John Sayles, an American conscience
“I’m interested in the stuff I do being seen as widely as possible but I’m not interested enough to lie.”–John Sayles
John Sayles is a remarkable figure, maybe not quite unique or alone, but one of a small number of contemporary American filmmakers who have created substantial and distinguished bodies of work while working independently of the Hollywood system. Woody Allen and Spike Lee come to mind as in some sense kindred figures. No doubt there are others but not many who join Sayles, Allen, and Lee as American auteurs in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague. To be sure, each has distinctive concerns and vision that are manifest in his films, just as Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Chabrol, and the rest were distinct one from the other, with perhaps as much difference as there was common ground beyond a shared love of film.
Sayles is set apart from the others by ventures into the literary realm. Yes, Allen has published several collections of fine short pieces that show him to be a master of satire and parody, particularly adept at skewering the pretensions of intellectuals. Sayles, however, has cranked out full-fledged novels, including the recently published A Moment in the Sun, which I will not take up here but offer these passages from Nathaniel Rich’s essay in The New York Review of Books (“A Passionate Storyteller,” NYR, 18 August 2011) to give you some idea of vast scope of this novel and its themes:
[In six novels and twenty films] Sayles has proved himself a connoisseur of American shame. He has found his theme in the exploitation of West Virginia miners in the 1920s (Matewan), the 1919 Black Sox Scandal (Eight Men Out), electoral politics (Silver City), the Bay of Pigs (his previous novel, Gusanos), and rapacious real estate developers in Florida (Sunshine State) and New Jersey (City of Hope).
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A Moment in the Sun runs 955 pages, but the number is deceptive. The designer has narrowed the margins and reduced font size; with a little breathing room the page count might easily drift beyond 1,500. The novel is an encyclopedic portrait of an America era [at the end of the 19th century] when imperial, racist, and plutocratic power were asserted with exceptional force.Besides the novel about Wilmington [where the city's white aristocracy staged a coup d'etat to overthrow a local government coalition of Republicans (of that era, not the 21st century version) and populists elected by black voters, who made up a majority of the population], Sayles also intersperses two separate war novels: the first follows a regiment of black soldiers during the Spanish-American War; the second embeds the reader on both sides of the Philippine-American War (also the subject of Sayles’s new film, Amigo). There is a novella about the Klondike Gold Rush, and what amount to stand-alone short stories about the assassination of President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, a tense baseball game between black and white soldiers in a Chattanooga army camp, the travails of a sickly Lower East Side newsboy, and a Chinese peasant girls’ flight form a rural village in Shandong province to a Hong Kong whorehouse.
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Sayles can lose control, but over its 955 pages A Moment in the Sun is almost never dull. Though he is fascinated by the era, he doesn’t idealize it, as the excruciating accounts of nineteenth-century medical practices make clear. Ultimately, the nostalgia is not for a lost time, but for a type of novel that one rarely encounters anymore. In his historical epic—a forgotten genre itself—Sayles relies on a number of neglected conventions: a roving, omniscient narrator; an unambiguous political partisanship; a Manichaean approach to characters in which the heroes struggle to earn their daily bread and the villains preach white supremacy; and capacious, messy, impassioned storytelling. In the right hands, these strategies still retain the ability to excite and transport. A Moment in the Sun is evidence, and a reminder that this form of fiction needn’t be relegated to the rendering vat.
Anyone as prolific as Sayles is not apt to be a great stylist, and the aesthetic choices made by any filmmaker are always to a degree contingent on the resources available, which is say, funding. Sayles himself notes that “[A movie] may not look the way we’d like it to look, or sound the way we’d like it to sound or get seen by as many people as we’d like to have see it but at least it will say the stuff we want it to say.” Sayles is far from indifferent to matters of aesthetics and style, but what matters for him is content, that it “say the stuff we want it to say.” From John Sayles–Independent:
John Sayles was the original do-it-yourselfer. Even though his budgets have increased over the years — from $40,000 for Secaucus 7 to $4.5 million for Limbo (1999) — his basic MO hasn’t really changed. His methodical, buccaneering approach to film has become something of a legend in the Hollywood system.
From the beginning he has made his living and partly financed his own productions by working as a screenwriter for hire on commercial projects. In the early days, the films he polished or rewrote were mostly low-budget shockers like Piranha and Alligator. In recent years, he has worked as an uncredited “relief pitcher” on such high-profile releases as Mimic and Apollo 13. (Sayles gets the save if not the win.)
Amigo opened to harsh reviews. Some of the criticism has merit. Several of the soldiers are young boys from the deep South whose naïveté and lack of sophistication are believable, but the Southern accents, laid on way too thick, are not. They come off like actors in a mediocre sit-com trying to sound Southern. Nor are the lines always delivered well. Even Chris Cooper, a perfectly competent actor, as the cranky Col. Hardacre, comes off on occasion like an earnest but not especially capable amateur doing community theater. Here I expect better from Sayles. He settled for less than he ought to have been able to get from his cast.
The pace is slow and it takes a while for the characters, relationships, intrigues, and subplots to develop. Here, too, Sayles settles a bit, relying on stock types from countless war novels and films: the lifer colonel with not a doubt in his military mind that the way to subdue the insurgents is not with the carrot but with the stick; the good-natured but generally inept drunk we sense early on will come to a bad end; the kid with the clap; the innocent country boy who falls for a young village girl who does speak a word of English; the brainy one with the glasses who operates the telegraph; the lieutenant, an architect in civilian life, who gradually comes to respect the villagers over whom he has the power of life and death. The allusions to Vietnam and the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are apt but heavy-handed.
Character and plot develop through gradual accretion of details that requires the viewer’s patience and at times makes for a slow slog as the tale plays out with the inevitability of classic tragedy. The village headman is doomed the instant the Americans arrive. He tries to look out for his people, older men, women, and children, for all the young men, including his son, have left to fight with the insurgents. The Americans are convinced the headman is feeding information to the insurgents, while the insurgents, led by his brother, a former seminarian, believe he is collaborating with the Americans. There is no way he can win.
Yes, Sayles could deliver his content more effectively if it were done with a bit lighter hand, and we are generally well advised to be wary of historical parallels that are too easy and obvious. Yet the American experience in the Philippines does presage later misadventures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Sayles’ soldiers are strangers in a strange land, clueless about the native people and their culture, convinced of the righteousness of their actions, truly puzzled as to why they are not welcomed as liberators bringing democracy, freedom, and a better life. Not one American speaks the language of the villagers. They rely on a Spanish priest whose translations reflect his own bias. How could things possibly turn out well?
Near the end the lieutenant, by now sympathetic not just with the villagers but also to a degree with the insurgents, asks rhetorically why they keep fighting when it clear to everyone on both sides they cannot win, to which the telegraph operator replies, “It’s their country.” Just as Amigo is Sayles’ film. A film with shortcomings, yet one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the stuff Sayles wants to say that matters, and if he makes demands of the viewer along the way, that is fine as long as he holds up his end of the bargain with the reward of a deferred pleasure at the end that makes it worthwhile. Sayles holds up his end of the bargain. I left the theater not transformed or profoundly moved, no I could not say that, but I was happy that I had walked in two hours earlier.
David :: Sep.12.2011 :: House Red: Film, House Red: Miscellany :: No Comments »