Animal Factory (2000)

ON THE INSIDE THE RULES ARE BRUTAL AND THE STAKES ARE HIGH

If there’s one place that I don’t know about, it’s prison. And if there’s one place that Eddie Bunker does know about, it’s prison. Bunker used to be a criminal, a seriously bad egg convicted of vandalism, armed robbery, numerous assaults, including jamming a fork in another boy’s eye at age 15 and stabbing a prison guard at 17. He was, for a while, the youngest inmate in the California penal system. However, on the inside, he became a novelist, writing No Beast So Fierce (about armed robbery) and Animal Factory (about life in prison). He also became friends with people in the business, including James Ellroy, Michael Mann and Danny Trejo. He’s also appeared in many films, most notably as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs. As can be expected, some of his books, those mentioned above, were eventually turned into films.

Ron (Edward Furlong) is privileged young man, sentenced to a stretch in prison on marijuana charges. On the inside, he is taken under the wing of 18-year prison veteran, Earl Copen (Willem Dafoe). As Ron serves his time, he becomes part of Earl’s gang, so Earl can keep him out of trouble. However, with prison being the place that it is, filled with violence, drugs and the constant threat of assault, it might not take long before Ron succumbs to his environment.

I’ve actually got the novel for Animal Factory, although I’ve never got round to reading it. No real reason as to why, I’ve just been busy reading other things. I will say, though, that if the novel is anything like the script for Animal Factory, which Bunker co-wrote with John Steppling, a sporadic writer of crime films and TV, then I hold out less hope for the book than when I first acquired it. The script is quite poor. Although it is filled with some nice details of prison life that could only have come from someone with firsthand experience, the script that it produced is remarkably clumsy. The major problem is that Bunker and Steppling seem to have confused gritty brutality with a lack of subtlety. Often characters, particularly Ron, say what’s on their minds in an awkward attempt to convey information. You can understand the necessity for it, of course. The prison system is a complex thing, and the rules of conduct are as important as the rules of basic survival. Like Ron, we are a stranger to these walls, so we need someone to tell us what’s happening, who’s who, how to behave if you want to stay alive and… well, intact. Ron isn’t alone in this. Some of Earl’s conversations have the distinct air of mere exposition and explanation, so the feeling of being spoon-fed is hard to ignore. There are also quite a few plot holes, such as Ron’s father’s attempts to get him out and the film’s open-ended and weak denouement.

Some of our principle characters are rather poorly drawn, too. Ron’s relationship with Earl is meant to be something akin to a father-son dynamic, but neither character is sufficiently built to explain the reason for this. The only scene we have to think that there may be a problem between Ron and his real father, played by John Heard, is that his dad missed Ron’s court date, so he got sentenced on his own. However, every other time we see him, Ron’s father is attentive and loving and incredibly self-sacrificing. It’s also never properly determined why Earl would care one bit about Ron. Does he remind of him of himself when he was young? Does Earl have a son that won’t speak to him, and so Ron becomes a surrogate? Is he doing someone other than Ron a favour? It’s never really addressed in a way that offers a satisfactory explanation for his actions. Given that this is the central relationship of the film on which the film rests, it’s just not good enough to warrant any kind of investment from the viewer.

Sadly, the direction does little to rectify this situation, which is a real shame because it’s directed by Steve Buscemi. There is just no atmosphere to this prison. Given the title of the film and its very clear thesis (that prison is a place for breeding criminals, not rehabilitating them), there should be a palpable air of threat behind these bars. Scenes of violence seem to have such a distance to them, even when they involve our main protagonist. And everything just seems so blocky. There’s no sense of nuance or delicacy to the visuals. Just because we’re in a harsh place, doesn’t mean the images have to be so rudimentary. The environment isn’t even that harsh. One of the major obstacles to this lack of atmosphere is the cinematography from Phil Parmet, and the general lack of grit on everything. The lighting is so pleasant that the surroundings actually look quite comfortable. Hell, say what you want about Prison Break, at least that place looked grim and the characters were defined and somewhat threatening.

One of the more frustrating things about the film are the occasional hints at something interesting, a story that may be worth picking up on, or a character that clearly has some depth just waiting to be explored, but they never get picked up. At best, it’s a glimpse and a single line of dialogue and then we move on. For example, near the beginning of the film, Ron briefly talks to a black kid, another young man going to the same prison for the first time. They occasionally spot each other as they serve their sentence, but there’s one instance where we see the different positions they find themselves in. Passing each other in the hallway, it’s clear that the other young man has had to become the property of a much larger prisoner for protection; he’s become a “punk”. Thanks to Earl, Ron has not been broken down by the place in the same way, so he’s remained free of violation. This opens up an interesting notion, whereby we could much better see the kind of toll prison takes on a young man new to the system, compared to the relatively easy road Ron has. However, we so rarely see this other kid, and when we do he’s actually in decent shape, so the whole point is rather moot.

