'Heartless' Review

Originally published at filmspotting.net

Direct link:  http://filmspotting.net/reviews/spotlight-reviews/643-heartless.html

Heartless

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Friday, 21 January 2011 11:30

By Alex Wilgus Heartless is an imaginative film that tells the story of Jamie, a young man with a disfiguring birthmark on his face that prevents him from having a “normal” life. It is at once psychological thriller, Faustian fantasy, horror, gangland tale and Hallmark channel family drama. Jim Sturgess (Across The Universe) plays the lead role capably, though it’s sometimes hard to believe his face wouldn’t get him any dates even with a big, red scar layered over it. Still, Sturgess’ take on the psychologically tormented loner manages to pull off an affecting level of inner anguish without dominating his co-stars. The performance belongs right up there with Jake Gyllenhaall’s Donnie Darko. Jamie’s search for inner peace leads him into a dark world where inner demons are made real and violence threatens everybody. Heartless is a nice reminder of what fantasy should be. Fantasy is not just escapism--it confronts reality with representation, and real problems with humanity’s most powerful weapon: imagination. The film is bathed in its setting, London’s East End. The neighborhoods and graffiti-covered walls and tunnels are filmed richly, with the shadows inspiring both fear and a strange comfort. From beginning to end, Heartless is a movie about cities and the people who inhabit them, but it’s a film that any human being can resonate with no matter their environment. Director Phillip Ridley doesn’t confront violence as such, but rather the spirit of violence. The devil (referred to as ‘Mr. B’) gives Jamie a deal: He will grant him his heart’s desire in return for a “piece of chaos”, which is just one little act of violence or anger or rebellion. The film’s narrative supposes that urban violence begins not with socioeconomic conditioning and behavior patterns, but with desire and choice, fundamental human emotions and actions that everybody can relate to. This Faustian choice is a refreshingly simple way to depict urban violence. People who join gangs want good things: family, protection, love and safety. They acquire these good things but deal out violence in return for them, a pattern which threatens to destroy peace and civility. It’s a two-dimensional portrait, but that’s what makes it so compelling. Most impressive perhaps is Ridley’s gumption in dealing with a subject as heavy as gang violence within a fairy tale (a very dark fairy tale, but a fairy tale nonetheless). By bending reality into fantasy, human emotions and motivations incarnate themselves into characters, and inner demons take on solid forms. Heartless is not a subtle venture, but that’s not a bad thing. When someone asked Flannery O’Connor why her characters were so exaggerated, she answered that when writing for the near-blind, one must draw large, simple caricatures. Heartless is a film for people who are in a predicament. There is a consistent sense that there is a message embedded in the plot that needs to be heard, understood and taken to heart. Often, there is little time to paint an intimate character study when dealing with big issues like violence, in the same way that a drowning man doesn’t have the time to consider the make of the life-preserver he’s thrown. This is not a lack of quality, but a lack of complexity. Sometimes, simplicity is an artistic choice in the way that Matisse would opt for painting in solid red instead of Monet’s multichrome palette. Not every film needs to have Aaron Sorkin layers of irony and double-entendre to be meaningful. Heartless is full of the kind of thick, juicy metaphor one gets from a folk tale or a fable. Its villains are toothy demons in hoodies and jeans; its heroes (or ‘victims’, rather) are doe-eyed mothers and kindly fathers. The film’s imagery is both familiarly archetypal and just weird enough to be wholly unique, exhibiting a stark originality in a time of meta-fiction, recycled characters and homages to other films (which often skirts dangerously close to artistically acceptable plagiarism). This is a movie that attacks its theme with all the boldness of Oliver Stone or James Cameron without inducing any eye-rolling. Heartless is a truly original fairy tale that contains the kind of vitality and love of filmmaking that is fun to watch. Whether or not the film’s particulars succeed in supporting its vision is debatable (I stuck with it), but unlike so many high concept fantasy and genre films these days, the spirit is willing.

Originally published at relevantmagazine.com
Direct link:  http://www.relevantmagazine.com/culture/film/features/24121-why-do-we-love-superheroes

Why Do We Love Superheroes?

Alex Wilgus

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Looking at what superheroes represent—and why they're important to our culture.

The recent influx of superhero hype has caused a wave of negativity toward superhero fiction, charging it with the cardinal sin of all speculative fiction: “escapism.” In the minds of many smarmy critics, superheroes represent a genre of simplistic narrative, completely bereft of any power to sharpen the mind, whose popularity can be attributed to the enthusiasm of salivating fanboys, nerds and geeks whose minds are dulled to the appreciation of fine art. But whatever one’s feelings of its artistic merit, the superhero genre has proved to be something eternal. The superhero is a figure that has held its place in the pantheon of American cultural iconography throughout the 20th century and is seeing a loving rebirth in the early years of the 21st. Has it simply been empty enthusiasm and marketing that has kept the superhero alive and profitable for more than 70 years? If Americans have a short attention span, as the critics love to suppose, then why haven’t we moved on to something else? The fact is that nobody has really taken the time to examine why superheroes are so resonant with people.

Every action hero embodies the spirit of the age he is created in and as a result, is doomed to be a relic of his time. James Bond is the suave secret agent of the Cold War, preserving the balance of power and enjoying the fruits of the status quo. Rambo is the super-soldier of the Vietnam era, with little use for human pleasures, the embodiment of total war. Jason Bourne is the silent assassin of today’s digital world whose lifestyle of constant mobility serves both to outrun the gaze of security cameras and the nihilism of his situation. Traditional movie action stars mirror the state of the world they find themselves in. 

The superhero, however, is something different. It is not supernatural power that makes them popular (or if it is, it is because those powers represent something). Superheroes are symbols for something deeper and it is this quality that allows them to remain popular and relevant no matter what time they are in. One might compare action heroes to secularism and superheroes to religion. Action heroes deal with immediate, external properties of the world; superheroes deal with the interior elements of humanity. Superheroes are colorful incarnations of the human soul.

The symbolic quality of the superhero is most readily evident by the costumes they wear. There is usually a large, emboldened icon on the chest or midsection, traditionally a cape and almost always a mask. It has long been a common human practice to depict the unspeakable spirits of human experience (love, hate, jealousy, compassion, etc.) as having a certain form, either a human or animal form or, usually, a combination of the two. “Anansi the Spider-Man,” was a recurring character in the Anasazi tribe’s fables. He was a man turned into a spider who used his spidery cunning and craft to outwit and defeat his rivals. Sound familiar? It was also not uncommon to for tribesmen to clothe themselves in animal skins or give names based on animals. To the Iriquois hunter, bears represent brawny courage; therefore, “I am Little Bear.” 

In this way, we put our hopes, fears, dreams, emotions and all unspeakable facets of human nature into corporeal form and loose them in fantastical worlds to see what we may learn from them. So there is near limitless narrative potential in superheroes. There is a common criticism that superheroes are not complex characters and represent very simple moralities. This is true for a hero like Superman, but the possibilities for what superheroes represent have a wide range. “The Green Hornet,” for example is an obscure superhero who is just now breaking into the limelight due to a new movie. The story is of a wealthy young heir to a media fortune who teams up with a talented martial artist to take down crime syndicates. Their trick is to pose as villains to get close to the crooks so they can easily lay the hurt on them and bring them in. The hornet represents craftiness and the sting of justice and proves that even evil can be intimidated.

The subject of superpowers should be addressed. If Superman did not fly through the air and see through walls, his appeal would be considerably diminished. Critics often take these fantastical powers as the primary reason to ignore superhero stories; for what is fantastical must surely be escapist and therefore worthless. However, superpowers are symbolic in themselves. It is an excellent representation of how human beings have been set apart as creatures from the rest of nature by their powers of reason and symbolic awareness. G.K. Chesterton, a writer notoriously disposed to spinning fantastical tales to excavate deeper truths once wrote about this separation:

“... Man has distanced [himself from] everything else with a distance like that of the astronomical spaces and a speed like that of the still thunderbolt of the light.”

The image of Superman floating high above Metropolis using his super-hearing to spot trouble afoot in his city is the image of Adam in the garden before Eve. He is alone and somewhat listless, though in possession of great power and understanding. Every human life has a component of isolation due to unique ability. Humanity is out of step with nature. We are in the world but not of it.

Perhaps the best recent example of this kind of symbolic storytelling is Geoff Johns’ latest issues of The Green Lantern, who will also get a movie debut very soon. It’s a story about seven warring armies of superheroes called the “Lanterns,” each harnessing the power of a particular emotion vying for dominance. The Green Lanterns represent will, the Yellow Lanterns represent fear, Blue Lanterns: hope, the Pink Lanterns: love, the Red Lanterns: rage and the Orange Lantern: greed (there is only one of these, of course, since greed does not share power). The fun of the story lies in seeing physical embodiments of the emotions we all know intimately interacting with each other. In the story, love proves it can be just as possessive as greed, will and fear ally with each other to stifle the overpowering assault of rage and in the end they must all unite to beat back the formidable Black Lanterns, who symbolize death.

These sorts of pulp-fiction metaphors aren’t going to win their authors a Pulitzer Prize, but they are effective. Subtlety rarely enters the picture and it need not. The best superhero stories are the ones that don’t pretend to be anything more important than comic books, but do not shy away from commenting on human nature in their own humble way. "Higher" art forms, like novels, could be compared to a dissertation, whereas superhero stories are sermons. Both have the capacity to tackle equally eternal themes in their own way—one with exhaustive literary weight and form honed by years of intellectualism, the other with bold lines and primary colors.

Philosophical superhero reading list:

All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison
Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
Green Lantern by Geoff Johns
Watchmen by Alan Moore