Beyond the Multiplex

What a week! A subtle, profound film that's likely to get an Oscar nod, a deep chat with Mr. Madonna -- and more.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, John Cusack, Independent Film, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

Dec. 6, 2007 |

I know I say this nearly every week, but: What a week! Just when I think I'm going to sip some eggnog by the flaming hearth, sharpen my 10-best list for the year, and break out the stash of reissued '70s Euro-horror flicks, along come some more new, or semi-new, or gently pre-owned movies I can't avoid. Guy Ritchie was in town last week to talk about his intriguingly nutso crime film "Revolver," which is finally getting a United States release two years after opening in Britain. If you think I was going to resist that you've got the wrong lemming-like entertainment reporter.

This week also brings us a brief, bicoastal Oscar-qualifying run for "The Band's Visit," a gentle, likable and subtly profound film about an Egyptian police band lost in the Israeli desert that pretty much the entire world expects to be among the Academy's foreign-film nominees. John Cusack may also be in line for a statuette for his lumbering performance as a bereaved and bewildered dad in "Grace Is Gone," even if the picture has the constricted airways of a formula weeper made for the Hallmark Movie Channel. In the documentary world, there's something of a controversy brewing over "Billy the Kid," a pseudo-vérité portrait of an awkward small-town adolescent. But given how compelling the movie is, who cares? Let's get right to it.

"Revolver": What if Deepak Chopra did a remake of "Reservoir Dogs"?
Guy Ritchie demurred when I told him that "Revolver" was one of the strangest films I've ever seen, but I wasn't blowing smoke up his bum (as he might say) and I didn't exactly mean that as either praise or criticism. The film begins as if it's going to be a fast-paced, hard-boiled noir thriller in the vein of Ritchie's "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels." Dressed like Billy Jack, or like a 1970s porn star hoping to go straight (which may come to the same thing), Ritchie pal Jason Statham plays Jake Green, an English thug just out of prison with a vendetta against Macha, a lizard-like casino lord played, with ample wit and venom, by Ray Liotta.

Throw in a deadly blood disease, a couple of mysterious bystanders (Vincent Pastore of "The Sopranos" and André Benjamin of the hip-hop group Outkast) who keep saving Jake from Macha and then blackmailing him, a series of stylish heists, a fractured, "Memento"-style puzzle and a deliberately unspecific setting that suggests "The Matrix," and it all sounds like a dandy entertainment, right? Well, OK, sure. But the $12 bills, the lack of license plates, and all the murky chess games and con games are only the beginning of the weirdness, frankly. And then a whole bunch of shrinks appear, in inset boxes against the closing credits, to tell you what Jake's struggle with Macha and the unseen Mr. Gold (also referred to as Mr. I-run-this-game, Mr. Ambiguity, Mr. Mystery and "the man behind every crime ever committed") is all about. Yep: Deepak Chopra shows up at the end to explain the movie. I shit you not.

If you're a spoiler fascist, I'm totally sorry but you'd better go someplace else and read about some other movie, because Ritchie hardly talks about this movie except in psychological or philosophical terms. He's made a film about the self's struggle with the ego (unless it's the other way around) wrapped only in the thinnest thriller disguise. It's likely to bewilder almost everyone who sees it, but frankly you've got to see it to believe it, and that's a recommendation of a certain kind. In person, the 39-year-old Ritchie is bluff and cheerful, even at the moments where he cut my questions short to breeze through his answers more quickly.

The famous person to whom he is married only came up when he turned to his assistant to ask "Has the wife e-mailed back?" Which left me thinking about the implausible vision of Madonna at the kitchen table, surfing the Web. I could have asked him whether the half-baked Joseph Campbell-esque psychological voyage-narrative of "Revolver" derived to some degree from conversations with his spouse (and my editor is sad that I didn't). But, you know, read the interview. It's a dumb question. (Listen to a podcast of the interview here.)

I gather "Revolver" got a pretty mixed response in Britain.

It wasn't mixed at all. They pretty much hated it. It's already been received in a more positive light here than in the U.K., which surprised me. I would have thought it was the other way around.

I don't know. I have to say that the psychological exploration aspect of this movie doesn't seem very English.

To be fair to them, they walked in blind. They thought they were going in to buy apples and they bought oranges. Or bitter lemons. You have to engage yourself with this movie, and if you don't engage yourself you'll be disappointed. They thought they were in for "Snatch." They wanted to laugh, they wanted entertainment and they wanted fast, snappy dialogue. The primary drive behind this film is intellectual, and until you can get over that aspect, it can be a miserable experience, as I've been told.

Did you ever think you'd be sitting here telling someone that you made a film that was primarily intellectual? That's not what your career has suggested, up to this point.

[Laughter.] No. I've tried to make everything I've done clever. But it wasn't primary. It's intellectual and it's not intellectual, right? Sometimes intellectual people get pissed off with it, because they don't understand it. Your intellect can only take you so far, and your instincts need to take you the rest of the way. I'm suggesting that your intellect is actually your greatest enemy. It's your greatest friend and your greatest enemy.

I suppose that's really what the movie's about. The ego, the false self, whatever it is that you want to call it, is essentially an agency that matches your ability -- whatever your blessing is, it marries it with its own form of negativity. So great people have great big egos, but the battle they're actually playing is with themselves and with no one else. One of the aspects of the mind is to make you think you're playing other people and not yourself, and I think it's exactly the other way around.

Next page: "We're all fighting the same battle"