Book Review: “The Last Action Heroes” by Nick De Semlyen

Nick De Semlyen, the editor of movie magazine Empire, recently published a film history book with a very clear title, The Last Action Heroes: the Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage. De Semlyen’s book focuses on eight of Hollywood’s major action stars of the eighties and nineties: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, Jackie Chan, Bruce Willis, and Steven Seagal.

De Semlyen’s writing is professional, research-heavy, and readable. The author never makes his overview of this period in Hollywood history about him. He never even mentions what led him to write the book. The back of the book includes thirty pages of citations and the depth of research and thought is palpable in this thoughtful, intelligent, and fun book.

The Last Action Heroes doesn’t seem to set out to put any of these performers on a pedestal or take them down either. De Semlyen recognizes the discipline that most of these movie stars share – Stallone waking up at 4 or 5 am every morning both before and during his stardom to work out, Schwarzenegger’s decision to cut ties with his Austrian parents when he moved to California to pursue his career, Van Damme finding someone to take care of his dog when he left Belgium for the United States – while also pointing out their many flaws, both self-acknowledged and alleged by others. Even the star the author seems to warm to the least, the famously arrogant Seagal, is illuminated through anecdotes that illustrate his capacity for generosity and diplomacy.

De Semlyen probably could have included more consideration on how these stars’ films, with their hardcore violence, might normalize or even promote violence in the real-world. Then again, one of the book’s strengths is that it is a very clear work of journalism rather than cultural criticism. He does mention Norris’s decision to make less violent television shows and movies, Willis’s complaints about always carrying a gun in his projects, and Stallone’s eventual turn towards very public and brave anti-gun, pro-gun control stances.

This is a fun and immensely readable book.

Book Review: “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” by Alex Pappademas

Last week while walking on Fourth Street in Long Beach, I stumbled upon Casita Bookstore where I discovered “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant: The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon” by the Los Angeles-based writer Alex Pappademas. Like Keith Phipps’s recent “The Age of Cage: Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career,” Pappademas’s 2022 book is a work of both film criticism and film biography. Phipps’s book found recurring motifs in Nicolas Cage’s films while describing Cage’s life at the time of each film’s production. Pappdemas takes a similar approach with the movie star Keannu Reeves and analyzes the Reeves films he picks largely in the chronological order in which they were released. 

“Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” is both funny and sad. Pappademas opens his book by describing his introduction to Reeves for a 2019 magazine profile and Reeves’ befuddlement at Pappademas’s description of the layout of his home. This anecdote establishes the concerns of the book: Reeves’s public persona based on kindness and generosity, his difficulty just being a person when he can’t go anywhere without people recognizing him, and our shared collective difficulty in feeling heard and understood. While Reeves can be an outsized performer and, like Nicolas Cage, a bit of a joke, “Keanu Reeves Most Triumphant” also explores some well-known painful facts about Reeves including his father’s imprisonment, the stillborn death of his child, and the fatal car accident death of his child’s mother.

I enjoyed Pappademas’s book and devoured its 301 pages in a week. My only complaint is that Pappademas might as well have covered every Keanu Reeves project for a book of this length. Reeves’s Zen teacher performance in “Thumbsucker,” very much keeping with his sage screen persona, is overlooked. Pappademas also neglects Reeves’s personal connection to the band Sonic Youth, who once played in the middle of an ice skating rink for a Reeves birthday party. Overall, Pappademas has written a book that is fun, funny, sad, and interesting like its subject.

Scott Frank’s Shaker

Scott Frank is a long-time screenwriter and more recent director best known for his screenplays for Logan and Minority Report (among other box office successes) as well as being the creator of the Neflix series Godless and The Queen’s Gambit. His first novel, Shaker, was published in 2016, and I became aware of it that year when a film critic (whose name I forget) for the Seattle publication The Stranger tweeted about it.

I recently read the 355 page thriller over the span of a few days, and had a mixed reaction to it. Frank created a propulsive and adult high-concept premise: a New York hitman named Roy Cooper comes to L.A. a few weeks after a damaging city-wide earthquake to kill a mob accountant only to unwittingly and somewhat mistakenly become a viral hero after being caught on video trying to save an elderly jogger from being mugged at gunpoint by four gang members. In a very twisty plot, the jogger turns out to be a mayoral candidate and Cooper’s unwanted hero status destroys his anonymity and a dangerous person from his past come looking for him.

Shaker works best as a darkly comic, cynical thriller. Cooper is a killer for hire, but in a rush to judgment echo chamber culture he is regarded as a brave hero. The city’s craven mayor is both relieved that his opponent has been killed, but is also fearful that he’s going to be rightly accused of holding this relief. Some of
Frank’s best dialogue comes from his awareness of this kind of hypocrisy in people, particularly with regard to one of the L.A. mayor’s staffers being an academic who displays far more empathy for the jogger’s marginalized killers than the murdered innocent victim.

Cooper is given a whole traumatic backstory, and the book flits between the high-concept present premise and the hitman’s tragic origin story. The book is unrelentingly grim in detailing Cooper’s dark childhood and adolescent. Anyone with half a brain is going to know a hitman has had a hard life. I don’t think Frank needed to basically write two novels in one to get this point across. This made me think of Tom Cruise’s character in Collateral, another high-concept hitman in L.A. premise, and how Cruise and his director Michael Mann summed up their character’s reason for being a hitman in a sentence or two. Shaker would have benefitted from his hard brevity. Frank’s earthquake premise also ends up having very little to do with the plot. While the novel does end on a few notes of compassion and solidarity, I was grateful to finish this nasty thriller. There’s been some talk that Frank is writing a sequel. I’m not sure I’ll check it out.

David Thomson’s Disaster Mon Amour

Famed British-born, San Francisco-based author David Thomson recently published Disaster Mon Amour, a slim 198 page book on our collective cinematic addiction to disaster. Thomson has been very prolific recently and has published several thoughtful and provocative books in the past few years. His Sleeping with Strangers argued that our collective love affair with beautiful stars on the screen has set us up for desiring others and things we generally can’t have. In Murder and the Movies, he also persuasively argued that violence and revenge in film has had a violent impact on our collective psyche and has influenced violent people. These are not new or far-fetched arguments and his other recent book, A Light in the Dark, was an overview of significant filmmakers, which might suggest Thomson has run out of ideas.

Whether these book prompts are novel are not, Thomson continues to be a fascinating and even seductive writer. He consistently writes in a style that makes me feel he is only writing to me, and I’m sure many other of his readers feel this way. Thomson is known for his orneriness, and that is apparent in sections of this new book including when he writes about Meryl Streep and Sophie’s Choice. According to Thomson, “Streep did win the Oscar, and she deserved it. She always deserves it, and usually gets nominated because she commands a strain of brilliant artifice that reassures and impresses the dumb Academy” (65).

Overall, though, Thomson’s book comes from a concerned and caring place. He began researching the book before the current pandemic, and frequently mentions how in disaster movies hundreds or thousands of human figures die and the viewer isn’t meant to care. Thomson reflects on this indifference to human life on screen, and how in the real world many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of Covid and how many more of their family members have suffered with this loss. Thomson repeatedly comes back to the Dwyane Johnson movie San Andreas, where countless people die in an earthquake and contrasts it with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which follows a father and son in a post-apocalyptic world. According to Thomson, McCarthy illustrates care about single lives whereas a film like San Andreas clearly doesn’t. At one point, Thomson’s book basically becomes a diary of the first few months of the pandemic, and this might have made for a stronger, separate book.

I mostly enjoyed Thomson’s book, but I felt a lot of it had already been covered in some more recent critical film books. Peter Biskind brilliantly argued in his The Sky is Falling that disaster narratives in texts such as The Walking Dead strengthened the extremist views that have led to the profoundly polarized world we live in. Mick LaSalle’s more recent Golden State also eloquently covers movies like San Andreas and the clear death wish in Hollywood and its audience to watch its beloved cities be destroyed by earthquakes and aliens.

In this book, Thomson writes about watching Rachel Maddow on television throughout the pandemic, which often brings to mind his far stronger Television: A Biography from a few years back. At the end of A Light in the Dark, he makes the argument that the last four hours of the third season of Ozark are more compelling that Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. I’d be very interested in reading a book by Thomson about TV in the steaming age.

Interesting Things I Read and Saw in 2021

One of the main reasons I rarely blog is that most film blogs I come across have a diary style that is a lot weaker than the type of strong, formal film criticism found in a rare film magazine such as Cineaste. Since I don’t venture out to movie theaters again just yet, it would be difficult for me to fairly make a list of the best new films I saw in 2021 so instead I’ll go for the diary route after all and mention some of the films and books that stuck with me this year, many of them not being 2021 releases.

This year, I read several ‘making of’ books including Steven Hyden’s funny, depressing (for its observant candor about our polarizing, tech-dependent last two decades) Radiohead’s “Kid A” and the Beginning of the 21st Century, Glenn Kenny’s also funny, warm (for its clear affection for Martin Scorsese and his Goodfellas team) Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, and W.K. Stratton’s The Wild Bunch. Of the three, Stratton’s book feels the most dense with history, covering the director Sam Peckinpah’s biography, the making of his film The Wild Bunch, the Mexican Revolution, and the film’s lasting influence on American cinema.

I also read Tom Shone’s thoughtful but very subject-interview-focused book on Christopher Nolan, The Nolan Variations. In terms of books on a single director released this year (and read by me), Adam Nayman’s recent David Fincher: Mind Games was the strongest, most accessible, and most intelligent. I also read David Thomson’s book on violence in film and its potential/obvious negative impact, Murder and the Movies, and his overview of important filmmakers, A Light in the Dark. While these book premises may suggest Thomson has run out of ideas, he is as sharp and provocative as ever, and like Kenny, Hyden, and Stratton, he is able to look at texts from the past with today’s culture and mores in mind while also finding value within the texts for what they were at the time they were released. His age (eighties) and experience do give him a deserved place in film criticism. My partner gave me the hefty Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, and while its team’s thorough list of entries are fascinating (preferring the nearly unheard of The Zodiac to Fincher’s Zodiac) I longed for Thomson’s seductive writing style while reading it.

Few new film releases really struck out at me this year. The most memorable new releases were two very different music documentaries. One, The Velvet Underground, was by the hip, smart, and provocative Todd Haynes, and unsurprisingly covered the hip, smart, and provocative band The Velvet Underground. What made this film feel fresh was that most of the interview subjects were individuals who were either in the band (such as John Cale, who is still living) or knew the band intimately or at least were part of the same circle they ran in (i.e. the film critic Amy Taubin). This is sadly a strong contrast to the tendency in recent music docs to make the ‘talking heads’ be a long line of sycophant famous fans.

On that note, Penny Lane’s Listening to Kenny G is also unique. What starts off as a documentary about the world’s most successful instrumental jazz musician quickly becomes a portrait of how profoundly hated Mr. G’s music is in the serious jazz community. A lot of Lane’s interviewees are professional music critics who are politely astonished by Mr. G’s success despite his bland music and clear cultural appropriation. What’s even more fascinating about the documentary is that Kenny G, who also interviews with Lane, comes across as earnest, considerate, hard-working, grateful, and kind to his fans and friends even as he seems oblivious to why people would take issue with his music and its wide appeal.

Unwilling to venture into movie theaters, I did watch several older films through The Criterion Channel and sometimes through Mubi. Being able to watch a curated series of films starring the American actor Robert Ryan on The Criterion Channel including Bad Day at Black Rock, Crossfire, Caught, The Set-Up, On Dangerous Ground, and Odds Against Tomorrow illustrated how fortunate any film fan with Criterion is and how much more accessible classic film is now with many streaming services.

A Few Thoughts on Adam Nayman’s David Fincher Book

I finished reading film critic and academic Adam Nayman’s auteurist take on the American filmmaker David Fincher, David Fincher: Mind Games, last week. Since the book isn’t that fresh in my mind, I’ll skip a full review and just post a few thoughts I had on it.

Overall, Nayman has released a very fine, attractive, and intelligent book. He includes many still images from Fincher’s body of work, and in a nod to the growth of fan art there are also several illustrations created by different artists. I appreciate that Nayman decided to utilize multiple illustrators, which alludes to the wide array of film-related fan art out there. These illustrations often take up two pages in this lavish hardcover book, and for each chapter on an individual film being studied there are two illustrated figures from the movie placed in opposition from one another. This is a good place to mention that Nayman places a heavy emphasis on dialectics in Fincher’s body of work and displays some clarity in discussing psychology in film (just as he did in his last book on Paul Thomas Anderson). Nayman also deserves a lot of praise for not simply creating an interview book with Fincher or mainly relying on Fincher’s own interview quotes (as Tom Shone did with mixed results in his recent book on Christopher Nolan). In fact, like with his book on P.T.A., Nayman interviews Fincher’s collaborators, and those interviews reveal that the notoriously perfectionistic Fincher has repeatedly shown loyalty and support to his collaborators. His long-time casting director started off as his music video assistant, and his most recent cinematographer started off as a gaffer on one of his previous films (!).

I wish that Nayman had been more critical or pressing when it comes to Fincher’s repeated obsession with policing and how that impacts viewers’ understanding of policing in the real world. With Fincher’s Se7en, Zodiac, and Gone Girl (I haven’t seen his Mindhunter series), detectives are consistently portrayed as well-meaning even if they don’t end up catching the criminal. I think that this overall positive if not sympathetic depiction of police work needs more thought especially in light of the polarizing zeitgeist when it comes to police in the U.S. in the past two years. I was also surprised that Nayman didn’t refer to more older, esteemed critics and their takes on Fincher. The late Robin Wood (who had also been based in Nayman’s Toronto) is never mentioned nor is his astute observation that Fincher’s early films represented a corporate conspiracy trilogy nor is David Thomson who in his famous Biographical Dictionary of Film has referred to Fincher as someone who likely doesn’t read much and in his recent Murder and the Movies has implied that the public might be better off with someone like him having never been around to repeatedly make violent movies with or without serial killers.

I read several film-related books this year, and Nayman’s was by far the strongest.

Briarpatch on Peacock

I was late to Andy Greenwald and Rosario Dawson’s single season television series Briarpatch. The series, cancelled after one season at the start of 2020, was based upon a novel by Ross Thomas. Dawson plays a U.S. Senate investigator who has left D.C. and returned to her small hometown in Texas to investigate the car bomb murder of her younger sister. We’ve seen this setup oh so many times before, but Briarpatch feels fresher largely thanks to a strong cast led by Dawson and some bold updates to the paranoid conspiracy thriller genre.

Briarpatch was broadcast on the USA Network, produced by Anonymous Content- responsible for other intelligent, postmodern series True Detective and Mr. Robot, and executive produced by Mr. Robot‘s creator Sam Esmail. Like those shows and Hulu’s recent murder mystery dramady Only Murders in the Buildings, Greenwald and Dawson’s series places a heavy emphasis on its setting (the Lone Star state) and fills it with an admirable cast. Dawson, who has always been strongest playing characters who are serious, intelligent, and also stricken, was born to lead a noir series. She’s ably supported by American television’s most underrated actress, Kim Dickens, as well as Mad Men‘s Jay Ferguson, Edi Gathegi, Brian Geraghty, Christine Woods, David Paymer, the late Ed Asner, and Alan Cumming.

American television certainly didn’t need another conspiracy-related murder mystery, but Briarpatch is colorful- both visually and through a Tarantino-esque collection of old pop songs, funny, and unpredictable. Throughout the series, characters listen to an Alex Jones/Joe Rogan-like radio nut job, a Greek Chorus for modern times connecting the characters through space, airwaves, electricity, and capitalism. I was lukewarm on the show until this radio personality actually shows up on the show played by an actor going far against type. I won’t spoil much more except to say that like another short-lived conspiracy masterpiece, Terriers, Briarpatch will probably be regarded years, if not decades now, as some kind of grungy, knowing, cognitive mapping work of art.

On Alex Garland’s Heady and Frustrating DEVS

After not updating this blog in nearly two months, I felt compelled to write again after spending months watching, taking breaks from, and then returning to writer-director Alex Garland’s eight episode mini-series Devs from Hulu and FX. While I try to make my essays about the texts I critique and not my personal experience in consuming them, I can’t think of another short series where all the episodes were available for streaming at once and I decided to watch them spaced out over the course of a few months. You know, as if each new episode was being released in weekly intervals.

The reason I took my time with Devs is that it doesn’t start off particularly strong. In the first episode, Lily (Sonoya Mizuno) and Sergei (Karl Glusman) are a young couple living together in San Francisco. They are both computer engineers for a large tech company in Silicon Valley known called Amaya. Neither Lily nor Sergei are particularly interesting, brave, or sympathetic characters. They are introduced impatiently and uncaringly stepping over a homeless man living on their apartment building steps before they take a company bus from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, and the series’ writer-director-auteur Alex Garland remains uninterested in commenting on the tech industry’s disturbing and unprecedented real-world gentrification of San Francisco. It is in the first episode that Sergei is promoted by Amaya’s founder and CEO Forest (Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation going far against type) to the company’s experimental development division known as Devs. Hopefully it’s not a major spoiler to reveal that Sergei discovers something awful about Devs as soon as he begins there and mysteriously disappears, putting Lily firmly in the position of ‘protagonist in a paranoid conspiracy thriller genre’ that has now gotten rather old in film and especially television- especially when conspiratorial misinformation is spread so easily and significantly online.

Like so many conspiracy thriller protagonists who have lost a friend or loved one under mysterious circumstances (See Warren Beatty in The Parallex View or Fox Mulder in The X-Files), Lily is determined to find out what happened to Sergei. What’s less apparent and never becomes apparent in the show is why Lily feels so compelled to find answers to Sergei’s disappearance, especially when even in flashbacks Sergei isn’t revealed to be particularly bright, caring, honest, funny, or sensitive. In this regard, Lily makes for a rather bland heroine and Sergei an even less interesting victim even if Garland deserves credit for writing Lily as a female protagonist in a genre that is usually male-oriented and casting an Asian performer.

Mizuno is also very good and believable in the series even though Garland gives her character little depth, and the said can be said for most of the cast and their respective characters. Forest has named his company after a daughter he lost in a car accident, and, like in Garland’s previous films Ex Machina and Annihilation, Devs is a sci-fi thriller in which Forest is trying to develop a software that can replay the past and predict the future. So like Lily in seeking to avenge Sergei, Forest has very clear motivation for developing and protecting this software (he wants to be reunited with his daughter), but what led him to be so ruthless in doing so and even how he became a tech messiah is less clear. For every character in this series, which interestingly only has a handful of major characters, there is one large motivation they are holding onto and little other character depth. The same can be said for Lily’s puppy-dog ex Jamie (Jin Ha) who follows her around tragically to try and get her back and Forest’s number two Katie (Allison Pill) who is also his girlfriend and has benefitted from his largesse.

In a television era where characters have complicated backstories and often refuse to remain static, Devs suffers tremendously from superficial character development. In Garland’s last two films, characters played by the likes of Oscar Isaac and Natalie Portman felt like complicated, imperfect people living in sci-fi worlds; their strengths and flaws leading them to make choices that would shape their film’s plots. In Devs, Garland seems to have given his characters only the most rudimentary motivations so he can explore his larger philosophical question: do we have free will or are our fates pre-determined? Ex Machina touched upon this already in its exploration of data-mining and artificial intelligence as well as its title (derived from deus ex machina), but whereas Ex Machina is a lean movie with only three major characters, Devs is nearly seven hours long (without commercials), several thin characters, and enough conspiracy thriller cliches to compile a running list of seen-before tropes. In a world where Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, and Google are knowingly harming democracy for the sake of profit, Forest’s quest to resurrect his daughter seems rather benign. In this regard, American life today and the way it is being harmed by social media and search engines is stranger than Garland’s fiction.

“Doctor Sleep: The Director’s Cut” Will Keep You Awake

I was late to Mike Flanagan’s 2019 Doctor Sleep, a sequel to one of the best films made by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980). Did the likely best horror movie of all time need a sequel? No, but Stephen King did write the novel The Shining in 1977 and then wrote its sequel Doctor Sleep in 2013, and King himself did give Flanagan his blessing to adapt the latter book so a Shining sequel in 2019 wasn’t entirely desperate.

The premise of Doctor Sleep is simultaneously more interesting and more absurd than you might guess. Dan Torrance, played with characteristic likability by Ewan McGregor, has grown into a traumatized and angry alcoholic after he and his mother were nearly killed by his possessed father at the Overlook Hotel all those decades ago. He has his moment of clarity after doing something truly selfish and amoral in New Jersey and then taking a bus to New Hampshire where he is taken in by a kindly park groundskeeper played by the ever-reliable Cliff Curtis. After sobering up with the help of AA, Dan gets a job as an orderly at a nursing home where a white cat named Azzie is prone to lay on the beds of elderly patients as they are about to pass away. Dan uses his telepathy, what he refers to as his ‘shine,’ to comfort his dying patients as they leave this world by helping them go to their final sleep (hence his nickname Doctor Sleep). The film’s scenes in the nursing home are consistently sad and touching as Doctor Sleep and Azzie help ease the suffering of vulnerable people at the end of their lives and Flanagan and his cinematographer Michael Fimognari clearly watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master before embarking on this equally decades-spanning narrative.

A movie just about Dan Torrance and a prescient cat assisting the dying out of inter-connection and compassion alone could have been a strong movie, but King has consistently illustrated that goodness exists amongst evil and so one film about a sober Dan Torrance assisting the elderly nearly switches gears and becomes one about his fight against concentrated evil. As Dan Torrance is staying sober in New Hampshire, a young black girl in the same state is also developing her own shining powers. Abra, played with plausible precociousness by Kyliegh Curran, has very strong shining abilities. Hers are so strong that she not only reaches out to the decent Dan, but also a caravan cult known as the True Knot who murder children and feed off their innocence. If this sounds fantastical, just consider how seriously film scholars have taken seriously the premise of the Overlook Hotel as a haunted hotel for four decades. The True Knot is led by Rose the Hat, a woman who is evil enough to kidnap and kill innocent children and conniving enough to convince her cult followers that what they’re doing is justified because it keeps them alive. Rose is played by Rebecca Ferguson, who gets the film’s showy part and her charming and melodramatic performance would make 80s era Jack Nicholson proud.

