TALES OF LOHR: "GODZILLA MINUS ONE"
My thoughts on the unexpectedly acclaimed kaiju thriller; plus, "Factory Roll Call" prays to Saint Phalle
By some measures, one could hardly ask for a worse person than me to consider Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, the 33rd official Toho Studios feature starring the mammoth radioactive city-stomping lizard. My knowledge of the Godzilla franchise comes largely through cultural osmosis rather than consumption of the films themselves. In fact, I must somewhat shamefully confess that this may be the first Toho Godzilla that I have viewed in its entirety…and yes, that includes the 1954 original. (I have seen Roland Emmerich’s widely despised 1998 Americanization of the franchise, and my generally okay-with-it reaction to the film probably owes as much to my unfamiliarity as to anything else.) This fact owes a great deal, of course, to a general ubiquity of the series and its tropes that can make one feel as if they know everything there is to know about Godzilla without ever watching any of the actual films. I mean, it’s a guy in a rubber lizard suit bashing away at plywood skyscrapers, and sometimes fighting a giant turtle or bug or something. That’s all there is to it, right? At least that’s what the parodies and rip-offs would largely lead one to believe.
Then again, my lack of direct Godzilla experience might make me, paradoxically, ideally suited to take on Godzilla Minus One. This is a film that aspires to shuck off much of the franchise’s pre-existent baggage and approach the concept more or less on its own terms. In that sense, it is somewhat akin to the James Bond adventure Skyfall, another film in a long-running, bound-by-convention franchise that was received, by both critics and viewers, as “the franchise film for people who aren’t fans of the franchise.” And I cannot tell a lie: Part of me was largely compelled to check this out by the sheer effusive enthusiasm of the early reviews, many critics praising Godzilla Minus One as not merely a great Godzilla movie, but as a genuinely fine entertainment in its own right. Having now seen the film myself, I still cannot, for reasons enumerated above, tell you if it’s a “good Godzilla movie.” But as someone who’s seen plenty of cinematic popcorn spectacle, both marvelous and miserable, I can assure you that the hype is not misguided. Godzilla Minus One stands tall as one of this year’s best genre films.
Of course, like any great entertainment, even one driven by visual effects and spectacular set pieces, the magic starts with the screenplay, and Yamazaki has written a sturdy and surprisingly engaging one. The film begins in the waning days of World War II, where Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot, has faked an aircraft malfunction to escape his suicidal duty. Landing on a remote maintenance-hub island, the flyer’s arrival provokes an attack by the titular kaiju, and Shikishima is too paralyzed by fear to save the mechanic detail from a slew of grisly, jaw-crunching deaths. Riddled with PTSD and survivor’s guilt, the abashed pilot returns to a Tokyo decimated by the war his country has just lost. His parents have perished in an air raid, but Shikishima quickly acquires two surrogate families. He builds a household with fellow displaced refugee Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and an orphaned baby girl she’s taken under her wing. He also forges a convivial connection with the crew of a ramshackle boat he’s been hired on to help hunt and destroy seagoing mines left over from the war. But when the mine-harvesting operation, combined with nearby nuclear tests, stirs the now-mutated and even more massive Godzilla to attack, Shikishima and his war-scarred community must rally their strengths to succeed where their government and army have so recently failed them, and bring down the beast threatening their already fragile safety.
The beauty of Godzilla Minus One lies in the pure and genuine conviction Yamazaki and his cast and crew bring to the material. Godzilla has always been regarded as a symbolization of Japanese fears in the wake of the nuclear attacks they suffered at the end of the war, but few if any films in the series have so explicitly wedded the monster and his rampage to the aftermath of the conflict. Handling this connection poorly could have resulted in a film that was misguided at best, tasteless and disrespectful to the dead at worst. But Yamazaki’s screenplay gracefully threads this needle on a number of fronts. His characters’ clear frustration with their governmental and military commanders serves to absolve our protagonists from responsibility for the genuinely heinous acts some Japanese soldiers and officials ordered and committed during the war. Leaving the responsibility for the defeat of Godzilla purely in the hands of the citizenry likewise gives the characters a chance at unspoken redemption, replacing a conflict in which they have been largely culturally represented as villains with a noble cause for which they can be proud to take up arms. And much poignance and sympathy is gleaned from the sheer brute tangibility of the film’s production design, the half-wrecked villages and cobbled-together residences offering clear evidence of the wages of war falling hard on the heads of the culpable and innocent alike.
