Pat Pitsenbarger (Udo Kier) was a real person the director Todd Stephens’s small hometown of Sandusky. He is described as “the Liberace of Sandusky”. The film, however, is a mostly fictionalised version of the last years of Pitsenbarger’s life. We first meet him in a nursing home. He has had a stroke at some point, but his energy for life is not diminished at all. A fellow resident in the nursing home dies, and in her will, there is a paid provision for him to do her hair and makeup for the funeral, as Pitsenbarger was a hairdresser in his golden years.
Pat revisits all the significant places of his life before he gets to the funeral home. Thematically, it is not dissimilar to David Lynch’s The Straight Story(1999). There is even a glorious scene where Pitsenbarger is driving an electronic wheelchair in the middle of the road, not having a care in the world, decked out in a fedora and a mint-green pantsuit, and puffing away on one of his beloved More cigarettes.
Udo Kier shines – if you had almost any other actor it just wouldn’t work. The flamboyant nature of the role could end up being a caricature in the hands of another actor. Kier has done so many different roles in so many films, but rarely was rarely given a complex lead role such as this. It’s a shame that the film is at times a little too syrupy for its own good, and has an ending you can see coming from the outer reaches of space. It touches on the changing nature of gay culture, with gay bars being on the verge of closing with the advent of hook-up apps. This is a theme Udo certainly can relate to, he was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s lover when they were both teen street hustlers in the Frankfurt of the 1960s. There is a very telling line that Pitsenbarger utters to an old friend in what seems like the last remaining gay bar in Sandusky: “I wouldn’t even know how to be gay anymore.”
Overall it’s a good showcase for Udo Kier.The movie’s quirkiness is quite endearing, even if it’s far too predictable. The dramatic scenes are effective, especially the one early on in the film where he visits the grave of an old lover whom he lost to Aids. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but Swan Song shows a version of Middle America that rarely appears on screen, far more tolerant than most would expect
There is another film called Swan Song starring Mahershala Ali and Glenn Close coming to Apple TV+ later in this year, so when this comes out, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s retitled.
Swan Song premiered at SXSW. On BFI Player and Amazon Prime in March 2023.
Its title speaks of powerlessness in the face of an irresistible force and an involuntary movement in respect of a man-made, industrial era material suggesting a modern urban environment. Several characters inflict and/or are forced to endure suffering in a variety of unpleasant forms. Curiously, the literal dragging across concrete scene late in the over two-and-a-half-hour running length involves the towrope pulling of a wrecked car by a fully working one without any actual suffering at the point of dragging. Before and after, yes, but not at that point. And that scene isn’t in an urban environment at all but rather on a piece of industrial wasteland presaged by a discarded refrigerator and a dead rat on a dark road.
S. Craig Zahler’s third directorial outing after Bone Tomahawk (2015) and Brawl In Cell Block 99 (2017) boasts two starting points. A black ex-con comes out of prison and discovers his mother in debt and working as a prostitute. Two white cops are suspended for excessive violence after being caught on mobile phone video when arresting a Latino suspect. As in those earlier two films, the American director builds on his characters and their separate plights to construct a slow-paced but relentless journey through to his narrative’s conclusion. At the end it all makes perfect sense. However, on your first viewing you won’t see what’s coming. It plays out as a power struggle between various factions of white people at various social levels and black underdogs not content to stay in their place.
Ex-con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles, surely destined for major stardom on the strength of his performance here) is approached by old mate Biscuit (Michael Jai White) who is looking for help on an upcoming job which very quickly places both men well out of their depth. Meanwhile, Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn) are the older and the younger cop who although on official leave following their suspension are pursuing leads which may or may not lead them to a crime – with half an eye on making a financial killing rather than upholding the law.
Zahler is a master of characterisation and knows how to direct with a minimum of fuss allowing actors to do what they do brilliantly. He also knows how to plot a movie. The whole thing clocks in at just more than two and a half hours, but you won’t notice the time. He manages to make, for example, two cops sat in a car on a stakeout into compulsive viewing as they interact with one another. There are many similarly low key scenes involving small numbers of characters from which the wider whole would lose something if you cut them out.
The opening image shows the black Henry having sex with a white woman in bed. He always fancied her in school. While he’s certainly having a good time, she maybe isn’t so much. It turns out their meeting was set up by Biscuit as a favour to Henry. The next woman we see is Henry’s mother who got into debt while he was in prison and into prostitution to pay the debt. Now he’s out of prison, Henry vows to take control and sort her debt out. Rosalinda (Liannet Borrego) is the deaf girlfriend of Vasquez (Noel G), the dealer the two cops arrest at the start: she is involuntarily soaked in a shower, stood under a cold air fan and questioned. The two cops “can’t understand” her protests because of her Latino accent.
