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Review: "The End of Violence" is just a jumble
September 16, 1997
Web posted at: 8:57 p.m. EDT (0057 GMT)By Reviewer Paul Tatara
As I was entering the theater to watch Wim Wenders' new movie, "The End of Violence," two old ladies who had just seen it passed me on their way out and wished me good luck. When I asked them what they meant, one of them said, "I may be old, but I'm not slippin' that bad! It's just a jumble."
Well, I was warned. "The End of Violence" (starring Bill "Mr. Squinty" Pullman, Gabriel Byrne, and Andie MacDowell) is a tedious, confusing movie that deals with the dehumanizing effects of technological paranoia. The slow-paced density should come as no great surprise, however. Wenders has been periodically dishing this stuff out like a brooding lunchroom lady for the past decade. Even the casual viewer (who may or may not be slipping) should be able to call his bluff by now.
Some history is necessary to understand what would drive a person to make a movie like this. Wenders is an ambitious German director who had already made 14 films before he was discovered by the American pierced-bellybutton crowd upon the release of "Wings of Desire" back in 1988. Out of nowhere, a filmmaker who had previously been capable of making an obscure thought cinematically-evocative without sending up flares to announce his own brilliance was pronounced a genius. Sprawling spread-eagle in existentialism while shooting in black & white did the trick. "This must be art," the hipsters said as they puffed on their herbal cigarettes.
Suddenly, everybody was clamoring to toil with the Great Man. This lead to ever more nonsensical work, with "Faraway, So Close!" (the titular exclamation point is probably due to the cameos by Lou Reed and Mikhail Gorbachev) and "Until the End of the World," a movie that is very much in the same vein as "The End of Violence". Upon first glance, these latter movies seem highly challenging, but they're really just pseudo-science fiction noodlings that allow Wenders to film whatever he wants to film without having to worry about the chains of clarity that hold down more conventionally fathomable directors.
This rather selfish sense of freedom makes "The End of Violence" nearly unbearable. It's also dull-dull-dull. After a while I was reminded of that bizarre David Lynch vibe, the one where you feel like you're watching someone dance the twist while their batteries are running down to nothing. I'll tell you the plot, but I don't want to imply that the story is composed of interconnected events, at least not the kind that lead to something as quaint as an ending.
Pullman plays Mike Max, a rich Hollywood film producer with a luxurious seaside house and a slinky California-style wife (Andie MacDowell, who is surprisingly lifeless, but beautiful as usual.) Mike is infatuated with technology. For the first several minutes of the film, we see him communicating with people on the phone and via his video-ready computer, but never face-to-face. MacDowell even announces that she's leaving him over the telephone, while standing about thirty feet away from him inside their house. (Oh, I get it! People just can't connect because of all this darn technology!)
One day, Mike unexpectedly finds a highly confidential FBI memo in his e-mail. Later, he gets car jacked and ends up blowing the heads off of the two numskull would-be car thieves. You would think that these two events are unrelated, but maybe they are and maybe they aren't. Either way, Wenders sure isn't going to tell us. Quite surprisingly, Mike doesn't run to the cops. Instead, he disguises himself as a Mexican gardener and spends a couple of months working on some of the fancier lawns in the greater Los Angeles area.
Don't ask me.
Meanwhile, back at a top-secret government spy facility, Gabriel Byrne is using satellites and hidden video cameras to ogle the citizens of southern California as they shoot and rob each other. He thinks his satellite caught what happened between Mike and the car thieves, but he can't seem to get a clear enough image to determine the whole story. Just like the audience. Then, for the next hour or so, everyone says obscure things while staring into the middle-distance, there's some avant-garde poetry, and I ate a box of chocolate-covered raisins.
I wish I could say that interesting performances save this one, but that would be asking for way too much. Wenders seems to have somehow coaxed his actors into revealing their inner tree stumps. Everyone is practically inert, and the dialogue is delivered in a paralyzed monotone. All of the leads have done decent work in the past, so I'll chalk this one up to Wim's' whim. I don't know what conclusion I was supposed to draw from all of this, but the one I came up with is that somebody out there needs to make a good cowboy movie.
"The End of Violence" has some slight sex, quick nudity, and a little bit of profanity. I can make no guarantee as to what the audience members will be muttering. Rated R. 122 minutes.
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