Stars and Bars
Released in 1988, directed by Pat O’Connor
Nothing from the past gains its strangeness as rapidly as a dead end. Stars and Bars has left so little mark on the present that it’s difficult to classify, even as for anyone who was watching movies in the eighties it will be sharply evocative of a certain ambiance of clamshell VHS cases and saxophone-rich scoring. Like the Edsel it is an odd-lot collection of ideas. On one level it’s almost highbrow – the register is often blank satire, the plotting is unintensive, much of the cast is drawn from the New York theatre scene (Rockets Redglare has a minor role); but the meat of it is slapstick comedy and undemanding fish out of water scenarios (i.e. a veddy proper Brit walks into a bar in the rural south. Mounted on the wall: a deer’s hindquarters, its anus replaces by a blinking red bulb). Moreover it was made for around $20 million (adjusted for inflation), and no movie this undefined is made for any kind of budget any more – thus it’s odd to watch the ramshackle proceedings take place on film stock, with very nice cinematography (done by Jerzy Zieliński) and accompanied by a real Hollywood-style score (through-composed with multiple orchestrations and timbres – a trip to from NYC to the South is signaled by a shift from jazz stylings to slide guitar)). Finally the entire product is glazed over with that incredibly specific 1980s brand of benumbed melancholy, that sense of having become somehow disconnected from an important wellspring even as the external signs of happiness remain acted out; from the first chords of Sting’s ska-inflected theme song (yes – titled An Englishman in New York) we can feel the chill seeping into our bones.
Daniel Day-Lewis stars as Henderson Dores. He is the Englishman, and he begins in New York. He is soon sent to Georgia however to broker a deal for a Renoir that has turned up in the possession of a moldering antebellum patriarch (Harry Dean Stanton). Once in-situ he encounters a wide array of pat Old South personages and scenarios, indulged with an almost charming recklessness, a wild-eyed incuriosity to engage with any reality existing beneath second-hand and third-hand and fourth-hand stereotypes, to the extent that whenever the slightest bit of unprocessed detailing is offered it juts upward from the film’s planed surface like a splinter – for example, the fact that one of the characters deals in mail-order medical supplies is probably much more memorable than it should be. Eventually Henderson returns to New York, but he is pursued there by southern elements, and the film concludes with him fleeing from a gun-toting Georgian through the streets of the city, as Sting’s theme swells monochromatically and the camera swings back and away as if to say ah, does any story ever really end?
In its combination of unformedness and specificity this is a film that, I think, might offer the illusion of a promising scaffolding for various aesthetic musings, only to swiftly collapse under the slightest theoretical pressure. Thus I will confine myself to noting a few bits of interest. Day-Lewis offers probably the most facially vigorous impression of a monkey every captured on film. Spalding Gray does yeoman’s work in a scene where he has his balls twisted by Martha Plimpton. Joan Cusack’s character sells computers, and is in possession of a striking business card that reads COMPUTERS (this is intentional and well-done). Finally there is a long scene set in a luxury hotel in Atlanta, which is presented as a mini theme-park where guests must canoe through a Native American village on their way to the elevators; thus the South’s reduction of other cultures to a stereotype is lampooned. This is the movie’s most visually appealing scene, because the physical ramifications are so carefully worked out, and because it is filmed in the dizzying, striking atrium of the Atlanta Marriott Marquise, for a long time the largest atrium in the world (apparently it was recently eclipsed by the Burj Khalifa).
I will report that despite some harsh words above I finished watching Stars and Bars feeling alienated and strange, in a somewhat positive way, likely from the exposure to material that feels far more distanced in aesthetic time than a German silent film or a Japanese family drama. The charm is in the obsolescence and is real.
