(From Hollywood Vs. Dogville, © by Jake Horsley)
“It’s a more difficult and dangerous world to live in
where we accept the fact that some people who do bad things have good in them.
You can’t define a life by one action. We all have some of that bad in our
goodness; the line is always sort of blurry.”
—Matthew Ryan Hoge
With his famous mix of wit and wisdom, Oscar Wilde
once quipped how “no good deed goes unpunished”; perhaps the same perverse law
applies to fresh and original works of cinema? In Hollywood, there is
apparently no sin greater than artistic integrity, and in being denied access
to the collective consciousness of “mainstream” audiences, Keith Gordon is far
from alone. Such works as Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone, Alexandre Rockwell’s Sons, Finn Taylor’s Dream with the Fishes, Henry Bean’s The Believer, and
Nick Cassavetes’ Unhook the Stars are among the most enjoyable and memorable movies
of recent years yet they are works that have come and gone (like Gordon’s work)
without barely a twitch of acknowledgement from the mass mind of critics and
moviegoers.[1] However
lamentable this situation may be, however, it has to be said that there is
a special pleasure in discovering rare movie gems that no one else has a clue
about. At the same time, the relative obscurity of these works only confirms a
growing suspicion, namely, that Hollywood and its audience are already too far
gone to ever recognize works that truly come from the heart. The most recent
example of this sad but no doubt inevitable fact is Matthew Ryan Hoge’s The
United States of Leland.
So far in the present work, I’ve been using the term
“auteur works” loosely, to describe films possessed of a strong, usually
directorial personality (for example when Scorsese made Taxi Driver or
De Palma did Casualties of War, both from scripts written by others). In
a stricter sense, however, an auteur work must really be written and
directed by the same person, and so imbued with a unique sensibility from its
inception onward. Auteur directors who bring a strong visual, aesthetic, even
thematic sense to their films are common enough, and by such a wide definition
even James Cameron and Peter Jackson may be considered “auteurs.” But
filmmakers who possess a unique philosophical or literary (for lack of better
words) sensibility—whose personality is felt almost as strongly through their
films as a novelist’s is felt through his books—have always been extremely rare
in movies.[2]
Because of the depth of feeling and layers of meaning which they
possess, works of this kind often seem to have been based on novels even
when they aren’t. Perhaps this is because the ideas have been fermenting that
much longer inside the mind of the filmmaker, or perhaps it’s because they are
drawn more directly from his or her personal experiences; whatever the case
(and be it Flesh and Bone, Dream with the Fishes, the recent Around the Bend, or The United States of Leland),
the result has been some of the finest films ever made in America, but also
some of the least known.
Like Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (another
recent auteur work), The United States of Leland is about a young adult
who suffers from an excess of empathy, and how it leads him both to wisdom and
madness, in more or less equal proportion. Ostensibly, it’s about a senseless
murder (Leland kills the retarded brother of his girlfriend, after she dumps
him for another boy), and the equally senseless search for a reason why, a
search that invariably turns up answers deeper and more disturbing—and more
mysterious—than the original question. Although Hoge—whose first film this
was—doesn’t have any obvious visionary gifts as a director (unlike, say,
Richard Kelly), he does an astonishing job drawing together the various
elements of his screenplay into a cohesive whole, creating an Altmanesque
patchwork of lives in distress.[3]
Hoge has a phenomenal gift as a writer: the ability to create scenes,
characters and dialogue strong enough to carry his personal, philosophical
concerns without ever being bent out of shape by them. Hoge is clearly writing
from the heart, and unafraid to put his psyche whole into the movie. Yet his
touch is unobtrusive and discreet, with none of the usual angst and indulgence
common to first-time auteurs (Pi, Welcome to the Dollhouse, etc, etc).
Hoge’s restraint is especially remarkable because, by choosing to concentrate
on story and character and letting the personal stuff seep through in its own
good time, instead of diminishing the intensity of his vision, he allows it to
come slowly to life through the course of the film. By the end, it packs such a
wallop that it may take a day or two to recover. This kind of restraint—and
such an assured creative instinct—is almost unique to first-time filmmakers,
most especially ones this ambitious.
The United States
of Leland presents an impressively rich and complex array of human
problems—neurosis, fear, grief, confusion, rage and sorrow—yet it never gets
bogged down by them, it never feels indulgent or morose (as in the case of Paul
Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, for example), and it never seems forced or
contrived. Its only motive (like Leland’s?) seems to be to release some of the
unbearable pressure of empathy, in the face of an overwhelming universal
sadness. And because it’s a gesture made in earnest—without airs or
expectations or ulterior motives—the film connects; it connects to something
close to the essence of being human—our shared loneliness, and the isolate
despair of being an island, a nation unto ourselves. As Leland says, all the
tears in the world can’t make what has happened unhappen. But the tears come
anyway.
In essence,
Hoge’s vision touches upon something profound: how the most apparently
monstrous evil can come out of an excess of goodness, how the burden of
empathy—of deeper seeing—can lead to the most desperate of acts, to
suicide, for example, or murder. Like a distress signal from a lost soul afloat
in a sea of lost souls, it suggests both complicity in despair and the
possibility of release from it; like an aria, it appeals to audiences to
let down the shields and the blinds, for just a moment, and look.
Audiences could have cared less, however. Hoge’s film appeared out of nowhere,
and vanished back from whence it came soon after, under a barrage of critical
incomprehension and outrage, and several attempts to boycott the film (by
parents of autistic children, claiming it glorified murder—having never seen
it, of course). I can think of no other recent film that was so unjustly
overlooked as this, nor greater evidence of the nigh-pathological obtuseness of
American film critics. (These are the same critics, mind, who hail a smug and
asinine work like American Beauty as a work of moral depth, social
relevance, and psychological poignancy!)[4]
Audience and
critics’ indifference notwithstanding, however, make no mistake about it: The
United States of Leland attains the highest goal of art; by expressing the
bottomless pain of a single individual, it eases the sadness of the world. That
Hoge isn’t recognized and acclaimed as a brilliant new film artist—along with
Paul Thomas Anderson, Alexander Payne, and the rest of the new indie lights—is
perhaps evidence of just how unwilling people are to be reminded of that
sadness. Hoge made a masterpiece from the heart, and was duly punished. The
world (and Hollywood) rode right over him, on its merry and soulless way to
nowhere.
Back to Movies
[1] Other interesting works largely
ignored by public and critics alike include The Alarmist, The Boiler Room,
Jesus’ Son, Palookaville, Kissed, Bodies: Rest and Motion.
[2] Novel ideas, flesh and blood
characters, genuine human interactions, depth psychology, emotional
poignancy—what we might call heart—these are all qualities that only
arise when a movie is made, not out of a lust for fame or Hollywood glory—nor
even out of a simple love for images—but from something that burns within the
artist’s breast and demands to be expressed. Such filmmakers must, one
supposes, be first of all writers, and that they choose to express their
thoughts and feelings by writing and then shooting a movie is secondary; if they
couldn’t make their movie, such artists would always express themselves
somehow.
[3] All the performances are
flawless, none more so than that of Ryan Gosling playing Leland. Gosling brings
to the role just the right qualities of isolation, strangeness, and sweetness
to hold Hoge’s vision together; another actor—one less endearing and
unsettling—and Hoge’s deceptively complex character portrait might have fallen
apart. With Gosling in the role, the full richness and heartache of Hoge’s
psychological tragedy is expressed. Besides Gosling, there are remarkable
performances from the entire cast, which includes Martin Donovan, Don Cheadle,
Jena Malone (from Donnie Darko), Chris Klein, Michelle Williams, Ann
Magnuson, Lena Olin, and a perfectly cast Kevin Spacey as Leland’s absent
father, the cold and self-obsessed writer-genius Fitzgerald. (Spacey no doubt
hand-picked the role for himself, since he also co-produced the film for his
company, Trigger St.)
[4] As Hoge expressed it at the
time, “some of it is the subject matter which people can’t get past, but it’s
sort of sad to me that sincerity is not a virtue, you know? That being earnest
in your storytelling and trying to tell a story that means something in an
earnest way isn’t appreciated. People, particularly critics, sort of prefer an
ironic distance and not getting emotionally close to characters who are asking
difficult questions about human nature.” (Ergo, the ecstatic response to American
Beauty.)