circles
by Douglas Messerli
Alan
Sharp (screenplay), Arthur Penn (director) Night
Moves / 1975
In both of these works, and particularly
in Penn’s study in despair, people tend to gather round one another in
terrifying circles, a bit like buffalos defending themselves from attack, and
to separate one of these beasts out from others results in a kind of herd
collapse, resulting in a whole series of destructive and deadly actions.
In Sharp’s and Penn’s dark tale, Harry is
recommended by his fellow friend, Nick (Kenneth Mars) to take on a case that
involves bringing back former actor Arlene Iverson’s (Janet Ward) daughter,
Delly*—a Lolita-like figure who’s recently gone missing. It’s not that Arlene
is particularly worried about her incorrigible charge, but that her divorce settlement
determined that she must live with her daughter until she reaches the legal age
of her trust fund; without the girl, Arlene has no income. She’d prefer, it’s
apparent, to take the detective into her bath than send him out into the world
to chase down Delly (Melanie Griffith).
Nick, we soon after discover in an
argument Harry has his wife, Ellen (Susan Clark), has attempted to hire our
detective hero for his own quite successful company; but Harry obviously
prefers to work alone—and for far less money. Nick is clearly proud of his
success, symbolized by a display cabinet in his office filled with priceless
pre-Columbian sculpture, growing more and more expensive every day, he
explains, since the Mexican government has begun to attempt to protect them
from exportation—our first clue in this twisted tale that things are not always
what they seem to be. Indeed, despite the denials of critics such as Vincent
Canby and Roger Ebert that the plot is so impenetrable that it is unnecessary
to completely unravel it, I would argue that the interlinking relationships of
the characters and the circular structure of the plot is crucial in
understanding how and what Penn’s bleak tale means.
Arlene suggests he check out a young
mechanic, Quentin (James Woods), who had hung out with Delly. The surly
mechanic, who has worked as well for the studios, has evidently taken Delly on
a shoot with him to New Mexico, has been abandoned by the young girl for a
stunt pilot, Marv Ellman (Anthony Costello). On a film location, Harry
questions Ellmann, also meeting up with stunt coordinator, Joey Ziegler (Edward
Binns), and observes Quentin working on Marty’s stunt plane, despite their
obvious falling out over Delly.
When Harry discerns that the two men have
also had affairs with Delly’s mother, he suspects that Delly may be working
through her mother’s former lovers; and after a tip from Ellman that Arlene’s
second husband, Tom Iverson (John Crawford), Delly’s stepfather, is now
organizing charter flights in the Florida Keys, Harry heads out of town—but not
before his discovery that his wife has been having an affair with another man,
Marty Heller (Harris Yulin).
His voyage, accordingly, combines a
journey that entails both his mind and heart, allowing the problem-solving part
of his life to fill in for the marital problems over which he has no control.
Complications dictate that Harry stay at
Iverson’s shacks for another day, and he agrees to join Paula on a swimming
trip with Delly that afternoon. While swimming near the boat, Delly spots the
wreckage of a small plane wherein sits the decomposing body of the former stunt
pilot, Ellman. Distraught by the event, Delly is comforted by the two, as Paula
marks the spot with a buoy, which she appears to report to the Coast Guard when
they return to camp. Later that night Paula joins Harry in his bed, but soon
after disappears when Delly screams out from a nightmare.
The following day he returns Delly to the
California home of her mother, observing that Quentin has already turned up at
the house and that the two, mother and daughter, are already arguing.
He finds his wife missing, and breaks into
the Malibu home of Heller where he finds Ellen.. She joins him at their home,
and together the two attempt a kind of rapprochement, interrupted by news of
Delly’s death in a on-set automobile accident. Apparently, she has been killed
in a car driven by the stunt coordinator, Joey, who shows Harry clips from the
accident. In one of the clips, Harry spots Quentin working on the car just
prior to the accident.
In a
visit to the supposedly grieving mother, Harry finds her sitting poolside,
drunk, reveals that she will now inherit the girl’s trust fund. Harry’s
indignity for her lack of feeling leads to her demanding he leave.
With Iverson’s accomplice, Harry now
returns spot, but as Paula dives to retrieve it, a plane suddenly appears and
moves toward to boat. As Paul attempts to return to surface
with the loot,
the plane dives down, its pilot shooting at both Harry and her. Paula is killed
and Harry, seriously hit, watches the plane crash nearby, recognizing the pilot
through the cockpit window to be the film stunt coordinator, Joey.
Unable to move, Harry attempts to
manipulate the boat’s throttle, but only manages to pull it half way before he
collapses, the boat beginning the slow arc of a circle, as he surely has come
to realize that, like the chess game he plays over and over again—a move of the
knight to checkmate in three quick moves which the original chess champion
failed to play—his efforts to make sense of reality were all for naught, that
he has failed at playing a game he did not even know he was playing.
Finally, given this film’s emphasis on
art—on both making it (primarily through the films references to other
directors, in particular Rohmer, and its representations of filmmaking itself)
and in possessing it (through the pre-Columbian artifacts and the expensive
antiquities which Harry’s wife sells)—we might conclude that a world of such
artifice can no longer allow a straight-forward, straight-thinking man like
Harry to survive. For Harry, who clearly sees the role of a gumshoe as being
someone to watch and follow in order to discern reality, there is no role for
him in a place so designed. Watching in such a world, as he expresses it early
in the film, is like “seeing paint dry.”
*The
filmmaker father’s aspirations were to film epics such as Samson and Delilah.
Certainly his daughter, Delly, might be described as a femme fatal devoted to
sheering the hair of any likely Samson.
Los Angeles,
December 4, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment