Renowned experimental artist Matthew Barney directs this lyrical, challenging work about America, mythology, and death. Believing that his grandmother had an affair with Harry Houdini (Norman Mailer), noted murderer Gary Gilmore (Barney) wanders through the afterlife -- depicted here as a gold-colored honeycomb maze filled with two-stepping cowboys and rodeos -- hoping to find the magician. In the process, Barney constructs a personal narrative from elements and symbols of the American west.
Cremaster 2 was shot on high-definition digital video and transferred to 35mm. ~ Jonathan Crow, Rovi
A tantalizing melange of dreamlike riffs on the desolation of the American west, the empty poses of male ritual, and the blood lust of macho fetishism.
It is Gilmore's story and his family history, evoked symbolically, that give Cremaster 2 a solidity and emotional depth that are missing in the earlier, more playful installments.
The most cohesive narrative in any of these films, following murderer Gary Gilmore (played by Barney) on his crime spree, conviction, & striking execution, juxtaposed with a Harry Houdini (played by Norman Mailer) subplot.
Barney's outlandish mise-en-scène, forever emphasizing the organic, the amorphous, the massive, the adhesive, and the fluorescent in quite literal ways, also retains those very qualities in my memory.
Barney defiantly makes expensive avant-garde movies that proudly flaunt both their extravagance and their obscurity, and while they're salient forays into notions of history and narrative to be sure, they're also sallies of the genius Artist writ large.
Easily the most plot-driven in all of Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle, Cremaster 2 still conveys the thematic obsessions that drive the series, and stands as one of its most accessible entries.
Pretty images, but terrible pacing. The odd sex was out of place. The columbian exposition stuff spent too much time wandering and not enough on ritual. Redeeming qualities: bee drummers, death rodeo, fake-medium imagery (which I wish was played up more, honestly).
October 14, 2008
Jim McCann
Do you consider David Lynch to be terribly pedestrian and excessively beholden to the linear narrative? This could be right up your alley.
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