Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1969)

The squealed harmonica refrain that runs through Sergio Leone's masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, sounds like the unholy death moans of a desert reptile. Its minimal, haunting, even terrifying noise reflects much of the film's style, which is at once epic and stark, melodramatic and painfully, acutely real. The harmonica itself is something of an absurdity, the embodiment of psychological trauma of a bloodthirsty gunslinger out to avenge his family's deaths, yet it, like all the other transparently cinematic, borderline Brechtian elements, fits with odd plausibility.

Lured into making another Western by the Hollywood system despite hoping to retire from the genre, Sergio Leone got a fast one over on them by elevating the Spaghetti Western (which he'd already raised well above its usual level) into the realm of genuine art. Once Upon a Time in the West certainly wasn't the first (nor last) film to document the downfall of the West, but it ranks among the merciless and unsparing. Before this, revisionist Westerns carried some sense of elegy, of the loss of the spirit embodied in the other Westerns. Even The Wild Bunch, released the same year, has its own sense of regret, even if it is in the futility of it all. Leone's film, though not scathing or condemning, is a depiction of an evil system replaced by another evil system, though that might not even be sufficient: this is not a changeover between parties so much as an evolution of the old way.

Consider the way he aligns bandits (importantly led by a Henry Fonda playing WAY against type) with capitalist forces paving their way through the West. Government is the usual culprit in such films, but here the same greed that led so many to abandon everything to settle in the unknown at last matures into true business and commerce, and the old villains fit in surprisingly well with the suit-and-tie railroad owner, Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) who employ them to eliminate any resistance to their expansion. When Frank (Fonda) sits at the tycoon's desk, the man asks the bandit how it feels. "Like holding a gun," Frank replies, "only much more powerful."

Working from a story he conceived with Bernando Bertolucci and Dario Argento and refined with Sergio Donati, Leone manages to sublimate the political into the personal in a way he never did with the Dollars films. Once Upon a Time in the West follows two story arcs that quickly converge: Jill (Claudia Cardinale), a woman from New Orleans, arrives to join her new husband's homestead, only to find the whole family murdered for sitting on a patch of water the railroad company needs access to for its steam engines. Meanwhile, a mystery man (Charles Bronson) arrives in the area to confront the killer, Frank, for his own past with the sadist.

"Harmonica" naturally interest in Jill, as well as Cheyenne (Jason Robards), a bandit framed for the McBain slaughter who convinces the widow of his innocence and takes an obvious liking to her. Compared to the violent but moral protagonist of Leone's preceding trilogy, Bronson's Harmonica can scarcely be called even an anti-hero. Scarred by Frank's sadism as a young boy, he speaks rarely and always has a gun ready. Anyone who dies in the pursuit of his revenge is expendable; driven by hatred, he even alerts Frank to a double-crossing member of his gag about to fire on the blue-eyed devil, just to ensure he will have the satisfaction of the kill. "I didn't let them kill him and that's not the same thing," he says with speed and venom when Jill witnesses this act and accuses him of saving Frank. If Cheyenne seems nobler in comparison, it's only because his own crimes are so pedestrian in such a world that the fact he, too, is a murderer hardly rates a second notice.

Yet for a film about the ever-present but shape-shifting violence that poisons America's soul, Once Upon a Time in the West lacks the epic shootouts that made Leone's previous films so wild. Self-consciously high-minded, the film unfolds in static long takes, drawing out the tension to and past the breaking point. The opening sets the scene: a transparently theatrical set (you can almost see the edges), minimal dialogue and the dawning inevitability of something terrible about to happen. As a trio of thugs silently waits for someone to show at a train station, natural sound fills the aural gaps to make for an unbearable experience. A windmill creaks overhead, and a telegraph ticks like a throbbing pulse, the only suggestion of life among the still, tacit men until one gets fed up with it and breaks the machine to shut it up. At last, the train arrives, and the harmonica fills the air as Bronson is revealed, leading to yet more quiet and tension until three bullets fly out of Harmonica's gun so quickly the static frame almost seems to move in shock.

