INTERNATIONAL

Larraín simply fashions, as he does in The
Club, a portrait of depravity in which condemnation
is meaningless. While audiences might
accept that circumstance and the writer-director’s
resulting nihilism in his illustrations of
Pinochet-era Chile, they will be hard-pressed
to accept it in a movie about the Catholic
Church’s decisions with regard to men who
raped children. In choosing the microcosm,
a few priests to represent the many, and one
briefly despairing Vatican cleric, Larraín is not
compelled to background the events, to depict
complexity or nuance, or even the longstanding
internal strife in the Church over
what to do with pedophiles. In many ways,
this mirrors medical science’s debate in the
last half of the 20th century over the nature
of male homosexuality and the psychopathology
of child rapists.
Larraín’s indictment of the institutional
Church in The Club is deserved and apt, but it
is accompanied by some simplistic conclusions,
and a leering interest in the priests’
sexual habits, rather than the violent core of
their personalities. In Father Lazcano’s troubling
interviews with Father Vidal (Larraín
regular Alfredo Castro), the defrocked priest
rather unconvincingly argues for the sanctity
of homosexual lovemaking. In doing so, he
appears to celebrate both his sexual orientation
and the indefensible, incurable illness of
pedophilia. In the eyes of the Church, Father
Vidal sins on both counts, but in reality his
homosexuality is distinct from his criminal
behavior, from his domination and torture of
children. While Larraín touches upon Father
Ortega’s misogyny, there is a notable absence
in the film of heterosexual pedophile priests.
Had The Club been about the dilemma
Church authorities confronted, and myopically
avoided with a cover-up, then Father
Lazcano’s actions might serve as an object
lesson, and the film a parable about institutional
wrongdoing. When the cleric discovers
the depths of the scandal, and confronts his
own tenuous position at the Vatican should it
become widely known, he saves his own skin.
Everybody is tainted in The Club. In Larraín’s
dystopia, excess is the primary means of expression.
Sandokan (Roberto Farías), a local
fisherman and a stand-in for the priests’ victims,
is just one example. A defining scene unfolds
early in the film in which the fisherman,
though admiring of a naked young woman, is
unable to consummate his desire for her; his
sexuality is confused, and the woman senses
it, as well as the potential for violence in
that circumstance. Rather than trusting this
portrait of a victim of child rape, Larraín later
provides Sandokan with a heap of psychological
maladies, and the admission that he wants
to be cared for by priests because the priest
who raped him was his first love.
Sandokan loudly recounts his victimization
throughout the movie, threatening
the house’s anonymity. Larraín apparently
views him as a Christ figure, but because the
screenwriters fail to place their story in an archetypal
context, the miserable drunk is simply
a stereotypical victim in a debauched and
indifferent universe. The Club’s melodramatic
conclusion, involving Sandokan as the center
of an arcane Biblical ritual, accompanied by
Arvo Part’s relentless score, would be farcical
if the movie possessed any moral complexity
or authority. It does not, leaving one to wish
for the deft hand of Luis Buñuel—or perhaps
for the appearance of Vincent Price and the
unfolding of an old-fashioned horror movie.
(House on Haunted Hill is better title for Larraín’s
movie.) There, the docile greyhounds
would exact revenge in true Biblical fashion,
as the hounds of hell. —Maria Garcia
MOJAVE
A24/Color/2.35/93 Mins./Rated R
Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Oscar Isaac, Louise Bourgoin,
Walton Goggins, Mark Wahlberg.
Written and directed by William Monahan.
Produced by William Green, William Monahan, Justine
Suzanne Jones, Aaron L. Ginsburg.
Executive producers: Andy Horwitz, Nick Quested, Jason
Spire.
Director of photography: Don Davis.
Production designer: Robb Buono.
Editor: John David Allen.
Costume designer: Arielle Antoine.
Music: Andrew Hewitt.
An Atlas Independent, Henceforth Pictures and MICA
Entertainment production.
Oscar Isaac’s over-the-top performance
as a menacing drifter can’t save this turgid
neo-noir western.
