A House of Dynamite

For an age in which the threat of nuclear annihilation is so unmistakably present, it strikes one as quite strange how so few contemporary filmmakers dare to grapple with one of the key issues of our times — almost as if narratives on mutually assured destruction have become radioactive material in themselves. Sure, we have Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) that serves as the alpha to our atomic-aged omega, but whatever happened to nail-biters such as WarGames (John Badham, 1983) and Fail Safe (Sidney Lumet, 1964), the probing satire of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), or those silly spectacles that are actually Certified Bangers™ like The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990) and Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)? We’re talking about genuine movie-movies, boasting tense men in suits wiping sweat from their foreheads as they stare at computer screens that count down toward potential global obliteration.

Kathryn Bigelow has made such a film before with K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), starring Harrison Ford as a Russian Commanding Officer submerged in a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. Although far from her best, it still flexed what was back then known as her main calling card: elevated genre fare, embellished by baroque cinematography and hyper-machismo performances by electrifying movie stars. With A House of Dynamite, she now has made the far superior version of an atomic warfare picture, one that revives all the anxieties of the cold war and propels it into the 21st century. Actually, this is easily one of Bigelow’s very best films, and the most brilliant crystallisation of what we could call her late era — one that is defined by an unwavering fascination with the American Military Industrial Complex.

Bigelow describes A House of Dynamite as the final entry in an “unofficial triptych,” capping her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker (2008) and controversial follow-up Zero Dark Thirty (2012). Taken together, these films probe the American imperial mindset in a post-9/11 reality, stirring the scarred psyche of a country that has entangled itself in a seemingly never-ending ambient war with the rest of the world. The first two entries in this triptych mostly projected their gaze outwards through their exploration of the fraught power dynamics of American boots on Middle Eastern soil, whereas A House of Dynamite strongly benefits from taking the opposite approach. In a sly reversal, it’s the American airspace that’s being penetrated here by an unattributed missile carrying a nuclear payload. Once that calamitous blip appears on the radars of the U.S. Strategic Command and is heading toward Chicago, it triggers a pressure-cooker scenario in which, over the course of a mere 18 minutes, the US is dragged into nuclear warfare and possible total annihilation.

So much happens within those precious minutes that to recount most of the plot within the confines of this review would be superfluous — especially since Bigelow and screenwriter Noah Oppenheim chop up the narrative in a three-part structure, allowing them to repeatedly loop back in time to explore the inner mechanics of America’s nuclear deterrence from a myriad of perspectives. Cross-cutting between The Oval Office’s Situation Room, the Pentagon, Strategic Command offices, a missile base in Alaska, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Bigelow unravels the clockwork mechanisms with unprecedented insight and access, delivering a striking level of verisimilitude for what is essentially an old-school political thriller.

All of that is captured in what is the director’s most Michael Mann-esque film to date. With taut cinematography that frantically captures the interplay between agents of the state and their computer screens, A House of Dynamite revels in extracting suspense out of the digital flux. It’s like Bigelow found the perfect marriage between the stressful kineticism of hit aughts series 24 and the cerebral video work of Harun Farocki. Meanwhile, she constantly emphasises the human factor at play, as A House of Dynamite is highly attuned to the emotional duress that all the cogs in the machine experience while desperately trying to maintain their professional composure. It’s essentially a film about the painful process of decision-making in extremis. And as America moves closer and closer to the brink of nuclear collapse, the plot funnels all this anxiety upwards and throws it on the lap of the President (Idris Elba), who, within mere minutes, is forced to decide on America’s level of nuclear retaliation. What A House of Dynamite ultimately shows is that, to some degree, this decision ceases to be political. It’s essentially the ultimate philosophical dilemma — the most nightmarish trolley problem one can imagine.

Due to her sympathetic depictions of Americans engaged in active warfare — and her close collaborations with the army, CIA, and other state agencies to deliver these realistic pictures — Bigelow has often been criticised for giving America’s Military Industrial Complex a pass. In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, those critiques especially rang true, as this film about the operation that led to the killing Osama bin Laden could reasonably be argued to condone violent interrogation techniques used to gain intel on America’s adversaries. It’s always seemed that it’s exactly this “problematic” proximity to the U.S. war apparatus that made Bigelow one of the most important American filmmakers of our time, as her Riefenstahl-esque relationship to the centers of power allowed for extremely clear-headed insights into the weltanschauung of a dying empire. In these morally shifty films, America is always portrayed as the victim of its own violent imperialism, a political insecurity that constantly refuels America’s raison d’être in its quest for global domination.

