By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: May 20, 2015
The first car-aided superhero stunt pulled off by the Fast & Furious crew in Furious 7 involves the surprisingly foolproof parachuting-in of roll cage-reinforced cars to a pass in the Caucasus Mountains. It is, like many of the racing-stealing set-pieces in the series, a combination of dull realism and imaginative play: the cars float down, the wind rippling past for our ears, but not theirs, what with the windows being up and all, only to crunch down on the same old highway with the same visual language the Fast & Furious series coasts on: quick cutting, an emphasis on actor reaction shots, CG stunt composition.
James Wan, known as a successful horror director, directs Furious 7 following Justin Lin’s direction of the previous four in the series, and adds a couple new twists (the camera, locked to a character’s perspective, will spin as they are flipped onto a table or wall during a fight scene; the camera, imitating a fast-forwarded Google Streetview zoom, cuts out as much as possible of, for example, the walk from building to car). Both moves fit with the series’ approach, which is a complete absence of suggestion: did the cars land where their GPS monitors said they would? Yes, so let’s move on. It’s impressive marksmanship but lousy storytelling — Chris Morgan’s unnecessarily complicated scripts aside, the pace of a chase in a Fast & Furious movie is often repetitive, juggling one thing at a time, holding a single new idea, if any, until the end.
In the case of this wooded heist, the group of five (Paul Walker, Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, and Chris Bridges) are after a hostage being transported in a protected bus. As they approach it, ramming it from behind, compartments open up, revealing automatic weaponry. So they duck and swerve and after about two minutes of that, a couple of crashes, a close-quarters fists-and-feet-fight, and an explosion or three, the scene reaches a conclusion.
Much has been made of why the Fast & Furious series is successful: diverse casting, near-telenovela plotting, an embrace of cars as a means for achieving the American ideals of class transcendence and family bonding. Yet its longevity, and its defining contribution as popular art, can be found in the series’ inability to completely satisfy: its action scenes are often similar and inferior to other genre standards, but with cars; its minority cast may be empowered one scene, casually killed off or framed with a sexist lens the next; or, to get specific, Kurt Russell shows up in this one hawking the same technology Batman used in the ending of The Dark Knight, and is never once shown driving a car. Dwayne Johnson spends 90 per cent of this one in the hospital. It’s a puzzle.
But back to the problem of the armoured bus. I couldn’t help but think of that modern pop masterpiece Speed Racer, which also features a scene in which a bus opens up with gunfire on a thin, high-altitude cliffside road — only in that one, the Wachowskis cut between the car manoeuvres and an interior drama, where a menacing proposition of selling out or ending up as piranha feed (crystal-clear tank on luminous display) sent a somewhat normal scene into loopy mayhem. In Furious 7, Tony Jaa and his henchmen are presumably checking their phones or meditating in their seating compartments. Or there’s even Bond: in License to Kill, Timothy Dalton is at least duelling with a tanker full of gasoline and explosive cocaine. And Wan’s coverage, which gives us plenty of shaking piles of dirt flung at the camera, makes one wish he idolized Johnnie To’s long-take backseat exchanges in Breaking News. The ending of the scene, in which Walker dangles above an abyss, is Spielberg’s The Lost World minus the dinosaurs, or any sense of timing besides a deadline.
Of course, comparisons or not, the reasons Furious 7 have become a cultural centrepiece have just as much, if not more, to do with what happened outside the frame. That this is Walker’s last movie, and how the crew and cast worked to finish it after his death, gives the movie a sense of paying respect. Still, the entire storyline for Walker’s character, who struggles with the idea of giving up the life of illegal racing and stealing, runs in the derivative shadow of pictures like Michael Mann’s Heat, where families, especially wives and children, are a burden at work and a stifling comfort at home. Mann, in his subsequent work, including this year’s Blackhat, has moved on from that idea, but it remains influential for hacks like Morgan and Wan, who, in a series like this, merely stitch together a conservative installment, rather than create something lasting. It will be called a tribute, but it’s just a small part of a franchise.
Mad Max: Fury Road
In 1880, Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif” was published; in 1939 it served as inspiration for a small Western called Stagecoach, directed by John Ford. Stagecoach was technically based on Ernest Haycox’s “Stage to Lordsburg,” but Ford, familiar with Maupassant’s story, saw in it the potential for a stronger social critique to inform his straightforward narrative. It’s a simple point-to-point journey, limiting character movement and forcing people together.
In both “Boule de Suif” and Stagecoach, the authors contrast a prostituted woman with the seemingly respectable members of a makeshift society — but the long journey, harsh weather, and close quarters mean that, well, when you put a banker, an alcohol salesman, a military officer, a preacher’s wife, a doctor, a wanted rebel, and a stablehand together, eventually they’ll all get hungry, grow tired, let their guards down, façades drop, and feel the need to survive, even if that means acknowledging the humanity of the people beside them. That’s precisely the narrative jumping-off point that George Miller is working with in Mad Max: Fury Road.
It’s a sequel, but at 70, Miller isn’t making movies because he’s looking for work — there is, in the uniquely Australian merging of car culture, hooliganism, oil trade, and arid landscape grandeur, something more to be done, 30 years later, with a different set of tools. There is much to be said for the process by which Miller constructed this film: how editor Margaret Sixel, who has edited Miller’s work since Babe: Pig in the City, brings a unique sense of how an action scene might be constructed that exceeds the then-innovative work of the original trilogy, and easily surpasses the predictable rise-rise-delay-delay-moving-on structure of American action. Unlike the Fast & Furious world of momentum slowed for 90 degree turns and grey-and-black warehouse aesthetic accidents, Mad Max is an endless straightaway, composed of hand-cranked trick photography, sunlight-seared colour-timing (as boldly divided into action-painting segments as Hitchcock or Miyazaki), and crashes that tumble and cartwheel through the Namibian desert, perhaps the most dangerous-looking stunts since the streetcar chaos of silent cinema.
In the middle of two increasingly dominant movements in American film (superhero movies and Christianity movies), Mad Max: Fury Road is an example of a work that is actually on a biblical, mythological scale: Miller’s conception of the film begins not in backstory delivered in ponderous voiceover, but images, each of them carrying an individual stamp and an historical evolution. Not unlike Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, to which Fury Road bears some similarities (its relentless pace, clear direction, and weighted respect for life and death), Miller began work on the film as a series of comic book panels. Working with artist Brandon McCarthy, the first “script” for the film was 3500 illustrations or storyboards; the level of care and detail in this film is exhaustive, and impossible to capture in a single viewing.
Fury Road isn’t just a perfectionist action film, though. It’s not for nothing that Charlize Theron, in a protagonist’s role, at certain angles, eyes glowing, wind biting her face, resembles Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s Joan of Arc. Fury Road is informed by a feminist perspective, as you’ve likely heard, but Miller, Sixel, McCarthy, and co-writer Nico Lathouris have not made a movie reducible to an ideology: it is simply that, by creating a movie and a world entirely about movement and collision, and placing human characters within that world, to not include systems of prejudice and fear that try to control social life would be ignoring an entire history that stretches back before cinema. It’s similar to how Paul Duane writes of the cinema of Howard Hawks: “No one protagonist, no easily parsed storyline, secondary characters get the redemption, and it’s not about anything — just about men and women.” As in the original Mad Max, placing a story in the future allows Miller to describe the present, with greater adjectives, and with an eye to what has yet to change.
