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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: April 17, 2006

The Left Behind Collection

Filmic
adaptations of the highly successful, Christian-theology-infused
franchise of end-time novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins — which
offer up a fundamentalist interpretation of the Book of Revelations,
covering the Rapture, Tribulation and subsequent battle with the
Antichrist — The Left Behind Collection faces a unique cinematic challenge.

Like
a political-party hardliner faced with the sudden need to run to the
center, the films — which have bucked traditional Hollywood
distribution channels and seen to-scale sell-through success on a
grass-roots level later somewhat mimicked and honed by Tyler Perry for
his Madea movies — here seek to win more mainstream
action-suspense converts in collected form. While at times preachy and
certainly overly earnest, there’s a level of surprising polish above
and beyond their rather limited production means that generally help
these films score as relatively solid pieces of conspiratorial
entertainment, even for those not in their demographic wheelhouse.

The plot of the first film takes the Rapture as its leaping-off point. On an overseas flight, airline pilot Rayford Steele (Always stud-in-waiting and former Marlboro Man Brad Johnson) and reporter Buck Williams (Kirk Cameron, free from Growing Pains,
but still possessing a sitcom star’s instant likeability) cross paths.
Williams is a successful and well-regarded (if suspiciously green)
international correspondent on a CNN-like cable network, while Steele,
a cranky father of two, is a bit put off by his wife’s devotion to the
church. Soon the two, linked by flight attendant and fellow survivor
Hattie Durham (Cameron’s real life wife, Chelsea Noble), find
themselves caught in the middle of an incredible event. Without
warning, dozens of passengers simply vanish into the thin air. But it
doesn’t stop there. It soon becomes apparent that millions of people
are missing. As chaos and anarchy engulf the world and various white
men in suits begin jockeying for power, both men set out on a search
for answers — Williams the pragmatist and Steele the man of burgeoning
faith.

Pleasing the books’ Christian constituency factors largely into the
film’s mission, but it’s still undeniably accessible; it feels,
rightly, like the folksy opening chapter of a much grander story. The
thriller and mystery aspects of the narrative are less successfully
handled — if one presumes that included amongst those left behind would
be not only folks like our protagonists (secular but basically decent),
then it stands to reason there would also be a good number of both
people of different, but no less devout, faiths as well as some
downright malevolent criminals and lowlifes. All breezy theologizing
and non-specific menace, the film fails to address either of these
issues. That said, the character arcs are at least interestingly
written. It’s hard to strictly impose any social agenda on a piece of
entertainment, but Left Behind genially, almost charmingly
refuses to cater to a metropolitan worldview, and thus manages to walk
a decent line between proselytizing and entertainment, even if its
narrative inevitabilities are familiar.

The story continues with 2002’s Left Behind II: Tribulation Force and last year’s Left Behind: World at War,
which collectively center on the rise of darkly charismatic
international business leader Nicolae Carpathia (Gordon Currie), whose
uniting of the world in peace has distinctly sinister and self-serving
undertones. Despite increasing warnings and admonitions from both
Williams and his underground Tribulation Force, American President
Gerald Fitzhugh (Louis Gossett, Jr.) aligns himself with Carpathia and
his vision of a sustainable international concord. When a failed
assassination attempt opens his eyes to a wide-ranging conspiracy,
however, Fitzhugh must come to terms with the agonizing truth that
Carpathia has been secretly orchestrating a global war of biblical
proportions.

The DVDs here, each presented in a separate Amray case in a
cardboard slipcover, all feature a nice array of bonus material,
including making-of featurettes, blooper reels, cast and crew
biographies and deleted and extended scenes. On the first film, Noble,
Cameron and others also speak to their deep level of attachment to the
material. While, frustratingly, only the last movie is available in
anamorphic widescreen, The Left Behind Collection still marks the fine treatment of a carefully orchestrated apocalyptic trilogy. C+ (Movies) B+ (Discs)

The Cinema of Hostility

Reviewing Hostel on DVD recently had me thinking further about cinema of hostility, actually, and not just within the horror genre. No, my mind later wandered to all things underworld (though this time, not of Kate Beckinsale in leather). For all the refashioned pop flair of Guy Ritchie and Matthew Vaughn’s recent films, no one captured underclass British antagonism, resentment and its criminal acting out better than Alan Clarke.

In his day, working with the late Clarke was a sort of rite of passage for intense, up-and-coming British actors. A singular talent, the filmmaker delved into psychological torture and bellicose narratives long before they were in vogue, and his raw, unsettling visions often felt like found screeds from under a dirty, upturned rock. Clarke’s television work for the anthology series Play for Today included Psy-Warriors and Beloved Enemy, but his three best known works all delved into the psyche of violent young males.

In the late 1970s, Clarke was hired by the BBC to make a television drama about life inside a juvenile detention center. Its evocative, one-word title: Scum. A grim and graphic indictment of the British borstal system, the program was so relentlessly brutal that the horrified BBC banned its broadcast indefinitely. In defiance, Clark and his producer, Clive Parsons, refashioned the film as a feature, and loosed it upon an unsuspecting public in 1979. In it, a young Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast, The Proposition) stars as Carlin, a juvenile thug rising to the top of an inhuman prison hierarchy amidst violence and sexual assault.

The ferocious Made in Britain, released in 1982, serves as an English forerunner to both Romper Stomper and American History X. For those who think Russell Crowe and Edward Norton have the market cornered on charismatic racists, Tim Roth debuts here as Trevor, an eloquent teenage skinhead whose random acts of sadism send him on a snarling spiral through the English justice system. Scripted by David Leland, the film is an unsparing portrait of youth fueled by hate and rage, and ruled by a swallowed depression and despair.

1988’s The Firm, meanwhile, serves as a showcase for Gary Oldman, who gives a blistering performance as Bex Bissell, a middle-class family man who also leads a violent gang of soccer hooligans. While the real roots of Oldman’s nihilistic rage run deep to 1986’s Sid and Nancy, it was this telepic that first and best harnessed his quiet temper, and served as the underpinning for future brash turns in The Professional, The Fifth Element and even Air Force One.

Though Clarke was taken too soon, dying of cancer at 55 in 1990, his stirring work lives on, and is well worth a look for anyone who fancies uncompromising portraits of youth run amok — rampaging id hardwired to nervy ambivalence. All the above titles are available separately on DVD or via a great eponymous collection from Blue Underground released earlier this year, with still galleries and cast interviews from The Firm, both versions of the incendiary Scum and another bonus — the streamlined, 39-minute Elephant, part of the inspiration for Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name. In the latter, Clarke and producer Danny Boyle (28 Days Later) explore the political violence of Northern Ireland via the stark depiction of 18 separatist murders; Boyle also sits for an audio commentary. All the films are distinctly British, but still universal in their basic enmity.

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