Knox Goes Away

“I don’t know how you can unwind with that clock ticking,” Jerry Seinfeld once remarked to Elaine Benes regarding her customary “60 Minutes”-led weekend winddown. As it happens, the first sound we hear in director Michael Keaton’s neo-noir “Knox Goes Away” is a ticking clock, a sound that becomes as much a motif as Alex Heffes’s musical score. It’s less on the nose than brain-burrowing, and evocative of a main character suffering from a fast-moving neurogenerative disease virtually erasing him before our eyes. He is John Knox, played by double-duty pulling Keaton, whose contract killer occupation is riddled by this diagnosis. It’s not a new plot device, of course, evoking “Memento” (2000) in spots and Liam Neeson’s “Memory” (2022) in many more. The latter was a trashy thriller, no matter how much weariness Neeson tried to infuse, whereas “Knox Goes Away” elicits a surprising amount of gravity. Granted, it is occasionally muddled in its tone and narratively bites off more than it can chew, but there is a patience to its rhythm that I appreciated, and ultimately it transcends the gimmicky nature of its plot device. Time is running out on Knox, and as one of the most prominent champions of Keaton’s only other directorial feature “The Merry Gentleman” (2008), I felt myself mourning time running out on Keaton as a director too.

Though director Keaton does not do much with his Los Angeles setting, he sure knows his way around a dimly lit diner booth, as he demonstrates in an opening scene between Knox and his hitman partner Thomas Muncie (Ray McKinnon). In the actors’ air, you sense the characters’ ease in one another’s company and their shared history. So, when things go wrong on the ensuing job as Knox’s sudden mental deterioration causes him to forget who he’s supposed to kill, shooting his longtime comrade in a burst of his confusion, his offering that he didn’t mean it is as pitiful as it is poignant, giving this moment real weight. With the botched job and his declining mental state, Knox decides to cash out of the life and, as the title implies, go away until his son Miles (James Marsden) shows up at his door, pleading for help having killed the man who raped his daughter Kaylee (Morgan Bastin).

Though we know Knox has explained the finer points of his complicated exit strategy to another aging criminal cohort Xavier (Al Pacino), “Knox Goes Away” plays coy and never tells us exactly what it’s up to. If it is the movie denying us omniscience, in another way, it evokes Knox’s own plight, the struggle to keep everything straight, causing him to write down his plans as he goes along, a plot point that the movie refreshingly doesn’t pay off in the way you might expect. No, even as “Knox Goes Away” builds toward an inevitable twist, his fading mental state resonates. A brief scene with his ex-wife (Marcia Gay Harden) might be something of a set-up for later but it becomes so much more, an accidental goodbye, of sorts, in which the way he scribbles a note on a grocery list that isn’t his becomes isn’t just a signal of where he is now, but of the life he used to lead. Gay Harden helps invest the sense of a whole past life in the space and silence between them, and just as she scores in this small role, so does Pacino in his. Whether his character’s youthful girlfriend is meant as sly commentary on the actor’s own in real life, I haven’t the foggiest, but it feels buried in there, and there’s something kookily poignant in his own character’s aging, content to enjoy what years he has left in the bathtub with a glass of red wine.

As much as “Knox Goes Away” lingers in some places and on some characters, however, it doesn’t give as much to attention to Miles, or more crucially, to his daughter. There are hints of Kaylee’s deep emotional toll, like a scene at a restaurant where an unhinged Miles assaults a man who may or may not be looking at her where Keaton’s camera focuses on Kaylee as much as the attack. Mostly, though, she exists merely as a device. Her storyline’s grisly nature is also at odds with the police investigation led by Detective Emily Ikari (Suzy Nakamura). If Nakamura is effective in vacuum, her dry comicality seems to be taking place in a third movie, a police procedural send-up that never quite meshes.

Director Keaton also occasionally overdoes it with various effects to emphasize Knox’s increasing dementia where actor Keaton, frankly, doesn’t need it. The best moments are the quiet ones in the middle of Knox just, like, doing something, attending to the complicated parts of his scheme but getting caught in the middle of it not remembering and the quiet, delicate way Keaton imparts the sense of the mind going, of recognizing the mind going but not being able to stop it from going, the struggle to summon something so simple while also struggling to effuse the idea that everything is normal when it’s not. For as melodramatic as the story can sometimes skew, these little physical moments of acting, nevertheless, emotionally reverberate. And though everything story wise snaps into place, there is something impressive in the way a full-blown emotional catharsis remains just out of reach, the closing shot calling to mind the closing shot from “The Irishman” but looking through the looking glass the other way, as if the sum of us, the good, the bad, the ugly, can never, no matter what, truly be reconciled.

