Two kings, but only one ruler
By RICK GROEN

Globe and Mail, Canada
Sept 3 2005

They are the co-reigning kings of movies in Canada, English fiefdom,
and have been for the last decade. Both are renowned abroad and the
darlings of the Cannes crowd, if not of any mass audience (no one said
kings have to be popular). Both are as amiable in person as their work
is disturbing on the screen. Both make difficult films that dole out
plenty of sex and violence, yet always in an individual style and in
pursuit of similarly modern themes. Both continue to live in their
home base of Toronto, whose namesake university both attended and in
whose film festival, this year, both have brand new pictures treated
as gala presentations.

So, with all that David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan hold in common,
how is it that their movies are so completely, so emphatically,
so apples-and-oranges different?

Well, their destination may be the same, but they sure took divergent
routes to get there. In fact, their current offerings at next week’s
TIFF – Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies, Cronenberg’s A Hi story
of Violence – speak volumes about those separate paths and their
competing talents. And, maybe, about who sits higher on the throne.
Each movie is essentially a genre flick, but – call out the palace
guard – one is very good and the other decidedly ain’t.

More about that later.

Advertisements Let’s first return to the beginnings, where, since
the two are almost a generation apart in age, we already find their
paths divided. Cronenberg is 62, an early baby boomer born and bred
in Toronto the staid, but soon exposed to the headier air of Sixties
rebellion. His artistic heroes were literary and openly subversive –
William Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov. Egoyan is only 45, an immigrant
born in Egypt to Armenian parents, then raised in British Columbia
and required to adapt to Western ways. His heroes were theatrical
and existentially bleak – Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter.

Now cue the further separation. “For me, art is almost a sacred thing,”
Egoyan has said, and from the outset he established himself as an
art-house director whose work – technically accomplished, non-linear
in plot, European in style – was almost immediately embraced by the
festival set. An early film, 1987’s Family Viewing, not only won the
top Canadian prize at TIFF but reaped further accolades (and some
money too) from none other than Wim Wenders himself. So Egoyan quickly
found his niche, and, thanks partly to him and his awardable skills,
that niche would set the dominant tone in our industry. He was the
artiste; he was the anti-Hollywood.

Not so the young Cronenberg. When TIFF started up 30 years ago,
Cronenberg had just made Shivers, a picture that stood about as much
chance of getting invited to a film festival as a squeegee kid does
to a Rosedale brunch. Not only did critics diss Shivers as schlock
horror at its depraved worst, but even the pols in the House of Commons
turned their collective thumbs down, wondering aloud why good Canadian
taxpayers should be funding such low trash.

Temporarily thwarted but hardly daunted, Cronenberg answered with a
succession of movies – Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome – that
only upped the ante further. But by then, amid the ongoing spectacle
of exploding heads and mutating parasites, of syringes growing out
of armpits, and vaginas sprouting from stomachs, the discerning few
were beginning to detect something else, too – a brain at work, a
man grappling with a metaphor, pondering the age-old schism between
mind and body, contemplating the psyche at war with itself, wondering
whether we are consuming technology or technology is consuming us.

Later, in films like Family Viewing, The Adjuster (1991) and Exotica
(1994), Egoyan would also use technology, especially video technology,
but strictly as a distancing device – a symbol of alienation,
a tool for objectification, a means of revealing and concealing,
of sustaining illusions and masking reality. These films are cool,
dispassionate and cerebral. By contrast, in Videodrome and again in
eXistenZ, Cronenberg has people plunging cassettes into the gaping
portals of their tummies, whereupon the illusion/reality fun really
begins. These films are hot, outrageous and, yet, cerebral too. Same
theme, very different approach. Egoyan, the smart immigrant, is
conforming within an artistic model; Cronenberg, the smart baby boomer,
is rebelling within a commercial model.

The rebellion would continue. Who’s more commercial than Stephen
King, yet, in The Dead Zone, Cronenberg redeemed the book with an
infusion of melancholy, even as he extracted from Christopher Walken
one of the few unmannered performances in his ultramannered career.
He did the same in The Fly, turning a safe remake into a lovely
mediation on his favourite subject – the monster within us all. In
1988, when the subject got embodied in the twin gynecologists of Dead
Ringers, he spurned his usual special effects without giving up an
ounce of menace – that film is both profoundly creepy and creepily
profound. And everyone who saw it agreed. With Dead Ringers, Cronenberg
had completed his own metamorphosis from schlockmeister to auteur –
he was now critically respectable.

Of course, over on the Egoyan side of the ledger, respectability
was never at issue, and it skyrocketed with his 1997 adaptation
of the Russell Banks novel, The Sweet Hereafter. Hollywood itself
paid homage to our artiste, awarding him Oscar nominations for both
directing and writing. Not that Egoyan dumbed down his aesthetic
principles. Quite the contrary. He took Banks’s tragedy – on the
death of children – and overlaid it with his trademark complexity,
keeping the survivors alienated and their understanding fragmentary.
The movie’s few detractors argued that, in so doing, he robbed the book
of its raw, incisive emotion. But his legion of admirers countered
that the emotion in any Egoyan film lies in precisely this lack of
incisiveness, that his work (like a Beckett play) triggers anxious
feelings all the more powerful because they can’t be traced to an
“understandable” source. Perhaps.

Over approximately the same period, Cronenberg was taking his
hard-earned reputation and rolling the dice with it, heading off on
his boldest tangent yet. After a bravely hallucinatory attempt to
adapt the unadaptable novel of his beloved Burroughs ( Naked Lunch),
followed by another tiptoe along the illusion/reality boundary ( M.
Butterfly), Cronenberg brought that tangent to an extraordinary
culmination in Crash (1996) – a movie so artfully unsettling that
even the deep thinkers at Cannes couldn’t decide what to make of it.
They settled on conferring a special prize for “audacity.” Others,
appalled by the unholy trinity mating cars to sex to violence, and
by the grisly congress of metal and flesh, reached out for blunter
adjectives. “Pornographic” got thrown around a lot – Cronenberg was
back where he began in Shivers.

Still, whatever you may think of Crash – I find it truly provocative
– this is hardly the labour of a guy resting on his laurels. Unlike
most American directors of his generation, Cronenberg has forged an
independence that he uses to continually take risks, which, more often
than not, pay off in unique and worthy pictures. Like Spider (2002),
a stark yet poignant trip into the divided mind of a schizophrenic,
one more embattled psyche where objective reality wages war with
subjective perception.

Meanwhile, Egoyan has been spinning his wheels of late. Felicia’s
Journey, another tale of imperilled innocence, seemed less a revisiting
than a rehashing of the topic. In Ararat, Egoyan returned to an Armenia
he explored earlier in his most affectingly personal film (1993’s
Calendar). Here, however, the historical canvas is too broad, the
subplots are awkward, and the ending suffers from a near-sentimental
leap into hopefulness.

Which brings us, finally, to the present, to TIFF and the kings’
pair of galas. Where the Truth Lies is a backstage whodunit, a murder
mystery involving a celebrated comedy team. A History of Violence
is a contemporary retelling of that old yarn where an ex-gunslinger,
buoyed by the love of a good woman, tries to go straight even as his
past catches up with him. Okay, but when it comes to smartening up
a dull genre pic, mining for merit in commercial pits, guess who has
the upper hand?

Don’t pick Egoyan. Despite operating with his fattest budget to
date, he badly miscasts a crucial role and, beneath the surface of
the whodunit, finds precious little substance to chew on, nothing
much to interest either him or us. Conversely, Cronenberg, casting
impeccably throughout, converts his gunslinger into yet another study
of the “beast within,” and the movie into a subtle essay on society’s
investment in that beast. Typically, Cronenberg refuses to lyricize
the violence – it’s dirty and brutal. But he’s equally unwilling to
simplify our reaction to violence, insisting that what we abhor we
also lionize, that the same bloody fist that is repellent in the back
alley can be sexy in the bedroom.

Yes, the sex. Compare what both directors do with it. Egoyan has
managed to earn his film an NC-17 rating (in the U.S.) for a sexual
encounter that doesn’t shock, or dismay, or even titillate, that
doesn’t really do anything except forward the plot. While dodging
the censor’s pencil, Cronenberg includes a sex scene that does shock,
that does dismay, and that, both during and in its aftermath, gives
the central theme a wickedly intelligent twist.

In that scene, Cronenberg finds the art that Egoyan holds sacred. And
he finds it for the very reason that nothing is entirely sacred to
him – even art, especially his art, must co-exist with the profane.
So all hail our reigning monarchs who, in their different ways, serve
us well. As to who has served better, I don’t know where that truth
lies – but I’m damn sure where my affection does.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress