Metcalf's DVD Screening Room: May 31, 2008

Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" and "Sweeney Todd."

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007)

I grew up in St. Louis. I used to go, with the Boy Scouts and with my dad and my brothers, to Merrimac Caverns. I grew up hearing all the stories about Jesse James and the James Gang. Legend has it he used Merrimac Cave as a hideout. In fact, he hid in many of the caves in Missouri when he was running from the law, as he often was.

Missouri happens to have more caves than any other state in the Union, or the Confederacy for that matter. I was in one near Hannibal just last March that has his name and a date in 1879 scratched into the ceiling. This early graffiti has been authenticated. It's the same cave where Tom Sawyer took Becky Thatcher when he was hoping for maybe one more kiss, but Injun Joe interrupted them.

Jesse James was kind of a hero to me when I was playing cowboys and Indians all over the neighborhood. I usually liked being the Indians or the outlaws. The romance was always on the side of the outlaws. That's the nature of American popular literature. We all love the bad boys. Boys and girls alike, men and women, we are attracted by the danger. The rush feels good and a little brush with the rush is a nice way to make a memory.

So with all this prior connection with Jesse James, it's a little hard for me to like a movie that celebrates the "dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard, and laid poor Jesse in his grave."

Mr. Howard was the name Jesse James used when he was living at home with his wife and kids and not out robbing the rich and giving to the poor. I relate all of this because I am aware that most people don't have the fascination with the man that I do. Anyway, this movie with the really long title is more about Bob Ford than it is about my beloved Jesse James. Casey Affleck plays Ford and he is perfect as the sniveling little weakling who ingratiated himself into Jesse's life and his gang near the end of a long career.

Subsequently, his feelings having been hurt because Jesse didn't accept him as an equal but treated him as the cloying, sybaritic fan that he was. Ford shot him in the back after eating a home cooked meal prepared by Jesse's loving wife, Kate. Do you sense a little bias on my part? Yeah, I know. I told you, I grew up thinking Jesse James was a hero, the same hero that everyone in the 1860s and ‘70s thought he was.

Brad Pitt plays James. And even though Jesse was actually kind of a small, weaseley man, it's right to have a movie star play him because Jesse was like a movie star or rock star in his day. Pitt is really very good. He plays Jesse as obviously quite mad -- paranoid, delusional, completely aware of his status as a rock star but plagued by guilt and shame about it too, autocratic and ruthless, but a good and loving father.

It is a complicated characterization and even though at one point in my life I thought Jesse James walked on water, I understand that I may be a bit delusional myself and I applaud Pitt's work. It is detailed and fully realized, quite smart and thoughtful. The difficulty is that he does not invite you in. But then the man, Jesse James, probably did not invite you in. I don't think he had that kind of charm. Pitt does.

You can see it in other things when he is playing a different kind of movie star, like "Ocean's 47," or whatever it was. But in this he plays away from that. He is frightening in his madness and terminally sad with the loneliness of a man who is so feared he is avoided and who is nearing the end of a long and complicated career outside the law and knows he is no longer in complete control.

Despite two very good performances, I think the film fails. You have to give a director credit when he gets out of the way of an actor and lets him or her do their work, when he provides a frame with in which they can work.

But this director, Andrew Dominik, is too in love with his camera and his pictures. They are beautiful pictures, but they don't bring anything to the story except landscape. Still pictures that don't move become static after awhile and bring nothing to the story. Men in a landscape can be interesting but not for two-plus hours, even when the actors are doing such good work. If we just see them riding along in a snowstorm, no matter how good looking it might be, it's just a picture and it doesn't propel us forward.

I definitely suggest watching it, even though it takes some of the air out of the hero Jesse James mythology, but be prepared to nod off a little once in awhile.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (2007)

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Blood flows, it spurts, it splashes across the floor. Innocent men, sitting comfortably in the chair for a shave, their heads lolling back, throats exposed and vulnerable, a sweet melody, violins and slash, the blood sprays all down their clean white shirts.

The worst part, the funniest, most painful part is when Sweeney pulls the lever and the chair drops them, head first, three floors down in to the basement. They pile drive into the floor like so much laundry down the chute. And then it's into the oven and on into Mrs. Lovett's meat pies to feed the bourgeois of London. The great middle class consuming it's own with such joy, such pleasure. And all the while, Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett sing a sweet love song of hatred and revenge.

I saw it in New York when it opened on Broadway with Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou. Both have big, big Broadway voices. They seemed to complete for the center of the stage. I didn't see Patti Lupone do it a year or so ago, but I know Patti and her voice is maybe the biggest ever, and dark, and menacing. She likes to stand alone at the center of the stage.

Helena Bonham Carter does not have a big voice. Nor does she have a big bold presence. She's quiet. She stands behind and a little to the side of her man. But she is honest and truthful, and subtle, and she draws you in, seduces you with what seems like vulnerability, and then you find there's steel underneath, and the steel is pointed at your heart.

It is a performance that works on screen. When the movie opened it seemed amazing that Johnny Depp had done his own singing. And there was a lot of publicity about it and how Steven Sondheim, who wrote the musical, had applauded his performance. What else was he going to do? Depp doesn't necessarily sing it well. He doesn't sing it badly, but it's not about his voice. But he certainly acts it. He is a wonderful French clown of an actor, with a deep sadness and dignity about him always. A little arch, a little fey, as we say. Always the actor.

We see the dancer and the dance, as the poet W. B. Yeats would say. And it's a beautiful, elegant dance. The little duet that he and Snape, no, I mean Alan Rickman, do when Sweeney first has the object of his revenge in his chair, is so painfully elongated, stretched as taut as it can be, until you beg for the blood to flow, for it to be over. It feels as though the blade is passing over your own skin, tattooing graceful curves in blood, always beautiful, with the scream of pain held back until it explodes.

The blood flows. It spurts. It splashes across the floor. It's a musical. And even though the body count approaches one of those old Arnold Govenator movies, it's fun and funny.