{"id":7151,"date":"2011-09-30T14:57:53","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T18:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=7151"},"modified":"2014-06-09T00:06:21","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T04:06:21","slug":"backtrack-directors-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/?p=7151","title":{"rendered":"Backtrack: Director’s Cut"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The imagery described by Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs<\/em> of Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) where, as an orphaned young girl running away from the farm where she lives, carrying a baby lamb away from inevitable slaughter with her, is etched into society\u2019s cultural mind as much as virtually anything else in film history. Clarice, trying to get all of the lambs to stop screaming, helplessly carrying one before being picked up by the sheriff and sent away from the farm to an orphanage is so evocative that you forget that we never see any of it. It\u2019s so easy to imagine that many viewers swear they\u2019ve seen it just like they think they saw Gwyneth Paltrow\u2019s head in the box in Seven<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>If Clarice running away from her fear is never actually seen, then why, in Backtrack<\/em>, in the movie she shot right before Silence of the Lambs<\/em>, is Jodie Foster seen running away from her captors, carrying a baby lamb? No one saw Backtrack<\/em>; it had such a difficult post-production process (listen to my interview with the film’s screenwriter<\/span><\/a> for more background) that the film was butchered and buried for two years by its soon-to-be-bankrupt distributor and disowned by its director and star Dennis Hopper. Was Foster aware of what she was doing, essentially making fun of her to-be Oscar winning role before she\u2019d even participated in it?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Such foresight would truly be astonishing, even more so than John Cusack appearing in both 2002\u2019s Adaptation <\/em>and 2003\u2019s Identity<\/em>. In that case, Adaptation<\/em> has one \u201cfictional\u201d character (Donald Kaufman) write a screenplay that to the audience and his non-fiction brother (Charlie Kaufman, both are played by Nicolas Cage) sounds utterly clich\u00e9d and formulaic, which of course is the very reason it gets purchased. The screenplay Donald has written is suspiciously identical to that of Identity<\/em>, except Identity <\/em>isn\u2019t played as a satirical joke, suggesting that the real Charlie Kaufman read the script <\/em>for Identity<\/em>, thought it was so ridiculous that he should make fun of it, and the same studio (Sony) didn\u2019t notice, and made Identity <\/em>anyway.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The lines aren\u2019t nearly as clear in Backtrack<\/em>; Hopper\u2019s film is a tonal mess, and even in the longer director\u2019s cut it\u2019s quite clear that there are heaps of necessary transitional material missing. The fact that the exposition is handled over the opening credits, with Jodie Foster\u2019s Anne Benton listening to a tape of herself<\/em> being interviewed about her post-modern art implies that a lot of this was thrown together at the last minute, and this was simply the most efficient way to introduce anything. It\u2019s not even clear that her art is meant to be taken seriously, it\u2019s just heavy handed messages displayed on LED signs, until another fellow artist, played by Bob Dylan, describes her as a \u201cliteralist.\u201d When hit man Milo (Hopper), assigned to take out Anne, who witnessed a mob murder, calls her on her pretensions, she gets defensive (and delivers the best line in the film, which I won\u2019t ruin), we can\u2019t help but feel that he\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>How aware Hopper was of the goofy nonsense he was creating is up in the air. Could the montages of mopey, introspective but dumb Milo playing the saxophone badly and learning about art possibly be serious? Some scenes, like one where Milo gets frustrated and tries to break the saxophone through a window, but is repeatedly betrayed by plexi-glass (surely one of the earliest examples of that now standard scene), are probably meant to be funny. As is the moment where Milo is struggling with what the best way to properly romance your kidnap victim is. But what about Milo trying to glean what Anne really means with her art, figuring out where she is, based on advertising slogans she\u2019s written while in hiding? That\u2019s where some of Hopper\u2019s more esoteric touches get in his way.\u00a0 A scene where Milo aimlessly walks through a Native American ceremony, with a giant wooden figure being burned (very much shades of The Wicker Man<\/em> and its stranger in a strange land themes), is just as hopelessly pretentious as any art Anne came up with. It makes it truly hard to believe that Hopper, with his Native American spiritual fixations, never worked with Oliver Stone. [Trust me, I had to check. It\u2019s simply that<\/em> hard to believe.]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Certainly Hopper, like Stone, knew how to draw an impressive array of supporting actors, even if a lot of them probably felt like Milo\u2019s edict about his work, \u201cit\u2019s a job, it don\u2019t feel like much.\u201d Dean Stockwell, in another of his long line of mob lawyers<\/span><\/a><\/span>, probably had a lot more interesting quirks that hit the cutting room floor, Joe Pesci rants, raves, and curses like he knew he was about to get famous playing mobsters and\/or loudmouth characters named Leo (as he did in 1989\u2019s Lethal Weapon 2, <\/em>shot a year after Backtrack<\/em>), and John Turturro certainly hams it up<\/span><\/a> as a slow-witted, existential gangster.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>What lingers in the mind though, is the small role for Vincent Price, as the head of \u201cthe family,\u201d who seems to be far too measured and classy to be either a head of this particular family or even in this movie. Price has a moment where he regretfully utters a word in Latin, \u201cAbsum,\u201d which means absent, and though we never get a full explanation, it is like Price himself uttering his regret at his many roles camping it up, limiting himself in so many schlocky horror roles. Or maybe it\u2019s also Price\u2019s character looking back on a wasteful term as boss of this particular inept bunch of mafiosos.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s not that Backtrack <\/em>is a waste as a whole though. Foster, whose role could have been reduced to the \u201cpretty-girl-in-peril\u201d type (especially as the movie is so similar in story to Nurse Betty<\/em>), delivers a wide-eyed performance similar to the one she had in Taxi Driver<\/em>. While she\u2019s more aware of the danger she\u2019s in, Foster\u2019s scenes where she is utterly surprised by Milo\u2019s lack of knowledge of the world are so inviting without being condescending, eerily reminiscent of how she responded to De Niro in Taxi Driver<\/em>. Hopper didn\u2019t have nearly as much control as De Niro did though, and so some of his directorial choices play better in retrospect, like the film’s musical score that sounds like slowed-down circus music. But he also clearly learned from those he worked with, gleaning the notion of perpetual industrial noises invading Backtrack\u2019<\/em>s soundtrack from David Lynch, who directed Hopper in Blue Velvet<\/em>. Hopper also borrowed Lynch\u2019s absolute confidence in his material, not worrying about leaving the audience behind. It\u2019s a shame the studio was afraid that might be the case.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The imagery described by Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins) in Silence of the Lambs of Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) where, as an orphaned young girl running away from the farm where she lives, carrying a baby lamb away from inevitable slaughter with her, is etched into society\u2019s cultural mind as much as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14],"tags":[5188,2559,8301,8300,2733,5346,8302,4547,74,1718,8310,153,1862,89,908,230,3011,1337,8311,527,1104,1017,8313,1541,8309,3096,8307,824,920,8308,4442,1013,1815,1813,4600,7637,1006,91,309,500,123,1835,310,8314,232,262,2145,8304,929,4186,8312,2381,6073,8305,8306,8303],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regrettablesincerity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}