Forgotten Films: MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1990)
10/3/2006 2:00:00 PM
Editor's Note: This would have gone up yesterday, but didn't, due to unforeseen delays.
Bob Rafelson was one of the seminal American filmmakers of the 1970s, having directed gritty classics like Five Easy Pieces and The King of Marvin Gardens. So it came as a bit of a surprise in 1990 when he emerged with a historical epic about the British exploration of the Nile in Mountains of the Moon. In truth, Rafelson had been something of a journeyman for some years, putting his name to such genre pieces as Black Widow and the Jack Nicholson-Jessica Lange remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice. It might have been understandable for some viewers to assume that this was a director-for-hire job. Amazingly, though, Mountains of the Moon turned out to be one of Rafelson’s most personal films – certainly his most ambitious. It even got a wide release and some degree of critical acclaim (“Completely absorbing,” said Roger Ebert; “An outstanding adventure film,” said Variety). So how come nobody seems to remember it today?
In a sense, Mountains of the Moon is a deceptive film. It seems to be, on its surface, a classic prestige picture of the kind David Lean and Richard Attenborough excelled at – handsome locales, historic pedigree, period recreations, epic running time. The story certainly fits the bill: Based on the novel Burton and Speke, it's the tale of famed explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton (Patrick Bergin) and his friendship and rivalry with John Hanning Speke (Iain Glen), the British nobleman with whom Burton sought out the titular source of the Nile River. It’s certainly gorgeous, and one can see how Rafelson’s eye for composition and detail made him an ideal director for this sort of lavish awards-bait picture.
But look a bit closer, and it becomes clear that Mountains is a darker, more bracing film than most others of its ilk. Indeed, the obstacles Burton and Speke encounter on their voyages would give the edgiest of horror directors pause. This is a movie in which a main character gets a javelin through his cheeks, and another has all his limbs speared open in the first 30 minutes. It doesn’t end there: At one point, a giant beetle crawls into Speke’s ear as he sleeps. Attempts to pour hot wax in there don’t work. Finally, mad with pain, he gets the bright idea of jabbing a compass needle in there. We are far from Out of Africa territory. There’s an exploitation picture in here crawling to get out.
Rafelson and co-screenwriter William Harrison (who also wrote the novel) deftly draw these characters with effective shorthand: Burton is the inveterate traveler, a seeker and something of a social anarchist, determined to find ways to poke holes in the repression and provincialism of British society. Speke is of a noble family but, thanks to not being first-born, will not inherit the family fortune; he has to make his own name for himself. At the same time, though, Speke very much upholds the very rigid, traditional caste system that's holding him back. Both characters' inabilities to reconcile themselves with British society leads to their respective downfalls -- though the nature of that downfall turns out to be different for each one.
The relationship between Speke and Burton is a rather odd character dynamic, one that breeds suspicion as much as it does friendship. Of course, it helps that Rafelson cast his film brilliantly: Bergin, then a newcomer, gives Burton a slightly psychotic edge with his wild eyes, and Glen’s quiet intensity hints at Speke’s inner conflicts in a way that recalls Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaking of Lawrence, there’s also the small matter of sexuality. While many buddy films (and let’s face it, on many levels, Mountains is if nothing else a buddy film) might hint at some kind of sexual tension between their protagonists, they’re usually pretty careful about crossing boundaries; it’s left to academics and film-geeks with overactive imaginations to ponder further. But Rafelson and Harrison actually take on the subject with a rare degree of honesty. Burton didn’t just explore new lands and societies, he was also a sexual adventurer, translating the Kama Sutra and other similar works. The film depicts Speke as something of a closeted homosexual, and in one scene, as Burton lies suffering from illness, the two share a passionate kiss. Beautifully, the film keeps the moment ambiguous: Is the repressed Speke taking advantage of a fevered Burton, or is he helping to heal a sick friend? Nothing more is said about the embrace after that, but it subtly informs the conflicts of the film’s third act.
