End of Violence, The
Review: Director Wim Wenders was a central figure in German New Wave cinema since the 1970s. Invited to Hollywood by Francis Ford Coppola to make Hammett, he stayed to make the haunting Paris, Texas. Disillusioned with America, Wenders returned to Germany. However, a decade later, Wenders journeyed again to America for one movie: The End of Violence. An assessment of American life’s seamless blending into popular culture, The End of Violence is a self-referential film about film-making and surveillance: the need to capture every fragment of detail in order to reconstruct the truth – a theme examined by director Michelangelo Antonioni in the classic Blow Out. However, Wenders also chooses allusion to classic American tough-guy cinema in the casting of cult director Sam Fuller in a small role, a hard-boiled type voice over and is here re-united with guitarist Ry Cooder, who scored Paris, Texas a decade earlier. In The End of Violence, Bill Pullman plays a Hollywood action film producer on the outs with his wife, who uncovers information about a satellite navigation system. After an attempt on his life, he goes into hiding, his actions pieced together by a surveillance expert (Gabriel Byrne). Soon Pullman starts to investigate matters on his own, in tandem with the attempt to track him down. The film producer and the surveillance expert are repeatedly paralleled, with Byrne’s voyeur distantly recalling Gene Hackman’s bugging expert in Coppola’s The Conversation though Byrne obsessively watches people’s private moments and criminal encounters through the multitude of police cameras throughout the city of Los Angeles, where The End of Violence is set. "The plot may be that of a thriller, but the material is played as character drama" There is a sly sense of comedy to some of the film, especially in the characterization of Pullman’s abductors. But just when the mood seems secure, director Wenders introduces a note that disrupts it: the self-conscious evocation of construction and performance in a manner which recalls some of the games played by director Robert Altman in The Player; though Wenders is slow and ponderous in comparison to Altman’s open-framed, overlapping lives and textures. Indeed, despite moments of human warmth and surprising tenderness in The End of Violence, it is slowly paced, as are many Wenders films. The plot may be that of a thriller, but the material is played as character drama – the situation is a necessary hook on which to hang several offbeat characters in what is a quirky mood piece. Ultimately, the tonal uncertainty here prevents the film from engaging, though its note of abstraction on one man’s emotional catharsis as a result of an unexpected brush with violent death offers the semblance of thematic continuity. Clever but disconcerting mood changes aside, The End of Violence is a film of moments in which plot is decidedly secondary: in that it brings a European art-house quality to American film. Contemplative rumination seems to be Wenders’ concern in The End of Violence: the two main characters come to terms with their own private form of humanism respective to their involvement in the almost irrelevant narrative, and what Wenders considers a questionable morality but favours human behaviour and observation over any real social criticism, although there is a motif made of violence in American popular culture.
|
          |