There are some things that are good. John Lurie’s music has an interesting edge to it, a bluesy feel streaked by metallic grindings that offset the surroundings better than the lighting or direction. There’s also a surprising and welcome cameo from Antony Hegarty, from Antony and the Johnsons, as a prisoner singing for other inmates at a performance night. The performances are okay for the most part, many trying their best to cope with such poor character development, Furlong and Dafoe included. Two performances stand out, however, as being the closest thing to having actual depth or presence, something tangible. Typically, they are both bit parts. The first is Mickey Rourke’s Jan, an effeminate transvestite prisoner who has taken to modelling himself after Liza Minelli, albeit a very butch Liza Minelli. Ron’s original cellmate, Jan talks incessantly, and very amusingly, about what he wants to do when he gets out, where he’ll go and how hard he finds it being so pretty in such a nasty place. It becomes clear that he is very lonely, and needs a sympathetic ear to listen to him because he feels so alone. It’s simply from how well Rourke plays Jan that we get a sense of the character’s place in prison and the world. It’s also absolutely typical that we never see or hear about him again after Ron is moved to another cell. He's just abandoned. The other good show comes from Tom Arnold, who plays Buck Rowan, a regular of the prison system, new to these parts and a thoroughly nasty individual. Arnold is a big, imposing guy, so Buck is actually the only person in this whole prison who makes any kind of impression as a threat, and Arnold does it with little more than a hard stare. Every time he’s onscreen, he’s very menacing, making no secret of his desire to rape Ron, despite his supposed protection. Once again, the film dispatches Buck quickly and, though we hear about him afterwards, it’s a very unsatisfying conclusion and leaves the film feeling hollow once again.

Animal Factory should really be much better than it is, but it simply isn’t. The script is weak, the direction is short-sighted, the cinematography is wholly inappropriate and most of the actors spend their time trying make up for the weakness in the writing. Plus, in this film, prison just seems so inconsequential. There’s no real feeling of lasting threat, from guards or other prisoners, or that this is the kind of place that can change a person forever. This isn’t an animal factory… it’s a Build-A-Bear Workshop.

American History X (1998)

VIOLENCE AS A WAY OF LIFE

Racism… feel the eerie chill that runs through the room when the subject is brought up. It’s an old issue, but still holds all of the power to antagonise and divide today. Some people believe it’s a simple issue of perception; others believe it to be one of, if not The most complex and thorny subject in society. It’s a heavy topic and, in the tradition of the artist’s need to explore the many problems of society, it has been the focus of so many works, from novels to films to music to painting to sculpture… like I say, it’s a big one. In 1998, another film was released to explore this subject: American History X.

A brutal skinhead named Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) is tried and sent to prison for the murder of two black men who tried to steal his truck. When he gets paroled three years later, Derek emerges reformed, but finds that his younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong), who grew up idolising his brother, is following him down the same path. Derek resolves to save his brother from the same fate.

American History X had something of a tortured birth. It was the first script from writer David McKenna and the first film for director Tony Kaye. The story has a good central conceit and Kaye certainly seemed to have an idea of, at least, how he wanted to the film to look. The problem came much later on, during the editing process. Kaye, who was editing the film himself, was taking a while to finish. New Line Cinema, who were behind the film, didn’t like his version and made several suggestions as to what they wanted from the final cut. Kaye begrudgingly then came up with a second, much shorter version of the film. New Line apparently rejected it right away and took the task of editing away from Kaye, bringing in editors Jerry Greenberg and Alan Heim (who got final credit) and Edward Norton to come up with a new version for release. Angry at this decision, Tony Kaye disowned the film and tried to have his name taken off of the project. However, because he openly spoke about his reasons for doing so in Variety, he violated the rules of the Director’s Guild of America and was not allowed to remove his name. Kaye then sued both the DGA and New Line for violation of his right to free speech. Pretty messed up, isn’t it?

I suspect the reason that Kaye was taking so long to come up with his best edit of the film was because he saw a problem with it that he was trying his best to cover, which pretty much seems to exist at the scripting stage. In the chronology presented by the film, Derek starts off as a teenager in high school, intelligent but naïve. We see that the beginnings of his hatred, or at least mistrust, of people of other races rests with what his dad taught him at the dinner table. Derek’s father was clearly a big part of his life, as he alludes to how important he was to him. However, we really only have this one scene to show what the father is like and how that inevitably leads to Derek becoming the skinhead we meet at the film’s opening. It does make a kind of sense, but it still seems like quite a leap, especially since this is the only time we see the father. We already know that he was killed when he was shot trying to put out a fire in black neighbourhood, which Derek immediately takes as being clear evidence that black people have no respect for law, property or life. A couple more scenes would perhaps have helped sell this trajectory more, but as it is, it’s a lot to hang on a single scene.

