The Glass Shield
Smoke
My dozen favorite films at Cannes this year? Terence Davies’s ecstatic wide-screen The Neon Bible, set in a perfectly imagined Georgia of the early 40s, with Gena Rowlands; Emir Kusturica’s Yugoslav black-comedy epic Underground; Hou Hsiao-hsien’s beautiful if difficult Good Men, Good Women; Jim Jarmusch’s transgressive western Dead Man; Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, an Iranian urban comedy about children that unfolds in real time; Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, a cross between Sternberg’s The Devil Is a Woman–with Gong Li taking the place of Marlene Dietrich–and Billy Bathgate; and Manoel de Oliveira’s The Convent (Ruizian metaphysics and theology with John Malkovich and Catherine Deneuve). Then there were such pleasures on the market as Gianni Amelio’s Lamerica, a mordant treatment of the collapse of communism in Albania; lively low-budget musicals by Jacques Rivette and Joseph P. Vasquez; and a memorable period extravaganza by Cheik Oumar Sissoko from Burkina Faso called Guimba. My least favorite festival movie was Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead–the latest stupid, hollow Tarantino imitation–whose wit ends with its title. The only one of the bunch you’re likely to see soon, of course, is the last. If you want to know why, ask Harvey and Bob.
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What Harvey and Bob think will determine not only whether you’ll see the film and whether and how it will be recut or reshot but also how it will be promoted and discussed by the media–including most critics. For The Englishman Who Went up a Hill Harvey and Bob threw a big party on the Majestic beach the last night of Cannes, right next to a reconstruction of said hill/mountain (perfect for photo ops with Hugh Grant) and blasted the score from several speakers loudly enough to discourage conversation. Accurately gauging the puritanical hysteria of this country, they promoted Kids, a so-so AIDS fable about heartless, unsafe teen sex, by showing it only once, at midnight, at the Sundance festival in January, setting up an aura of mystery and money that lasted for four breathless months. Sure enough, many who saw it at Sundance wrote excitedly (and inaccurately) about “kiddie porn” and searing artistic vision, creating expectations that couldn’t possibly be met when the film showed in Cannes, underwhelming practically everyone but the hopeful hacks eager to gull the American public all over again. (Keep watching your TV sets, and don’t forget to ask Bob Dole what he thinks about it, too. If Dole said he saw an elephant fly, you can bet Time would offer a cover story on whether elephants in fact sprout wings.)
Of course, some Miramax pictures get treated even worse than The Glass Shield. I shudder to imagine what Harvey and Bob must think of Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees–the first Iranian feature ever released in this country, and one of my favorite films at Cannes last year. A few months ago Miramax gave it only minimal, last-minute press screenings in New York and Los Angeles and minuscule ads that virtually guaranteed minuscule business, then withdrew it from distribution, which means that Chicago won’t see it at all. In other words, it’s Harvey and Bob–not Roger and Gene, say, or some New York Times reviewer–who determine what most of this country will think (or not think) about Iranian cinema, just as it’s Harvey and Bob who’ve defined the genre of The Glass Shield as “Hollywood cop movie” for most critics. (Not all of them, however: check out Terrence Rafferty’s perceptive review in the June 12 issue of the New Yorker, which ranks the film alongside Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well and Satyajit Ray’s The Middleman “as an anatomy of moral corruption.”)
Divided into five chapters–each named after a different character, as in a novel–Smoke gives us a novelist named Paul (Hurt), grieving after the accidental street death of his pregnant wife, and a black teenager named Rashid (Harold Perrineau) who lies compulsively and tracks down his long-lost father (Whitaker) but doesn’t reveal his own identity. Paul takes him in for a spell; the second father figure is Auggie (Keitel), a cigar store manager in the neighborhood who’s a friend of Paul and becomes Rashid’s employer. Midway through the film Auggie’s former girlfriend Ruby (Stockard Channing) turns up asking for help for her daughter Felicity (Ashley Judd), who’s pregnant and addicted to crack, claiming that he’s her father. Other key elements in this narrative roundelay are the daily photographs Auggie has been taking in front of his store for the past 14 years and a paper bag containing $5,000 Rashid stole from some other thieves.
In short, what’s confusing about The Glass Shield, Burnett’s fourth feature (after Killer of Sheep, My Brother’s Wedding, and To Sleep With Anger), is that it’s a police procedural that refuses to play most of the Hollywood games associated with police procedurals: there’s no profanity, little violence, not much humor, and just a smattering of action. The film is loaded with plot, however; if the movie has a serious flaw, it’s that a plethora of incidents and procedures sometimes overwhelms the only story that really matters–Johnson’s gradual horrified discovery of the way that American power and justice work in a Los Angeles police station, and what this process has done to him and to others. I’ve seen the film three times now–twice with its original bleak ending, without all the gratuitous closing titles about what happened to the characters–and each time the plot has seemed a bit overloaded just before moving into the powerful, lucid final act.