In every sense of the word, A House of Dynamite is the natural endpoint of Bigelow’s cinematic project, as it reveals the glaring ideological void that’s at the heart of maintaining the failing American project. All the professionals on screen are trained to sustain a level of stability in a geopolitically involatile landscape, but desperately lack a guiding narrative when push comes to shove. Idris Elba’s POTUS is somewhat Obama-coded in his pop-savvy appearance, but his supposed Democratic affiliation provides no clear path forward in the face of his overwhelming dilemma. One of the best shots of the film actually features Pete Souza’s canonical Situation Room photograph in the background, depicting Obama and Hillary Clinton as they witness a live feed of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Cause and effect are conflated here, showing America’s eagerness to invade, and its confusion when the favor gets returned.

It’s ironic that we never learn which advisory has lobbed the bomb, suggesting that America has made so many enemies that they have collectively mutated into an amorphous mess. The sharpest bit of geopolitical analysis that A House of Dynamite offers on this entanglement is that Russia might be the most probable source, as Putin’s regime has already gotten away with the annexation of the Crimea and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. One advisor suggests this is yet another test of the Kremlin — an atomic humiliation of America in the theatre of war, showing how easy it is to undermine U.S. authority wholesale. It’s simply staggering how level-headed and probable this interpretation is. And it only reinforces that Bigelow has made a tremendously skillful time capsule of our present, a film that for better or worse perfectly embodies what America’s anxious and insecure relation with the rest of the world looks like right now. — HUGO EMMERZAEL

Director’s Diary

Russian luminary Alexander Sokurov delivers another curveball. Following Fairytale, his 2022 animated feature about notorious leaders of the 20th century languishing in purgatory, Sokurov offers a five-hour history lesson, slow, steady, and painstaking, taking the viewer from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Director’s Diary is very difficult to evaluate because in conventional terms it’s not really a film at all. It establishes one pattern and elaborates it at exorbitant length, and while it’s never exactly boring, it doesn’t necessarily feel like a project best served by a theatrical presentation. Poised somewhere between the text-heavy educational films of Alexander Kluge and Immemory, Chris Marker’s 1997 CD-ROM, it’s an idiosyncratic look back at the second half of the U.S.S.R.’s existence, from a kind of parallax angle.

Keep in mind, the entirety of Soviet history was elided by Sokurov in his best-known film, Russian Arc (2002), the director’s one-shot journey through the Hermitage. As the camera glides through hundreds of years of Russian culture, we peer only briefly into a private room that is said to contain the whole of the Soviet period. “Don’t bother looking in there,” the narrator cautions. But Director’s Diary is more than a peek into that dark chamber. It is a relentless gaze at a nation guided by propaganda and dedicated to isolation from the rest of the world. Throughout the Diary, Sokurov provides a nonstop presentation of Soviet news and documentary coverage: Khrushchev offering his blessing to a new concrete factory, the Politburo’s appointment of Brezhnev to the premiership, a lot of happy workers and a great deal of folk dancing from the various Republics. This footage tells one story, over and over again. Life is great in the Soviet Union and is only getting better.

But Sokurov augments this stream of official blather with an onscreen commentary track, marking year by year what is happening in history outside of this channel of propaganda. We learn about the space race, various revolutionary struggles in the developing world, who has been awarded the Nobel Prizes in Literature and Physics, which films won the Palme d’Or, and which major cultural figures have died. This includes composers like Sibelius and Hindemith, political figures like Kennedy and Martin Luther King, or authors such as Hemingway and Faulkner. Along the way, Sokurov also notes the births of people who will be notable later on in history. In case you thought Sokurov wasn’t aware of folks like J.K. Rowling or Whitney Houston, think again.

Director’s Diary does in fact have very brief interstitial moments where we see an elderly hand, writing in Russian, jotting down the dates, year by year. We hear Sokurov mutter something faint and gnomic, and then it’s on with the countdown. And the film never once attempts to quicken its pace. We see a Y-axis graph line on the right hand side of the screen, starting at 1917 and ending at 1991, and when the viewer realizes that, thirty minutes in, we have only moved from 1957 to 1958, it’s clear we’re in for a long night.

And why not? Sokurov is under no obligation to make this a sprightly, rapid-fire demonstration. This is the semester course, not the final review. Director’s Diary is compressed, of course, but seems devoted to making the viewer feel the slow process of historical accumulation, especially as compared with the smiling milkmaids and barrel-chested electricians of the Soviets’ official story. It’s compelling but dauntingly maximalist, and it also exhibits odd errors, like getting James Van Allen’s name wrong, or jumbling the English phrasing here and there. And again, like Kluge’s later TV essays, Diary is a torrent of weird, changing fonts and kitschy motion graphics. It’s charmingly lo-fi, professorial but weirdly personal as well. What possessed Sokurov to make this behemoth after Fairytale’s rich chiaroscuro and radical use of deepfake technology? Well, accessible as Fairytale was, Cannes rejected it, and it got very little traction following its Locarno premiere. So maybe Director’s Diary is our punishment, the stern instructor making us copy sentences out of the textbook onto the blackboard. Director’s Diary is a remarkable, audacious, eye-glazing piece of work, and we only brought it on ourselves. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

In the Hand of Dante

Filmmaker Julian Schnabel returns to a familiar topic with his In the Hand of Dante… sort of. The painter-turned-acclaimed filmmaker has dedicated most of his career to dramatizing the personal demons and trials of artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Reinaldo Arenas, and Vincent van Gogh — and depending on how one defines “artist,” Jean-Dominique Bauby, the subject of The Diving Bell & the Butterfly might fall under the same rubric — and, with Schnabel’s new film, one can add Dante Alighieri to that list, albeit with a sizable caveat. The 14th-century Italian poet best known for writing The Comedy (more commonly referred to as The Divine Comedy in contemporary parlance), Dante is played here by Oscar Isaac as a man mired in a spiritual and creative block; struggling for years to give birth to the magnum opus that would come to define him, not to mention inspire a glut of movie serial killers. The film dutifully presents Dante’s banishment from Florence and his fraught journey to Sicily where he would go on to write his masterwork, along the way crossing paths with Pope Bonifacio (Gerard Butler) and taking the counsel of an old sage (the filmmaker Martin Scorsese behind an enormous bushy beard, an image that’s almost certain to outlast the film itself), all while keeping his devoted wife, Gemma (Gal Gadot), at an emotional remove. Yet, perhaps in acknowledgment of how little is known about Dante’s inner life or how little the author’s life conforms to the shape of a conventional biopic — or, for that matter, what an iffy commercial proposition a straightforward biopic of Alighieri would be — the film dedicates the majority of its runtime to a lurid parallel narrative that treats the existence of an original manuscript of The Comedy as a seismic event in the criminal underworld of the 21st century. One where hardened killers knock off anyone who stands in the way of an incalculable fortune and romance echo across centuries. Past and present are meant to comment upon one another, but, in truth, it all plays like flipping channels between highbrow and lowbrow, often on a scene-by-scene basis.

Based on the novel by Nick Tosches, In the Hand of Dante primarily follows embittered writer and modern-day Dante scholar, Nick Tosches — yes, the author made himself the protagonist of the story — also played by Isaac. Set in 2001 for reasons that only belatedly reveal themselves, Nick is drawn into a well-funded conspiracy by the mysterious Joe Black (John Malkovich) to steal what is purported to be the long believed lost-to-time original copy of Dante’s The Comedy from an elderly mafioso (Franco Nero) in Palermo. Partnered somewhat against his will with the sociopathic henchman Louie (Butler again, in a role that is dispositionally not a world apart from his work in the Den of Thieves films), Nick and his grouchy handler fly by private jet to Italy. Upon arriving at the mafia don’s villa, Louie proceeds to execute anyone who so much as offers them a glass of water. Immediately returning to the States with the manuscript in their possession (not before rubbing out further accomplices along the way), Nick is entrusted with the near-impossible task of authenticating a 700-year-old text where there’s no surviving handwriting samples to compare it against. This finds Nick criss-crossing the globe, taking him to laboratories for carbon dating and archives in Italy in an effort to accumulate enough contextual evidence for the manuscript to hold up to scrutiny on the black market. And all the while, Louie continues to “sweep up” behind him, killing every librarian and archivist Nick engages with in order to keep their secret safe, which is the kind of thing that tends to draw unwanted attention.

That attention arrives in the form of Rosario, a brutish figure dressed in white linen and played by Jason Momoa (the vagaries of international financing being what they are likely explains how the film ends up casting one-third of Zack Snyder’s Justice League), who believes the manuscript belongs in Italy. Or maybe, like everyone else, he’s just interested in getting rich and is not above torture or murder to achieve that end. Either way, the hulking character lurks in darkened corners and pursues Nick across Europe, imperiling both him as well as Nick’s new lover, Giulietta (Gadot, like seemingly half the cast, also doing double-duty). Meanwhile, the increasingly desperate Nick finds the walls closing in on him and fewer and fewer places to hide as he attempts to claim the manuscript entirely for himself while trying to insulate Giulietta from harm, all while navigating a secret world of shadowy power brokers and Mephistophelian figures.

Alternating between boxy academy ratio filmed in color to denote the 1300s and widescreen black-and-white for the 2000s, In the Hand of Dante is ultimately neither fish nor fowl. The scenes featuring Dante are presented with hushed solemnity befitting both Schabel and Tosches’ (that would be the author, not the character) reverence for the poet. But the film all but assumes a similar level of, if not appreciation, then certainly a familiarity with The Comedy, allowing it to mostly eschew exposition pitched at the cheap seats or contrived dramatic fireworks in telling what’s largely a quiet journey of the self. For whatever its failings, no one would damn In the Hand of Dante with the designation of being a “Wikipedia film.” The closest thing the film has to a “You’ve done it, Pollock; you’ve cracked it wide open” moment is when Isaac kills a carnivorous rat and throws its small body against the wall, where its blood leaves the mark of a crucifix. Instead, Schnabel presents Dante’s uncertainty and doubt as largely internalized matters; favoring shots of the character staring aloft at the heavens or having Isaac and Gadot silently gaze beatifically at one another as the camera circles them. When characters do speak, it’s primarily in riddles meant to approximate Renaissance-era prose, and some of the actors acquit themselves of better than others. There’s a self-seriousness to scenes of, for example, Dante being bestowed the very parchment on which he is to write The Comedy that verges on the parodic, or upon reciting a passage from Paradiso being told “God has breathed into you and from you” (given voice by no less an authority than Scorsese). These scenes regularly achieve a stultifying level of humorlessness that leaves little room for the filmmaker’s typical impressionistic flourishes — and even those are reserved for the modern-day story, such as a sequence that finds Gadot’s character recreating The Birth of Venus against the backdrop of a CGI tidal wave — or any actual lifeblood.

It gets so that when the film does finally cut back to the skullduggery and off-brand Sopranos plotting of Nick in the (semi-)present day, it begins to feel like a reprieve from all the respectful cosplay. Watching Nick evade Italian gangsters against a backdrop of the Venetian canals or shooting co-conspirators point-blank in the head lends the proceedings a superficial charge, but there’s also something impersonal and halfhearted about the pulpiness —  aside from Butler, who embraces Louie’s loutishness and quickness to violence with a commendable disinterest in ingratiating himself to the audience. It all has the shape of something thrilling — exotic locales, unexpected bursts of gunfire, doublecrosses, witnesses turning up dead — but in its execution, it’s as simplistic and facile as the 1300 scenes are artfully ponderous. That’s exemplified in instances like a fairly absurd climactic scene which finds Momoa and Gadot’s characters engaged in an armed standoff that wouldn’t feel out of place in one of the Fast & Furious films. Further, try as the film might, the Dante scenes never really inform the Nick ones; the closest the film comes is having Nick and Giulietta come to the realization that they are the living embodiment of Dante and Gemma, reunited hundreds of years after their respective deaths. Not only do the narratives exist on tracks that rarely thematically intersect, but the approach creates a tonal whiplash where neither series of events has the opportunity to sustain momentum or become fully realized, instead lurching from incident to incident while leaving connective tissue largely elided. In the Hand of Dante is almost cruelly designed in a way that seems destined to please no one. Interested in a meditative period drama? What about a sleazy airport novel? Well, here’s a film that does both, but neither especially well! — ANDREW DIGNAN

