Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (My Neighbor Totoro)

My Neighbor Totoro (1988), the fourth feature film by Hayao Miyazaki, drops the rote fantasy structure of the director’s previous two movies while foregrounding his distinctive brand of gentle surrealism.  Interestingly, the film’s plot doesn’t revolve around conflict, and there are no attempts to turn any of the characters into heroes or villains.  Though Miyazaki’s first feature length work was the excellent, action-packed Castle of Cagliostro (1979), it seemed that he had mostly lost interest in the adventure genre by the time he made Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), where the adventure movie plots seemed to exist mostly because the director needed some sort of recognizable frame to support his gorgeous animation.   Totoro eschews the conventional plotting of Miyazaki’s early work in favor of an immersive, relaxed pacing that evokes the wonder and confusion of childhood in a way that very few family films even attempt.

Totoro’s plot is very simple.  A father and his two daughters move into a new countryside home in order to be closer to the hospital where the girls’ mother is recovering from an (unspecified) illness.  While playing outside one day, the younger girl, Mei, wanders into the forest and winds up on top of a large, bear-like creature.  When Mei asks the creature what its name is, it lets out a series of roars that she interprets as “Totoro.”  Eventually Totoro makes himself known to Mei’s older sister, Satsuki, and he winds up helping the girls through some potentially scary moments in their lives.

And that’s about it.  There are none of the expected scenes of adults telling the girls to stop making up stories, and no scenes where angry townspeople misunderstand Totoro and try to harm him.  There are no moments that seem designed to amp up the melodrama or manipulate the viewer into having a heightened emotional response.  Though Totoro is aimed more directly at children than any of Miyazaki’s previous work, it seems to trust the intelligence of the audience more than those earlier films did.  Aside from an annoyingly saccharine ballad that plays over the opening and closing credits, there is nothing in Totoro that feels like a generic example of filmmaking for kids.

By keeping overt plot mostly out of the way, Miyazaki ensures that there is plenty of room for his finely honed sense of charm to dominate the proceedings.  Satsuki and Mei are spirited and likeable in the way that real-life children often are, and their sisterly bond seems genuine precisely because it is so understated and well-observed.  Totoro’s appearances are fairly sparse, but Miyazaki makes them count; his most memorable scene occurs at a bus stop during a rainstorm, where he is delighted to share the girls’ umbrella.  The furry creature’s friends, such as a many-legged half-cat/half-bus, are imaginatively conceived and impressively realized.  But the oddball, fantastical touches share equal screentime with enjoyably quirky characters like the neighbor boy who is so shy around girls that he becomes speechless when he is in their company.

Perhaps My Neighbor Totoro is a bit too slight to be considered a truly great film.  At times the film’s aimless plotting and lighthearted tone make it feel almost too gentle to be really special.  Miyazaki could perhaps be accused of soft-pedaling the mother’s illness; nothing has been done in the animation of the character to even make her look sick, and it basically just turns out in the end that she isn’t doing so badly.  Then again, the point of Totoro is not to show a family in a dramatic, life-and-death situation, but to show how an imaginary friend/teddy bear/Totoro can help kids deal with everyday stresses.  Miyazaki’s fourth film may be a relatively minor work in the grand scheme of things, but by turning away from traditional good-and-evil action and focusing on small charming details, the great animator has made a major breakthrough in his own aesthetic and has finally fully honored his unique voice.

UP NEXT  Kiki's Delivery Service

The Masterpiece Test: Edvard Munch

NOTE:  I have been dissatisfied with the quality of the last several Masterpiece Tests.  My feeling is that the rigid structure of this series of posts – breaking the films down into the seven different categories (beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality) proposed in Paul Schrader’s “Canon Fodder” essay, one by one – is to blame.  As a result, I’m changing the format of the Masterpiece Test posts.  I’ll still attempt to assess the films based on the seven aforementioned criteria, which will hopefully be evident even if some of those factors aren’t literally mentioned by name.  Ideally, this will eliminate the awkward repetition of points that demonstrate more than one criterion, and make for a smoother read overall.

