Rented "Men With Guns", the latest by
John Sayles last night. I really liked it, but he was preaching
to the choir for me. For those who don't know, MWG is about the
most stridently political movie made in the last decade. It's the
story of a rich Mexican doctor, who upon retirement decides to
seek out his students, whom he trained to bring modern medicine
to the poorest indians in the mountains of southern Mexico. Time
after time, he finds that the Men With Guns (sometimes guerillas,
sometimes army, sometimes bandits) have killed them.
As the doctor travels farther and farther from
Mexico City and deeper and deeper into un-Europeanized Mexico the
peoples language, customs, and religions become continually less
familiar, and they understand less and less about the conflicts
that they are caught up in. Or perhaps they understand them
better, and it is the audience who really understands very
little. To prod at the viewers sensibilities, Sayles unleashes
the ugliest, most ignorant, whiningly liberal american tourists
the silver screen has ever known several times throughout the
film (I think the husband is played by Sayles, but I can't be
bothered to check right now). The obnoxiousness of the couple
that are clearly intended to stand in for MWG's likely audience
is further accented by the fact that the movie is filmed almost
entirely in 'foreign' languages, or more specifically, the
languages that the characters would actually speak; Spanish, and
various Indian languages (except for the tourist couple, who
speak English and first-year Spanish. Furthermore, the pacing,
cinematography, and lack of background music for most scenes all
reinforce the idea that we are watching a foriegn movie - and of
course the more American anything is in the movie, the uglier it
is made to seem.
Sayles obviously wants to shock his audience
and he even succeeded a couple of times for me; once in the
"ghost's" flashback, and earlier with the depiction of
sub-subsistence level farming communities. But Sayles knows that
he IS going to be preahing pretty exclusively to a uppermiddle
class liberal choir, so he makes sure to keep the ending
ambiguous, leadenly symbolic (Cerca Del Cielo indeed!) and with
just the slightest room for hope.
Anyway, it worked for me, and I heartily
recommend it to my fellow bleeding heart hand-wringers, and to
the rest of y'all as well.