The Kurosawa Odyssey
Year: 1951
Studio: Shochiku Studios
Screenwriter: Akira Kurosawa & Eijiro Hisaita, based on the story by Fryodor Dostoevsky
Cast: Masayuki Mori, Toshiro Mifune, Setsuko Hara, Yoshiko Kuga, Takashi Shimura
Cinematographer: Toshio Ubukata
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
If “Rashomon” comes with a lot of baggage, then “The Idiot” is that mysterious passenger who slips into the coach mostly unseen. It’s wedged in between the movie that made Kurosawa’s career in “Rashomon” and would be followed up by two of the greatest movies of all time: “Ikiru” and “Seven Samurai.” And yet, like “Scandal,” it’s fallen through the cracks of history. Most of the critical analysis of the movie only compares it to the movies that surround it (Michael Koresky’s Criterion essay on the film talks almost as much about “Rashomon” as it does “The Idiot”), or talks more about what the film could have been. I’ll talk about that first to get it out of the way, because I’m more interested in talking about the actual guts and bones of the movie itself.
Kurosawa originally envisioned “The Idiot” as two films, and the runtime of both halves was well over four hours. This was before “Rashomon” hit the stratosphere and the co-writer/director did not have the power he would soon yield, so when a test screening did not go well, executives at Shochiku Studios welded the two halves into a single film and began chopping. I could not find out how much, if any, control Kurosawa had over the final cut, which is two-hours-and-forty-five minutes in length. The second half seems (mostly) intact, but the first half is obviously chopped to bits, with intertitles explaining a LOT of character relationships, motivations and actions. There is even one especially annoying title card that explains what Fryodor Dostoevsky meant when he was writing the original source novel… as opposed to just letting the movie speak for itself. Legend also says that years later when Kurosawa made another movie for the studio he searched for days in their archives to find the missing footage – and couldn’t.
So yes, “The Idiot” is a fragmented mess at the beginning. But I can only analyze what actually made it to screen, and that’s what I’m going to do. 95% of the other critical analysis frames anything written as “It’s Kurosawa’s destroyed masterpiece!” or something similar. But did it really have the makings of a masterpiece? I don’t want to write about what the movie isn’t… I want to talk about what the movie is.
The idiot of the title’s real name is the innocent Kameda (Masayuki Mori), and we open with him just back from the war after almost being shot to death. He meets Akama (Toshiro Mifune), a rich and rogue-ish figure and strikes up a friendship with him. They both end up falling in love with Taeko (Setsuko Hara), a kept woman just escaping her bounds. She doesn’t want to sully Kameda’s innocence, but isn’t really in love with Akama either, so the pendulum swings back and forth. At some point Kameda begins to court a woman named Ayako (Yoshiko Kuga), but all Ayako does is seem to yell at him about either being an idiot or loving Taeko.
Just writing that out, I’m thinking to myself “Gosh, that’s not a lot of plot for an almost three hour movie,” and I can’t imagine what else Kurosawa and his co-screenwriter Eijiro Hisaita threw into the over four hour version. The fragmented opening really makes it difficult to engage with the story until about half an hour in… it took me two or three times to make it past that point anyway. And once you get what’s going on, you find yourself rewinding to watch the opening again to make sure you understand everything.
Cards on the table, even though I have read a few of Dostoevsky’s texts, I have not read the novel upon which “The Idiot” is based. Dostoevsky strikes me as an almost impossible author to adapt, though that hasn’t stopped a ton of filmmakers trying…the old chestnut “Crime and Punishment” in particular. His work is just so internal – so much to do with the inner workings of people’s minds and why they make the choices they make. So a large percentage of “The Idiot” is people talking about the way they feel over and over. How I feel, how you feel, how I feel about the way you feel, and one hell of a lot of talking about how Taeko must feel and why she’s acting like an insane person when making any decisions. To highlight the obsessions of these characters, Kurosawa and Hisaita embrace melodrama.
Let me state here that melodrama doesn’t have to be a bad thing, even though critics have adopted the word as such over the past two decades. “Gone With the Wind” is melodrama. “Titanic” is melodrama. The best sequences in “The Idiot” are pure melodrama, particularly one from the first half where Taeko is essentially being bid upon at her birthday party. Will she remain a kept woman? Over a dozen partygoers watch and follow her every word and movement, and the character makes such a strong impression that it almost (but not quite) makes up for the countless sequences where she isn’t around but other characters talk about her motivations. When Kameda knocks over an expensive vase and people are calling him an idiot, Taeko reminds them that the vases are hers and simply drops the second one. Pretty badass. The sequence climaxes brilliantly, with Taeko taking a bag of a million yen and tossing it in the fire, daring one of her suitors to pull it out while the entire party watches the money burn. So awesome.
