Medium
Cool
(1969/Paramount/Criterion Collection Blu-ray)
Picture:
A Sound: B Extras: A Film: B
Medium
Cool
is one of those films whose reputations precedes it.
Cinematographer-turned-director Haskell Wexler exploded the lines
between documentary and narrative fiction in his story about a TV
newsman (Robert Forster) on a 110-minute journey of disenchantment -
with his profession, with the system, with himself - by placing his
actors in unstaged scenes, most notably in the climax at the 1968
Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Wexler shot Forester on
the job inside the DNC, while his co-star Vera Bloom, costumed in a
canary yellow dress, gets caught in the thick of a police crackdown
on protests outside convention hall. One shot, where cops fire tear
gas at protesters, ends famously with the line, Watch
out, Haskell, it's real!
If
you're at all plugged in to cinema, you know Medium
Cool
from those climactic moments even if you've never seen the full film.
It's availability had been sketchy in the DVD era (there was a disc
from Paramount that has been out of print for years), though that's
all changed thanks to the excellent Criterion Collection release of
the film. But like anything with reputational baggage, the reality
of the thing is far less exciting.
That's
a tough thing to say from a film that crackles with energy and
ingenuity. It opens on Forster and his sound guy shooting footage of
a highway car crash. The duo stalk the wreck, casing it for gory
angles and wrenching audio, which is disrupted by the loud,
high-pitch drone of the car's horn - until the soundman callously
disconnects it from the engine and the scene goes silent, save for
the last gasps of a driver. It's a crushing scene of callousness,
rendered all the more challenging for Wexler's documentarian
camerawork. (Nightcrawler
is a feature-length extension of this gut-punch moment.) One of the
next scenes is a party full of reporters talking politics and
bemoaning this or that about their profession (were journalists ever
satisfied?) that calls back visually and spiritually to a similar
gathering in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot
le fou
(whose Criterion edition is sadly out of print and very valuable.)
Again, Wexler deftly places us right there, amongst the political
angst and professional malaise. We feel like we're intruding, but in
the way that we're late to the conversation, not uninvited crashers.
We
get a couple more of these documentary moments - Forster and his crew
shooting National Guard training exercises and a protest camp on the
National Mall - but then Medium
Cool
lays on the narrative. Forster at home, Forster at the office,
Forster getting cozy with Bloom, who plays a single mother from West
Virginia whose husband was killed in Vietnam, and hanging out with
Bloom's on-screen son. There are some 'real' moments sprinkled in
here (a date at a roller derby, interviews with Robert Kennedy
supporters), and they're a welcome relief from the tedium. As
constructed, the narrative elements are so stagy and contrived that
they utterly derail the film. They're this weird dead space we have
to suffer to get to the next on-the-scene moment and, ultimately, the
DNC.
It
didn't have to be that way, though. It's a bit ridiculous to offer
advice to a movie that's nearly 50 years old, but had Wexler shot the
whole thing as a documentary rather than hedge it (I'm guessing to
make it palatable for the studio) Medium
Cool
would be an unassailable masterpiece. And there's proof of concept
in the completed film, which makes it all the more frustrating.
In
the middle of the film, Forster catches wind of a story about a black
hack who found thousand of dollars in the backseat of his cab and
decided to return it. After twisting his editor's arm to give him
the resources to do a human-interest story on the driver (a battle
that contributes to him later losing his job), Forster takes his
audio tech to a rough part of Chicago to get the cabbie on the
record. When they get to the subject's apartment, though, they're
confronted by a gathering of friends and family frustrated that white
journalists are only interested in black people when the story is
uplifting. They don't care about the struggle, danger, hardship, or
inequity that puts black citizens on an entirely different social
footing from whites.
Wexler
attacks the scene as a documentarian would, leveraging the cramped
quarters of the small apartment to heighten his characters'
claustrophobia and ours, and then allowing the driver's associates
directly address the camera with their accusations, condemnations,
and prescriptions. Outside of the DNC segment, it's the most
powerful moment of the film - not only because the anger and
frustration resonates across the decades as clearly and relevantly as
if today were 1968, but because it has the vitality and urgency of
verite where so much of the other narratively-guided scenes are limp
and lifeless.
Scenes
like those in the apartment and at the convention work so well
because Wexler is as skilled a documentarian as he is a
cinematographer. (His work on Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and In
the Heat of the Night
is some of the best ever committed to celluloid.) He also has a
finely tuned social conscious, so when he sees indignity or
mistreatment or an absurd bastardization of American ideals he's more
than willing to turn his camera in that direction. Medium
Cool
works best - and, indeed, solidifies its reputation - when it
captures America's from-the-inside-out rot. The film was released in
1969, but perhaps more than any other film represents a document of
the wave of protests in 1968 protest hitting this country's shores.
And if only on that score, it deserves its Criterion canonization.
But it could have been - should have been - so, so, so much better.
Maybe if Easy
Rider
(on Criterion Blu-ray, reviewed elsewhere on this site) had blown up
Hollywood's expectations in 1968 rather than a year later, Wexler
could have turned Medium
Cool
into the film only hinted at in in the final product.
One
thing that is beyond reproach, though, is Criterion's Blu-ray
presentation. The new 4K digital restoration, approved by Wexler, is
breathtaking. The picture is crisp and clean without losing any of
the magic of the original 16mm and 35mm film negative. Blacks are
deep, the contrast is nuanced, and colors just pop: Bloom's iconic
sun-yellow dress is warm yet evocative, Chicago PD's blue uniforms
and helmets are pacifying yet threatening, and the convention's red,
white, and blue bunting is defiantly patriotic yet blindingly
menacing. On the audio side, the uncompressed monaural soundtrack is
free of pops or hiss and wonderfully textured. It wonderfully
captures the small incidental sounds (kids playing, trucks passing
by, fans whirring) of Bloom's housing project as well as the
cacophony (tear gas canisters exploding, clubs connecting with
bodies, terrified screams) of the DNC protest.
Extras-wise,
the disc is stacked. There are two commentaries, one with Wexler,
editorial consultant Paul Golding, and actor Marianna Hill, while the
second features historian Paul Cronin. There's a new interview with
Wexler, excerpts from Cronin's documentaries Look
Out Haskell, It's Real!,
about the making of Medium
Cool,
and Sooner
or Later,
which catches up with Harold Blankenship, who plays Bloom's son in
the film. There's also an essay about Medium
Cool by
film critic and programmer Thomas Beard.
The
key feature on the disc, though, is Medium
Cool Revisited,
a 30-minute documentary shot by Wexler at the 2012 NATO summit in
Chicago focused on the Occupy movement. In the video, Wexler talks
to Occupiers and others sympathetic with the cause about the protest
as well as how this experience compares and contrasts with the one he
captured in 1968. It's heartening to hear how many people were
touched by Medium
Cool
and how it continues to inspire them to agitate for a better, fairer
country, yet it's disheartening to see just how little progress has
been made (or even how much we've regressed) since those DNC
protests.
But
the most resonant moment of the video is one that's a victim of
circumstance. At the NATO summit, Wexler talks with James Foley
about the dehumanization of war and the experience of veterans
returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Two years after their
conversation, Foley was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in Syria.
Because Criterion's release of Medium
Cool
preceded that barbaric act, there's no warning that Foley appears in
the video. So when he does, and you hear what he's saying... Talk
about a gut punch.
-
Dante A. Ciampaglia
