Movie netherworld as fact and prophecy
In the era of movie franchises, none has been more offensive than Ron Howard’s series adapting novelist Dan Brown’s best-selling potboilers that began with The Da Vinci Code, continued with Angels and Demons, and now befouls the marketplace with Inferno. This time, cryptologist-skeptic-apostate Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) goes on another art-history expedition that doubles as a heretical crusade. The premise sets Langdon in Florence for a forensic investigation of Giorgio Vasari’s 1565 fresco The Battle of Marciano in the Palazzo Vecchio, as well as Botticelli’s painting The Map of Hell, based on Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century epic poem The Divine Comedy.
These art references are an insidious joke, since Howard and Hanks care little about making art in this franchise. They traduce Western cultural heritage for a Halloween spectacle. Perhaps they flatter themselves that nodding towards green ecology and political subterfuge transforms the hackwork that fills their banking portfolios into something of significance. But when you see biologist Bertran Zobrist (Ben Foster), who warns against overpopulation, throw himself out of a bell tower in an early scene (promoting a future thrill ride at a theme park?), or crowds of people in apocalyptic stampedes fleeing epidemiological disasters, you know only morons would consider this anything but junk.
It is the art citations and the Catholic Church–bashing that make the Howard-Brown-Hanks franchise more annoying than those aimed at gullible fanboys, like the unintelligible Lord of the Rings films, the unmagical Harry Potters, the asinine Toy Storys. Langdon’s atheistic trek through fiscally fragile Europe, always with a comely scream queen in tow (this time, Felicity Jones), is so insensitive to political and spiritual needs that it makes Gianfranco Rosi’s guilt-inducing, open-borders documentary Fire at Sea look like a humanitarian mission.
Really, what could be more offensive than rich Hollywoodians like Howard and Hanks traipsing through a collapsing Europe, contributing to its disintegration — and the diminishment of our literary and art heritage — merely for the delectation of jaded, semi-literate moviegoers? Inferno is further proof of the global dumbing-down. It’s awful enough to force conservative as well as liberal filmgoers to understand that Hollywood bigwigs are, ultimately, as indifferent to the human condition as they are to art. They use international spies, art and theology experts, as well as poor migrants as exploitation fodder. And Howard isn’t even good at it. The desperate blatancy of his violent scenes, such as the hallucinatory imagery of blood flooding out of windows, is just gross. How did cute little Opie turn into such a craven, crude sadist?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RH2BD49sEZI%3Fshowinfo%3D0
The National Treasure franchise (in which a hunt through political relics reveals our Founding Fathers’ history) is far preferable to this anti-patriotic, non-believer’s nonsense. Howard and Hanks perpetuate Dan Brown’s cynicism for craven purposes — although I don’t doubt that it’s a reflex of their liberal sarcasm. Dante’s Latin mottos cerca trova (“Seek and ye shall find”) and then its anagram catrovacer that appear throughout Inferno resemble a National Treasure–style joke, but those mottos might as well be references to millennial culture’s love of corruption and longing for self-destruction: Seek oblivion and ye shall find it, even at junk movies.
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In Inferno, Dante’s circles-of-hell metaphor sounds TV-smart (the kind of implausible reference Tony Soprano might make), but the literary analogy is well suited to the Hollywood hills or the D.C. Beltway’s avenue-grid. This end-of-the-world tease recalls Robert Altman’s end-of-culture alarum in his 1992 film The Player, which has now been remastered as a Criterion Blu-Ray. Altman went beyond Hollywood’s customary behind-the-scenes self-mockery to produce the most cynical of all his cynical films. He took dead aim at the venality behind franchise culture.
The homicide investigation in Michael Tolkin’s script goes to extremes, but the moral point of The Player exposes the murderousness of the Hollywood system that boasts “Movies. Now more than ever” as an industry motto. (Change the noun to “media” for a 21st-century update.) The venality of Inferno came to mind while watching Altman’s tale of industry skullduggery — a reality no one admits to anymore, even though the large cast of celebrities attests to the truth that Altman and his colleagues knew and were indentured to, yet were unable to change.
#related#The treacherous hero, studio boss Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins perfecting yuppie scum), addresses a glittering throng to proclaim “the art of motion pictures.” He adds: “Many people across the country have for too long supported the idea of movies as a popular entertainment rather than an art and I’m afraid a large majority of the press supports this attitude.” That’s more true now than ever. That’s why The Player burns off the phantasmagorical glow of Altman’s greatest Hollywood farce, The Long Goodbye (available in a lustrous Blu-Ray from Kino).
The Player, which Altman made after years of struggle, with all Hollywood fascination worn away, is Altman’s dour version of Dante’s Inferno. His satire forces us to realize the obscenity of Clinton-era corruption — once again. This ironic “triumphant” double-ending (which recently puzzled a New York Times critic) fills a viewer with absolute, justified disgust. Altman’s mockery of Hollywood formula is mortifying — but his detail of an executive tripping in humiliation makes the failing painfully human. Both Inferno and the media’s current presidential campaign give The Player new relevance.