Super 8 in Paris
This time, I’m mashing a JJ Abrams movie and a Woody Allen movie. They’re both about struggling, self-doubting artists who find themselves in a very unnatural situation. They face antagonism and disbelief when they try to share their secrets. And both hope to win the love of a girl who seems far out of reach. Oh, and there’s spoilers. I ALWAYS have spoilers.
So JJ Abrams made a movie, right, with these kids who have a video camera. They’re filming their own little thing, not getting in anyone’s way, when BANG, crash...a crazy, unthinkable thing happens and they find themselves in the midst of something huge. It seems the whole world is collapsing around them. There’s a monster in town. An evacuation is ordered by the military. But a girl is lost, and needs to be found! Can the protagonist find her and get both of them to safety before they lose their lives?
That’s right, JJ Abrams made Cloverfield. But I watched his Super 8, which it turns out is Cloverfield after Steven Spielberg shined it up with his PG buffer and took it to the big budget track for a spin. Super 8, in fact, is every (non-horror) alien movie ever. It uses tropes from ET, Close Encounters, Alien, and Cloverfield (natch). Hell, even the Iron Giant could claim rights. The hell of it is that Super 8 wouldn’t have been a bad movie if it hadn’t been done 20 times before.
The beginning of Super 8 is strong, with the circa-1980 setting and a slow unveiling of the various players. The establishment of the main character Joe’s initial crisis (his mother’s death) is really tautly done, as is the showing of the boy’s fitful, halting recovery and his father’s difficulty in relating to him. Joe doesn’t appear to be very social, but he’s serious about model trains, and movie make-up, and helping his friend (who fancies himself a 12-year-old Hitchcock) make a zombie movie with his Super 8 camera. That’s the hook for getting our band of boys (and one girl -- the marvvy Elle Fanning) into the right place at the right time to accidentally film a military secret. As they prepare to shoot a scene at the railway station, a truck forces the oncoming train to derail.
The introduction of the Other is also pretty great, even if JJ Abrams is unable to portray a train wreck in a believable way (as this guy says at more length). A pick-up truck driven by the school’s science teacher rolls onto the tracks. Anyone who’s read a newspaper knows what should happen next. The train would smash that truck like it was a paper plane, shredding it to tiny pieces. The train’s conductor would then hit the brake, coming to a long, screeching halt miles beyond the initial incident, where he will call his superiors to inform them of the tragedy. Abrams seems to think that trucks are a bit tougher. This one stays in one piece, while the train hurtles off the track in a pyrotechnic parade of flipping, uncoupling cars and flaming boxcar doors flying through the air.1 The kids watch it all happen around them, still filming, but are protected from the apocalyptic levels of destruction by their protagonist status. As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, they then rush to the pick-up truck, and have a conversion with the driver...who is breathing, cognizant, and able to recognize his students and caution them to not tell anyone that they saw the accident because Bad Guys will come after them. DO. NOT. BELIEVE.
So, the upshot is that the kids have one crazy night. The next day, word is out about a military train accident, and soon the Air Force shows up to do damage control and generally act so totally suspiciously that the sheriff (Joe’s father) starts getting tetchy. Then all the electronics and engines in the town start vanishing. Dogs run away. Things get freaky.
The best part of the movie happens immediately after the kids realize that they’ve stumbled onto something strange and scary. Their reactions to this having this forbidden knowledge is both believable and fun to watch. Denial, fear, and anger all boil up over a lunch at a local diner. When one decides to further investigate the train accident, the others are frightened and angry, and delightfully immature.
Unfortunately, the movie gets super cliche as soon as the monster is revealed. It goes from a sort of mystery to a hero quest in a whiplashed second, and everyone suddenly suits up into their stereotype. Cue Spielbergian alien movie plot points. Roll to end credits.
