Following up his exhaustive look at the John Sayles catalog for episode 316 of the Wrong Reel, filmmaker/podcaster Bill Scurry takes a look at a theme that connects the movies of one of the country's greatest independent directors.
Bill co-hosts the podcast I Don't Get It and his work can be found over at AmericanCaesar Enterprises.
~ by william scurry ~
It's a double entendre, of course: John Sayles got his start reworking scripts by other writers for Roger Corman and continued to do uncredited doctoring on screenplays for big Hollywood movies well into his career. At the same time, ever since self-financing his own directorial debut in 1979 with Return of the Secaucus 7, Sayles's heart has always been with small people in large confines.
For as fit as he is to limn the disaster of releasing mutated killer fish into a river, the name John Sayles makes me think of David Strathairn's terrified scan of the sky in Limbo, or Passion Fish's Mary McDonnell grimacing as she struggles to reseat herself in a wheelchair. Most of the protagonists in his own films aren't fighting giant alligators or werewolves or Japanese feudal clans, but for dignity and prosperity - fairness itself. Perhaps the more proper usage of "punching up" in this case is the mission of identifying the burdened, the dispossessed, the oppressed, the crushed, and giving them the weapons to wage a fair fight against powerful interests.
He identifies with the little guy, yet doesn't limit his protagonists merely to the proverbial "little" or "guy." Sayles might not get singled out for his empathy, but there are few other filmmakers who have spent so much of their careers essaying the fates of people outside their own gender, race and sexual orientation. His technique in this regard is effortless, which thankfully diverts attention away from it, and we get to avoid the tediousness of a well-meaning ally "virtue signaling" himself.
Sayles's origin as a young man in Schenectady, New York who worked factory jobs while in high school and while attending Williams College (where he met his partner in life and business, Maggie Renzi) speak to his appreciation for dedication and hard work. He hit the business in the 1970's alongside a wave of boomers with similar values. Something that distinguishes Sayles from his colleagues, I think, is embedded in his biography: he's a novelist. He published his first novel, Pride of the Bimbos, in 1975, his second, Union Dues, in 1977, his third, Los Gusanos in 1991, and his most recent, A Moment In the Sun in 2011. It's not as if there haven't been novelists in the directing trade before, but a cursory scan of the man's movies would indicate the influence of Faulkner and Steinbeck over Bresson and Godard. Perhaps as a result, Sayles-the-auteur (he writes, directs and edits his own films) successfully codified his thoughtful, post-hippie style in a market which was veering away from that kind of intimate storytelling.
In his curriculum vitae, enfranchising poor and dispossessed is obviously high on Sayles's list of missions. But there's something else there, shown but not told: the redemptive value of hard work. Coupled with behaving responsibly, there's a Calvinist morality laid overtop his films. People work with their callused hands to do good in the world: the idolized champion ballplayers of Chicago, Strathairn's Alaskan fisherman, West Virginian miners working underground, a humble R & B pianist in Alabama, a soap actress sweating through physical therapy, an elderly internist hiking a mountain with no roads. The examples are myriad, and it's Sayles's imprimatur as much as railing against ineffaceable power.
Reviewing all 18 features of Sayles's authoring, I see crushed little-guys all over the place. They're stepped on by millionaires, doctrinaires, bullies, politicians and criminals alike. Themes of injustice run throughout Sayles's filmography; here I offer a few notable extracts...
Emboldened by a MacArthur Genius grant, Sayles writes a timely and inventive rumination on race in the form of a sci-fi movie. Nicholas Roeg is fused with Melvin Van Peebles, anchored by a soulful, wordless performance from the great Joe Morton as a spaceman who really resembles an African-American male. Since I first watched the movie on HBO decades ago, I've never forgotten the look on Morton's face when he grabs a wad of bills from the Korean deli, presenting them as payment for fruit he stole; it's Sayles projecting market-based capitalism through the prism of a blank naif. The director got a chance to look at the Harlem of the eighties through an invisible man's eyes (Ellison pun intended), and his vision is both solemn and funnier than you might expect. Contrast a kid dying of a heroin overdose in the The Brother's neighborhood with the pursuant comical "men in black" (Sayles himself and rep company member David Strathairn) and their hyper-stylized fight scene in the bar. The Brother may fall down and get kicked by the man, but he never stays down. He evades his caucasoid hunters and joins up in the final frame with the others of his kind, who live among us in polyglot skins.
The Brother sets a tone for his career, taking the earnest trajectory set by his earlier films and injecting it with social justice to metamorphosize into the confident storyteller who shoots a historical diptych set around 1920: Matewan and Eight Men Out. Sayles is a historic exorcist, litigating the turpitude of both the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. The robber baron coal masters of West Virginia were the instigators of an event called the "Matewan Massacre," and Sayles hired rookie actor Chris Cooper to play the charismatic (and tragic) labor leader bringing the message of collectivization to the sooty faces of Appalachia who work the black seam of coal. Sayles even plays a small role himself here as "Hardcase Preacher," equating unions to Bolshevism and Satan. Cooper's union man pitches Italian immigrants, African-Americans and Appalachian locals on a strike, at great risk to their safety -- and all three blocs bivouac outside the town in a hollow, holding out until their demands are met. Hired gunmen wielding Colt pistols invade the town to break labors' back with a hail of bullets, and they shoot it out with Strathairn's sheriff Sid Hatfield over the railyard. Cooper's character is dead, a martyr for the cause. Baldwin-Felts wins the battle, but collectivized labor eventually wins the war.
