The most chillingly relevant fiction feature of the year to date remains April release Civil War. It imagined the US in an all-too-credible near future of violent collapse between contested Federal leadership, secessionist regions, and a chaotic tangle of conflicting military, police, religio-cult, and terrorist-extremist forces. Some nitpickers complained the film sidestepped detailing a backstory that pinned specific political blame on one party or another. But then the whole point was to show that such an end result would be catastrophic for everybody—no one would “win” in the event of democracy’s demise, unless you count individual psychotics now free to run amuck for lack of any general social order. Even the orchestrators of an authoritarian coup won’t be happy when they’re basically forced to retreat into bunkers, having turned most of a broken nation against them.
Let’s hope the most chillingly relevant nonfiction feature of the year does not turn out to be War Game, which opens this Fri/30 at SF’s Roxie and the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin. But one fears it might well be. SF-based Jesse Moss (The Overnighters) and Emmy winner Tony Gerber’s (Jane) documentary records a “secret national security exercise” staged on Jan. 6, 2023 in locations close to the US Capitol. It was an unscripted simulation of an attempted coup—like the real-life one that got no further than a thwarted insurrection at that Capitol exactly two years earlier—that might follow this November’s Presidential election.
The role-play specifics are fictionalized, including the POTUS who wins a second term (albeit by a slim margin) and the opponent who not only refuses to accept defeat, but actively stirs resistance nationwide, including among political leaders, and military and law enforcement personnel nationwide. These characters aren’t played by professional actors, but by volunteers who really do operate in related public-service sectors. Ergo their “improvisations” during a speculative six-hour window “to avert a civil war”—as they react to increasingly alarming news from the “game’s” architects—very much reflect decisions that might be made if this scenario were to come true.
Protestors again gather outside the Capitol, hoping to stop Congress’ certification of election results; factions within various armed forces turn out to be dangerously loyal to an invented “Order of Columbus” extremist group. Individual states governors’ plead for mobilization of troops to quell citizen unrest, while others’ (disturbingly) do not. Should the Insurrection Act be invoked? Can a coup be avoided, and the nation’s binding institutions preserved?
Of course it’s all just make-believe, even if it comes complete with fake TV news reports and other very convincing illusions. But as the directors cut back to the events of 1/6/21, we grasp this is preparation for a “worst case scenario” that already came very close to happening. And since then, there’s been an additional four years of social media disinformation, much of it specifically targeting both active military personnel and veterans. (One in five Jan. 6th defendants to date fit that description.) Intelligence experts tell us “the alarms are flashing red” in terms of such well-trained, radicalized individuals and organized groups readying themselves for armed revolt. Even the tamest web-surfer can agree that, as one participant here puts it, ““Eroding confidence in democracy [has been] successful.”
The dramatics enacted here by an array of officials from the last five administration aren’t treated as a joke, and don’t feel like one. (The whole exercise was devised by Vet Voice, a non-partisan organization hoping to stem the tide of far-right brainwashing many of its members have witnessed in their own enlisted ranks.) War Game isn’t the most cinematically exciting movie you’ll see this year, and sometimes the attempts to package it as a mock-real-time “thriller” can be heavy-handed. But it’s compelling to see how decision makers might react in an emergency that develops faster and further than it did last time, with so many scary variables in play. It won’t be long before we find out if this simulation proves a rehearsal for a play that just might bring the curtain down on the “great American experiment.”
Other new films and events of interest:
Great Absence
Kei Chika-ura’s second feature is initially reminiscent of another film by a Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda’s 2008 Still Walking (still my favorite of his), in that it also revolves around an adult offspring’s polite but reluctant reunion with a now elderly, always difficult father who has not mellowed with age. 40-ish actor Takashi (Mirai Moriyama) hasn’t seen his father, retired professor Yohi (Tatsuya Fuji, who nearly a half-century ago starred in Oshima’s notorious In the Realm of the Senses), in 25 years.
The root of that estrangement is gradually revealed, as our protagonist pursues another mystery—the whereabouts of his surviving parent’s second wife Naomi (Hideko Hara). She may be hospitalized, have committed suicide, or simply left him. Even Yohi can’t be sure, as he is now weaving in and out of senile dementia, sometimes thinking the rest home he lives in is a prison, or that he is no longer even in Japan. The reality of these situations gets teased out over a methodically paced two and a half hours whose low-key intricacy is rewarding, but requires close attention. Great Absence also opens at the Roxie this Fri/30.
Cockfighter
Contrastingly low-down and raucous, although in a ramblingly anecdotal way, is this 1974 feature from Monte Hellman, a Roger Corman protege who acquired critical stature, but never had the commercial breakthrough that might have stabilized his career. Cockfighter was no exception—in fact Corman said it was the only film he produced in the Me Decade that lost money, despite a degree of the required sex and violence. Nonetheless, it was close to the last time Hellman had real creative control, and it fully reflects his idiosyncratic sensibility.
The great Warren Oates plays Frank, a mute (by choice—he eventually speaks a single line of dialogue) amiable loner who travels the South participating in cockfights. Though you might think the cast of characters he encounters were just colorful local hires, they’re actually played by a rollcall of already- or soon-to-be-familiar faces including Harry Dean Stanton, Richard B. Schull, Troy Donahue, Millie Perkins, Ed Begley Jr., and Steve Railsback. There’s even a small role for Charles Willeford, who wrote the original pulp novel.
Purportedly Hellman saw that paperback tome on a drugstore rack and was immediately convinced the title alone guaranteed a hit. How wrong can you be? Even the substantial drive-in audience for yee-haw rural action comedies back then drew the line at Cockfighter, whose subject repelled too many viewers—in fact due to animal cruelty laws, the movie still hasn’t been seen in the UK, and probably never will be. Corman re-released it under several less off-putting monickers, to no avail.
Still, if you can stomach the poultry carnage and bleak gender dynamics (Frank’s voiceover-narration sendoff to discarded girlfriend Laurie Bird is particularly nasty), it’s a singular slice of vintage Americana. Cult film authority Kier-la Janisse just published a book about it, and she will attend Movies for Maniacs’ 50th anniversary screening at the 4-Star this Fri/30 at 7 pm to sign copies.
4 Films by Powell & Pressburger
Going from the gritty to the baroque, another celluloid flashback at the 4-Star throws the spotlight on an equally idiosyncratic British filmmaking team who—like Hellman—were most appreciated in retrospect. The subjects of a Martin Scorsese-produced documentary (Made in England, which we reviewed here) that recently played local theaters, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger together created films of unusual conceptual ambition and high style for UK cinema from 1939 onward, until commercial failures dissolved their partnership in the late 1950s. They remain best known for phantasmagorical ballet romance The Red Shoes, but this series offers four other memorable flowerings of a ripe (some would say occasionally overripe) visual imagination.
It starts Sun/1-Mon/2 with 1947’s Black Narcissus, the vivid exploration of repressed eroticism in a nunnery (!) that was drawn from a story by Rumer Godden—one of the last century’s great, semi-forgotten popular novelists. Sept. 8-9 brings 1951’s The Tales of Hoffman, a fantastical visualization of Offenbach’s opera that probably reps the duo’s farthest leap in realizing an eye-poppingly colorful theatrical vision on film. After they went their separate ways, Powell alone made the 1960 proto-slasher thriller Peeping Tom (playing Sept. 15-16), which came out just before Hitchcock’s similarly themed Psycho—but unlike it, was universally reviled, only to be championed by Scorsese and others much later.
Last up on Sept. 22-23 is my own favorite P&P joint, 1949’s The Small Back Room, an atypically modest, B&W drama that nonetheless has great power, and surprise flights of noirish surrealism. David Farrar gives a beautiful performance as a tormented weapons expert during WW2 who, like The Hurt Locker’s protagonists, has the nerve-wracking task of defusing enemy bombs. Info on the whole series is here.
