Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Akira Kurosawa's "Ran" remains a bloody and spectacular depiction of doomsday karma -- and the trickle-down theory of anarchy.
Sep 21, 2000 | For people who grow up loving movies, returning to the work of favorite actors or directors can be as jarring and illuminating as blowing the dust off a family photo album. Even if our judgments about films are identical the second time around, our emotional reactions, if we've grown at all, change or deepen. Rediscovery becomes self-discovery, and the sparkle on the screen casts a mysterious tunneling light.
Two wildly different reissues have snared me in that mesmeric spell. Recently rewatching "Ran," Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, I was struck by an echo of David Lynch's marvelous "The Straight Story." The aging hero of Lynch's film illustrates the strength of family with sticks: You can break a single stick, he says, but you can never break a bundle. The tragic hero of Kurosawa's movie says the same thing about arrows -- but his youngest son manages to snap a bundle on his knee. I always admired "Ran." This time I loved it. That's partly because of Kurosawa's refusal in his old age to soften his worldview or his storytelling. What came off as virtuosic in 1985 now also seems valiant.
On a less grand level, I also got more out of seeing Monte Hellman's cult film "Two-Lane Blacktop" last week than I did nearly 30 years ago. Seeing it in 1971, hyped with an awful quote from Esquire calling it "the movie of the year," I thought it was both spare and overblown. Now the wispy and elusive premise -- a cross-country car race that peters out -- registers as a marvelous showcase for a character actor whose earthy volatility I grew to revere: late, great Warren Oates.
"Ran," of course, has always been a hair-raising epic. In the new print touring the country (next stop: San Francisco) it doesn't merely pop your eyes, it also makes you feel clearheaded. With a 160-minute running time that gradually accelerates into a gallop, "Ran" has the imaginative force to air out your brains and revivify your senses -- to make you more attentive to life as well as movies. Not just an electric Japanese interpretation of "King Lear," it infuses Shakespeare's tragedy with black-comic elements derived from "Macbeth" and a mystic fervor all Kurosawa's own. "Ran" sums up the sensei's action-film profundity in its ultimate phase.
"Ran" is one of the last big-screen extravaganzas to depict vast and terrifying Nature and the thrill and awfulness of cataclysmic battle without overreliance on special effects. Like the great silent filmmakers, Kurosawa waited for just the right thunderheads to unsettle us with a vision of a mute, ambiguous universe. He also took advantage of every chance to bend natural elements to his creative will -- so that, say, dewy mists around Mount Fuji gave the aftermath of battle a pale, spectral glow. Like a great choreographer-general, he had enough mastery of mass movement to make a flutter of ensigns on a distant hill send a chill charging up your spine. Of course, his inspiration comes from his subject: a man's confrontation with his destiny.
Kurosawa's Lear is a 16th century warlord who has three sons (not three daughters) and a career studded with conquests. Kurosawa's genius is to tell his story so that every step suggests how wild and savage a journey it has been. At the start, this bold, dominating figure, now called Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), is a sacred monster who wants to be a sort of warlord emeritus. He hopes to bequeath power to his oldest son while retaining his own entourage and emblems of command. He hasn't reckoned with the ambition of his successor or the manipulative skill of his heir's wife, who goes for the sexual and political jugular of anyone who invades her sphere.
Kurosawa has a trickle-down theory of anarchy. ("Ran" has been translated as "chaos.") Kurosawa's monarch, like the Bard's, overburdens the bonds of family when he places his security on the shoulders of unsuitable and unready offspring. Hidetora's wishful thinking blinds him to the honesty of his third and youngest son, whom he banishes for bad-mouthing his scheme.
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