In What Dimension?

“Eye candy, that’s what it is. I liked it, but it’s eye candy,” my young companion exclaimed as we walked out of the 3-D version of Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis’ combination of digital animation, an epic poem and, for just about the first time since 1953, 3-D photography.

I had to admit my young friend was right. You only experience a simulation of actual performances in this version of Beowulf, nor do you expand your ways of seeing, as some of us did back in the early 1950s with early cinemascope and, sometimes, 3-D. Instead the film is an uneasy combination of puppet show and cartoon. Diverting, yes, exciting, certainly, but Beowulf is as ephemeral as a piece of candy.

As for the 3-D, it does seem to be an advance on the technology I experienced briefly in 1953. For one thing there are no red and green lenses in the spectacles provided with your tickets: also the 3-D can be perceived with one eye. This was impossible fifty years ago; Andre de Toth, director of the 3-D House of Wax, couldn’t see the film he was making because he had only one eye. (In spite of this the film was supposed to be very effective.) Now the spectacles are like Polaroids with the tints blended.

However, Zemeckis doesn’t use the technology to tell his story; he just shows it off. An elaborate long shot will be incorporated to feature the greater depth of field. Compare this with Alfred Hitchcock’s exploitation of a similar device in Dial M for Murder. Reportedly he used the deeper perspectives, especially in the top shots, to draw viewers into the confined space of the single London flat where the action is set. (As with Rope, the master decided to remain within the confines of the original play and used every device he could think of to make the film cinematic.)

Even more interesting was John Farrow’s use of 3-D in the excellent western Hondo. In this case very few audiences (myself included) saw the film in its original form. The new restored DVD release, while not reproducing the exact 3-D effect, does give the viewer some idea of how the original visuals worked. A form of deep focus replaces the extreme depth of field that must have existed in the first prints.

Except for some arrows and lunges in the knife fight that would have seemed to come straight at the audience, Farrow and his cinematographers, Robert Burks and Archie Stout, employed the so-called third dimension to place the characters in their environment and draw the viewers into their lives—enhancing the performances of John Wayne and the young Geraldine Page. Farrow also liked to employ long takes and elaborate travelling shots. (He is much admired by the likes of Bertrand Tavernier.) In Hondo there are not just the long takes showing parallel action, such as Hondo breaking a horse, linked by a single camera movement to the life of the small station where he has taken refuge; figures are repeatedly brought into the action from deep in the shot, and that hardy perennial of the period, the two-shot with both actors facing the camera, is given greater variety by having one or other deeper in the frame with one or other given some quite complex “business”. Absent are the meaningless travelling shots used so often nowadays to “animate” the scene and distract from the dialogue and characterisation.

With Beowulf, on the other hand, the viewer is being assaulted by an alien world as monsters, axes, spears, swords not to mention severed limbs leap out of the screen. This is a pity, as Beowulf could have been much more than the filmic equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. Writers Neil Galman and Roger Avery scripted a thoroughly respectable adaptation of the seventh or eighth-century Old English epic poem that relates (with numerous digressions) how the hero Beowulf defeats not one, but two horrific monsters. The first is Grendel, a slobbering giant, the other a winged dragon. I have to admit that both confrontations work very well in the film: in the best tradition of the horror movie the creatures are both fascinating and repulsive.

Even better is the writers’ major interpolation. Grendel’s mother has been turned into a temptress who has seduced the older king, and later enthralls Beowulf with visions of wealth and power, as well as exotic sexual favours (unspecified of course). This, as American critic Kirk Honeycutt points out, solves a major structural problem in the original—how to relate Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel to his last fatal battle with the dragon. In the film he is the author of his own destruction, with Beowulf the father of the second monster.

According to the publicity, actors climbed into a kind of technological equivalent of a wetsuit that mapped out their bodies as they played out their roles. These were then transmitted to the computer to be digitally animated and placed into similarly animated castles and landscapes using some fifty cameras and computers galore at the cost of some $150 million. On the whole I found the result of all this alienating. Fine actors like Anthony Hopkins, Ray Winstone and John Malkovich were reduced to robots.

