A Man of Conscience
MEN WITH
GUNS
A compelling cinema artist goes south.
With Federico Luppi, Damián Delgado, Mandy Patinkin
Written and directed by John Sayles
DESPITE THE PRIVILEGE of his profession and the wealth that goes with it, Dr. Humberto Fuentes is a man of conscience. He wants to do more than treat boils on the backsides of his overweight, middle-aged Capital City patients. He wants to leave a legacy.
And so he creates a program to teach young people to work as medics in the poor remote Indian villages of his Spanish-speaking country, which the outside world often sees, through inflammatory newspaper accounts, as a place where life and death are negotiated amidst a thicket of automatic weapons.
But something goes wrong. One day, in the city, he sees a medical student of his selling prescription drugs on the street when he'd thought the young man was working in the villages. So the vigorous, silver-haired Dr. Fuentes gets into his land rover and begins a journey that will take him--for the first time in his life--into his country's mountains and jungles, where men with guns call themselves soldiers and reign like thieves and terrorists over the poor, starving, uneducated villagers.
Spoken in Spanish, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna, Men with Guns is the sort of movie you'd expect from a politically motivated Central American filmmaker. But the writer/director here is John Sayles, a white guy from Schenectady who's one of America's most compelling and humane cinema artists. First in Lone Star, and now in Men with Guns, Sayles seems to have entered a period of rich creativity, and to have focused some of his attention on Spanish culture in the Americas. His films are worth anticipating, and you can only imagine how much more glorious they'll be as he continues to mature.
Men with Guns unfolds through the eyes of a well-meaning innocent who can't understand the savage world that's revealed to him as he penetrates his country's heart of darkness. Why would an army of well-trained young medics betray his trust and turn to terror? Why do soldiers rape women and turn children into orphans? Why didn't he know any of this? And what will happen to the legacy of goodness he so desperately wants to leave when he dies?
Along the way, he meets a savvy Indian boy, a priest who's lost his faith, an armed-and-edgy young deserter from the army, and a few dozen more desperate Indian villagers, who beg him for medicine to cure a woman gone silent after a rape, or who can't understand that their children are not really "sick" (it's only malnutrition because breast milk can't sustain them any longer).
The characters talk about violence a lot, but Sayles keeps it to a minimum. He only permits us to see one or two raids by Army thugs in grainy black and white, and one character's initiation into manhood as he plunges a knife into the chest of a half-dead child. You might expect a story like this to have a shocking climax. Instead, Sayles brings Men with Guns to a perfect little epiphany, which befits his deliberate, haunting, relentless intensity.
Sayles films Men with Guns in the muted hues of a sunset, even though much of it takes place on verdant sunny days. It's one of the most persistently sad movies I've seen in a long while, yet Sayles never makes it tragic, didactic or bitter. He simply shows us what takes place and invites us to wonder how it can be possible. (The most commonly spoken word in the movie, especially from Dr. Fuentes, is "why.") The dialogue is possibly the best Sayles has written: Literate as always (he's also a novelist), yet with an almost soothing simplicity to it.
The only vaguely jarring element in the movie is a pair of happy-cum-ugly American tourists--the husband played by a unusually sedate Mandy Patinkin--who meander through the countryside with backpacks and patronizing curiosity. I'm not sure what they add to the drama besides the obvious dig at the complacency of capitalists toward the underdeveloped world. But we only see them twice, and the rest of Men with Guns is intimate and profound--a slice of life, a novel on film, and a metaphor for all the quiet, inexplicable madness of the world.
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Burnt by the Sun
SUNSHINE
STATE
Politics overpower people in a John Sayles drama.
With Edie Falco, Angela Bassett, Timothy Hutton, Jane Alexander,
Ralph Waite
Written and directed by John Sayles
TWO CULTURES SHARE SPACE on Plantation Island, a burgeoning resort town off the coast of northern Florida, and in Sunshine State, writer/director John Sayles introduces us to them with two scenes that establish an intriguing thesis and antithesis for the dialectic that follows.
First we see Terrell (Alexander Lewis), a morose 13-year-old black boy who watches silently as a local icon he’s just set on fire burns in the quiet night. You can tell he’s not happy with what he’s done, and yet his expression conveys the vexing sensation that he still felt compelled to do it.
