Higher Ground: between God and a hard place

This thing we’ve been calling the culture wars has in recent years aggregated at least one mighty bipartisan ethic: ambivalence is bad for you and your country; tolerance is a slippery slope; agnosticism is for wimps; which side are you on? (Just as an aside: How strange it feels to be posting this review so soon after learning of the death of God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens.) Yet betweenness is a fundamental part of life; we are ever moving from one place or one absolute to another, most often learning the most we’ll ever learn while on route. Betweenness is what story is made of.

All this is just my way of contextualizing my strong feelings for the closing note struck by Higher Ground—something about which I feel no ambivalence at all. The directorial debut of Vera Farmiga, who also stars, is about living with religious values that remain fixed while one’s life remains insistently fluid. The movie is elegant, intelligent, sensual, and a little uneven—a few truly bum notes stand out against a predominantly careful and wise series of choices. But its closing moments sweep the central character up into a scene of un-showy yet immense bravery and still manage to leave us without firm resolution, and that absence is itself something meaningful.

Farmiga plays Corrine, who, having already conveyed a deep curiosity about Jesus as a child and having survived a potentially catastrophic accident with herself, her husband and her infant child miraculously intact, becomes in adult life a member of some radical New Testament community nestled somewhere in rural New York. Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir This Dark World, Higher Ground begins with extended scenes depicting key moments in Corrine’s youth before catching up with her in the present, a time of great tumult: Corrine’s best friend (Dagmara Dominczyk), a vivacious, raven-haired fellow believer who has no problem leading a fulfilling erotic existence under God, becomes terrifyingly, senselessly ill; Corrine’s fierce intellect becomes increasingly unsatisfied by the gender codes of her sect and the pastor whom she admires yet resents; and Corrine’s unhappiness with her marriage to her high school sweetheart Ethan (Joshua Leonard) is about to overwhelm her normally unbreakable composure.

Despite the repression, despite moments of alarming, sudden violence, there are no clearly marked villains in Higher Ground, and Corrine’s heroism is a quiet one, rooted mainly in her refusal to shut out the voices of desire or doubt or the longings of the spirit. Farmiga depicts the religious community with both affection and frustration, at times celebrating the camaraderie, at others reeling from its enforced naiveté. Her approach only goes astray in the few moments where she tries to slip fantasies into Corrine’s waking life, and the story itself only feels awkward in a few scenes dealing with Corrine’s immediate family, such as the one involving her sister and a big bag of blow. As for her work as an actor in Higher Ground, I can’t say that Farmiga ever gets it anything but right. Her lack of judgement as a director carried over into her performance, so we see Corrine fully surrendered to the ecstasies of worship, mothering and fighting for her dignity in equal parts. The last seven or eight years has found Farmiga emerging as an interesting actress under the direction of Minghella and Scorsese, but we may just be seeing her at her very best here, taking on both roles, and directing herself.

Senna: Life in overdrive

Though it rather daringly confines its visual trajectory to nothing but archival footage—most of which feature its hero, Brazilian racing superstar Ayrton Senna, traversing tracks the world round at dizzying speeds—it could hardly be said that Senna simply goes around in circles. Its narrative, which skims the surface of Senna’s personal life in favour of his professional one, is burnished down to its mythical contours, rendering Senna’s meteoric rise to World Champion and tragic death at 34 in a mid-race crack-up as an Icarus tale, not one of hubris exactly—Senna spoke with great humility about his gift and his sense of debt to the god who endowed him with it—but of a deep faith in speed and glory that transcends reason. One memorable interview clip finds Senna describing a major turning point in his career arriving when he found himself behind the wheel and feeling as though he was no longer conscious. But this yearning for ecstasy was balanced by a fierce intellect, one trained to make split-second risk assessments. Senna was a champion because he was ruthless on the track, and his record for accidents was nearly as exceptional as his winning streak. Some thought him reckless, but the thrill of his greatest feats are undeniable: he won the Brazil Grand Prix with his car stuck in sixth gear for multiple laps; his fingers had to be pried from the wheel afterward.

