Visual Chords

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2010)

What a great example of what can pull you into a film.
Storywise, it is a pretty tired deal: ruined life, redeemed life through romantic encounter. Along the way you get to see the lows of the ruin and highs of the redeeming love. Such a thing is either so ordinary that it is worthless, or so bland that you can layer all your attractive tricks. It is like runway models. The dynamic there is that the women by themselves are supposed to have no appeal whatever. Add some clothes designed to catch to catch the mysteries of womanhood, and the woman comes alive. It is subtle effect that universally works.
The "narrative fold" here is nested in this phenomenon. This man needs love, so we reinforce the urges behind the romance. Gyllenhaal makes it easy by being simply appealing, and visibly going along. We are not supposed to identify with the old loser, but the young admirer.
But there are other devices at work here, so many that the film is overloaded. But I guess that will work at the box office and award circuit. One of them is something I have remarked on many times: the explicit fold. We are watching a performance with highlights of a life, of a man whose profession is performing highlights of his character's life. The inner performance is perfectly aligned with the outer by the songs, carefully crafted in tone and lyrics.
We have a second admirer. The woman loves him for the character in the middle of the fold, the guy in the movie. A character played by folded acting genius Colin Farrell admires him for the man in the fold (the inner character of the songs) and barely tolerates him as the character himself. Farrell, we will all know, is redeemed himself from substance abuse.
And we have another rather common "fold." Bridges is fantastic. We are watching the character (self-named "Bad") only 20% of the time. The rest of the time we are watching Bridges play this guy. He uses actorly devices that we know are such. The young director frames these devices in camera angles that make us very aware that it is a movie, and that daredevil skills are on display. We don't fall in love with Bad; we fall in love with Bridges.
All that is old. What's newish is the use of the landscape. We are told in the first few seconds that this will be the case: we see the open haggard beauty of the place in a couple shots with major guitar chords, then a strong minor one and the coloring changes to dark, and the focal point moves out. Where in another film we see the characters, here we first see the landscape.
I first noticed the engineered use of the open and the close in "Proof of Life," but I suppose it was already a known device there. "Lone Star" was a sort of high point in western film, using the same sense of place, but having imposed times in the same shot. Here, with the precisely engineered songs, it is the real novelty and skill of the thing.
Duvall was responsible for this, I believe.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.