The Future of Martin Scorsese

I confess that I'm a Netflix junkie. Less and less I enjoy the theater--the people talking to the screen, the people talking to each other, the movie that doesn't pause when I need to go to the restroom. Soda, at my apartment, has never risen to movie theater/Yankee Stadium prices and no one crossing his or her legs has ever kicked the back of my sofa. The theater has always been a paradox: a private viewing experience in the company of others. I understand the power of being in a darkened room full of people laughing at the same joke you're laughing at. It's reassuring. Fun, even. All these strangers seeing what you're seeing, hearing what you're hearing, reacting the way you're reacting. Yet less and less I enjoy the theater. If we can send an 'Army of One' to Iraq, perhaps I am a 'Theater of One.' It takes a village, after all...

And so my latest Netflix experience in the privacy of my own living room was Sang-soo Hong's Woman Is the Future of Man, a South Korean film from 2004. It's funny to see Martin Scorsese introducing this film on the DVD--a director whose last project, the Oscar-winning The Departed, was a bloated rip-off of Infernal Affairs, a superior Hong Kong crime drama. His films couldn't be more different from Hong's. But if Marty likes it...

Woman Is the Future of Man is the story of three 30-something acquaintances (two men and a woman) who at one point were friends and lovers but now, in the words of Borat, not so much. The film plays out with almost no cinematic interference. The camera is often stationary and people enter and exit these long, still shots with saint-like patience. It's so effective that at one point, early in the film, a rare, slow camera pan to the right is enough to induce vertigo.

In this meticulous character study we learn of the men's callowness and the redemptive, nurturing power of the woman who accepts them for what they are while never falling completely victim to their charms--or lack thereof. However, despite the lingering gaze of the camera these characters aren't nuanced, they're types. We're allowed to glimpse them as we pass by but our emotional engagement with them is appropriately shallow. Despite their chatter and frank sexual encounters they don't connect with each other--so why should we form any lasting attachment? That unsatisfying taste at the film's end is as cultivated and appropriate as it is unfortunate. Who was it that said we don't grow up, we just grow older?

The film's title, whether it's intended to be humorous or profound, is essentially meaningless. The men in this story are so insubstantial that for the perpetuation of the human species--let's hope our eggs are in the women's basket.

The Season of Our Discontent

The last two films I've seen are Half Nelson and Borat. Both worth mentioning and maybe I will--but for the moment the final episode of The Sopranos is the 800 lb. gabagool in the room.

My first reaction was that I didn't like the ending at all, but I respected it. After 24 hours and a second viewing I like it more and more. Here's why:

The general plot is pretty simple: With the back door help of the New Jersey FBI, Tony wins the war with the New York family and, in a classic scene, Phil Leotardo's head is squashed by his own SUV. On a typically cynical note, A.J.'s global angst is cured by a new girlfriend, a new job at a film production company, and a new BMW whose 23 mpg highway, he feels, is helping to ameliorate America's dependence on foreign oil. (So much for joining the Army and saving the world from Afghanistan). In the last scene the family gathers in a local diner, hearkening back to the final episode of the first season. A.J. even alludes to Tony's words of wisdom those many years ago that have become a refrain for the last two seasons: 'Cherish the good times.'

However, this isn't the first season. We’ve all come too far and there isn’t going to be a next time. The show's creator, David Chase, reportedly agonized over the music for each episode and so it’s fitting that Tony flips the carousel of a table jukebox for the song to end it all. As, one by one, the family gathers in the booth for dinner, the camera takes note of several other patrons--most notably a middle-aged man who enters and takes a stool at the counter. He may (or may not) seem to have a special interest in Tony. It's impossible to say. Tony settles on Journey's Don't Stop Believin' and the next few moments are a brilliant mixture of banality and tension. Tony says that there’s a strong chance he's about to be indicted for illegal gun possession; Carmella states that Meadow’s changing her preferred method of birth control, and A.J. sidles up to add that he’s already dissatisfied with his new job.

Then as Meadow rushes in after a difficult parallel park and the suspicious man at the counter heads off to the restroom and two African-American men enter the diner, the camera catches Tony looking up from his menu quickly--not in fear or surprise or in any easily discernible emotion. He just looks up and then--NOTHING. Cut to 4-5 seconds of black before the credits scroll silently across the screen. And that's it. It's like we got whacked.

Frustrating, but that's the idea. Chase is too good to give a comfortable ending that satisfies expectations and offers the consolation of a neatly ordered structure. Instead we get ambiguity, interruption, and massive uncertainty. It's been the world of the show for the last eight years and it's the world we live in every day.

Think back to the last episode of Seinfeld. There was a sitcom that proudly touted itself as a show about nothing: "No hugging, no learning," was the writers' mantra. And America ate it with a big spoon. Then, in the finale, the lead characters were placed on trial for failure to comply with a good Samaritan law, and suddenly it was a show about something: a really lame morality tale where minor characters of seasons past returned to accuse Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer of everything from gross insensitivity to dangling a marble rye from the window of an Upper East Side brownstone. It was the worst creative decision since McLean Stevenson left M*A*S*H to do Hello, Larry.

I’m glad Chase didn’t pander or try to imply that any kind of harmony governs his universe. That awkward, sudden cut to black is an ending that’s not an ending. It denies even the solace of a violent death that so many had predicted for Tony. Instead, it implies that the Sopranos will live on in the same territory we all do--in that strange mixture of daily tedium, anxiety, and joy where uncertainties abound. Will Silvio live? Who will become the next New York don? Will Tony go to jail or even make it out of that diner alive? If death (or in Philip Larkin's nihilistic phrase, "endless extinction") is the only real closure, no closure may be the most hopeful gesture of all.

And after the black—no music whatsoever. Just the credits, a list of who’s accountable. The rest is silence.