Countdown

Countdown
dir. Robert Altman

No images of Countdown anywhere on world wide web.
This movie is lost in space.

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY

January 18, 2007 - 35mm/IFC Center

Worth noting in the Robert Altman canon is the 2nd half of this otherwise typical astronaut movie. The first half is a very calm, cool, collected character drama. Robert Duvall is frustrated (though in a rather subdued manner) that James Caan is picked for a solo mission to the moon. Jealousy runs rampant, though with the restraint you would expect from astronauts and their families. The way the families of astronauts were forced to become politicians, and thus look the cleanest of clean cut is fairly interesting. Moving from The Right Stuff to Apollo 13 to Countdown, every astronaut, their kids, their wives seem more or less physically interchangeable. Serious acting chops carry Caan, Duvall and Altman regular Michael Murphy through the first half with class, despite its rather uneventful nature.

Countdown opens with a Star Trek 2 “fake-out” featuring the aforementioned three leads. They’re prepping for one of the Apollo missions. News comes down the wire that the Soviets are on their way to the moon. The race is on. Countdown was released in 1968, a year before the United States won that leg of the space race and set foot on the rock. The Soviet vs. United States race was very real, but it did not reach the heights of this movie. The race in Countdown is a simple footrace through the stars, though the competition is nowhere in sight.

From the launch of the one-way solo spacecraft to the very last frame of the movie Altman fashions a deliberately paced and tense stretch of drama. As Jimmy Caan goes streaming through space, his communication (and lack of) with the base is just about all we get for 40 minutes. In 1968, all this switch flipping and technospeak must have sounded like nonsense. It still does today, but like all the grounded scenes in United 93 and the engineering babble in Primer the drama takes precedence over understanding what anybody is talking about. The banter between Duvall and Caan is so constant that when it is cut off, due to technical problems, the silence is deafening. All this is well and fine, but totally uninteresting.

Fatalism overtakes the rest of the story as Caan embarks on a suicide mission, and for what? For pride. For manliness. For poetry. Obvious parallels can be drawn between what happens toward the end of this movie and the overreaching themes of the far superior in every way, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was release mere weeks apart from Countdown. In part, I’m sure 2001 is responsible for the failure of Countdown. The final landing on the moon, in all of its loneliness and silence is shocking. Earth has lost communication and Caan is in the desert. He then embarks on a journey to find a small space station the U.S. landed on the moon not long before. In there he will live awaiting rescue. He has no idea where the station is. Along the way, as time and oxygen starts slipping away he comes across the spacesuited corpses of Soviet astronauts. This scene makes the movie worth watching. It is very, very simple, very quiet, and politically charged. There may be a space-race on Earth, but up there on the moon, there are no countries, no politics, no race. There is only cold loneliness. Mission accomplished.

Prime Suspect 2

Prime Suspect 2

dir. John Strickland

Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison ponders Jane Doe or Yorick

Jeff GP, NEW YORK CITY
January 2-4, 2007 - DVD

Prime Suspect 2, while being the second season in what appears to be a television show, is actually the second installment of a serialized mini-series…. or something. Proving herself a top-notch detective to a doubting bunch of man-cops (no, they don’t call each other “bobbies,” even though it’s England) in Prime Suspect 1, DCI Jane Tennison is now a respected leader of her unit, and thus, though not at the cause of and having nothing to do with, she is a full character, full in a spilling-over, exhausting full, and I credit Helen Mirren.

A young girl’s body is unearthed in the backyard of a home in an African-Caribbean neighborhood in London. Very quickly, racial tensions boil to the surface. It also becomes rather clear that white/black racism in England is a very different story than that in the United States. In England it is a racism borne less of slavery (though that certainly existed), and more of immigration. Meanwhile, Jane Tennison, in the aftermath of a heated Star Trek 2 “fake-out” re-introduction to her character, has a tryst with Sergeant Robert Oswalde, an equally ambitious black detective. As Tennison dashes off to take charge of the unidentified girl case, her tryst ends in a rash of name-calling.

What follows is a very, very complicated, difficult, seemingly dead-end murder mystery, where the victim is a skeleton that has been buried for a couple years now. The case is riveting and engrossing, of course, but secondary to just marveling at Helen Mirren’s performance. It is very rare you see a character that is so tough and so vulnerable in the same moment, but not necessarily like Indiana Jones. Unlike Indiana Jones, she is not permitted to crack a whip to solve her problems. She cannot fight back (as demonstrated in a scene where she is assaulted by a grieving mother). She must demonstrate patience, and use her vulnerability to toughen the skin As a reward for this patience and diligence, much like in Prime Suspect 1, she is eventually rewarded with an orgy of evidence. To be fair, she worked through sleepless night, but nonetheless, it is a little much when the walls come tumbling down. A deluge, the damn bursts open in the second half to unreasonable proportions, again much like Prime Suspect 1. Yet, the interesting thing about Prime Suspect 2 is that the story does not stop there. It continues.

Sgt. Oswalde is brought on the case to assuage difficulties Tennison’s troops are having with the African-Caribbean community. Tennison and he butt heads, due to personal and ethical differences, but they both push forward and again grow close. Oswalde has a big break in the case and Tennison, his superior, instructs him to be patient. In the series’ most impressive moments, Oswalde disobeys and goes rather mad. All the while, Tennison is in a hospital taking a confession from a dying man. Oswalde’s frenzy gets uglier and uglier and results in a death. We watch Oswalde go berserk and these images linger through every scene that follows. The remarkable thing about Mirren’s performance from this point on is how Tennison continues to work with Oswalde with the knowledge of an uncalled for outburst, and because she did not witness it, like we did, she is able to play the scenes in her typically cool demeanor. She is as tender to Oswalde as ever, despite the personal affront. An unease is sure to wash over the viewer as she seemingly turns a blind eye to his actions. Tennison did not observe this outburst, and therefore Mirren plays the part as though she cannot exactly understand what happened. The drama of their relationship unfolding in the final hour or so of Prime Suspect 2 is, to put it bluntly, complicated.

Colin Salmon, a newcomer to screen acting at the time, was faced with some task going toe-to-toe with the already showered with awards from Prime Suspect 1 Helen Mirren, and he truly does hold his own. And yet, Mirren is the reason to continue watching the show. It is easy to call it a gritty show, but nitty-gritty is better. It’s the sort of program that if you checked under the hood, it has dirty fingernails, bad teeth, a hairy back and probably a few STD’s. Everything is played like the most important event in the history of mankind is occurring, and every once in a while, narrative contrivances aside, that is true.

Finally, there is a character, Nola Cameron, who immediately assumes and is certain the skeleton belongs to her missing daughter. It turns out to not be her daughter, and thus, Nola Cameron disappears from the story. With the deluge of aforementioned narrative contrivances and loose ends tied and tied, could writer Allan Cubitt not work her back in? Let’s say I’m looking forward to Prime Suspect creator and Series 1 writer, Lynda La Plante’s return to the typewriter in Prime Suspect 3.