What a Mess

Ararat. This came and went 8 years ago. Conversation with the video store clerk: "Oh, do you like Atom Egoyan?" Me: "Well, I don't... um, no." But I still wanted to give it a chance.

Well, what a mess! It's about a genocide, so all the emotional chips are in and I feel bad criticizing it, but honestly it's exasperating. I'm not going to make a laundry list. Here's what bothers me the most: why are so many movie villains made into unfathomable monsters? People who do bad things are fascinating because of how similar they are to everyone else, not because of how alien or inhuman they are (or so we try to make them). The scenes of genocide in Ararat are presented as a movie being made within the movie, and its principal antagonist is an officer commanding the Turkish forces who commit the atrocities. Why did they make him a Bruckheimer-grade redneck version of a mustache-twaddling bad guy (not unlike that guy in The Rock who mutinies against Ed Harris)? In a movie with this subject matter, why does there seem to be zero curiosity about evil itself? About how anyone from anywhere is capable of this kind of campaign of executions, rapes and dismemberments- how when no one is watching and there seem to be no consequences involved, this is actually what human beings tend to do?

A friend of mine who teaches English said that his students laughed when told about Nazis hurling babies into ditches. And I thought, sure, that is funny, simply because you can't imagine it. The more you try to understand a tragedy, the more affecting it becomes. You achieve this with sympathy, not with glossy fantasy and stereotypes. (The best example of the former I've seen is United 93.)


The best part of Ararat goes by quickly: we occasionally return to the studio of Arshile Gorky in the 1930's as he works on his famous painting of himself and his mother, and in these fleeting moments we get to watch the French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian portray the artist. It is a silent performance, and Abkarian is fascinating to watch. (Did you see Casino Royale? He played the contractor who finds the bomb specialist for Le Chiffre, the fish-looking guy, and he puts up his Aston Martin in the poker game, and then they run to the Miami airport, and... etc. See that movie, it rocks!)