When I first started watching Flanagan’s director’s cut, Doctor Sleep felt like highbrow fan fiction complete with flashbacks to the events from the first film as well as recurring characters from the original text. There’s more depth to this late sequel than meets the eye though. If the Overlook Hotel was a fixed manifestation of evil, then the mobile True Knot is an allegory of ever-feeding capitalism, crossing state lines and borders, leaving behind only suffering and death. Rose and her minions dress like aging hippies, but their counterculture aesthetic merely masks American capitalist selfishness. The True Knot only think of themselves, and what feels good to them and how they can take the lives of others in order to prolong their own lives and pleasures. In that regard, they share common ground with both the conservative anti-maskers of this year along with the allegedly liberal victim-status cancel culture mob of the past few years as well. The power of Doctor Sleep is that its vision of evil is all-encompassing and boils down to selfishness: from the self-centeredness of taking too many drinks to taking any lives.

Edward Norton’s Ambitious, Intelligent Motherless Brooklyn

I was late to Edward Norton’s 2019 film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn, mainly because the reviews I came across on the film had been critical of how far Norton strayed from Lethem’s source material. I’m happy to report that Norton’s film is ambitious, intelligent, dense, and makes for a fine and very different adaptation of Lethem’s book. I’d go so far as to say that Norton’s film is stronger than Lethem’s original work, but “the book was better” or the less often “the film was better” stance is hardly ever a fair argument for judging one text’s quality. That being said, here it is difficult to discuss Norton’s film without comparing and contrasting it to Lethem’s book.

There are some major differences between the two texts. While Lethem’s novel took place in 1999, Norton’s film takes place in the 1950s. In Lethem’s book, the protagonist Lionel seemed and acted like a much younger person while in Norton’s film he’s clearly in his late 40s. In both texts, Lionel is a private investigator working for the Brooklyn snoop Frank Minna along with three other hoodlums Minna once rescued from a Catholic orphanage along with Lionel. When Minna is killed pursuing a job, Lionel has to put his intelligence and investigative skills towards finding his boss’s and surrogate father’s killer. In Lethem’s book, Minna is a small-time hood with a buried heart of gold whereas Norton’s Minna is played briefly and touchingly by a far more dapper and warmer Bruce Willis. Norton plays Lionel, and convincingly conveys the character’s constant Tourette’s syndrome outbursts. In the book, Lethem paints Lionel’s tics and convoluted thought patterns in heartbreaking density. In the film, Norton displays his character’s verbal outbursts effectively and without relying on excessive VoiceOver narration.

Norton’s decision to move to film’s setting from the end of the 20th century towards its postwar period was not an unmerited one. Lethem’s detective novel is a noir piece, and the story lends itself well to a directly noir postwar period. Like the shell-shocked WWII veteran Freddie Quell in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Lionel is an outsider unable to get proper institutional treatment for his affliction even as so many benefit from the postwar economic boom, but is saved by an equally benevolent and manipulative father figure (Philip Seymour Hoffman in PTA’s film, Bruce Willis here).

In Norton’s film, the real antagonist behind Minna’s murder and seemingly every injustice in New York City is Moses Randolph, a city planner played with prudent villainy by Alec Baldwin and clearly based on the real-life New York City planner Robert Moses. Randolph has maneuvered himself into multiple city commissioner positions and created his own Bureau Authority. He is enabled by a team of bureaucrats set to profit greatly from clearing African “slums” in order to build costly housing for white families. Like Daniel Plainview in PTA’s There Will Be Blood and Noah Cross in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Randolph is even willing to harm his own blood relatives, including his brother played by Willem Dafoe, in order to amass power and control.

The scholar Fredric Jameson has written extensively about how the conspiracy film is a poor man’s version of cognitive mapping, the impossible goal of situating oneself within global capitalism. What Norton accomplishes, intentionally or not, is an attempt at cognitive mapping. Just as Lionel’s mind leads him down an uncontrollable path of mental obsessions and verbal tics and outbursts, Randolph’s ever-expanding reach over land, roads, parks, beaches, and buildings creates a clear and complicated flow of money, human connections, and human and financial costs. Just as Lionel’s mental space is a mess, so is the sprawl of global capitalism. This is what Norton’s film so brilliantly and effectively conveys and what most film critics seem to have overlooked.