So what if they held a contest to showcase the most pathetic, miserable, spirit-crushing music imaginable? It's already been done, you might well respond, and they call it American Idol.
Well, yeah, sure. But if you think AI's pretty much the pinnacle of pathos in song, think again.
A competition exclusively devoted to music so melancholy it gives lumps to the lump in your throat is the featured attraction inThe Saddest Music in the World, the latest offering from master surrealist Guy Maddin of Winnipeg, Canada — a place not often associated with master surrealists. The film is as bizarre and even downright macabre as anything Maddin has ever done, but it's also an incredibly funny movie and, in its thoroughly eccentric way, an accessible one. Maddin's movies will never be for the masses (hopefully), but this one comes closer than most.
The Saddest Music in the World often feels like pure slapstick, albeit the strangest slapstick on the block. At the very least, it's proof positive that "serious" art films don't have to be dour, humorless affairs. Maddin's new movie performs all sorts of unnatural and unmentionable acts while straddling the fine lines between comedy and pain, a relationship that's not often discussed in polite society but that's been implicit ever since the first human watched somebody slip on a banana peel.
Set in the depths of the Great Depression (when else?), the sublimely ridiculous contest that serves as the movie's main event is surrounded by an extravagantly complicated tapestry of melodramatic flourishes, the likes of which would make Douglas Sirk blush. The film is fairly awash with overlapping, overheated romantic triangles and passionate, mutated rivalries between fathers, sons and siblings, ultimately suggesting some unholy cross between East of Eden and Eraserhead.
The perpetually smiling but emotionally unavailable Chester (Mark McKinney from The Kids in the Hall) has stolen one woman apiece from both his father and his brother, although smarmy, self-centered Chester doesn't really seem to have much use for either dame. The woman stolen from Chester's dad (David Fox) is Lady Helen Port-Huntly (Isabella Rossellini), a domineering double-amputee whose legs have been hacked off as a direct result of Chester's spat with his drunken dad. The woman swiped from brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) is Narcissa (Maria De Medeiros), a sweetly clueless nymphomaniac with a talking tapeworm.
It gets even odder. Rossellini's character presides over the contest like some legless, tarted-up Nero, ruling on whether the Mexican team's song about child burial customs is sadder than the song sung about tiny, crippled birds by the team from Siam. Meanwhile, the American team dazzles the crowd with state-of-the-art misery via a production that's "vulgar, obvious and full of gimmicks," and the winners of each bout get to whiz down a water slide into a gigantic beer bath to the roar of an appreciative audience.
Maddin knows exactly when to be subtle and sincere and when to overplay his hand like the most shameless huckster on the planet. Surreal sights abound, from prosthetic glass legs filled with sparkling beer to a character carrying around a small jar containing his son's heart preserved in his own tears. The mostly black-and-white cinematography owes much to the visual poetry of vintage American, French and German Expressionist films, and the whole movie often seems to play like that one most sublime moment in your favorite silent film expanded to feature length.
The contrast between the movie's visual splendor and the kitschy-kooky scenario is pretty delicious, with light gleaming and bouncing around everywhere, streaming off physical bodies like mystical auras coming unglued long enough for the characters to cut a rug or two. It's all quite a treat, and maybe just a little bit like what Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle might have been without the illusions of grandeur or pretentious aftertaste. And in case you were wondering, that's a good thing.
The Saddest Music in the World is scheduled to play at Channelside Cinemas, incidentally, a place that's still plugging in the occasional gem or two. With all that's happening (and not happening) at Madstone at the moment, those remaining local venues brave enough to play non-mainstream films need all the support we can offer.
Fat of the Land
If you're getting all weak at the knees waiting for the arrival of Michael Moore's latest controversy-in-a-Cannes, Fahrenheit 9/11, then Super Size Me might just be the very thing to tide you over.
Morgan Spurlock's Sundance-approved attack on the fast food industry and on America's eating habits in general is a documentary very much cut from Moore cloth, both in its political leanings and in its methodology. Like Moore, Spurlock cloaks his diatribes in humor and odd behavior, includes all sorts of gonzo asides, and features the filmmaker himself as our personal guide through the chaos. The facts doled out are generally accurate but are selectively chosen and just incendiary enough to qualify, when all is said and done, as a friendlier, leftist version of old-fashioned fascist propaganda.
And, as in Moore's films, there's always a hook. Spurlock's hook is that he took it upon himself to eat nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days, using himself as a guinea pig in order to demonstrate the effects on the human body. The filmmaker imposed some rules on himself: he would eat a full three meals a day, he would walk and exercise as little as possible (just like most Americans), and whenever someone asked him if he wanted to super size his order, he would have to agree.
The results were predictably gruesome. Spurlock loses muscle mass, gains body fat (and 25 pounds), begins having chest palpitations, tingling in his arms and odd sensations in his groin, and loses his sex drive. By day 16, he discovers his liver is failing and begins to worry about irreparable damage. He also realizes that he's become addicted to this food; he feels bad all the time, except for when he's scarfing down McDonald's, then instant happiness.
All of this is interspersed with interviews with various nutritionists, fast food junkies, a Baskin-Robbins heir turned health food advocate, and even Spurlock's girlfriend, a spunky Vegan chef. The movie makes additional detours to hospitals (where one patient developed diabetes and went blind after drinking several gallons of soda a day), and to public schools, all apparently in the pocket of the fast food industry, where kids are encouraged to eat reconstituted crap.
It's not a pretty picture, but Spurlock makes it slide down easy. Like Moore, he's a likeable personality who seems at ease before the camera (even when lying on an examining table with a doctor's finger up his rectum, or puking up his McGuts). Spurlock is engaging but rarely subtle and, like all good satirists and propagandists, he understands the value of exaggeration — the filmmaker consumed as much McDonald's in 30 days as most nutritionists say you're supposed to eat in eight years. The fact that Spurlock makes an easy target even easier may gall some, and Super Size Me's flip approach barely disguises its preachiness, but none of this makes the film any less valuable or, in the most positive sense of the word, nauseating.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2004.