If a more interesting and entertaining Hollywood movie than Down With Love has come along this year, I’ve missed it. Down With Love—which has already closed in Chicago—is entertaining thanks to Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake’s clever script, Peyton Reed’s mainly assured direction, inventive production and costume design, a musical number behind the final credits I’d happily swap all of Chicago for, and even a miscast Renee Zellweger pulling off a difficult climactic monologue. But I was knocked out less by these achievements, which are clearly deliberate, than by the film’s authentic weirdness, which is apparently accidental.
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Surprisingly, the collapsing of the 50s and 60s results in a hyperbolic dream of a dream—and makes the movie more, rather than less, fascinating and touching. In expressing a yearning for what it perceives, dubiously, as a less cynical and more innocently romantic time, Down With Love says a lot about who we are today. In addition it conveys an aching sense of a void that’s too definitive to qualify as nostalgia. Nostalgia tends to shrink our image of the past to cozy dimensions, to something we already know, but this movie expands that image across time and space—suggesting that in some ways the past is more sophisticated than the present, even if we can’t say exactly how. Hovering ambiguously over a stupid and tacky trio of hypocritical comedies as if they contained awesome and precious secrets, Down With Love still offers creative and poetic insights into the present.
Our embrace of technology and planned obsolescence—which remains vital to the further enrichment of the wealthy—condemns us to a myth of continuous progress. Yet we remain haunted by the feeling that we’ve left something substantial and untapped behind. Historian Eric Hobsbawm recently suggested that people in the 19th century had an edge on us in their capacity to distinguish war from peace. Hollywood filmmakers in the supposedly repressive 1950s found more ways to work social criticism into their movies than their counterparts today can manage, and some film directors in the 1920s knew things about their craft and art that the Scorseses, Spielbergs, and Lucases—with all their high-tech equipment—can’t begin to fathom.
Maddin has also indicated that even though he was bored by the Stoker novel, he was intrigued by the elements involving male problems with sexuality—including jealousy, rivalry, and paranoia, especially in relation to race, nationality, and ethnicity. This is apparent at the outset of the film, when graphic images of blood spilling across Europe are accompanied by such intertitles as “East Coast of England 1897,” “Immigrants!” “Others!” “From Other Lands,” “From the East!” and “From the Sea!” Maddin makes this theme even more nuanced by having Dracula played by a Chinese-Canadian, Zhang Wei-qiang, who periodically evokes the late French-Italian New Wave actor Pierre Clementi. This reading of the novel may, as critic Mark Peranson has suggested, be more faithful than any other we’ve had to date. (Most adaptations derive from Deane and Balderstein’s play rather than the novel, and only Francis Coppola’s splashy and underrated 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula rivals Maddin’s as a meditation on the historical period.) That Maddin films his dancers in none of the conventional ways—often moving in for close shots and sometimes using as many jump cuts as Godard did in Breathless—doesn’t so much interfere with our appreciation of these dancers’ moves as reconfigure it, assigning it a fresh kind of poetics.
“a) The studies of physiognomy and phrenology should be primary considerations in the casting of actors. Head bumps have long been ignored by the industry.
The neosurrealist flavor of these directives lets us know that Maddin is no foe of the industrial film studio and what it can produce. More precisely, he belongs in the tradition of obsessional, poetic tale spinners and studio craftsmen such as Erich von Stroheim, F.W. Murnau, Josef von Sternberg, Jacques Tourneur, and Michael Powell, who bend public materials toward private ends and take us on a feverish ride.
Directed by Peyton Reed
Written by Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake
With Renee Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Sarah Paulson, David Hyde Pierce, and Tony Randall.
Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary ★★★ (A must-see)
Directed and written by Guy Maddin
With Zhang Wei-qiang, Tara Birtwhistle, David Moroni, CindyMarie Small, Johnny Wright, and Brent Neale.