At times, this movie feels like an Antonioni film, albeit one with payoffs. Its plot is so complex—involving revenge, double crosses, expansionist capitalism, romance, mystery and the always exciting topic of land ownership—that a film with only a few scenes of action can stretch to nearly three hours. Harmonica's motives are not revealed until a flashback embedded in the final standoff. Yet it uses that time to deconstruct the Western by way of catastrophe: each shootout only drives the film deeper into despair and revulsion. Argento and Bertolucci were still film critics when they helped Leone come up with the story, and the trio's Western movie binge can be seen on the screen. References to classics such as High Noon and Shane abound, and the diegetic break of the cicadas and wind dying suddenly when Frank arrives off-screen at the McBain farm takes on even more of a reflexive bent when one considers it comes from The Searchers. The film collects tropes, but never to simply parade them. Instead, Leone weighs them against each other, bringing out the rotten core that was always at the center of all these films, even the ones that gloried in the West.

For all his metacinematic flourishes and clear disdain for the genre he'd been coerced into revisiting Leone does nevertheless give these characters time to develop and make a human imprint. Jill is one of the most memorable female characters to inhabit a Western, a whore looking to make a new life, only to find that life snatched away from her. Yet she does not let this defeat her, and while both Harmonica and Cheyenne help her and seek to protect her from Frank, she proves capable and resilient on her own terms. Cheyenne's love for her, though doomed from the start, elicits his own depth, turning him from a marginal gang leader to someone more fleshed out than, say, Eli Wallach's own greasy thug in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Even Morton, whose single-minded dedication to expanding his line and crippled frame make him ripe for parody, has a moment near the end of his life, in which he stares at a painting of the Pacific and comes to grips with the dawning knowledge that he won't live to see it, that makes him more than a propped-up target for political scorn.

Leone, famed for his violence, pulled back and made a film about that violence, and like Peckinpah, he got vilified for it despite not sinking into Sam's pits of off-putting carnage. Every aspect of the film speaks to the director's jaded view of the West, right down to the casting. Bronson, having achieved fame in films like The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen, was still a few years away from the Death Wish films, but the character of Harmonica prefigures and preemptively critiques that image, withholding the motive for revenge until it's too late to emotionally invest in his warpath; we can be happy a monster like Frank dies, but Leone vitally cuts short the time for an audience to root for the bloodbaths.

Fonda's casting, of course, was a masterstroke: Leone turned Fonda's All-American appeal on itself, using one of the few actors to truly embody that vague but quintessentially "American" feel as one of the most despicable, amoral villains in movie history. The tilt that reveals his face, moving up from the torso and gun hand of a child murderer to reveal the beautiful face of Henry Fonda is one of the greatest, most stunning reveals I've ever seen. Fonda serves as the film in microcosm: a Western that uses previous Westerns to splinter and undermine the genre. To introduce Fonda by an act of familicide and continue with rape and killing sprees breaks the audience of a connection to the film's biggest and most beloved star, reflecting the distance the film puts in its visuals.

By the same token, his aesthetic remove and carefully planned construction does not constitute a moral separation à la Kubrick. Once Upon a Time in the West strikes that rare balance between intimate involvement and overarching surveillance. For a film that is so unabashedly sweeping, it doesn't feel like a grand statement but a carefully reasoned argument, one that lays out a bold critique on the West but finds the emotional currents to back up such an attack as well as the intellectual ones. Once Upon a Time in the West is a film of numerous dichotomies, and it somehow finds the middle ground of each one, even if that means the splits collapse on themselves.

When reading reviews of the recently released Blu-Ray to determine whether it was worth an upgrade (very much so, as I've happily seen), I came across a review that called the film the Götterdämmerung of Spaghetti Westerns, a short-form summary so perfect I can't help but envy Lawrence Devoe for coming up with it. The word itself is now synonymous with a collapse, but one can find traces of Wagner's actual opera in Leone's fourth Western: it's as large as its predecessors—larger, even—but the style breaks and folds in on itself, shattering the world as characters, performers (in Wagner's case) and form (in Leone's) fall apart. Once Upon a Time in the West is not the elegy of previous paeans to the dying West, but neither is it the vicious appraisal of films like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Dead Man. Somehow, it mixes Italian trash with Italian high art to craft one of the most encompassing visions of America in all its contradictory messiness. The only thing more impressive than that is that he managed to do it again 15 years later.

