| Sunday, May 25, 2008 |
22:17 - Chasing the MacGuffin
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I feel I can breathe a bit easier now, somehow, because Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually good. Very good, at that.
Granted, it's got a premise that's far-fetched enough to have put Spielberg and Ford off it for years, apparently only relenting in order to prevent Lucas from making any more hash out of Star Wars. Aliens? Area 51? Nukes? Nazca lines? Cate Blanchett as a rapier-wielding Russian dominatrix? Indy at 60-something? Okay, so there was a time when I had hoped to see Star Wars sequels appear, set twenty years after the original three installments, with an aged Han Solo and a middle-aged Luke and so on, and I guess this is the kind of man of action Ford would have been able to play, much though I might have preferred that to the prequels if given the option—but as things have turned out, I'm just as glad it's gone this way and not the other.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable movie, not least because of the innumerable ways they've attempted to tap into the cinematic success of the first movie, and none too subtly: from expositional expansions on that movie's iconic asides (e.g. the warehouse at the end) to reappearances of characters whose screen chemistry with Indy people have been longing for more of for decades, and indeed to the entire look and feel and setting of the whole second half of the movie (which harks back to those definitive few scenes in the intro to Raiders of the Lost Ark that established the character of Indy for the first time to audiences). It's as though they're making a loud, obvious effort to recapture everything the Lucas/Ford team used to be able to pull off, and not just in the Indy movies. Jungle car chases in period military vehicles, ridiculously big bugs, cliff-jumping, tomb-crawling, fist-fights with military heavies where Indy waves for surrender with that bloody aw-shucks grin and then goes for the Greedo-smoking sucker-punch—it's all there. And fortunately for the movie, none of it is supposed to be taken seriously: if they were trying to do all this and keep it in the realm of puffed-up epic filmery, it would have been doomed. But the tongue is planted so firmly in cheek here that when Indy mutters "I've got a baaad feeling about this," or when the CG prairie dogs emit cheesy foley chirps, or when the kid drags Indy out of quicksand by tossing him a—okay, fine, no spoilers—all you can do is lay back in your seat and laugh, helplessly and in camaraderie with a filmmaking team that seems to have given up the pretense that it's doing anything deeper than entertaining us, which I guess is what Lucas was trying to say in that interview.
Ford has said that the time spent out of the saddle has not been detrimental:
He says he got right back into the role once he suited up. “There’s something about the character that I guess is a good fit for me, because the minute I put the costume on, I recognize the tone that we need, and I feel confident and clear about the character.”
Be that as it may, this is definitely not quite the same character as before. The intervening twenty years have changed him, perhaps in ways he doesn't realize. This Indy is not the mumbling grumbler of the first movie or the catchphrase machine of the other two; he's a more demonstrative character, with a sharper, louder voice, quicker engagement in a conversation, more bookish sarcasm, more inclination to an expository monologue. I don't know if even Ford realizes how subtle and complex that delivery is supposed to be, or how different it feels now; but at least he understands it well enough that it still works, altered though it is.
The first movie's is the set of memes they were going for, almost comically obviously, and apparently steering well clear of those of the second and third, though inevitably sharing a lot of its tone with the third—yet it's not possible to recreate that first movie's ponderous pace, its apocalyptic tension, and its devilishly sly and subtle humor (the definitive example of which I always take to be the completely unexpected, out-of-the-blue gag with the rotating full-length mirror catching Indy under the chin and the sudden cutaway to the long view of the ship while he shrieks in pain). We know the character too well for there to be any mysteries left about him, any purported dignity and enigma for the slapstick to play itself off of. But now we have this other, new side of Indy, the one who volunteers details of a military career never before mentioned, who slips into spookery as easily as switching from the professor's suit to his adventure garb with whip on belt. It's the one thing they couldn't quite recapture about Raiders of the Lost Ark—the way the character felt when he was new to all of us—but the new angle to how it's played in this installment feels like it makes up the difference.
I had my doubts about whether this movie's premise could be made to work; it didn't feel like it even fit within the universe the earlier movies had created. But then, now that I've seen it, I have to ask myself: was it really any weirder than revolving an archaeology storyline around the Holy Grail or the Ark of the Covenant? Is ancient mysticism that centers on earthbound religion any odder a thing to crossbreed with a swashbuckling-with-Nazis backdrop than Area 51 aliens are to mix with Cold War Soviets? I didn't think it would work, but now it seems perfectly natural—as natural as the comic-bookish ease with which Indy stands in silhouette on a ridgetop with a mushroom cloud rising behind him. Turns out that's pretty easy indeed.
Don't worry, one of these days I'll probably see a movie I don't like.
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Brian Tiemann
