Last night’s experiment in using editing to produce a performance on Netflix Disk: this year’s AFTERMATH, which features Arnold Schwarzenegger and somebody named Scoot McNairy.
What a career coup for McNairy, eh? Alas, no. Co-starring with Schwarzenegger no longer means what it once did. This film is direct-to-video, arriving without fanfare on the shelves of places like Target and Wal-Mart. And though it tries very very hard to be special, it misses the target.
Another well-meaning attempt, inferior to the 2014 art-zombie movie MAGGIE, to document that now that Schwarzenegger can no longer be a believable unstoppable action hero on screen, he can transition to character roles of nuance and depth, the movie is the story of two men beset by unimaginable grief. Arnold is a building contractor who early on heads off to the local airport to pick up his wife and imminently pregnant daughter; Scoot is the air-traffic controller who, left in the tower to handle a snarl by himself when the only other man on duty goes off to the vending machines, makes a critical error and allows two passenger planes, include the one carrying the family of Schwarzenegger’s character, to collide in mid-air.
At this point, and for some time afterward, you might be fooled into thinking you’re watching some kind of great film. Those last couple of minutes in the tower are a small masterpiece of escalating complication, a slow-motion catastrophe you can see coming but will be unable to stop. And the horror that follows is well-acted by both Arnold and Scoot. Both men are naturally destroyed emotionally by what’s happened, and the film is clearly an exercise on dramatizing the path toward their tragic eventual meeting, but the problem is that it’s all one-note, dramatized by lots and lots of tortured stares, slow-motion walking, and soulful music. It’s a significant relief when we get a title card saying, “One Year Later,” but though both characters have moved on to some degree, it is STILL dramatized the same way, with lots and lots of empty pauses and heartfelt staring.
The problem is no better with Scoot than it is with Arnold, but because Arnold’s the one-time superstar here, let us focus on him. Again, this movie is in large part an exercise in demonstrating that Arnold can be a terrific character actor, something that – surprise, surprise – I honestly don’t doubt. I take the early gratuitous lingering shot of his now somewhat flabbier ass, as he takes a shower, to be a brave statement of intent, on the part of The Terminator and those filming him, that you need to put away any expectations you have from the Arnold of old. And yes, he does manage to convey the eagerness to see his family, the growing realization that he never will, the shell-shocked trauma of a life suddenly rendered empty. What lines he has, along the way, are well-delivered, and he gets one absolutely great scene, showing rage at airline lawyers who offer a cash settlement but won’t do the one thing he requests, tell him they’re sorry for his loss. But for a long long time, his character has no arc beyond that sadness, that emptiness, not even much else in the way of spoken dialogue. It’s all great hung heads and soulful staring at family pictures and slow-motion walking and soundtrack dirges, the movie using these brute-force methods to force that one note.
Let me put it this way. When Schwarzenegger is allowed to act here, he is able to convey the emotions asked of him. But the movie uses him as a prop that can be shot from certain angles, to create that emotion without him doing much of a damn thing. Try an experiment. Take a picture of yourself, looking down at a table. Darken the room and make sure a third of your face is in shadow. Now take footage of yourself in that position. Hold that shot for several seconds. You sure as hell look like you’re going through some heavy shit. Now, add a shot of yourself walking to the mailbox, in slow motion, your face just as blank. Connect the two scenes with soulful music. Wow, you not only look like you’re going through some heavy shit, but that it’s lingering. Now put several of these scenes together in a manner that conveys the passage of an extended period of time: wow, that pain won’t go away. Do this sparingly and you can create the impression of great acting. (As happened in MAGGIE, which used many of the same techniques, and where Arnold was terrific.) But too much of it becomes distancing, and you start to wonder whether the Governator was given any direction, for long swaths of this film, beyond “Hang your head! No, lower! Okay, just hold that position! STAY THERE! Don’t bother acting!”
It’s unworthy of the subject matter and it is, in fact, unworthy of Schwarzenegger, who has never fooled anybody into thinking he’s a great thespian but who has always, always, been able to convey, at bare minimum, when his characters were in pain.
It’s hard to tell whether the moviemakers thought they were covering for an actor of limited skills, or whether they thought that this needed to be a movie of long pauses and great silences and overdid it, but either way, when his character and Scoot’s finally wind up in the same room, with tragic consequences, this audience member’s reaction was outright relief. Which is not the way I should have been feeling. Honestly.
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