Year of Release  1974

Country  Sweden/Norway

Length  174 min.

Director  Peter Watkins

Screenwriter  Peter Watkins (in collaboration with the cast)

Cinematographer  Odd Geir Saether

Editor  Peter Watkins

Sound  Kenneth Storm-Hansen, Bjorn Harald Hansen

Costume Designer  Ada Skolmen

Makeup  Karin Saether

Cast  Geir Westby, Gros Fraas, Kare Stormark, Alf Kare Strindberg, narration by Peter Watkins

The biopic is at once one of the most popular genres of film (with awards-giving bodies, if not necessarily with critics or audiences) and one of the most problematic.  People’s lives aren’t stories, but many filmmakers have attempted to force the shapeless trajectory of their subjects’ lives into the square hole of three-act narratives.  The sheer machinations of plot necessarily smooth out the contradictions that make many “great men” fascinating in the first place, while often vastly simplifying (or virtually omitting) the subject’s relationship to his society, his contemporaries, and his family.  Landmark events and personal relationships are given too much or too little weight, leaving many of these movies feeling awkwardly paced, manipulative, and inauthentic.  Conventional narrative is simply not suited to capturing the lives of famous or important people, but only a handful of filmmakers have come up with new methods for delivering biographical material.

For most of his career, British filmmaker Peter Watkins has been concerned with ways of dismantling what he refers to as the “monoform” (“the internal language-form used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages”).  Along with Kevin Brownlow (director of 1965’s It Happened Here, a documentary-styled piece of speculative fiction that imagined what Britain would look like if the Nazis had won WWII) Watkins pioneered a type of docu-drama that blurred the line between documentary and fiction.  Watkins’ breakthrough was The War Game (1965), a disturbingly plausible look at what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped in England.  As Watkins’ career has gone on, he has moved increasingly further away from such manipulative monoform devices as emotion-stoking background music, rapid montage editing, and three-act narrative structure.

Edvard Munch (1974) is simultaneously Watkins’ first biopic and his first major break with the monoform.  While previous Watkins works like The War Game and Punishment Park (1971) draw their power from their focused outrage, there is no denying that much of Watkins’ early work is didactic and stubbornly humorless to a fault.  The grim tone of Privilege (1967) is almost laughably out of proportion to its pop music milieu, while The Gladiators (1969) is single-minded to the point of being banal.  The far more dynamic Munch is a watchable median between Watkins’ early didactic work and his later, more difficult material, which is often easier to respect than it is to watch.  (In fairness, I’m basing this assessment entirely on 2000’s La commune, a 6-hour exploration of a little-known piece of French history, but 1987’s The Journey, a 14-hour look at various civilization’s reactions to nuclear technology, hardly sounds inviting).  Edvard Munch is a radical and ethically sound biopic, but its avant-garde qualities serve to make the experience more gripping rather than to shut the audience out.

Where many biopics tend to suggest that the key to understanding their subjects’ extraordinary lives can be found in a single monolithic event or a significant relationship with another person, Edvard Munch instead overwhelms the viewer with contextual information that simultaneously makes the titular artist’s work easier to understand while allowing the man himself to maintain a dignified air of mystery.  Watkins’ narration occasionally pops in to make the viewer aware of the passage of time, and to flatly announce certain historical details (ranging from child labor statistics to developments in the art world to the birth of Hitler) that may or may not have any direct relevance to Munch’s life.  The film does include the expected staging of various important events from Munch’s life, but these are often broken up by scenes that either don’t include Munch or that feature him so far in the background that lead actor Geir Westby essentially becomes an extra.  Munch also has fairly little dialogue in the film, as if to suggest that he might simply have been a product of his times.  It seems equally likely that the great artist’s work could have been inspired by his tumultuous home life, his frustrations with women, his repressed upbringing, the influence of his socially progressive bohemian friends, the work of other artists, or the attacks of art critics, each with varying degrees of consciousness or unconsciousness.  Compare this lifelike complexity with the simplistic Oedipal urges that fuel the protagonists of Oliver Stone’s W (2008) or Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), two recent examples of the monoform biopic.

It is unlikely that any two viewers would come away with the same interpretation of Edvard Munch, or even that an individual would have the same experience with it on multiple viewings.  Like contemporaries such as the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker, Watkins seems less concerned with imposing his own interpretation on the material than in getting at a greater but harder to define collective truth.  Watkins employs several stylistic techniques in Edvard Munch that are literally designed to prevent the film from succumbing to any one explanation.  He collaborated on much of the dialogue with the cast of non-professional actors, who, when they weren’t reciting things that there real-life counterparts said verbatim, were invited to write or improvise their scenes.  Watkins also used an innovative and dynamic editing technique that involved splicing bits of random footage, with no apparent relation to the dialogue or narration that it accompanies, at a number of points throughout the film, as if to suggest memories or thoughts that might be unconsciously influencing Munch’s developing artistic direction.

Of course it is essential for any film about a visual artist to possess a strong visual style, and Edvard Munch succeeds fully in this regard.  Odd Geir Saether’s cinematography initially seems a bit flat and grainy, like the work of a style-less craftsman doing functional work with subpar film stock.  But as the film goes on, it becomes clear that he has found the perfect middle ground between documentary plainness and painterly expressiveness.  In the sequences where characters are directly addressing the camera, they look equally like talking heads in a documentary and subjects of a Munch painting, fully justifying the potentially awkward intrusion of contemporary documentary techniques in this period piece.  The film also has a wonderfully tactile feel for the actual act of painting; the scenes where Munch scrapes away details from his in-progress works are perhaps the most riveting sequences of artistic creation outside of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956).  Saether’s camera work brilliantly finds the middle ground between Munch’s stylish eccentricities and the plain reality of everyday Scandanavia.  At one point in the film, an art critic sites the frequent use of red skies in Munch’s canvasses as an example of his “insanity,” an opinion that the film quietly contradicts in separate scenes by filming actual red Norwegian skylines.

Edvard Munch passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  From high art to B-movie pulp, with Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy

Book Report: The Corner by David Simon and Edward Burns

The Corner is a long, challenging, depressing story about the plight of one drug-ravaged West Baltimore neighborhood.  The 543-page nonfiction novel rarely strays from its central Fayette Street location, and only follows a handful of people, but authors David Simon and Edward Burns go so deep into the specifics of their subjects’ struggle with poverty and drug addiction that readers can perhaps be forgiven for putting the book down for weeks or months at a time.  (I read the book on and off for nearly a year and a half before finishing it, and read several other books in the meantime).  The book’s structure scarcely makes it more approachable; it is divided logically into four chronological sections, but then broken down into very lengthy chapters and sub-chapters that sometimes seem to begin and end at arbitrary points.

The Corner doesn’t qualify as “light reading” by any stretch of the imagination, but its difficult aspects stem from Simon and Burns’ honorable determination to give a voice to the voiceless and to put a human face on a part of the United States that has been almost entirely ignored by the rest of the world.  Simon and Burns (who went on to be the head creative forces behind HBO’s The Wire) stand alongside Dickens and Chaplin as perhaps our only major chroniclers of poverty.  Even if The Corner weren’t so eloquently written or so agonizingly powerful, it would still have journalistic value on a purely informational level.

But The Corner has much more to offer than simple statistics or abstract arguments about the plight of those involved in the drug trade.  Simon and Burns center their study on the McCullough family, whose members are each struggling with the narcotics market in their own way.  Patriarch Gary was once a promising renaissance man with an entrepreneurial spirit.  But a series of harsh setbacks in Gary’s personal life led him into an endless spiral of addiction, and a revolving series of petty crimes to support it.  Gary’s estranged wife Fran goes in and out of addiction throughout the book as well, the pressures of her environment frequently overwhelming her most sincere attempts to get clean.  Fran and Gary’s fifteen-year-old son DeAndre is a small-time drug dealer whose difficulties fitting in to life outside of Fayette Street (his legit fast food job falls apart quickly) and easy access to drugs ultimately lead him to follow in his parent’s footsteps.

Simon and Burns follow the story of the McCulloughs in riveting, sometimes sickening detail.  The first few pages of the novel include a map of the area where the novel takes place (as if this were The Lord of the Rings), which makes the story more intimate, vivid, and relatable than it otherwise would be.   Following along with the map, the reader can easily understand where the recreation center that DeAndre and his friends play basketball is in relation to the corners where they sell drugs, or where the scrap yard that Gary steals materials from is in relation to the old home where he once showed such promise.  It’s easy to imagine roughly where any of the novel’s major figures is and what they are doing even in sections of the story where they aren’t mentioned, and this sense of intimacy makes The Corner all the more moving and powerful.  Emotional highpoints such as the (surprisingly life-affirming) section where DeAndre’s on-again/off-again girlfriend Tyreeka realizes that she has the strength to raise their newborn child, despite DeAndre’s unreliability and her own young age, succeed largely because readers will understand exactly where the characters are in relation to each other.

The Corner is not entirely without faults.  Simon and Burns’ devotion to detail can be distracting, as when they report tirelessly about the specifics of the recreation center’s basketball program.  And while the book goes into minute detail about the lives of the junkies and dealers, the other forces that effect the characters’ world (such as politics and the police force) are only dealt with in the abstract, which retroactively makes The Corner feel lacking compared to The Wire’s full-bodied look at the ways that circumstances conspire to keep the poor separated from the wealthy.  Some of the novel’s essayistic passages contain its best pure prose, particularly the second chapter’s passionate yet well-reasoned argument for legalizing drugs, and a late-book screed that gives the lie to the idea that someone from Fayette Street could pull themselves up by the bootstraps and succeed in the “real world” if they only tried hard enough.  But most of the sections that comment abstractly on poverty and drug laws feel like they could use the vividly personal touches that take up the rest of the book.  Fortunately The Corner is mostly filled with powerful personal stories that honor the lives of the real people that they discuss while making larger, thought-provoking points about the many ways that we’ve all failed the less fortunate among us.

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Castle in the Sky)

Tech-savvy warlords battle each other in the air while humble farmers toil on the ground.  Workers tell tales about huge buildings in the clouds, though most are too afraid to travel outside their village.  The villagers rely on a rare crystal whose power can be easily misused for violent purposes.  A young, adventure loving princess is one of the few who can harness the power of the crystal, but that doesn’t stop a number of warring factions from attempting to use the mineral for their own selfish needs.  One such villain plans to use the crystal to activate a series of long-dormant, hulking robot beasts that are rumored to live in a castle in the sky.

If the plot of Castle in the Sky (1986) sounds a little familiar, it’s because the film is only a slight variation on Hayao Miyazaki’s previous movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984).  Once again there is a collision between a peaceful, old-fashioned village and a series of warring, high-tech societies.  Once again there is an environmental theme, which is once again expressed through a heroic princess who is the only one can utilize nature’s power to a righteous end.  Once again there are arrogant, power-hungry warlords who want to use a natural power to devious ends.  And once again those villains want to seize their power by activating ancient, destructive beasts.

Miyazaki’s third feature is largely a remake of his second, albeit with some noticeable cosmetic changes.  But Castle in the Sky does mark a genuine improvement over Nausicaa (and Miyazaki’s first film, 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro) in the sense that there are no completely extraneous characters.  Every major figure in the film has something to do, and even if the heroine and her male sidekick/chaste romantic interest have scarcely more personality than Princess Nausicaa, at least they each have a complete character arc.  And some of the supporting characters are genuinely eccentric.  A family of shy, bumbling sky pirates, led into combat by their domineering, clown-haired matriarch, keep the film lively even as the plot goes through the “fantasy 101” motions.  Even the most ill-defined of the film’s major characters, a villainous army general, has a clear function in the plot, so it doesn’t seem like a waste of the film’s generous running time to feature him in scenes the way that it did with, say,  the master swordsman in Nausicaa.

Castle in the Sky does have a few of the impressively large action set pieces that we’ve come to expect from Miyazaki.  The master animator boldly opens the film deep in the middle of the action, with the princess being chased through a giant air ship by the sky pirates, as if this was a late chapter in an ongoing serial and not the beginning of a children’s film.  A massacre that occurs when one of the aforementioned robots is unleashed is genuinely intense and brutal, with Miyazaki grippingly building the intensity by continuously increasing the scope and scale of the destruction until the screen is virtually filled with blood-red fire.  But overall Castle in the Sky, like Nausicaa, is too convoluted, lumbering, and lengthy to be consistently thrilling.  The ambitious, wide-canvas style that Miyazaki is quickly turning into his signature style does give Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky a truly epic feel, but its easy to miss the fleet-footedness and insouciant wit of Castle of Cagliostro, which remains Miyazaki’s most enjoyable film to this point.

UP NEXT  My Neighbor Totoro

The Masterpiece Test: The Mystery of Picasso

Year of Release  1956

Country  France

Length  75 min.

Director  Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cinematographer  Claude Renoir

Editor  Henri Colpi

Original Score  Georges Auric

Cast  Pablo Picasso

Beauty  A documentary in which Pablo Picasso creates twenty one-of-a-kind drawings, paintings, and collages obviously meets the basic beauty requirements for a masterpiece.  The Mystery of Picasso’s novel yet low-key approach to presenting those pieces of art  – Picasso creates each of his works on a special transparent canvas that fills the screen, allowing the viewer to watch the artist’s inspiration in action – is what makes it so spellbinding and delightful.  While there understandably isn’t anything on the level of, say, Guernica in this batch of artworks, each piece is nonetheless gorgeous and distinctive.  It’s a pleasure to watch a vague germ of an idea transform into something completely different by the time Picasso is satisfied with it (or tired of it).

Strangeness  Supposedly all of the pieces created for The Mystery of Picasso were burned immediately after filming, so that they would only exist for the movie.  If there is any truth to this bit of trivia, then the film is unique and special simply for containing these artworks by one of the world’s great masters.  Even if the pieces are out there in somebody’s private collection, as some scholars allege, the film still holds value for demonstrating in minute detail Picasso’s process.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  By essentially turning the screen into Picasso’s canvas, Henri-Georges Clouzot allows viewers the greatest possible opportunity to see a master at work.  The first few drawings are shown developing literally stroke-for-stroke, while the latter pieces employ smartly timed jump cuts to trace the evolution of some of the more ambitious pieces.  Clouzot also changes the film’s aspect ratio as Picasso moves onto larger works, bringing a welcome dramatic flair to this stylistically modest documentary.  The process of creation has perhaps never been as viscerally realized as it is in Clouzot’s film.

Tradition  Clouzot actually wasn’t the first to film Picasso’s works in action.  A Belgian film called Visit to Picasso (1949), which I haven’t seen, features the artist painting images on glass plates from the viewpoint of the camera.  That said, it’s hard to come up with any contemporary equivalents of Clouzot’s documentary.  Stan Brakhage’s shorts in which he painted directly onto film strips seem like The Mystery of Picasso’s closest relatives.

Repeatability  Art history students and aspiring painters could probably learn a lot from rewatching Clouzot’s film.  Or perhaps not; despite the film’s introductory voiceover suggesting that we only need to watch Picasso’s brushstrokes to understand what he’s thinking, the artist’s seemingly improvisatory technique isn’t really any easier to grasp by the end of the film.  The brief interludes where Picasso takes a break and has brief discussions with Clouzot don’t really shed any light on the artist’s process, and mostly serve to disrupt the film’s flow.