Senna the film, now available on DVD, directed by Asif Kapadia, edited by Chris King and Gregers Sall, and written by Manish Pandey, understands very well that adrenaline is key to its appeal, whether the audience is full of racing enthusiasts, those who crave a solid sports documentary, or those who are simply drawn to high-stakes stories of ambition. Things move fast, excitement accumulates, and we’re often treated to views of the action from Senna’s on-board camera. But it should be said that this need for speed ultimately obscures everything else, and the absence of talking heads makes it tough to distinguish between the various commentators we hear speaking almost constantly on the soundtrack. So by the time Senna is over, you might feel as though you missed a great deal in the blur.

Immortals: It's all Greek to Tarsem

Set in 1228 BC, Immortals tells the story of how a fierce peasant with an unlimited gym pass rose up against and ultimately defeated a sadistic warmonger with a lot of help from body-buttered Aryan deities. Apparently it’s all based on Greek myths, though departures from the source material are conspicuous and most often really dumb. One could argue that director Tarsem Dhandwar Singh (the artist formerly known as Tarsem Singh, or plain old Tarsem—his name just keeps getting longer) is very much in his element; he clearly prefers the god’s eye view whenever possible and finds countless opportunities here to have his actors strike poses modeled after the cover paintings of fantasy novels.

Theseus is bulgingly embodied by future Superman Henry Cavill, while his antagonist, King Hyperion, is played by Mickey Rourke, who seems to be channeling Brando in Apocalypse Now, what with his croaky voice muttering out from the gloom, his munching of chestnuts, the crumbs stuck in his scraggily beard, and his looming over a basin of water as he interviews an unfortunate minion. The two first meet when Hyperion, just like Thulsa Doom in Conan, slaughters mom before Theseus’ eyes. “Witness hell,” says Hyperion, whose route to mega-evil was earlier explained as the result of his despair over the death of his entire family during a plague. The gods did nothing to save them, he complains, so why bother with faith?

Turns out Hyperion’s got a point, because the gods can actually intervene when the mood strikes them, and in fact do so several times throughout Immortals, whose multiple dues ex machinas add up to an apologia for fundamentalists and constitute a defense for all those who choose to interpret religious texts literally. An odd sort of suspense, or perhaps anti-suspense, is at work here: no matter how heroic or resourceful Theseus and his friends are made out to be none of it really matters because every time they’re in big trouble the gods just swoop down and take care of business, climaxing in a cage match with some butt-ugly titans that involves a lot of exploding heads and makes no sense whatsoever. So the protracted third act is especially dull, and it doesn’t help that Steven Dorff’s horny thief—the closest thing to an actual character in the movie—gets swallowed up at the top of it in a horde of baddies.

TIFF '11: Fueron con dios

The 1917 Mexican Constitution featured a number of severe restrictions against demonstrations of faith. The opening scene of The Last Cristeros, which consists of only voice-over and a black screen, gives us the rundown—one year imprisonment for ringing a church bell, for example—and efficiently provides all the context needed to comprehend or at least intuit all that follows, even if you’re unfamiliar with post-Revolutionary Mexican politics. The government’s war against the Cristeros—those who took up arms to defend their right to worship—officially ended in 1929, but the film takes us into the mid-1930s, following a small group of hold-outs as they make their way across gorgeous, arid and unforgiving northern terrains, where the occasional bullet comes seemingly out of nowhere, where nights are long and cold and food and water in short supply, and doubts blossom.

Directed by Matias Meyer and co-scripted with Israel Cárdenas, who co-directed the tender and memorable Cochochi, The Last Cristeros is a beautifully photographed and edited modern-Mexican take on the anti-western (if the term suits). Not unlike Meek’s Cutoff, it depicts an arduous journey through wilderness where danger looms quietly and everyday tasks are depicted with great accuracy and empathy. But the film also recalls Of Gods and Men, in that this is a story, peppered with many songs and prayers, about spiritual integrity and acts of bravery in a situation where such acts have arguably lost all practical purpose. Meyer’s Cristeros, their faces deeply lined under massive sombreros (some of the actors are actually descendants of Cristeros), clearly have no chance of making any difference in Mexico with regards to religious intolerance. And it’s equally clear that they will not survive. Which is why the last scene is so poignant—this isn’t The Wild Bunch; isn’t going to end in thrilling slaughter, so instead opts for a final moment of tranquility, the Cristeros in Christ-like loin cloths, in the face of looming death. The film is one of only two Mexican films at TIFF this year, and a major highlight of my Festival thus far.