R. Lee Ermey

The character actor R. Lee Ermey passed away in April. He was a former military man who made a career in Hollywood as a technical advisor and character actor. Despite his notoriety as both a Marine and a Hollywood personality, he fell into both more or less on accident. As a teenager in Washington state, he had multiple run-ins with the law and was arrested twice for criminal mischief by the time he was 17 years old. The second time around, the judge offered him a choice – jail or the military. Ermey picked the Marines and enlisted in 1961, serving as aviation support, a drill instructor, and as a staff sergeant in Viet Nam for 14 months. A few years after being medically discharged, Ermey attended the University of Manila in the Philippines on the G.I. bill, and while there, he got a small role in Francis Ford Coppola’s dark Viet Nam masterpiece, Apocalypse Now. Ermey also served as Coppola’s technical advisor and began a career as both an effective character actor who could evince tough, rigid authority better than almost anyone and as a former professional soldier who could translate the military world for Hollywood.

Ermey appeared in about 60 films over the course of his career as well as being featured in commercials and tv shows. While a wide, nuanced range was not necessarily his strong suit, he did work across a wide variety of projects. He acted in Texas Chainsaw Massacre films and did voicework for the Toy Story trilogy and Spongebob Squarepants. 

But no role he had was more impactful or memorable than his portrayal of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick’s Viet Nam fever dream, Full Metal Jacket. Released in 1987, the film is considered to be one of the filmmaker’s best. That is not to say that it’s a pleasant experience – because it’s not. Watching Full Metal Jacket is like taking a bath in nightmare juice. And then drowning in it. But that’s kind of the point of a film about Viet Nam.

The story is in two parts – the first focusing on the training of new recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina and the second following some of those same Marines in-country. Ermey’s Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is the new recruits’ abrasive, unbending, unforgiving drill instructor at Parris Island. Every cliché we’ve come to expect from drill sergeant characters basically originated with him except, rather than coming across as trite, here, they are terrifying traits that make Ermey’s performance unpredictable, darkly hilarious, and intimidating to say the least. In trying to whip his new recruits into shape, Hartman zeroes in on Private Leonard Lawrence, who he quickly renames Gomer Pyle. Pyle is chubby and a little slow in more ways than one, regularly falling short of what Hartman sees as combat readiness. His verbal and physical assaults on Pyle escalate until Hartman sees they aren’t doing the trick. So instead he switches tactics, and every time Pyle screws up, everybody in the squad gets punished except him. It gets worse from there until things come to a horrifying, bloody end the night before the platoon is scheduled to ship out for active duty. Hartman confronting a now broken and unhinged Pyle in the moonlit barracks bathroom is a movie moment that still haunts me over thirty years later.

In an unheard of move for the meticulous and controlling Kubrick, Ermey was allowed to rewrite and improvise his own lines on set. Also, Kubrick generally only required three or four takes from him for each scene. Undoubtedly, his willingness to let Ermey ad-lib and keep his performance fresh is a big part of why that performance is still so visceral.

Accidental as his career was at first, Ermey went on to work on many other worthy projects. But if you ever want to see his greatest work, unpleasant as it is, check out Full Metal Jacket.

A Quiet Place

Warning: This review contains spoilers for A Quiet Place.

It’s always interesting when actors become directors. Sometimes, they’re successful and make interesting, award-winning films like Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, and George Clooney. Sometimes, they set records like when Elizabeth Banks directed Pitch Perfect 2 which earned 69 million dollars in its first weekend, the highest opening ever by a first time director. Other times, it becomes clear that maybe the actor should stay in front of the camera rather than behind it. Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Nicholas Cage each have exactly one directing credit to their names – and it’s probably one too many.  

In the case of John Krasinski, the guy who played Jim in TV’s The Office and the director of the sci-fi thriller, A Quiet Place, it’s clear he’s got the skills to be one of the successful ones for sure. A Quiet Place occurs after some kind of alien invasion where a race of super-fast, supremely deadly, seemingly indestructible creatures attack and immediately kill anything that makes sound. What I admire most about the film is its focus and discipline. Rather than a sprawling, cosmic, cast-of-thousands scale you might expect with an alien invasion, the story is tightly focused on one small family hiding out in upstate New York. There are only eight people in the entire film, and the whole thing plays much more like a compelling family drama than a special effects bonanza. I give credit to Krasinski who also rewrote the screenplay and increased the emphasis on the family relationships. 

In terms of its discipline, the film’s whole concept is that no one can make any noise, so everyone uses American Sign Language or whispers inaudibly with subtitles to help viewers. Often in American films that feature a foreign language, characters will speak a few lines in subtitled French or Russian and then inexplicably shift to English for the rest of the film. A Quiet Place does not cop out in this way, and the entire film is conducted in almost complete silence and diegetic sound. While there is a traditional musical score, which Krasinski has said he allowed to be added for the audience’s comfort, it’s relatively restrained. I admire that as a director, Krasinski was willing to take the risk and pay his audience of the compliment of doing something different and somewhat challenging.

A good director also tries to pick the best talent with which to work. The film looks great and uses its cinematography to effectively evoke dread, sadness, hope, and thrills. Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen makes confident choices with the camera that had me engaged from the first shots.

Krasinski also cast talented actors, including his secret weapon, his wife Emily Blunt. Blunt reminds me of Kate Winslet in her range and believability. Action hero, seductress, fashion addict, or beleaguered mother, she makes audiences believe what she’s doing. 

My only real problem with the film was a narrative one. The final scenes reminded me a lot of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film, Signs. The family discovers that the aliens don’t react well to their hearing impaired daughter’s cochlear implant. They use it as a sonic weapon to disable one of the creatures long enough to blow it apart with a shotgun. It was reminiscent of Signs’ deus ex machina moment in which we figure out that a race of aliens who hate water came to planet that’s 80% covered by water. I just found it a little hard to believe that no one on the entire planet thought to use a sonic weapon against creatures that are sensitive to sound.

Despite that one quibble, the film is excellent – confident, smart, and respectful of its audience. Rather than carefully explaining every single thing, it trusts its viewers to understand what’s going without a ton of obvious exposition. A Quiet Place is harrowing at times, tender at others. It’s perfectly paced, and I hope we will see other films this good from its director and star.

Lost in La Mancha

Last week, something historic happened. After eighteen years in the making, the first trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was released. For film nerds who follow the esoterica of troubled film productions, this is a big deal, and many of my movie buff friends are saying things like, “I can’t believe it’s finally happening!” My response remains the same. I will believe that Gilliam has finished and successfully released this remarkably fraught production when I am sitting in the theater and it plays all the way from the beginning to the end of the closing credits and not until then. Because with Gilliam’s luck on this project, it’s entirely possible every copy of the film will spontaneously burst into flame before anyone actually ends up seeing it.

 Gilliam, of course, got his start as an animator and cast member of Monty Python and was the co-director of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. After the group’s breakup, he moved into screenwriting and directing full-time, earning a reputation as both a fiercely independent visionary and sometimes a giant pain who couldn’t control his own artistic excesses. He clashed extensively with his studio over the brilliant and bizarre film Brazil, lost gobs of money on the overstuffed Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and then hit a hot streak in the 90s with The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. With that momentum behind him, in 1998 Gilliam then chose to take on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with a fresh-faced young heartthrob named Johnny Depp in the lead. Unfortunately, after only a few days into filming, everything went down the tubes. The first shooting location was right next to a Spanish air base, and so nearly every shot was ruined by F-16‘s flying overhead or in the background. The French actor he’d hired to play Quixote himself had both prostate problems and a double-herniated disc, so riding a horse was pretty much out of the question, and that was before he had to fly home for hospitalization, never to return. Then there was the storm that caused the flood that swept away the sets. Investors were understandably nervous, the money got pulled, and Gilliam even lost ownership of his own screenplay in the deal. Since then, the film has become a kind of legend, famous for not ever materializing. There’s even an entry on Wikipedia about it under the term “development hell,” the industry term for a project that is always in the works and yet never reaching completion. Apparently, after the initial attempt, Gilliam tried seven more times to mount a production of the film.

Even with last week’s trailer, the film, which now stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, has no official release date, so as I say, I’ll believe it literally when I see it. In the meantime, during that first attempted production, Gilliam hired filmmakers to record behind-the-scenes footage, and instead of ending up as some cute extra, it became the Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s award-winning documentary, Lost in LaMancha. The film is an agonizing and entertaining on-the-ground, as-it’s-happening document of the dissolution of a project. We see Gilliam’s zeal for his own vision as well as his frustration when it all blows apart. I often show Lost in LaMancha in my film classes when I want to demonstrate to students the realities of big budget film production. Rather than being glamorous, it often has more to do with the weather that day and what the accountant says.

Will The Man Who Killed Don Quixote come out sometime in 2018 as its new trailer suggests? It’s possible, but it’s equally possible Gilliam could lose a legal battle or the warehouse with all the film prints could fall into a sink hole and disappear forever. In the meantime, watch Lost in LaMancha and join me as I wait to see what’s going to happen next.