Hara gives the best performance in the movie, and by far the best female performance in a Kurosawa film to date. There’s something so electric about her face here… it’s so organic that you really feel her character figuring out things and making decisions right then and there, however crazy they may be. They don’t seem crazy when she is onscreen because Hara is so beautiful, seductive and enigmatic that she could sell the audience on anything. It’s only after she’s gone and the other characters are talking about her that the viewer begins to think “Hey, that doesn’t quite make sense! Like at all!” I’m happy she had a fruitful career with Ozu after this, but just wish she would have made a few more movies with Kurosawa.
Mori is also very good as Kameda, in that you sympathize with him and at the same time kinda want to strangle him. He holds his hands to his jacket collar about 30% too much, though. Mifune is perfectly cast as Akama, and like Mori has a tightrope to walk. Mifune has to be dangerous, but also must allow his friendship with Mori’s character to seem grounded and real… all without any character motivation track laid aside from a lengthy intertitle. That he pulls it off is impressive… that he pulls it off well is most impressive.
Kurosawa and his cinematographer Toshio Ubukata shoot the film for the most part very simply. The big set pieces work because a big deal isn’t made of them…put the camera on the actors and let them do their thing. It’s a marked difference in how Kurosawa approached “Rashomon” and would soon handle “Seven Samurai,” but I feel like Kurosawa was so slavish to “The Idiot” novel that he was intent on letting Dostoevsky’s work be the star, not him. The sets are impressive, as are the frigid outdoor locations chosen because Kurosawa obviously wanted the entire affair to seem Russian without putting it in Russia.
I feel like I’m writing a lot of great things about “The Idiot”… and yet in the end I didn’t like it very much. The parts all work well, but taken as a whole it’s a lopsided emotional mess that makes its point but then can’t help but underlining it for an extra 45 minutes. Most of Kurosawa’s later work is long but rarely feels that way – he gives each film just enough runtime to tell the story he needs to tell and then exits stage left. If it’s three hours, that’s fine. Here I get the impression that “The Idiot” could have made a crackerjack 90 minute movie where Taeko was involved much more than she is in the second half. That way we see the emotions of the main characters instead of hearing about it repeatedly.
If this odyssey has taught me anything about Kurosawa, it’s that the more he adopts a story to his personal style (even if it’s an adaptation), the more successful it can be. He was trying to tell “Stray Dog” in the style of an author and failed, but the movie ended up amazing because it was really Kurosawa’s voice in the void. In trying to be so true to Dostoevsky, he loses himself and why he’s so singular as a storyteller.
Notes:
-Not crazy about the music of Fumio Hayasaka here. It’s too insistent… to intent on telling you how you should be feeling about any given scene, and up way too high in the mix.
– Takashi Shimura has a small, thankless role here but absolutely kills it. His confession that Kameda owns a farm is instilled with so much more emotion than it should possibly have. What a great actor.
The Noir Odyssey
The prime suspect is a woman named Eden Lane, and the best sequence in the film is Patrick tracking her up north when a blizzard happens. Instead of waiting and possibly losing the lead, Patrick abandons his car and treks up a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm to get to her cabin. Let me repeat that: the dude walks up a mountain. In a snowstorm. Awesomeness. When he finally gets to her cabin, Ulmer unleashes his one indelible visual – the cabin is almost entirely buried in the snow except its chimney.
The second and third act are a very convoluted series of investigation scenes. Patrick does most of the footwork at first, with Eden (who has a miraculous number of new outfits materialize out of nowhere) staying in the hotel room. Ostensibly this is because Eden is a wanted felon, but the cops are looking out for Patrick too, so why not have the woman who can identify Dean along for the investigation? Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter because suddenly Eden disappears, abandoning Patrick to turn herself into the authorities (?!?) for literally no reason whatsoever. It’s here that Rawley re-enters the film and takes over as the sidekick, helping Patrick put the final pieces together.
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 89
Setting the twist aside, the movie works beautifully as both a drama and a supernatural thriller, and of course those two components are closely connected. Hell, we don’t know ghosts are involved until 45 minutes into the film. Until then, Shyamalan takes great pain to create a complete world for Osment and Collette to inhabit and, just as interestingly, a void of a world for Bruce Willis’ child therapist Malcolm. Shyamalan paints in all the edges. At first, Osment just seems like an odd, troubled child, and (almost) everything supernatural that happens around him could easily be explained away. Everything except several passages of Latin that he has memorized and that he somehow knows that his teacher was tortured for his stutter in his youth.
