For the week of December 31st, Drew Goddard's postmodern '60s noir Bad Times at the El Royale hits Blu-ray. The movie plays like the best film ever made in the afterglow of Pulp Fiction. In its broad strokes, it's riffing on all of QT's hallmarks: large ensemble; blend of graphic violence and deadpan banter; deep love of anachronistic pop culture; nonlinear storytelling. However, it's also very much a Drew Goddard movie. Goddard got famous for his Academy Award-nominated Martian script, but he cut his teeth on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the great postmodern slasher Cabin in the Woods, both of which hinge on the same profound fascination/fear of surveillance behind Bad Times at the El Royale. Bad Times plays with the very idea of seeing. When have we seen too much? Are we seeing enough? Can we trust our own eyes? Can anyone? I confess to a bit of impatience when the film first began scrambling its timeline (it unfolds, like Pulp Fiction, in different block sections that Goddard announces with separate title cards), but it gains power the more these various perspectives scramble and obfuscate one another. To say too much would risk spoiling some of Bad Times's legitimate surprises. Here's what you can know - we open at the titular hotel, which sits on the border of Nevada and California. Its guests seem to check off a '60s Stereotype Bingo Card: the genial Catholic priest (Jeff Bridges, the most committed he's been since True Grit), the Motown backup singer (Cynthia Erivo, in a starmaking performance), the Dean Martin-esque vacuum seller (Jon Hamm), and the sullen hippie chick (Dakota Johnson). Some of them are lying about what brings them to the El Royale; some are not. And the less said about the twitchy, Norman Bates-wannabe of a hotel clerk (Louis Pullman, son of Bill, giving the film's trickiest performance), the better. But regardless, they're about to intersect in all sorts of violent configurations. More than that, I should not say, in part because I need a few more viewings to unpack what Goddard's true endgame is. I suspect the film gets better on repeat viewings. Right now, it ends on a bit of a deflation - anyone expecting a postmodern explosion à laCabin in the Woods' big finish might walk away disappointed. But I also think that's the point. Erivo has a great speech where she essentially shuts down our need for a grand design, and Goddard's humanist leanings might be the most mature way to conclude this crazy genre quilt. I can't wait to see if I'm right.
Kino is using the week to release two very different film adaptations of classic novels. First up is Roger Donaldson's take on Mutiny on the Bounty, simply titled The Bounty. Here, Kino is providing for anyone who didn't jump on Twilight Time's now-sold-out Blu-ray edition, and The Bounty is interesting enough to warrant the double-dip. Every version of Mutiny on the Bounty focuses, as the classic Nordhoff-Hall novel does, on the conflict between HMS Bounty Captain Lieutenant William Bligh (played here by Anthony Hopkins) and his Master's Mate Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson), but both the Frank Lloyd Bounty and the 1962 Lewis Milestone iteration cast Bligh as the tyrannical aggressor and Christian as the sensitive humanist. Not quite so with The Bounty. Certainly, Hopkins plays Bligh as a figure of unprincipled (and unchallenged) authority, but he's no monster - rather, he's an unyielding product of British naval decorum. Screenwriter Robert Bolt always makes sure that we understand Bligh's actions, even when we wouldn't choose them ourselves. And Christian, by comparison, is far more opaque here. This is from a time when Gibson excelled at playing morally ambiguous leads, and his Christian recalls the opportunistic journalist he played in The Year of Living Dangerously. He's absolutely guilty of breaking Bligh's trust, and I was surprised at how I shared Bligh's sense of violation. This dynamic always proves compelling even when the surrounding movie sags a little bit. Famously, Bolt wrote this script for David Lean (it was to be the fourth collaboration after Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Ryan's Daughter), but when Lean left to make A Passage to India, Donaldson came in late to take the helm. He's good with actors but less accomplished with the kind of widescreen spectacle at which Lean excelled; large stretches of The Bounty feel like aesthetically pristine (and dramatically inert) travelogues. But Hopkins and Gibson justify the experience.
Of the Twilight Time edition, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "is structurally...diverse, ping ponging back and forth between the trial Bligh (Anthony Hopkins) is forced to undergo after he manages against all odds to get back to civilization after the mutiny, and various vignettes in flashback form which slowly but surely fill in the history of his initially friendly but ultimately contentious relationship with Fletcher Christian (Mel Gibson). Robert Bolt's screenplay seems to give a bit more benefit of the doubt to some of Bligh's behaviors, at least in the first half of the voyage. His increasingly abrupt decisions in the wake of the crew's long exile in Tahiti are perhaps too extreme in what sometimes seems like an overly redacted version of the events, but they at least provide suitable motivation for Christian and several cohorts to set Bligh adrift. Ironically, this at least relatively more 'fair and balanced' portrayal of Bligh tends to suck some of the dramatic impetus out of the film, making the mutineers seem more like petulant spoiled children rather than resolute 'blue collar' types railing against The Man."
Still, The Bounty is a masterpiece of literary adaptation when compared to Kino's other big book-to-film adaptation: Roland Joffé infamous 1995 reimagining of The Scarlet Letter. To some, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 original novel might qualify as cruel and unusual rendition, yet Hawthorne uses the novel's symbolic and romantic excesses to Trojan-Horse in a far more daring - and postmodern! - study. Here's a novel about adultery (between widow Hester Prynne and Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale) that never even lets its adulterers explicitly confess the nature of their sins - Hawthorne withholds just enough that we become as judgmental as the Puritans surrounding our lovers, and then he guts us with a final chapter where he essentially throws a bunch of conclusions at us and says, "I'm out. Pick the one you like best." And I spend this much time talking about what the book does so you'll have a better sense of how this movie bungles it. Joffé shows his Hester (a boring Demi Moore) and Dimmesdale (Gary Oldman, bungling his big shot as a romantic lead - he's just too creepy) getting it on, and then he tosses in enough side-sexual content (including a cringe-worthy interlude wherein Hester's servant Mituba watches Hester take a bath) to qualify The Scarlet Letter as something you might watch on Cinemax After Hours. Just clarifying the nature of these relationships breaks everything Hawthorne wanted to say about the world's fundamental unknowability. Still, you've got to make choices when you adapt a book, so I'm not against such big choices in principle. No, Joffé also ruins them in practice, most notably during a spectacularly ill-advised climax that tries to turn Oldman into an action hero (spoiler: it doesn't work) and plays like Last of the Mohicans on a budget. This movie is a fiasco.