Recession, Depression and Just Plain Depressing

Glenn Kenny reviews "Tokyo Sonata" and "The Last House on the Left."

“The Edge of Love” begins with intercut shots of lovely, red-lipped Keira Knightley crooning “Under The Blue Tahitian Moon,” and scenes of bombings and victims of bombings during the blitzkrieg of London in World War II. Because such contrasts are ironic, you see.

Screenwriter Sharman Macdonald — Knightley’s mum, as it turns out — extrapolates a ménage-a-trois out of some not-entirely-supported anecdotes from the life of poet Dylan Thomas. He — played by Matthews Rhys — runs into Vera Phillips, Knightley’s character, in a London pub. Apparently, they were childhood sweethearts, and Dylan, not yet a hopeless drunk, is eager to re-ignite their, um, acquaintance. But no sooner have the two connected cute than the mother of Dylan’s child, one Caitlin MacNamara, portrayed by the ever-hapless Sienna Miller, turns up. Caitlin and Vera get along like houses on fire, or at least houses with fireplaces — all Sapphic implications aside, they don’t do much more than snuggle in the picture. Complications set in when Vera catches the eye of a sympathetic but largely dim soldier, William Killick, played with his typical blue-eyed soul by Cillian Murphy. Killick just doesn’t understand these wacky artists and their lifestyles. And Thomas rambles on about “selling my soul by writing bloody propaganda films” and marches out of a screening room that director John Maybury means to evoke a scene out of “Citizen Kane.” No talk of villanelles here; just Vera calling Dylan “Dullan” and a lot of “give us a fag then,” until the point that something’s got to give. Yet another film about an artist that has zero interest in the artist’s art, just, you know, the fact that artists lead such interesting lives. Maybury, here coming back from having directed one of the very worst films ever (2005’s “The Jacket,” also starring Knightley), dreadfully overheats his material yet again, and illuminates precisely nothing. Miller transposes the way she’s rumored to behave in nightclubs to the MacNamara character, doing cartwheels in pubs and such. It’s all very tiresome; even Knightley and Murphy, who have been so creditable in other pictures, come off like dippy young dilettantes playing dress-up.

The 1972 film “The Last House on The Left,” written and directed by Wes Craven, is a landmark horror picture that received its most thorough and credible critical defense from Robin Wood, whose writings on the film can be found in his seminal book “Hollywood From Vietnam To Reagan.” My respect for Wood’s exegesis on the film is, I have to admit, pretty much matched by my very strong desire to never actually watch the film again. The movie, a variant on Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” that features such set pieces as the explicit disemboweling of a wayward flower child and an exchange in which a father goads his own son to blow his brains out, is an extremely unpleasant piece of filmmaking made all the more effective by its seeming artlessness.

Mr. Craven, who seems intent on turning his cinematic legacy into an ATM, is one of the co-producers of the remake of the film opening on Friday. Without getting into a point-by-point comparison between the films, I believe I can state without fear of contradiction that the new version trades in a vision of ever-eddying moral chaos for a rather more banal causality. That is, the degenerates who violate the teens here are equally motivated by a fear that their victims are going to rat them out as they are by their own degenerate lusts. Makes a little more “sense,” as they say, but isn’t quite so… jarring. Similarly, the film’s climax isn’t so much concerned with the fact that the representatives of putatively civilized society finally become as depraved as the film’s “villains” so much as it is with tactics and logistics; e.g. the question “Where are the keys to the boat?” rising in tandem with the high-register strings of John Murphy’s score.

Of course, the mayhem itself is the best that money can buy, and quite jarring. Screenwriters Adam Alleca and Carl Ellsworth add to the stabbings, shootings and rapes of the original with quite a bit of impromptu surgery (good patriarch Tony Goldwyn is a doctor), not to mention methods of torture and homicide lifted from post ’72-“House” films such as “Rolling Thunder,” “Irreversible,” and, believe it or not, “Gremlins.” It’s all entirely unpleasant, and pointless, and makes you want to do at least emotional harm to many of its cast members, although one does feel rather bad for poor Monica Potter, who plays the matriarch here; her transformation from ingénue into, um, Mom The Bad Guy Would Like To Violate has happened with unseeming quickness. (Indeed, upon leaving the screening, I heard one of my fellow all-media types moaning that Potter “deserved better,” then explaining to a friend that she was the daughter in the film. The daughter is played by 21-year-old Sara Paxton.) One does not, however, feel much of anything for Garret Dillahunt as Krug, the villain played so indelibly by Robert Hess in the ’72 original. Despite all the vile stuff his character does, Dillahunt himself comes off as less menacing than Johnny Knoxville on a bad day. Thus, he earns two black marks: for appearing in this piece of amoral trash in the first place, and then for utterly sucking in it.

Glenn Kenny is our guest critic for the month of March.

“Tokyo Sontata” opens in New York on March 13th. “The Edge of Love” opens in L.A. on March 13th and New York on the 20th. “The Last House on the Left” opens wide on March 13th.

[Additional photos: "Tokyo Sonata," Regent Releasing, 2009; "The Last House on the Left," Rogue Pictures, 2009]

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