The Weekly Gravy #164

Walkabout (1971) – ***½

Walkabout was Nicolas Roeg’s first solo effort as a director (he’d previously co-directed Performance) and there’s a feeling throughout of the film of being free to try anything, to take risks, to sample all that cinema has to offer. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as when the editing juxtaposes the ostensibly uncivilized (the Aborigine boy butchering a kangaroo) with the ostensibly civilized (a meatcutter in a shop breaking down a carcass), or when the behavior of the white girl and her little brother is contrasted against that of the Aborigine boy to reflect, in a relative microcosm, one of the major fault lines in Australian society.

Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, as in the scene depicting a group of scientists working in the Outback, several men drooling over one woman, sneaking peeks up her skirt and down her shirt, the only clear connection to the main story being the weather balloons they’re working with, one of which the youths later find and regard mainly as a toy. There are thematic grains in the scene which could apply to the rest of the film – the critique of supposedly mature society, the objectification of women – but it doesn’t really fit.

The story is quite simple: the girl (Jenny Agutter) and her brother (Luc Roeg, as Lucien John) are driven into the desert (they live in Sydney) by their father (John Meillon), who suddenly starts shooting at them before setting their car on fire and taking his own life. The girl and her brother make their way through the wilderness but struggle to survive; they find an oasis, but it dries up overnight. They’re discovered by the Aborigine boy (David Gulpilil), who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage where he must live off the land by his own skills.

He helps them to survive as he guides them towards an uncertain destination, but he speaks no English and they speak no Djinba (I believe this is what Gulpilil speaks in the film), and even as they form a friendship which encompasses moments of simple grace, once an opportunity to return to their society arises, the girl is quite ready to go – and the Aborigine boy makes an effort to draw her fully into his own world – but the result is tragedy on his part and enigmatic reserve on hers, even years after the fact.

Much in Walkabout was and is controversial. The theme of sexuality, only partly connected to the depiction of nudity, pervades the film and is handled just as ambiguously as everything else in it. One may wonder if Roeg’s camera doesn’t linger too long on Agutter’s figure in the schoolgirl’s uniform she wears throughout the film, yet when we see other Aborigines wearing loincloths at most, and being completely at ease with their nakedness, we’re invited to question whether one standard of modesty is more moral, or more natural.

And the treatment of the Aboriginal characters raises questions – even concerns – given that the film generally sticks to a white perspective, doesn’t subtitle the Djinba dialogue, and doesn’t grant the Aboriginal boy much interiority – though, to be sure, it doesn’t grant much to the girl or her brother either. It’s not that kind of film, after all.

It is, to be quite sure, a striking film to behold, with Roeg’s cinematography shining in the abstract patterns of the city and the desolate beauty of the wilderness, the editing blending the days and nights together in a dreamlike fashion, fragmenting the simple narrative with associative cuts and juxtapositions which explore the central dichotomies of Australia, and John Barry’s score (including a haunting arrangement of “Who Killed Cock Robin”) adding to the dreamy atmosphere.

It’s also quite well acted within the limits of the material; Agutter’s sad eyes and well-bred manner perfectly fit the girl who seems to view the whole affair as an extended outing, young Roeg is wonderfully unaffected as the boy who’s at once wiser than he seems (he more or less figures out what’s going on despite the girl not telling him) and very much a kid (he tells the most rambling shaggy-dog story you’ve ever heard), and Gulpilil, who had little contact with white society before making the film, plays his confidence as a hunter, his kindliness towards the girl and her brother, and his developing feelings for her without a hint of artifice.

Ultimately, I think a single viewing isn’t enough to resolve the enigmas of the film, to decide whether scenes like the girl and her brother exploring a deserted mine (attended to by one very unhelpful employee) add something to the story or whether they betray the flaws in Edward Bond’s script (from a novel by James Vance Marshall) and Roeg’s grasp of narrative, which would improve in Don’t Look Now (and slip again in the remarkable but messy The Man Who Fell to Earth).

For now, I hold it as a very good film, a bit too messy to quite reach objective greatness, but one well worth pondering.

Score: 85

Priscilla (2023) – ****

It’s not that I haven’t appreciated the Sofia Coppola films I’ve seen, but none of them have really impressed me – The Bling Ring was fine, The Beguiled was pretty good, and Lost in Translation, when I finally saw it, was fine. So I wasn’t quite sure how I’d respond to Priscilla – and while it does just barely sneak over the edge into ****, it does manage that, becoming easily the best work of hers I’ve seen, a film where her restrained style and understanding of the pitfalls of privilege really elevate the story she’s telling.

In 1959, Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is 14 and living near a U.S. Air Force base in Germany, where her stepfather (Ari Cohen) is stationed. She’s approached by Terry West (Luke Humphrey), who invites her to a party at the home of Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), currently in the midst of his two-year stint in the Army. Elvis is immediately taken with Priscilla, despite noting that she’s “just a baby,” and despite her parents’ concerns, their relationship develops.

Elvis returns to America, and for a time Priscilla only hears of him via the tabloid press, whose constant reports of his relationships with various starlets only deepen her grief. But in 1962, he reaches back out to her and asks her to visit Graceland; while there, his insistence on waiting until “the right time” to consummate their relationship first causes her frustration.

Nonetheless, he remains infatuated with her and convinces the Beaulieus to let her move to Graceland, where she’s enrolled in a Catholic school to earn her diploma and first begins to realize her place in the Elvis machine: his father and stepmother treat her like an employee, and when she suggests getting a part-time job while Elvis is away, he rejects the idea, saying that he needs her to be available whenever he needs her. He also takes a greater interest in her clothing and hairstyles.

She also becomes ever more aware of his volatile temper, his abuse of amphetamines and sleeping pills, and his susceptibility to fads and charlatans. In time he proposes, they marry, and soon have Lisa Marie, but the marriage soon begins to fade as he sinks slowly deeper into substance abuse and into the mythologized version of himself who only exists onstage. Coming for the first time into her own as a human being, Priscilla finally tells Elvis their marriage is over, though as the final needle-drop says, “I Will Always Love You.”

It’s a film which says more in its elliptical restraint than Elvis said with all its bombastic showmanship. With all due respect to that film and to Austin Butler’s performance, I got far more of a sense of Elvis as a human being through Elordi’s fantastic work, which conveys the charm, the stunted-adolescent temper (his outbursts and the way he walks them back are painfully believable), the sincere longing for someone who isn’t part of the industry which has given him ridiculous amounts of wealth and influence, and the arrogance which leads him to mold her into his ideal woman – or try to.

The film’s approach necessarily limits Spaeny’s performance, as by the end she’s still in her 20s and only just beginning to get an idea of who she is – and even then, we get glimpses at most. (Coppola’s script, from Priscilla’s ghostwritten memoir, is at times a bit too spare.) She’s wholly convincing as the young girl (and small – the 16-inch height difference between them is played up to great effect) who finds herself on a pedestal of luxury – which is to say, quite alone – but for me Elordi gives the more dynamic and compelling work.

Coppola’s script and direction shine brightest in the details, from the offhand way Elvis introduces Priscilla to pills and how it’s revealed, the first time she takes a sleeping pill, that she’s slept for two days, to how he introduces her to guns and how she ends up with a pistol for every occasion, to how Priscilla takes the time to put on false eyelashes and mascara before heading to the hospital to give birth. She makes good use of montage – credit to editor Sarah Flack – to show how the years flick by and play up how removed Priscilla actually is from Elvis’ public life (which the film’s relatively tight budget wouldn’t have been able to depict in any case).

It’s handsomely shot by Philippe Le Sourd, with excellent sets and first-rate costumes, but what truly stood out to me was the hairstyling, with Priscilla’s hair evolving from the simple style she initially wears, to the dyed and elaborately built-up styles Elvis encourages her to wear, back to its natural color and arrangement as she begins to grow beyond his influence, and Elvis’ hair growing from a modest pompadour to its iconic form, flanked by heroically thick sideburns.

And while the film’s elliptical style results in passages which are, for my taste, a bit too shallow and glossy (especially in the last few minutes, which really feel rushed), there are still moments of real impact, like the final goodbye between Elvis and Priscilla, when he sadly notes, “Another time and place,” as if the fame and celebrity which made their relationship possible was, in the end, the worst thing for it. I think of Charles Foster Kane’s line “If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”

Priscilla isn’t Citizen Kane, or even Citizen Susan Alexander, but it’s a fine union of style and subject, a biopic that has a real story to tell, rather than simply co-opting a notable life story for the sake of prestige.

Score: 87

Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023) – **

I hadn’t necessarily planned to see Five Nights at Freddy’s, but Ben (of Words About Books, check it out) asked me if I was going to, which is enough of a reason for me to check out a film which, despite pretty weak reviews, quadrupled its $20 million budget in the first weekend…then dropped 76% in the second. It hardly matters to the studio, who’ve made out like bandits, but it would’ve been nice if they’d actually made a good film in the process. (At least they didn’t make a three-hour film, as originally rumored, though the finished film’s 110-minute running time is still excessive.)

Five Nights at Freddy’s isn’t a good movie, but it’s tempting to say it’s three not-good movies crammed into one. There’s the horror film about the abandoned arcade whose animatronic band have the ability to move on their own…and kill. There’s the family drama about the struggling young man and his little sister (with her own emotional needs) trying to stay together despite the machinations of their aunt. And there’s the mystery about the abduction of the young man’s brother years earlier, which he’s trying to solve through controlled dreaming.

The family drama falls short because the young man, Mike Schmidt, isn’t particularly interesting or likable. It’s not just that he’s so paranoid about child abduction that he assaults a man for appearing to abduct his own son (with no mention of jail time or probation for this), it’s that Josh Hutcherson’s performance is a dull one, rarely able to rise above the character’s weary moping. It also falls short because the aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) is too absurd to take seriously as a threat and fixated on getting custody of the sister for the sake of getting support payments from the state…which I’m told are hardly enough to balance out the lawyer she keeps on retainer or the people she hires to prove Mike’s incompetence.

It also falls short because this is the kind of film where supposedly impoverished characters live in a house which looks far nicer and cleaner than most I’ve lived in – and in a house, period, though it might technically be a reflection of the film’s apparent late 90s setting. It’s never clearly stated, but landlines are used more than cell phones, videotapes are extensively used, and characters go to great lengths for $200. Hell, $2,000 still seems pretty low for how far they’re sticking their necks out.

The mystery side of the film falls short, first because Mike’s notion that he somehow has a vital detail buried deep in his subconscious is pathetically absurd (has he never heard of false memories?), and second because when it’s solved (sort of), the answer makes no damn sense. Maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Maybe it’ll be explained in the inevitable sequel. But probably it just doesn’t make sense.

And the horror aspect of the film falls short because, even before you realize how little sense any of it makes, it’s just not scary. True, Freddy Fazbear and his friends Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Mr. Cupcake turn out to have hidden depths, but they’re still quite lethal, and the scenes where they stalk and dispatch their victims pack no punch; they seem almost to teleport at times, the kills are neutered even by PG-13 standards, and the scenes are so generic in their style and development as to fall totally flat.

But it also doesn’t make any damn sense. Why does Freddy’s need a security guard, if like Mike, they’ll inevitably fall victim to Freddy and friends? If the animatronics can leave Freddy’s (and they do, at least once), why aren’t they out seeking prey on a regular basis? Even when we know who’s behind them, these questions aren’t really answered (and another one pops up – why do they kill adults?); it’s an unsatisfying mess of a story with tortuously doled-out exposition, punctuated by unstimulating horror beats.

Now, I have only a passing familiarity with the Freddy’s franchise. I know there are numerous games, novels, and comic books set in this world, and from what I’ve heard, the film is full of lore for the fans to appreciate. Setting aside my issues with fandom as it tends to manifest itself in this day and age, I would think the fans would be just as happy with a good movie that actually adapts the material for the medium, rather than whatever this film does.

Series creator Scott Cawthon developed the screen story, co-wrote the script, and co-produced the film, and whether he’s simply too deep into the accumulated mass of details to cut through them and tell a good, cohesive story using the basic premise of the game (surviving five nights, which the film botches by making most of the nights quite survivable indeed and failing to emphasize the “five” part of the equation), or just wasn’t cut out for dramatic storytelling, is beyond my ken.

Credit where it’s due: the sets are quite good, the animatronics are delightful, Rubio brings some spirit to her role (and Matthew Lillard does what he can with his own too-brief performance), and Emma Tammi’s direction shows sporadic traces of visual imagination, even if any real atmosphere is absent. And, as much as the film is overplotted and underdeveloped, as full as it is of narrative stumbling blocks that prevent any real tension from developing, it remains essentially watchable. But will anyone fondly remember this film, even if they remember the games? Will anyone care about this film next year – when Universal’s own classic horror films remain beloved classics after nearly a century? Watch those instead.

Score: 46

Captain Celluloid vs. the Film Pirates (1966) – ***

Captain Celluloid is an odd duck indeed: an homage to classic serials about pirating silent-film negatives! The villain, the Master Duper, is constantly seeking rare negatives to make “dupes” of, using advanced technology provided by the alluring Satanya (Jean Barbour), whom he pays in rare prints. The hero, Captain Celluloid, is the alter-ego of Larry Steele (Robert Miller), an agent for the Association of Film Distributors, whose shipments to the George Eastman Museum are a frequent target for the Duper. And the film begins with the discovery of the uncut original version of von Stroheim’s Greed, which is far more valuable to the characters than mere money.

If Five Nights at Freddy’s banked on the viewer being steeped in the franchise’s lore, Captain Celluloid expects you to know not only why finding the uncut Greed is a big deal, but why a minor character is named D.W. Hart, and what exactly the piece of equipment the Duper uses to evaporate those who’ve failed him is. It’s not just aimed at people who love movies, but people who had the means and know-how to trade in actual film prints, long before home video made it so much easier to be a cinephile – and before the Internet made it easier still.

Indeed, while the Master Duper is clearly a bad dude, it’s hard to really object to his duping, given that he seems to treat the films themselves with genuine respect. Yes, he’s lining his own pockets by renting out his own prints, but we don’t get enough of a sense of why the AFD is so much better; after all, neither of them actually made the films in question, and they’re both profiting off the work of others, most of them long retired or dead; just look at the actions of Raymond Rohauer, who claimed copyright on numerous silent films.

The target audience doubtless understood, however, and they also appreciated the adherence to the serial model, with Captain Celluloid finding himself in mortal danger at the end of the first three chapters (the film is in four chapters; the print I watched runs just under an hour), with the next chapter revealing his daring escape from certain death. Aside from the premise and the obviously miniscule budget, the homage is played quite straight.

Too straight, even, as one may wish for a little more humor to make up for the lack of characterization and the repetitive story. The cast were all, as far as I can tell, members of the film-preservation community; the film was based on an idea by archivist William K. Everson, who cameos as Hart. The film doesn’t tax their acting ability or lack thereof, but had it done so, it might have been a bit more fun – a bit easier to actually like, easy as it is to appreciate.

But it is easy to appreciate, and for an amateur it’s really pretty well made; director Louis McMahon was at least sporadically employed as a cinematographer, and the film is, within the limits of its resources, well staged and shot. The fights are especially well-done; you pulse won’t be pounding or anything, but some real care was put into the choreography and an impressive amount of props get smashed in the process. The soundtrack (it’s a silent film with intertitles) is composed of stock music from the very serials it homages; the cues are all well-chosen.

In the end, Captain Celluloid is more of a curiosity item than anything else, but as a dedicated effort by a group of film buffs, and a look at what being a film collector actually entailed long ago, it’s worth at least watching the first chapter. And hell, if you do watch the whole thing, it’s still only half as long as Freddy’s.

Score: 67