reaking the
Waves is a prime example of a significant
and somewhat frustrating trend in non-mainstream filmmaking: It engages
the eye, the mind, the soul -- raising fresh hope about what movies can
be and do for us -- and then, seemingly unaware or, worse, indifferent to
having aroused us, it turns away in self-absorption.
The good news is that more than half of Danish director Lars von Trier's tale of a simple young Scottish woman coping with very complex challenges is cause for celebration. The disappointment is that the genuinely moving story and promising filmic method for telling it are nearly wrung dry by von Trier's self-indulgence.
Trapped
within Breaking the Waves' two-and-a-half-hours-plus, navel-contemplating
corpus, is a potentially superb 90 or 95-minute work of art. It's a shame
that both that film and the audiences for the film-as-is are victimized
by the director's apparent inability to edit and shape his vision, know
when enough is enough of a very good thing and when, simply, to stop.
None of which frustrations is reason enough for a passionate moviegoer to avoid it.
The central character of Bess is played by Emily Watson, a newcomer to film who received a Best Actress nomination for her performance (and who bears a striking resemblance to the young Sarah Miles). If the lovely, whimsical Bess had more conventionally efficient mental capacities, her story would no doubt be about her fleeing her small hometown in northern Scotland, which is bound to the rocky shore by gray mists and the dourest possible brand of fundamental Calvinism. But Bess is simple. Though not severely retarded or easily diagnosed with a clinical disorder, she is special. And so her story is not one of escape or overt rebellion but of humbly trying to understand the world in which she finds herself and her modest sense of herself in it. She marries an outsider named Jan (Stellan Skarsgard) who works on one of the North Sea oil rigs. The former wastrel loves her for her innocence and her trust, and Bess loves him for giving her the gift of love. When Jan is severely injured on the job, Bess' brief and tenuous blossoming seems doomed. We watch her faith in God, in love, and in her already self-effacing sense of her own resources struggle with a valiant, confused spirit against a sea of troubles.
Von Trier's pace is slow, and at first we are grateful for it -- the film takes the time that high-concept Hollywood trash never dares for interesting development of character and the telling nuance of narrative detail. Eventually, however, we notice that the investment of our close attention is getting less and less return; scenes sag, situations repeat. Without any dramatic catharsis, or even layering of the central meditation (the concurrent simplicity and harsh necessities of loving), we feel betrayed -- for the character of Bessie, and, eventually, for ourselves. Bessie's story is tough enough for her to live and us to think and feel about; it doesn't deserve to be made tedious. As Breaking the Waves becomes more and more self-regarding, it loses its regard for its subject -- and the audience. We want to offer von Trier first our thanks and then a swift kick into the nearest Film Editing 101 class.
This disconnect between managing to raise viewer expectations and actually satisfying them is what Waves has so notably in common with other promising independent efforts -- and even some big-budget industry products like Anthony Minghella's The English Patient -- among the recent crop of films.
This trend may have, however, a larger, contextual silver lining. The relatively new commercial success of independent films is encouraging; there's a slight but perceptible sea change in the market. At least some viewers are hungry for movies that are about something. Hollywood's ceaseless sausage-crank of car wrecks, gunfire, special effects, and dispirited sex isn't going to stop anytime soon. But there's a creeping numbness being monitored up and down the demographic appendages -- out there among the millions of Americans sitting in the dark. Subversive whispers are being heard -- and even when not philosophically articulated, they sound something like this: "Gee, if movies are our most popular art form at the end of the 20th century and have become a central aspect of the human experience, perhaps they could occasionally actually have Something To Do With My Life?"
The healthy insurgence, particularly from Europe, of art-house filmmaking in the 1950s was like a blast of cold, disturbing, but invigorating air through the hothouse conformity of Hollywood's end-of-the-big-studios fare. (Surprising as it seemed to some at the time, not everyone could define his moral center through close comparison with the latest Jane Wyman melodrama.)
Well, von Trier may not be our Ingmar Bergman for the millennium, but he and Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade) and Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies) and other risk-taking film artists are much-needed arrivals on the scene. What these films have in common is the promising potential of filmmaking driven by strong, creative directors. They have something to say about how we live; they may want to sell us but, at least as much, they want to move us. Anthony Minghella's screen adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient is one of the most beautiful cinematic experiences in some time, visually lush, with a limpid fluidity of expression. But the central characters are so hollow that, except for our generalized human sympathy at their final plight, we barely care enough to invest the more than three hours it takes to see them off into eternity. The story's two romantic leads are glamorous (and who more glamorous than Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas to portray them?), but Karl, the mildly retarded character at the center of Sling Blade, and Bess, the simple, and similarly sorely tried, girl in Waves are far more compelling human beings.
These are not the usual, superficial disease-of-the-season Hollywood films. Even David Helfgott, as portrayed in Shine -- challenged with clinical mental illness exacerbated by his family upbringing -- moves us as much by what he makes us realize about our own lives as by his own situation. In their extremes, these characters come close to us, they force us to feel, and they do so not manipulatively, but by giving us far more to consider about our own lives than the beautiful, hollow people set against the gorgeous landscapes of The English Patient. Karl and Bess embody the conflict between good and evil in the human condition and the maddening infrequency with which we seem able to apply our hard-won lessons about either.
If the expanded menu of films that connect with the human condition by delighting, informing, or stirring us comes just in time for our starved collective oversoul, it's the pacing that, in some cases, is hard to take.
Sling Blade tells us from its beginning exactly where we're headed and then takes too long to get there. Breaking the Waves takes even longer and is even more self-conscious about it. Shine, though more tightly constructed, loses force through its confused and confusing, pathos-drenched cheerleading. The English Patient is cinematically superb; it just forgets to make a compelling case for us to care about the couple at the center of its gilded story.
But each of these films -- from the lowest-budget and most adventurous to the most chic and most commercial -- gives moviegoers cause for at least cautious rejoicing. (As does the fact that they have appeared alongside Fargo, Secret & Lies, and other projects that have not only garnered surprising box-office returns but multiple Academy Award nominations as well, helping confound the film industry's obsessive definitions of making money and making art.)
Breaking the Waves is daring, passionate cinema. Whatever its failings, at least they do not include being another $150 million industry behemoth, cobbled together from last year's market demographics and screenplays by a committee of suits, bearing no trace of humanity or artistic merit. Like Sling Blade and, in a different degree but related quality, The English Patient, Breaking the Waves gives us enough that it makes us want more. Or less. Or somehow different. It bends and pushes and heightens our expectations. It may unsettle us, or make us impatient or even angry.
But that -- in our day-to-day living and in our wildest dreams -- is what going to the movies can be all about.