Holiday Gift Guide: Valley of the Gods

This film is like a clown car loaded with symbolism. No matter how hard you try, you will probably never finish unpacking it. It also has some striking natural scenery and a really interesting supporting cast packed in there. Lech Majewski is probably best known in North America for the wonderous “cinematic painting” The Mill and the Cross and he brings the same genre-defiance and distinctive visual sensibility to bear in the fabulistic Valley of the Gods, which is now available on DVD. It would indeed make quite a memorable gift for any fan of Jodorowsky-ish auteurs on your shopping list (but be warned, they will keep talking about it for months to come).

Either a lot happens in Valley, or maybe not that much. Engineering titan Wes Tauros is about to secure the uranium mining rights for the Navajo Nation’s Valley of Gods (near Monument Valley), where the spirits of their ancestors are thought to reside. The deal has split the community, largely but not entirely along generational lines, between those who value the spiritual over the material concerns and those desperate for greater opportunities.

John Ecas was a copywriter with the Tauros company, but he is now concentrating on his midlife crisis and pining for his wife, who left him for her hang-gliding instructor. On the advice of his unconventional shrink, Ecas has embraced absurdity as a means of therapy. It was during his resulting misadventures that he crossed paths with Tauros, in his incognito homeless avatar. Ostensibly, Ecas is summoned to Tauros’s grand castle in the sky to serve as his Boswell, but the weirdness that unfolds could just be the novel he is finally writing.

There are a lot of visual references going on in Valley—so much so, astute viewers may start to second-guess how much they are projecting themselves. Regardless, cineastes will inevitably see echoes from dozens of films, starting with the grand vistas of John Ford’s classic Monument Valley westerns. Ecas’ trippy spirit walk brings to mind John Cassavetes dropping-out in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest. Tauros is frequently likened to Howard Hughes within the film, but his Xanadu is also reminiscent of Hearst Castle, while his statue garden is shrewdly compared to the Medusa’s lair. Fittingly, the great Keir Dullea appears as Ulim, Tauros’s trusted butler and confidant, because there are elements of the wildly over-the-top climax that bring to mind 2001.

So, basically whatever you might want to see, you can find in Valley, maybe even kaiju. Of course, John Malkovich is perfectly cast as the eccentric and arbitrary Tauros. Dullea is aptly mysterious and a little bit unnerving as Ulim. Plus, the great John Rhys-Davies is wonderfully sly as Dr. Hermann, Ecas’s erudite analyst, who we can’t be absolutely sure truly exists. These are three of our favorite thesps, whom Majewski shrewdly uses in ways that play to their strengths.

Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

If for no other reason, HBO’s remake of Fahrenheit 451 stakes a claim on history, because it gives Keir Dullea bragging rights as perhaps the only actor to appear in films based on the work of both Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Unfortunately, this adaptation is far too concerned with being “timely” and “relevant,” thereby limiting its long-term significance. Bradbury’s anti-censorship message is perhaps more needed now than in 1953 when he wrote his classic novel, but it doesn’t come through in an urgent, principled way in Ramin Bahrani’s Fahrenheit 451 (trailer here), co-adapted with the great expat Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi, which premieres this Saturday on HBO.

Guy Montag is a fireman, just like mentor, Captain Beatty. As you should know, that means they set fire to banned books (pretty much all of them), rather than extinguishing accidental fires (come to think of it, wouldn’t they still need old-fashioned firemen in a dystopian world?). Montag has never really thought about the implications of his work, except maybe when a repressed incident from his childhood resurfaces in his memory. However, an encounter with Clarisse McClellan, one of Beatty’s reluctant sources, starts churning up vague doubts. Not long after, he secretly takes home a contraband book, Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. With McClellan’s help, the book spurs Montag to start thinking for himself, perhaps for the first time.

Montag is further haunted by the horrifying sight of an old fashioned “Eel,” who opts to self-immolate rather than abandon her books. In a significant departure from Bradbury (and Truffaut), she also happens to utter a word she really shouldn’t have, because it gives the Firemen a clue as to a game-changing book-preservation initiative the dissident underground has concocted. (As an aside, Montag’s media-anaesthetized wife Millie was cast, but later cut from the final film, which seems like a rather Orwellian act to make such a major character disappear without a trace.)

Without question, the greatest misstep of this Fahrenheit is the attempt to update the near dystopia with elements of internet culture and reality TV that will be familiar to contemporary viewers. However, this just distracts more than it enhances the films credibility. It’s a constant source of business undercutting the starkness of Bradbury’s original vision. Bahrani and Naderi also ash-can the background drumbeat of impending war, which explained why all these thought police regulations were implemented in the first place.

Still, the ever-reliable Michael Shannon is quite intriguing and compulsively watchable, playing the hard-nosed Beatty, who has his own secret print vices. In contrast, Michael B. Jordan is rather inert and inexpressive as Montag, the Fireman supposedly wrestling with his conscience and doubts. Nor is there much chemistry between him and Sofia Boutella’s McClellan. However, Dullea adds a note of integrity as the learned “Historian,” who is also involved in the book-preserving underground. That really was perfect casting.

Fahrenheit just doesn’t hold together as a persuasive cautionary vision, which is a shame, because we could use a good version about now. Quite problematically, it plays ideological favorites with the books we see burning. You will not find any conservative classics like Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in the Firemen’s bonfires, but it is hard to think of a book that would be less acceptable to the dystopian powers-that-be. In fact, it rather mixes the message when one of the underground “Book People” is introduced as “Chairman Mao” because she memorized the Little Red Book—yet you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in history who did more to censor and eradicate books than Mao Zedong. Sadly, the film never really drives home the point that we should apply the 1^st Amendment most to books and articles that we do not agree with, or else we risk adulterating our own constitutional protections. A major disappointment, Fahrenheit 451 premieres this Saturday (5/19), on HBO.