With half the world foaming at the mouth about how pissed off they are, and the other half paranoid and petrified about the half that's pissed-off, it was only a matter of time before a movie like Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later appeared.
Unmanageable amounts of anger and fear are the twin engines fueling 28 Days Later. And while on the surface that may not sound so different from what you'd find in something like, say, The Hulk, Boyle's movie is a whole other animal. It's hard to imagine a movie like 28 Days Later emerging from a world other than one where every closet conceals a suicide bomber and every suitcase a dirty nuke. And there are even worse things lurking in 28 Days Later, a scary and grim little horror movie for the New Dark Ages.
The government's gone in 28 Days Later, as are the police, the electricity and most of the people. There's only chaos and small bands of ragtag survivors fighting off hordes of snarling, once-human creatures who've been turned deadly by a powerful virus that has devastated the country. The creatures are cut from much the same gore-soaked cloth as the zombies in George Romero's Living Dead trilogy, with one significant difference. Romero's zombies lumbered about munching brains because they were incessantly hungry. Boyle's mindless neo-zombies have an appetite only for destruction. They lash out for the sake of lashing out, out of an all-consuming, self-perpetuating, never-ending anger.
The condition these unfortunate creatures are infected with is referred to simply as "Rage," and the movie invites us to supply our own metaphors. In any event, they're a nasty lot, spewing blood in torrents — the infection is passed through the blood (insert additional metaphors here) — scurrying about, screeching, yowling and clawing at anything that moves. At the other end of the spectrum are our heroes, an ordinary bicycle messenger named Jim (Cillian Murphy) and a tough young woman named Selena (Naomie Harris) who has readjusted her dreams in light of the first rule of the New World Order: "Staying alive is as good as it gets."
Despite the occasional burst of warmth and light, 28 Days Later is a fiercely gritty and even ugly affair, made even more so by the jittery editing and flat, no-frills look of its digital video footage. The film generally eschews even the modicum of sentimentality we normally expect in movies like this, projecting an attitude manifested all too clearly in a bloody scene where one of our heroes matter-of-factly bashes out the brains of a former friend who's suspected of having become infected. It wouldn't be a stretch suggesting it's the emotional equivalent of that infamous shot in Night of the Living Dead where a little girl zombie feasts on her mommy's intestines. Not nearly as funny, though.
Boyle, who hasn't made a film this strong since Trainspotting, draws inspiration here from all sorts of horror movies, both classic and contemporary. The debt to Romero's zombies is unavoidable, of course, as are the nods to the you-are-there video verite approach popularized by The Blair Witch Project. As for 28 Days Later's wonderfully eerie sequences featuring a single survivor roaming the empty streets of the metropolis-turned-necropolis, they're straight out of The Last Man on Earth or its remake The Omega Man.
The movie doesn't add too much that's new to this mix but, for the most part, it holds its own with the macabre past glories that it references. Many will find the tone a little too hip or frenetic (flying in the face of tradition, these zombies move fast), but the raw power and ambitious scale of this blood-drenched journey into the heart of darkness can't be denied. It sometimes seems as if Boyle's trying to make the Apocalypse Now of zombie flicks, if not the genre's Dr. Strangelove.
The movie's loaded imagery starts with the very first shots — a captive monkey helplessly fixated on atrocity images pouring in from a bank of TV news shows — and continues right up to the film's final sequences depicting an all-out battle within the ranks of the non-infected. The irony here, of course, is that the movie reserves its most awful and intense moments for the scenes involving humans being killed by other so-called normal humans. This quintessentially modern horror film seems to be saying, as it piles on the footage of the last people on earth brutally destroying one another, you always hurt the ones you love, even when there's no one left to hurt but yourself.
An even better film about the fine art of self-destruction, Capturing the Friedmans is as funny and heartbreaking as it is scary.It's also a true story, which makes it all the more heartbreaking and scary, not to mention confusing. The truth in Capturing the Friedmans is a very slippery thing, ultimately as complex and elusive as a dozen Rashomons. And a whole lot more disturbing, too.
In the late '80s, the quiet, affluent suburb of Great Neck, N.Y., was rocked to its core when two of its model citizens were arrested on charges of child molestation. Charges were brought against award-winning, well-liked teacher Arnold Friedman and his then 19-year-old son Jesse, claiming that the pair had repeatedly abused scores of young boys during the computer classes the elder Friedman taught in the family basement. Hysteria set in, the community was traumatized, the case went to court and the Friedman family crumbled.
What transforms Capturing the Friedmans from an interesting film to an extraordinary one comes down to the Friedmans themselves. A bizarre mix of Barnum and Bailey showmanship, brutal honesty, Borsht Belt goofiness and sexually repressed secrets and lies, the Friedmans come off as America's most eloquently dysfunctional family since the Crumbs. They're an endlessly fascinating bunch, and one forever obsessed with documenting themselves — originally on ancient 8mm film, then, as the years go by, on video, audio tape, whatever's handy. It's an obsession that yields some of the most remarkable moments in this wonderful and horrible film.
Most of this footage comes from Arnold's eldest son David, the family's staunchest defender and the most dedicated witness to its disintegration. David shoots everything, inevitably blurring the lines between the public arena and moments of intense intimacy, and frequently adding an unintentional dose of the surreal to the proceedings. A professional clown by trade — and an angry, somewhat unstable personality by nature — David shows up ranting and raving on more than one occasion, once with a pair of underpants on his head as his father is led away in handcuffs on Thanksgiving eve.
In another of the film's astonishing moments, David encapsulates many of the contradictory impulses at the heart of his family's story and videotapes himself sitting on the edge of his bed, half-naked and sobbing on the night of his father's and brother's arrest. "This is private," he tells the camera. "If you're not me, turn this off. Don't watch this."
But privacy, like safety, doesn't really seem to exist in the Friedmans' world, and watch it we do. David archives everything, allowing the recorded images to become his memory, and we're compelled to take it all in. Director Andrew Jarecki blends extensive footage of the family shot over a decade or more (by both David and his camera-bug father) with talking head interviews of the various players today. What emerges is a profoundly neurotic saga that gradually takes on the air of a crackling good mystery and a crime drama, as well as a poignant tale of corruption of the innocent.
The movie doles out tantalizing clues, but the dots don't seem to connect in any sort of neat fashion. Arnold Friedman was indeed, by his own admission, a repressed pedophile and one who said he had "crossed the line" on at least one or two occasions. At the same time, it becomes clear that there's a strong possibility Arnold and his son did not actually do what they were accused of doing. There was no physical evidence and the accusations of the alleged victims (some of whom later revised their testimony) may have been the result of snowballing hysteria and aggressive prompting by the police. There are other strange twists too, but you'll have to discover them for yourself.
No one will probably ever know if Arnold Friedman really abused any of those boys down in the basement all those years ago, but that's almost beside the point. The fascinating, complex portrait the movie paints raises more questions than it answers, but it ultimately poses the possibility that what we might just have here is a man punishing himself for a lifetime of secret desires. A man seeking oblivion by extending his guilt to imaginary crimes he may not have committed.
Through it all, the cameras roll and the Friedmans keep up appearances right up to the bitter end, effecting an air of jaunty normalcy even as their lives teeter on the verge of collapse. The family members are almost always "on," always performing, although it's hard to say if it's for themselves or for some unseen audience. I'm being recorded, the incessant mugging all but insists, therefore I still exist.
With the prospect of prison looming, the camera finally focuses firmly on Arnold, weirdly relaxed and making little jokes, almost as if he's somehow relieved to be free of the whole messy ordeal. He horses around with his kids, sits down at the piano to perform a bouncy rendition of Dancing Cheek to Cheek, then stops in his tracks as one of his sons, in his best fake news anchor voice, asks his father to comment on his personal life.
For the briefest of moments, a light seems to go on somewhere behind Arnold's eyes, and then, just as quickly, it's gone. The father meets his son's gaze and, with the faintest trace of a smile, gives him the only answer he can.
"It's personal," he says, smiling that faint smile again. And then the room fills with the sound of laughter.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2003.