Yamazaki’s cast is fully up to the challenges presented by the material, giving sincere, committed performances that hold the screen even when Godzilla is nowhere to be seen. Kamiki’s low-key charisma and genuinely wrenching portrayal of battle fatigue make him an easily sympathetic figure, well worthy of the tenderness and care shown to him by Hamabe’s Noriko. Sakura Ando has some powerful moments as a fellow villager who alternately castigates Shikishima for his cowardice and supports him in caring for his surrogate family. The crew of the mine-harvesting vessel are likewise brought to life by a terrific trio of character actors. Kuranosuke Sasaki gives good Quint as the jolly, quick-with-a-grin captain; Yûki Yamada is charming as the green-but-eager youngster of the team; and Hidetaka Yoshioka, in the film’s best performance, is sheerly marvelous as the science-minded former naval official who cooks up the citizens’ audacious plan to defeat the monster. These actors work together to achieve something that’s not always a foregone conclusion: A Godzilla movie in which no sane viewer will be sitting there rooting for the big lizard.
Yamazaki’s unfussily assured direction evokes the crowd-pleasing best of classic Spielberg, ably supported by Kôzô Shibasaki’s cinematography, which brings stately authenticity to the domestic scenes and bracing, coherent clarity to the kaiju assaults. Naoki Satô’s score is appropriately awestruck and energetic, and includes several elegant incorporations of Akira Ifukube’s themes from the original 1954 film. In addition to writing and directing, Yamazaki also personally oversaw the film’s visual effects (the filmmaker started as a VFX supervisor), and the set pieces he and his crew create are simply stunning, full of visceral grace notes and genuinely overwhelming moments of impact. This is Godzilla as an almost Platonically pure force of destruction, throwing around train cars and boats like children’s toys, smashing buildings with the merest flick of his tail, and charging his razory spinal spikes like an unholy battery to unleash a radioactive firestorm blast from his roaring throat. Here, the big lizard’s footfalls have genuine and fatal power, and the screams of the escaping citizens feel authentic and horrifically apt. (Much of the credit for this goes to the film’s sound design team, whose efforts, heard via the IMAX theater’s superior speaker system, are a ribcage-rattling treat.) These sequences are even more impressive when weighed against the film’s modest $15 million USD budget, a testament to the value of resources smartly used by seriously skillful craftspeople.
Perhaps the finest compliment Godzilla Minus One can be paid is that it works no matter your prior relationship to the franchise. Longtime fans should be intrigued by the film’s deployment of the kaiju within the relatively straight-faced context of a postwar drama, with none of the camp and unintentionally comic elements of previous Godzilla pictures. Newbies and more casual viewers, on the other hands, will be satisfied by the picture’s ability to deliver a rock-solid, emotionally resonant narrative within the context of a high-octane, visually and aurally enveloping creature feature. This is a Godzilla film unlike any other that has come before, and even if you don’t come away from the viewing as a full convert to the franchise’s fandom, chances are good you will still feel that you’ve experienced a completely satisfying evening of entertainment.
FACTORY ROLL CALL
NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE (1930-2002)
The star of a Screen Test shot by Andy Warhol in 1964, Niki De Saint Phalle was every bit as much a polymath as the man who filmed her at the Factory. A painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and feminist activist, Saint Phalle is a fascinating, significant, and perhaps still undervalued figure in the foregrounding of feminist concerns within the context of contemporary art.