 | | Patrick Bergin (foreground) and Iain Glen |
That’s not the only genre taboo Rafelson’s film breaks. Films about colonialism always have difficulty dealing with issues of race and culture. While it would be silly to make too great a claim for Mountains of the Moon in this regard, it is interesting to note that the film never goes out of its way to try and treat Burton and Speke as angels. Burton, seasoned world traveler that he is, understands African cultures better than Speke, but the film allows many of the tribes they encounter along the way to remain decidedly other to the protagonists: We don’t get any audience-pandering scenes of cross-cultural understanding, designed to show how sensitive Burton and Speke were to other races. It’s a measure of the film’s confidence in its story that it feels no need to give its characters brownie points for racial sensitivity: This is who they are, Rafelson seems to be saying. Take them or leave them.
Indeed, Mountains of the Moon is a much darker, leaner and meaner film than others of its genre. Perhaps that explains both why it is so unique and why it didn’t quite get the attention it warranted. Despite its wondrous production values, its impeccable recreation of the past, the film doesn’t quite work as escapism: It’s too violent, too confrontational. One doesn’t know quite what to make of it. There’s a historical lesson here, perhaps, but no tidy moral resolutions. In some senses, the movie feels as strange and otherworldly as the continent on which most of it takes place must have seemed to 19th century British explorers. You go in expecting a historical epic and emerge from it worried about having nightmares.
 | | Bob Rafelson |
And it has a special place in its director’s career. In an interview with Peter Tonguette at the Film Journal, Rafelson noted that making Mountains of the Moon was the most enjoyable filmmaking experience of his career, even though he struggled with the idea of making it at first: “I didn’t know anything about the English culture, that I had a responsibility to make American movies in odd American places…and then I said to myself, ‘Is it because you’re not interested or is it because you’re afraid?’ And the answer was because I was afraid. And that became all the more reason for me to ultimately say, ‘Well, that’s a good reason for doing it. You approach everything in your life fearfully, why not approach this next movie thinking it’s impossible for you to make this, you don’t understand the culture?’”
Clearly Rafelson understood the risks he was taking. The resulting masterpiece should have been acclaimed as one of the great films of its time. Instead, it sank away quietly. Luckily, it is possible to see it on DVD. While it may be a forgotten film, it stands a good chance of rediscovery.
-- Bilge Ebiri
Previous Forgotten Films Columns:
- Augus t 18, 2006 -- LUNA (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci, 1979)
- August 28, 2006 -- OUR MOTHER’S HOUSE (dir. Jack Clayton, 1967)
- August 14, 2006 -- THE CHOCOLATE WAR (dir. Keith Gordon, 1988)
- July 31, 2006 -- THE STRANGER (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1967)
- July 17, 2006 -- WALKER (dir. Alex Cox, 1987)
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Video of the Day: Blood Tea and Red String Trailer
10/3/2006 12:01:00 PM
Christiane Cegavske’s stop-motion fairy tale Blood Tea and Red String, whose week-long run kicks off the Pioneer Theater’s month of “Horror, Terror, and General Mayhem” starting Wednesday, October 3rd, might just be one of the most insanely unsettling and creepy films I’ve ever seen. Want a taste? Check out this trailer, which gives you a pretty good idea of what this beautiful, haunting film looks like.
If you’re in the New York area and even mildly intrigued, I urge you to check this film out. It’s a real dazzler.
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More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Mission to Mars
10/3/2006 11:00:00 AM
"I love Brian De Palma films.
"Why?
"Because Brian De Palma makes movies that speak to my penis. They make me hard. They always have."
- The opening lines to Harry Knowles's review of The Black Dahlia
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Morning Deal Report: Williams to Seduce McGregor, Daughters of Comedians and Their Wicked Ways...
10/3/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Michelle Williams will play a “sizzling sex kitten” who will seduce Ewan McGregor in a “wild, secret sex club” and then disappear, leading to his getting accused of her murder, in The Tourist, which Hugh Jackman will also star in. Sounds like Vertigo reimagined by Joe Eszterhas.
