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If it's all the same to you, I think I'll have that drink
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handful_ofdust especially asked for this post, but then I kind of wrote it to her in e-mail. The rest of you get to benefit? I am on a train to D.C., staring intermittently out the windows at the salt marshes of Connecticut and curling stacks of shell-white cloud; this is a post about The Avengers (2012).I will admit freely that my primary stake going into this film was its handling of Loki. My favorite of the recent Marvel cycle remains Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), which I have still never written up (I am looking at the notes on my desktop right now), but Thor (2011) turned out to be a surprisingly close second, mostly for Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston who make far more convincing gods than anyone acting in this decade has a right to. Plus the latter is a figure that has fascinated me since childhood, that I care about almost more than any other commonly represented divinity; so I am glad to report that while I do prefer a more double-sided Loki for the same reasons that the trickster of Sleipnir's birth and Sif's hair interests me more than the Lucifer of Baldr's death and Ragnarök, Hiddleston still has a hold on the character in ways that keep me watching. That thin-skinned quality which so struck me in Thor is still present here, after his fall through Ginnungagap and whatever Lovecraftian outer regions the Chitauri in their cold, dark chain of moons inhabit (it looks at first like the icy spires of Jötunheim, but we are far beyond the Nine Worlds), even accelerated—those deep, shuddering breaths as he raises his head with the Tesseract's plasma-blue glow still smoking off him, a high-wire tension even in scenes like the benefit he crashes in Stuttgart, where he grandmasters the reminder of unspeakable things with a striding, stylish flair. Everything is always on the line, riding the collapsing waveform; at any second it could shatter.1 I loved that I could not tell how much he believes of those grand dystopian speeches about free will and subjugation, how much he is playing (for his audience, for himself) the role of interstellar megalomaniac. He is polymorphous perversity in action: while he's in the role, it's real.
And I am very glad that we are not asked to accept Loki as sympathetic for any more reasons than his own complicated self, which I realize sounds like faint praise or equivocation, but he's going to burn because that is the nature of fire and he's going to unleash forces he can't control because chaos is the state of the world and if he really believes that dominion over Earth will return him some of the pride-of-place that was lost to him with the kingship of Asgard, he must also know that it is not the same to rule over humans (ants quarreling with boots) as it is to see his family kneel and acknowledge him. In his last scene, I couldn't help noticing that even with archaic chains on his wrists and that clever mouth of his gagged silent,2 he's going home. (Was that the plan? He can't consent to come back himself; that would be admitting he wanted to. To be taken as a prisoner, though: then he can say he had no choice.) And like any trickster worth the name, he can be subject to the same sudden whims of the universe: the Hulk walloping him around like a ragdoll is both very funny and very fitting, especially the peculiar good humor with which Loki seems to accept his defeat after the initial what the fuck just happened ceiling-stare. There is perhaps no more classically English-wry line for a graceful loser than the title of this post and he delivers it beautifully, as if all the deaths and destruction, the waste of downtown Manhattan were no more than a game, a gamble that didn't pay off. That disarming honesty that is only as deep as he'll let you see. It's his expression as he watches Tony Stark and Captain America take on his brother in the woods of Germany, bashing the hell out of each other back and forth through the Black Forest. Lord, what fools these mortals be! He'd be eating popcorn if he had some. You'd ask him to pass it.
(It is not merely the appreciation an audience feels for a character it's impossible to admire; there is something genuinely attractive about him, even if he knows and uses it. And I love that it's not that Thor is so stupid that his brother can keep pulling one over on him, but that he is stubbornly loving enough to keep offering Loki the benefit of the doubt, knowing as he must each time that his predictably unpredictable sibling probably will shiv him, but he asks him to come home anyway.)