I Am Love

I Am Love combines beautiful evocations from various media -- art, design, fashion, opera and especially food -- yet it never offers much lucid inspection of any one of them, and the whole is too messy to gel into a working film. It wants to be operatic, elegiac on the epic scale of Visconti's The Leopard. But that was a film that never let its passion dip below a rolling boil; Luca Guadagnino has made his film in a time wherein "melodrama" has become a four-letter word, so he attempts to cover his bases by trapping the swirling emotions this type of film should contain underneath the glacier of classical European art drama.

The opening shots underline this split, as the camera moves through images of post-industrial factories blanketed in snow with the ornate scrawl of the title card placed over the drab backdrops. These shots are graceful but unimpressive, and the occasional quick cuts that randomly shatter the mood without warning or meaning set a precedent for some sloppy editing here and there. The camera at last settles on a mansion, tracking with geometric precision until it moves inside to document the Recchi family, a group of people as outdated as the palatial home in which they live.

Servants clean dishes alongside Emma (Tilda Swinton), a Russian who married the Italian Tancredi and moved into this lavish villa to spend her days not doing much of anything. She, like her husband and children, always dress impeccably, even when they clearly have nothing planned that day and some only leave the house for minor errands. They could have fallen out of one of Bergman's more stately films, and the alignment of the family on the poster recalls similar blocking in Distant Voices, Still Lives, an attempt to capture the same sense of familial imprisonment.

But I Am Love only fleetingly conveys these feelings. One could attribute the more objective aesthetic to a reflection of Emma's own alienation from her emotions, but she does not appear to be unhappy in any way with her life. At a birthday dinner for the family patriarch, Edoardo, Sr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), she is as delighted as everyone else when the old man names his son, Tancredi, and grandson, Edoardo, Jr. (Flavio Parenti), as the new owners of the family textile factory. Everyone celebrates though they must have known ownership would pass down the family line, and Emma swells with pride. That textiles are a relic does not matter: this is a family business, and it has already provided enough generational wealth to make inevitably dwindling profits a concern for the middle-class person they no doubt hired to sort out financial affairs.

The only indication of something inside of Emma yearning for change comes when a chef who beat Edoardo, Jr. (also called Edo by most of the family), comes by to offer a cake as a conciliatory measure. Edo is delighted by the man's kindness and insists he come inside, but Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) politely declines, not wishing to intrude on the festivities. A passing Emma gets a look at him, though, and when Antonio quietly slips back out into the snow, a light comes on in an upstairs window, and Emma floats to the portal, peering outside of the curtain as if trapped in a Bröntean prison. Her old life did not constrain her previously, but a mere glance has put something into her mind, a faint pause where one did not previously exist. But is that dissatisfaction with the old way, or a sudden desire to try something fresher, more unknown?

I Am Love modestly scales down The Leopard's mournful commentary on changing times to a simpler look at the intoxicating allure of the new. The family itself has already survived the changing times that would have claimed anyone else: the factory still churns out fabric, still turns some kind of profit and the family enjoys aristocratic opulence. Only a mild comment from the younger son, Giancula, to his older brother about their grandfather exploiting forced Jewish labor during World War II hints at a darker past. By casting Ferzetti, star of Michaelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, as the patriarch, Guadagnino recasts the modernity of that film as the old hat, the past he and others must now overcome to make their name when Antonioni is still praised even in death as the greatest of modern cinematic poets. It's a deft touch that opens up interpretations of the struggle of the Italian filmmaker to follow in the patriarch's footsteps or try to make a new way, an themes that are sadly unexplored.

For the rest of the movie is about Emma, played brilliantly by Swinton. Most filmmakers use her androgyny, that otherworldly aspect of her unconventional beauty. Because they allow for the more masculine attributes of her angular face, many often give her more traditionally "masculine" parts, and Swinton has shined in recent years with meaty, talky parts in which she controls much of the action. Her Oscar-winning turn in Michael Clayton threatened to overshadow the host of solid performances in the film, her conniving lawyer providing an icy, villainous logic to offset Tom Wilkinson's crumbling sanity and George Clooney's slowly seeping gallantry. I was so torn on Julia I've yet to review it, but her portrayal of the title character's fleeting ability to stay just ahead of her impending self-immolation fluctuated between dramatic intensity and a glorious flourish of overwrought melodrama in a way that made her irresistible even if the movie's mood swings and unnecessary length dragged the proceedings down.

