How much mood-setting work is a score by Tangerine Dream doing? I guess that's like asking what came first, the chicken or the egg.
One thing about Near Dark is clear, though: In the six years since her directing debut in The Loveless, Kathryn Bigelow has taken major steps forward as a filmmaker.
I should probably clarify that. I didn't have a problem with the filmmaking in The Loveless, I just didn't care for the story (what story?) or the characters.
What I really mean is, in Near Dark, Bigelow has started to show us who she is as a filmmaker, and what sorts of themes and ideas will come to characterize her best work.
I suppose the characters in this movie are not so different from the central characters in The Loveless, a bunch of motorcycle greasers there, and a group of miscreants who similarly disrupt social norms here, though there's nary a motorcycle in sight. Here, though, they are vampires, and it's that little step into genre filmmaking that seems to really set Bigelow free.
The main character wasn't a vampire when this all started. That's Adrian Pasdar's Caleb, a nice enough young man who wears a cowboy hat and looks for potential romantic interest at the local watering hole in his small Oklahoma town. Unfortunately, the one with whom he strikes up a connection on this particular night is Mae (Jenny Wright), whose cryptic comments about planning to still be here when the light from a star takes a billion years to get here don't faze him one bit. Before dawn he's got a bite on his neck, his skin is starting to smoke in the rising sun, and Mae's group of nomadic fellow vampires have to decide if Caleb is worthy of taking up with them, though Caleb refuses to kill to feed his appetites and pass their litmus test for his worthiness. Meanwhile, Caleb's father and younger sister set out looking for him.
I mentioned the Tangerine Dream score earlier, and though a score like that is incomparably effective in the right situation, it takes a director to create that situation. Bigelow really sets the stage with all her shots of the wide open Oklahoma plains at near dusk and near dawn, establishing a southern gothic tone that just deepens as the movie progresses. There's something apocalyptic about the way the sun bleeds into the sky and suffuses everything with a slightly surreal feeling. Tonally, there's nothing remotely like this in her first work.
The next thing I want to focus on is the cast, and specifically, how much of it is part of the greater Kathryn Bigelow-James Cameron universe. I checked just now and it appears those two did not get together until the following year, but in Near Dark Bigelow used three actors who were in Cameron's Aliens the year before, all part of the vampire group. Lance Henriksen and Bill Paxton obviously stand out from the Aliens cast, but Jenette Goldstein -- whose name I did not know -- was more recognizable to me from her role in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where she plays John Connor's foster mother. (You know, the one the T-1000 impersonates, ultimately driving an arm turned into a sword through the face and milk carton of John's foster father.)
Speaking of chickens and eggs, I'm not going to spend a lot of time researching the way Cameron and Bigelow came into each other's orbits, but it does indeed seem that Bigelow was offering up the sincerest form of flattery with these casting choices. From a distance of more than 30 years, it surely places a viewer within a certain sort of cinematic universe that has included some of the most memorable genre films of the past four decades.
I should say the cast sharing actually goes one step further than that. There's a small character actor who appears here that I recognized, that maybe not everyone would, name of Robert Winley. You know the biker Arnold Schwarzenegger beats up to get his clothes in T2? "Take it! Take it!" he says, throwing Arnie the keys to his motorcycle. He actually appears here, in a similar sort of seedy biker bar, serving a very similar purpose. So maybe the sincerity and flattery goes both ways.
Also on the topic of the cast, it caused me to wonder why Adrian Pasdar hasn't gotten more work over the years. He has a good look and is a charismatic presence in the lead (as is Jenny Wright as Mae, another actress who should have gotten more work based on her distinct appearance and presence). It's hard to believe that the only really significant thing Pasdar has done in the last 20 years was appearing on Heroes, a gig that did not end up getting him additional work, though it did for much of the cast. (Actually, it appears he's been working a lot on TV, just in shows I don't watch -- but it doesn't mean I can't still miss seeing his face on the big screen.)
Anyway, this movie has cult horror written all over it, but I think it's actually better than that. In addition to the terrific performances by Paxton, Henriksen et al, this movie gives us some really good vampire world-building, and plenty of excellent violence. It's a mood, but it's got its heart in the right place too, ultimately reminding us that these charismatic characters are not the ones we should be rooting for. In its mixture of small-town innocence and murderous darkness, there's even something about it that reminds me a little bit of Blue Velvet.
I should mention that I had significant technical challenges watching this movie, which started with finding it available at all. I ultimately had to order it on Region 1 DVD from the U.S., which means I had to play it on my old laptop that I've reprogrammed to play DVDs from that DVD region. That part went fine, but this laptop is not in great shape, and when I paused the movie at one point, it didn't recover well from coming unpaused. For the next five minutes the dialogue played uninterrupted, but the images froze and then caught up in superspeed. I was actually kind of digging on the frozen images, which were coming fast enough that it almost seemed like a collection of iconic snapshots -- like something you'd seen in a pre-sound film where a reel has been lost, so they supplement it with stills.
But when it became clear that the normal playing of the film was never going to recover on its own, I had to try to exit the video player, and when that wasn't working I had to restart the computer altogether. And then all of the sudden it was running Windows updates and I ultimately couldn't resume the film for another 45 minutes.
Worried about pausing again, I instead fought through sleep on the couch for a significant portion of the film's final 30 minutes. I didn't always succeed, but I was never asleep for more than about a minute and always retained a hazy understanding of what was going on -- which was also kind of a cool way to take in a film with such themes. I reviewed on Wikipedia and it turns out I didn't really miss anything in terms of the plot. And hey, now I own this so I can watch it again whenever the mood strikes me -- and whenever I'm willing to deal with the shortcomings of my old laptop.
So glad to have loved Bigelow's second film for this series after not liking her first. In July we'll turn to Jane Campion's second film I haven't seen, Holy Smoke!
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