(Directed by Gus Van Sant)
by Kevin Murphy
Mention his name, wait and listen. To some he is a pioneer, a liberating force that posted bond for American film. Others judge his work as partisan, hampered by a skewered vision and mediocre talent. No matter the opinion, though, Gus Van Sant has entered the canon of American directors whose work remains distinctly personal and socially relevant.
A group of guys here at Vickery’s considers him a Film God. The consensus being “My Own Private Idaho” is slightly superior to “Drugstore Cowboy,” followed by “Good Will Hunting,” “To Die For,” and “Elephant.”
When I explained being from Boston raised my estimation of “Good Will Hunting,” the group chuckled and scoffed because most of the film was shot in Canada.
So credibility, I asked, was found in the hardball reality of the streets, in places steaming with uncontrollable activity, told through stories as honest and close as the guy sitting on the next bar stool.
Something like that, they seemed to say. Asked what my assessment missed their eyes shot up and down. They smirked and buried their faces in beer mugs. Their gestures seemed to suggest an instinctual understanding. An understanding essential to their identities, an understanding that embraced Van Sant as a cultural collaborator whose body of work unleashed an artistic allegiance.
As influential artists must do, Van Sant has gained his allegiance by creating films with which the gay community can identify.
Much like my kinship watching “Good Will Hunting,” the guys here at Vickery’s saluted Van Sant for revealing a lifestyle and message that was accurate, worthy and true. My assessment fell short, they felt, only because I couldn’t truly appreciate the personal dramas, machinations, and struggles of gay life.
Surprise, surprise then, when just one of them said he’d seen “Mala Noche,” Van Sant’s first feature-length film.
His name was Harry. He’d been sipping a Bloody Mary, flipping the pages of last week’s City Paper.
He must have been thirty years older than most of the group. I asked what he thought about “Mala Noche” and he coughed into his fist. Below his eyes world-weary canyons of pink skin glistened like snails. He swiveled on his stool and faced us.
“I never actually saw the movie,” he said, laying his palms on his thighs. “But I knew Walt Curtis. I guess you could say I was there.”
There is Portland, Oregon, in the early eighties, and Walt Curtis is the author of the story from which the film was adapted.
Curtis is a rambunctious writer with an acerbic tongue. Flush with crime, poverty, and sexual desire, his words burn with trenchant criticism, obliquely trashing authority, the status quo and anyone not consenting to his advances. He cast himself as a post-beat poet, on page with Ken Kesey. He wrote a brief memoir concerning his obsession with a Mexican migrant; a sad and lonely tale of unrequited love and hardship set among Portland’s Sixth Avenue skid row.
Van Sant was part of the Portland art scene; he was a friend of Curtis’s, and the pair, along with a small crew, decided to film a production of “Mala Noche.”
Greeted immediately by a declaration of Walt’s (Tim Streeter) desire for Johnny, the film jumps headlong into the circumstances shaping the lives of the three men. Johnny is a Mexican migrant that hangs around the convenient store where Walt works. Pepper, Johnny’s fellow migrant, serves as the quiet, looming character to whom little attention is paid, but whose presence highlights Walt and Johnny’s disparate motivations. Walt is desirous to a fault, a pathetically desperate man willing to sacrifice his job and apartment for a chance to get into Johnny’s pants. Johnny parades his elusive sexuality like a dog that will not listen and takes advantage by snacking for free on the hard-boiled eggs and apple pies offered by Walt. Walt’s furtive advances are doomed from the get-go. But the film manages to slither seamlessly through scenes even when it’s obvious Walt’s goodies will crack on the sidewalk before he’s had the chance to get his gift basket to Johnny.
Asked of the relationship to the book that inspired this film, Van Sant has said he wished to remain as close to Portland and its people as possible. Most directors would probably agree with that, but unique to Van Sant is his transparent achievement. Working for years to finance the film, he constructed a thorough storyboard that served as the spine for his interpretation. His screenplay remained malleable, shifting throughout production to follow the text. He used a handheld camera to capture his actors’ movements, shot stark, intimate scenes in black and white film, and relied on mostly natural sound, all in an effort to remain within his budget and underscore the gritty realism propelling this bleak, beautiful tale.
Harry chewed a bloody ice cube and called for hard cider.
“This is what we used to drink,” he said. “We had no money and the stuff was cheaper than water. Walt especially never had a dime, and he was a terrific swindler. Got his butt kicked on numerous occasions for it. But we had good times.”
“Mala Noche” is sprinkled with good times, too. It jettisons the empty desire and banality of Walt’s callow existence by celebrating road trips to the country, modest dinner parties, the beauty of the pacific northwest as seen through the grimy windows of a mythic clunker, and allows these sequences to breathe with a natural grace. Moving from the dimly lit convenient store to rural Oregon’s wide expanses, “Mala Noche” often feels like a recollected dream.
In that dream, satellite characters populate Walt’s life. His days are tour guides through Portland’s skid row. The men and women here, drinking and smoking with bad teeth and swollen hands, bolster their community by waving and chatting with this amiable, lonely store clerk. The migrants, drunks, hookers and thieves show their humanity and retain their dignity through subtle, personable gestures: an enthusiastic wave, a joke, an introduction to a friend; small, rare pieces of interaction that brighten the otherwise dark days of Portland’s transients.
When Johnny (Doug Cooeyate) shows up, he offers Walt a clean opportunity to swoon. For most of the film Johnny is silent (Cooeyate is actually Native American and didn’t speak a lick of Spanish), a characteristic that, when pitched against Walt’s voluble advances, develops into a form of communication; he’s usually too busy running away, avoiding Walt’s pursuits, to have the time to say anything, but his touch and go, grunt and run behavior turns out to be a strange, animalistic form of flirtation.
Johnny’s friend, Pepper (Ray Monge), is interesting in that his status among the trio begins as a third wheel. He serves as the buffer boy for Walt and Johnny’s complicated relationship. But when Johnny won’t have sex with Walt, Pepper substitutes. It’s a onetime deal, though, and afterwards Pepper acts as if nothing’s happened. Weeks later Johnny gets deported and Pepper falls sick. With Johnny out of his life, Walt’s needy, caring nature nurses Pepper back to health. The two begin a stint of domesticity. Walt uses Pepper for sex, Pepper uses Walt for shelter; their relationship suffers, though, as their companionship grows increasingly tumultuous.
One night Pepper is alone in the apartment. He hears a woman frantically knocking on a neighbor’s door. The woman says the police must be called as a man who “makes the Son of Sam look like Tweety Bird,” is in the building. The police arrive. Pepper mistakenly believes they’re there to arrest and deport him. He grabs a pistol and makes for the roof.
On the roof, with no place left to run, Pepper becomes one of the many metaphorical symbols that appear throughout “Mala Noche.” Shot in black and white film, the distinction and lack of color adeptly expresses the unity and disparity of Walt and Johnny’s relationship. It also emboldens Portland’s dividing line, a single point of separation that defines the city’s class structure.
The metaphors continue. There’s Walt’s shabby, torn t-shirt; issues of charity and theft; heavy, consistent rain mixed with long train whistles; cigarette smoke climbs the walls of locked-in apartments and rides the wind of the countryside. Each of these metaphors works as a collective feeling, a mood or theme the audience is left to interpret and enjoy.
Ultimately, Van Sant and his crew remained true to their goals and true to their roots. He is a filmmaker whose artistic stamp is easily discerned, and for good reason “Mala Noche” is a slim, illuminating portrait of Portland’s past.
For Harry, that past still is very much alive. He’s been talking for over an hour now, slightly trembling and raging mad at Walt.
“That’s why I don’t think about him anymore,” he explains. “I’m still angry twenty years later.”
Everyone asks why, but Harry refuses to elaborate. He shakes his head with closed eyes, sips his cider and sighs.
Today, as goes forever, some things must stay a mystery.
