Why This Is Hell

Another example of hyperlink cinema which has the ensemble cast but lacks the international locations (even the Mexican setting is knowingly and openly faked). It’s also a point when you think, hyperlink cinema is Robert Altman without the mastery of the material and using subtitles. We are here closer to intertitles than subtitles.

Twenty years ago Mamie (Lisa Kudrow, but then played by Hallee Hirsh) seduces her gay stepbrother Charley (Steve Coogan, then played by Eric Jungmann) and becomes pregnant. She secretly puts the child up for adoption – and in the present she is then blackmailed by aspiring film maker Nicky (Jesse Bradford) into making a documentary. She thinks that she can manipulate him by offering to make a film about her lover Javier (Bobby Cannavale) as masseur and supposed sex worker. Meanwhile Charley, running a restaurant (into the ground) is convinced that his lesbian best friends have secret user his partners sperm to conceive their child and wants to expose them. Charley has a secret admirer, the closeted Otis McKee (John Ritter), who is seduced by the new singer in his band, Jude (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who then goes on to seduce Otis’s widowed father, Frank (Tom Arnold).

Again, the threads are tied together, and not just through Charley and Otis, although the chronology will fall apart if looked at too closely. But there is a deftness of touch here, in the subtle mirroring of one pregnancy with another, one seduction with another, one attempt at parenthood with another. Great play is made of mirrors and the video footage of the documentary the characters make – which is also called Happy Endings.

Tom Arnold is better than I’d expect from previous outings, and quietly steals his scenes. Lisa Kudrow is a smarter actor than her Friends persona would suggest – whereas I’d made it a rule to avoid romcoms with Friends alumni, Kudrow is the exception as I realised with Roos’s The Opposite of Sex. The film is (almost) all about her and her lack of self-awareness and her failure to get other people. Gyllenhaal – as her thematic twin, again unaware of consequences to actions – continues to impress, and should be winning Oscars one day: her character remains likeable despite her manipulation, she’s always constantly on the move, thinking, eating, emoting. The one weak link is the lazy depiction of the lesbian couple, which is right out of (either version of) Queer as Folk.

Finally, the intertitles. Used sparingly but with apt affect, these offer information on the characters, a commentary on the action or a notification of what is going to happen. It’s a novelistic technique, but brings a refreshing sense of irony to a tight rope walk over the abyss of soapdom. I think it’s this that fits it in the camp of hyperlink cinema.

Oh, and a smattering of stand out, quotable, lines.

Mamie: I'm not pro-life, though.
Jude: Who is, once you start to pay attention?



But maybe I want linear again.

One of the films I enjoyed in Melbourne in 2001 was Amores Perros - which translates into something like "Life's a Bitch" or "Love's a Bitch". Somewhat like Pulp Fiction and Go it eschewed linear order in favour of telling several interlocking stories. A cameo in one story is the protagonist in another and so on.

This film, English language rather than Mexican-Spanish, is more ensemble, but, rather like Soderbergh's The Limey gives the impression that the editor dropped all the cans of film and lost the correct order for them. The question is whether it's worth the attention you then need to give it. He's no Tarkovsky.

Benicio Del Toro is driving home when he runs over Danny Huston whose heart goes to a sick Sean Penn who decides he wants to find Naomi Watts the widow of Huston who wants revenge on Del Toro whilst Clea DuVall auditions for Carnivale. Del Toro's Jack is a Judas figure, the betrayer, whose fall is necessary for Penn's Paul to be raised from the dead - although he like Christ presumably doesn't have long for this world.

It's very bleak, and any redemption in the form of love or sex is at a cost. It's Hollywood Arthouse, really. Would we care less if it were told in linear order. Sure not I'm.

Edit: Apparently it's an example of hyperlink cinema:

"The genre was generally identified as such in 2005 with Syriana, though its development can be traced back to the beginning of cinema, starting from 1975." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink_cinema

Does cinema really go back as far as 1975? I mean, that's pre Star Wars.