Birdman

Alejandro González Iñárritu's ballyhooed "Birdman" should be bracketed with an "And Starring" credit for his cinematographer, the renowned Emanuel Lubezki, so integral is his camera to this rousing cinematic piece of performance art. If the film is at least partially about illusion, then it's grandest illusion is making the entire hour and forty-nine minutes appear to unfold in a single continuous take, cleverly masking cuts and finding inventive ways to create transitions. It swoops and glides and occasionally hovers before re-engaging behind the curtain of the St. James Theater on W. 44th Street in Manhattan, employing the pre-eminent device of the cinema to re-imagine the language of the theater as a director and his cast and crew struggle to reach opening night of their Raymond Carver adaptation intact, like "Noises Off" on a handful of uppers. The camera's presence is so arresting, it charges headlong across the border of self-conscious. But then actors, from Marilyn to Monty and beyond, are often self-conscious, and it becomes a struggle to free themselves of that self-consciousness once they take the stage or appear on the screen.

This metaphysical quality affirms itself in the casting. Michael Keaton, once a bright Hollywood star prowling for a comeback (which has never made sense to this blog because this blog still adamantly contends Mr. Keaton's directorial debut in which he also starred was the best film of 2009), plays the lead role of Riggan Thompson, a once bright Hollywood star prowling for a comeback. The lines are blurred further because Thompson's most famous role is a vaguely-defined superhero called Birdman, just as Keaton's most famous role was Batman, one he chose to stop playing after a sequel which, in the broad narrative, instigated his "downfall".

Yet it's not just Keaton. Edward Norton, an incredibly talented actor saddled with long-standing rumors of being "difficult" on set, plays an incredibly talented actor who is "difficult" on set. Naomi Watts, the supremely skilled Australian always made to speak with American accents who toiled for years before getting her true shot in Hollywood, speaks with an American accent as an actress who has toiled for years before getting her true shot on Broadway. The marvelous, eternally underused Amy Ryan is marvelous and underused as Thompson's ex-wife. (The gregarious Emma Stone plays Keaton's daughter, just out of rehab, and while Stone distinguishes herself well, boy, just think if they'd cast Lindsay Lohan.)

Still, in spite of the cast's overall strength, this is Keaton's show, the Art Blakely leading his Jazz Messengers, underscored by the soundtrack that is strewn with snare drum played by Brian Blade. In fact, Keaton acts as if he's sitting at an impossibly larged drum kit, so full of movements and mannerisms is he, allowing him to work in harmonic tandem with the free-flowing camera. It is not, however, merely a supremely busy performance, but one that means to mire him in the self-conscious madness of his own mind and, like the most famous role of 'em all, the Prince of Denmark, stick him in the trappings and suits of woe, struggling to employ his role as a means to express his inner-torment.

"Birdman" does not exactly allows these ideas to quietly manifest and burrow themselves into your brain, instead flashing them in front of your face like a brightly-lit theater marquee. Norton's cocky and committed Mike Shiner, in fact, repeatedly asserts that he only places he feels alive is the stage, which would sound more believable if he was relaying it to an interviewer for an Esquire cover article. Then again, a late sequence finds a hobo spouting off the "life is a shadow" monologue from Macbeth. As Riggan passes, the hobo pauses and wonders aloud if he's overdoing it, which has to be a sly nod in an already self-aware endeavor. Keaton's overdoing it and Norton's overdoing it and even Stone is overdoing it a little and, God Almighty, is Lubezki's camera overdoing it and I'm pretty sure they don't care. I'm pretty sure that's part of the point.

As the troubled production progresses, the film's trajectory seems weighted toward an end point "you can see coming", one that will soar all the way to the brink of "artistic truth". But then the movie barges right past that brink, casually dismissing it, right past the showbiz satire and into the land of full-on farce, as if mocking all the verbal conjecture that came before. Keaton, or is it Riggan, removes a mask (functioning as a hilarious nod to a certain musical) only to still see himself as someone else, sort of, and the actor and the actor's role and the role of the actor's role all become tangled and unquantifiable.

It was no less an authority than George C. Scott who said that what he looked most for in an actor's performance was "joy", and Keaton's hyper, tic-laden performance is the embodiment of joy. What it "means" becomes meaningless and the concluding shot, open-ended only on the surface, asks us to look up at the screen, up at the illusion, and give ourselves over whole-heartedly to that joy. As you wish.

Game 6

---We interrupt your regularly scheduled Friday's Old Fashioned for a review of a film I watched several months ago in order to pay homage to an infamous date in baseball history.

Michael Hoffman's “Game 6” is a strange feeling movie, but then writers and sports fans are strange people and “Game 6” is about a man who is both at once. He is Nicky Rogan, played by Michael Keaton in a performance of cunning likability, a noted New York City playwright which is at odds with his simultaneous status as a devout since-he-was-six-years-old Boston Red Sox fan. His new play is set to debut on Broadway October 25, 1986 – that is, the same night the baseball will go rolling through the legs of Bill Buckner, causing the Red Sox to fall to the New York Mets in Game 6 of the World Series. Talk about omens.

