) is mild indignation, like your grandpa being shocked - shocked, I tell you! - to learn that these things called smartphones can be used for international espionage, and that the government is always watching. Tell us something we don't know, Oliver, and in a way that makes us feel something other than, "Well, that happened." To paraphrase a character from the last true Oliver Stone venture, where's your intensity, Ollie?
And finally, we have Image Entertainment's Dog Eat Dog, and with it, the question, "What the heck happened to Paul Schrader?" For about twenty-five years, Schrader was one of the most exciting screenwriters working in Hollywood; his collaborations with Martin Scorsese are already the stuff of legend (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the masterful, underrated Bringing Out the Dead), but Schrader's best non-Scorsese projects like Rolling Thunder or Mishima share this singular mix of genre pulp and spiritual questioning. But in the last few years, Schrader has seemed adrift, vacillating between narratively compromised morality plays (Dying of the Light), bizarre gimmicks (the Kickstarter-funded The Canyons, which exists only to confirm that, yes, pornstars are more professionally reliable than Lindsay Lohan), and...whatever Dog Eat Dog is. You might think this film should be a slam-dunk for Schrader - he's working from Eddie Bunker's phenomenal novel, which places Schrader in the same seedy milieu that served him so well in Taxi Driver and Hardcore, and he's reunited with his Bringing Out the Dead and Auto Focus stars Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe, respectively. You would be wrong. Dog Eat Dog is less a film than a sustained exercise in alienation effects: at no point does Schrader ever seem to want the viewer to engage conventionally with what he's doing. The nominal plot (Cage and Dafoe's idiot criminals embark on a foolhardy baby-napping scheme) quickly gives way to whatever whim Schrader feels like indulging. Sometimes his film is awash in gaudy colors; sometimes it's in black and white. Sometimes he'll let things unfold in time-saving, exploitation-ready long takes, and sometimes he dashes the editing into quick-cut murk. And if Cage wants to play whole scenes while doing a Humphrey Bogart impression, then Schrader is cool with that, too. There's nothing to latch onto here, and while experimentation within familiar genres can be a good thing - part of me would rather watch the delusional riffs of Killing Them Softly or Natural Born Killers than something more formulaic - the reason Killing Them Softly or Natural Born Killers work is because you never doubt the agencies at work. It's controlled chaos, timed for maximum thematic/political impact. Dog Eat Dog, on the other hand, is about on par with the work of a talented film student who's spent too much time watching The Boondock Saints. All the interesting experimentation in the world can't hide the cheapo lighting and staging, or patch over the "hip" violence and tiresome, profanity-laden dialogue. The end result is so tonally and aesthetically unstable that you begin to suspect the movie is probably better for Schrader than it is for anyone else. At a certain point, all the creative freedom in the world isn't worth a damn if your movie is unwatchable.