COLORS ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Dennis Hopper Written by Michael Schiffer and Richard Dilello With Sean Penn, Robert Duvall, Maria Conchita Alonso, Randy Brooks, Grand Bush, Don Cheadle, Glenn Plummer, and Rudy Ramos.
Which of these films is regarded as absolutely essential to this country, containing vital information that can’t be found elsewhere as well as artistic integrity, imagination, originality, intelligence, vitality, and serious social meaning? And which, on the other hand, is regarded as marginal and inconsequential, unworthy of extended treatment or even mention in most cases on TV and in glossy magazines–a trivial pursuit, in short, for trivial people? Two guesses.
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As other reviewers have noted, Colors is a collection of loose pieces that only occasionally fit together. Nothing builds dramatically, and none of the characters can be said to grow in meaning or impact. As a look at two drug-dealing gangs in Los Angeles and the efforts of the local police in holding them at bay, the movie sustains a fairly lively surface with its steady stream of rap songs and jivey percussion on the sound track (score by Herbie Hancock), its car chases and periodic bursts of violence, its authentic-sounding lingo (such as the obsessive use of “Homes,” a nickname among gang members), its omnipresent graffiti, and its conspicuously “busy” performances from the two leads, Robert Duvall and Sean Penn, as a relatively peaceful older cop partnered with a sadistic younger cop. But what is it about, and what does it have to say?
The script is terrible. Apparently Hopper had an uncredited hand in revising it, but it doesn’t show. As a typical example of how the movie thinks and operates, the first extended car chase, through various back alleys in East LA–very effectively shot by Haskell Wexler–has two police cars chasing after two cars full of gang members who’ve just attacked the funeral of a rival gang member with a blaze of bullets. Both of the gang cars topple and crash in a playground, and the police car containing Hodges and McGavin flips over. As they’re hanging upside down in their car, Hodges says to McGavin, “My wife says she wants to meet you. She says you can bring a date”–and the scene abruptly shifts to McGavin with a date visiting Hodges and his family. Who got killed in the last scene, and who got caught? The movie doesn’t care, and, thanks to such indifference, neither do we.
As it turns out, it is nothing of the sort–except for being an allegory, which is probably what scared me and my American reflexes off the most; we all know from the ways we were taught this in school that allegories are instruments of pain, not pleasure. What this prejudice misses, however, is the movie’s playful and fanciful side, which led one critic to call it “socialist surrealism.” As Abuladze pointed out in an interview last year, “Much of Repentance–not a shot or a phrase–consists of images I have seen in my dreams. I am certain that it was through dreams that my unconscious forced the story to the surface so that I would film it.”
Despite some of the gloomy details, a lot of this is played for laughs, and some of it’s very funny indeed. The mayor himself–a figure out of comic opera who periodically sings arias to whoever’s around–is a kind of cartoon composite of four dictators, sporting Hitler’s mustache, Mussolini’s black shirt and suspenders, Stalin’s boots and dark eyes, and Beria’s pince-nez. He typically starts off his speeches reasonably enough, only to descend gradually to maniacal rages and gibberish (“Four out of every three people are our enemies!”). His “refusal” to remain buried at the beginning and end may have a simple allegorical meaning, but that doesn’t prevent Abuladze from spinning some of this out as rather hilarious slapstick.
An exclusive diet of realism as a medium for serious art and/or social discourse is part of the problem. (Could this be why the French took Poe and Faulkner seriously long before we did, and catch the social meanings in Jerry Lewis movies that most Americans are blind to?) After rightly declaring for decades how utterly boring Soviet socialist realism is, why can’t we come up with something more interesting that’s socially useful ourselves? Why, for every truthful scene or detail in a Platoon or a Wall Street, do we have to put up with yards of childish comic-book rhetoric? Why is Broadcast News serious only when it deals with newscasters, and helpless when it has to deal with the news? Or is all that we can even hope to get from “serious” movies some form of noncommittal journalism, carefully calculated to change precisely nothing?