Viewer Engagement  It may not ultimately give viewers any real insight into what made its titular artist tick, but The Mystery of Picasso is a highly enjoyable and lovely film that offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of a great artist at work.

Morality  Part of the point of The Mystery of Picasso seems to be that half of Picasso’s genius was in simply putting in the work.  The emphasis on process, and the (sometimes stroke-by-stroke) evolution of the works of art onscreen suggests reasonably that Picasso was not magically imbued with talent, but that he became a great artist by constantly trying new things and pursuing each of his ideas to their logical end.  Unfortunately, Clouzot’s film occasionally seems divided against itself, with Georges Auric’s incongruously pompous musical score frequently aiming for a tone that suggests that the work being shown on screen is some sort of transmission from the gods.  The film would’ve been better off if Clouzot didn’t take his occasional awkward half-measures toward attempting to explain Picasso’s talent, and simply let the works of art speak for themselves.

The Mystery of Picasso fails the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A more ambitious and biographical look at an artist, Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch.

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Four, Discs Two, Three & Four)

Episodes covered:  Tar Baby, Insurgents, Hurt, Cut Throat, String Theory, Back in the Hole, A Thousand Deaths, Judas Priest, Ain’t That a Shame

It is a mark of The Shield’s unpredictable plotting that season four’s major storyline’s reach their dramatic climax not in the season finale (“Ain’t That a Shame”), but in the extended-length tenth episode “Back in the Hole.”  At times, the series’ messy, cases-piling-on-top-of-each-other style of storytelling can be frustrating, as certain plot elements seem to get short thrift or disappear altogether in favor of unnecessarily repetitive character arcs or insignificant standalone cases.  But the busy layering of plots also gives the series a lifelike pacing that contrasts nicely with its amped-up action movie tone, and allows the storylines to organically reach the dramatic high points that make “Back in the Hole” The Shield’s best episode to this point.

The payoff was particularly strong for season four’s two most prominent new characters, Monica Rawling and Antwan Mitchell.  It is a testament to Glenn Close and Anthony Anderson’s fully lived-in performances that these new faces were able to suggest enough personal history to make their ferociously intense interrogation sequence in “Back in the Hole” feel like the culmination of four seasons of character-building rather than ten episodes of plotting.  The writers spent the middle part of the season turning Antwan into a disappointingly typical villain (particularly in the final scene of “Tar Baby,” where his moustache-twirling murder of a young girl informant didn’t jibe with the much more ambiguous community leader we’d been introduced to at the beginning of the season), but the full complexity of the character immediately clicks into place during his interrogation.  As Rawling picks away at Antwan’s psychological defenses, reminding him of his years as a powerless abused child, tears well up in the gang leader’s eyes, and suddenly this charismatic cypher feels like a real, complicated human being.

Though Rawling’s grilling of Antwan is ruthless, it is clear that her desire to put him behind bars is based on a sincere and passionate desire for justice.  It is impressive that Close and the writers never turned Rawling into a villain, even though she was essentially the Dick Cheney figure in this season’s blunt Iraq war metaphor.  Her zero-tolerance, morally inflexible tactics represent a different type of corruption than the ass-covering, bending-the-rules modus operandi of the rest of The Shield’s ethically ambiguous characters, and the show was able to get a lot of mileage out of the collision of her well-meaning brand of injustice and the other characters’ more self-serving forms of moral turpitude. 

