OM, SHANTI, KEANU

So a couple weeks ago, one afternoon when neither of us had anything better to do, my friend Bastard Keith and I were Facebook chatting about whatever, and after a brief discussion of Johnny Mnemonic (which BK had just recently beheld), the following (unedited) conversation took place:

Me: ....and at the center of it all, the inimitable keanu

Bastard Keith: He really is a law unto himself.
Sometimes utterly right as the center of a film, sometimes almost glaringly not.

Me: never unmemorable, though

Bastard Keith: NEVER

Me: which is odd considering everyone always talks about how blank he is
and i think sells him short

Bastard Keith: I think he's kind of a monolithic presence.

Me: but he IS a presence

Bastard Keith: That's my point.

Me: unlike people like sam worthington
whose name i had to take a second to remember while typing

Bastard Keith: Worthington is almost astonishingly unmemorable.

Me: exactly
everything about him, down to his last name being too long, is anti-memorable
you always remember keanu

Bastard Keith: There's an essay in that.

Me: even this shitty serial-killer movie [name of ex-girlfriend redacted] made me watch once, there's this indelible moment where keanu's dancing around like a jagoff

Bastard Keith: Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?

Me: THE ETERNAL KEANU: AN ACTOR WITH NEITHER BEGINNING NOR END

Bastard Keith: He's a room you enter and never leave, perhaps without realizing it.

Me: he is the cinematic image of one hand clapping

Bastard Keith: He is Om.

Me: heh there we go, i'll call the essay om shanti keanu

Bastard Keith: NICE

Me: this actually has to be done

Bastard Keith: I struggle to think of an actor with a career as indestructible.

Me: oh yeah

Bastard Keith: ANY other actor, ANNNNNNNNNNY other actor who'd given some of those performances would be on the outs.
And yet his iconic roles are so perfect, so RIGHT.

Me: but keanu, he bombs in something and then a quiet few months later there's a thing in the trades about keanu being in talks for something new that sounds kinda cool
and frequently is

Bastard Keith: I have this image of, like, studio heads talking in a conference room and Keanu just sort of walking and sitting down quietly and they all slowly realize he's there.

Me: actually on further reflection the fact that when he goes down, he goes down SO HARD is actually kind of admirable
yes! meetings with keanu must be the GREATEST FUCKING THING EVER

Bastard Keith: And they ask what's up, and he just sort of calmly talks about what he'll be doing next.
And they're like, “So...so that's....we're making that?”

Me: “yeah.”

Bastard Keith: And he's like, “Yes, this is what I saw happening.”

Me: “i was riding my motorcycle along the pacific coast highway, and the film came to me in an instant”

Bastard Keith: No threat, just this ineffable sense of zen inevitabllity.

Me: yeah, in a totally even, slightly ethereal tone of voice

Bastard Keith: And the studio heads are just so beguiled by him.
So the movies get made.
Like, can you say no to the tide?
To the phases of the moon?

Me: nor to the wind

Bastard Keith: Basically, I'm saying he's the closest thing to a shaman that modern film has to offer.

Me: oh absolutely

Bastard Keith:
I'm loving this conversation, by the way.

Me: and it makes hugo weaving's speech about inevitability to him in the matrix an extremely meta moment
i am too

Bastard Keith: OH GOD YES.

Me: i'm writing this essay

And for the last couple weeks when I've had a spare moment I've been trying to gather my thoughts about the essay I repeatedly said I was going to write. For the most part, I've been failing miserably. Keanu “the reification of one hand clapping” Reeves is one hard motherfucker to pin down. He's had an amazingly durable career, and long, too. Make sure you're sitting down before you read this next bit: the year after next Keanu is going to be fifty fucking years old. Isn't that kind of fucked up? But, more to the point, isn't that kind of fucked up because you don't think of Keanu as being any age at all? One of the reasons I excerpted that chat with Bastard Keith is that Herr Bastard raises the excellent point that “Doesn't it feel like he's always been with us?” I know it feels that way to me. Bill & Ted dropped when I was 9 or 10, and Keanu was very much a fact of life in it. He's continued to be that way ever since, showing up in a variety of pictures of variable quality. In each, though, at its center, was Keanu.