I didn't realize that my primary stake going out of the film would be Bruce Banner. As much as I thought I would miss Edward Norton and his twitchy energy, there is something about Mark Ruffalo's diffidence that works for me on a very basic level. Watch him aboard S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Helicarrier:3 he is a man trying not to be noticed. Everyone else is feeling out their territory, dick-measuringly in the case of Tony, more cautiously and formally when it's Steve, a roomful of circling cats; Banner is literally off in a corner by himself, because the less he interacts with anyone, the less he runs the risk of waking up that other part of himself that he refuses to name, that is really (in a justifiably iconic line) not so different from the rest of him after all. He's not graceful, when he's Banner. I had trouble telling how tall the actor was, because he rounds his shoulders in so unassumingly; he's mumblecore soft-spoken, with a nervous chafe to his hands when he doesn't have anything to do with them, and he wears his glasses like he needs them, not because they make him look like a scientist. (The solid purple shirt is a nice touch.) But I love that while he has a haggard look—rumpled, greying-early—he has sometimes a wry one as well; he exhibits a profound and frankly reasonable skepticism that Dr. Banner has been asked to the party for his skills with a spectrometer, not just because he ports "the other guy" around. He's not accustomed to being wanted for the talent he actually values, which is why moments like Tony's real, if snarkily expressed enthusiasm at finding someone else in this benighted operation who can converse at his tech level ("Finally, someone who speaks English!"—"Is that what just happened?") are so rewarding, because there really aren't that many people Bruce clicks with. And there is shame and self-loathing, as when he wakes up in Harry Dean Stanton's rubble like someone coming off the world's most block-leveling bender—see also how badly he reacts to Tony's suggestion that becoming the Hulk originally saved his life—and there is also a wonderful reckless joy, as when he wades into the fight in New York at last. He is never quite safe, which is as it should be. My mother's favorite moment was his floor-mopping of Loki, but I think he may be best characterized by the moment he punches Thor off the screen without even a warning blink, just because the thunder-god was there. I found myself thinking this was very much the sort of depth I'd wanted to see from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)'s Jekyll/Hyde, where the script wasn't quite up to it.
(I also didn't realize I would leave the theater wanting an entire film about Natasha Romanoff, but there you go. Her introduction is one of the nicest bits of misdirection in the film and I appreciated that having established her as a character whose deceptive fragility is a mirror of Loki's, the correct Chekhov's gun went off in the second act and she played it on him.)
The film overall is more of an action movie than I would have liked, despite the fact that I could write at least a paragraph for every character and in some cases go on for more; it is very well-done action in that I never felt I was seeing the same set-pieces played over and over again, but I wouldn't have minded more conversations and fewer chases, especially since The Avengers is easily my favorite script by Joss Whedon, possibly because his reflex for self-referentially clever dialogue does not here overwrite/undercut any of the emotional currents of the story. Tony Stark is a chronic wiseass, but Steve Rogers isn't. I still think it would have been more fun if Jane Foster had been the ensorcelled astrophysicist instead of Erik Selvig, but maybe Portman had other commitments that summer or her inclusion would have weighted the story too much toward a romance. (I did appreciate that Natasha never falls in love with any of her teammates, even if Bruce and Tony look like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Sometimes, you know, people don't.) It is a point in Coulson's favor that he knew he was being fridged, but I was more than half expecting to find that Fury had exaggerated reports of his death in the same way he faked the blood on the trading cards. I don't know if it really was worth waiting through the infinite number of fx credits for, but the shawarma scene is cute. (Mostly because it's clear that everyone is just too tired to eat, but dammit, they said they were going to meet up.) I was not expecting the Chitauri invasion force—like bony Devonian fishes, diving with the terrible grace of titans through the canyons of Manhattan—to look almost exactly like scenes I dreamed about five and three years ago, including the one that crashes dying on the apartment roof.
I don't know what the next film is supposed to be, but I suspect I'll go see it.
1. Please send help: I just pictured Tom Hiddleston as chaos theorist Loki in a lab coat. There goes my higher brain function for the afternoon.
2. By which visual reference I realized there were ways in which the entire film functions as a retelling of Loki's bet with the dwarves Brokkr and Eitri: out of which good things come (like a team of superheroes who are a lot less fucked up when working together than they are as individual operators), but the need for the bargain in the first place was still a deeply sketchy act on Loki's part; and he loses, betting his head against theirs. His mouth is sewn shut to remind him.
3. It is not the scriptwriters' fault that I am constitutionally incapable of not thinking of it as a Motherfucking Aircraft Carrier.
And now we are in Philadelphia, because the internet on trains is not always the most compliant. But it's a post. Now I can go back to reading.
no subject
He's a beautiful Loki. And the actor was a Cambridge double first in Classics, so I can feel slightly proprietary toward him.
and I want to watch the film just for him and Thor.
I linked my review of it; I liked it so much more than I was expecting to. I don't say that just because it didn't cause me to bleed from the ears.
no subject
This is exactly what happened with me and Captain America! I gritted my teeth throughout most of Iron Man (as I knew I would, which is why I didn't watch it until last November at the coaxing of my Glaswegian who agreed to my stipulation that he listen to me vent my spleen about the inevitable racism), and then Captain America was available on the flight home, and I thought what the hey, I am expecting absolutely nothing from this film and don't want to pay to see it, why not, and I really, really liked it. And teared up when Rogers threw himself on the grenade. I just. I love him so much.
I will read your review of Thor once I've seen it, which I hope will be soon!
no subject
OK. Now I want him and Tim Blake Nelson to do something together. No idea what, just... something.