In Eight Men Out, Sayles wrote a narrative based on research he and Maggie Renzi put into the topic, making knotty and human the saga of Shoeless Joe Jackson and his colleagues fixing the World Series for a piece of Arnold Rothstein’s cash. I love the casting of Michael Rooker as bitter agitator Chick Gandil, using his anger, lantern jaw and gravel voice as a torpedo pointed at notorious skinflint Comiskey (portrayed by Clifton James, veteran maestro character actor). After winning the pennant, the boys are in the locker room asking about the bonus they were promised -- and the team rep points at the table bearing flat champagne. And here’s Sayles’s premiere proxy, Strathairn, in the mix: His pitcher, Eddie Cicotte, talks to the old man about the 30-win bonus he's owed, and Comiskey pushes back on the clerical point he won only 29 games. Never mind the fact he was purposely benched to be kept from hitting the mark. "Twenty-nine is not 30. Is there anything else?" Cicotte tracks back to Gandil, and the fix is in. The '19 Sox might have devolved into finger pointing on the stand and lifetime bans handed down by Kennesaw Mountain Landis, but Sayles manages to make Joe Jackson and his teammates fully human again, rather than the American folk embodiment of corruption.
Lone Star could easily be argued as Sayles's masterpiece. He finds the perfect balance of plot machinery and characterization with Chris Cooper as a mild lawman living in the shadow of his blood-and-guts father (Matthew McConaughey in flashback scenes), while rekindling a flame with Elizabeth Peña's school teacher character, Pilar. Cooper's Sam Deeds is unraveling the popular historical narrative in which his father gets credit for stopping Kris Kristofferson’s psychopath sheriff in 1958. Deeds finds evidence that the past didn't quite happen as written, but no one who was there wants the truth to shudder back to life. The scene where he drills returning Sayles regulars Clifton James and Ron Canada about that night in ’58 is an elegy for the canard they've all maintained for years. James's character never wanted the responsibility for doing the shooting which local lore attributes to McConaughey. Regardless, Deeds does he what thinks to be right -- and makes gray what was once black and white. But Deeds is snakebitten: Cursed by a domineering father, he’s overshadowed by the reputation of the red-meat lawman, and sent to a crossroads by the revelation that the elder Deeds sired Peña’s character via indiscretion. They’re half-siblings. He negotiates with Pilar: "If I met you for the first time today, I'd still want to be with you." She says, "All that other stuff, the history? Forget the Alamo."
Limbo entangles wayward chanteuse Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in haunted Alaskan roughneck David Strathairn's family troubles: Bandits are looking for money they're owed by his brother, Casey Siemaszko. You can't fight bullets with empty hands, so they retreat into the forbidding Alaska wilderness -- and the legendary ending of this movie has the two staring powerlessly at an inbound seaplane, wondering if it brings the succor of flight or the bandits themselves, ready to finish their dread work. (I'll suggest that David Chase was inspired by Sayles's blackout ending when it came time to close up the shop on "The Sopranos" in 2007.) Strathairn's Joe Gastineau, scared out of the water by losing a crew of salmon fishermen in a tragic accident, pays the price for daring to captain a vessel again, trying to exorcise his demons. Rarely is Strathairn hired to play a bouncy, positive type, but his creased face was almost designed to play the noble and cursed Gastineau. There is no resolution with the smash cut to black, just the suspended animation of fate. Of course, the titular "limbo" is Gastineau's frozen life after the shipwreck -- as well as the literal narrative ending.
The devastating late-career masterpiece Amigo is a revised look at the horror of the American occupation of the Philippines in 1901, with beleaguered village elder Rafael (Joel Torre) as a man scourged by both complicity with the Americans and charges of treachery from his Filipino guerrilla relations. The depths of suffering Rafael undergoes are Herzogian, from assaults on his flesh to destruction of the earth his people have lived on for generations. His uneasy relationship with a benevolent American lieutenant played by Garret Dillahunt is filled with respectful notes and tempered by violence (mandated from up on high by his cruel superior Chris Cooper). Rafael's brother is a seminarian turned insurrecto, organizing the fight from a redoubt in the nearby caves. Rafael pays the ultimate price for his allegiance to country and creed, the victim of a senseless execution by Cooper's tin pot colonel. The Filipino is dead, made an example of, just as the hostilities are coincidentally ended. Dillahunt has studied Rafael's character and laments the travesty of justice; as the Filipino dangles on the hangman's poorly tied rope, the lieutenant draws a Colt and ends the noosed man's suffering. There's no way Rafael could have done better - he's simply undone by the times he lives in. The story is a confabulation, but Sayles and Renzi did their due diligence through research and discovered many just like it in the record.
I can conclude this with a neat bow in the form of The Boss: Sayles was requested by Bruce Springsteen to shoot some videos as part of his media deluge for the Born in the USA album (in fact, Brian De Palma had directed the video for "Dancing In the Dark"). Sayles was given three songs to work with: "Glory Days," "I'm On Fire," and the album's eponymous track. I ask you: Is there a cultural figure from the last century who better represents the value of hard work and sticking it to The Man? Springsteen is a living John Sayles text, for chrissakes.