I get a little defensive when the topic of acting comes up for discussion, until the other party's credentials come up for discussion, because I spent a lot of years studying acting in a variety of different disciplines, with almost a decade as a working theater artist. Which, yeah, whatever, I don't want a gold star or a fuckin lifetime achievement Obie or anything, but even the most cursory glance at these pages or at my other critical writing will show you that I think the deep thoughts about stuff. Acting is one of the handful of subjects on which I can discourse with confidence, erudition, and insight, joining movies (obviously), basketball, and the ways and means of bringing a woman to orgasm. Having spent all those years trying to figure acting out, it thus pains me how people who've never done it and barely even know what it is hold forth about acting as experts. (For a longer and more eloquent kvetch on this same topic, Uta Hagen's Respect For Acting is a surprisingly fun read.) I bring this up because it's largely these armchair experts who will, with ruthless brevity, dismiss Keanu's acting as “shitty.” Most often because his performances aren't naturalistic. Sometimes because, yes, he actually isn't very good. But this misses the larger truth of Keanu, his Om, if you will. He is as he is. To try and mold him into something he isn't is folly. Also, it means something that Bertolucci cast him as the Buddha. Sure, that was no Last Tango In Paris and it sure wasn't The Conformist but Bertolucci's not some schmuck off the street, and he could have had any number of actors, but he chose Keanu.

Just as filmmakers and writers can be stylists, not conforming strictly to a rote transcription of the world “as it is” to give some illusory sense of “real” life, actors can be too. In fact, most movie stars give off a sense of being larger than life, of being above such mortal concerns as reality. John Wayne did John Wayne. Bogart did Bogart. Clint did (and may at some point again do) Clint. This may even be the very thing that does make them great, that they are stylists. I don't know whether Keanu qualifies under this category, because it's not entirely certain he's doing it on purpose. This sounds like I'm saying he's some kind of holy fool, but that's not it. It's basically like we were saying in the chat: he's a force of nature, like wind, or the sea. He is as he is.

And, even though I know he won't, it feels as though he ever shall be. The genuine joy I've felt watching him act is more like the joy of a summer breeze or the ocean gently brushing my bare feet on a beach than it is watching an actor. The inflection in his voice on “whoa.” (Specificially the “whoa” after watching Morpheus jump in The Matrix, though at least one of his Ted “whoa”s qualify as well.) The triumph of “Yeah? Well I'm taller” is every triumph. The genuine awe of confronting the mysteries of the universe contained in “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” It's part of the great beauty of the work of Keanu Reeves that this piece is at once kind of kidding, a little ridiculous, and absolutely sincere at the same time. At a certain point, pondering the mysteries of the universe is pointless, because the universe is us and we are it. That's the great thing about Keanu. He is. His apparent comfort in simply being radiates off the screen. Sometimes it means he isn't very good in the given movie (and a lot of times the given movie's a piece of shit, too) but for those moments of absolute perfection when everything clicks together, he's one of the finest mediums there is.

BETTER LIVING THROUGH NETFLIX, VOL. 10: FIND ME GUILTY

Vincenzo Gasolina and Tyrion Lannister. Boosh.

With a handful of notable exceptions, Sidney Lumet's career as a director was characterized by his tendency to make very good movies that it never occurred to anyone to watch. This, to be clear, was never Mr. Lumet's fault. (Well, almost never: Q&A was terrible.) It was merely a function of his valuing character and story over all else, his refusal to (intentionally) lean on melodrama for cheap effect, and—maybe most important—the humility with which he carried himself personally. If you want people running around sucking your dick about what a genius you are, you need to plant the seeds by acting like one. Of course, this can backfire if you aren't one. But Sidney Lumet never seemed to care about that, always talked up the importance of the work above all else and the collaborative nature of the filmmaking process, and as a result he never won a competitive Oscar (he was given an honorary one when he was old, and his speech was pure elegance and class; Sidney Lumet was a men among men, believe) and even among the list of all-time classics he directed, all are associated primarily with their leading actors. His careful preparation, empathy, and humble commitment to the work above his own personal glory (and a number of other things associated with being awesome, surely) led to a vast array of actors giving either the best or one of the best performances of their careers working under Lumet's watch, among them Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Al Pacino, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Paul Newman, River Phoenix, and many many others. So too, in the second-to-last movie Sidney Lumet would ever direct, did Vin Diesel, in Find Me Guilty.

That's right, Vincenzo Gasolina himself. And it's not like “oh, sure, wow, he turned in a better performance than The Fast and the Furious, xXx, and The fuckin' Pacifier, big whoop.” Vincenzo's amaaaaazing in Find Me Guilty. He's out of his mind good in this. There's a grand total of one moment the entire picture when he's not perfect, and that moment is like two seconds in the Annabella Sciorra scene an hour or so in, even then it's just a moment of his composure cracking because he doesn't know what to do with his hands, and even then it's something you can rationalize as “well, maybe it's not that Vin doesn't know what to do with his hands, maybe it's Jackie” except, sorry, it is Vin. But that's okay. The whole rest of the picture Vincenzo's in this fucking wig looking like Jerry Orbach except radiating Movie Star, and it's like “Holy shit, Vincenzo has star power even when he's not flexing his guns driving two hundred miles an hour doing sex with Asia Argento?” If ever there was a moment for Sidney Lumet to pop his collar and be like “Oh yes that's right, y'all,” it's this. Making Robert Duvall look good is one thing. Making Vincenzo Gasolina look like something other than a guy who throws grenades by flexing his biceps is another matter entirely. It's not that Lumet waved a magic wand and turned Vincenzo into a good actor, it's that he knew enough about what acting actually is and was forward-thinking enough to say “I'm going to make a picture with Vin Diesel playing the lead where nothing blows up and he never drives a car.” And he did. And it's a massive amount of fun.

Based on a true story (and purporting to consist to great degree of actual court transcriptions), Find Me Guilty is the story of Jackie DiNorscio (Vincenzo), a wiseguy from the Dirty Jerz whose fuckhead cousin tries to clip him, unsuccessfully. Once he recovers, Jackie's luck takes another turn for the shitty when he gets pinched trying to buy a suitcase full of coke from an undercover cop. Not to mention, he has racketeering charges hanging over him. The US Attorney's office (represented by oily Linus Roache, who did an NY/NJ area accent so well I had to check who he was, only to be like “Holy balls, that's Linus Roache?”) swoops in and offers Jackie a deal if he rolls over on The Boys, only Jackie's a stand-up guy and won't hold with such rubbish. He tells the US Attorney, “Hey, you got a brother? Fuck him, too.” And thus Jackie and practically everybody he knows and has worked with go on trial.

The trial, a massive clusterfuck (it would go on to be the longest criminal trial in American history), is the bulk of the movie. Judge Sidney Finestein (Ron Silver, who is pick-your-jaw-up-off-the-fuckin-floor great in this, in a reminder of how great he could be when not simply noshing on scenery in an exploitation movie for a paycheck) does his best to keep all twenty-something defendants and their respective lawyers (the de facto leader of whom is played by the mighty Peter Dinklage, who rules beyond the capacity of the English language to describe) in line. And he'd have done so perfectly if not for the monkey wrench of Jackie deciding to defend himself. Jackie's wildly inappropriate, blithely ignorant of proper procedure, yet charming debut as defense counsel completely overwhelms the entire trial.

Storywise, that's all there is to Find Me Guilty. The narrative has occasional telling-rather-than-showing problems with conveying the massive amount of time over which the trial took place, and despite being based on a true story elements of it are really, really farfetched. It's the kind of material that in the hands of anyone other than an absolute master—and I really think it's time we start putting Lumet in with the all-time greats, if we aren't already—would be ridiculous nonsense. But in Lumet's hands, it's a delightful bit of entertainment.

Beyond the performances, which are simply tremendous, with countless beautiful little human moments, Lumet's direction is pristine classicism, with meticulous framing, long takes, actual medium and long shots that aren't either establishing shots or panoramic landscapes, and invisible edits. In spite of this it never feels conservative, or an example of a relic of a bygone era clinging to an outmoded way of working because it's all he knows. I feel like kicking myself in the balls for even suggesting such a thing. No, this is a director who trusts his actors to be all the flash and dash the picture needs. That trust derives from careful preparation, years of experience, and the confidence those combine to create. Maybe the result only seems so good because no one makes classical American cinema anymore, but it's still a wonderful little movie.

It's a movie that's been done wrong by history, too. Due to one of the absolute worst marketing campaigns in the history of human endeavor—like, “Kilgore Trout's SF appearing in porno magazines” level bad marketing—Find Me Guilty was gone from theaters before anyone knew it had come out, and was a non-factor in 2006's Oscar race, which I mean yeah I know, “Oscars? blow me,” but imagine if Harvey Weinstein is running the picture's campaign. Suddenly we've got Sidney Lumet going up against Marty Scorsese for Best Director, with both of them trying for their first. You've got Vincenzo getting a nom against Forest Whitaker; I mean, Forest Whitaker still would have won, but then we get the Fast and Furious trailer hailing “ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE VIN DIESEL.....and paul walker” a couple years later, which would have been considerably lulzier than Vincenzo returning to the franchise having failed elsewhere.

Anyway. Fuck the business. Find Me Guilty still exists, and can be watched. And I'm here to say, with all the authority given a random asshole on the internet with Proustian Tourette's that it goddamn well should be. So there. At the very least, people fiending for a Game of Thrones fix should watch this to get a hit of some Dinklage. Or if you feel like winning a bet with a friend of yours who refuses to believe that Vin Diesel could ever look like Jerry Orbach. Or, if you just want to plain want to see a good movie. Sidney Lumet was the truth, ladies and gentlemen. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

"BRAD PITT, ACTOR"

This essay by Isaac Butler is great, and should be read by anyone who has to write about film acting. The rest of you should read it, too.