Tony Scott rolls the dice

Recently I caught a mid-week screening of director Tony Scott's (not to be confused with New York Times co-chief movie critic Tony "A.O." Scott) latest ode to Avid-powered excess, Domino, as it played to a surprisingly populated Thursday night show just over the bridge in Georgetown. The negative critical consensus about the picture (Metacritic currently lists it at a 36 – lower than this summer’s craptastic Fantastic Four) is accurate to some extent, and yet not entirely complete. Clearly, it’s a pummeling, amoral barrage on the viewer’s senses —more punishment than entertainment—and yet it seems to me that there’s also something deeply revealing about the film’s unrepentently violent, hyperstylized aesthetic. It may not be a good movie by any definition of the word, but it’s undoubtedly one worth discussing.

The first thing that struck was that, like Scott’s previous foray into spastic digitally edited incoherence, Man on Fire, Domino is a sign of how sophisticated modern film viewers have become. This is a $65 million venture from an industry not known for taking risks, and yet a little more than a decade ago it would have caused nothing but confusion and disgruntled railings from the masses. With its editing infiltrated by paranoid kineticism and its camera work juggling a half dozen film stocks, lighting schemes and color palettes in every scene, it’s either a stylist’s nightmare or wet dream—either way, it never would have made it out of a film school editing bay until just a few years ago. Yet audiences seem to accept Scott’s nuttiness; what used to be hedonistic excess is now expected.

Largely, of course, this is due to the prevalence of music videos and commercials, which are increasingly edited to the beat of butterfly wings. On a wider social level, films like Domino reflect the increasingly twitchy pace of modern life, where it’s common to sit in front of multiple monitors while checking several email accounts, handling a phone and a blackberry and reading information from multiple browsers and RSS feeds. Our once boulder-sized attention spans may have been hammered down to a pile of pebbles, but each of those pebbles—however small—can concentrate on something different.

Scott seems to realize this, and indeed, he seems to want to test it. How much can a mainstream audience handle? What will it take to get their knickers in a bunch—or rather, their eyes and brains twittering too fast (cause who wears knickers anymore? And if you do, please don't tell me you call them "knickers."). And in every frame, he seems to want to prod the limits of accessibility, daring his audience to accept whatever outrageousness he’s put before them.

This goes not just for the editing and camera work, but for the content as well. The whole film seems like the fever ramblings of caffiene-riddled, blood-and-guts-obsessed coke addict; in addition to being nearly incomprehensibly edited, it is thoroughly amoral, playing only to the most vile, base, violent pleasures. Scott is challenging his audience to be offended, to be confused, to be unable or unwilling to deal with his onscreen temper tantrum and his self-obsessed bloodlust. But the fact that the film was made and released with a significant budget and star suggests that the boundaries it pushes are rather minimal. Hollywood marketing master don't allow their studios to drop that sort of cash on films that audiences can't handle.

But Scott goes for the jugular (almost literally) anyway. How else to explain a scene in which one of the protagonists cuts another character's arm off in what’s supposed to be played as a case of goofy, missed-communication hijinks? That sort of sickening violence is what passes for humor in this film. Every character is a narcissistic asshole, most with sadistic tendencies. The only difference between the good folks and the bad is that the good ones recognize their vileness for what it is—but they still don’t feel any shame. Scott, ever the egoist, fills his movies with people like himself.

The film ends in typical Scott fashion with a Mexican standoff and a storm of gunfire. For Scott, who has used this ending now at least three times, the only catharsis comes with mass, senseless slaughter. For good or for ill, it seems that mainstream American filmgoers may be surprisingly willing to agree.