The triumphant exception is Angelina Jolie’s water sprite—the monsters’ mummy. She has been given a golden animated version of her own superb body that is so good that it looks as though she has actually played the part in the nude. In fact, according to Ray Winstone, while the other performers bulged all over the place in their wetsuits, “Angelina looked terrific”, even though she was three months pregnant. Zemeckis and his team then gave her a long plaited tail and cleft feet with stiletto heels. The result may be high camp, but her seduction of Beowulf with just about everything implied and the camera exploiting her eyes and sultry voice is the most effective sequence in the film. What’s more she even plays her scenes with Grendel in Old English, which matches perfectly with the assortment of regional accents employed by the rest of the cast.

All of which demonstrates what might have been achieved if Zemeckis had concentrated on the drama instead of the special effects. As it is, all we have is, as my friend says, eye candy. But it is candy that can only be consumed in a movie house, so I suppose that is at least a step in the right direction.

Into the Wild is anything but eye candy. Based on a splendid piece of reporting by Jon Krakauer, the film tells the story of a twenty-year-old college graduate, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) who rejects his father’s (William Hurt) offer to pay for a Harvard law degree and takes first to the road, and ultimately the wilderness.

Sean Penn, who scripted and directed, is forced to leave a lot unsaid. The emotional abuse that may have led to this plunge into the unknown is only suggested—after all, the McCandless family after a lot of persuasion agreed to co-operate in the making of the film. It is to Penn’s credit that the movie remains as open about Christopher’s behaviour as it is. At times, such as when he kayaks to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico without a licence, McCandless appears wildly irresponsible. His abandonment of his family, who for all their faults were devastated by his disappearance, is never condoned. The voice-over narration by his sister Carine (Jena Malone), makes some tentative excuses but that is all.

Still Penn, to whom this story clearly means a great deal, does his best to give Christopher’s wanderings some kind of purpose. The narrative begins close to the end with his finding the abandoned bus in Alaska where he is later to die of starvation after being “rained in”. There follow a series of flashbacks portraying his earlier experiences. Even if you don’t recall the news stories there is a sense of impending disaster as we wonder what has brought him to this place.

The book traced McCandless’s movements through the memories of people encountered in his wanderings, and Penn deftly recreates some of these meetings. Especially moving are the two surrogate “families”—the middle-aged hippies, Rainey and Jan (Brian Dierker and Catherine Keener) whose lives have an emotional stability and who become an important influence on the young man; and the older Ron, played splendidly by Hal Holbrook, who tries to avert the tragedy by offering to adopt Christopher as his grandson. McCandless’s eventual discoveries about life are not especially profound—“happiness is best when shared”—but they are moving in the light of the character’s emotional pain and isolation, and beautifully recreated by Emile Hirsch.

Visually, however, Into the Wild doesn’t come close to embodying the natural world the film’s protagonist wants so desperately to experience. Groups are kept emphatically in the foreground, with the rest of the frame out of focus, There is no grouping of figures against the landscape. To be sure, there are a few awkwardly composed long shots and sunsets but they are only decoration.

Which brings us back to Beowulf and Hondo. Not that I’m advocating a rush to 3-D. But with the opening out of the cinemascope frame in the 1950s—the substitute for 3-D—there was not just greater width but increased depth of field without special glasses. This enabled directors like Delmer Daves, Anthony Mann and Martin Ritt to effortlessly locate their characters in a specific landscape, or even a particular urban environment. This is not nostalgia for old-time film-making, just a plea for the application of greater visual sophistication to the widescreen formats we have now. And Into the Wild, where the landscape is an integral part of the story, needs the kind of complex pictorial statement you find in films like Ritt’s Hud or Mann’s The Naked Spur. Certainly Penn did his best. Reportedly the film was mainly shot on the real locations. But instead of opening out the frame Penn appears to have used every device his cinematographer Eric Gautier could come up with to simplify the visuals.

Nevertheless Into the Wild is a thoughtful work that is not afraid of ambiguity and doesn’t try to impose a spurious dramatic structure on the infinitely diverse reality of McCandless’s life—impressive achievements by any standards.