Soon afterwards, we’re introduced to the nearest and dearest of each of the cops. Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) is the teenage victim of a bicycling black youth throwing a soft drink in her face near her home, his wife Melanie (Laurie Holden) a former cop struck down with MS who these days needs a cane to get around. Lurasetti’s black girlfriend Denise (Tattiawna Jones), the one woman here seemingly in control of her life, is a power-dressing professional constantly on her mobile to colleagues and clients. We never discover exactly what she does, but it involves a high degree of organisation and self-motivation and her phone conversations suggest she’s really good at it.
Part way through the narrative we meet Kelley Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), returning after maternity leave to her detested but high paying job in a financial district bank at the behest of the manipulative father of their baby. If that sounds grim, it’s nothing compared to the extremely nasty humiliations that will later be inflicted upon her as the plot unfolds.
Apart from Denise, all the women are victims. They are peripheral in this male world, even if their roles as mothers, partners or offspring motivate their menfolk to do what they do. Most of the men locked in to the overarching narrative from start to finish are victims too.
The ruthlessly efficient, criminal gang leader Lorentz Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann) spends much of the proceedings with his two masked sidekicks in the back of an armoured van being driven by the two black guys Henry and Biscuit. Elsewhere, memorable male characters are tossed into the mix for little more than one scene each: Police Chief Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson) gives the two cops a hard time, Fredrich (Udo Kier) is a shady character who owes Ridgeman, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) is Kelley’s ingratiating boss at the bank.
Zahler is far more interested in telling a rattling good yarn and exploring character nuance than in playing to political correctness. If you can get past the pervasive misogyny of the piece, this slow-burner of an urban crime thriller with its gripping performances great and small will have you on the edge of your seat. A bleak and original vision of the world – and a dirtylicious treat.
Dragged Across Concrete is out in the UK on Friday, April 19th. On VoD on Monday, August 19th.
This being a Hollywood movie, you may find yourself worrying you’re at the right film when it starts off with a Norwegian scientist in a lab. No matter: it soon goes through momentous discovery to big international conference where one Norwegian scientist takes to the stage and opens up a box to reveal another of his colleagues – who has been ‘downsized’ and is now a mere five inches tall. It’s the solution to too many people living on planet Earth with its finite and inadequate resources.
Cut to people watching this on TV in public spaces, among them occupational therapist Paul Safranek (that American everyman Matt Damon). He and his wife Audrey (Kristen Wiig) are currently experiencing budgetary problems and over the next few weeks and months they discover couples that they know who have ‘downsized’ and think it’s the best decision they ever made.
So the couple take a visit to Leisureland, a miniature resort where ‘downsized’ people live after the non-reversible procedure. They learn that if a full-sized person becomes downsized, the financial assets of an average income would turn from just about enough to get by to a millionaire’s income. They’re hooked, the paperwork is signed, the process undergone.
On the other side of the process, it all seems too good to be true, although Paul isn’t really sure if he fits. He is even less sure he likes his constantly partying, Serbian upstairs neighbour Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz) and his business partner Konrad (Udo Kier). And as Paul watches the TV news he learns there are global issues with the process too: people in repressive regimes are being downsized against their will, such as Vietnamese activist Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau). Who one day turns up as the head cleaning lady in charge of a small posse of cleaning ladies tidying up Dusan’s flat after one of his parties.
If this seemed initially like a utopian existence, Leisureland turns out to suffer from all the financial inequalities that beset other human societies: there are haves and have-nots. Tran takes Paul to her home in the hope that he can administer medicine to her seriously ill flat-mate – on a bus through a vast tunnel to outside the Leisureland complex where the poor live in substandard, run down blocks of flats. The narrative has stranger things to deliver still, as Dusan takes Konrad and the other two to visit the original downsized Norwegian colony…
Sadly, however, while downsizing is a visionary film brimming with radical concepts it’s equally an infuriating narrative exercise where potentially rich ideas, themes or characters suddenly appear only to disappear shortly afterwards before they can be fully explored. So for instance, the ill neighbour for whom Paul supplies inappropriate tablets which Tran gets her to ingest one week is gone when he visits the next week. What happened? “Oh, she died”, says Tran matter-of-factly. No shock, no grief, patently unbelievable. Something similar happens towards the end of the film when Paul, in an episode with the Norwegian scientists’ colony worthy of When Worlds Collide (Rudolph Maté, 1951), has to decide whether or not to accompany the departing colony members into a huge Brave New World deep underground.
Were it not for such serial errors of judgement, this could easily been the film of the year. It’s still worth seeing, though, despite its faults.
Downsizing is out in the UK on Wednesday, January 24th. Watch the film trailer below:
