jeff eaton

When I saw the initial trailers for Lord of War, I was pretty convinced it was my kind of film. Black as black can be humor, a post-national Leggy Starlitz vibe, and some 80s music in the background. It'd be grim, but so was Grosse Point Blank, and it's on my favorites list.

I took a break from some code this evening, watched it on a whim, (thanks, Comcast On Demand!) and I can say a couple of things off the top of my head. First, Lord of War is a weak film story-wise. They weren't exactly going for super-spy thriller material, but most of the plot was telegraphed so far in advance that waiting for shoes to drop felt like a chore, not anticipation. And Nicholas Cage just plays... well... Nicholas Cage again. I suppose I can buy him as a Ukranian arms dealer from New York; if Clark Kent's glasses hide Superman, I guess Nicholas Cage doesn't have to bother faking an accent for this film.

Billed as a 'black comedy,' it was just black; nobody expects Keystone Kops from a movie about arms dealers, but what possibilities for brain-twisting irony and weirdness in a business like that seemed to be overlooked. Maybe I'm just war-inured after reading about military tech, international mercenery corporations, insurgency, and... well. Yeah. That.

That brings me to the second thought about this film. I can't help but think after watching that director Andrew Niccol had no real intention of making a black comedy. Lord of War, at its heart, is a dead-baby-photo thrust in the face of the viewer. There's some gore, but it's not really just about the violence that arms dealers facilitate. It's about the deadening of the human soul that goes with the territory of selling death.

Make no mistake about it: this movie is depressing in every sense of the word. Love is lost, lives are lost, souls are lost -- Nicholas Cage is invincible, unstoppable, but only in the most technical sense. By the time the film is over, he's won and he's no longer really human. He knows it, and even though he lies to everyone around him, no one is fooled -- not him, not them.

Perhaps it's not really, truly possible to enjoy a movie about people killing people without lying to yourself in one way or another. If I had, I'm not sure if I'd want to look in the mirror. I didn't enjoy Lord of War, and to be honest I think that's what the director intended.

This weekend, Jason and Steph and I saw A History of Violence.The movie's premise is promising. It's based on a high-quality graphic novel, a distinction that seems to be the new badge of edginess for hip young directors. It's getting rave reviews from critics in high places, and its complement of A-list acting talent gives it instant credibility.

The film tells the story of Tom Stall, an all-American dad in a small town whose diner is robbed by two sociopathic thugs. A switch flips, and he saves the lives of his coworkers and customers with a startling display of brutal heroism. He's an instant town celebrity, of course, and the diner's business booms. But there's something unsettling, something off-kilter, about this gentle churchgoing man with a wife and two kids killing would-be robbers with reflexive efficiency. His eyes say it all: there's something more under the surface, and he's tormented by it.

Sound promising? It is. But A History of Violence never delivers. All the complex themes and challenging questions are left as an exercise for the viewer while the film zooms in for an extended closeup of the blood and the screams and the bruised thighs and the spilled brains of brutal sex and violence. It'd be a shame, after all, to spend valuable screen time exploring the nature of man or the morality and ethics of violence when you could just show, say, Tom inexplicably raping his wife or closeups of someone's jawless face gurgling.

This is a film based on a graphic novel in the worst possible ways. It reminds me how easy of a ride most graphic novels get: they're considered deep if they even hint at moral complexity, but few are ever expected to do the hard work of exploring those themes in the actual work itself. In this way, A History of Violence also reveals precisely what's rotten at the core of the comic and graphic novel industry that spawned its story in the first place.

I'll be writing more shortly -- it'll have spoilers, so if you really want to see the film, don't click any farther.