If anyone should worry about remaking one of his own movies, it should be Woody Allen, who’s made, what, 486 films so far? But Midnight in Paris is quite different from the typical Woody Allen flick, not least because it’s not set in New York. Midnight plops a Hollywood hack writer Gil (Owen Wilson) in Paris with his snotty, shallow fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her snotty, shallow family. The non-famous characters of Midnight are nearly all caricatures, more like sketches of characters that in another movie might be filled out with nuances. But for this movie, they remain shadows on a Platonic cave wall -- with the exception of Gil, who is the film’s center and locus. They aren’t important. Gil is. They like shopping in super high-end antique stores and generally throwing their American ideas and wealth around. Gil, while he (inexplicably) loves his girlfriend, would rather wander the streets of Paris and fall under the enchantment of the City of Light. He’s looking for inspiration for his stalled first novel, which he hopes will free him artistically.
One evening, he stumbles down an alley and finds himself transported to the Paris of the 1920s. Here, Gil encounters his heroes: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, TS Eliot, and a host of others. The scene stealing Hemingway takes a shine to Gil and offers to take him to Gertrude Stein to have his novel draft looked at. That’s where Gil sees a charming French girl (Marion Cotillard) who captures his heart.
Gil returns to the magic alley every night, spinning more lies for his increasingly distant and chill fiancee, and falling ever deeper under the spell of the Golden Age of the 20s. The fly in this ointment is the growing suspicion of the fiancee’s father, who sets a private detective to follow Gil. Shall the cold present intrude on Gil’s golden ideal?
The villains of Midnight in Paris are as straightforward as they come - a self-interested man determined to catch his soon-to-be son-in-law in whatever nefarious act he must be committing. The antagonism makes perfect sense. Gil isn’t being up front about his nightly exploits (how could he be, without being considered crazy?), so Daddy-in-law takes what seem to be reasonable steps to thwart Gil. The chance that the private detective might destroy the magic of the alley, or that he’ll discover Gil’s 1920s girlfriend, loom as awful threats.
Not so with Super 8. Why are Spielbergian villains always EVIL? The Air Force takes the role of villain in Super 8, but they aren’t merely The Man, a bureaucratic labyrinth of unbelievers who thwart the heroes with their grown-up skepticism and compromised idealism. Hell no. That’d be too realistic. This Air Force unit is mean. The leader is a sadistic ass, who is almost solely responsible for the alien/monster’s anti-human stance. At one point, he looks on smugly while one of his flunkies steals from the hero a memento of his dead mother...for NO APPARENT REASON. The object has no value, no McGuffiny goodness attached to it, nor does the flunky know what the object might mean to the hero. So why take it? If you need your character to be a dick, at least give his behavior logic within the story. Stop beating the audience with obviousness.
As much as I found Cloverfield to be kinda dull, at least it was good at maintaining a sense of dread, of bad to worse. Super 8 is safe, safe, safe. The heroes suffer nothing worse than a single broken leg, even with all those Bad Guys trooping around. And that makes it dull all through the second half. The supernatural element -- the Area 51-style alien conspiracy -- isn’t scary after the monster is revealed. Nor it is particularly compelling. The hero instinctively understands that he just has to help the alien leave the planet, and then everything’s cool. And we never doubt that he’ll be able to do it. The lack of tension is a classic problem of this type of movie. Everything gets explained, and the audience is left with nothing to consider or wonder about. It’s like watching the final moves in a chess match when you know it’s already over.
Midnight in Paris handles its supernatural element -- time travel -- in a completely different way. When Gil stumbles down the alley, he doesn’t know what’s about to happen. Neither do we. The sloshed Gil is hailed by the passengers in an old-fashioned car, and perhaps unwisely, hops in. When he gets out, he’s in the past, although it takes him a little while to realize what’s happened. Until too many details overwhelm him, he assumes he’s at some fancy dress party. But Allen doesn’t pull any tricks for this trick. There’s no CG, no gimmick. He’s just in one time, and then another. There’s never an explanation for how it works, because that’s not important. At all. Woody Allen, bless his heart, understands this. The point of the film is to get Gil the writer in touch with the artists he most admires, and to jolt him out of his complacent reality. By hiding the machinery, Allen lets the story tell itself. He trusts the audience to come along.
So the summer blockbuster and the rom-com both turn out to be Künstlerroman. Ish. But one is a lot more fun to watch.
Super 8: snooze.
Midnight in Paris: squee!
1 Just because CGI lets you do something doesn’t mean you should.