52 Weeks of Literature, Week Four: “The Old Gringo” by Carlos Fuentes

Representative excerpt: “Harriet dancing this night with her ramrod-straight, decorated, brave father at a soirée welcoming the heroes of Cuba, tricolor rosettes on the bosoms of all the women, WELCOME HOME HEROES OF SAN JUAN HILL, her uniformed father, with stiff mustaches and hair smelling of cologne, proud of his slender daughter in her whirl of taffeta, Captain Winslow with a slightly different scent, and she, burying her nose in her father’s scent, smelling the city of Washington there, that false Acropolis of marble and domes and columns sunk in the wet mud of a pernicious tropics that dared not say its name: a Southern suffocation, a jungle of marble like a grandiose and empty cemetery, the temples of justice and the government sinking into an equatorial, devouring, spreading tangle of undergrowth: a vegetal cancer rooted in the foundations of Washington, a city moist as the crotch of an aroused Negress: Harriet buried her nose in Tomás Arroyo’s neck and smelled a Negress’s swollen, velvety sex: Captain Winslow, I am very lonely, you may have me at your pleasure.” (pp. 109-10, trans. Carlos Fuentes and Margaret Sayers Peden)

Carlos Fuentes’ Old Gringo is a journalist and minor author who arrives in Mexico in 1913 and shacks up with Pancho Villa’s army with the intent of committing suicide by Mexican Revolution. He is modeled on Ambrose Bierce, who may have succeeded in euthanizing himself in such a way—but we cannot confirm that because he vanished, so it is natural for authors like Fuentes to fill in the story’s gaps with legend, not unlike the composers who’ve tried to finish Mozart’s Requiem. The Old Gringo is banked on the allure of an unsolvable mystery—on “what might have happened” serving as a nourishing aesthetic substitute for the unknown “what happened”—but that mystery is far from Fuentes’ only concern. In fact, most of the novel’s midsection is devoted to the sexual liaison that American tutor Harriet Winslow enacts with rebel general Tomás Arroyo to keep Bierce safe, once it becomes clear that Bierce—a paternal figure for Harriet—is challenging Arroyo’s authority. The characters spend much of that liaison flashing back to the traumatic events that define them and their relationships with their homelands, and many of the resulting flashbacks deal with sex, abusive parents, Oedipal crap, a scary cellar, and other psycho-mumbo-jumbo. So you see, I’m skeptical. This isn’t because I feel misled by a title and back cover blurb promising a story about Bierce—it’s hardly fair to force an author to conform to all your expectations—but rather, it’s because I’d hoped an author of Fuentes’ stature was above Paddy Chayefsky’s rubber ducky exposition: “Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that’s why he’s a deranged killer.” Bierce specialized in short stories, poetry and adages, so it’s appropriate for Fuentes to work in a calculatedly incoherent, unfocused fashion, and there is some insightful poetic waxing on the sociopolitical ties between the U.S. and Mexico, as well as between the human body and its landscape, and on Bierce’s curious links to W.R. Hearst. This is a novel of and about substitutions—of myth for history, of surrogates for biological parents and children, of new regimes for old ones, of propaganda for fact, of oral culture for written language. All is mutable. The cognitive impulse to fill in our vacancies and wounds is a natural and potent one. It’s frustrating when Fuentes resorts to the usual trite Freudian psycho-babble to meet that end, but when he is dissecting the constant exchanges of people and territory between his home nation and its imperialist northern neighbor, and when he is actually getting to the heart and soul of the Ambrose Bierce mystery, there is a plenitude of profound moments.

Grade: B

Next week: Another tale of a life-and-death struggle in the middle of nowhere, this time in Tasmania: Nobel winner Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves.

Review: “The Boondock Saints”

The Boondock Saints is that rare example of cinema: the product of an average Joe Schmoe’s moviemaking pipedream brought to life by the luck of the Irish, and regrettably so. Film buffs may recall: in the mid-‘90s, a Boston bartender named Troy Duffy wrote a script on a whim, got it into the hands of Harvey Weinstein and—despite various struggles and an eventual falling out with Weinstein—notched a $6 million budget and an ensemble boasting an Oscar nominee and a well-established Scottish comedian. Everyone has a story to tell, and plenty fantasize about manifesting their stories into books and movies, though few such fantasies are fulfilled. Duffy’s was, and the result is an essential warning to all aspiring filmmakers about the dangers of ego, and a reminder as to why Hollywood’s gatekeepers are so hesitant to let newbies in. I’m writing a South Boston-set crime novel that I hope to turn into a screenplay (so you see, I’m a dreamer, too), and in my research on the place, I’d tried to control the temptation to watch this. Few films are as clear an indicator of the divide between critics and regular filmgoers; Saints has a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and, at last check, a 7.9 out of 10 on IMDB, which puts it on the cusp of that site’s coveted Top 250. It failed-at-the-box-office-and-has-since-become-a-“cult-classic.” Alas, I’ve seen the film, and I’m glad I have because now I can wax on about how right the critics are. Paddy Chayefsky, the master screenwriter behind Network, once advised budding writers, “First, cut out all the beautiful stuff, slash, slash, slash.” The Boondock Saints is just under two hours of such “beautiful stuff.”

Not everyone is an artist; not everyone can make art. It takes education, talent and discipline. Duffy had too much education, some talent and almost no discipline; he has potential, and he squanders it on his near-total lack of artistic control. This much is evident as the film begins. After a priest delivers an overtly thematic sermon on “the indifference of good” to all the evil in this world (he brings up Kitty Genovese), we delve into a schizoid credits sequence smashing together Boston scenery, schmaltzy bagpipe braying, and an introduction to our two main characters, native-Irish twins Murphy and Connor MacManus (Norman Reedus and Sean Patrick Flanery), who work as butchers. One of the twins—I can’t remember the distinctions between the two, nor do I want to—is indoctrinating a greenhorn, a woman, and uses the term “rule of thumb,” which moves her to educate him on the (likely apocryphal) misogynistic origins of that phrase. Apparently, long ago, a husband could beat his wife with a stick as long as its diameter was no greater than that of his thumb. I’d bet that somewhere, while writing his script, Duffy heard that factoid and couldn’t resist the chance to put it in the film. Yet, he doesn’t know what to do with it, nor how to weave it into a larger framework. The scene quickly forgets about the woman and devolves into a playful brawl. As it turns out, that woman is arguably the movie’s most substantial female presence.

Duffy has been labeled a Tarantino wannabe, and aptly so, as Duffy not only apes Tarantino’s juggling of factoids in drawn-out conversation but also his toying with chronology. In his efforts to provoke the audience with time jumps, Duffy fumbles. His main conceit involves getting the twins, who become vigilantes, into situations that prime them to kill some bad guys; then flash-forwarding to the eccentric, opera-loving, homosexual FBI detective Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe) reconstructing the crime scene; during which there are several flashbacks to the crime taking place, which confirm Smecker. Done once and well, such a structural device can pay off. Duffy uses this calling card no less than four times, and poorly throughout. This crutch becomes tiresome and predictable, even onanistic, very rapidly, with little sense of development to be found between the four set pieces. They’re all just scenes of the twins slaughtering a bunch of stock Italian and Russian criminal bigwigs—with their friend Rocco (David Della Rocco) often stumbling in and joining the gang—that drag on for far too long and grow increasingly implausible and stupid. These guys wouldn’t last a day in the real world; they make Bernie Goetz look like a genius. Once again, I see potential in Duffy. I see creativity in the moment when past and present conflate and Smecker joins the twins on their spectacular killing spree. But by that scene, we’ve reached the fourth iteration of the director’s trademark move, and we’re sick of it all.

Duffy’s hubris matches that of his witless protagonists. He wants us to think he’s wrestling with the moral dilemma of vigilantism when he isn’t; it’s pretty clear the MacManus twins are heroes, and we’re supposed to be rooting for them. Their butchery of villains comes off as slick, smug, self-indulgent entertainment. In this respect, Duffy is ethically dishonest. (The end credits run over a day-late-dollar-short sequence in which passersby on the local news give divergent opinions of the twins and their mission to rid Boston of evil. Nice try.) What’s even worse from a narrative standpoint is that Duffy is too easy on his twins. In one scene that had my eyes rolling, Smecker goes into a confessional booth. The twins, unnoticed by Smecker, are holding the priest hostage in the booth behind. I see cleverness in this setup, but cleverness needs a focused vision and a restrained hand to translate well, and Duffy lacks both. He kills the scene by having Smecker confess that he’s on the twins’ side and that he’d rather not arrest them. With the FBI compromised, the twins face no conflict and no significant opposition, and the audience checks out.

On the other side of the law, the Italian mafia recruits a hitman, “Il Duce” (Billy Connolly), out of prison to hunt down these goons. One second we see Il Duce in prison, and the next he’s magically bailed out and facing the twins head-on in an absurd shootout that has the ammunition of Peckinpah but not the blood. (The worst injury sustained is a lost finger. Come on.) Spoiler alert: the Italians take the twins prisoner, and their capo, Papa Joe (Carlo Rota), guns down Rocco. In the twins’ effort to escape, not only does Smecker—convincingly if campily dressed as a female hooker—aid them. Il Duce, out of nowhere, turns on the Italians and reveals himself to be not Italian but Irish and not just that but also—wait for it—a MacManus! He recognizes the family prayer the twins are reciting over Rocco’s dead body and joins them on their quest. What a fucking cop-out. (Wikipedia tells me he’s the twin’s father, which makes the prior shootout even more ludicrous. It’s never clarified how he doesn’t recognize his sons until this late.)

That pathetic anticlimax is followed by one of the dumbest and ugliest film endings I’ve seen in a long time. The MacManus trio breaks into Papa Joe’s trial, manages to subdue all the police and justice officials, and proceeds to address everyone present with a pre-rehearsed speech about what they plan to do with their vigilantism and how they think it’ll help Boston. Connor and Murphy exchange dialogue in a too-perfect, too-obviously scripted way that hints at Duffy’s true intentions: not to question the moral quandaries of taking the law into your own hands, but to kick off a hip new franchise. Il Duce demands that a young lady, a witness, watch their vengeful assassination of Papa Joe—a gesture that is meant to offer catharsis but that actually comes off as cruel. As the three mercenaries stand ready to execute Papa Joe, their Irish prayer overpowers his Italian prayer, a creative choice that reeks of a medieval anti-Italian racism and depicts the vigilantism as a thin veil for an uppity religious crusade. (Curiously, the twins are Irish and not Bostonian; they’re transplanted Eurotrash serial killers.) Duffy and the MacMani don’t stop for once to consider, as Hamlet does, whether Papa Joe’s prayer will send him to Heaven. They just blow him away, as Smecker watches through a crack in the door and grimaces, and as everyone else shrieks in horror, while Duffy expects us to be in awe of his brave heroes. Add to all this some truly crappy acting from the bit players—from the bartender with the lazy Tourette’s mugs to the token Asian guy who wants to cuddle with Smecker—and you have an intriguing, clever but ultimately mindless and cowardly film.

To the extent that you should watch this, I implore you to watch it as a double feature with Overnight, the making-of documentary by Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith. Shot on cheap camcorder with unfiltered wind noise, it’s a neat look at the mid-‘90s—which is such a foreign land by now that there are already period pieces of it—and at pre-9/11 Hollywood, and it manages some poetry. There are some ethically troubling moments, such as the decision to include shots of a drunk woman flashing her breasts in a bar and a nude beach at Cannes, but beyond this, it confirms most of the suspicions I had about Duffy. He’s an asshole, and his ego not only interfered with any talent he may have but also wrecked the careers and lives of everyone who joined him for the ride. Men of such stature as Dafoe and Connolly only agreed to act in this trainwreck insofar as they had a good time making the damn movie. God knows what Weinstein and company saw in the script, but one can understand why he backed out of Duffy’s passion project and why no one in Hollywood wanted to get involved in this film, nor release it when it was finished. As I’ve said, the best function of The Boondock Saints is as a lesson on what happens when a director thinks everything with his name on it is gold and can’t muster the humility to take a step back and judge his work with a fresh eye. In calling it a cult classic, one sullies that fine label awarded to such masterpieces as Harold and Maude. This isn’t a classic in any sense. This is the best cinematic equivalent I know of a man jacking off in a motel bathroom. The pleasure is his alone, and no one else’s.

Grade: D