The acting throughout is nothing short of amazing. Osment’s face seems to hold all the pain of a man three times his age, and Willis is one of those actors who can hold his own with a child actor. Collette was the standout for me here. I remember the other two performances as being great, but Collette manages to create a fully-understandable, completely relatable three-dimensional character in (comparatively) little screen time.
The Kurosawa Odyssey
Now before I get to the many, many good things about “Rashomon,” let me first just throw out the main stumbling block that I cannot overcome – the acting. It’s out of control, with every actor going back and forth between non-acting (seriously, the entire opening of the film appears to be about people who have had too much ZZZquil) and way Way WAY over-the-top acting. There’s no in between – no moment where I thought to myself “Wow, he/she did a good job with that character moment.” It was only me shocked by one extreme or the other. In Robert Altman’s introduction to the film on the Criterion release, he waves off the acting, simply stating that it must have been the acting style of the time in Japan. As someone who has watched all of Kurosawa’s previous films, and quite a few pre-and-postwar Japanese movies, I can firmly state that it’s false. The character Shimura played in the previous Kurosawa film “Scandal” was a “big” character, and yet never came close to the cackling that Mifune or Kyo make on a regular basis. Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” essay on “Rashomon,” which is otherwise awesome, waves off the acting as well because “Kurosawa was not looking for realism.” He also writes that the acting actually works because “many of the sequences are, essentially, silent.” Um, no.
Also really ingenious is the way Kurosawa frames the first three testimonies, with the characters looking toward the camera when they are speaking. In other words, the audience is questioning these characters as “we” try to get to the bottom of what is going on.
Writer: Nedrick Young
The fatale in question is Margot, and she’s played by Jean Gillie in an extraordinary performance. If you’ve never heard of Gillie before, it’s because she was primarily an actress in Britain. She came to America, made this film and then a supporting performance in “The Macomber Affair” (unseen by me). She was married to Jack Bernhard, the director of this film, and when the marriage dissolved, she raced home to England… and died of a pneumonia. The entire story is obviously tragic, much more so when you look at her work here, which is calculated in a way so perfect that you cannot look away from her. For most of the film, she speaks in a very straightforward, logical manner, as if this is the only way to think about a given situation, no matter how insane. But then at the film’s climax, Margot shoots a man, collects a box of money and cackles as she almost skips out of the dark woods toward her car. The sudden turn in character is brilliant and Gillie takes it just to the edge of caricature without going over. It’s a truly beautiful moment… in a dark and fucked up way, of course.
So Margot comes up with a plan. She’ll break Frankie out… after he’s dead. Yes, you read that part right. She partners/seduces rival mobster Jim (Edward Norris) and the aforementioned Craig in no time flat and tells them her plan. Let Frankie die and then steal his body, inject it with something called methylene blue, and Frankie will come back to life. Again, you read that right. I spent 30 seconds Googling methylene blue, and it counteracts cyanide, which I assume is what they used in the gas chambers back in the day. So there you go, a foolproof method to come back to life – you’re welcome.
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 90
The characters change their motivations and come to decisions that make The Idiot Plot from romantic comedies seem inspired. The Lucky character is originally portrayed as a gullible pushover in the first two reels, but is suddenly ballsy enough to begin betting big bucks and telling off the wrong people once he gets to New York. He also basically destroys Penny’s life a piece at a time for a half hour after he meets her, and then suddenly we are supposed to believe they are a dancing team? I’d say looking anywhere below the surface would reveal huge plot holes, but they are often right there onscreen.
Astaire has a “solo” number, “Bojangles of Harlem” (in unfortunate blackface) that is filled with the kind of creativity and high energy modern musicals have long forgotten. At one point he’s leading a line of twenty dancers in what appears to be a waltz effortlessly. Later in the number, he dances before three of his shadows, perfectly in sync at first until the real Astaire begins to out-dance the shadows. Moments like that can leave you cheering.
Year: 1950
Shimura gives an astoundingly good performance as Hiruta (one that frankly steals the movie out from under its “star” Mifune), a down-and-out lawyer who shoves his way into Ichiro’s studio and presents himself, all while pouring raw sewage from his shoes (he stepped in the wrong puddle on the way over) onto Ichiro’s floor. Hiruta has a hunchback, eyes that often bulge and is a big drinker. His law practice isn’t exactly booming, since his office is a converted birdhouse on the roof of a building (not kidding), but then again neither is his family life. His wife isn’t exactly a talker, and his daughter Masako (Yoko Katsuragi) is suffering from a really bad case of tuberculosis that has kept her in bed for many years. In other words, he’s a mess, but Ichiro hires him anyway.
