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Good thing they didn’t have kitchen sinks back in the 18th century, else Gore Verbinski would undoubtedly have thrown one into his latest anthropological investigation of vanished Jolly Roger culture, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Not that Verbinski doesn’t come close, though even with all the desperation flailing, you’d hardly expect an homage to Eric Rohmer (not to mention the alternate Sax–how else to account for Chow Yun-fat‘s anachronistic yellow-peril turn?) to pop up in the middle of this overheated buckle-swashing stew. Which is what that “green flash” phenomenology seems to be about, yes? Deus ex machina in both cases, here and in Rohmer’s Le Rayon Vert (aka Summer)–though in Rohmer, the contrast between an almost subliminal causality (green flash on the horizon at sunset, at the limits of physical perception) and the quasi-hysterical tension it generates (can you see it happening? will the world fall apart if you don’t?) is the whole ironic point. Of course James Benning routinely mines the same minimalist lode in every film he makes–water, clouds, smoke-belching chimneys, etc–but Rohmer’s the classical master at this kind of dry, introspective tease: melodrama at the edge of vanishing, where everything solid melts into the air.
What finally puzzles me is why Verbinski, who’s nothing if not knowledgeable about his chosen medium–aesthetically, historically, etc–invariably makes such graceless, ungainly films (including that stodgy critics’ fave The Weather Man, which may be worst of all). But maybe I’ll get back to that in another rant …