- Comedian Offspring Gone Wild: First it was Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter getting deported after becoming involved with drug-dealers and money launderers. Now it’s Peter Sellers’s daughter Victoria getting deported. (And she co-starred in a Heidi Fleiss video to boot.) Somebody make sure that Buster Keaton’s kids are doing okay.
- Mark Wahlberg is exec producing another show for HBO, after the success of Entourage. This one, based on a popular Israeli series, is called The Treatment and will star Gabriel Byrne as a therapist “who is calm, smooth, insightful and nonconfrontational with his patients but turns into a testy, self-doubting man full of barely concealed anger when he is a patient seeing his own shrink.” Embeth Davidtz will co-star. And as far as we can tell, it bears no relation to this pretty awesome movie, which recently premiered at Tribeca.
- The Bourne Ultimatum has apparently begun shooting, “but it is still without a worthy nemesis for its amnesiac spy hero, Jason Bourne.” The producers have approached Gael Garcia Bernal, but “negotiations have not yet begun.” Cutting it pretty close, aren’t they?
- What is it with these action movies starting production without major roles in place? Beau Garrett and Andre Braugher are joining the cast of the already-shooting Silver Surfer movie, which is actually called Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer and features “Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis reprising their roles” from the original. “Garrett will play Frankie Raye, a scientist and love interest to Evans' character. In the comic she eventually gains super powers. Braugher will play a general with the responsibility to capture the Silver Surfer.”
- Thank You For Smoking director Jason Reitman’s next film will be the dark teen comedy Juno, which will “look at the difficult choices facing a pregnant teen Juno McGuff, who gets pregnant during a single sexual encounter with her best friend, decides to adopt the baby out to a married couple, and then falls in love with the husband.” I think I saw that episode of Jerry Springer.
- Hayao Miyazaki has begun work on his next animated film, this time with color storyboards, a first for the legendary Japanese auteur.
- Oscar-bait Watch 2009: Terrence Howard will join his Hustle & Flow director Craig Brewer for a biopic about the life of country singer Charley Pride.
- "I want to spend every single night for three months going out with a different famous actress. You know, Halle Berry one night, Salma Hayek the next, and then walk on the beach holding hands with Leonardo DiCaprio.” - George Clooney discusses his plans to foil the paparazzi by inundating them with work. How come that never works for us?
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Video of the Day 2: Death of a President, The Trailer
10/2/2006 2:00:00 PM
Well, the trailer for the incendiary British arthouse "what if" documentary is finally here, just in time to get us all worried in the run-up to the election.
Go here to download the video.
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Finally, Somewhere Ben Affleck Can Really Shine
10/2/2006 1:00:00 PM
We love a good Hollywood miscasting story as much as the next guy, but one of the great joys of movie lore is learning about all the various actors who were considered for certain iconic parts but then dropped for various reasons (Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, OJ Simpson as The Terminator, and Ronald Reagan as Rick in Casablanca are some of the most notorious ones). We’ve often wished somebody would catalog these tidbits of trivia. And now we have our wish, with the site Notstarring.com – sort of an Internet Movie Database for What Could Have Been.
Lucille Ball in Gone With the Wind? Tupac Shakur in Forrest Gump? Mickey Rooney in Myra Breckenridge? It’s all here. And it’s all constantly being updated. Because Hollywood pretty much churns out bad casting ideas by the hour.
One quibble: The font they use appears to be the same font as the little list of sponsored links that immediately follows the names – so for a second there I thought Barry Manilow had been considered for a part in Babel. Which, now that I think of it, would have been kind of awesome.
(Hat tip: The Guardian.)
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Video of the Day 1: New York Film Festival Trailer
10/2/2006 12:01:00 PM
Watch this trailer for the currently-raging New York Film Festival, and try to tell us that it isn’t basically saying, “Fuck you, Tribeca.”