Okay, in case you didn’t realize from reading the last paragraph, but the movie begins to lay it on pretty thick. Like most of Capra’s work, there comes a point where you just either go with it or don’t. Here it’s a long sequence where Hiruta comes home drunk to find Ichiro and Miyako singing “Silent Night” for the adorable dying girl after decorating her house for Christmas. Hiruta takes Ichiro to a bar where they sing “Auld Lang Syne” and drunkenly wander around town together. Nothing happens of note to further the plot – it’s basically a variation on the bus singing scene in “It Happened One Night” or the pool scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” in that it’s completely implausible but still oddly charming.
The Film Noir Odyssey
Fundamentally, I have issues here. So many issues. Did the filmmakers think that the story was supposed to function as a mystery at all? If so, they really blew their load within the first five minutes, and then let the cat out of the bag motive-wise twenty minutes in when Montgomery reveals he’s very anti-Semitic. And Montgomery is a fundamentally stupid villain – dumb enough to murder another guy in a plot “twist” while screaming “I don’t like Jews! And I don’t like nobody that likes Jews!!” Subtle. Very. Oh, and that killing should make it so much easier for the police to realize it’s him.
And how can one overlook the finale, with execution so silly it’s laughable. Montgomery races out of the apartment where Finlay is confronting him without confessing, and hurries outside where he sees a police car, then runs in the other direction. Does the car simply chase him down to catch him? Nope! With nary a confession or any real evidence, Finlay breaks the window of the apartment and guns the unarmed Montgomery down in the street. Because of course.
AFI Top 100 Ranking: 91
Just who is Stingo? I kept going back to that question repeatedly throughout the film. It’s not that MacNicol gives a bad performance (he is, after all, a very good actor), it’s that the character is written so blandly that we get no insight into who he is. He witnesses conversations between Nathan and Sophie instead of involving himself in the conversation. He’s told horrifyingly tragic things, and yet we never see him react in any way other than widening his eyes. I would have loved to hear his opinion about everything that is going on, especially since screenwriter Alan J. Pakula (also the director) provides us with voiceover from Stingo. We never even get an idea of what his novel is about, other than that it concerns “the South” (that narrows it down). Since he’s the character we first see and it’s his voice narrating the story, one would assume that the film is “about” his journey. Nope. I understand that, in theory, his arc is that he begins with naïve aspirations and becomes slowly jaded by the sad realities around him, but I don’t see that anywhere. Hell, as the film ends, he sees his two best friends (one of them his first lover) dead in an embrace after committing mutual suicide, and he can’t even articulate a thought—he has to read it from a book of poetry.
Pakula seems perfectly happy to do what so many directors have done since this film. He sets the camera up with a slow zoom-in and then jumps out of the way to let her do her thing. Streep is phenomenal, putting so many just-right details into the character and giving Sophie all the layers of complexity the character deserves. She is so good that she manages to land jokes about her character’s accent and shaky English that were so bad they should have never gotten into the script (example: “Is that your Cocksucker?” “I think you mean Seersucker.”). It has to be one of the most difficult characters ever put on film, and Streep simply disappears into her. It’s a “showy” performance, at least in that the character screams and cries, gets her head shaved and has to speak in several languages…but it’s the smaller beats that make you believe in her. Look at Sophie’s eyes every time Nathan walks through the door…always excited to see her love but also just a little horrified that he might be brutal to her again. Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s because of her that the film has achieved “classic” status and is on this list.
The Kurosawa Odyssey
What also makes Murakami interesting is that, if things had gone just a little bit differently, he could have been the frightened penniless murderer with the gun. Murakami was in the war, and the amount of able men who returned to find nothing waiting for them is staggering (something Kurosawa has touched on in four movies before this one), and getting the detective’s job was just plain luck. It didn’t have to happen that way. This brings an unease to the final confrontation between “hero” and “villain,” because in a way we are watching Murakami fight against himself.
Even as I write that, I should point out that the way he is introduced is still interesting and, ultimately, superior to almost every homage and rip-off of Sato’s character. Instead of the co-writers immediately setting up the dynamic between the two detectives, they let Sato take charge of the investigation, with Murakami in the backseat observing the way he questions suspects and deduces things from the information he’s just gleaned.