The Act of Killing (***)

This is among the oddest documentaries I’ve seen, a sometimes goofy take on a most grim subject. With over 200 million inhabitants, Indonesia is, to Americans generally, surely the most mysterious of the world’s populous nations. Even the well-informed may not know about the 1965 coup that resulted in the mass executions of hundreds of thousands of suspected communists, with the assistance of lists provided by “western governments,” as the brief title states. Joshua Oppenheimer does not explore the history that preceded the Suharto dictatorship or the role of the CIA in facilitating it. Instead, he examines a few of the men who committed the atrocities. But rather than just interviewing them, he gets them to re-create their crimes, providing them with professional make-up artists, sets, and letting them direct.

The “star” of the film is one Anwars Congo, a genial, gentle-seeming host who seems to have aged well. In an early segment, he explains — and demonstrates — the method he devised to quickly strangle some 1000 (by his own estimate) victims. Congo still pals around with another of his anti-communist comrades, a overweight and jolly man with a penchant for dressing up like a woman during colorful musical sequences staged by himself and the others.

I confess to being less enthralled by this film than I had expected, given its widespread acclaim. Despite their crimes, Congo and the other men are not characters of great depth; it’s hard to tell whether they felt any strong emotion when killing. Only Congo, who says he sometimes has bad dreams, seems to have even the dimmest qualm about it. The lack of introspection no doubt allowed them to kill easily. Possibly I’d have preferred more history to be included. What is maybe more striking than these unrepentant men, who seem to embody the banality of evil, is that they live in a country than seems as blind to the horror of its past as its perpetrators. The dictator is dead, but there have been no apologies for the past, no truth and reconciliation committees, and obviously no imprisonments. Those empowered by the coup, and their descendants, are still in power, ruling over a corrupt country where people are paid to attend political rallies and, in one of the most astonishing segments, a talk-show host born after 1965 praises her elders for their humane way of eliminating the supposed communists, who remain enemies today. As the numerous credits to “Anonymous” attest, Indonesia is still living with its cruel past.

IMDb link

viewed 7/25 at Gershman Y [PFS screening and reviewed 7/26–8/6/13

 

Meeting Evil (**1/4)

If you heard someone beating on your door several times within 30 seconds and weren’t expecting company, would you maybe look through the peephole before opening up? Would you head off without taking your cell phone or wallet? And would you agree to go anywhere in the car with a stranger in a fedora (Samuel L Jackson) who’s clearly a little off, if not crazy? Regular guy John (Luke Wilson) does all of these things. There you have, or maybe you don’t have, the problem I had with this movie, which is quite suspensefully directed by TV veteran Chris Fisher, who adapted a novel by Thomas Berger. Jackson has played crazy before, but this is a new kind of crazy, and we’re not sure what sort this is. In any case, he leads John, just fired from his job but hiding it from his wife, on a one-day odyssey through some his very recent, mistake-filled past.

The setup suggests that the passive John will be pushed too far and get all badass, but the tone is of some sort of philosophical movie, like Fight Club, maybe. Berger also wrote the novels on which the (very different) films Little Big Man and Neighbors were based is another clue that this isn’t supposed to be just an exploitation movie. Fisher conveys existential themes, no doubt more easily explored in a novel, partly by using location, both bland suburban ones and rural, desolate ones. Yet, although the worst violence is off-screen, one reason this is a suspense drama instead of a horror film, the sheer level of that violence makes the plot ridiculous. Has the killer, whom we learn about later, really done this before and not been caught? If not, why now?

Incidentally, Berger’s novel was published in 1992, before cell phones were common. Why didn’t Fisher just set the movie then instead of creating a series of awkward machinations (not just leaving the cell phone home) just so John won’t have a phone to use? This also would make it more plausible that a convenience store wouldn’t have security camera footage available. And, if a black man was going to play the second lead, perhaps it would have made sense to make the setting somewhere with a few more black people. That way, it won’t seem entirely too coincidental when, later, the only other black character in the film happens to be in a place where he can be mistaken for Jackson’s.

 

If you interpret the fedora-clad man as a symbolic character meant only to test John, perhaps such implausibilities will bother you less than they did me. Maybe he is another version of the killer in the Saw movies, who weaves morality plays into his torture games. With, say, Bruce Willis as the lead instead of the everyman-type Wilson, one can imagine the film building to a conclusion in which nebbish becomes superhero and the villain dies by having a construction crane land on top of him. The climax is a close-enough approach to satisfy conventional expectations, but the actual ending is about a husband, a wife, and an uncertain future. It’s the the best part, actually, but the titter of laughter I heard from the screening audience suggests that such subtlety was incongruous in a movie with so many bullet and plot holes.

IMDb link

viewed 4/20/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/1/12 and 5/13/12

Beautiful Boy (**3/4)

This is a heartfelt drama about parents grieving for a child, with one difference: their son had, previous to killing himself, shot several classmates at college. The parents (Michael Sheen and Maria Bello), already having marital difficulties, go through the expected steps of sorrow, shock (second, because they don’t immediately learn that he was the shooter), self-blame, and blaming each other. Despite the added dimension of learning their son is a killer, the drama plays a lot like the better Rabbit Hole. Even though the couple there are merely dealing with an accidental death, there is similarity in the focus on each partner’s different grieving style, and how it affects the couple’s relationship.

There is nothing inauthentic about this movie, and it’s a nice actors’ showcase for Bello and Sheen, who uses an American accent. However, everything was pretty much what I expected to be. Tears, pity, confrontation. True, it didn’t occur to me, as it does the husband here, that there would be a need to craft a media statement to assure the public and the families of the other students of their sorrow for what their son had done. But I did anticipate that they would wonder about why he did it, a question the film raises but doesn’t try to answer. And that really is the question you want answered in a film like this. It wouldn’t be fair to ask a film to supply an explanation for such a rare event. But it would have been more compelling to have explored the parent-child relationship as it was rather than only seeing a husband and wife wondering, as I was, later.

IMDB link

viewed 5/25/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/9/11