While season four’s new major characters provided a riveting counterpoint to the established players, the development of many of the show’s longer running storylines had a mixed success rate.  It was interesting to see the Strike Team working separately and at odds at the beginning of the season, especially during the stretch where Shane was essentially functioning as the dark mirror version of Vic (just as ethically compromised but with less competence).  But the writers quickly dropped the storyline about Antwan blackmailing Shane into killing Vic in favor of the more familiar and less tense storyline of the Strike Team coming together to get Shane out of his mess.  The fact that the old team wound up working together for most of the season despite technically being assigned to different precincts undercut the power of their tenuous reconciliation at the end of the season, and also made the introduction of Shane’s vice squad partner Army seem borderline pointless.  Here’s hoping that if Army  returns in season five, the writers find something for Michael Pena to do, because he was largely wasted as Shane’s lackey.

The Strike Team has always been The Shield’s most problematic partnership, and over the years they’ve largely proven less interesting than the Barn’s other teams.  Dutch and Claudette’s season-long investigation of a series of convenience store crimes wasn’t terribly compelling in and of itself, but it did provide a stable framework for exploiting the tension that had been growing in their partnership since late in season three.  The payoff in “Ain’t That a Shame,” which found Dutch turning down a promotion in favor of sticking by Claudette, even though her morally uncompromising ways make the partners the outcasts of the Barn, was truly the culmination of four years of smart character-building.

Danny and Julian were very much in the background of season four, and mostly functioned as representatives of opposing viewpoints about Rawling’s property seizure policies.  It was perfectly in character for Danny, who has always shown a reactionary streak, to support Rawling’s no-nonsense style.  Julian’s turn from naïve support to principled opposition of the property seizures was equally organic, and the definitive turning point – the police raid on an in-session church that was harboring drug paraphernalia in “Insurgents” – was one of the season’s most gripping moments.  Fortunately, Danny and Julian share a certain respectful bond that transcends politics, as seen in the quietly moving moment when Julian is the only cop who shows up to tend to a recovering-from-a-shooting Danny in “Ain’t That a Shame.”  While it might have been nice to see more of Michael Jace this season, it was something of a relief to see the writers lay off of his ongoing struggle with his sexuality, which had become tiresome and one-note in season three.

Another somewhat tedious element of the previous season of The Shield was the Aceveda rape storyline, which the writers ingeniously wound up justifying by making it an integral part of the political complications that ultimately undercut Rawling’s investigation of Antwan by allowing the One-Niners leader to make a deal with the DEA.  I’m not sure that the show needed so many scenes of Aceveda enacting rape fantasies with a high-class hooker – the scenes felt equally like excuses to give Benito Martinez something to do and desperate grabs for controversy – but the payoff in “Back in the Hole,” which found Aceveda basically reenacting a version of his rape where he was the one in charge, was powerfully executed.  Better yet, the councilman’s decision to move on from his humiliation at all costs led to some interesting plot complications in the final three episodes of the season, where Aceveda basically hired Antwan to kill his rapist in exchange for a deal with the DEA. 

The political complications that ensued – with Rawling and Vic racing to capture a Salvadoran drug dealer before Antwan could testify against him – featured the series’ most intricate and exciting plotting since its two part season one finale.  But really the fourth season took the sophisticated action movie feel of those two hours and maintained it for an entire season, making this the most consistently satisfying season so far.  There is still the sense that the writers are consciously avoiding pushing the series’ overarching storylines too far ahead – I’m not sure that Terry Crowley has even been mentioned since season two, and the Armenian Money Train thing seems to have definitively ended in season three – but by focusing explicitly on the ways that the Barn’s policies fail the community of Farmington, season four got to the heart of the show’s themes in a way that previous season’s only did sporadically.  And with Rawling’s Internal Affairs guy digging up some definitive dirt on the Strike Team at the end of “Ain’t That a Shame,” it’s only a matter of time before Vic starts to real feel the results of his past actions.

Quick Thoughts:

-  The storyline involving Dutch dating Vic’s ex-wife seemed promising when it started, but did not pay off.

-  I also wish that the Barn’s overly forceful raid of the church would’ve led to greater consequences.  We saw that the media had picked up a damning freeze frame of a smiling Vic tackling a churchgoing One-Niner, but the outrage surrounding this incident was never really explored and mostly felt like an abstraction.

-  While there were some plot elements that didn’t fully pay off, it was nice to at least see the show drastically downplaying the standalone cases this season, with most of the police work relating in some way to the asset-forfeiture storyline.

-  I recommend checking out the documentary on disc four.  It provides a lot of interesting insights into Glenn Close's working methods, and details the surprisingly complicated evolution of a memorably profane line of dialogue in "Back in the Hole."

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)

Hayao Miyazaki followed the critical and commercial success of his debut feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), by creating a manga series known as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.  The origins of the series, which began its twelve-year serialized run in 1982, are somewhat controversial.  Some say that Miyazaki originally intended for Nausicaa to be an anime, but couldn’t find funding for a feature film, while others claim that the director started the manga on the condition that it would never be adapted to film, and that he was only later convinced by financers to turn his story into a theatrical release.  Regardless, Miyazaki wound up releasing a filmic version of Nausicaa in 1984, adapting only the portions of the story which he’d already completed in the manga (roughly a quarter of the story that was ultimately completed in 1994).

Like Cagliostro, Nausicaa freely blends medieval fantasy adventure with space age sci-fi, though it replaces the earlier film’s spy elements with a post-apocalyptic wasteland motif.  The story is set a thousand years after a world war known as “The Seven Days of Fire,” which destroyed the earth’s ecosystem and turned human civilization into a scattered series of settlements.  The various villages face the constant threat of being engulfed by the toxic jungle that now takes up most of the earth.  While humans can’t survive long in the toxic environment, insects have thrived and become enormous, threatening beasts.  Princess Nausicaa, a skilled wind glider who often enters the toxic forest in order to gather supplies for her settlement, is one of the few who seem willing or able to communicate with the insects rather than enraging them.  But when several other warring kingdoms crash land in the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaa and her peaceful settlement are thrust into a complicated conflict involving a long-dormant “Giant Warrior” who may be able to eliminate the insect threat, but who may also pose a lethal threat to the humans.

The plot is about as convoluted as it sounds, and probably more well-suited to a lengthy comic book series than a two-hour film.  Sadly, the film quickly gets bogged down with long expository scenes, and Miyazaki never finds a way to effectively incorporate all of the plot points and characters into one distinct, compelling vision.  Cagliostro had several peripheral characters that seemed to have been included simply because fans of the Lupin the III series would expect them to be there, but every character besides Nausicaa gets short thrift in Miyazaki’s second film.  While the characters in Cagliostro were largely archetypal in conception (and in their physical design), many of them were given enough personality to at least partially transcend their generic origins.  Not so in Nausicaa, which features such hackneyed figures as the noble swordsman, the blind but wise old lady, and the arrogant and power- hungry soldier, and then doesn’t give any of them enough screen time to become anything more than walking action figures.  Miyazaki is wise to temper his earnest environmental and anti-war themes by acknowledging that nature is often harsh and inhospitable to humans, and the animators admirably make no attempt to make the slimy, multi-eyed giant bugs cute in any way.  But otherwise the low level of ambiguity and nuance in the film seems wildly out of proportion to the complexity of its plot.

Fortunately, Nausicaa’s stunning hand-drawn animation ensures that the film is at least as compelling as it is frustrating.  The world of the film may be made up of a thousand different fantasy and sci-fi clichés, but its indigo hue and wide-open vistas are as unique as they are breathtaking.  There are a lot of nice little touches, such as the way that the wind rustles through the characters’ hair, that earn the animators points simply for degree of difficulty.  Nausicaa’s action sequences aren’t as crisp as those in Cagliostro, but they do feel impressively huge and they are edited with a clarity that is sadly lacking in most modern action films.  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is bloated with plot and underdeveloped characters, but it is proof that even a heavily flawed Hayao Miyazaki film is well worth staring at for a couple of hours.

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