But her role here recalls her extended cameo in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Also a socialite wife in Fincher's fairy tale ode to classic Hollywood. In that film, as this one, her life is comfortable and not particularly repressive, but the entrance of a force she cannot explain, a whisper of new, fresh life in the form of a man she does not particularly know. Emma comes across as an even more frigid and poised version of Elizabeth Abbot, the Russian winters of her youth having imbued her with a frosty countenance even at her most jovial and kind.

If nothing else, Guadagnino does us the service of presenting Swinton in purely feminine terms, never feeling the need to remind the audience that, just because she does not fit the narrowly defined guidelines of Hollywood attractiveness, Swinton must be considered weird (her weirdness is a whole other matter entirely). She looks even paler than usual from pancake makeup, a streak of red lipstick a tantalizing burst of color, as if all the blood in her face drained and pooled in her lips. After playing so many hard-edged characters lately, she displays an intense matronly warmth, treating her daughter's sexual identity with compassion and understanding and supporting her son's advancement within the company. But that look of longing in her eyes is piercing, when Antonio reciprocates she looks as if she might explode with pleasure in his presence.

Sadly, everything else borders on parody. Guadagnino's close-ups on art and food morph from a beautiful evocation to the most pretentious slide show in human history, a constant cutting between immaculately composed but lifeless shots that suck the air Swinton breathes into the film. Her lust is nakedly unlocked by a prawn dish Antonio prepares for her, a scene that unfolds with such unintentional hilarity that I half expected it to end with the punchline cutaway to a woman at another table saying, "I'll have what she's having." The other characters are rigidly divided along "old" and "new" lines, from Elisabetta's lesbianism and her pursuit of the arts representing more modern viewpoints and Edo, his named tied to the grandfather and patriarch, adheres to the more chauvinistic and greedy style of his father. Except when he doesn't. There's no consistency to these caricatures even though they are uniformly two-dimensional.

One cannot deny that Yorick Le Saux's cinematography is crisp and gorgeous, nor that Swinton isn't, as ever, at the top of her game. But it's all for naught. All of the beautiful shots of food and faces and art and nature lose their luster, and they drag on Swinton's lush and exotic performance. It's like seeing a Ferrari with a boat trailer attached to it, and just because the boat in question is a yacht doesn't make the setup any less lugubrious and absurd. The music of the excellent American composer John Adams is used throughout -- contrary to some reports, he composed no new music for the score -- but it does not fit. Guadagnino wants to make this an opera, but his use of Adams' actual operas clashes horrendously with the slowly paced, uneventful narrative.

Laughable juxtapositions abound, from Adams' ill-fitting score to some edits that would have gotten me thrown out of a theater for laughing so hard. When Emma discovers a note written by her daughter admitting to her lesbianism, the director cuts to shots of Milanese cathedrals surrounding Emma, the implications of old-school religious condemnation lazy and inarticulate, the equivalent of a rakishly raised eyebrow and a gentle nudge to the ribs. Having rewatched Black Narcissus the same day, I found Powell's cutaways to flowers, vibrant explosions of the passion that seeped out of every frame of that film, meaningful and evocative in a manner that Guadagnino aims for but does not reach. His close-ups on flowers during his distant and cold shots of sex (which still manage to get in some male gazes for all their stiffness) are desperate grabs for the same emotion, but all they amount to are sub-Georgia O'Keeffe evocations of a vagina.

Only at the last moments does the film finally play into the operatic tone it wanted to attain throughout. There are those who would criticize the ending from breaking totally from the tone of the rest of the film, its euphoric leap into boisterous music and epic framing wholly at odds with the progression to that point, even the melodramatic climax. But that is a drawback of film criticism, the need to justify each scene within the narrow context of how it fits everything else in the movie. Never mind that literature has enjoyed such breaks for centuries -- Hamlet featured a freaking play within a play, after all. The best parts of great movies can be total separations from the more objective moods for a flash of intense subjectivity (or the other way around, providing sudden clarity the character does not have). The last three minutes of I Am Love so happen to be the best part of a mediocre movie, and for that I am grateful.