The Conspirator Abra-sham-Lincoln
I’m sorry, I’ve been spoilt. I’ve watched Al Swearengen feed dope fiends to Chinese pigs and Cy Toliver put out cigars on a whore’s left hand, all the while pontificating on life’s existential dilemmas of the hopelessness and fatalistic nature of maggots swimming in dead women’s eyes . The Conspirator chases up the same muddied alleyways of the late nineteeth century world of Deadwood, but seems to fall considerably short on the master work that has come before it. Give me any day of the Christian week, a strung out hustler being drowned in a bathtub over a period melodrama with too many tv actors and an even greater surplus of fake moustaches.
The Conspirator follows hard on the Hollywood tradition of painting by numbers. It is a well intentioned and an oft times, almost substantial reach into civil war complications and contradictions that make up the better angels of American ideology. Better to sacrifice a life for an idea, better to sacrifice a brother tomorrow for a mother today, better to fight for an impossibility and die, rather than live in emptiness and submission. Unfortunately The Conspirator simply falls too short of its grand ideal. Although it tries hard and as mentioned, nearly succeeds in portraying a gritty, nineteeth century landscape, all too often the illusion is ruined by the lighting, which looks like it is off the set of Six Feet Under as well as a barrage of lowbrow actors including Justin Long, Tom Wilkinson and Irish favourite Colm Meaney. The opening scene, which is supposed to set the tone for the film, looks like a parody outtake from a parody film, where you expect a director to yell cut and walk across screen yelling into his Blackberry at an unseen camera assistant.
I wanted to love this film as much as it’s poster but alas “Thus always to tyrants” and the tyrant in this case is Robert Redford, who has turned nationalist passion and bloodthirsty conviction into stale courtroom melodrama. It’s like an episode of LA Law without good writing or Corben Bernstein. The one redeeming feature of the piece is an unrecogniseable Robin Wright (nee Penn) who I last saw slow dancing with Irish gangster Terry Noonan in the near perfect State of Grace (1990). She is fantastically wasted. She is like a few actors we all see now and then, wandering amidst what looks like the prehistory of a film age yet to be ushered into the mainstream. There’s very little reality here, the standards are appallingly low. The dialogue is pedestrian, the actors seem to be chosen to simply make do and one of the most dramatic episodes of the formation of modern America is reduced to paltry and predictable slops.
The Consirator is okay. Okay like a Sandra Bullock movie is okay. It turns at the right moments and has a decisively cute arse, but when you get stuck in and have a good look, there’s little more than a Southern tale fondling with its own importance, but ultimately delivering none of its intended promise. If you’ve never seen any television or film in your life, The Conspirator will probably make you cry, if you have seen any television or film before, it’ll do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment