Movies I Should Loathe, but Instead Love: The Wraith

The Academy gave Matt Damon and Ben Affleck an award for the screenplay of Good Will Hunting. Each year somewhere around 1 million American college freshmen males adorn their dorm room walls with at least one Scarface poster. Fight Club is considered philosophical in some circles. In short, nobody's perfect. With this in mind, I present a series of objectively terrible films that I will gladly watch just about any time, anywhere. As with that "OTOH, Remakes" series I began in July 2009 and have not revisited since, this series may be short-lived. Consider it a New Year's resolution to make this one more fruitful, and consider that resolution as reliable as any New Year's resolution.

Installment 1: The Wraith

Just one month before Charlie Sheen launched his A-List leading-man career in Platoon (and a year before sealing the deal with Wall Street), he was greatly angering one already stern-looking Nick Cassavetes, wooing a perfect 10 Sherilyn Fenn*, giving Clint Howard a chance to show off that pre-total-bald-dome white-dude 'fro, and otherwise letting Randy Quaid enjoy a well-deserved break between his busy National Lampoon's _____ Vacation schedule.

"A Wraith, man! A Ghost! An evil spirit and it ain't cool."

In the mid-1980s southwest U.S., a band of hooligans runs the highways. Led by Packard Walsh (Cassavetes), they prey upon unsuspecting teens in sports cars (that is, what passed for sports cars in the 1980s) and force them to race. "If you lose the race, you lose your car!" The legal technicalities of gaming law and contract law aside, this allows for the hooligans to keep the losing car fair and square. And before you write this off as "boys will be boys," please note: the hooligans cheat when they race.

Packard isn't just a sociopath on the road, he's also got problems communicating. When Keri Johnson (Fenn) rejected his advances in favor of her boyfriend Jamie (Sheen, but played by Christopher Bradley in flashbacks), Packard killed Jamie with the help of his gang. Keri has nearly recovered from the horrific episode, but just as Packard seems to be settling in as king of the Arizona backdesert, a mysterious Jake (Sheen) arrives in town, quickly putting the moves on Keri and wooing her in ways Packard cannot muster due to his salty disposition.

About the same time as Jake's arrival, a mysterious , futuristic car appears to challenge the hooligans. One by one, this car-- this wraith-- exacts certain death on the gang members involved in Jamie's death. Sheriff Loomis (Quaid), mysteriously absent any time Packard is stealing cars via street racing or until after the Wraith has claimed a victim, pieces together the solution to the riddle at a distance. He is the one bulwark of wisdom among the premium-fueled, deadly adolescence.

The Wraith, in addition to my previous jabs in the plot summary, is largely an amalgamation of a soundtrack featuring Billy Idol and other '80s hair, physics that allows four-banger Dodge Daytonas to keep up with supposedly supercharged Corvettes, and a rather meandering plot connecting frivolous action sequences between scenes of country bumpkins like Sheriff Loomis standing around just letting the Wraith do his business with looks of deep contemplation. There's also some serious drug abuse (of the "huffing" variety, if I recall my D.A.R.E. education correctly) by two of the holligans, aptly named "Skank" and "Gutterboy."

So, this begs the question, why do I love this movie?

Did I already say "Sherilyn Fenn?"

Keri (Fenn) confides to Jake (Sheen) that
she enjoys Dostoevsky and political discussion.

One element is certainly nostalgia. When I was growing up in the early 1990s, Wraith was often shown as a Saturday afternoon movie on TV, but I always caught it at the half way point. Even upon reaching college, The Wraith did not get a DVD release until well into the 2000s. Even then, it was bundled together with The Gate, some Trick-or-Treat movie with Ozzy Osborne and at least one other movie I certainly wasn't going to watch. (For the record: a Special Edition of the Wraith was finally released on DVD in March 2010.) Does my quest to see The Wraith in its entirety suggest that the film represents not so much a destination, but a long fond journey? Well, maybe so. Maybe so.

In actuality: this movie is fun. The Wraith was not the first or last cobbled-together story with young actors of varying talent that was considered by producers a success if it just brought in a few hundred thousand profit (which it did, holla), but it has some gems. Rip on Billy Idol all you want, but the music works to the pent-up teen angst and especially for car races. The special effects are actually quite stellar for a $2.7 million movie-- and still look pretty good today. The Wraith car itself is pretty stinkin' cool, and the writers do not attempt to explain Jamie / Jake's resurrection-- he's just there. Just the right aura of mystery, unconcerned with confusing the audience that might want to know everything.

I love The Wraith. There, I said it.

*"Marry me, Sherilyn Fenn circa 1986" almost equals "Marry me, Grace Kelly circa 1954."

True Grit: Some Carry the Fire

Four Coen Brothers films ago, No Country for Old Men ended very closely to Cormac McCarthy’s novel, with a monologue by Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones in the film) recounting a dream about his father. This comes just after Bell avoids—perhaps deliberately—a confrontation with Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), one of the most merciless villains ever conceived. Bell describes to his wife

[I]t was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin' through the mountains of a night. Goin' through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past... and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

The ideal father, strong and resolute, would not have avoided Chigurh. On the other hand, perhaps with that stark last line Bell believes this dream is just that: maybe no one would really have the grit to take on the pure evil of Chigurh.

Cormac McCarthy went on to write The Road, a popular novel with a recent, decent film adaptation of its own, that redeemed the bitter ending of No Country. In Road’s post-apocalyptic future, a father and son travel through the worst of mankind, and the father carries the proverbial fire with all of the resolve that Bell could only dream of. The Coens were not involved in the film adaptation of The Road, but they may have provided their own addendum to No Country for Old Men with their latest film, the remake (or re-envisioning) of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit. The film delivers up a hero with the selflessness that we longed for in No Country and received in the The Road.

Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, an aged Arkansas lawman whose reputation leads young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to offer him a reward to track down Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who murdered Mattie’s father. LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) is a Texas Ranger who is already pursuing Chaney for a different murder, and he teams up with Cogburn, though their relationship is tenuous at best. Already an impressively confident 14-year-old girl, Mattie’s resolve to join the two men on the hunt is proven when she fords a river with her horse in order to catch up with him. But despite her young grit, the violence—often outright barbarism— that pervades the Indian lands where Chaney has fled is still new to her; she has a long way to go to attaining true grit.

There are a number of things to admire in this True Grit. There is not one bad performance. The Coens give us yet another very amusing court room scene, as they did in Intolerable Cruelty, where Cogburn’s no-nonsense answers to a recent arrest gone wrong introduce his character and humorously play off of the doctrine that prohibits attorneys from asking leading questions. As in some of their best films, the Coens also are unafraid to use the language of the period, and play great jokes off of old manners and customs. The cinematography wants for nothing. But ultimately, as with any film, it’s the story, and in this case the heroism, that elevates True Grit to greatness.

Rooster Cogburn is far from perfect. A drunk, and an arrogant one, his heroism at the climax of the film (with details I will spare) is unexpected. After much macho, adolescent sparring with LaBoeuf and almost giving up the hunt for Chaney, we’re left with the impression that Cogburn’s best days may be behind him. But when the time comes, his selflessness is as unquestionable as it is visceral. Whether facing bandits or snakes, he is methodical and does not hesitate to act when he must. Cogburn is not as old as No Country’s Sherriff Bell, but he is well past his prime. Although he’s not Mattie’s father, he risks his life for her as we could only hope the best fathers would. The man lives up to his legend after all.

The Coens’ True Grit may redeem the despair of their No Country film as effectively as The Road novel did the No Country novel. Indeed, Cogburn could be that man in Sheriff Bell’s dream more easily than the father in The Road. But some uneasiness remains, at least for this critic: where are today’s heroes? Why can’t we have them now? No Country is a nearly modern setting, the 1980s, whereas True Grit is set in the early 1900s and The Road in a (hopefully) never-determined future. Many of the most popular films today cast off any realistic portrayals of heroes into the future or back into antiquity. Is our only hope that a radioactive spider might bite the good-hearted newspaper photographer?

To be sure, going back to The Odyssey, legends have a place in instilling virtue. But must the vast majority of today’s cinematic heroism be seldom relatable to reality? And even when the term “hero” is brought up, must we moviegoers really endure the title of being placed on the likes of Valerie Plame? Indeed, there are indicators of a desire to see more modern fare: the heroism shown in last year’s Hurt Locker might explain why it won the Best Picture Academy Award despite so few having heard of the film before it won.

True Grit is an excellent film and yet further proof that the Coens are among America’s most gifted filmmakers, and my only complaint is that hopefully the next hero they deliver up is someone we could actually know.