Into The Psyche of a Broken Man…revisiting John Landis’ Into The Night May 16, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1980s, Desert Island Films, Drama, After Hours at Cafe 80s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Crime , 7 commentsInto The Night (John Landis, 1985, USA)
Dir. John Landis; screenplay by Ron Koslow; starring Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dan Aykroyd, John Landis, Bruce McGill, David Bowie, Richard Farnsworth, Clu Gulager
John Landis might be remembered for Trading Places, Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf In London. He might also be remembered by his detractors for the unfortunate incidences that occurred during the filming of The Twilight Zone, but for me, his career should almost be defined by his 1985 masterpiece Into The Night.
The film, starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, is a little seen gem (not unlike his vampire flick Innocent Blood) that sheds the genre trappings of say An American Werewolf and the iconic prominence of stars and celebrity in, for example, Trading Places, Blues Brothers, or Coming To America. It’s a film that focuses on character, very much inspired by its time, with Landis not having to worry about special-effects (ala man changing into werewolf) or eccentric spectacle (look no further than The Blues Brothers or Animal House). It’s Landis’ most assured piece of filmmaking, and debatably, his greatest ever achievement.
The film is also prominent because it was the first Landis made after the tragedy of 1982 when Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed when a helicopter stunt went wrong. Landis and other production crew were initially blamed and charged with manslaughter. Many people still hold Landis responsible for the deaths but the fact remains that after a long trial, Landis and the other crew members were acquitted in a court of law. The director was clearly deeply affected by the terrible deaths – more than many give him credit for – and this can be seen in Into The Night. His vision is pessimistic and bleak. He shows a disregard for commercialism and a materialistic world, and uses Los Angeles (the most fictionally abused city by American cinema, where dreams are made and broken) as his backdrop. His main character is confused, alone, miserable. He can’t sleep, almost an indication he has to spend more waking moments in his misery than those who can sleep. The film is very a much an investigation into what happens when conventional life loses its boundaries and suddenly a cavernous space opens up with infinite possibility. It’s about a frightening reality that isn’t governed by pop-culture, television adverts, or consumerism. Landis depicts a world where we have to make choices – not always the right ones – but choices that aren’t necessarily straight-forward. Ed, the main character, learns what he wanted by the end of the movie but can’t fathom what it is at the beginning. The choice, therefore, isn’t always in front of us, and we might never know what it really is, but it exists.
Retrospectively, it is wonderful how director John Landis has actor Jeff Goldblum working in a plain office doing a job that needs no other distinction than appearing awfully boring, and probably requiring its workers to turn-up nine to five, five days a week. His job description is not required, the only thing worth noting the fact it has something to do with the machination of technology. It’s an idea that extends to his life in that he is so bored with the everyday machination of his being (like in the board meeting when his turn to speak interrupts the flow because he isn’t doing his work properly), he’s inadvertently trying to break down the boundaries of the familiar conventions that bind him. It’s almost as if he wants to breakout but he can’t bring himself to do it - a fear of the unknown, of what isn’t conventionally part of his life - preventing his desperation to break free. The fact he has insomnia signals that inadvertent rebellion. Coming home one day to hear his wife screaming in orgasmic pleasure with an anonymous stranger triggers his pursuit of change – his pursuit for adventure.
Into The Night shares some similarity to Scorsese’s After Hours - two films that flirt with the idea of ‘ordinary’ thirty-something men working in jobs that appear to trap them, both looking for the catalyst that opens new territory and new ideas. They share the femme fatale and both are primarily set at night, but these films are not about a lewd concourse between a man and a woman, they’re about musing about life outside of one’s own and finding adventure when the walls of the American dream have broken down.