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Idiocracy Update: You Only Thought It Was Over
10/2/2006 11:00:00 AM
 | | No way, dude. A NEW Idiocracy still? Sw-eeet. |
Better late than never, I guess, Slate published a review of Idiocracy last Friday, and it was pretty much a rave, calling the film “easily the most potent political film of the year, and the most stirring defense of traditional values since Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
Money passage:
”Watch Dogville or Fahrenheit 9/11 or even The Passion of the Christ and you get the distinct sense that you're being congratulated for believing the right things. Rare is the movie that challenges your beliefs. Rarer still is the movie that tells you you're a fat moron, and that you should be ashamed of yourself. The unmarried adultescents swarming the cities, the DINKs who've priced families with children out of the better suburbs, the kids who never read—these are Hollywood's most prized demographics, and Mike Judge has them squarely in his sights. Is it any wonder 20th Century Fox decided Idiocracy would never be boffo box office?
“Idiocracy challenges a central article of faith in American life, the notion that we are destined for moral, material, and intellectual progress. And what if things really are getting worse? What if, more to the point, we really are getting dumber? Recently there's been some troubling evidence that the arrow of intelligence is pointing downward. A British study found that the intelligence of British 11-year-olds has actually declined during the last 20 years. Data from the Danish draft board indicate that intelligence peaked in the late-1990s and has now fallen to levels not seen since 1991, when MC Hammer-inspired parachute pants were all the rage. If that's not enough to make you slit your wrists, I don't know what is.”
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Help Netflix Recommend You More Scratched-Up Coffee Coasters
10/2/2006 10:30:00 AM
Netflix wants engineers out there to come up with software to improve their movie-recommendation system. (The first job: Find out why every other recommendation I’m getting is a Bollywood flick.) And if your program can improve the accuracy of the recommendations by 10%, they might give you a million bucks. “The prize, offered in a contest scheduled to begin Monday, is part of Netflix's effort to sharpen its competitive edge as it continues a bitter duel with Blockbuster Inc. and prepares for an anticipated onslaught of services that make it easier to download movies on to computer hard drives.”
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Morning Deal Report: Scarlett Deemed Sexy, Reeler Revamps, Topher Grace Gets "Coxblocked," and More
10/2/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Scarlett Johansson has been named the Sexiest Woman Alive by Esquire Magazine. “What about my brain? What about my heart? What about my kidneys and my gallbladder?" she asks in an interview in the magazine. Don’t worry, Scarlett. We can only assume they’re hot, too.
- ScreenGrab friend The Reeler has undergone a major overhaul. It’s no longer just a one-man film blog, it is now a full-fledged website, with features, reviews, interviews, news, and an army of writers. (Well, okay, maybe not exactly an army. Yet.) It only just launched, but there’s already tons of stuff on there. Still devoted primarily to New York City moviegoing, it’s a must for your bookmarks even if you don’t live near Gotham.
- Greg Coolidge, who directed the upcoming Employee of the Month, already has his next movie set: It’ll feature Seann William Scott and Topher Grace and will be called Coxblocker. “Grace plays William Cox, who has trouble with women until he finally meets the girl of his dreams. The trouble is her best friend is her ex-boyfriend (Scott). Little does he know that the ex-boyfriend is trying to get back together with her -- so while our hero, Grace, is trying to hook up with her, Scott is blocking him all along the way.”
- Keira Knightley’s mother, playwright Sharman Macdonald, is finally getting her script The Best Time Of Our Lives produced, starring daughter Keira herself. “It’s based on the true story of the relationship between Dylan Thomas, his wife Caitlin, childhood friend Vera Phillips and Phillips’ future husband, William Killick. Knightley will play Vera.”
- Pan’s Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro is developing a horror TV series for Fox called The Strain, which he describes as a “really nasty, nasty fantasy.” Maybe it’s a Fox reality series.
- Romeo Must Die auteur Andrzej Bartkowiak is getting set to direct Black and Blue, a thriller which “revolves around a Boston detective who is desperately trying to combat an escalating drug war between an old-school Irish mob boss and a group of young thugs, only to learn that some of his family members might be involved.” With The Departed coming up, and now this, has Boston become the new locale of choice for gangland thrillers?
- This is happening. This is actually happening. WarGames 2: The Dead Game has a director. His name is Stuart Gillard, and he apparently also directed something called Kart Racer in 2003. Okay, so maybe it isn’t happening anytime soon.
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