Born in Paris to a French banker father and American mother, Saint Phalle and her family moved to New York City mere months after her birth, in the wake of a French financial collapse. Her childhood was an immensely traumatic one, marked by a draconian Catholic education, physical beatings administered by her mother, and, from age 11 onward, sexual abuse at the hands of her father, creating a formidable fortress of negative influences against which she would spend a lifetime battling. Saint Phalle marked her attendance of the Brearly School, an upper-crust girls’ private institution on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, as the commencement of her feminist consciousness. At the age of 18, Saint Phalle embarked on a brief career as a fashion model, appearing in the pages of Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, and on the covers of French Vogue and Life.
She first began painting in the early ‘50s, not long after her marriage to writer / translator Harry Mathews. Their marriage was a tumultuous one, marked by infidelity, a suicide attempt, and Saint Phalle’s own eventual nervous breakdown. In 1960, the couple finally divorced, and Saint Phalle moved in with abstract Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, with whom she would enjoy a longtime creative connection. (The two eventually married in 1971, an equally fraught, adultery-wracked union that lasted a mere two years.) By this time, Saint Phalle had given up her previous ambitions as an actress to devote herself to painting and sculpture full-time.
The works she created during this period evoked the upheavals of her upbringing and earlier relationships. She created “target paintings,” canvases at which she encouraged observers to throw darts, and paint-packed sculptural images she decimated with splattery rifle bullets at destructive public performance events called “tirs.” Other works incorporated such hazardous items as razor blades, knives, and scissors, the resultant pieces redolent with incipient violence and threat. But by the mid-’60s, Saint Phalle had shifted her focus into a different, more monumental arena. Inspired by the pregnancy of her friend Clarice Rivers, spouse of fellow painter Larry Rivers, Saint Phalle embarked on her Nanas series: Large, vibrantly hued sculptures of women with tiny heads and sleek, voluptuous bodies. Saint Phalle was one of the only women sculptors working on such a mammoth scale, and was encouraged in her efforts by such influential arts-world figures as Salvador Dalí, John Cage, and Moderna Museet director Pontus Hultén, who invited her to participate in a number of major exhibitions at the Swedish museum.
As the ‘70s commenced, Saint Phalle moved into ever more expansive arenas. In 1974, she began work on the Tarot Garden, a massive park in Tuscany to be filled with sculptures based on the major arcana of the Tarot. She would work on this project for the next two decades, finally completing the garden in 1994. This was one of a series of major public works on which she would labor. She designed several other sculpture gardens and parks, and in 1982 worked with Tinguely on a fountain on the grounds of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Her other credits include several books, such as the autobiographical Traces (1999) and the 1987 children’s title AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, which she later turned into an animated film. This was just one of a number of films Saint Phalle produced during her career. She co-wrote and co-directed (with Peter Lorrimer Whitehead) 1973’s Daddy, and also made 1976’s A Dream Longer Than the Night / Camelia and the Dragon. In addition, Saint Phalle designed a line of furniture, and even lent her name to a series of feminine fragrances. Much of Saint Phalle’s work was motivated by a myriad of political concerns, touching on issues of feminist agency, AIDS awareness, and (ironically, given the nature of the tirs) gun control.
In 1994, plagued by respiratory problems exacerbated by exposure to paint and polyester fumes throughout her career, Saint Phalle relocated to La Jolla, California, where she would reside for the rest of her life. In 2000, she was awarded the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale award for sculpture, an honor that is considered by many to be the art world’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Sadly, by 2002, the accumulated years of respiratory abuse had taken their toll, and Saint Phalle endured six months of intensive hospital care before passing away in May of that year. Since her death, major retrospectives of her work have been mounted in Paris, Denmark, Houston, and at MoMA’s PS1 branch in New York City. The passage of time has only seen an increase in her esteem, and when that fatal dust settles, Niki de Saint Phalle should assume a prominent place among the giants of 20th century sculpture.
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