Into The Night begins with a plane landing, followed by shots of corporate Americana before gently moving towards a quiet suburb, entering the bedroom of a house owned by Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum). He sits in bed, wide awake, next to his sleeping wife. Ed has insomnia. He tells his friend Herb (Dan Aykroyd) who recommends he uses it to his advantage and should take the late flight to Las Vegas. He’s unsure at first but when he comes home to find his wife having an affair, he heads to the airport. Parking the car, Ed takes a moment to survey his predicament, but his attention is quickly removed to a distraught young woman who gets in the car and begs him to drive away. Four armed men chase the vehicle out of the parking lot but Ed is able to escape. The girl tells him her name is Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer), and that she doesn’t know why the SAVAK (Iranian secret police) are following her, but they murdered her friend as they got off the plane. Ed probes her for information that she isn’t willing to provide, she just asks him to take her home. However, Ed is about to get more than he bargained for as an already long night begins to throw up more mystery, more murder, and a lot more intrigue, as he inadvertently becomes another player in a dangerous cat and mouse adventure, set against the backdrop of a cold Los Angeles night.
Essentially, Into The Night is about superficiality, in that life is based on false pretences. If we live our lives by pre-conditions what will happen if we are faced with a series of unconditional, uncertain avenues? Ed Okin is told that Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) has nothing of her own, that she has only what is given or what she takes. This is mirrored in him because his own life is simply based on what has been given to him such as the conventions of getting married, having a steady job, a car and a house – all things that are supposed to equate to happiness (in both the conventional sense of the word, and the way such life choices are viewed by common American values) but there’s something distinctly missing in his life. He’s accepted all these things because he knows of no other way but if they are supposed to make you happy, then why isn’t he? Director Landis continually abuses our senses with the superficial world that surrounds us – Diana is a model for instance, and Ed examines the stylised photos at her apartment. Her brother idolises Elvis and tries to live like the man himself, driving around in a car that proclaims ‘The King Lives’. Indeed, when Ed and Diana visit a film set in search of her friend, it is the artificial props that cause Ed a problem as he leans against a false wall and falls through it, and sits on a papier-mâché rock crumpling it to a pulp. When he tries to make a call from a payphone two prop engineers look at him questioningly as they pick up the prop and take the phone from his ear.
It’s interesting that the men that chase Ed and Diana around the city destroy every place they visit looking for clues to their whereabouts, as they put to the scrap heap the very physical embodiments of the superficiality that bind us. They break a film director’s awards, smash televisions, vinyl records and stereos. In essence, Landis reverses the narrative psychology of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ character roles, in that what the corrupt, and potentially evil SAVAK are doing is the very thing Ed needs to save himself. The SAVAK agents are not content with what is given to them, they are chasing the riches. When Ed and Diana meet, it’s at the airport and Diana asks Ed why he is there. He tells her that his life isn’t working out somehow, but Diana wonders why he is drawn to the airport. He has no answer, but it seems to lead to the idea that he inadvertently tries to chase the riches, like his insomnia being an inadvertent rebellion to life’s constraints. The airport signifies a place of relatively infinite possibilities with its key to the world – other countries, other cultures, other people. Finally, when cornered by the Iranian secret police and questioned Ed starts to fictionalise his reason for being caught up in the situation – ‘I’m on her majesty’s secret service, we’ve got the place surrounded’. Shrugging he says, ‘I’m really from immigration, we thought you had some illegal aliens working around here.’ Ed begins to breakdown the superficiality that binds him, embracing it, consciously fictionalising his predicament into a fantasy world that holds no such boundaries, conventions or constraints.
Landis paints Ed’s adventure much like a dream, Goldblum’s forlorn facial expression indicating he can’t remember the last time he slept. He allows bits of information to come through but Landis captivates the viewer by a languid narrative that is part road-movie, part mystery, which seems at times as rebellious to convention as Ed wants to be. Landis takes the film on quite unique tangents, his unhurried pace a sign of Ed’s tired insomniac. In between quips about American consumerism, he keeps Ed and the audience in the dark, much like the night that surrounds them, and through following a rather arbitrary plot direction Landis is able to instill the indistinctive, incomprehension of a nightmare that bares no outcome. Indeed, the film could be seen as Ed’s dream played-out in reality, though it takes the form of a nightmare because that is how he sees his life. It’s ironic then, that to learn from a nightmare you have to stay awake all the way through it, but that again is another example of the film’s rebellion of constraints that bind society.
