A crying shame?

What have these two films got in common – The Burning Man and A Single Man? Two things. The actor Matthew Goode and the theme – grief. (I don’t want to spoil the plot of The Burning Man for you so I will try to avoid saying much more about it here but it may be hard to be totally oblique so don’t read any more if you plan on seeing it.)

About half way through The Burning Man I started to think about the best films about grief and A Single Man was the first film that entered my head. It’s in the acting; Firth manages to convey grief and anger with a look or slow movement of the body or delivery of a sentence and in the degree to which it explores his character and that of the female lead in the film (we care about them, dysfunctional as they are). Both films are also highly stylised but this stylisation works in one film but not in the other. I thought about the reasons for quite a while after watching The Burning Man.

I am the person in the dark in the cinema who reaches first for the hankie. I am often embarrassed at how easily I cry (I find it difficult to watch any of the Olympics without tearing up. The ABC news can be an emotional whirlpool.) So why no tears over this one? The Burning Man opens with a series of fragmented scenes. We see chef Tom (Matthew Goode) in road rage, in his restaurant, running down the corridor of a hospital yelling, being escorted by two men in security uniforms. He is a man filled with rage. (And libido – the opening scene is of his bottom quivering as he masturbates.) The reasons for the rage are not clear – the film moves back and forward in time forcing the viewer to really concentrate.

Rage is an unattractive thing – unless we can empathise with it – (The “I’m Mad as Hell and not going to take it any more” scene, almost any early Jack Nicholson, George Kostanza on a good day). So there’s a man, out of control with anger. When he’s not being angry, the camera gazes soulfully at him. I use that phrase deliberately – the camera person (or maybe the editor) is in love with this actor and the gaze of the camera lingers often and unnecessarily on Goode, who is very good looking in a tragic wild man careful one-day growth kind of way. He’s sad, he’s angry, he’s dysfunctional. Interestingly (for what it says about me), I empathised with the main character Tom only three times in the film – and most strongly when he runs amok at a picnic of strangers and throws their food all over the park. I should have felt more for this character but was unable to.

There was something missing from the film and I think, oddly, that the element is tension. Where a film is an “emotional journey”, as this one is, there is usually an element of tension, of waiting for an outcome or for something to emerge. The first part of the film has this – as we strain to make sense of the fragments. But once the storyline is clear, there is almost nothing there. What happens is predictable. Typing this makes me feel like I’m not doing the film justice but the main character is not interesting or conveyed in enough depth to pull the story along. We don’t see enough of pre-angry Tom and his life to feel the contrast. There are anodyne scenes with his wife/ girlfriend where they go mussel hunting which look a little like Tourism NSW ads, they are not particularly interesting or convincing. His pre-angry life is annoyingly good looking and bland. I would have preferred Goode to be a little more haggard as well; his looks and the lingering gaze of the camera distracted from whatever emotion he was trying to convey. Many shots were very self-conscious, look at me, look at the art kind of shots. This film maker needs to go look at some Kelly Reichart and Koreada films to learn how to tell an emotional story minimally.

A lot of reviews have talked about the initial non-linear mode of story telling (popular this year – Jane Eyre, We Need To Talk About Kevin); Leigh Paatsch, a reviewer said: "It might be an unfair comparison, but another new release this week, We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers a virtual masterclass in non-linear storytelling." Paatsch is right about this; the Kevin film works very effectively fragmenting the plot to build tension and to delay the ‘money shot’ of that film (which incidently is also about grief and anger and where Tilda Swinton looks completely frumpy and undone by these emotions). The director of The Burning Man Jonathan Teplitzky said that he wanted the fragments to resemble the kind of chaos that might plague someone like Tom. In this way it is effective although Paatsch also says “Burning Man features an audacious structure that makes it seem more interesting than it is.” The director says, in an interview with The Australian, "I wanted the film to be visceral and emotional over a heavily plotted film," he says. "I was very conscious of writing like that because I wanted the structure of the film to tell as much as anything else about the emotional and psychological state of the character." Visceral, this film isn’t, despite the actual offal that plays a bit role in the film.

In summary, I agree with this assessment from FilmInk: "Unfortunately, he's (Goode) undone somewhat by the film itself, which is over directed, too proud of itself, and utterly enamoured with its main character's destructive personality." It's a shame - I wanted to like it more.