Mojave’s premise
sounds like the set-up
for a joke: A movie
star walks into the
desert, where he’s
greeted at his campfire
by a drifter pretending Garrett Hedlund
to be the Devil. Unfortunately,
The Departed screenwriter William
Monahan’s latest–which he both wrote and
directed–is a laugher only in unintentional
ways, affecting an air of self-seriousness that’s
so crushing as to be embarrassing. Stuffing
its players full of Shakespearean quotes as it
wrestles with existential questions that are
only used as embellishments for an empty
narrative, it’s an aimless film that, like its
protagonists, searches blindly for itself, only
to come up empty-handed.
The celebrity at the center of this fauxphilosophical
neo-noir western is Tom (Garrett
Hedlund), who’s introduced on video
lamenting the fact that he’s been famous since
he was 19. With shaggy hair, a scruffy goatee,
and a deep, laid-back voice that exudes both
world-weariness and a devil-may-care arrogance,
Tom heads out into the Mojave Desert
to get away from it all, only to promptly crash
his jeep (a rental from his newest movie). At
a campfire shortly thereafter, he’s greeted
by Jack (Oscar Isaac), a rifle-wielding man of
mystery in a cowboy hat and duster jacket
whose menacing demeanor is matched by his
habit of discussing “To be or not to be” as
the fundamental issue of all men, and to state
that he’s less fond of Moby-Dick than the Bard
because “I’m into motiveless malignity.”
Jack naturally doesn’t trust Tom, and
after a violent scuffle, Tom winds up retreating
to a cave where he accidentally kills an
innocent lawman. This propels him back
to his miserable Hollywood life, where he
continues to sleep with a budding actress
(Louise Bourgoin)–his wife and child have
left him for London–and have meaningless
exchanges with his lawyer (Walton Goggins)
and producer (Mark Wahlberg), both of
whom speak in the same sort of overenunciated
Tarantino-esque patois. Those
two figures are Mojave’s main means of
poking fun at Hollywood extravagance, but
Monahan’s dialogue is too affected, and his
visuals are too blandly austere, to generate
any sort of satirical electricity. Instead, the
film putters along at a pace that’s meant to
suggest hallucinatory dreaminess but comes
across as merely somnambulant.
By the time the proceedings get around
to again pitting Tom and Jack against each
other in the desert–this after Jack has spent
the better part of the film tracking Tom
through his ennui-infected life of luxury–the
script’s talk of man’s “duality” and “infinite
complexities” feels strained to the point
of pretentiousness. Amplifying that mood
is Hedlund’s monotonous brooding, which
makes him seem like the most full-of-himself
bore to ever make it big in L.A. Isaac fares
better as a man of ill-defined malevolence, if
only because the actor’s charismatic overacting
helps sell what amounts to an underwritten
part. However, stuck quoting literary
giants at regular intervals, as well as referring
to Hedlund as “brother” like some evil latterday
Hulk Hogan, Isaac is ultimately a victim of
material that plays like a pulpy put-on.
—Nick Schager
NORM OF THE NORTH
LIONSGATE/Color/1.85/86 Mins./Rated PG
Voice Cast: Rob Schneider, Heather Graham, Ken Jeong,
Colm Meaney, Bill Nighy, Loretta Devine, Gabriel
Iglesias, Michael McElhatton, Maya Kay.
Directed by Trevor Wall.
Screenplay: Malcolm T. Goldman, Steven M. Altiere,
Daniel R. Altiere.
Produced by Nicolas Atlan, Liz Young, Mike Young, Steven
Rosen, Ken Katsumoto, Jack Donaldson, Derek Elliott.
Executive producers: Max Madhavan, Paul Cummins,
Noah Fogelson, Kamal Khanna, Daniel Engelhardt,
Silvio Astarita, Shi Wen, Han Tao, Xia Xiao Ping.
Co-producers: Steven M. Altiere, Daniel R. Altiere.
Head of story: Tim Maltby.
Music: Stephen McKeon.
Editor: Richard Finn.
A Lionsgate presentation, in association with Splash Entertainment,
Assemblage Entertainment and Telegael,
of a Splash Entertainment/Lionsgate production.
FEBRUARY 2016
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