Remake

Aside from the late Jonas Mekas, Boston-based director Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of the diary film. For nearly 50 years, McElwee has been documenting the business of his daily life and, like Mekas, he has thematically organized those quotidian fragments and arranged them into coherent cinematic statements. Unlike most diary filmmakers, however, McElwee had a bit of a breakout hit in 1985 with Sherman’s March, a film that began as an ostensible travelogue and evolved into a sort of nonfiction Woody Allen film. As McElwee traveled through the South retracing the path of Gen. William Sherman’s path of destruction, he kept meeting unusual Southern women and becoming infatuated with them. While McElwee’s later films were more clearly organized by social and political matters — such as Six O’Clock News (1997), about people whose personal circumstances made them unexpectedly newsworthy, or Bright Leaves (2003), about McElwee’s family history as tobacco moguls — Sherman’s March set the template for McElwee’s awkwardly autobiographical filmmaking. Located on a spectrum somewhere between Nick Broomfield’s citizen-journalism and Caveh Zahedi’s insufferable narcissism, McElwee has managed to locate a kernel of narrative entertainment in the day-to-day, partly because he is a compelling character. Shy, honest, and frequently overwhelmed by life’s demands, McElwee comes across as an everyman in the form of a reserved Southern gentleman.

But of course, one of the pitfalls of making yourself the subject of your art is the fact that even the most well-curated life contains unexpected surprises. Remake, McElwee’s first film in 14 years, is primarily about the death of his 27-year-old son, Adrian, from a fentanyl overdose. Like everyone in McElwee’s family, Adrian has been a major character in the diary films over the years, and Remake is in part a director’s reckoning with all the things he should have seen through his camera but was perhaps too close to notice. Addressed to Adrian, Remake is a father’s apology and his struggle to understand what went wrong. It’s an impulse shared by anyone who has lost a loved one under unnatural circumstances. But McElwee’s gift and curse is that he has collected years’ worth of audiovisual evidence of his role as a father and his troubled relationship with his son. Remake begins with footage of Ross and Adrian on a fishing trip when the latter was no more than five years old. Across Remake and McElwee’s other films, we watch Adrian grow up, 7 Up-style, becoming a young man with dreams but no clear plan for executing them, someone prone to binge drinking and smoking weed and, eventually, heroin.

Given the subject matter of Remake, it’s impossible not to be moved by it. McElwee’s pain saturates every frame, and is made even more poignant by his attempts to keep his agony at bay. McElwee’s once wry, jocular presence is now muted with confusion and regret, as well as the filmmaker’s attempt to, in his own words, keep Adrian alive by watching and working with this footage. Adrian also had ambitions of becoming a filmmaker, and so quite a lot of what we see in Remake is shot by the director’s son — skiing and skateboarding footage, silly camera tests, and his own private diary that sometimes runs parallel to Ross’s own. Adrian featured prominently in McElwee’s 2011 film Photographic Memory, and we see Adrian accompanying his father on film festival trips around the globe. Remake emphasizes this paradoxical closeness and distance between father and son. Even as Ross worked to bring Adrian into his world, he remained profoundly inaccessible, lost in his own private turmoil.

At the same time, there is something rather disturbing about Remake’s organization and its secondary themes. The title comes from a plan that never came to fruition. Director Steve Carr (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) optioned Sherman’s March in order to remake the film as a meta-fiction. Over the course of Remake, we watch this project fall apart, going from feature film to limited HBO series to sitcom, until finally the option elapses with nothing to show for it. The proposed remake was a point of contention between Ross and Adrian, the former being skeptical about “selling out” while the latter insisted that it was time for his father to make a “real movie,” instead of whatever it is he’d spent his life doing. Despite their very different points of view on the project, this Sherman’s March remake feels like a rather inappropriate B-plot in a film about the death of one’s own child. Whenever it comes up again, Remake feels almost glib, and in a way, this might be the point. In the face of profound grief, the ordinary business of living can feel vaguely obscene, and still we have to carry on. But the way McElwee frames it in Remake, it feels almost symptomatic of the pathologies that may have contributed to Ross’s alienation from his son. It is sadly common for men to fixate on our careers to the exclusion of our families, but most of us don’t produce such an incriminated record. The grim undercurrent of Remake is McElwee’s fervent desire to have Adrian back and try to do it all again. Sadly, that is yet another option that has permanently elapsed. — MICHAEL SICINSKI