First, take a look at this poster:
Yeahhh! Look at that badass Mads Mikkelsen, with a beard and a gun on his back. He's probably riding a motorcycle while slaughtering Evil Bikers.
And I want to assure you viewer, that yes, this is a movie about:
- Mads getting some revenge on some gangsters who killed his wife. It's satisfying, violent righteousness.
- A geek comedy using offensive stereotypes, but also plenty of jokes that come from within the nerd community, accurately making fun of themselves. They are bumbling, rude, gold-hearted, and eclectic dorks.
- A heartfelt emotional drama between a stoic father and his teenage daughter as they cope with the grief of their mother's violent death.
- And, weaving all these threads together, a found family tearjerker centered around a gay twink.
Each of those aspects of the movie are executed well and entertaining. If these tropes even remotely interest you, you should watch this movie and you will enjoy it.
But that's not what is important about "Riders of Justice." Spoilers beyond the fold, but really, what spoilers can there be in "Mads will shoot a bunch of bikers?"
(There are spoilers.)
The same ethical struggle to sustain the meaninglessness of the catastrophe is the topic of Atom Egoyan's masterpiece The Sweet Hereafter, arguably THE film about the impact of a trauma on a community. Mitchell Stephens, a lawyer, arrives in the wintry hamlet of San Dent to sign up the parents of children who died when their school bus plunged into an ice-covered lake. His motto is "there are no accidents": there are no gaps in the causal link of responsibility, there always HAS to be someone who is guilty. (As we soon learn, he is not doing this on account of his professional avarice. Stephens' obsession with the complete causal link is rather his desperate strategy to cope with the private trauma, which is sorting out responsibility for his own daughter Zoe, a junkie who despises him, although she repeatedly calls him demanding money: he insists that everything must have a cause in order to counteract the inexplicable gap which separates him from Zoe.) After Stephens interviews Dolores Driscoll, the driver of the bus, who says the accident was a fluke, he visits the families of the dead children, and some of them sign up with him to file a lawsuit. Among them are the parents of Nicole Burnell, a teenager who survived the crash as a paraplegic but remember nothing. Stephens' case depends on proving that the bus company or the school board were at fault, not Dolores' driving.
- Slavoj Zizek
Riders of Justice is the most profoundly spiritual movie I've seen all year. Honestly, it is retreading the territory of "The Sweet Hereafter" but it goes deeper into that question and is even more blunt.
The movie starts with a trio of geeks pitching their Big Data startup that collects huge amounts of diverse data sets, correlates all kinds of variable, and predicts the future based on statistical connections we humans could never see.
The movie was made in 2005, and so the investors are unimpressed. (Fortunately, they could not foresee that by our time this would become the basis of all the world's richest countries.)
Later, one of the geeks is on a train when a freak accident occurs: a freight train hits one of the train cars in transit, killing everyone along that side of the train.
A serious military man in the desert receives news: his wife has died in an accident, and his daughter is recovering from injuries. He hurries home with the exact seriousness of a soldier receiving an order. It is clear he had a distant relationship with both his wife and his daughter, and he is determined to fix it now, but lacks any of the emotional tools to do so.
The father and daughter have a painful conversation about the train accident: was it a random accident, or was there some purpose behind it? Well if there's a purpose, there has to be and ultimate purpose behind all the reasons, which we call God. And if God intended their mother to die -- well He is an uncaring God. Meaninglessness or an unloving God, what's the difference? But the daughter continues obsessing about all the coincidences that had to happen for her mother to be sitting in that seat at the exact moment the trains collided. A bike was stolen and a car was broken so they took the train. Mads had said he wasn't coming home so they were disappointed and took a holiday.
Meanwhile, the geeks are making connections of their own. There was an ex-biker who was going to testify against his gang, who died in the accident. And our geek saw a man who looked like the brother of the gang-leader briefly board and leave the train car right before the accident. Of course it would be impossible for the gang to know right where the informant would sit - except the informant had OCD and sat in the same seat every day. They visit Mads, present their information, and a revenge pact is formed. Mads finally has someone to channel his anger towards.
Things continue like this. There are ambushes and counter ambushes and a lot of bad people die. None of the bikers survive Mads' wrath to confess to their sabotage. Until we find out... the gang had nothing to do with the accident. Apparently the mysterious boarder only looked like the brother, but was just some other random guy. Everyone has a breakdown.
Why do bad things happen? When we see a reason behind them, is it the true reason, or just a smattering of coincidences that we knitted together in our delusion? And is there even any difference between the two things? The cast all wrestle with these questions, from the daughter's conspiracy-board to the facial recognition computer's similarity threshold.
How can our grief find meaning in the world?
These are the questions RoJ wrestles with. Not even subtextually it's right there in the text, even more blatant than the Sweet Hereafter. Nihilism on one hand, or a God that is no better than nihilism on the other. It's like the main character seeking revenge in Memento, but this time there isn't even Joe Pantiliano manipulating us for us to blame it all on.
No comments:
Post a Comment