Richard Williams: Movie of the week
When Wim Wenders points to the change in the nature of violence in the mainstream cinema, he is stating the obvious. He says he made The End of Violence to get us thinking about how explicitly gruesome sights that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago appear to be included in violent films as if by quota. And he has done a clever thing by making a film that uses the same language as the films t
hat his film is about.
Wenders’s effort, his first to be made in the United States since 1984, has the look, the feel and the faces of a Hollywood film. What it does not have, he insists, is a message. Maybe he fears that such a suggestion would put off the customers who might be attracted by Bill Pullman, Andie MacDowell and Gabriel Byrne. Maybe he doesn’t have a message, anyway.
Reduced to the essential outline of Nicholas Klein’s screenplay, The End of Violence is about a secret government plan to cover Los Angeles with surveillance cameras in an attempt to eradicate violent crime. Mike Max (Pullman), a maker of exploitation mo vies, receives a secret FBI file on the project via e-mail. The anonymous source turns out to be Ray Bering (Byrne), a computer scientist employed to set up the system from a base in the Griffith Park Observatory, above Hollywood. Mike is abducted by two contract killers, but escapes and goes into hiding. The subsequent action interweaves several plot-strands, including the relationships between R
ay and his boss (Daniel Benzali), between Mike’s disaffected wife (MacDowell) and a rapper (K Todd Freeman), and between a stuntwoman (Traci Lind) and a young, movie-obsessed detective (Loren Dean) who is trying to solve the mystery of Mike’s disappearance.
Mike and Ray never meet, but Pullman and Byrne create the film’s tension, playing variations on the same weary watchfulness. MacDowell’s air of half-suffocated glamour suits an unsympathetic role, and Lind, who has the healthy voluptuousness of the young Kim Basinger, makes a strong impression.
Two hours gives Wenders enough time to take us down various LA byways – to a stand-up poetry club, a film producer’s mansion, the home of a gang of Mexican gardeners and a movie set where Edward Hopper’s famous Nighthawks is being brought to life, down t o the tiniest detail. The film’s internal rhythms are complicated, but its unhurried pace is seductive.
There are moments of satire, even self-satire, as in Udo Kier’s wicked portrayal of a hack ,migr, director (“Why I do make films in America? I should have stayed in Europe!” – which gets a laugh from those who have followed Wenders’s career). And there is a cinephile’s affection in the appearance of the dying Samuel Fuller as Byrne’s dad, and the use of Griffith Park, where Nicholas Ray, another of Wenders’s father-figures, set much of Rebel without a Cause.
The film’s violence happens off-screen, in the old-fashioned way. Two minor characters, a pair of hit men, have their heads blown off. We see them beforehand, in a comic argument about getting their job done (one of them is the wonderful Pruitt Taylor-Vi nce), and we see them afterwards, as shrouded corpses. That’ll do nicely.
Distance is also among the film’s themes. Someone once wrote an essay on how Wenders’s vision of the US was framed by the windscreen of a car. Times have changed, and now Wenders watches the US from the seat of a helicopter, through the restless lens of a remote-control surveillance camera. Time and again the camera creeps over the top of a hill to reveal the grid of enigmatically identical street s. “Quite a city,” one man says to another as they look down. “Nothing like it,” the other replies. “If you could see it,” the first man says. The hill is shrouded in fog.