Written by acclaimed author Don DeLillo, the film is verbose – mostly in a good way – and does not lack for want of a theme. It follows Nicky as he cuts to and fro all over New York City, hopping into cabs and hopping out of cabs, always finding time to discuss how he used to drive a cab and keep it clean and keep it moving (shades of Max), running into various characters – his daughter (a rebelliously chic Ari Graynor) and an old playwright pal Elliot Litvak (Griffin Dunne, who exec produced) who has fallen on such hard times we half expect to find him eating right out of a dumpster. A character says to Elliot, bluntly, “What happened to you?”

What happened to him was Steven Schwimmer (Robert Downey Jr.), theater critic, reclusive harbinger of doom for all playwrights, whether aspiring or already successful. One blood-drawing review sent Elliot spiraling into a depression from which he never recovered. Schwimmer, of course, is set to review Nicky’s new play and Elliot is there is to issue dire warnings, like a Macbeth witch with a Walkman, although Nicky seems unconcerned. “I’ve got a good life,” he says. Does he? Although his beloved Red Sox are but one win from their first World Series championship in over 70 years, Nicky, often babbling to himself, has seen them lose so many times he seems to be attempting to convince himself that they will lose again even as he simultaneously clings to the desperate hope that they will not.

Failure and Obsession are the lifeblood of “Game 6” as it asks over and over that age-old question: Why do we care so much? Why can one review destroy a life? Why can a team and/or a game “pound in your head like a hammer of fate”?

Whether the film intends to truly make us wonder if Nicky plans to skip his own premiere – where the kind but old leading man struggles to remember his lines – for the game is perhaps open to debate, but any true fan of a particular sports team (which I am) already knows full well what he'll choose. The arts are important, as important as anything in the whole wide world, in my humble opinion, but more important than Game 6? Ha! And, in fact, knowing the outcome only enhances Nicky’s plight, as if it is a modern day tragedy he is authoring in his head. This story would not have felt right had Buckner made the play and hit a home run in the next inning to win.

At first glance the film’s weak point seems to be Nicky’s odd befriending of his latest cabbie, the oddly named Toyota Moseby (Lillias White) and her young son, who watch Game 6 alongside him, offering encouraging platitudes. “Baseball is life. Life is good.” What the hell is this, you wonder? But stick with it and eventually the way in which Nicky, whether by denial or something else, chooses to envision his own partly happy ending, I think gives away the fact these characters are mere apparitions. He is a writer, after all, and the writer, it seems, has imagined his own Magical Negro (coinage: Spike Lee) to offer the moral support he so desperately needs in these trying times.

The end comes cloaked in the guise of convenience and melodrama, but I liked it. The film, smartly, does not pretend to have answers to its questions, content with merely offering a hypothesis or two, but very conscientious of how sports can cut through a myriad of differences to momentarily unite us as utterly unlikely families of commiseration.

5 Other Bands Capt. Gene Mauch Could Unwittingly Quote

Michael Keaton is one of the most undervalued comedic actors of our time. I sense this is because Keaton takes so few roles in general which, in turn, means he takes that many less comedic roles. He enjoys his privacy and generally keeps himself out of the limelight and so when he randomly pops up you think: “Oh yeah. Michael Keaton. He’s awesome.”

I had this thought again when I happened to catch a snippet of "The Other Guys" at a pub while indulging in a pint. It happened to be one of the scenes in which Keaton's Gene Mauch, Captain to a pair of unpopular police officers seeking to prove they belong (Will Ferrell & Mark Wahlberg), unwittingly quotes TLC. At least, it is assumed this is unwittingly. He keeps quoting them throughout ("Cuz I don't want any scrubs") and then when it is pointed it out to him that this is a TLC reference he claims not to know who TLC is.

This, as it must, got me to thinking. What if there were to be an "Other Guys" sequel and Capt. Gene Mauch was called up to unwittingly reference another band? Hmmmmmmm.

5 Other Bands Capt. Gene Mauch Could Unwittingly Quote

En Vogue. “I just can’t pinpoint the one lead that will crack this case!” “Hey! ‘Free your mind and the rest will follow.’”

The Cranberries. “Look, the death of someone close to you is never an easy thing. But ‘do you have to……do you have to let it linger?’”

Real McCoy. “You may not be give me your badge but I’ll ask for it. Right now. ‘Run away. Run away and save your life.’”

Jewel. “I'd rather you guys see the world from a different angle because, really, you two are everyday angels.”

A Tribe Called Quest. “We’re cops and cops have rules! You pull a stunt like that again and ‘I’ll have you left without a job like Isaac from ‘The Love Boat!’”