Whether Into The Night is an interpretation of Ed’s dream or reality itself, it’s quite unforgiving in its bleak outlook. Landis depicts a world of corrupt excess and pessimism rooted in big business capitalism that permeates from characters that are seemingly miserable in their riches, or chasing such riches within the confines of violent, greed-ridden crime. The SAVAK want Diana’s diamonds and are willing to kill anyone that gets in their way, while a mysterious French entrepreneur with a British henchman also wants to get their hands on the loot (Landis using their very different nationalities to suggest that the problem is hardly local, perhaps a rather haphazard criticism of globalisation), all manoeuvring in the criminal underworld. Yet the ones that have riches fair no better as Diana’s ex-sugar Daddy is a dying cripple who hates his wife, and whose many expensive cars lay soullessly in an oversized driveway. Similarly, a Hollywood producer is more dismayed at his film awards being smashed than the well-being of his trophy-girlfriend. When the police ask he claims he doesn’t know what happened to her even though her dead body lays a hundred yards away on the beach, his preoccupations going no further than his broken living room. Landis provides a quite horrid sense of life based on commercialised excess to the point of it being an epidemic that breeds through a weakened, consumerist society. This is beautifully depicted in Diana’s brother whose fascinated, idolisation of Elvis Presley has turned him into a social misfit who struggles to even afford a downtrodden, one bedroom apartment. In a sense, it isn’t apparent what Ed really wants, but he doesn’t know himself, because his life has become alien to him. When a gun is held against Diana’s head and he’s facing the possibility of his own death, he says: ‘Let me ask you something, maybe you can help me. What’s wrong with my life? Why is my wife sleeping with someone else? Why can’t I sleep?’. This is a haunting reminder that the answers are a little hard to come by when the reassuring conventions that govern one’s life have broken and you’re looking beyond the profit-margins and collector’s items, the adverts for cheap dinners and the fast cars that guarantee the trophy-blonde.
Into The Night has been criticised for being overly self-referential and it would be unwise to overlook Landis’ constant use of cameos in the form of ‘director’ friends that show-up constantly in the movie (from Lawrence Kasdan, David Cronenberg and Landis himself, to Amy Heckerling, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, and Don Siegel, plus many more), and his homage to one of the first films that could be termed post-modern - Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein - which is shown within the film. In many ways, Into The Night acknowledges itself as an entity apart from the ‘real’ world, much like the nineties vogue kick-started by Wes Craven with New Nightmare and continued through Scream and its sequels. Here were movies where the characters acknowledged their existence within a film, their lives governed by conventions set out in fictionalised accounts within previous films. It’s certainly an idea that examples Landis’ love of movies, but also shows how popular culture governs cultural identity as reality and fiction blur, so that they are hardly separate entities at all. Taken at face value, this is as superficial as the phony-reality the film criticises, but at its root it’s a post-modern fear of mass cultural identity disappearing into itself, so that Ed’s question of ‘what’s wrong with my life’ becomes the rather more complex ‘what is life itself?’
Landis has certainly concocted an enjoyable journey into the enclosed, urban expanse of inner-city Los Angeles - an ‘island’ surrounded by the build-up of its own excesses. Ed’s adventure is frequently amusing, largely through Goldblum’s laconic, deadpan performance but Landis juxtaposes the humour (the SAVAK’s pursuit painted in cartoon-like styling as if they are bumbling bad guys following a treasure map) with reasonably graphic violence (when a girl is drowned, and when David Bowie’s psychotic Englishman kills some people who offered to help Diana). The film takes no half-measures right down to a genuine fear of the upper classes, and a lack of confidence in an evidently corrupt police force. Yet the film’s sense of ambiguity (both in Ed’s character whose core is born out of an existentialism that is suggested by the world that surrounds him, and in the mystery of Diana’s femme-fatale) is what holds everything together. The film’s episodic nature is far more fulfilling than the term might suggest, each segment offering another clue to Ed’s predicament and his world, rather than a narrative cog for the plot to move forward. Landis is far more concerned with Ed’s life than Diana’s survival, that everything that happens is simply a clue to where ‘X’ marks the spot, not in terms of hidden treasure but in Ed himself. For Ed, the ‘gold’ is the answer to his question ‘what’s wrong with my life’, and for Landis, it is the utterly brilliant premise for us to find out. This is a true, underrated, eighties classic.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Click HERE for further information on Into The Night
Who says it’s a Camberwell Carrot? April 4, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1980s, Desert Island Films, Drama, After Hours at Cafe 80s, Film reviews , 1 comment so farWithnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987, UK)
The trials and tribulations of iconic British due Withnail and I.
Dir. Bruce Robinson; screenplay by Bruce Robinson; starring Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths, Ralph Brown
For many, the first introduction to Bruce Robinson’s tale of friendship at the end of the ‘greatest decade in history’, appears not in the form of a video, a curry, and a group of mates, but by the discovery of an intoxicated body lying forlornly on the living room floor. ‘What happened here,’ someone will ask, to hear the reply: ‘He was playing the Withnail and I drinking game.’ Of course, anyone not familiar with the film might not immediately see the significance until reminded, ‘you know, the one where you drink every time Richard E. Grant drowns his sorrows in either alcohol or lighter fuel. Of course, the lighter fuel must be reserved only for terminal cases and those who can’t afford the alcohol.’
Of course many associate the film with student life. The living in squalor – the kitchen with an ever-growing tower of dirty dishes turning last weeks leftover chips and gravy into new life forms, larger with every day, seeking south for winter. It’s easy for your average student to take one look at the greasy stove and congregation of plates and cutlery (that are beginning to smell like a morgue) and decide to ‘sort it out tomorrow’. It’s even easier to start watching ‘Withnail and I’ trying to sort out their own messy sink because at least you get to keep your hands clean and have a few laughs for good measure.
Released in 1987, ‘Withnail and I’ was, during its production, hampered by a producer who couldn’t see the merits of the film, and a director who admitted he didn’t really know what he was doing. Bruce Robinson, by this time, had already accomplished himself as a writer. He’d been nominated for both Oscar and Bafta awards for his screenplay The Killing Fields which looked at the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from the experiences of three journalists. Yet, his real passion was acting, or at least that was until he became disillusioned with whole practice after spending years being rejected and having to live off the state. However, since he couldn’t make it as an actor, he decided he may well profit from telling the story of his trials and tribulations. That’s where the genesis for ‘Withnail and I’ came from. But, Robinson’s script takes more from the essence of the period, and the way he was feeling at the time, than from any one situation. The film doesn’t rely on strong plotting, it relies on characters in a predicament; friendship in a world of confusion, counter-culture, and loss.
To say Robinson didn’t have any success as an actor would be to perpetuate the director’s own modesty. When it comes to this film he sees the merits of his own screenplay but downplays his visual direction, claiming the film doesn’t look pretty. Certainly however, the writer/director focuses his attention on those out-of-work days, when experimentation with drugs was commonplace and alcohol became a secure part of any diet. You can see the autobiographical nature of the film reflected in both Withnail and his counterpart ‘I’ (or Marwood, to which he is never referred to on screen). Withnail’s constant barrage of self-righteous nonsense is clearly the mark of Robinson’s pre-Romeo and Juliet acting struggles (although the character is more specifically based on his drinking buddy and close friend Vivian Mackerrell), while Marwood’s jittery anxiety is a product of rampant rejection and over-indulgence with amphetamines. There’s an unsympathetic tone to the period, and an apprehension for the future. No wonder so many students can cling to the film’s ideals. Withnail and Marwood’s friendship is true but built on fear of failure, poverty-induced paranoia, and a loveless world that pervades not only their relationship but Marwood’s homophobic panic (believed to be inspired by Robinson’s difficulties working under gay director Franco Zeffirelli who allegedly assaulted him), Uncle Monty’s loneliness and inability to garner the attention of another male, gay or otherwise, and the fact there is no romantic sub-plot for either of the two friends.
Indeed, when you strip ‘Withnail and I’ of its linguistic jousting and infinitely quotable lines, you lay bare a heartfelt parable of two friends fighting themselves. Marwood laments poetically, his inner-monologue introducing the viewer to this urban squalor in Camden’s miserable town, while Withnail’s destruction appears self-warranted, as if his only way to live life to the full is finding the most hallucinogenic way to end it. The film’s heartbreaking finale sees the friendship conclude, with Richard E. Grant’s Withnail delivering his finest, and perhaps final, theatrical performance to an uninterested pack of wolves. His injured pride is laid naked on this ‘stage’ as he reads from Hamlet, which is both a poignant finale and bitter indictment of the situation. It carries more power because Grant so brilliantly encapsulates the scene, Robinson not allowing any cinematic extravagances to take anything away from Withnail’s ‘moment’. It is also saddening given Robinson’s later essay for Criterion where he paid tribute to Withnail’s inspiration – Vivian Mackerrell – who battled and later died from throat cancer. As Robinson nostalgically remembers his friend laughing in the face of death, he says ‘that sad, brilliant, bitter face of yours laughing. Good-bye my darling friend. This [the movie] is for you forever. And I know if there’s a pub in heaven, you’ll be in it.’ For everyone else, film fans at least, who only knew the on-screen Withnail, this becomes an unpleasant but deeply effectual denouement for both friendship and Withnail’s exit stage left.
Yet, nothing can take away from the film’s wonderful humour. Nor can it be claimed the film isn’t unabashedly funny. It was voted the third greatest comedy of all time in 2000 and its unsurprising why. Robinson’s script is full of joyous wordage born out pathos, paranoia and bitterness. Infinitely quotable, the film is one of the most oft-imitated and referenced. It sits proudly alongside the likes of This Is Spinal Tap, The Big Lebowski, Some Like It Hot, and just about anything Neil Simon ever wrote.
Over course, it wouldn’t be half as funny if the actors didn’t give career-best performances (interesting in that both Grant and McGann were starring in their first major film). McGann was fired by Robinson during filming but swayed the director back on side when he swore he’d deliver an accent more fitting with what was required. Robinson was so particular with his dialogue (and who wouldn’t be with such a wonderful script) that he insisted on pauses and intonations being in the right places. The director would later praise Grant, who was a teetotaller, on delivering the best performance of a drunk he’d ever seen. Robinson got Grant drunk just once during production so that he could use the experience for the film. It certainly worked. Grant is simply spectacular. He encapsulates Withnail’s bitter, alternate view of the world with as much zest as a million sour citrus fruits. His sudden outrage at something living in the overgrown sink, his fishing technique, and trying to look sober in front of a police officer, all exude the self-righteous bitterness of Withnail. McGann, conversely, hides Marwood’s fears inwardly. His quiet indignation held more closely to home. He of course must come out of his shell in the face of what Monty (Richard Griffiths) calls ‘burglary’, when he’s trapped by the amorous wannabe-thespian while Withnail sleeps off another session of over-drinking. And like McGann, Griffiths and seedy, drug dealer and part-time philosopher Ralph Brown, are all excellent. Even if Robinson doesn’t give himself much credit as a visual director, he certainly gets the most out of his actors.
You’ve also got to give the director plaudits for the use of music in the film. The low-budget origins might well show up in the original music composed for the movie by David Dundas and Rick Wentworth, but there’s a certain charm to it that becomes unique to the film. The opening slow-tracking shot of Marwood as he laments, King Curtis’ live version of A Whiter Shade of Pale playing over the scene, is inspired but even more melancholic given the singer was killed moments after the performance. Also, the film is one of few who were allowed to use original music recorded by The Beatles (largely due to George Harrison being one of the film’s producers). Indeed, notoriety must also be shared with Jimmy Hendrix’s songs, as the film’s soundtrack became unavailable to buy after the late-musician’s family did not want his music associated with drink or drug use. However, the songs remain in the film with All Along The Watchtower brilliantly used alongside shots of buildings being demolished.
It all adds up to a wonderfully entertaining movie that has lost none of its humour or effect in the twenty years since its release. Indeed, its iconic influence on the cult following who hold it so dear might well have grown stronger. Unsurprising, since it represents one of the last quintessentially British movies to come out of the country’s independent cinema before American big-business and the rampant multiplex-building of the late 1980s changed the face of the U.K film industry forever. Perhaps the film’s greatest attribute is the pervading sense of an unsure future, taking nothing for granted. But that’s where it’s wrong. Robinson, Grant, McGann and co. left us one thing we know we can control: the rewind button. And the great thing is: you can always go back to the beginning and watch the whole thing all over again, if you still don’t know what you want to do tomorrow.
Rating: 5 our of 5