Also, there is a constant shift in narrative perspective, though this is made easier to handle due to Kaye’s decision to film past events in black and white and present events in colour. Most of the film is told in flashback, narrated by Danny as he tries to write a paper on his brother. He recounts the big moments that he was present for in Derek’s growth into the skinhead leader, which serve for some powerful scenes. However, because all we can see of the past is what Danny saw, we don’t get answers for some questions that would have been very interesting. For example, how did Derek fall in with Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach), the man who fed him the white supremacist stuff, to begin with? This is a hugely significant moment of Derek’s life and incredibly important to our understanding of his development, but since Danny was not privy to this, neither are we. It just happens. Even then, there are some slight holes in this point of narration, such as his mother talking to Murray outside their home. Then we have the moments of the present, which are free of narrative constriction, so we can go where we want, follow whomever we want. Under these conditions, we split our time mainly between Derek and Danny, with the occasional deviation into glimpses of other characters. Then there is a second, more extended flashback sequence from Derek, telling Danny about his time in prison. So, within the film, there are three shifts in perspective. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does leave the whole feeling a bit disjointed.

Ultimately, the problem with the script is that it tries to do too much. It wants to open a debate on racial politics, it wants to meditate on the nature of hatred, it wants to show the brutal actions and the more brutal consequences of these characters, it wants to scare, it wants to educate, it wants to offer a small glimmer of hope… the script simply can’t do all of these things in a concise and erudite manner. As I said, I think that’s what Tony Kaye was trying to compensate for in the editing suite. He saw that some scenes were not really carrying the full impact that they should have, and tried to work around it. Not that the edit we see is without problems. Often, characters are ignored when you really feel they would have had something to say. For example, there’s the scene where the Vinyard family are at the dinner table and Derek’s father is telling him not to swallow all of the “affirmative black-tion bullshit”. This scene seems to exist only for Derek and his father… but the rest of the family are present. Don’t they have any thoughts on this? We know Davina, Derek’s sister, would disagree, but she stays silent. There isn’t even a shot of her during all this. Why? Again, this seems like the kind of thing that results from a script that hasn’t been properly conceived and a direction that hasn’t been properly focused. Saying that, there is report that part of Norton’s input in the editing process was to give himself more screen time, which could also explain such a problem.

So, yes, I do think that there some problems with the film on a basic level of conception, but this is all stuff that speaks to, for lack of a better way of putting it, my filmic intellect. If I ignore the problems of narrative or plot, what does the film do on an emotional level? It’s a very emotive subject, so it would be foolish to ignore the impact that emotion has. I find the film very disquieting and unsettling, but I say that in a good way. The film may seem more like a string of scenes on some occasions, but these scenes do have power to them. This is pretty much thanks to some excellent performances onscreen. Edward Furlong often gets relegated to simply watching events happen, being that he is the conduit for the viewer, but he does carry himself well in the role. He shows that Danny isn’t really a believer in all of this neo-Nazi crap, but goes along with it because it gives him a sense of being and a social life, not to mention because it makes him feel closer to his brother, whom he clearly admires. Ethan Suplee’s Seth is a repulsive individual, offensive in almost every aspect, even to his own friends, who put up with him only because he’s so intimidating. Avery Brooks is a firm and dignified presence in the film as Sweeney, one of the few people willing to meet Derek and engage with his ideals. Guy Torry gets overlooked a lot, but his is a rather important role. His Lamont is Derek’s first real interaction with a black person as equals, which only happens because Lamont wins him over with humour. If he wasn’t convincing, there would be a real weak spot to Derek’s story. Beverly D’Angelo also gets a rather overlooked show in the film, but is rather touching as Derek’s much put-upon mother. However, this film belongs to Edward Norton. He’s a force in this film, both emotional and physical. He comfortably carries the early Derek’s slightly unsure teenage self; through to his rather scary incarnation as an instigator of hate (the look of pride on his face after he murders two people is very unsettling); and finally to his reformed and repentant self, trying to severe his connections to his past life for the good of his family.

American History X is a good, but flawed film, which holds some great performances, especially from Norton. However, there is something that stands in the way of it being the really great film that you know it wants to be. There are small technical issues with some of the camerawork, but the structure of the film remains the biggest the obstacle to overcome, which sees the final message maybe a little hard to nail down. Nevertheless, I do like the film. It’s provocative and deeply unsettling and doesn’t really offer a clean conclusion. I’m not sure it makes its point as powerfully as it wants to, but it does at least try.