A sort of voting rights companion piece to Steve York’s A Force More Powerful, which was a rangy nonfiction film about non-violent resistance movements around the world and spanning time, Ben Moses’ A Whisper to a Roar is a powerful documentary that ties together the heroic and ongoing efforts of democracy activists in five countries, and reaffirms the human spirit’s innate desire for freedom.
“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong,” Voltaire once wrote, and A Whisper to a Roar offers up ample evidence of this axiom, in the form of lethal pushback by dictators, autocrats and other corrupted power systems when faced with challenges to their authority. A striking segment focusing on the Ukraine opens with the story of kidnapped journalist Georgiy Gongadze, and then charts the rise of the country’s “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and the poisoning of reformist presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez’s distastefully violent rhetoric and overreach in closing radio and TV stations that offer dissent to his policies is examined. Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim’s slandering and incarceration is detailed, as are the brutal policies of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. And in perhaps the strongest narrative strand — or at least the one freshest and with the most direct implications for the United States — Egypt’s crackdown on democracy protesters and imprisonment of opposition leader Ayman Nour is cast into stark relief.
Shot over the course of three years, A Whisper to a Roar deftly intercuts back and forth between all of these narratives, which unfold at different times over the past 15 years. In doing so, it shows their commonality in “breaking down the barrier of apathy,” as one interviewee puts it. Social media and/or liberalized press have helped open new channels of communication amongst disaffected constituencies, and emboldened calls for democratic participation. The poor and otherwise marginalized see, by way of both other international examples and the skittish actions of their own authoritarian governments, the precarious and assailable nature of systemic corruption and oppression, through sustained public pressure.
The production package is fairly straightforward, but the range of interviewees runs the gamut from frontline demonstrators and participants to more intellectual members of the international commentariat, which give the movie a rooted sense of scope. Smartly, too, director Moses doesn’t tip the hands of his narrative in advance by fully identifying the occupations and standings of his subjects, leaving room for some suspense for those who don’t follow or recall international news. Emotionally engaging and impactful, A Whisper to a Roar is a well put together look at the yearning and universal nature of values we too frequently ascribe as uniquely American. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. A Whisper to a Roar opened this week in Los Angeles at the Laemmle NoHo 7. For more information, visit the movie’s website. (Appleseed Entertainment, unrated, 94 minutes)
Daily Archives: October 22, 2012
Chained (Blu-ray)
Undone by one twist too many, Jennifer Lynch’s Chained nonetheless covers some transgressive and interesting terrain, telling the story of a boy imprisoned for a decade by a madman, and made to participate in his crimes (think Dexter by of Nell… sort of). In its chilliest, most unnerving moments, the film asks viewers to consider the nature/nurture breakdown of sociopathy, and how monsters are remade generation after generation.
The story centers on a nine-year-old, Tim (Evan Bird), who, while coming home from the movies with his mother (Julia Ormand), is kidnapped by a psychopathic cab driver and serial killer, Bob (a beefy Vincent D’Onofrio). After murdering his mother, Bob begins to shape Tim into his unwilling pupil, rechristening him Rabbit following a couple abortive escape attempts. He chains him to a bed in his secluded home, and breaks him down mentally. Years later, with Bob having groomed him for homicidal culling, the understandably wrought Tim/Rabbit (Eamon Farren) stands poised on the precipice of his own plunge into further darkness.
With Surveillance, Lynch crafted a work of spare desperation, where unchained menace seemed to blow in the wind. In Chained, she roots herself much more to character, and digs down deeper into warped psychological motivational systems, to satisfying effect. While no stranger to unsettling imagery and tonal manipulation (she’s the daughter of director David Lynch), Lynch here somewhat surprisingly takes a fairly straightforward tack with the story; this is delivered as a sordid father-son tale, which makes the grim violence mean something. The performances are great, too. D’Onofrio is dialed in and scary as Bob, but also realistically trigged; Farren, meanwhile, captures the shattered innocence and flickering malevolent potential of Rabbit.
The film’s great disappointment, then, is when — after some moments of truth that find Rabbit getting his first taste of blood, and then experiencing a night of freedom hunting for more victims with Bob — Chained pivots and attempts to grab surprise via a somewhat bizarre yet almost conventional “twist.” Lynch takes sole screenplay credit, though her script is actually based on another, previous script (more on that below). It’s not entirely clear where this idea came from from, but it doesn’t work — either on an emotional/cathartic level or as a very convincing ancillary argument about the disease and rot of generational violence.
Housed in a Blu-ray case, the movie’s Blu-ray/DVD combo pack release includes a 1080p 2.40:1 widescreen transfer, with a Dolby TrueHD 7.1 audio track on the former format, which also houses the bonus features. Under a motion menu screen with a dozen chapter-stop options, Chained features the movie’s trailer, a one-and-a-half-minute alternate murder sequence which allegedly garnered the film a NC-17 in its initial editorial pass with the MPAA, and the big other extra, an audio commentary track with Lynch and D’Onofrio.
While there are an awful lot of gaps in this conversation, D’Onofrio helps steer Lynch toward engagement, talking about the 15-day shoot, (for D’Onofrio, concurrent with his work on Fire with Fire, a straight-to-video flick with Bruce Willis and Rosario Dawson), his method acting and interest in playing a killer that didn’t function merely as a plot device in part of a bigger story. He also flashes some deadpan humor, joking when he appears on screen in boxers and a grungy T-shirt that, “One of the reasons I did this movie was so I could keep the wardrobe.” Apart from talking some about child abuse, Lynch chats less about the thematic broad strokes of the material than one might expect; she does, however, mention the only other person she says she thought of for the role of Bob (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and sketches out the more “torture-porn-oriented” script, by Damian O’Donnell, that producers Lee Nelson and David Buelow, originally brought to her, seeking her opinion and input. All in all, it’s a slightly above average commentary track, though when Lynch talks about wanting a director’s cut you wish she went into a bit more detail about exactly what sort of additions/changes she’d most want to make. To purchase the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)