And then, in the daylight, we meet Murray Silver (Alan King), a rich white developer playing golf with his friends and opining like a Greek chorus about how People Like Him brought prosperity - "nature on a leash," he calls it - to an landscape where once there was nothing but weeds and decay. In fact, he tells his companions, who even cares about land? "Farmers care," one replies, weakly. And then Murray putts.
And so Sayles neatly sets the stage for his socio-political drama. A novelist before he turned to the cinema, Sayles (Lone Star, Men with Guns) has always been a rewardingly literary filmmaker, although in Sunshine State he creates a work that feels uncomfortably more like a novel than a movie. Sayles is too good for any of his work not to have copious pleasures. But Sunshine State too often goes down like chunky metaphor soup with a side of irony, and he contrives his myriad characters from familiar cloth rather than from the air they breathe.
The result is an incisive dramatist turned sociologist, economist and political scientist - the artistic equivalent of fooling with Mother Nature. You can certainly admire his intent, but Sunshine State, which explores the juggernaut of capitalism and the people drowned by its wake, simply doesn’t have the vivacity of his challenging other work.
We meet the inhabitants of the island just as a development company has landed a team of suits, flacks and money men to take measurements - and to seduce all the necessary politicians and landowners before resorting to eminent domain. Their goal: Develop a rocky beach front into resort homes and strip malls, thus tearing down or threatening the security of homes and businesses that have stood for generations.
This all means opportunity for Marly (Edie Falco), a bright, sardonic, middle-aged white woman who runs the Sea-Vue Motel, which she inherited from her retired working-class father (Ralph Waite) - the movie’s Official Racist (redeemed, of course) who’s blind from diabetes - and her college-educated mother (Jane Alexander), the impresario of the local theater company.
Marly is divorced from a ne’er-do-well local ex-rock star wannabe, she’s sleeping with a hunky ne’er-do-well local golf pro wannabe, and she’s attracted to a nice architect (Timothy Hutton) on the invading development team, which arrives during the town’s demi-festive Buccaneer Days, a "new tradition" (second annual) started by the fluttering wife (Mary Steenburgen) of a suicidal councilman (Gordon Clapp) with gambling debts.
The story of the town’s black residents revolves around Desiree (Angela Bassett), who’s come from Boston to visit her estranged mother (Mary Alice) for the first time in its-unclear-how-long. Her new husband (James McDaniel) is an anesthesiologist, her ex-boyfriend (he got her pregnant in high school) is an ex-football star in liege (as a token) with the white developers, and an old family friend, Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), is leading the fight against a development plan that once again leaves black residents outside the circle of power and profit.
At the heart of Sunshine State is a story of "progress" that’s happening all across the United States of Wal-Mart, although it becomes even more resonant when set in a place we often think of as a vacation and retirement mecca, but which is, in fact, a Southern state with an embarrassing record on civil rights. The developers in Sunshine State want to buy all the land of Lincoln Beach, a community founded in 1934 by segregated blacks who were forbidden to swim or own land anywhere else. There’s full integration now on the island and, at least in Sayles’ world, nary a hint of racism - except, of course, that white people own all the new development.
This conflict becomes the winnowing polemic of Sunshine State, although Sayles tries to weave it naturally into his languid, Faulknerian character drama. Unlike Robert Altman, the mordant maestro of panoplies like this, Sayles doesn’t assault you or his characters with his visual style. His movies have a warming documentary look and feel, with simple camera setups and virtually no soundtrack music. But the speechifying script of Sunshine State returns too often to its ideological project, and there’s too much tragic expository back story that forces depth upon the characters. So Sayles’ very good actors, with few exceptions - notably Hutton, McDaniel, and, with his big, expressive, watery eyes, Bill Cobbs - end up stilted by their edifying stereotypes.
The sum of it all is a message movie with no bite that reduces a modern complexity to a kind of literary melancholy that resolves itself with one final ironic contrivance. Nor does Sayles treat all of his characters as fairly as, say, Tim Robbins does in Dead Man Walking. Sunshine State is a slight detour from its creator’s mature recent work, and an example of how art and politics don’t mix - at least, not this time in the cinema of John Sayles.